Herschel Walker Loses in Georgia

I would not have thought that Herschel Walker could lose an election in Georgia, but he did. A friend points out that he might have simply waited too long to run: the median age in Georgia is 38, meaning that most voters weren't even born when he was leading the Bulldogs on the gridiron to their national championship. They wouldn't have been old enough to know who he was until he was long gone from Georgia. 

It is also true that he is not well-spoken.  His English is poor at times, and his ability to express his thoughts is limited. He can come across as unintelligent.  On Saturday Night Live, Dave Chappelle -- whose comedy is praiseworthy for its courage and truthspeaking, generally -- called him stupid. He made that remark in a performance that otherwise attempted to save the career of Kanye West for remarks that were surely as stupid as anything Walker ever said.

Chappelle also used to give a performance designed to show O.J. Simpson in his best light. While acknowledging that Simpson surely killed his wife, Chappelle could praise him for his remarkable football career and manners. No similar accord is granted Walker, who was accused of far less serious things than murder. The media has done much to find women who would often simply say that he wasn't nice to them. "One, who was involved with him in 2006, said: 'Having Herschel Walker lose this very important Senate race tonight not only vindicates that democracy has won but the women that he betrayed, have won.'" I suppose he was a philanderer, like Bill Clinton; or perhaps like Ted Kennedy, who like the Juice actually also killed a woman. It is no matter, though, because they were favored by our cultural institutions. 

His opponent, meanwhile, could go on television and literally claim that Jesus favors abortion and only receive laudatory remarks for it. Indeed he ran on it and was portrayed as saintly for his views.

Ultimately I am saddened to see that a boyhood hero has not proven to be as good a man as my boyish self might have hoped him to be; and deeply dismayed to see that support for abortion -- not merely as an occasionally-necessary but tragic medical procedure but as if it were somehow a good and desirable thing -- has taken root in the state of my birth. It is a sad day to see self-described men of God claiming it in the name of God, and being rewarded with praise and power. I left Georgia quite a few years ago now, and will never be back except perhaps to visit; but it is sad to see the moral state into which it is falling.

Pearl Harbor Day

This year the main story out of Pearl Harbor is Red Hill. Built after the Japanese raids, it is an under-mountain fuel facility that is proof against aerial bombardment. It is also now very old, and subject to fuel leaks and toxic spills affecting the water table. 

It is understandable that the people want it cleaned up, but the strategic importance of a secure fuel facility hasn’t changed. If anything we are closer to renewed attacks on Pearl Harbor being possible than at any time since the end of the Cold War, maybe even since the end of WWII. Instead the plan is to move fuel to ships at sea, which are vulnerable to air attacks and submarines. 

Thirteen Silver Dollars

 

The Evil State

In the discussion to the Riddle of Steel post below, a matter has come up that deserves its own discussion.  

Blogger jabrwok said...

The State is just a way of organizing human beings. It's neither intrinsically good or evil, any more than a gun or automobile or whatever.

A definition of "evil" would be useful here. I'd say "evil" is any action which undermines social trust (some actions do so more than others, hence greater and lesser evils). States can certainly *engage* in evil, and have a lot more power to do so than individuals, but I wouldn't say that a State is *inherently* evil.

E Hines said...

States can certainly *engage* in evil....

This is another misapprehension. States do nothing at all; they're merely, as noted, a means of organizing. That organization, though, is populated by particular men and women. It is those men and women who engage (no quote marks needed) in any action, and those men and women can use or abuse that organization's power to more or less good (however defined) or more or less evil (however defined).

It's important, too, to keep in mind that those definitions of good and evil, while perhaps originally the definitions of the population who created their State organization, quickly become the changing definitions of the changing men and women who populate the organization.

Grim said...

St Augustine says that evil is, purely, a privation from the good intended by God in creation. I think the administrative nation state we have today is an evil in that pure sense. Humanity organizes naturally into families; Aristotle claims that it organizes even more naturally into polities, because (he claims) that is the only place where humanity's full range can be realized. In a polity, one can be free of oppression by other families or clans or bandits; one can enjoy a sort of equality with others that is not found in nature; one can take actions as a member of that polity to govern one's self and to express one's virtues through practical action. One can help others in the community express their own virtues by electing them to other offices to which they are well-suited.

Weber's criticism of the administrative state -- you can read my notes on it by following the links at the sidebar -- shows clear privation from these goods. The need of the elected officials to constantly run for office means that they have to defer their powers to administrators who aren't elected; this means that the good of self-governance is lost, because the people we elected don't end up being the ones with power over our lives.

The need for money for those campaigns means that the elected officials also end up chasing donations instead of doing good to deserve election; that means they don't actually end up doing even their limited duties, or exercising their limited virtues.

The need to use power to perform favors for donations is inherently corrupt. It also draws into the political class not the virtuous, but the most successful at corruption.

It also creates an administrative class that is both unelected and really powerful, thus eliminating the sort-of equality that free citizens had with each other.

Thus, all the goods intended by human nature -- according to Aristotle -- end up being achieved either not at all or only privatively. Thus, per Augustine, the state is evil: and really evil, not just rhetorically evil.

E Hines said...

Except it's not the State doing any of that. It's the men and women populating the State. The State is just a tool.

Grim said...

Yes, but at the same time also no. It's true that only living beings, and not formal organizations, can act -- yes, in that sense. But it's also true that the form of organization creates effects, even they aren't willed actions. One form of organization has a structure that does the one thing; the modern administrative state's structure does the other. It's not that the right people, choosing the right things, could fix it. The right people won't be successful in obtaining offices under this structure; should they by accident, they couldn't keep them over successive cycles without becoming corrupt; the elected offices don't end up having the power to fix the problems anyway because it gets delegated to administrators; and the administrators interests are necessarily separated from those of the governed so they are sorted into separate classes.

It's similar to the materialist/immaterial issue. One can say that 'only material things exist,' and in a way that seems true: everything we can observe is composed of material parts. But it really matters how those parts are organized. The same parts can be organized into a table, and it will function as a table and provide the goods for which a table was wanted. Or they can be organized into a loose heap on the floor, in which case it's all and only the same parts -- but the form of organization prevents them from attaining any of the goods that they might have if they'd been organized into a table instead of a heap.

My sense is that the Conan-style band of adventurers is a kind of political organization, non-family members choosing a leader and striving towards a common goal, each contributing according to their own virtues and by voluntary participation. That's an ideal, more Homeric than Aristotelian as it does not attempt (nor really contemplate) the sort of organization that would entail all of the human goods that Aristotle wants from the polis. 

Dying in a flood

For some reason we got dramatically better at preventing coastal flood deaths just at the turn of the millenium. I can't think of a good explanation, especially for worldwide statistics. Otherwise climate risks look pretty steady.

