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
I’m starting for the other side of the world this morning. Taipei by Friday — local time.
Requiescat in Pace, Dolly Parton
A very young Dolly singing in Fountain City, Tennessee.
Dolly Parton will be missed here in Appalachia. I don't doubt that such a forward-thinking and cunning operator -- for she was that, as much as she was a darling of everyone and a much-beloved singer and songwriter -- will have set up all the proper contingencies to keep her charity for the poor children of her home running long into the future. She will still be missed for her example.
Dolly was the same age as my mother, who is still alive. As such mom, who grew up in nearby Bearden, Tennessee, got to watch Dolly from a very young age and all her long career. That show whose (silent) video opens this post was a Cas Walker show, a local politician and shopkeeper to the Knoxville area who used country music and his radio show to advance his position (and thus was a sponsor of such events).*
From her beginnings from the age of 10 as an extra on a local politician's radio show, she progressed to real success as a songwriter first. She then got on with Porter Waggoner's show -- he is usually though incorrectly credited with having the first all-female backup band in country music (in fact it was David Allan Coe who did that first, but he wasn't famous enough yet to be remarked for it). From 1967 to 1974, when she left the show and broke with Waggoner professionally, her duets with him were some of her biggest successes. In 1973 she had a real independent hit with the famous "Jolene" -- thus the name of one of my second cousins' only daughter -- and then went off on her own. The song she wrote about that departure is "I Will Always Love You," a song later more famously covered by another female vocalist.
She had a long and varied career, but what I always keep coming back to in my mind is all the good she did for those growing up poor in the place where she once did. Music has the ability to last forever; some songs are so old that we don't really know when or where they came from. Some of hers may, if not exactly as she wrote them than in the manner of folk songs. Yet her good deeds for the poor of the mountains, that is what I will always remember about her and her life's work.
Rest in peace.
* Cas Walker was a noted character. Dad's favorite Cas Walker story was from the radio show, The Farm and Home Hour. Shortly after radar guns became a thing that the state police were using, Cas gave an editorial against them on the show. "Some of our best citizens," he said, "are being caught in these traps."
UPDATE: Widespread mourning.
The Commancheros
In American history, the Comancheros were a group of Europeans who traded with Comancheria, the Comanche Empire, during its period of dominance in the Southwest. In the John Wayne movie of that name, these traders deal especially in weapons, making them enemies of the Texas Rangers.
In Australia, for some reason it's the name of a Motorcycle Club. Like the Texas Rangers before them, the Australian police are hot enemies of theirs for reasons chiefly related to firearms (though the press release mentions seizing large amounts of tobacco as well as cannabis and meth).
All of this explains, if it does not quite make sense of, the current Kafka-like attempt to send a biker down for 15 years because he played Duck Hunt at a carnival shooting gallery to try to win his daughter a teddy bear.
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
My great-grandmother and her folk were Primitive Baptists, for whom foot-washing was a crucial annual ritual (as it is for the Pope). My mother tells me stories about how carefully prepared were the feet of all the parishioners come Maundy Thursday, lest any rumors get around that they weren't perfectly upkept, those feet belonging to very hard working men and women from the mountains of rural Tennessee.
Muslims do it five times a day, at least they're meant to do. In Texas there's a little controversy about it.
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
One of my county commissioners is apparently on a mission from God.
Next time I run into that guy I'm going to ask him just what he means by "dangerous gentlemen." In principle it's compatible with my 2004 essay Social Harmony. All the same, religious angles make me suspicious when they come from a politician.
In a California Rock Festival...
...you're supposed to bring your own rocks.
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
I noticed today this small note about a range war written up here in 2024.
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
A clipping from last weekend’s chile pepper contest.
Sic transit gloria Mundi.
How Safe is the US Compared to Europe?
The Economist poses a novel dataset as a partial answer to the question (archive version because of paywall; original is here for subscribers).
Short answer: if you're interested in how safe you are walking down the street or operating a business, no, probably not. Murder rates are higher in US cities -- again, it's a few neighborhoods in a few cities driving those numbers up in the US -- but murderers usually know their victims. Your house is far more likely to be robbed in a European city than in an American one. Your business is far more likely to be robbed in London than in New York City, and even Chicago and LA are less likely to involve a business robbery than the capitol of the UK.
Only Chicago ranks among the worst European cities -- and below both Paris and London -- for how likely you are to be robbed on the street. Vehicle theft is more likely in Chicago and LA than in Europe, but on the other hand, Americans are more likely to own a vehicle to steal.
The set doesn't include other offenses we might care about: assault, battery, violent sexual assault or rape. However, the picture that comes out overall is not the one you normally get from the press. If you compared the rural US, which has violent crime rates around half of our city average (i.e. not our very worst cities like Chicago), the safety of Americans would be even more stark.
Another Noble Victory
A judge rules the 'ghost gun' ban by the Biden administration to be unconstitutional. Most importantly, this governs the construction or finishing of your own firearms at home.
State-level restrictions may remain, as with last week's victory; and once again, the judge's order might only apply to parties to the suit, which is a potential problem if you aren't a member of one of the organizations that sued.
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."
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