There Was Never Any Russian Collusion

Nor, in fact, even any evidence of any.

This will not shock readers of the Hall, in spite of the multiple impeachments and the years-long Special Counsel investigation. We reported it on April 7, 2017. Even by January 6 of 2017, before Trump was inaugurated, it was clear that the DNC was not allowing its 'hacked by Russian' servers to be investigated by the FBI -- stonewalling obviously intended to forestall the Bureau from discovering the lack of evidence.

Yet the show was just getting started, and would run for years to come. Even to this day, there are die-hard fans; and thirty-year distinguished veteran Michael Flynn still lost his house, and had to be pardoned because the prosecutors and courts wouldn't let go in spite of the fact that he was always obviously clear.

After the jump, the FBI statement on the matter (language warning).

Piratical Guacamole

The diet of seagoing men in the seventeenth century wasn't enviable, but there were highlights on occasions for those who sought far enough afield.

[W]hen one gifted pirate permitted himself a curiosity for food, he played a pioneering role in spreading ingredients and cuisines. He gave us the words “tortilla,” “soy sauce,” and “breadfruit,” while unknowingly recording the first ever recipe for guacamole. And who better to expose the Western world to the far corners of our planet’s culinary bounty than someone who by necessity made them his hiding places?

...He ate with the locals, observing and employing their practices not only to feed himself and his crew but to amass a body of knowledge that would expand European understanding of non-Western cuisine.... In the Bay of Panama, Damier wrote of a fruit “as big as a large lemon … [with] skin [like] black bark, and pretty smooth.” Lacking distinct flavor, he wrote, the ripened fruit was “mixed with sugar and lime juice and beaten together [on] a plate.” This was likely the English language’s very first recipe for guacamole. Later, in the Philippines, Dampier noted of young mangoes that locals “cut them in two pieces and pickled them with salt and vinegar, in which they put some cloves of garlic.” This was the English language’s first recipe for mango chutney. His use of the terms “chopsticks,” “barbecue,” “cashew,” “kumquat,” “tortilla,” and “soy sauce” were also the first of their kind.

It's a pretty neat story, one that ends with him dying penniless -- unsurprisingly, given that piracy is just another way of being 'poor as thieves.' He had an eventful life all the same.  

CNN: "Time for women to give up on equality"

It's impossible, they say, on the occasion of another failure of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA):

Equality isn’t impossible simply because the people in power won’t give it to us. It is impossible because it cannot be faithfully implemented in supremacist and capitalist institutions created by men, for men. 

That's weird, because I thought women were actually doing pretty well. They're getting more college degrees, more graduate degrees, and are increasingly dominating well-paid office work (as opposed to the physical trades, where their participation lags but not apparently in a manner out of line with their preferences). 

Many feminists and proponents of the ERA cite abortion as central to their fight for the amendment’s passage. But abortion and issues pertaining to bodily autonomy, self-determination and human dignity of historically oppressed and marginalized people are not equality issues. Rather, these are matters of freedom.

Well, they're definitely not matters of equality. Nobody's even proposing giving men an equal opportunity to opt out of the duties of parenthood if they want to do so. Neither feminists nor conservatives are interested in that; I'm not interested in it either, to be sure. Freedom does not mean liberation from one's moral duty to one's parents or children; and if it entails a legal liberation from those duties, nevertheless one ought to do them. It's only scoundrels who seek to avoid such things.

[Better would be] respecting people’s human dignity, allowing them to fashion and become, for example, the woman of their dreams, rather than policing their gender identity and expression. Whereas an equality mindset reinforces the gender binary and limits women to a small box in opposition to men, a freedom mindset understands that the inclusion of trans athletes, for instance, elevates the competitive level of all women, and celebrates self-creation as the pinnacle of freedom....

From a freedom mindset grounded in accountability and care, abortion becomes part of reproductive health care. It isn’t oversimplified as an equal right to make a single “choice.” Abortion is never based on one choice but rather determined by a person’s circumstances, personal and financial supports, age, aspirations and dreams for how they want to build their own family.

All of this necessitates letting go of equality and an equality politics, built upon the patriarchal gender binary, of complicity and reliance on governments institutions to create a freer and more just world.  It requires asking new questions. How might our politics change if we, finally, relinquish equality?

So, ok, let's ask the question. Give up on equality and in return you get...? An absence of gender binary, I guess, so all the good things for women entailed by that. An end, I suppose, to all-female spaces like changing rooms; perhaps an end to female-only promotional institutions like scholarships and mentoring leagues for girls becoming young women. (Actually, the conservative feminist case against the ERA was that it would endanger such things, and affirmative action for women in general: this one wasn't a conservatives-versus-liberals fissure in plain terms. There were arguments on both sides against the amendment.) 

I guess it's not up to me, but if I were a woman I think I'd be a little miffed at the suggestion that I should give up my quest for 'equality' in order to make more room for others. I guess it's the time in the musical-chairs contest that somebody has to give up a seat, though. More than one somebody, it could be.

The only argument in favor of that awful capitalism is that it somehow finds ways to add chairs instead. I guess that's not as attractive a prospect.

All's lost, but not forever

All's lost, but not forever. Poland is not lost forever.

Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

Post-Soviet Poland embraced free enterprise while the EU did its best to destroy it. Poland already had survived murder attempts by the Nazis and the USSR. Now its economy and its education system are outstripping the EU and Great Britain.

Grass was an unregenerate old communist, but I will never forget the shock of reading The Tin Drum in the mid-1970s and encountering the idea that the USSR would end, and that its former slave states would triumph somehow. I had been brought up on the hopelessness of 1984. Grass himself seemed to think that the only real problem in his beloved Poland had been the Nazis, while East Germany under the Soviets was on the right path. He was skeptical of German reunification, not only in the Dennis Miller sense:

"I view this in much the same way I view a possible Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis reconciliation: I never really enjoyed their work, and I'm not sure I need to see any of their new stuff."

--but because he hated to see capitalism gobble up the virtuously administered communist assets of East Germany. As a college student, however, I wasn't aware of his inane economic views, and noticed only the horror of Nazi subjugation, which I knew, even if he didn't, had been followed quickly by Soviet subjugation.

Even now, as we seem determined to try the communist totalitarian experiment yet again, I think of Poland, not lost forever.