Medical Research and Safer Motorcycle Rallies

Although a bit dark, the article does have some mild suggestions to make motorcycle rallies safer:

Organ Donations, Transplants Increase on Days of Largest Motorcycle Rallies

The research, which appears Nov. 28 in JAMA Internal Medicine, shows that in the regions where the seven largest motorcycle rallies were held throughout the United States between 2005 and 2021, there were 21 percent more organ donors per day, on average, and 26 percent more transplant recipients per day, on average, during these events, compared with days just before and after the rallies.

...

Bike rallies are generally large, crowded events that take place in rural areas or small towns with traffic infrastructure intended for much smaller populations and far less traffic, the researchers noted.

This means that to increase overall safety for all motorists and pedestrians, event organizers should pay close attention to overall traffic management in addition to encouraging wearing of helmets and safe motorcycle operation.

Von Mises Learns the Secret of Steel

A post at the Foundation for Economic Education on our favorite riddle. 

It was not until many years later, while studying Ludwig von Mises’ text Human Action, that Thulsa Doom’s answer made complete sense to me. Mises, like Thulsa Doom, understood that power comes from action, and ideas are what drive human action.

“Ideologies have might over men,” Mises wrote. “Might is the faculty or power of directing actions.”

When Thulsa Doom, with a mere word, beckens a beautiful young woman to throw herself from a cliff, he’s showing Conan his power, or what Mises called “might.”

“Might is the power to direct,” Mises wrote. That power, Mises understood, stems not from swords or “steel,” but ideas.

“He who is mighty, owes his might to an ideology. Only ideologies can convey to a man the power to influence other people's choices and conduct. One can become a leader only if one is supported by an ideology which makes other people tractable and accommodating. Might is thus not a physical and tangible thing, but a moral and spiritual phenomenon.”

This is what Thulsa Doom meant when he says it’s not steel that’s strong, but flesh. The person who can use ideas to command people is a person who has true power, true might.

Unlike Thulsa Doom, Mises of course saw power as a dangerous and corrupting force, which is why he opposed concentrating might in the most powerful, and deadly institution in modern history: the state.

Doom too, in fairness:  he was intending, at the time of his death, to sweep away all the governments of the world in an epic of murderous assassination. There is no reason to think he meant to replace them, as their continuing absence would eliminate any institution with the ability to oppose him and his cult. 

Ironically that is the only defense for the existence of any state: such things are inherently evil, but they are effective forms of organization for opposing other organizations that are also evil. You end up having to set the evils against each other: the state against the corporation, the cartel, the mafia, the murderous cult. 

The question is whether there is a way to organize along voluntary lines, as Conan's band of adventurers, to hold back the other evils without needing courts and police, law and taxation, prisons and gallows.

Alternative Eugenics

The Orthosphere offers a striking proposal on the fall of Rome. It was at one time a commonplace among historians that Rome had failed for demographic reasons, but these were usually said to be matters of the will. Romans wouldn't serve in the Legions anymore as they became wealthy and lazy (to summarize entirely too quickly), and thus foreign mercenaries had to be recruited as auxiliaries. These auxiliaries came to be powerful enough that the various Germanic tribes were ultimately in position to seize whole portions of the Western Empire, and finally Rome itself. 

Since these histories were being written during the age in which eugenics was a popular theory among the scientifically-minded, one might have expected them to argue that the Romans' superior stock was out-bred by or cross-bred with inferior foreigners. For the English-speaking and German-speaking and French-speaking communities of historians, which together were most of the whole community of historians in that age, such talk was absurd. They were racists, of course, but talk of Germanic tribes like their own being inferior to Italians (often described in period documents as "swarthy," itself a Germanic word with racist connotations) would have been rejected out of hand. Obviously, for an early 20th century eugenicist, the Romans must have been improved by the association.

The Orthosphere's proposal is at once eu/dysgenic and yet not racist. That's what I find striking about it.

There was more than one cause of this depopulation and degeneration, but the greatest cause was removal of virile males from the breeding population so they could fight and die in distant lands.  As the great classical historian (and eugenicist) Otto Seeck explained,

“Only cowards remained, and from their brood came forward the new generation. Cowardice showed itself in lack of originality and in slavish following of masters and traditions.”***

Imperialism is profoundly dysgenic because when you “send forth the best ye breed,” you can no longer breed the best.  The American sage Benjamin Franklin saw the dysgenic effect of mass conscription and believed it must invariably undermine a militaristic people with depopulation, degeneration and collapse.  While he was ambassador to France, Franklin observed:

“A standing army not only diminishes the population of a country, but even the size and breed of the human species.  For an army is the flower of the nation.  All the most vigorous, stout, and well-made men in a kingdom are to be found in the army, and these men in general cannot marry.”†

This differs of course from our own standing army, in which one of the first things young soldiers tend to do is marry in order to get out of the barracks. Still, they do have a point to make about our own society as well as ancient Rome: the fact that we are putting off marriage and childbirth for the most intelligent and successful of our young men and women may well be having a negative effect on the quality of the population overall. 

Eugenics in terms of selective breeding is discredited in politics, but widely practiced in animal husbandry. Setting aside silly notions like race, different people like different animals are differently able and intelligent, and we know that these qualities are heritable to a degree. If the less able and intelligent are breeding early and often, and the moreso later and less, over time it will tend to result in a population that is weakened. 

It's a challenging idea, one that I advance for discussion with caution given the evils plainly associated with human eugenics. Regular readers of the Hall are a good group, though, and can be trusted to handle such ideas with due care. 

A Fearsome Prediction for Taiwan

Japan in 1941 wasn't always bent on war with the United States; but it was bent, from the late 19th century, on becoming a high tech economy. Following the Meiji Restoration the Japanese culture began inviting Westerners to come consult on everything from banking and policing to ship design -- they beat Russia in the Russo-Japanese War -- and redesigned its whole society accordingly. Then they began imperialistic expansion, which pressed further and further into territories the United States felt weren't acceptable. When we cut off their access to modern steel, it threatened Japan's whole model. War was the result of these sanctions as much as anything else.

The Biden administration introduced crippling sanctions on Chinese semiconductor production this year, which go so far as to threaten to strip the citizenship of Americans who work for Chinese industry. (It is not at all clear that move is constitutional, but what else is new.) There has been some speculation that China might follow the midcentury Japanese road to war, likewise to recapture its capacity to drive forwards to economic power.

Now a former American ambassador states that, should China attempt to capture Taiwan, the United States would not allow Taiwan's semiconductor production facilities to be taken intact. 

