Thomas Tallis

Fidei Defensor

What authority remains to defend the faith?

Buckingham Palace confirmed this week that King Charles will 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐮𝐞 𝐚𝐧 𝐄𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐦𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐚𝐠𝐞 in 2026. He did issue one last year. But this year — the most important holiday on the Christian calendar — the head of the Church of England went silent. This from the same King who recorded a Ramadan greeting in February, acknowledged a Nigerian president’s “sacrifice” during Ramadan at a State Banquet, and has repeatedly elevated Islamic observances in public addresses... The British monarch’s role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England isn’t ceremonial decoration. It’s a 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 of the Crown, codified since Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy in 𝟏𝟓𝟑𝟒. A king who won’t perform it has abandoned the terms under which he holds the office.

The demand [by former European Parliament MP Godfrey Bloom] was unambiguous: “𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘢𝘣𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘦. 𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘐 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘴𝘶𝘨𝘨𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘴𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘭𝘢𝘳𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘦.” 

Everyone knows that the title Fidei Defensor was given to Henry VIII by the Pope for Henry's defense of Catholicism; ironically Henry decided to keep the title after leading the English Reformation so he could try for sons on a few more wives. However, the Pope of today isn't exactly batting a thousand either.

Pope Leo XIV used his first Easter speech Sunday to deliver a resounding call for peace in times of renewed war, declaring, “Let those who have weapons lay them down!”

No. We often mention Luke 22:36 in this space; the time for laying down arms might come as we look for the Second Coming and the resurrection of the dead. Until it does, we already have a charge on the subject of arms and from a better authority.

Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who heads the Catholic Archdiocese for the Military Services USA, told CBS News in an interview taped Thursday that the war in Iran would not be justified under the “just war” theory applied by the Catholic Church, arguing that while Iran may have posed a threat “with nuclear arms,” the U.S. is compensating “for a threat before the threat is actually realized.”

“The Lord Jesus certainly brought a message of peace and also, I think, war is always a last resort,” he said in the segment that aired Sunday.

If war wasn't your last resort, you didn't resort to enough of it.

Removing a Sheriff

For the first time in a generation, a North Carolina sheriff is facing a formal removal procedure. 

Maintaining faith in the justice system and protecting law enforcement were the themes of the four-day hearing held last week in Robbinsville to determine whether Graham County Sheriff Brad Hoxit — now suspended amid allegations of misconduct tied to an investigation of the ex-husband of his current wife — would be officially barred from returning to office.

District Attorney Ashley Hornsby Welch sought to prevent Hoxit from regaining his badge, arguing that preserving the integrity of the critical institution meant keeping a corrupt sheriff out of power, while Hoxit’s defense team claimed that a message must be sent that a sheriff can execute his duties without fear of political retribution..... 

The sheriff is the most powerful person in any county, and Welch asserted that in smaller counties (Graham County has about 8,000 residents), that power is even more outsized. She said Hoxit felt he could use his power for personal ends, even at the expense of others in the community. In her final words to Stetzer, she drove home her thesis. By removing Hoxit, the judge would maintain the public faith in the justice system so crucial to its functionality. In a case this rare and this important, the precedent set will echo well into the future.

“It’s not for his punishment,” Welch said. “It’s for protection, because if we don’t set an example, and we don’t stand up and say, ‘You can’t do this; you are not allowed to get away with this,’ then what are we doing? Why do we have a constitution?”

A decision on the removal -- which is not a civil nor a criminal matter, but resembles a trial and is held in a court under the auspices of a judge -- will not come for weeks. 

Georgia had a vast problem with its sheriffs for a long time; when I was young, the various district attorneys referred to the sheriffs as 'the Dixie Mafia.' It used to be that law enforcement from outside the county couldn't enter without the sheriff's permission, which effectively allowed them to forestall any investigations of their bad behavior. Holding them to account was the work of generational reforms that brought them under the power of the state, but that is just another level of (often even more corrupt) government; at best you have the two powers working against each other, creating a tension in which at least sometimes a space is created for accountability. 

This mechanism is different: private complaints of corruption have created a legal action, rather than one level of government trying to control and dominate another one. There is an intention to preserve a sense of fairness and due process, though such processes are so vanishingly rare as to be almost ineffective. Graham County is tiny and rural, but capable of making the process work. There are far worse corruptions in the big cities, especially in Mecklenburg County where the mega-city of Charlotte lies. Holding those officers to account seems beyond what anyone can do. 

Still, even if justice is too much to hope for, an occasional lapse in injustice is still to be valued.

No One Gets Left Behind

The great American war ethic was reasserted over the last few days. It is a matter of honor. As we know from the long reading of the EN last summer, that which is most worthy of honor is the most reliable guide to that which is best in life. 

As we know from reading Xenophon last winter, this is also the reason the Persians couldn't overrun the Ten Thousand with their hundreds of thousands. The Ten Thousand stood together, ready to fight and die together; the Persian army was there to make a show to please their masters. The Ten Thousand still got themselves into a war that they had to fight their way out of, for a long time over a great distance. Indeed, much of the same territory involved today; and some of the same actors, although the Kurds are on our side this time.

The American war ethic is sometimes misunderstood as risk aversion, as if the Americans could not stand to lose a single life; but in fact the ethic embraces risk, and entails the will to risk hundreds of lives or to sacrifice planes and ships if need be to keep to the ethic. On the other hand it is sometimes portrayed as foolishness or an incapacity to judge the worth of expensive equipment against the cost of training a replacement. That is to put money ahead of honor, a decision that befits not warriors. 

UPDATE: From the Egyptian editor of a major paper:

Honor holds things together; shame, by contrast, tears things apart. The only thing keeping Iran's evil government intact is the fear of the people brought on by the ruthless slaughter and executions. As people begin not to fear them, their time is coming.

The Great Feast of Easter

Happy Easter to you all. 

Mostly the great feast part is spiritual, but some take a lot of pleasure in physical feasting as well. We will be having ham and homemade bread, as well as hard cheese and baked eggs. [UPDATE: I added those Oregon Trail beans, which are as advertised very good.] It's not in my house that much of a physical feast, not like Christmas (or even Thanksgiving, which is only a physical feast). It's relatively simple but traditional food. 

By the way, if any of you have heard of the alleged Anglo-Saxon traditions of Ostara, mentioned once by the Venerable Bede as an early pagan goddess, here is a young lady who wants to disabuse everyone of that story. If you like myth debunking -- which I don't, always -- that's really her thing and you might enjoy her other videos.

James meditates on Judas, the man who made the day possible. 

Saddle Tramp

We had a good ride this evening after work. It’s probably going to rain much of the weekend, but I’m grateful for the good moments we do get. 

Just in the little town of Webster, we came across a lady who was riding her horse in the road. Horses can get spooked by motorcycles, but fortunately she and we both knew what to do. We slowed way down, and she got the horse off the road and turned him to face us. That meant he could see us, but also — important piece of horse riding knowledge — that if he wanted to bolt he’d have to charge right at the thing scaring him. He danced and champed his bit, but he stayed put. The lady waved, appreciating our care for her situation. 