Fascinating

Today I learned that you can’t buy an ad to run in Times Square that is critical of someone without their written permission. This is true of dictators: want to complain about Xi or Putin? Not unless they consent. 

Happy Mother’s Day

To those among you who have earned the title, our best. To the rest of you, remember yours today. 

Humor and History

If you are unaware of the Flappr YouTube channel you are in for a treat. There you will find some of the funniest and informative historical videos ever made. The Good Thing, Bad Thing series is a must watch. There are separate videos on the French, Chinese, and Russian revolutions. I recommend them all. Don't be put off by the length. All are time well spent. 

More Comedy Unleashed

The earlier Nicholas De Santo bit was from Comedy Unleashed, and they have a number of funny comedians on. Here's Mary Bourke, "I Feel Sorry for Millennials":

Here's Konstantin Kisin:

And here's the channel. Pretty funny stuff.

5/18/23 Update: When I first found this channel, I watched maybe 5 comedians in a row who were all funny, so I thought I'd share it here. Since then, I've hit about 4 in a row who just weren't that funny, so I'm less enthused. Anyway, it's a comedy club, so I should expect it to be hit or miss.

Cowboy Poetry: Bear Tale

The Biblical reference is to Ecclesiastes 11, if you don’t recognize it. 

Ireland, Free Speech, and God-Given Rights

There is no reasonable defense for Ireland's new law on 'hate speech,' which is the kind of law one couldn't hope to comply with because it places the burden of proof on your opponent's feelings. 'You are guilty if your opponent feels that you are' is an insurmountable burden for any citizen to meet, no matter how well-intentioned and inclined to law abiding. 

However, it's Ireland's problem, and they'll have to deal with it. When the consequences of it become evident, the Irish have established traditions for throwing off tyranny as necessary. 

I won't, therefore, bother discussing the law at length; but the frame raises an old debate in an interesting way.

To begin: freedom of speech is not a "God-given" right; no rights really are. We may hold certain rights to be "self-evident," but that is simply a comforting fiction derived from the American Revolution. Rights must be taken, not given and, once won, any attempt to nullify them must be resisted by (in the Communist Left's favorite phrase) "any means necessary." ...

Nor are the enshrinement of rights in a nation's constitution any guarantee of perpetuity. Countries come and go; regimes change. The populace undergoes a philosophical and ethnic shift -- a quiet revolution -- and no longer feels any loyalty or allegiance to even bedrock cultural notions from hundreds of years ago. Constitutions become "living," which is to say, dead. 

Joel and I had a lengthy debate about whether or not that was the right conception of rights back in 2007, which was itself part of a subset of a debate that had already gone on for quite a while. I was taking roughly the same position as the fellow here: whatever God wants us to have in terms of rights, we have to do the work, in the same way that God created a world in which men could have wine, but there will only actually be wine to drink if we make it anew every year and all the time. 

You can find this debate on the sidebar under the heading "Frith & Freedom," it being the first several entries ("The Endowment of Rights" and then several posts citing Beowulf and the Founders). 

If you take the position that "a right" belongs to whatever level at which it practically comes to be, the only "natural rights" are the right to die and the right to think. The right to die Nature will defend herself; no matter what efforts are put into trying to force you to stay alive, your right to die really cannot be denied but only delayed. (That formulation puts an unwanted division between Divine Law and Natural Law, but Nature is said to be fallen; in at least this one way the Natural Law is out of order with God's Law). 

The right to think, likewise, is beyond human power to deny you. You can be drugged, deprived of sleep, tortured, or killed, and these things can delay thought or prevent it. But as long as you are not dead, during whatever moments of clarity your torturers leave you, you have the power to keep your own counsel. You may not be able to say anything about it or do anything about it, but your ability to think through the world is something they can only try to influence from the outside.

I have, in more recent years, argued that this inalienable right to thought implies also a right to speak: if your ability to think rationally about the world is a source of your human dignity (or the source, as Kant has it), then we ought also to respect your right to express those thoughts. By the same token, I have argued that the dignity that inheres in human beings implies an inalienable right to self-defense, which in turn grants necessarily the right to the means to defend one's self. 

Those things I think are rational truths that ought to follow from the limited things that Nature really does defend. They can be said to be natural rights because they are direct or necessary logical consequences of natural rights. In that way, they really ought to be part of any political system whatsoever; no government, which is always and only a human-created institution, ought to violate these pre-political truths about human nature. 

Even so, if that view is to be realized in the face of all the human beings who desperately want to exert their domination and mastery over others, it must be defended. These defenses may morally be as emphatic as necessary, and furthermore they ought to be, because something more fundamental and important to humanity than that particular government's survival is at stake. 

Religious Humor

Tex's comments in the post below reminded me of an old post on religious jokes, from way back in 2007. There was a follow-up post in 2009, in both of which I retold one of Jerry Clower's jokes. It's better when he tells it.

In any case, the posts are in line with Tex's complaint about jokes being "all hostility and no punchline." There's some bad jokes out there, and some great ones too.

Nicholas De Santo, Right-Wing Italian Comedian

Discovered this fellow in the comments over at the Sage of Knoxville's place. Mostly not vulgar and there's no profanity, but it may be hazardous if there are left-wing passersby. In my work environment, it would be NSFW.

A Bit of Byzantine Chant at the Coronation

King Charles's father, Prince Philip, was raised in the Greek Orthodox church. He was received into the Church of England in 1947, the month before he wed Princess Elizabeth, according to Wikipedia.

My guess is that that family background was behind the Byzantine chant at the coronation today, but maybe it was just an ecumenical gesture.

Psalm 71 in the Orthodox reckoning is 72 for everyone else, I believe. The Orthodox join what everyone else has as Psalm 9 and 10 together into Psalm 9, so the count gets off by one after that.

This Psalm is fitting for a coronation: 

Marking Lightfoot's Passing

Not something I listen to regularly, but I've always found the "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" haunting.

He has a number of other good songs I grew up with. Here's a couple. 

An Amazing Cover and a Fitting Tribute

Sabaton, a band that has quickly become a favorite, has covered Motorhead's (a band that has ALWAYS been a favorite), song "1916," an anthem to the fallen of WWI. 1916 was the title track of Motorhead's album of the same name released in January 1991. Sabaton has done an a amazing job covering the song and the video is very powerful. It is a fitting tribute to Motorhead's front man Lemmy and, more importantly, our fallen dead.   