Speaking at the Richard Nixon Foundation’s Grand Strategy Summit on 10 November, former US National Security Advisor Ambassador Robert O’Brien appeared to lend credence to reports the US will disable Taiwan’s semi-conductor chip manufacturing capabilities if China attempts to reunify the island with the mainland.

“If China takes Taiwan and takes those factories intact – which I don’t think we would ever allow – they have a monopoly over chips the way OPEC has a monopoly, or even more than the way OPEC has a monopoly over oil,” said O’Brien.

The US Army War College Press published a paper in November 2021 recommending that the US make credible threats to destroy Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) facilities, eliminating the most important supplier of micro-processing chips to China and the World.

The paper by Jared McKinley and Peter Harris, Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan, became the most highly downloaded paper from the US Army War College of 2021, and suggested that the US lay plans in Taiwan for a targeted scorched-earth strategy that would render the island “not just unattractive if ever seized by force, but positively costly to maintain.” 

Of course it is the job of the Army War College to consider what might eventuate in war, and how to deter a war. This is strikingly similar to the road that Russia has been forced down with Ukraine, though: increasingly they are facing a scenario in which even managing to attain their goals will only saddle them with a costly new stronghold, with only destroyed infrastructure, and likely to harbor insurgency.  

Plonkerdump

A new sport takes shape (h/t Instapundit).

I propose that points be awarded on a scale of how many vehicles are able to pass relative to how many stupid climate protesters have been removed.

Video of competitive performances at the link.

The Feast of St. Andrew, 'Là Naomh Anndrais'

Today is the Feast of St. Andrew, which is also a national holiday in Scotland. For those few Scots who still speak Gaelic, which has not been taught as a nationalistic project as in Ireland, the day is called 'Là Naomh Anndrais.' 

The relationship between St. Andrew and Scotland is a little attenuated, somewhat like the relationship between England and the Holy Grail. That latter depends on the person of Joseph of Arimathea, who supposedly brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury for safekeeping. In Andrew's case, some of his remains were supposedly brought to Scotland long after his death, and a Pictish king once asked him for a favor in return for naming him the patron saint of the land, and the king felt like the saint had kept his part of the bargain.

Emergency!

Today we had an emergency medical call to a house in a remote mountain community, one where most of the houses are out of sight of the main road. The address was garbled by the radio, which doesn’t always work well among the mountains anyway. 

The house was easy to find, though, because of the correct use of the inverted American flag. I’ve never seen that signal used properly before, but this is exactly correct. 

Shattering lies

I've been reading excerpts from Vaclav Havel's work for decades, so I guess it's time I read his epochal book, The Power of the Powerless. A Maggie's Farm link took me to an Australian site called The Quadrant, where I found this rumination on Havel:

The sense of personal responsibility—together with the refusal to accept the ideology’s lies— provides many small opportunities to begin to live authentically, honouring one’s own and other people’s better nature. The rulers cannot tolerate this honesty; their system is built on falsehoods, so any truth proclaimed anywhere is a danger. The proclamations may be small; for example, someone says that the state-run brewery produces terrible beer; or that the concerts organised by authorities are tedious compared to amateur music nights; or that elections are farcical.

These truths are prosaic—beginning to live in truth usually is—but they signify a shift. And they have an odd, disproportionate potential because any system founded on falsehoods will always be subject to recurrent social, cultural, economic or legal crises barely restrained by the crust of lies. A small truth enacted “in the ‘hidden sphere’, in the semi-darkness where things are difficult to chart or analyse” may have huge effects with surprising speed. This hidden sphere—of real human vocation involving communication, trust, choice and freedom—is obscure but omnipresent; it’s the everyday sphere where the genuine aims of life burst beyond the aims set by the system. It’s the powerful ally of truth.

From the book itself:

What is this independent life of a society? The spectrum of its expressions and activities is naturally very wide. It includes everything from self-education and thinking about the world, through free creative activity and its communication to others, to the most varied, free, civic attitudes, including instances of independent social self-organisation. In short, it is an area in which living within the truth becomes articulate and materialises in a visible way.

The strongest thread in my personal political philosophy is the primal importance of voluntary human institutions: "independent social self-organisation." Government can facilitate them by imposing a certain amount of order and coordination, but it can't replace them and must never crowd them out. No system of external order can make up for the chaos and violence that emanages from empty people with empty lives. We have to be responsible for ourselves and deal with each other on the ground of "communication, trust, choice and freedom." This is why I trust a free market over any other economic system: it requires people to bargain and persuade rather than dictate. It can't relieve us of our duty of generosity and disinterested mutual support, but then neither can a supposedly compassionate socialist safety net.

Electric Vehicle Revolution

It's probably less significant than you think, even if you're a skeptic.

 

A Knoxville Girl

My mother was one, more or less. Technically she was from Bearden -- "Bear den" -- which is a bit south of the city limits. If you know the Ballad of Thunder Road, the closing action happens there: down Kingston Pike, at Bearden is where the Federal police 'made the fatal strike.' 

The family history around moonshining is simple:  none of my kin made moonshine, but my father's father was a welder who spent Prohibition welding stills. Given the overlap with the Depression, it was the only paying work. 

A Humorous Interlude

 

A bit behind ...

Early Decorations

 

I had wanted to locate the tree more centrally, but a certain fuzzy grey bandit requires that I keep it lashed to the wall if I don’t want to clean it up every morning.

He’s not even sorry, the scoundrel.

“Gandalf,” obviously. 

Advent Begins

I never realized before now that the beginning of Advent also begins the liturgical year, but that makes a great deal of sense. 

Hard on Equipment

As I may have mentioned before, a good friend of mine builds electric motorcycles as a hobby. (He and I have a lot in common -- I met him in the philosophy program some years ago, and he's the one who got me into Strongman competitions.) He's been doing everything out of his home shop with hand tools, and was mentioning today that a fender he installed required 21 bolts. I suggested a mini-impact wrench and some impact sockets for a Yuletide gift to himself. 

Since some of you may be looking for gift ideas for a man in your life (or a statistically-unusual but not unheard-of woman), here is what I use.

The blue one is the Makita XDT11. The smaller red one is their XDT15. The smaller one is a better choice for bikes because it also has three power levels, which can help make sure you don’t strip or round off smaller bolts/screws. The bigger blue one is great for larger axle bolts on bikes, or general work on your truck.

My son prefers the American-made Milwaukee alternatives; they're heavier, but he thinks also stronger and more powerful. My sense is that there's plenty of power already for motorcycle bolts, which are often quite small. If anything I think the key issue is to balance the power you bring to the task with the risk of damaging the equipment (e.g. the bolt-stripping/rounding I was talking about).

That boy is, now that I think of it, hard on equipment. There's an appropriate Corb Lund song.

Maybe it's one of those things you learn with age and experience.