Well, I rode horses before I ever rode motorcycles. 

Free-ish State

The FPC has put out a new scorecard for the various states on firearm rights. New Hampshire friends, congratulations on your top score! You beat North Carolina and Texas both, each of which only qualify as "free-ish state"s. 

In spite of my continued irritation with the various governments involved, we have seen a lot of progress on 2nd Amendment rights over the last decades. Partly this is due to the two big SCOTUS decisions, but also it is due to the hard work of state-level groups to press their individual governments in the right direction. It is exactly that work that is now under attack in places like Virginia (currently rated as a "state of confusion").

I remember when the only Constitutional Carry states were Alaska and Vermont; now there are 29 of them. The conversation has moved from seeking "shall-issue" versus "may-issue" permits to the press to disregard permits entirely for the practice of at least some versions of the Constitutional right. That is now the law in the majority of states, and the vast majority of the land area of the United States; and it has generally accompanied a downward trend in violent crime, although there was a spike around the COVID era. 

There remains more to do, but all is not dark. 

Moon labe

"You should be glad we let you look at it."

About time, part deux

Colorado court rules Tina Peters's 9-year sentence was excessive because it was enhanced as a penalty for free speech abhored by the trial court.

About time

Military bases are no longer gun-free zones.

Wanted Posters

In keeping with the Old West theme, the local university had a whole series of these. They were posted alongside Woody Guthrie posters and similar socialist propaganda, so I imagine it's the local student socialist union or whatever. I captured three of them, but there were several more for various Trump administration officials.

I guess they've collected on a couple of these lately. Not sure who gets the meat. At least it's real meat, or at least real pretend meat, and not Impossible Burgers.

Poker Card Shootout III

It’s coming back with a little practice. 

Mystery unveiled

Sewing machines have always baffled and repelled me; I never could get the hang of threading them. I like to crochet, however, and also have wondered how the two interlocking stitching methods compared, which led me to this instructional video.



Lots of people developed and perfected the machines, but it was Singer who figured out how to produce them at a price that ordinary homeowners might afford.

I note that tailors rioted and destroyed some of the first machines.

The Troubador Dale Watson

Dale Watson's got new music.

He's one of those who's holding the line.

Supper on the Oregon Trail

A fascinating article, with recipes. 

The journey was brutal in ways that the romanticized version of westward expansion tends to skip over. Illness and accidents were more serious threats than any attack, about 20,000 people died on the California Trail alone between 1841 and 1859, an average of ten graves for every mile....

For each grown person to make the journey from the Missouri River to California or Oregon (provisioned for 110 days) the following was deemed requisite: 150 lbs of flour or its equivalent in hard bread, 25 lbs of bacon or pork plus enough fresh beef driven on the hoof, 15 lbs of coffee, and 25 lbs of sugar, along with saleratus or yeast powders for making bread, salt and pepper. That is the entire daily provision list for a working adult walking fifteen miles a day in all weather for nearly four months....

The coffee, made by roasting green beans in the dry skillet, grinding them, and boiling them directly in water, was excellent. The coffee was always the highlight....

This is where the day completely turned around. The beans had been soaking overnight and simmering all day in their pot, and by evening they were soft, creamy, and had absorbed everything the salt pork had to give over eight hours of low cooking. Then the cast iron skillet came back out: more bacon, fried until the fat had rendered and the edges were starting to crisp, and then the beans went in with a generous splash of molasses and a hit of salt. The molasses caramelizes slightly against the hot metal and coats the beans in something that is sweet and smoky and deeply savoury all at the same time. Biscuits baked alongside in the same pan, golden on the bottom from the bacon fat still in the skillet, used to scoop and soak up the bean broth.

Palm Sunday

I always think of this Bible story on Palm Sunday. 

This reminds me of a story I can't remember if I related before. I was talking to a Jewish friend who lives in Texas. He was telling me about a stockman he knows whose business is buying large lots of cattle and selling them once they're 'finished.' 

My friend relayed the surprising claim, from this Texas stockman, that in his opinion the best cowboys in history were the Jews. This was as surprising to my friend as it might be to you. 

It turns out that during his short period of ownership the stockman has people pick out the ones who are fit for the kosher factory. This is because kosher beef fetches much better prices, partly because the process is so selective: all kosher beef has to come from cattle that are unblemished outside and, after slaughter and examination, found also to be unblemished inside. 

The stockman, who is a Bible-reading Christian, took note of the fantastic numbers of animals that are supposed to have been sacrificed during the Temple of Solomon era. Each of the cattle sacrificed in this way had to be unblemished, inside and out. To make that happen on that scale would have required marvelous cowboys. 

So too sitting a colt for his first ride, now that I think about it. Of course that was long after the era of sacrificing from the great herds.

Taxation is Theft

A punk cover of a Steven Foster song. 

Dorcha (The Dark Island)

Speaking of modern English dialects of Old Provence, we've been enjoying the BBC detective series "Shetland," but having the devil of a time understanding the dialogue.

Scottish dialects don't normally trip me up too badly. I've been listening this afternoon, for instance, to an 1969 BBC radio production called "The Dark Island," a fine old cold-war mystery set in the Hebrides. Half the dialogue is in RP, which is no problem, and half in Hebridean, also pretty easy to follow, either because I'm more used to it or because the late-60s BBC tended to regularize accents somewhat for a broad audience.

In contrast, try this Shetland accent, especially the second guy working on his Jaguar:



I found the BBC radio show because I was reading a WSJ article this morning about a guy who uses AI to generate completely forgettable pop tunes that sometimes are hits for some reason, which made me nostalgic for a time when people composed melodies. I thought of the tune "The Dark Island" that I sometimes run across on folk albums. The tune is so pretty and fitting that I assumed it was a traditional Scottish or Irish melody, but it turns out it was composed specially for the BBC radio show. So here's the radio show, and after it a nice tin-whistle version of the tune with the Irish Rovers. I do love me a tin whistle.

"The Dark Island" show also made me nostalgic for stories with competent plot exposition, deftly handled suspense, and characters who effortlessly identify like-mind sorts who can be trusted in a situation that calls for courage, patriotism, and loyalty.



The tune:

The No Rally

Maybe two hundred people came out for the rally today, although a lot of the crowd were cops in uniform. Signs were surprisingly negative. 

No: 

* Kings

* Capitalism 

* Crooks

* ICE

* War(s)

* New Wars

* Attacking ‘Civil Servants’

This movement is, in other words, purely conservative. It stands astride history, yelling “Stop!”

My hero Talarico

If anyone can inspire Texas to boot John Cornyn and embrace Ken Paxton, it's got to be the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senator, James Talarico. He didn't do himself any favors with his interesting take on the real evangelical Christianity, but he's surely torn it for Texans with a call to ditch meat to save the climate.