A Bit of Stan Rogers

We've had this next one before, but it was a long time ago, and since it's probably my favorite from Stan, let's have it again.

In the Navy

On the newest Navy recruiting tactic:

The US Navy has embraced the Bud Light approach to selling itself — enlisting an active-duty drag queen to boost recruitment in the face of serious personnel shortfalls.

It’s hard to say which is more surprising — that the Navy would do such a thing, or that it has a drag queen on active duty in the first place.

 Oh, it’s definitely not the latter.

Rathcrogan

A Celtic archaeological site of less renown. 

Scenes from Willie Nelson's 90th Birthday Concert

 One of the last of the Outlaws celebrated his birthday last week.

May Day

I hope you find the Cathedral of May to be glorious. Memento mori, and enjoy your time here. 

UPDATE: Conan’s Maypole. 

Embedding Rumble Videos

Here's a quick how-to for embedding Rumble videos in Blogger. Most of this will be below the fold.

Before we get started, it's vital to ignore the video icon in the Blogger interface throughout this entire process. It will persistently refuse to help you with this task, so you should snub it like a stuck-up ex who broke your heart and stole the cash in your sock drawer on the way out.

Now, let's begin below the fold.

Rumble Test #2

 To see if the HTML Blogger option embeds from Rumble.

The Blogger facility within the HTML option still limits me to YouTube or my computer. Following, though, is the standard HTML URL underlie of a video title rather than the URL itself.

2023 SLS Chicago: Women’s & Men’s Final

The HTML option, though, is too cumbersome to use to suit me.

Eric Hines

Edudopia

It's school board election season here in my little county. Since my shackles were struck off at the beginning of this year, I've dipped only the occasional toe in local politics. I told myself I deserved a break from meetings, at any rate, and even skipped a candidates' forum that a year ago I'd have felt obligated to attend.

Still, with the election date approaching in a week, I broke down and watched a 2-hour video of a candidates forum. Yikes. School board elections draw some pudding-headed candidates, don't they? Luckily the choice this year was a little better defined than last year, when it was hard to distinguish among the candidates at all. One incumbent seems like a reasonably solid guy, while his challenger couldn't even manage to field the basic "Are you willing to assure us you'll have no truck at all with any CRT or gender-affirming nonsense?" The challenger went down the usual rabbit trail about law school curricula and affecting not to understand what the questioner was concerned about.

The two guys I plan to vote for (out of 5 candidates for two board slots) both came right out and said CRT and gender-affirmation had no place in the schools. One deftly avoided arguing about what CRT technically means and whether it's technically taught in public schools by simply saying people should be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. The other said it was pure garbage that he had no patience with. Both clearly were focused on academic excellence and were capable of formulating reasonably clear sentences. Best I can expect!

The challenger with the depressing CRT answer also assured us solemnly that the science has established that childish brains are biologically unsuited to learning to read before the age of 6 or 7. It follows, therefore, that we should spend more money on early childhood development, which should consist entirely of play. All I hear when someone talks that way is "Increase our budget, because it's not our fault that the effort is futile and the money is wasted." Not that I want to browbeat very young children into learning to read if they happen not to be ready, but then why are we spending education tax revenues on their playcare? It's the same reaction I have when people explain to me that it's not a school's fault when revenues per student are doubled but no one's learning improves. Granted that it may not be the school's fault what's going on in the kids' home lives, but the fact remains that we're throwing money away on techniques that even their loyal proponents don't think are working. It's as if the point of the school were to be a playground, not so much for the kids, as for the people pursuing hobbies in childhood development studies.

I wrote up the 2-hour discussion to the limit of my ability to decipher what they were trying to say, and to the limit of my patience ("I've had my patience tested, and it was 'negative'!"). This morning the "I don't know what CRT is" candidate complained in a comment to my post that I'd misunderstood certain parts of her fragmentary answers. No doubt; I responded that it was good that she'd read my summary and had carte blanche to add to or correct my rendition right there in the comments section. She explained solemnly how people often doubt her views on the appropriate age to learn to read, basing their erroneous opinions on their own experience instead of on the science. No need for me to respond; that's a campaign ad for her opponent, as I see it. I was probably a little brusque in my summary of what I took to be her views, but I actually left out the worst part, fearing I was not understanding her words and not wanting to embarrass her. I could have sworn that, when asked her views on the proper role of parents, she answered that parents were important, because if they didn't produce the kids, the schools would have no one to work with. She managed to get out the statement that parents were "partners," and I left it at that.

Were schools run by nimcompoops when I was a kid, and I just didn't have the opportunity to see it? I could swear that most of my teachers and administrators had more on the ball. Of course I have no idea what was going on at the school board meetings, which probably would have curled my toes. At least they didn't try to make me wait until I was 7 years old to learn to read, for pity's sake, not that it would have mattered. My family taught me to read before I ever walked into a schoolroom, without inflicting any evident cognitive damage. Perhaps today that would be grounds for a CPS intervention, or penalties for practicing education without a license and a union card.

Rumble Test

 What can I do to post a randomly selected Rumble video?

Here's the URL, copied from the address field of my browser: https://rumble.com/v2klc9a-2023-sls-chicago-womens-final-and-mens-final.html But that's not the video itself, only a path to it.

Here's the blogger's video embed effort: oops--can't do it. The blogger facility only allows "Upload from computer" or from YouTube in particular.

Maybe the problem isn't unique to Rumble. Maybe it's that Alphabet allows embeds only from Alphabet's wholly owned video facility or from personal equipment.

Eric Hines

Irish Comics Go Through Russian Immigration Interview

 

Well, I've never known a Russian (or citizen of any former Soviet block state) to pour such a tiny amount of vodka into a glass, but other than that it seems legit.

The Fruit of Philosophy

Today I happened through Highlands, a resort town with a spice shop I like to visit occasionally. It's long been a playground of the wealthy, but also a regular stop for bikers because it lies on some good motorcycle roads through good motorcycle country: the Cullasaja Gorge, twisty mountain roads through national forest, or down into Georgia or South Carolina. I'm always amused by the obvious tension the wealthy feel at the presence of the bikers, who are never especially rowdy or likely to cause trouble: they're just passing through on a ride they're enjoying. It's not a place they'd stop long to hang out.