Cimmerian Thanksgiving

 UPDATE: Director Robert Rodriguez had a similar idea. I also saw this classic this morning:

Go to the threat

It's not what I would do, I'm sure. It's a good thing everyone isn't like me.

“It’s the reflex. Go! Go to the fire. Stop the action. Stop the activity. Don’t let no one get hurt. I tried to bring everybody back,” he said Monday outside his home in Colorado Springs, where an American flag hung from the porch.

Funny how I see this story as about an eelbrain who was kicked back on the street last year for no good reason but finally stopped in his tracks by a random good citizen trained to use violence quickly and decisively for the public good. The press sees it as about the victimization of an imperiled voting bloc by a guy they'd love to portray as a member of the alt-right.

Happy Thanksgiving to all. As we often do, we're having a three-household gathering with our nextdoor neighbors, potluck. Greg is roasting a second turkey today. He wants to try a new recipe but felt I would object to abandoning the traditional one, which is fair. He's been brining and spice-curing a turkey for decades, now, and it's inimitable, but I'm looking forward to seeing how a John Besh recipe turns out. We'll bring over Spinach Madeleine and Presbyterian Green Beans. I made a little cranberry relish the way I like it, though probably no one else will eat it: fresh cranberries and a whole orange in the blender, with some sugar, crystallized ginger, and something for heat--in this case a dash of sambal manis. No need to cook it.

So far November has looked more like February: gray, drizzly, and rather cold. The winter vegetable crops are loving it. We may even get a crop of fall tomatoes. Today the sun has come out, so now it does look like November in South Texas. After a fresh wreath arrived in the mail this week, I scoured the yard for interesting berries and husks to add to it.

And here is my problem child, the most recent dog, who still can't get along with the others:

One last picture: my production so far this season of Froebel stars and crocheted snowflakes:

Actual "Journalistic Integrity"

A reporter assigned to craft a hit piece mistakes her job for actual journalism, and does that instead. There's a man-bites-dog story for you.

Never Try to Intimidate a Man in a Tam O'Shanter

"A man walks down the street in that hat, people know he's not afraid of anything."

-Wash

The Hunter Biden laptop story is likely to take on a new life when the Republican House takes its seat next year and gains investigatory powers. A central figure in that story is the laptop repairman, John Paul Mac Isaac, who turned the laptop over to the FBI, and eventually a copy of it to the press after the FBI "lost" their copy. Apparently he had some reason to suspect that they might given their treatment of him.

Mac Isaac described one of his first interactions with an FBI agent as "chilling." He said he was "overjoyed" when the agents handed him a subpoena, and he made a comment that he would change their names when he eventually wrote his book.

"That's when Agent Mike turned around and told me that, in their experience, nothing ever happens to people that don't talk about these things[.]" ... The comment, Mac Isaac suggested, was a warning against speaking out about what was going on.

And while Mac Isaac has said that Americans should be able to go to authorities without fear of retribution, he has experienced otherwise.

"I have been dealing with retaliation from multiple fronts for the past two years when what I did was leaked to the country." 

I don't know if he was wearing that hat when the FBI talked to him, but if he was they were fools to try to threaten him. You don't tug on a man's kilt for much the same reason. 

Notes from Gutenberg

I came across this in a Gutenberg project I'm working on, about pictures:

"... Rossetti saw the Blessed Damosel leaning from the gold bar of Heaven with eyes far

Deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven."

Painting and poem here.

“We Are All Different…”

…just like everybody else. 

The article, if you like, is about why nonconformists like hipsters end up looking just alike even as they're trying not to conform. There can be mild variations, but they end up affecting a style that is quite conformist within its subset. A fellow has a mathematical model that seems to show that in any such case, conformity ends up resulting.

I don't know how good the model is, and I don't know what its assumptions are. But nonconformist groups -- defined as groups that reject mainstream society in some significant way -- have a lot more need to be able to identify each other than mainstream people do. If you're part of the mainstream, you can just assume that most people you meet will be on the same page. If you're very much not, it can be a matter of survival, flourishing, or even just comfort to be able to identify the few individuals out there who might broadly agree with you.

The visual cues exist in these subcultures because they're important, in other words. They have real natural selection value. So yeah, hipsters pretty much all look alike; and so do skinheads; and so do people who join the punk rock or metal fronts; and so forth and so on. So do highly orthodox religious dissenters, and not just for religious reasons. It's a matter of survival, and over untold generations humanity has learned it.

Two Views of Winter Trenches

I have no idea of how typical these two videos of the Ukrainian and Russian armies winter diggings-in are, but to the extent they are at least a little representative (I suspect they're actually extremes but  that they do indicate essential differences), they indicate why a Ukrainian winter offensive would be highly successful, whereas a Russian offensive would...not be.

A Ukrainian trench: https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1593929751693258753?s=20&t=7kAnEz4gmLqqWZ8iqzIBMg

From a Russian surface camp: https://twitter.com/BorlandTrubo/status/1593931319427440641

The Russian text claims that, at the time the video was taken, it was -25 outside. Omsk is about 65 mi from Kazakhstan, so it's not an entirely fair comparison, but if this is typical of the preparation the Russian soldiers are getting enroute to the Ukrainian cauldron, I don't see how they can be effective.

Hence the barbaric assault on the Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, in an attempt to deny Ukrainians the fuel, power, and food necessary for winter survival.

Eric Hines

Drunken Poet's Dream

It takes some courage, as a poet, to substitute for a rhyme what is really an identity (as it does to substitute a near-rhyme, or a not-very-near one). I love that he acknowledges it in the text of the poem. 

The Reverend Horton Heat chose to rhyme gas-oh-leen with sev-uhn-teen, which would have worked for mesk-ah-leen just as well. RWH has the standing to defy petty conventions. 

If you are drinking tonight or this weekend, have one for the soul of Master Sergeant Craig Zentkovich, whom I knew a good while in Iraq. I hear he died in his sleep last night; I have heard no more. [UPDATE: Here is a GoFundMe link provided by Douglas in the comments.] Kenny Rogers said that was the best we could hope for. Those of you inclined to prayer might remember him. 

Agency and Determination

The Orthosphere hosts a philosophical argument that skips an important step.

We theists recognize two general categories of causation: mechanistic (i.e., “cause-and-effect”) and agency (“ground-and-consequent”). Most people, including most God-deniers, will initially agree that these two categories are real, and distinct, and unbridgeable … until they see where the argument is going.

From recognition of the unbridgeable distinction between mechanism and agency, I argue that agency cannot “arise” from mechanism – this is what the God-deniers who haven’t denied agency from the start will then deny and this denial can then be shown absurd and thus false – and thus that agency is, and must be, fundamental to [the] nature of reality.