A magnificent linguistic mess

On Saturday's I enjoy PowerLine's "The Week in Pictures." This morning the meme roundup highlighted an essay by Bernard Cerquiglini claiming that English doesn't really exist, it's just badly pronounced French. This quip is recycled Clemenceau, who is also said to have quipped (or quoted Dumas's d'Artagnan as quipping) that England is only a French colony that turned out badly. By the same token, the U.S. could be called an English colony that turned out badly, which I guess makes us a disappointing venture twice removed.

The Cerquiglini argument is mostly a tongue-in-cheek rehash of John McWhorter's excellent book, "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue," which sorts through English's complicated roots in Germanic, Scandanavian, French, and Welsh roots. Cirquiglini adds some interesting information about old Provençal vowel shifts and spelling that still show traces in English.

Requiem for Steel

I broke a couple of my grandfather’s tools this week. 

I was trying to free a lug nut that was put on entirely too forcefully by someone or other. Now these were old steel, and at least one of them was showing bending when I inherited it. Still and all, I guess I thought they were strong like he was. 

Nothing lasts forever, not even him. I raised a glass in his memory. I always like using his old tools. It makes me think of him. Today I got his air wrench out to finish the job. 

He’d probably be proud of me more than mad, breaking steel in my hands. My uncle could do that when he was young, and that with new-forged steel rather than older and long-fatigued stuff. 

Force multipliers

I found this RedState article about Apache Helicopter launching ALTIUS-700 "medium-range launched effect (MR-LE)" interesting. The author mentioned that he was "not clear on what the difference is between a drone and a 'medium-range launched effect,'" so as usual I asked Grok:

All launched effects are a type of drone (or UAV), but not all drones are launched effects. The term "medium-range launched effect" specifically refers to a tactical, host-platform-deployed, often expendable unmanned system optimized for extending a crewed platform's reach in contested environments—frequently acting as a loitering munition when armed. It blurs the line between a reusable reconnaissance drone and a guided missile by adding loiter, decision-making, and standoff capability.

I like to run these stories by you guys, because I'm interested in the developments but have too little background knowledge to put them in context.

A Revolution that Never Comes

In Europe, the Right wins but is never allowed to take power. There's a certain degree of similarity here, where the Republican establishment exists mostly to defang the American Right by giving them someone to vote for, but arranging to lose key votes (see Obamacare, John McCain; or the SAVE Act, John Thune). The powerbrokers claim to be on the side of the people, but they're really on the side of the powerful: that's how they got where they are, and how they stay where they are. 

In Europe, it's worse. At least we get some decent political appointees, until the next election at least. 

Last Sunday was supposed to settle the question of whether Europe’s populist right can govern, and instead it sharpened a different one: Whether the establishment can keep winning without solving anything. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally dominated the first round of municipal elections — finishing first in at least 75 communes, roughly seven times its 2020 number — only to be beaten back in the second-round runoffs by the familiar mechanism of the front républicain, losing Marseille by fifteen points, squandering a thirteen-point lead in Toulon, and watching Paris stay comfortably in Socialist hands for a twenty-sixth consecutive year. The French firewall held, for now.

In Germany, no such firewall exists in the architecture of the ballot, only in the minds of party leaders. In Rhineland-Palatinate, the AfD more than doubled its vote share to 19.5 per cent — the party’s best result ever in a western German state — and among voters aged 18 to 24 it was the most popular party outright. Among manual workers, it reached 30 per cent; in some Westerwald constituencies it approached half of all votes cast. The SPD, which had governed the state for thirty-five unbroken years, lost nearly ten points and was displaced by the CDU. And yet, just as in France, the result will change nothing in the short term: All parties maintain the cordon sanitaire, a grand coalition will be formed, and the voters who chose the AfD will once again be governed by a coalition that exists primarily to exclude them. 

Likewise in the UK.

The same fault line runs through Britain, where the post-Brexit immigration surge – non-EU net migration reaching record highs under the very government that promised to “take back control” – has made a mockery of democratic consent. It runs through Germany, through the Netherlands, through Austria.

At some point this delegitimizes the democratic process entirely; it can't be legitimate if it's just another method of control, instead of a method of self-governance. 

Honneur et Fidélité

Grim's "March or Die" post led to me reading up a bit on the French Foreign Legion. Here are the lyrics to their official march (translated, of course):

Le Boudin ("Blood Sausage," AKA "Marche de la Légion Étrangère")

Chorus:

Hey, here's blood sausage, here's blood sausage, here's blood sausage,

For the Alsatians, the Swiss, and the Lorrains,

For the Belgians, there is none left,

For the Belgians, there is none left,

They are lazy,

For the Belgians, there is none left,

For the Belgians, there is none left,

They are lazy.

1st verse:

We are crafty,

We are rogues,

Not ordinary guys,

We often have our cockroach, [dark moods]

We are Legionnaires.

In Tonkin, the Immortal Legion

Honoured our flag at Tuyen Quang.

Heroes of Camarón and model brothers

Sleep in peace in your tombs.

(Repeat chorus)

2nd verse:

Our ancestors knew how to die

For the glory of the Legion.

We will all know how to perish

Following tradition.

During our far-off campaigns,

Facing fever and fire,

Let us forget, along with our sorrows,

Death, which forgets us so little.

We the Legion.

(Repeat chorus)

What's up with the blood sausage and the Belgians? Apparently, blood sausage (le boudin) is the nickname for the bedroll that was tied on top the rucksack back in the 19th century, when this was written. One explanation for the role of the Belgians is that, back then, Frenchmen could not enlist in the Legion, but French criminals would pass themselves off as Belgians in order to enlist and escape the police. Being criminals, they weren't very good soldiers. There are other explanations, but I like that one.

4/1/26 Update: Really, I got too involved with searching for why the Belgians get picked on. There's no reason the chorus can't just be about breakfast, and maybe some Belgians were late one morning. Who knows?

Here's the Legion band:

The Legion is the only regular French army unit, apparently, that does not have "Honneur et Patrie" as it's motto sewn onto its flags but instead "Honneur et Fidélité." "Honor and Fatherland" doesn't make much sense for a unit of foreigners. It's second motto is "Legio Patria Nostra" -- "The Legion is Our Fatherland."

Correlation is Not Causation... But...

I'm just saying. 

Tables of Organization

This is funny for those of you who can read a military TOE. 

If you can't: Both the  82nd Airborne brigade being deployed and the Marine Expeditionary Units are Brigade sized elements, so they'd be commanded by a division command -- and it looks like the 82nd's is the one being deployed. If they are combined into a single Division-sized unit, then, the 82nd would have overall command of the Marines. This is frustrating for the Marines. That's the joke. 

"OPCON" means "Operational Control," while "TACON" means "Tactical Control." So while the 82nd DIV HQ would have full control over the 1-82 BCT, it would still be able to tell the Marines what to do on the battlefield.