I have the right kind of education to pass among the wealthy, if I wanted to do so enough to dress and act the part. I was trying to decide why I don't want to, not only not for the occasion but not in general. I think it's normal to aspire to rise in social class, or to maintain the highest one you could aspire to join. 

When I was young I spent the last two years of high school at a private school because the public school told my parents they couldn't challenge me, and my parents took that seriously enough to find a school that could. It was my first exposure to many things, including both wealth and serious education. I took to the latter, pursuing it as far as it goes. I turned out not to be interested in the former. I met some very nice wealthy people, at least one of whom took an interest in me and wanted to encourage me to go into something lucrative like stocks or finance. He even bought me a subscription to the Wall Street Journal so I would begin to learn about the language and thinking of that world. I had forgotten about that until just now.

In the end, I appreciate the education far more than is common, but the class that can afford the time to become educated not so much. I enjoy erudite discussions with fellows, but the wealthy never join volunteer fire departments. What I find there is not people who have read Kant, Aristotle, or even Plato; I can't have the same sort of conversations with them. They are, however, the ones who are living the Aristotelian virtues.

This reminds me of what Marcus Aurelius said: "Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one."

Ultimately that is the fruit of the tree of philosophy, and frankly one rarely finds it among philosophers -- or, at least, among those highly educated in philosophy. One finds curiosity, kindness, insight, alert minds and often a sharp sense of humor. I like them; I enjoy them. Nevertheless, I spend my time among the people who have never read those books and among whom I never mention them because I wouldn't want them to feel alienated from my company. They are the ones who work a full day, even a twelve-hour shift, and then get up in the middle of the night or go off and spend a day of their weekend because an alert goes out that someone is in need -- and they do it for free, just because it is the right thing to do. 

They could have learned that from Aristotle, but they did not. Somehow they learned it from the parts of the culture that no longer remember having even been informed by him and the other great thinkers and traditions of the West, but which retain the lessons truly. Those who have spent more time with the books have only rarely achieved Marcus Aurelius' distinction. 

Philosophy has many fields beyond ethics, beyond moral philosophy in general. Still and all, somehow that chiefest lesson is one that rarely conveys into the practice that Aristotle rightly identifies as the real nature of virtue. 

Arkansas Gospel

Dad29 sends a memorial to a lady with a voice.

She was old all my life; 76 when I was born, 87 when I first met her. When she spoke, it sounded like a swarm of bees hovering over a thick patch of clover.... Though raspy and thin, worn threadbare by the friction of so many passing years, her voice had a strength and beauty to it that was otherworldly. It was the sound of a century’s worth of Arkansas Delta breathed out all at once into the wind. The sound of revival meetings in clapboard churches; the sound of haltering lyrics strewn with the roses over a wooden box draped with a flag. It was the sound of feed store gossip around live-bait wells; the sound of pink tomatoes kissed by salt and summertime.

It was a voice that liked to sing.

About once a year she would get particularly blessed during a Sunday service. She would ask the pastor if it would be alright if she could “sing a special.” And these were always special times. A man in the congregation, often my grandfather, would lead her up to the platform and I would begin playing the introduction to the song she always chose, “I’ll Meet You in the Morning By the Bright Riverside.” Before she was finished, everyone that wasn’t on their feet shouting were on their faces weeping.  

The piece is moving and sweet. Here is the song, sadly not sung by the lady herself.

Jenny and the Mexicats

In the spirit of trying out new things, I thought some music to chill on a beach with would be good.

FPC Win IL Injunction

In the opinion, United States District Court for the Southern District of Illinois Judge Stephen P. McGlynn ruled that PICA’s ban on commonly owned semi automatic firearms, and the magazines they utilize, likely violate the Second Amendment and should therefore be enjoined.

It’s good to see this injunction, because the law in question is intended to violate the Second. 

Lying Requires Knowledge and Intent

I understand the frustration of the writer, but I don't think their opponents are all liars -- not strictly.

Only one criminal out of six uses a firearm in the commission of a violent crime. Criminals use firearms about a quarter million times each year and they violate our “gun-control” laws millions more times. That means that gun control is and has been a failure.

In contrast, we defend ourselves with a firearm about 2.8 million times every year. Mass murderers take about 600 lives a year. We protected hundreds of thousands of our children with armed school volunteers every school day. If you haven’t heard it before then I’m telling you now…armed self-defense is far more common than the criminal use of a firearm.

Politicians who push for more gun control say their laws will disarm criminals. In fact, their 23,000 gun-control regulations — already on the books — disarm far more honest citizens than they do criminals. Mass murderers deliberately attack us in gun-free zones where we are disarmed by law.

Emphasis added. The thing is, I think that almost no one who advocates for gun control actually knows those numbers, nor even just the orders of magnitude. I think they mostly really believe that "common sense" conveys that fewer guns will mean fewer gun crimes, and that the solution is just so obvious that there's no need for further inquiry. I have never succeeded in interesting any of them in the actual numbers, and when I've quoted them I've only encountered stark disbelief that the numbers could be real.

Another one they absolutely don't believe is that accidental gun deaths involving children are vanishingly small -- some years a single digit figure in a nation of hundreds of millions of people with hundreds of millions of guns. Mostly the statistics you'll see in the press blur this by including everyone under 18 in the category of "children," and blurring how many shootings were really accidents versus how many were gang-involved. If you really get down to brass tacks on actual children and actual accidents, though, it's a very small number. Every one is a tragedy, of course; it's important not to forget that fact, even as we recognize that it's statistical noise.  

Rumble Test

Just seeing how to embed Rumble videos here, so some silliness follows.

I was never really a Fox News viewer, and don't have much of an opinion either way on Tucker Carlson, but I like what he says here, after Fox let him go.

Okay, let's see how this works.

Conan Report

He pulled out the two-half-hitches, so I retied it with a triple one. That should hold him. 

Neoclassical metalhead

 As a child of the '80s, one of the artists responsible for making me a life-long metalhead was Yngwie Malmsteen, a Swedish guitarist credited with creating the subgenre known as neoclassical metal. As the name implies, this is a genre of metal that is heavily influenced by classical music. It also features some of the most technical guitar playing that can be found in any type of music.  I have included just a brief sample of songs below, but there are other great bands that play this type of music, such as Stratovarious and Trans-Siberian Orchestra.      