The important step is the proof that agency cannot arise from mechanism (as he puts it); it is not obvious that this is true, and the fact that people might 'initially agree' to it doesn't establish it as more than an unchallenged assumption.

(By the way this frame is older than monotheism in the West: Aristotle explains causality in just this way in the second book of the Physics.)

Consider that, as far as we can tell, atoms have no agency. An atom of carbon or of hydrogen or oxygen seems to decide on nothing; it joins into bonds, such as hydrogen and oxygen forming water, for purely chemical and physical reasons. This is 'mechanistic' determination on the Orthosphere's model.

Yet water has properties that its components, hydrogen and oxygen, did not. Both of these are gaseous at room temperature, for example; water is liquid at the same range of temperatures. Water has the property of 'wetness,' then, which has somehow arisen from the bond between the things that both lack that property. We can say some things about how and why this happens, but that it happens is clear enough. New properties emerge from combinations that happen mechanistically.

Why, then, should not agency be a property that emerges from things that happen mechanistically? Other properties, even complex ones, seem to do this. The carbon joins into long protein chains, the water is joined with it, and (skipping a long discussion) eventually you have DNA. This has a new property -- the capacity to order things it encounters mechanistically into a design that is not random but follows a kind of 'intention.' This ability to take from the world and put things into the order that is also 'you' is called life (as explained by philosopher Hans Jonas).

If this kind of proto-intention can arise from what appear to be mechanistic actions, why not a real intention? Why shouldn't it be true that living beings of certain kinds have the property of agency, even though none of their components had it before they were joined and ordered into that form? 

This is, by the way, a good reason to reject materialism: it is not merely the material that matters. All the same material -- all the same atoms of oxygen and hydrogen and carbon, etc -- if not ordered in this way lack the properties of life and agency. These only seem to arise when the right order is brought to them. Thus, the form -- which is not material, but the way in which the material is ordered -- exists and is causally important, and not only the material. Reality is not materialistic but hylomorphic as the ancients said.

This is not an anti-theistic argument or a theistic one; you can make both arguments from this ground. Perhaps a God is then unnecessary, and being unnecessary should be excluded according to Occam's Razor. Yet what explanation is there for reality having this strange quality, such that thinking agents can and do apparently automatically arise from deterministic material processes? Why should reason and decision be inherent in a material that does not need them, existing whether or not agents do? Occam's Razor is only a tool for gamblers, not a proof; and here it seems clear that unnecessary things do exist, because we experience being one of those things all the time.

Perhaps, then, reality has this order because the order was wanted; and if it was wanted, there must have been someone who wanted it. Someone who had the power to set this basic structure of reality, either through design or through will, or possibly merely through longing. 

The AARP on Pineapple Express

I don’t think most of us who were involved are quite old enough for the AARP, but they have a personal and compelling story from Scott Mann, a Green Beret who was at the center. His book on the subject is soon to be published. 

In fact it’s the same book that was coauthored by James Gordon Meek, the journalist who disappeared abruptly after an FBI raid on his house. He has been seen in the last two weeks, so I guess he’s not in GitMo, but there are still no answers to the questions produced by the raid. 

On Football Celebrations

I do not watch the NFL. I never understood the appeal of professional sports compared to collegiate ones, for one thing. A college team has roots in the community, made up of students from your state and possibly your town or county. A professional team is merely mercenary: the players usually have no real connection to the state, county, or city in which they are located, and they move about either as they are traded or later as free agents. 

The NFL's culture has also changed dramatically since I was young. Some of these changes are humane, and others are merely cultural shifts. For example, another friend sent this parody video of the growing culture of celebrations in the NFL.

Now I haven't watched an NFL game in years, so there's no reason they would care what I think about that, but apparently it does closely follow what the real celebrations are starting to look like. 

When my father was alive, he used to complain about this sort of thing regularly. He sounded a lot like the voiceover in the parody video. This may be a thing like AVI's discussion of 'uptalk,' a cultural change of no real significance which is going to happen just because things change and that's that. Or it might be, as dad used to say and the announcer conveys, that it marks the decline of real virtues like sportsmanship and civility, replaced by real vices like grandstanding and egoism. 

It could also be a combination of the two, some of it being merely cultural and some of it representing a larger cultural shift towards egoism. I'll leave that for the discussion in the comments.

From the Past

A friend I was close to in the 1990s sent this video, which is a cover version of a song that was popular during the middle of the decade. 

I don't remember the band or the song, actually, though perhaps I knew it at the time. Here is the original.

A Blind Gift to Republicans

As 'your favorite President' announces his intention to run for office in 2024, Democrats and their allies in the press are trying to push a narrative that the 14th Amendment bars him from office. 

It is not obvious that these claims hold any water. The idea is that Trump 'led' an 'insurrection,' which he certainly did not do in person -- the case they are citing is of someone who actually entered the Capitol during the J6 event, which is not really plausibly 'an insurrection' in my opinion anyway. It was a riot, and riots are illegal, but an insurrection would generally require an actual plan, weapons of some sort, and other conditions that don't seem to be met. (It also shouldn't be a mousetrap: there are good questions about the FBI's role here.) 

It should be obvious that the whole thing is a gift to Republicans, and that whether it succeed or fails. If it fails it will be one more show of powerlessness against The Mighty Trump, which will encourage and invigorate his followers; if it succeeds, it will clear the decks of the Republican most likely to lose in '24 due to his sky-high personal negatives, while infuriating his supporters into doing whatever they can to defeat Democrats that year. 

The whole project is encouraging to me, actually. It suggests that the Democratic Party doesn't believe that it can pull the rabbit out of its hat in '24 that it pulled in '20: all that 'fortifying' of 'our democracy' may have been a trick that could only occur under the unique conditions of the pandemic, which made the population willing to accept the mass-scale illegality by the government in the conduct of the elections. Four years on, with Republican legislators at the state level pushing for more election accountability successfully in some key states, it might not be possible to do all that again. That would be very good news, and reason for renewed confidence that the election might be legitimate this time (or at least more legitimate).

A Strange and Striking Logic

My original home state was Georgia, though both of my parents were from mountainous East Tennessee, and I grew up with Georgia's particular take on the American political system. Today a judge overturned (at least pending appeal) a six-week abortion ban that was passed by the legislature and signed into law by the governor, arguing that the law was unconstitutional -- "was" as in "not now, but at the time it passed."

Judge Robert McBurney of the Superior Court of Fulton County said the law was void at the time it was passed in 2019 under the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade ruling, which established a federal right to abortion in 1973.

McBurney said the state would have to pass the law again now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe for the ban to be valid. The 2019 law was "plainly unconstitutional when drafted, voted upon, and enacted," McBurney wrote in his opinion.