A War Against Israeli Interest

Robert Oprisko is a philosopher I know personally: he and I both write on the role of honor in moral philosophy, and share broadly compatible views about it. We've met for pizza in Asheville and exchanged ideas on several occasions. 

Today he has published a paper that offers a surprising view: Operation Epic Fury has been damaging to Israel's interests. Most of the commentary against the war has suggested that the war is very obviously in Israel's interests, and that America has been suckered into it by wily (or overly-influential) Israelis. Just yesterday I wrote briefly on why I think the war is overdetermined in America's interests; I don't take seriously the view that America hasn't got a national interest here, but instead think it has so many and such powerful interests at stake that many of them would individually be worth the fight. 

Yet here we see an argument that, in fact, while America may benefit from this war, Israel will lose even as it achieves its battlefield aims.

Anxiety over the existentially precarious position Israel occupies in the Middle East has persisted for thousands of years, though it has grown and intensified after World War II; genocide was no longer mere theory, it had been attempted. While existential anxiety can be alleviated, mitigated, and ultimately eliminated through dedication, discipline, and intentional action, Israel’s persists. Israeli and American politicians have personally found it politically useful... The fear of oblivion is so strong that support of Israel by citizens of allies (i.e., persons who don’t live in Israel and aren’t Jewish) represents a litmus test of the allies’ heads of government. For Israel, you are either with or against... Given the deep and pervasive concern of annihilation, Israeli spite to withstand and reject external pressure elicits asympathetic policy response from allies and reinforces the security protocols to reduce said anxiety.  

...

Operation Epic Fury has shown anabsolute character for Iran, but not for either Israel or the United States: Iran has absolutely no capacity formeaningful response..... Israel is capable of self-defense against Iran as a source of anxiety. In fact, they are capable of offense. More to the point, Iran is clearly not at the same level of military capacity, capability, or sophistication as Israel.... The “war” is not a war at all – Iran can’t fight back, they lost before they knew a fight was taking place....

The clear and undeniable success of the joint US-Israeli strikes against Iran do not simply mitigate the existential anxiety of the Jewish people and state, it utterly destroys the public façade maintaining that anxiety and eliminates the ideology as an aegis for any aggressive action taken (Oprisko 2015). Operation Epic Fury has been so successful so quickly, and the rationale for the aggression so flimsy that the world isn’t responding jingoistically, it’s attending a funeral; the world hasn’t seen such a lopsided win in an “even fight” since Ali-Liston II (Albanesi 2021).By having one-shot the end boss, the US and Israel have lost a value greater than any they will gain through success: an excuse for any bad behavior (Kain 2024).Overwhelming military dominance should feel like success, but the end result is failure via strategic blunder: Israel has inadvertently killed the ‘golden goose’ of all defenses by exposing Iran as a hollow threat. 

I think there's something to this. Israel has gone all-in* on the attempt to settle family business while it has a reliable presidential ally in the United States. It used its "grim beeper" ploy; it used its capacity to assassinate inside the most protected Iranian secure zone; it used its drone box to take out Iranian air defenses; it used up its whole targeting list on the first night or two of strikes; and now it is using its carefully-established networks inside Iran to identify and remove IRGC commanders leading the population suppression. Oprisko is probably right that they have also decided to use up the sense of vulnerability that they have long depended upon politically and diplomatically. 

That will have consequences. The Israel that emerges from this war will be very different from the one we have known for so long, and seen as hemmed in on all sides and threatened with destruction. This will have psychological consequences for Israelis at home, and political ones worldwide. 

I don't know that I agree that this will damage them in the long term, however. Someone used to say something about how good it is to be "the strong horse"; Osama somebody. It certainly works in the Arab world: just today the Wall Street Journal published a call from the UAE's current Ambassador to the United States -- and Minister of State -- to finish Iran once and for all, combined with his government's commitment to doing so.

* Oprisko and I are both using sports and gaming metaphors, I notice. I linked the Ali-Liston II fight video in case any of you hadn't seen that famous boxing match, or just wanted to see it again. "To one-shot a boss" is a metaphor from tabletop war gaming and/or role-playing games in which a single attack made on a target, in this case a 'boss' or final target, is able to kill it or destroy its ability to fight. In this case, the Ayatollah was 'one-shotted' in the sense of being killed; Iran itself might be said to have been as well; its continued but flagging resistance is trumpeted in the media, but the end-game is obvious to serious observers outside the news cycle. Finally, 'to go all-in' is a poker metaphor for pushing all of one's chips into the pot on the current hand. 

Some Catholic News

The full article is here. The wag's remarks are on point; even when Popes had a lot more practical authority than currently, the crossbow thing didn't work out even in Italy. During the Battle of Poiters, the French Army was supported by 2,000 Genoese mercenary crossbowmen.

On the other hand, crossbow bans are back in the news (in the UK, of course, where they somehow continue to labor under the idea that they can ban everything that is potentially dangerous and then crime will go away).

Also on that other hand, the Pope's authority at least in America may be gaining. Commenting on a news story that Catholic converts now outnumber Evangelicals, Robert Kearney writes: 

De Tocqueville foresaw a future time in America where Protestantism (existing as an intermediate form between pure reason and full authority) would struggle to endure long-term under our democratic conditions. 

Due to this, people would increasingly gravitate either toward complete unbelief or toward Catholicism due to the Church's existence as a singular, authoritative structure that could give answers to people and help organize society in order for it to remain functioning. 

Perhaps the 21st century may see his vision fulfilled.

I'm not sure we won't still be flying the A-10 and B-52 by the end of the century, but I guess we'll see. Well, our children or grandchildren, I suppose. 

Strategic Upsides in Iran

Dad29 has competing analyses of Iran. This one is negative, and focused as much of the negative commentary on the role of Israel. The US has at least three kinds of things it calls 'allies,' to include client states like Canada, which is one even though it deeply resents it (as until recently was the UK; the influence of Islamism and leftism on the UK elite is pulling us apart, but only a bit so far); true allies like Japan, whose interests are so closely aligned with ours that cooperation makes sense almost all the time; and states like France or Turkey that are allies for strategic reasons, but whose interests come apart from ours so significantly that we are often in serious opposition to one another. Israel occupies something between the second and third position. It has independent interests that differ from ours, and it sometimes pursues those; but most of its interests align with ours, and most of the time we act as genuine allies and partners. 

This Childers analysis of the Iran war, by contrast, is highly positive. It is also broadly correct, though as D29 notes it omits risks -- of which there are several beyond anything to do with Israel, including supply chain disruptions not only of fuel but of downstream goods like aluminum. If aluminum plants run out of fuel and have to shut down, it takes months to restart them.

The strategic upsides, however, are unassailable. Childers only gets at some of them, partly because there are so many they're hard to list in one place. For decades Iran has been situated at the center of the Chinese-Russian efforts in the Middle East: Russia's naval base in Syria was guaranteed by Iran's puppet Assad; when Assad fell Russia was pushed out of the Middle East (though still very active in Africa). 