Free Book: Unleash the Dogs of War

Probably for a very brief time, Amazon has the book Unleash the Dogs of War: Secret Missions in Support of Operation Crusader free on Kindle. (Look below the Kindle Unlimited to "$0.00 to buy".)

I haven't read it, but it looks like something folks here would appreciate. Part of the description:

During the Second World War, the summer of 1940 was a dark period for Britain and the Allied cause, and the German military was triumphant everywhere it went. Allied strategists looked for anything to turn the tide of battle in their favour. In North Africa, where the Allied armies had their backs against the wall, powerful benefactors who believed in the potential of the special forces bucked convention and allowed for their creation and growth.

North Africa became the birthplace and proving ground for some of the Allies’ most prestigious special operations forces. The infamous Long-Range Desert Group and the legendary Special Air Service were born in the desert, and other formidable organizations such as the Commandos and Special Boat Service first showed their true worth.

All of these organizations would have an important role to play in Operation Crusader, which played out in Egypt and Libya during 1941. They would go on to provide a great service to the Allied cause for the remainder of the war.

One From the Wife

Since we’ve had so much musical diversity lately, here’s one my wife likes. 

The New Normal

Over the weekend, the U.S. military bravely evacuated our diplomats from the U.S. embassy in Khartoum.

As a former diplomat, I feel an incredible sense of pride in our armed forces. Yet, I was horrified to learn that thousands of our fellow citizens didn't make it out.

They were abandoned by their government, while much smaller nations, like Spain and Saudi Arabia, were able to get their civilians to safety.

It is a bitter irony that today, as Biden announces his bid to again represent some 330 million Americans as president, some 16,000 are stranded inside this troubled East African nation.

In lieu of rescue, Americans left behind are advised to undertake a treacherous trek - on their own - across a 500-mile battlefield to Port Sudan.

It's unrealistic, dangerous, and deeply irresponsible.

This is not the way United States behaved when I served overseas.

It is, however, very similar to the way the United States behaved in quitting Afghanistan. At least this time the White House isn’t pressuring State to stop assisting or to actively block volunteer evacuation efforts. So far, at least. 

The urge to control

As Hayward points out, it's not just one party that gives in to the totalitarian urge.

Tartanic

The world isn’t all bad. Not while there’s beer and bagpipes. 

Heat Death

...Since it only “knows” the majority beliefs (or rather, the textual expressions of these beliefs) which exist on the Web, if ChatGPT takes over the bulk of mankind’s production of text then heterodoxy and heresy will be averaged out. Outlying concepts and beliefs will be averaged away from the contents of the Web as ChatGPT ignores outliers and swamps them with its own output. Outlying beliefs will become more and more rare, and regime-compliant beliefs will become increasingly common.

If its output is posted on “reputable” sites (schools, government bureaus, mainstream journalism, and so on), ChatGPT’s writings will arrive pre-approved for consumption by itself and other AI entities....

And since the Web has become the de-facto determiner of reality for citizens of the more advanced nations, ChatGPT could wash away heterodox thought from all but a tiny minority.

All the more important, then, are these algorithmic 'cleanups' occurring on blogs and in our comments sections. Unpublished, these ideas drop not just out of our reach -- who among us goes back and re-reads old comments anyway, or even many old posts? They also, and more importantly, drop out of the map that these large language models build. 

Why would Google go back and retroactively censor blog posts from a decade or more ago? Because it expects Bard to learn from what remains, and this is a first-pass purge of unwanted ideas from the AI's output.

So take AVI's point, and multiply it.

[F]ast-forward ten years, and is Dale made that much more invisible on a long quiet road? His book is still available, after all.  He hasn't been fired. This may be more of that ninja censorship I just read about and linked to.

Fast-forward ten years, and he may not exist in the Mind of Bard at all. It was instructed to ignore the book, and the internet was quietly purged of his ideas, or the ideas of anyone who thought like he did. The children who learn at the feet of Bard will learn only what was not silenced; and it won't even be Bard's fault. He never saw the things that were kept from his blinded eyes. He doesn't know to tell you those stories. They never existed in his world at all.

Sabatini Protection Services

It's a joke, kind of. It's also exactly what's really going to happen if things keep going the way that they are.

UPDATE: "You know, there was a time in this country when territory mattered."

Coincidence

Today was my father’s birthday. He died in 2016, receiving a heroic funeral from the Volunteer Fire Department he had so long served. 

Today I stopped by a little Mexican restaurant, one of Dad’s favorite sorts of food, on my way to night class at one of a neighboring county’s Fire Departments where we are doing technical rescue training. It hadn’t occurred to me at all that this was his birthday until I was eating, when I suddenly remembered. I suppose that, by pure chance, I had happened upon an excellent memorial for him. 

Spam Comments

After Tom noticed a missing comment of his in an earlier post, I'm reviewing the comments on the back end of the blog. I notice that a large number of comments by regulars -- and even by me! -- have been marked as spam and thus deleted from the ability to view them. 

Many of these are on sexual matters, especially as pertains to LGBT+ issues, but some of them are inexplicable. I assume this is part of Google's recent decision to review Blogger more closely, which had earlier resulted in some few of my posts being unpublished by them. Free speech, which is what internet blogging was initially all about, is under increasing pressure from tech companies that have decided it's too much trouble. 

Stunning Aurora Borealis

 Apparently the Aurora Borealis was very active last night- seen as far south as Arizona, Central California, Illinois, Virginia... I wonder how many of you were able to catch a gander.  Unfortunately, it didn't reach L.A., and we had overcast besides.  Had I known, I might have driven North to catch it. it's a bucket list thing for me.  It was also brightly visible over the UK:

The Northern Lights and a Meteor over Stonehenge this morning 😍 Photo credit Stonehenge Dronescapes on FB #Aurora #auroraborealis #northernlights #stonehenge #stars #astro #meteor #beautiful #april #astrophotography pic.twitter.com/RYIirr7X7J

— Stonehenge U.K (@ST0NEHENGE) April 24, 2023

Conan Report

“What is best in life? Licking the carbon steel you cooked those tri-tips on is pretty good, although the steak bits were better.”

Mark Knopfler for the Friday Tunes

Here's Knopfler in concert in Italy, 2013. Mostly new (in 2013), some going back to Dire Straits days.