Now I would think this logic was correct if the reason for the change in what 'was' constitutional had been a constitutional amendment. Let us say that you passed a law that said that no one could vote until age 28, as apparently some particularly ignorant journalists think is being discussed somewhere. That's clearly unconstitutional: the Federal Constitution determines that the voting age is 18. Such a law would be unconstitutional and therefore void, and like all unconstitutional laws it would have no legitimate force from the moment it was enacted. You'd have to amend the Constitution first, and then pass the law later.

A Supreme Court ruling is not like that. The Supreme Court did not change the Constitution; it only stated that earlier courts had misunderstood it when they said it meant X, and that the correct interpretation is Y instead. The Constitution was therefore the same all the time; our judges just didn't understand it correctly for a while. 

Too, the whole reason the Supreme Court was asked to rule on this was that there was a controversy about what the right meaning really was. It was not 'plain' what the constitutional stance was; lots of people disagreed, for decades, and eventually the court came to see it their way.

Thus, I think the logical position is that the constitution never barred this law, and that it is valid as enacted. Nobody changed the Constitution. The Supreme Court does not have that power.

Railroad Nation

Partly because the Russians were never able to establish air superiority, Ukraine's on-time railroads remain the backbone of the nation and its war effort. Trains running on-time would normally make easy targets for bombing runs, but Russia's military strategy did not prize air superiority the way the American way of war has done. As a result, the Russians are unable to cut these flourishing supply lines; for the same reason, they are vulnerable to the artillery we have been supplying to their foes. 

The war entered a new phase last week, between the retreat in the south, the advance in the center covered by a wave of missile strikes, and the big diplomatic push that is being made to end the war. The later is a good cop - bad cop approach, I think, with Ukraine in the role of bad cop. They can't continue the war without external support, however, both in funding and weapons; so the West can pretend that the bad cop holds the reins, but in the end Russia knows that the 'good cop' can cut them a deal.

The Violent Gods

Via Arts & Letters Daily, a review of a new translation of Ovid.

One day in the thirteenth century, James I of Aragon, not only a great conqueror but a king famous for his powers of memory, made a revealing slip: "We got to our feet and we began with an authority from the Sacred Scripture that says: Non minor est virtus quam quaerere parta tueri."

“It takes no less talent to keep what you’ve got than to acquire it”: for a crusading medieval monarch, what more convenient justification for territorial consolidation could there be than “Sacred Scripture”?

The problem is that that line of Latin doesn’t appear anywhere in the Bible. It comes, rather, from a notoriously risqué book of poems, published during the reign of the Emperor Augustus, whose narrator doles out advice on how to seduce women—preferably married ones.... That these lines of Roman erotic verse had become indistinguishable from Scripture by the Middle Ages isn’t really all that surprising. More than those of any other poet of ancient Rome, the works of Publius Ovidius Naso—we know him as Ovid—have insinuated themselves into the mind of Europe, influencing its literature, art, and music.

The translation is of the Metamorphoses, a long poem that introduces new twists to what were already old stories. For example, the story of Medusa was ancient even then; Ovid's new variation turns the goddess Athena ("Minerva" to the Romans) into a bad actor, who executes the transformation of a beautiful young woman into a monster in order to punish the woman for having resisted a divine rape by Poseidon ("Neptune," of course, for the Romans; (or, given that Athena was a virgin goddess, it may have been that Medusa failed to resist the rape; there is some scholarly debate about exactly what it was that offended Athena, the sex or the mortal defiance of a divine will).

That doesn't turn up in the review, but a lot of similar stories made the book.

Above all, Ovid’s presentation of Jove—the king of the gods and the obvious counterpart of Augustus himself—is almost uniformly disparaging in its contempt for the god’s use of his power. The Metamorphoses often reads like a catalogue of Jove’s violent offenses: Jove transforming himself into a bull in order to abduct Europa, Jove becoming a swan to get at Leda, Jove taking the form of an eagle in order to snatch up Ganymede....

In the Arachne episode, Minerva weaves a tapestry that celebrates her victory over Neptune, her uncle, in a long-ago contest for possession of Athens—an egotistical bit of divine P.R. Arachne’s weaving, by contrast, depicts nine rapes committed by Jove, six by Neptune, a few by Apollo and Bacchus, and one by Saturn, Jove’s father. 

The new translation abandons 19th and 20th century habits of euphemizing what exactly these gods were doing.  Numerous chapters are, the reviewer notes, titled in the form "X Rapes Y." The translator, Stephanie McCarter, writes:

The inclusion of so many stories of rape in the epic suggests, in fact, that Ovid felt such violence was worthy of critical interrogation. . . . To read Ovid with an eye toward his full complexity—his beauty and his brutality—allows us to scrutinize our own thorny relationship with the past and with the ambivalent inheritance we have received from it. To wrestle with the unsavory aspects of ancient literature is to do the hard work of self-examination.

A fair point. Ovid arguably used this not merely to play with violence, but to criticize his (very dangerous) political overlords. Who could object to being likened to a god, and the highest of gods in your pantheon, no less than Jove himself? When Ovid celebrates Augustus as being like Jove, he is not -- or not merely -- paying a compliment. 

That’s a Bold Move, Cotton

As a love song strategy, I’ve heard plenty of “hey pretty lady you’d better be sure, because I am dangerous.” I don’t think I’ve heard anyone put the case against themselves quite so front-and-center. Points for honest communication in a relationship!

You Don’t Say

In the local paper today:

Elections officials held a meeting this morning to clear the air about a sudden increase in ballots favoring Democrats.

Democrats got smashed locally, but with these changes they won’t be completely excluded from the local government. 

Happy Veterans Day

My father as a Vietnam-era Drill Instructor; I think he was a Staff Sergeant in this picture, but I can't see the rank insignia. 

My best to all of you who have earned the distinction of calling yourselves Veterans. Have a glorious day, and a wonderful weekend. 

Child ballads

As fond as I am of Child ballads for lo these five decades or more, I don't recall hearing "Earl Richard" until this week. Possibly I'd heard other version of it that didn't suit me and so didn't stick in memory, but I quite love this Sean Garvey rendition. I wasn't familiar with him, either, and am sorry to find he died earlier this year, and also to find that his recordings mostly don't seem available for purchase. This is a slow, repetitive, pretty, sad, hypnotic tune. What a nice burr Garvey had in his lower register.

Captain Blood

For one reason and another, until just now I had never read the once-popular novel Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini. It is exactly the sort of book I would have liked in my teens and twenties, kin to The Three Musketeers and its ilk. I've also never seen the movie, the one which launched the career of Errol Flynn and gave rise to other movies I've enjoyed such as 1935's The Adventures of Robin Hood. I will review it here, past a jump to avoid spoiling it for anyone who would like to read it.