China's oil supply is underwritten by Iran, which has provided cut-rate oil in return for China ignoring sanctions on Iran's oil. If the US military takes Karg and a friendly government is established that endorses that (as the US was allowed to occupy part of Okinawa by Japan after WWII), it puts the US in charge of that oil supply. That gives the US a powerful lever on Chinese actions anywhere. It isn't quite a veto -- Russia can still provide oil to China -- but it is a brake because Chinese actions against US interests are subject to new tradeoffs and pressures.

Also, China's Belt-and-Road project to Europe ran through Iran and Russia. The Russian arm is already cut off because of the war Putin started with Ukraine; the loss of the Iranian arm will cause China to have lost billions in investments and all of its expected returns in terms of regional influence in the Middle East and Europe. 

The Iranian response also has upsides for the US, strategically. Childers gets to several of them; but another one is that the Ukraine anti-drone lessons-learned have become newly important to all the Gulf States. That means that Ukraine will receive investment buoying it up greater than it was hoping to receive in aid. This will further exhaust the Russian capacity for aggression, or for actions abroad in places like Africa. 

The war isn't without costs, and the end-game will doubtless incur more. The strategic upside to pursuing it to victory is very clear, however.

Which One?

The NRA proudly announced that it had defeated "California's illegal gun control law," but you have to read their article to figure out which one they meant. This one was illegal under the First Amendment, more than the Second Amendment. There are plenty of Second Amendment violations still extant there, and soon to be a bunch more in Virginia. 

A Brazilian Feminist

Despite my criticism of the Modern interpretation of “equality” in political philosophy, and consequent rejection of philosophies based on that interpretation, I maintain quite a few deep and friendly relationships with feminist philosophers I have encountered over the years. Very often, at least among philosophers, agreement is not necessary for friendship as long as there is mutually respectful consideration of each other’s ideas. (That, by the way, is a sort of ‘proportionate equality’ of the type we examined in the long series on Aristotle’s EN. It is a much healthier model than the Modern attempt to impose mathematical equality in ethics and politics.)

One of them is here interviewed about a Brazilian early feminist. Many of you may find this interesting. 

Fool You Twice

Before the Iran War started, there was a round of negotiations that ultimately proved just to be a delaying tactic: Israel was hosting India's leader that week, and needed time to finalize their new alliance. 

This week we're told there's a pause in the war to allow for a new round of negotiations. Coincidentally, that will also give time for the United States Marines transiting by sea from Japan to get on-station in theater. The apparent WARNO to the 82nd Airborne, the Army's most rapidly deployable force, also looks relevant to that "week of talks." 

Is peace at hand? I wouldn't wager on it. I'm not sure who is left over there who has authority to negotiate a peace in any case.

UPDATE: Open sources indicate that the 'who' is the Speaker of the Parliament of Iran. In spite of the title, this isn't really a 'parliament' in the usual sense of the word: it's official title is "The Islamic Consultative Assembly." The "Consultative" part is what distinguishes it from a true parliament: "All legislation endorsed by the Islamic Consultative Assembly must be submitted to the Guardian Council. Within a maximum of ten days from its receipt, the Guardian Council must review the legislation to ensure its compatibility with Islamic criteria and the Constitution. If any incompatibility is identified, the legislation is returned to the Assembly for further review."

Israel is said to have approved their movement to Islamabad for talks. If we are aware of the flight and the photos from the open sources, you can be reasonably sure they'll be tracked home -- probably all the way home. It is generally wise to leave someone alive with the authority to surrender. 

We Aren't the World

Those of us in the usual age cohort for the Hall remember the "We Are the World" business. The song's 'collect all the celebrities and have them sing in no real genre to try to create a widespread emotional response' mode was mocked in the mockumentary Wag the Dog. In the real life version, Waylon Jennings walked out over the demand that he sing in Swahili, which it turns out is not even a language spoken in Ethiopia, a fact the celebrities were ignorant of at the time.

Probably all of us are also aware of how much aid money has been poured into Africa, and to how little effect, in the ensuing decades. I mention all this to draw your attention to an article from Arab News, which suggests that Africa may not need aid anymore: 

Abrupt donor retrenchment since 2025 has stripped away long-standing assumptions about who finances development on the continent. Economic data now tells a story that would have sounded improbable two decades ago: Africa no longer depends on aid to grow. Yet many African states still depend on aid to function.

Economic resilience in the face of shrinking donor flows has been striking.... Yet fiscal aggregates conceal structural fragilities. Aid once served as a parallel operating system for essential services... Roads can be financed through bonds and tolls; antiretroviral drugs cannot. Power plants attract investors; primary schools rarely do. The result is a bifurcated development model, one that sustains growth while eroding human capital....

Such contradictions define the current moment. Wealth exists, but systems to deploy it effectively remain uneven because governance sits at the center of this disconnect.

If you got the government out of the way in the "essential services" sectors, corruption would decrease and efficiency would improve. There may be enough wealth coming in without aid to make Africa work now; further aid only keeps the entrenched governments secure in their role of controlling those sectors.

And it won't become self-aware

H/t Instapundit, a hydrogel wound dressing that releases antibiotics only when it detects bacterial activity.

Show them the money

As a means to control national voter fraud, this could work. The same states that worship voter fraud also really like to suck up federal money, and in the competition between the two ignoble impulses, my bet's on the money.

The only living boy in NY

Paul Simon could write a bridge like nobody's business.

March or Die

The French Foreign Legion has that as their unofficial motto, so I am told. They do not admit women into their ranks.

MJ calls what happened to her in Zion national park “small ‘T’ trauma”. She knows women have experienced worse from their partners. But she still feels the anger of being left behind on a hike by her now ex. “It brings up stuff in my body that maybe I have not cleared out yet,” she said.

This article was brought to my attention by a hiking buddy; we once did 50 miles together in the Great Smoky Mountains, over some very tough terrain and during weather that threatened hypothermia. On the march up the mountain that used to be called Clingman's Dome, third highest in the eastern United States, we separated just this way. I don't remember who got to the top first or last, nor does he; it didn't cause either of us any trauma at all. It was just the natural thing to do to separate given unequal aerobic capability. 

Many of the women described having some level of dependence on their partner in nature. They may not have been carrying the right supplies or enough water, or were not familiar with the terrain, making them feel vulnerable.... One woman described a 12-hour journey out of the Grand Canyon after her boyfriend ditched her, during which she was assisted by a “very nice man from Norway” who carried her backpack.... A man walking 100ft ahead of his girlfriend because he cannot be bothered to wait for her is bad manners. But failing to properly care for someone in an environment they’re not prepared to handle alone can cause real harm. 