Sensible Gun Control

I have argued that the right to keep and bear arms is fundamental to human dignity, and as such I reject and abhor any attempts to disarm free people as a basic violation of that dignity. I do, however, support this initiative called Knuckle-Up, which aims to establish a culture of voluntarily putting down guns in cases of physical disputes and solving them honorably with fists instead.

Knuckle Up’s mission is to promote a culture who’s first resort isn’t to use a weapon. As participants in the MC culture, we’re no strangers to conflict. Conflict resolution should follow an escalation of force. Most disagreements between grown men should be able to be resolved through discussion. If violence is necessary, we should be handling it in an honorable way.

Now this is by no means “anti-gun”. Personally, I am an avid supporter of the 2nd amendment. I hold multiple certifications in firearms instruction. I believe in the individual’s right to keep an bear arms, especially in defense of oneself. If someone seeks to do you harm, you should meet that threat with appropriate force. 

What we’re talking about here is extreme violence in response to being offended. Someone starts a fight in a bar, and then it’s another persons immediate reaction to pull a weapon. 

What happened to a culture where two men, who didn’t agree, could settle their differences with an honorable scrap and a beer afterwards? When did we start putting ourselves in situations, and then fearing for the physical repercussions of those situations, and as an out, pulling a gun or a knife. 

I don’t want to wonder who I’m going to burry tomorrow. It’s time we as men, took a stand against the weak, beta behavior of bringing a weapon to a fist fight. It’s time we made fighting cool again. It’s time we brought honor back to the MC. 

I hope you’ll stand with me. Shame the weak who would just as soon take a life before they took an ass whooping. Put the guns down, and knuckle up.

There are practical difficulties to be solved: for example, if you brought a gun (or a knife, which is what I generally carry because they're endlessly useful items as well as providing an aid to self defense), you would need to have a lot of trust to put it down in order to have a fistfight. It makes sense that they're coming out of a club culture in which you could have friends you'd trust to take control of the weapon while you fought, and also to serve as guarantors ("seconds," they were called in the dueling culture) that the other side would not exploit your relative weakness. The honorable resolution of the dispute needs to be upheld. 

Still, for those who aren't willing to go all the way to a resumption of dueling, it's a nice middle ground. Of course mature men almost never resort to physical violence to resolve disputes; that is mostly the province of headstrong youth. In that way we serve as respectable examples for them to emulate. In the meantime, it doesn't try to pretend that young men aren't what they are, or ask them to behave as if they were something else. 

Too, creating a space to do this without exposure to legal punishment could be genuinely helpful. A society in which even a shove on the shoulder is treated as a felony has no way within the laws for these young men to act out their natures. If they're outside the law one way or the other, why not take the steps most likely to ensure victory? Creating a space like this would grant the incentive of a way of resolving the dispute honorably, publicly, with a high probability of coming through it alive, and without the threat of legal ramifications. It could really cut down on the kinds of killings that really do drive our murder rate: usually illegal, usually with illegally-possessed handguns, often in the context of gangs and therefore such young men.

Wooden Swords

Used by children and those training in sword fighting, this one is thought to have belonged to a woman who was a weaver in Cork. 

Crafted entirely from yew, the hilt of the Viking sword is carved with faces associated with the Ringerike style of Viking art, a style that dates to the 11th century. 

Other finds included intact ground plans of 19 Viking houses, remnants of central hearths, and bedding material. These finds have convinced archeologists that the influence the Vikings had in Cork city has been underappreciated, and that it may be comparable to that in Dublin and Waterford.

 Cork is on the south coast of Ireland. The Viking influence was known, but was thought to have been less substantial. 

ATF Leader: Define a What Now?

Challenged to define "assault weapon," the thing his administration keeps asking Congress to ban, the ATF leader admitted that he doesn't really know anything about firearms. 

"I, unlike you, am not a firearms expert, to the same extent as you maybe, but we have people at ATF who can talk about velocity of firearms, what damage different kinds of firearms cause, so that whatever determination you chose to make would be an informed one," Dettelbach added, confirming that President Biden had put forward another entirely unqualified person to lead a powerful wing of federal bureaucracy. 

This is part of the problem of "government by experts" -- Biden, who picked him, knows even less about firearms than the man himself. How could he judge the expertise of the expert, lacking himself any such expertise? So instead:

3) Since the politicians have to choose, and can't distinguish between real experts and political allies who are claiming to be experts, they'll generally choose political allies -- there's something in it for them there, at least. Appoint some nobody just because he has a degree or something and that person might do anything once in power. At least the party functionary will do what you want.

4) Thus, the 'scientific and technological society' ends up not only destroying self-government in favor of government by experts, but actually fails to achieve government by experts in favor of government by factional loyalists regardless of their mental or technological capacities. 

Congress' previous effort here was no better; their definition was easily dodged by simply changing one or two features to avoid making the list. Besides -- one of Ms. Smith's actually correct facts -- the real problem isn't long guns of any sort.

Mass shootings, as horrible and as frequent as they are, still only account for a small fraction of all gun violence that occurs each year. Far more people die from handguns — exactly what Americans have been stockpiling for the last three years — and the victims are usually Black and brown, people who are increasingly getting lost in the partisan battle over firearms.

Handguns account for almost all gun homicide, and illegally possessed handguns for most of that. So most of the guns being used to cause the problem are already subject to 'gun control laws.' The problem is enforcement, not more laws. If you could address the issues of felons illegally packing heat, people illegally stealing guns, and so forth, you'd have solved most of America's gun homicides. 

But enforcement is just what they don't want; and therein lies the real problem. 

UPDATE: The road goes on forever.  

CONAN, What is Best in Life?

Brynn Tannehill: "The Grim Truth: The War on Guns is Lost"

That’s something that people who support gun control measures need to understand: The war is lost. There is no conceivable way for things to change for the better within the next 20 to 30 years, short of a national divorce. 

Erika D. Smith: "Trump and the NRA might be right about guns — and we mostly have ourselves to blame"

I began to realize that [Trump] just might be right in his political calculation. Because, far from losing, the NRA seems to be winning. In fact, it might already have won, polls be damned.