Happy Birthday

To all the Marines in the audience, enjoy the day. 

(Meme by Gruntworks)

Aristotle's Ethics in One Brief Lesson

While the best way to study Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is to read the whole thing carefully, over and over, and then read Aquinas' adaptation and commentary, most students these days do not ever take a philosophy class at all. Those who do often only take one survey course, and it is necessary to convey the basics quickly. 

With this in mind, I have decided that you could teach an excerpted form of the EN fairly quickly. This would be the necessary introductory materials from Book I, and then the virtues of courage, justice, and magnanimity.

The reason to approach it this way is as follows.

1) The introductory materials are necessary, so included.

2) Courage is the easiest virtue to teach and serves as a model for all the rest. It's easy to grasp what it is, and why it is a virtue/strength/excellence. Once students grasp the model, you can just hand-wave indicate how self-control is obviously a virtue in the same way.

3) Justice serves as a _substitute_ for virtue, because the lawfulness component requires laws that compel people to act the way that a virtuous person would (or face punishment). In that way, it 'can be said to be complete virtue,' but really isn't. Courage comes up again here too: the laws should compel you to go fight or face death, so that you'll go fight like a courageous person (but because you're afraid of being put to death, not because you have the virtue).

4) Magnanimity is actually complete virtue, and in fact a crowning quality that one can only obtain once one already really does have all the virtues. It's an alternative model for complete virtue from justice, but the one that actually entails virtue. The contrast will help them see how the system is really supposed to be completed; but justice has to do for most people, because most people aren't actually virtuous.

This would only be the briefest of introductions, but students would leave with a functional mental model of how the system works: what ethics is, what a virtue is, why justice (which we hear so much about these days) is only a substitute for virtue, and what true and complete virtue really looks like. You could teach this in a long afternoon or one week in a semester, and it should stick with them ever after. 

Those who develop the taste for it can read the whole book. For the rest, as Tolkien says, it's enough to go along with.

A Good Night Locally

The elections are the subject of a lot of discussion today, for obvious reasons; but at least locally, things went as well as I could have wanted. There is a lot to be said for concentrating on the local right now: the national government is subject to a deeply divided populace, as are many state governments, but locally a lot can still be done. Communities often agree on the problems that face them, even if in a larger context there is division. 

The only race I cared about particularly was the local sheriff, where Iraq war veteran Doug Farmer carried the day. He becomes the first Republican sheriff in Jackson County in a hundred years, or right at it. All the candidates came to the fire department to talk to us, and all but him said the same thing: 'Drugs are the biggest problem, and if you vote for me I will seek additional Federal resources to tackle that problem.' Farmer said, 'Drugs are the biggest problem, and they're being sold out of the same houses they've been sold out for years. We know where they are, and we know who is doing it. Vote for me and I'll go walk across their porch, knock on their door, and run them out of town or send them to prison if they won't stop.' We'll see if he does what he said he would do, but if he does he has the right kind of courage for the job.

Offices like this are a kind of honor, and honor is properly the reward of virtue. One ought to award the honor of the office to the person who has the specific virtues that office requires. The problem with our nation is that instead our system has devolved into awarding offices of honor to those who prove they are adequately corrupt to keep the money train going. People move up to higher offices not because of their demonstrated virtues, but because of their demonstrated capacity to make the money flow. Here was an exception, and a chance to award an office according to the virtues that merit it. Hopefully he will do well; hopefully, we might find more chances to award offices in the proper way.

Shenanigans

Last night at 1:45 AM the county paged out an all-stations-call to let us know that 911 was down, and there were large-scale phone service outages for the government statewide. We were directed to man all stations and not rely on dispatch services like usual. Phone lines came back up six hours later; 911 services went back down this afternoon, though they are reportedly working now.

Both my internet service provider and my cell phone's AT&T internet service, two different corporations with completely different infrastructure, were offline simultaneously this afternoon for several hours.

I have not heard any explanation of all this, but it sounds rather like a cyber attack; and there was a significant outage just two weeks ago affecting North Carolina government. Officially this was because crack cyber security agents recognized a danger and took systems offline to fix it; but as the article says, the governor "is being tight-lipped" about the outages, and no word at all has come down about today's.

Today is of course the midterm election day. The National Guard has been called out for just this purpose, although I'm not sure what being 'called out' actually means for a cyber unit. 

In North Carolina, cyber units have trained state entities and officials in most counties, according to Maj. Gen. Marvin Hunt, adjutant general for that state’s Guard. He said the work of his cyber team will “surge during the election to ensure that we have 24-hour coverage throughout this whole process.”

“We’re really that third party that comes in—it’s just assisting them—to give them a different look, so that on election day, we can all have confidence in our election systems,” Hunt said. 

Neely told Defense One that few states are strong enough in the cyber arena, and the need is only growing. 

Security professionals hired by states often face “military-grade adversaries” they aren’t equipped to counter, said Brig. Gen. Gent Welsh, assistant adjutant general and commander of the Washington Air National Guard.

Keep your eyes open, and take special care in case your local 911 service goes down. In the event of an emergency and the service isn't working, go to your local fire department, police station, or emergency medical service facility and report the emergency in person. Go to whichever one is closest. They'll have radios that work even if the phones are out. 

It's not a bad idea to have the local phone number written down somewhere in case the phone lines work but the 911 services don't. People call the station here all the time rather than dialing 911, and for many purposes that works very well. In an emergency 911 is usually a better option because it allows the dispatcher to contact everyone who needs to respond at once, but it is good to have options.

Happy Day

You say it's my birthday (66).

More Songs of Dying on the Highway

I just posted that song by the Barnyard Stompers because it's my favorite one that they do, but as I was reflecting on it today I realized that 'death on the highway' is a pretty significant theme for touring Texas bands. I guess if you are a band that makes its living on the road, and your roads happen to be in Texas, you spend an awful lot of time on those highways. Enough time, manifestly, for existential angst to set in.

Here's one by Bob Wayne, who is one of my favorites working today.

It'll probably be Sunday when most of you see this, so you might want to pass over that one until Monday or next weekend. 

Here's one that goes with the last post, because half of it's about dying on the road and the other half is about college sports teams.

There are doubtless more. If you have a favorite, add it in the comments.

Justice on the Gridiron

One rarely encounters anything close to true justice in the world; one never meets any Platonic form in the street, but Justice in particular seems unlikely to show its face among human beings. 

Today, however, we did see something close. The committee that decides such things had chosen to rank the University of Tennessee's football team #1 in the nation because it was undefeated, and had beaten Alabama. It placed the Georgia Bulldogs at #3 even though they were also undefeated and the defending national champions. 