Speaking as a certified Wilderness rescue technician, don't go to the mountains if you aren't up to it. I'll come help you if I can, as will many others who have volunteered their time to train for that mission. Nevertheless, you really should be sensible about what your limits are. If you need someone else to carry your backpack, pack lighter. If you don't know what you're doing, study and train first. It's not that hard, but it also isn't trivial. 

Catfu

As good a use of AI as I've seen.

UPDATE: An American variation.

Nazgul shrieks

The sound alone from this laser weapon would be enough to demoralize me. It's like something out of War of the Worlds.

Justification

Instapundit posted a link to an analysis of all the lies told in just three paragraphs by the author of the Virginia gun bans. But really, you don't need to know that. You only need to know this:

Virginia voters are shocked to find out that Virginia Democrats are voting to exempt themselves from the new gun control measures they are imposing.

“The provision of this section shall not apply to any member of the General Assembly.”

That suffices.  

Therefore: the right of the people to keep and bear arms is a right that no government, this nor any other, can infringe upon without a basic denial of human dignity. Such a denial itself entails a right of self-defense against such a government; and the everlasting potential for such a denial therefore entails an everlasting, permanent, and basic right to arms.

Death & Rebirth in the Pigeon River Valley

More on this later.

Volume of Fire

H/t Wretchard. 

This phase of the war will be over soon. After that, we will see: it depends upon how they employ the Marines they’re sending. 

The Paradox of Enjoying Tragedy

I told Grim I'd post a few of Corb Lund's darker pieces but then got to wondering why I enjoy them. And why do any of us enjoy tragic stories? They've been around since the beginning of storytelling, so there must be some attraction.

It turns out, David Hume has some thoughts on this. The SEP quotes him thus:

It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle; and as soon as the uneasy passions cease to operate, the piece is at an end. 

One answer is that tragedies refine or clarify our emotions in a kind of catharsis, which seems to have been suggested by Aristotle in his Poetics. There are a number of other answers in the SEP article if you are interested, but this one seems the most interesting to me. The SEP describes it like this:

... a plausible construction of the idea is that we come to learn about some of our emotions when their expression is elicited by highly affecting works of art, in the case of tragedies specifically by the “release” of the negative emotions of fear and pity that comes with the narrative resolution of the plot. There, the expression of our emotions does not leave them unchanged; rather, they are exposed, fine-tuned, and given a salient form when arising in conformity to a work of tragedy’s prescriptions for how to feel.

A further development of this idea suggests that part of this catharsis allows us a kind of "enlightenment about the nature of suffering."

Whatever the reason we enjoy tragic stories, here are half a dozen or so of Corb Lund's tragedies for you.

UN Security Council Condemns Iran

So you know how the UN is useless because its resolutions are not binding except for Security Council resolutions, but those never happen because the US or Russia or China vetoes it? Not this time. 

I know. Curious, isn’t it?

Re-engineering evolution

At the age of 92, William Shatner has shattered his shoulder upon being thrown from his horse. It's bad enough that he reports his doctors are recommending a "reverse shoulder replacement."

Apparently some bright soul noticed that the arrangement of the ball and socket in the shoulder is a vestigial design that is not the strongest option for an upright biped with a three-dimensional range of motion. If the shoulder is really toast and has to be replaced, it makes more sense for the new joint to have the ball on the torso and the socket on the top of the armbone.

In the new configuration, the center of rotation is moved downward (inferiorly) and inward (medially). The deltoid muscle (the large muscle covering the shoulder) gains a longer lever arm and better mechanical advantage in lifting the arm, while bypassing the often ruined (and irreplaceable) rotator cuff. The ball acts as a mechanical stop to prevent the humerus from sliding upward, converting the deltoid's pull into rotation and elevation rather than just shear forces. This makes for better overhead motion.

For now, at least, the improvement wouldn't be worth the trauma for someone suffering from garden-variety rotator cuff or arthritic trouble. Maybe someday, though, aspiring major-league pitchers will opt for it as a prophylactic upgrade.

Corb Lund's Outlaws

The characters in Corb's songs are a wild variety. Here's three of his outlaws. The first song is about a tragic criminal and one of the darkest songs I know. The second isn't as dark and features a good lesson about how to treat wait staff appropriately, and the third is rather light-hearted for a song about outlaws.

 

Poker Card Shootout

It occurred to me that it's been several years since I posted any evidence that I could hit anything with a revolver myself. Going on a decade, in fact, and it's a perishable skill. I definitely don't shoot as much as I used to way back when, and I'm not as good as I used to be as you can see by comparing this poker card with the one from 2017.

The comparison is imperfect in several respects, since I was using a Vaquero-style fixed-sight Ruger Single Six rather than whatever the Assistant Attorney General was using, but hers probably suffered under greater recoil; and I don't know quite what rules she was shooting under. Tom guessed it was two shot groups, so I fired those. All six on paper, only one really good group and it was a little high. Group two was the closest to dead center; the first of those two got pretty close. Group three drifted a bit. 

Ah, well. Sic transit gloria mundi and all that. Not a total embarrassment, at least. 

The Progress in Iran

In spite of the fact that the American news has decided to act as the propaganda arm of the Iranian Islamic Republic, there has been substantial progress in the campaign. My old comrades at The Long War Journal are doing some good work right now capturing the movement. 

Another good source is Richard Fernandez, who blogs less now but runs both an X and Facebook page under his byline "Wretchard the Cat." He noticed what I think is a key development in the shift from an air war to preparation to assist the Iranians in overthrowing their government: 

Israeli drones carried out attacks on several Tehran neighborhoods... Fars says the drones flew over southern and northern districts of Tehran, adding that “several members of the security force and the (volunteer) Basij force stationed at checkpoints were martyred.”

Notice it wasn't attacks on "neighborhoods," as the opening paragraph framed it; it was tightly targeted drone attacks on police and security 'checkpoints,' i.e., the places from which regime loyalists planned to shoot any protesters who emerged as they did in the earlier parts of the winter. 

That's the missing piece in all of this. The Kurds are going to break away in the northwest; the Balochi in the southeast; probably the Azeri. The armored units that the military and IRGC planned to use to suppress such actions will be destroyed if they try to move to engage; they will also be destroyed if they try to stay put. The navy is being sunk; the minelayers are sitting ducks for air power. What remains is a plan to allow the central population in the larger cities to move against the regime. 

Accomplishing that means showing those people that they won't just be shot down like the thousands the regime murdered over the winter protests. This is a good first step at demonstrating that even small checkpoints of regime loyalists are subject to strike, and on small scales that don't risk the lives of innocents who might be gathered to protest them.

UPDATE: Overnight, the IDF started allowing Iranian citizens to call in air strikes on Basij positions. There is some risk to this, given that the situation is fluid, but it effectively provides air support to any revolutionary effort. 