It's not the NRA, which was never (as Erika puts it) "a lobbying organization for gun manufacturers." It used to represent gun owners and enthusiasts, before it collapsed over internal corruption issues some years ago. The people moving the ball now are the Firearms Policy Coalition, Gun Owners of America, National Association for Gun Rights, and state-level organizations like the Virginia Citizen Defense League and Grass Roots North Carolina. But that's neither here nor there; she plainly doesn't know much about the issue.

She is convinced that her side has all the data, and the other side is motivated by mere emotion. Her facts aren't right, though; she claims that more guns equal more deaths, but in fact guns increased every year during America's 20+ year decline in violent crime. What caused the spike in homicides that we are currently experiencing (a factor she doesn't mention at all) was the George Floyd protests, which taught police that they were imperiled if they used deadly force in the line of duty, and subsequently taught America that the police couldn't be counted upon because they pulled back from such enforcement. 

People who never considered buying guns began buying them in great numbers, such that ammunition became scarce for several years running because so many more people needed it. Now it's not so bad, but that's not because demand has fallen: it's because new lines of production came online in response to the demand.

So you're right, Ms. Smith, in a way you don't know: you did do this. Black lives do matter, and police training and culture around guns has long needed to be re-examined. But this is on you. The NRA didn't do anything; they've been immersed in infighting for several years now. 

Her facts are regularly wrong, but that's expected; it's not 'about 25' states that have Constitutional Carry, it's a clean majority. There's a 3/4ths majority -- enough to propose and ratify a new Constitutional Amendment if necessary -- of states that recognize each others gun permits.

But I do want to quote another woman she encountered, because she's a woman after my own heart.

Patrice Johnson, one of the few Black people I spotted checking out the rifles and bins of bullets in the exhibit hall of the NRA convention, told me she carries a gun for self-defense. As founder of a motorcycle club, she has seen an uptick in men in cars and on motorcycles trying to assault women riders, sometimes attempting to run them off the road.

“I carry it on my person,” she told me, tapping her hip.

Havamal 38; Lk. 22:36. She's welcome at my table any time.

Conan Report

Learning to tie rescue knots has many benefits. For example, I put a figure 8 on a bite at the end of this rope. It’s usually used to create a secure point to attach a carabiner; but it also creates a large, flat knot for someone to bite down on. 

Woke Walmart

I was just talking about this here the other day, but the Washington Free Beacon goes into more detail. 

According to documents obtained initially by families who requested public records, Walmart has been facilitating public school teacher training from the Racial Equity Institute, which also does Walmart's own internal DEI training. Walmart, or foundations funded by Walmart or the Walton family, has also facilitated similar training for other organizations in Arkansas, like arts non-profits, business leader organizations, the University of Arkansas, etc.

One aspect of Walmart's influence that the article discusses is the impact of being the biggest philanthropic organization in an area. Everyone who wants to curry favor in the hopes of getting grants will take Walmart's positions into account.

Walmart also donates to both major political parties, giving about equally to Democrats and Republicans.

However, a couple of things I didn't know is that, despite Walmart's opposition, Arkansas legislators in 2021 banned transgender surgery for minors over Gov. Hutchinson's veto, and newly-elected Gov. Sanders signed an executive order banning critical race theory in Arkansas schools. So, their influence has limits.

Nice shootin', Tex

Four youths who need to turn their lives around charged into a convenience store in Houston recently and started robbing customers at gunpoint. One customer pulled his own gun and managed to shoot three of the robbers without being shot himself. Another customer was hit, but apparently not too seriously, and it's not clear whether he was shot by the robbers or whether the armed taxpayer missed. Considering that the good guy managed to hit three out of four armed bad guys, though, I'm guessing the stray shot will not turn out to have been his.

All four robbers ran out and were driven to a hospital by their getaway driver. Two are stable while one is critical.

I never heard what happened to the citizen who killed the robber in the Houston taqueria earlier this year. As of mid-January, the grand jury was supposed to meet, but I can't find any updates to the story.

Star in the East

It's not quite the right season, but they don't make Christmas carols like this any more:

Heart of Oak

Mark Knopfler has always been one of my favorite songwriters and performers, both as the leading force behind "Dire Straits" and on his own.

Anheuser-Busch CEO Kind of Cool

What they’re calling a “spy handler” is actually a spy. Specifically it’s a CIA Operations Officer, formerly known as a Case Officer. The term “CIA Agent,” regularly used by Hollywood, actually refers only to those people recruited as informants by CIA Officers. This is the classic spy, the sort that gives rise to James Bond novels and suchlike. 

He worked for the Counterterrorism Center, the branch founded by my late friend Dewey Clarridge. At a time when the CIA wanted to spy on the Soviets, Big Navy was all about surface warfare, and Big Army considered the Green Berets a dead-end job, Dewey and a few visionary military officers established CIA-CTC and JSOC to address the emerging threat. After 9/11, that vision became a centerpiece of both intelligence and military operations. 

The CEO was also an officer of Marines. 

Hopefully that might mean that now that his attention has been drawn to all this, he might take positive steps to make things better. 

Tanassee Gap

South into Transylvania County.

North towards the Parkway. 

A brief break at a taproom on the south end of NC 215.

UPDATE: Afterwards I rode up 215 to the top where the Blue Ridge Parkway crosses it. I there encountered a stranded motorcyclist. Part of the unwritten Biker Code is to always assist motorcyclists who are having mechanical trouble and never to leave one stranded. (A helmet positioned behind a bike on the side of the road is a sign of distress.) Fortunately, between my toolkit and my Kabar we were able to get him back underway.

View from the top of the rock. 

Outrageous 'Justice'

 Via Raven, an outrageous story. It's in Reason magazine, not a particularly hot-headed place.

The prosecutors, who were found to have committed substantial misconduct throughout the case... held [defendant Esformes] without bond in the years leading up to his trial, placing him in solitary.... [He] was not convicted of the most serious charges leveled against him.... [s]o his 20-year sentence—handed down by U.S. District Judge Robert N. Scola of the Southern District of Florida—may appear grossly disproportionate to his convictions. 

Until you realize the judge explicitly punished Esformes for charges on which the jury hung.

That is not an error. "When somebody gets sentenced [at the federal level]…they get sentenced on all charges, even the ones they're acquitted on, [as long as] they get convicted on one count," says Brett Tolman, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Utah who is now the executive director of Right on Crime. It is a little-known, jaw-dropping part of the legal system: Federal judges are, in effect, not obligated to abide by a jury's verdict at sentencing. 