What happened today was that Georgia played Tennessee.

It was a very professional, strategic destruction. Georgia went up three touchdowns to two field goals in the first half, and then spent the second half denying the field on a prevent basis. They didn't get greedy; they didn't try to run up the score. They just burned the clock. Tennessee finally scored a touchdown in the fourth quarter, but it never got close to coming back. Georgia only scored one more field goal, but scoring more points was not their tactical priority. They had plenty of points; they needed to bleed the clock for every point they allowed. The opposing quarterback, a promising young man named Hooker, was sacked six times. 

Justice is likely to be done in the next set of standings. 

Don't Mind Dying on the Highway

That's the Outlaw country / metal band known as the Barnyard Stompers. If any of you like that and are inclined to the highway, they'll be playing tomorrow night at the Bobarossa Saloon. 

By Their Fruits

Or, why black Republicans 'ain't'... er, acceptable. 

How can we distinguish between the different types of Black Republicans? Johnson contends, “we can judge them by their words and deeds.”

What type of Black Republican is Stuber? He was recruited by White Republican leadership to run against Ammons, the only African American clerk in Champaign County history. Like Deering, “the hard, overt and aggressive” White supremacist, Stuber is an election denier.

And like the incompetent, subliterate and coonish Herschel Walker, Stuber reiterates “massa” Trump’s talking points. Intimating fraud, he cast aspersions on the 2020 elections. Stuber alleged votes were not counted in Georgia and Arizona, and further declared, “Champaign County may have stopped counting. I don’t know.” But during a late August interview with The News-Gazette’s Tom Kacich, he dissembled when asked if Trump had won. Again, disingenuously claiming uncertainty, he stated, “I don’t know if he truly was the winner.”

About a month later, similar to Walker and nearly all election deniers, Stuber miraculously backtracked. Without explanation, he affirmed, “Joe Biden was legally elected president of the United States.” I find his reversal unbelievable. Indeed, I believe it’s a tactical move to deceive the electorate.

Now, if any of you had written anything like the remarks about Herschel Walker being forwarded there, people would be rightly outraged and deem the speech explicitly racist. 

I do wish people would stand by the honest and demonstrable truth that the election was illegal in that it was conducted on terms altered by executive branch officials without legislative input, and therefore unconstitutional in that the Constitution clearly states that the legislative branch shall set the terms of elections; and that, therefore, there is no legitimate government of the United States. That is, however, perhaps an unacceptable position for anyone of a conservative temperament: on the principle of 'the king is dead, long live the king,' the idea is that the government cannot be so impermanent as to cease to exist except in the most extraordinary of cases. To hold otherwise is to court the chaos of the world, which whatever else violates that most conservative principle of stability.

For people to be forbidden from raising the point that the election was extremely dodgy at minimum, however, is silly. It was conducted with radical departures from the rules established by the laws of many of the states involved in it, every one of which made it less secure. Questions about its legitimacy should be perfectly acceptable, as should be insistences that future elections abide by the law or that laws should be crafted to create more certainty and credibility for election results. 

Normality

It's hard to realize how bad things have gotten outside of the wilderness in which I have fastened myself. I used to go to this part of Union Station on a regular basis, and it was as advertised a thriving shopping district. Here, where we have happy children and dogs, hikers and backpackers, picnics and boat trips, everything seems like America hasn't changed all that much. I have to look at the news to remember that Washington, D.C. has turned itself into a post-apocalyptic nightmare -- as has San Francisco and many other cities. 

Probably a lot more Americans live in the parts of the nation that have horrified themselves than elsewhere, though. The country has been badly hurt even if there remain oases beyond the concrete. 

Search & Rescue in Panthertown

At least they picked a pretty place to get lost.

This morning was spent rescuing some hikers from the Panthertown wilderness. There is not and never was a town in "Panthertown." It is named for the panthers, which are still regularly attested by backpackers in this area. Panthertown also includes a bear sanctuary region.

A map of today's SAR area.

Aside from taking a while, this rescue went as well as you could want. The hikers had a chilly night. One of them had fallen into a creek during the previous day, so her clothes were wet. They were from Colorado, so they weren't used to land navigation in heavily forested country where even clear landmarks can be obscured by trees and ridges. Making a fire in an alpine rainforest like this is not like making a fire out West, either: it takes a special skillset to know how to obtain sufficiently dry wood and get it going in this environment. 

Still and all, everyone is fine and now back on their way to food and rest somewhere warm and dry. 

Halloween

The Fire Dog was worn out by all the children. 

Jack. 

 

Samhain

R.I.P. Southern Icons

Jerry Lee Lewis, wildest of pianists and rockabilly lord, died this week after a false report earlier in the week. He was recently inducted into the County Music Hall of Fame, having long been in the one for rock and roll. 

Vince Dooley, legendary coach who led the Georgia Bulldogs to their previous national championship four decades ago, also passed on this week. 

When I was at UGA, his wife and he and I went to the same church. I never met either of them, though, because they were such celebrities locally that they were always mobbed.

The National Defense Strategy

The Biden administration put out a National Security Strategy last year; the Office of the Secretary of Defense has now put out its companion piece, the National Defense Strategy. This will inform the National Military Strategy yet to come from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As a high level strategic document, it's not terrible except in one huge way: it demonstrates that OSD thinks it still has a lot of time. This is made clear right at the beginning.

President Biden has stated that we are living in a “decisive decade,” one stamped by dramatic changes in geopolitics, technology, economics, and our environment. The defense strategy that the United States pursues will set the Department’s course for decades to come. The Department of Defense owes it to our All-Volunteer Force and the American people to provide a clear picture of the challenges we expect to face in the crucial years ahead...

Frankly they'll be lucky if they've got a year before some of these bills come due. Some of it is here already, and more of it is coming faster than 'by the end of this decade' or 'in the crucial years ahead.' 

Magic Drinks and Poisons

Professor Emeritus Ann Sheffield begins with the Saga of Olav Tryggvason. It's about twenty minutes for those of you who, like me, enjoy discussions of Norse sagas. 

Psychology of Woke

Definitely a confirmation bias issue here, but this does fit my experience of the people I have personally known who partake in this stuff.

One ought always to be suspicious of attempts to psychoanalyze people who have not actually been examined in person, or to apply psychoanalysis [apparently I was not using the right term; see comments. -Grim] not to individuals but groups. Combining that with my own confirmation bias issues on the subject, I can't actually place any confidence in these conclusions; but I forward them for discussion by those of you who might feel competent to do so.

Honors

One of these is me, Christmas 2008. One of the others in the photo, a good friend of mine, sent it to me today. I must have been just back from outside the wire, because I was in armor with a pack slung over my shoulder. I have no memory of what I might have been doing.