I saw something similar in Iraq only once. One time a “Concerned Local Citizen”/Sons of Iraq checkpoint came under attack by insurgent forces, including a technical that had parked in a shallow ditch to provide itself with cover. Under machine gun fire, they called us on a cell phone. In the Division Operations Center, the duty officers realized that they had an accurate map with a ten-digit grid of the location of the ditch. So, we hit it with indirect fire — mortars, I believe it was. Our fire was effective, allowing what was essentially a local tribal militia to survive and win against a coordinated assault with heavy weapons’ support. 

If Only You'd Inform on Your Neighbors, Asheville Edition

Not so very long ago during the wild days of 2020 and BLM the Asheville City Council was denying the police department money for body armor. Now, after three unrelated shootings downtown, the mayor and the chief of police issue a joint statement begging the citizenry to please start turning each other in.

Clearly they have mended fences. Asheville began addressing its public order concerns after the post-2020 era got really out of control downtown; then the 2024 hurricane washed away much of what was left of the homeless community there, giving them a chance to catch up. The activists who had so much sway over the council during the BLM moment are quite dismayed to see this new level of cooperation, but the city is a nicer place to visit than once -- especially for women and children. Even my rather fearsome wife found the place unsettling during the days of high disorder. 

Still, there's surely a balance even in urban areas between defunding the police and trying to encourage Stasi-like programs to spy into the private lives of citizens. Part of the reason Americans have fled to suburban and rural areas is that you can live much more decently without so many other people around, and without the mechanisms of control that 'public order' entails. Even in the city, there has to be a better way.

Range Day for Ladies

Specifically, Harmeet K. Dhillon and some of her comrades from DOJ. The target shows some fliers at 30 feet; but Dhillon isn't a professional shooter. DOJ has designated shooters. Harmeet Dhillon is Assistant Attorney General. Nobody expects her to have to fire a pistol except under extreme circumstances of self-defense; there are plenty of people whose job is shooting at that department, and in every court where she'll be engaged in litigation.

A lot of people decided to be highly critical. Kerry Slone (of women-focused Second Amendment group called We the Female, which focuses on arming women for self-defense) has strong words for such people, but that's to be expected. What I think she gets to that's central is this point: 

So how do we start to combat this First, is understanding that men and women are naturally biologically and psychologically different.  In relation to firearms, when a man is mocked, it does not typically have the same result that it does for a woman when it comes to firearms. Negative comments towards men when learning how to use a firearm typically makes them want to train more. When a woman is mocked, it makes her even more intimidated and insecure and can lead to her to not continue to grow in capability. 

A couple of framing points first. One, Harmeet is not a fragile flower. I don't know how much she cares about mouthy idiots on social media. 

Two, using a firearm or other weapon effectively is generally more central to mens' self-image than womens'. The fact that mockery of that ability drives men to train harder doesn't mean they aren't as hurt or as embarrassed; it means that they are so embarrassed and hurt by looking foolish in front of the others that they redouble their efforts to get good enough to be respectable. The mockery is meant to encourage this reaction; if a man was really thought too weak or incompetent to improve, the reaction would be much gentler rhetorically but more devastating because it would be a reaction of pity. The humiliation of this is much worse. 

"Not everyone was meant to be a soldier."

That said, I think Ms. Slone is basically correct. As we learned from reading Aristotle, 'equality' rarely means 'exactly the same' when we are talking about ethics or politics. It doesn't have to for the I.3 reason we kept mentioning: equality as a term of mathematics, like a proof from strict logic, doesn't belong in ethics or politics. All the terms in ethics and politics are analogies. The reasoning is analogical, not logical. Treatment doesn't have to be exactly equal, and often shouldn't be, but it does need to be proportionate to be fair. 

With rare exceptions like our own Texan99, who genuinely seems to want to be held to exactly and only the standards men ask of each other, most women don't want 'equal treatment' in the sense of 'exactly the same treatment.' Most women I know would prefer that you were encouraging; that you demonstrate that you care about them and are proud of them; and if you help them improve, you do so in a practical way that highlights that you, too, once were a beginner who had to learn as everyone does.

If you provide them with that, they will be happier and feel more engaged. However, sometimes we have the same problem as Leonidas: the unit is sometimes more important than the individual. 

Not this time. Harmeet is hell on wheels at her actual job. She can get as good at range day as she cares to bother doing, but where she's really doing good for all of us -- especially in the Second Amendment community -- is her real job. I have no doubt that she'll accomplish more over the next few years on this front than I will be able to, to the benefit of us all.

Canada Cowboys

Tom's Corb Lund post, below, reminds me that though we think of "Country" music as associated with Tennessee or Texas, and "Western" music as associated with the American West, Canada has actually produced a few good musicians in those genres recently. Corb has an upbeat sense of humor that a lot of people like; he's also done some more somber pieces, like "Horse Soldier," of course, but in general he conveys a strong mental health buoyed by that aforementioned good humor. 

Another of these Canadian Cowboys, Colter Wall, has just announced that he is taking an indefinite leave from touring to deal with his mental health. He should be praised for taking that kind of thing seriously. It is a matter that has claimed far too many musical talents at too young ages. 

It won't be a surprise, however, if you listen to his music. It has a notably darker tone even where it is playful. 

I like Colter's music as music more than Corb's. There's no doubt, however, that Corb's speaks of a vibrantly healthy mind that one needn't worry about too much. It's an enviable quality; whether or not it is an imitable one is I suppose the focus and business of psychology. Best of luck to Colter Wall in pursuing that project. 

But That's Not All I've Ever Been

Argle-bargle in a good cause

My father told me a story once about a Dutch mathematician working in the Netherlands under the Nazi occupation. He was constructing a large Cartesian grid of the complex primes, a project without any known practical applications. Nevertheless, he told his captors that his work somehow had nearly magical military value, so they left him alone to work on it in safety and comfort throughout the war. Afterwards, he supposedly admired the pretty pattern of the grid and had it printed up as a tablecloth. Later, a Rice University mathematician who owned one of the tablecloths built a home in West University (Houston) and commissioned a black and white tile floor in the house in an area where a central column was surrounded on all four sides by a kitchen and open living area. (He also supposedly commissioned a screen door with a graphical proof of the 4-color theorem built into its frame.) The mathematician was said to have taken infinite pains with the tile-workers, who were skeptical that the precise random-looking scatter-pattern was meaningful, and were therefore irritated when their client proofread the work every night and forced them to make corrections.

It was a charming story that, as far as I can tell today, had no basis in fact. There was indeed a Dutch mathematician, Balthasar van der Pol (1889–1959), who made a Cartesian grid of the Gaussian primes and had it printed up as a tablecloth, a novelty item that was sold at the 1954 International Congress of Mathematicians. Surviving examples are held in museum collections such as the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden. Although van der Pol had held a prominent position at the Philips laboratories in Eindhoven throughout the Nazi occupation, where his work in radio/electronics and relaxation oscillations was considered an essential industry, there is no record of his work during that period involving the complex primes grid, or of his persuading the Nazis that it had abstruse military applications. The tablecloth project itself was post-liberation, tied to the 1954 ICM. So darn it, that was a nice story that I wish were true. The West U. house with the interesting tile floor and screen door may have existed, but there’s no record of it.

I was reminded of this story, which my father may have invented himself, or may have passed along as an amusing story heard from someone else, when I saw breathless reports on X this evening about a breakthrough physics paper that would unlock unlimited power from vacuum and render moot all the current quarreling over fossil fuels, including the current military action in Iran. The abstract reads like a Sokal hoax, packed with buzzwords:

Emergent quantization from a dynamic vacuum, Harold White, Jerry Vera, Andre Sylvester, and Leonard Dudzinski, 2025, Physical Review Research 8, 013264 (2026). We show that adding quadratic temporal dispersion to a dynamic-vacuum acoustic model yields a fully analytic, exactly isospectral mapping to the hydrogenic Coulomb problem. In the regime [formula], a proton-imprinted constitutive profile produces an inverse sound speed [formula] and hence a time-harmonic operator [formula] that is Coulombic at each bound eigenfrequency. . . .

But what do I know? I’m about as well-versed in quantum theory as the man in the moon. Grok maintains that it is a real paper, in a reputable journal, not currently being outed as a hoax. On the other hand, Grok also reports:

The hype you’re seeing on X, Reddit, and sites like stardrive.org (“Power from zero point energy!”) is not coming from the paper. It’s people (and sometimes White’s company) connecting dots that aren’t there. Harold White runs Casimir, Inc., which separately claims to be building tiny nano-scale “Casimir cavities” (asymmetric vacuum structures with nanopillars) that supposedly let electrons tunnel one way and produce a trickle of DC power—on the order of microwatts (e.g., 1.5 V at ~25 µA per chip in their promotional descriptions). They’re framing this new paper as theoretical support for their “dynamic vacuum” ideas, but:

Those claims are not in the Physical Review Research article. The outputs are minuscule—enough for maybe a sensor or IoT tag that “never needs charging,” not your house, car, or grid.

Independent verification is essentially nonexistent; mainstream physics views continuous net power from the quantum vacuum as incompatible with thermodynamics (you can’t extract usable work from equilibrium fluctuations without violating detailed balance).

In short: this paper is fascinating math for people who like fluid analogs of quantum mechanics, but it gives no more practical power-generation advice than a paper on black-hole analogs tells you how to build a starship. The “revolution” narrative is classic over-extrapolation from a speculative theory paper + a company’s early-stage promotional claims.

So don’t sell all your fossil-fuel stocks yet.

Some Statistics on the Hall

According to a machine I have been running the archives through, over 4.3 million words have been written in posts here at Grim's Hall. 

Of the 20,664 posts (including this one!), 5,589 -- 27% -- have been authored by my co-bloggers, a very substantial contribution! Of these Tex contributed 3,793, Tom 853, and Eric 414.

That doesn't include the comments section, where many grand discussions as well as many playful ones have occurred over the decades.

Thank you all for contributing to the community and discussion all these years. 

"The Way a Man Views Tofu Reflects How They View Women"

I had actually managed half a century on earth without conceptually connecting women and tofu, aside from the fact that no one I know eats tofu except a few women. Not most women I know, however! It's an outlier even among them. One woman I know did once bring some kind of fake-meat to a cookout; she asked me to cook the real burgers first and then cook hers in the meat grease, please. I was glad to comply; after all, she was my friend and I wanted her to be happy. If I could minimize her self-imposed torture, why wouldn't I want to do so?

From this article on meat pizza toppings being offensive to a certain kind of young woman seeking dates with whatever sort of young man would put up with them. Probably when we were young women had similar sorts of conversations, but before social media they were contained within their friend group and didn't have to be encountered by everyone else. Eventually the young grow up enough to realize that trivia like this is not important; loyalty and honor, trust and respect, these are the foundations of love between successful spouses. You can always order half-and-half pizza.

The Winner

If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? 

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Ancient and Medieval Social Systems

AVI linked a post by Earl Wajenberg that examines the treatment of slavery in various parts and eras of Biblical society. While his thrust is chiefly moral rather than historical, the treatment of pre-Roman Biblical society reminded me of my historical studies into feudalism and vassalage. 

There is a word which is contextually translated ‘slave’, but it means just a ‘worker’ or a subordinate. This word is ‘ebed’.... In Near Eastern Bronze Age societies, everyone was the subject of someone, and everyone except the lowest tier had someone else as their subject. The ‘lord’ was the ‘adon’ (in Hebrew—other languages had the same system but different words). The ‘subject’ was the ‘ebed’.

Normally, the adon took on obligations in regard to the ebed, typically of protection and advancement, and the ebed took on obligations in regard to the adon, typically in regard to services rendered and honour due, though it might be taxes or profit-sharing.

High status was conferred by having a high-status adon, and by being given a high role in his entourage....

There is a careful breakdown of different types of this relationship, with very different levels of honor and status. In later, post-Roman society slavery was a legal institution governed by Roman law. He details this as well.

The relationship he describes between the 'adon' and 'ebed' is roughly analogous to the relationship in feudalism between the 'suzerain' and the 'vassal.' When reading chivalric romance from the High Middle Ages, our own cultural assumption that freedom is the most desirable state is often called into question. In England, there are free men of various sorts; they are often of Anglo-Saxon heritage and not very high up at all in the social structure; the most prestigious are the "franklins," formerly thanes, who inherited knightly levels of privilege from the Norman Conquest and its subsequent peace.

Yet you frequently read of knights addressing men as "Vassal," and are mistaken if you think they are talking down to them as servants. Rather, they are acknowledging that -- rather than a mere freeman, who can come or go as he likes but has no secure social position -- this person has established a prestigious relationship with a nobleman. A vavasour, in the literature, is generally a figure of quite high respect: he is a vassal who also keeps his own subordinate vassals, and outranks the knights he encounters socially. 

Also, just as he describes marriage as a special case of the adon/ebed relationship, in feudal society the marriage relationship among the nobility increasingly took elements from the homage ceremony between knights and their lords. This was partly because of the increased prestige of knighthood resulting from the chivalric literature: nobles, who cleanly outranked knights, increasingly found themselves being knighted or seeking to join knightly orders (like the Order of the Garter) established by the royalty. 

Much as the society depicted in Starship Troopers elevates those who serve -- "Service Guarantees Citizenship" -- ancient and medieval societies often found themselves valorizing services of certain kinds, especially of course military services. Even nearby societies that did honor freedom still honored service to clan and kin -- as in Lawrence of Arabia where the sheikh rejects the idea that he is a 'servant' who is paid 'a servant's wages,' but proclaims instead that he is paid well but is poor "because I am a river to my people!" He does not 'serve' the Turks, and is free to pursue what he calls 'his pleasure,' yet his honor is entirely tied up with the service he provides to his tribe.