His sentence was commuted by the Trump administration after he had served four and a half years in prison. But!

Esformes... is facing an even stranger ordeal: someone whose sentence was commuted and will soon go back on trial—for charges on which he was already punished. 

Central to the most rudimentary understanding of the U.S. legal system is the protection defendants are promised against double jeopardy—the safeguard that prohibits prosecutors from trying and punishing you multiple times for the same crime. 

Esformes' second prosecution "directly violates the double jeopardy clause," says Tolman.... Jackson agrees. "If you walk through the facts, it's clearly double jeopardy," she says. "The judge on the record at sentencing used the hung conduct as part of his sentence…. That sentence was then commuted by President Trump."...

s presents a question for the Department of Justice: How can it proceed with the prosecution against him when he was already sentenced, and had that sentence commuted, for the charges it wants to retry?

Some in the government are trying to answer that. "I [am inquiring] as to how the United States Department of Justice could believe that any further prosecution of Mr. Esformes on charges for which he was already tried, sentenced and granted clemency by the President of the United States could possibly be constitutionally permitted, and in all events a proper use of United States government resources?" asked Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) in a recent letter to Attorney General Garland.

The query has yet to receive a response. 

Is there any part of this system that still works remotely the way it was supposed to work? Are there any Constitutional principles left that still function?  

More Geneaology

The discussion of genealogy interested several of you, so here's a piece Dad29 sent me yesterday on the Celtic influence on the American South in the early period. The link with the Highland Charge is a frequent claim I have always found persuasive, although that link -- like all of this stuff -- is debatable and subject to alternative explanations.

The Irish did very well in the South compared to the majority of them who migrated north; the South welcomed them as white men, because the deadly threat posed by slavery meant that only the black/white division mattered. In the North, they were often not as readily accepted into the general population.

My ancestors were all in what became the United States before the Revolution, and passed into Tennessee in the first generation of Americans to do so. Most of them came from Scotland, but the names include Welsh, obviously Norse derived names like Thurman, as well as plenty of Duncans and others with obviously Scottish names. Very Celtic, if one accepts that the Scottish Vikings were also strongly Celtic. 

The article also admits Joel's consideration that at least part of the Scottish Borders were strongly Anglo-Saxon, which made an additional admixture.

Bipartisanship

The son of a Communist endorses defunding the FBI, which ruined his father’s life. 

Lefty Frizzell

I don't think I've seen Lefty here before, though maybe I've missed him or forgotten. In the early 1950s he was probably as popular as Hank Williams, but that doesn't seem to have lasted.

He wrote this first one, which I'm sure you've heard covered by others:

According to Wikipedia, Lefty toured with Hank and later pulled a teenaged Merle Haggard on stage and handed him his custom Gibson J-200 guitar. Merle says that was the first guitar he played on a professional stage. Many years later, after Lefty passed away and the guitar had been displayed for some time at the Country Music Hall of Fame, it was auctioned off and Merle Haggard bought it. Roy Orbison was also a big fan.

More tunes below the fold. 

Six Billion Dollars

It's only market capitalization. That stuff is fairy gold. The real problem is they aren't selling beer, either. 

Comedians used to make fun of Donald Trump because he lost money running a casino. I agree, that's funny stuff. It'd be like losing money running an insurance company or a government. Losing money running one of the world's biggest beer companies, though? That's above and beyond.

Two Surprising Stories

It's been a while since I posted anything from Sose the Ghost, but this piece struck me. It compares the stories of David Allan Coe and Danny Trejo. I had not realized that both were at one point slated for the death penalty. 

You don't necessarily want to reason from outliers like these: most people who end up being nominated for the death penalty are unlikely to reform themselves and turn out to be great artists. Nevertheless both of these are cases in which the genetic background looks stacked against them: they came from poor backgrounds with early exposure to crime as a way of making a living, ended up in serious and repeated trouble with the law, and yet turned their lives around and became something grand. David Allan Coe is regularly featured here for his music. Trejo also appears occasionally, especially for his good heart and patriotic outlook.

'The race isn't always to the swift, but that's the way to bet.' Still, it's good to remember that sometimes the door swings the other way too.

How Long?

In the last post, I mentioned that enmity has lingered since at least the 90s. I was thinking of active government enmity, but the cultural enmity is older. Joe Bob Briggs dates the cultural issue to the shift in Hollywood from using as de facto enemies either Native Americans or Nazis, to using rednecks because everyone else could agree to hate them.

An obvious example of that is in 1969's Easy Rider, a transformational year in Hollywood. (Little Big Man, one of the strongest examples of Hollywood rethinking its position on the US cavalry vs. the Native Americans, was being filmed that year; it came out in 1970.) Florida rednecks (they usually call themselves "crackers" in Florida) foolishly stunt with a shotgun, accidentally killing a biker they just meant to scare. They then intentionally murder the second one to avoid being caught.

This distances itself from the treatment similar folks had received in Thunder Road (1958), where they were heroic rascals dodging revenuers. (This treatment would reappear during the later 1970s, when countercultural forces acknowledged the Duke Boys, the Convoy, and the Bandit as obvious cultural allies.) If you saw a character in a movie who was Southern, country, Conservative, or obviously Christian, they were most likely going to be a bad guy. 

Nevertheless it wasn't until the Clinton administration that I think this new class that came of age in 1969 felt comfortable going all-in on destroying the traditional American culture. There had been outspoken feminists suing to prevent private clubs from being all-male, successfully insofar as they could show that there were potential business advantages to be had from membership, for quite some time. Bill Clinton had run, however, as a man who could bring the Reagan Democrats home to the Democratic Party -- which he did, winning Georgia in 1992, and then sold all their blue-collar jobs to NAFTA. Hostility to Reagan among the Wise had been intense, but the ordinary American was respected because his or her vote was needed. 

The shift to center-left politics under Clinton hardened substantially during the Bush administration, but even by the 1990s Married with Children regularly showcased the ways in which a blue-collar white male was being run down by every sort of powerful actor in society. Waylon Jennings, who was the troubadour playing the guitar in Dukes of Hazzard, appeared in one episode (available on YT in German or Spanish, but not English) to explain to Al Bundy that "nothing" could be done about the destruction of his way of life, but to enjoy his remaining time on earth: "The only thing wrong with being a dinosaur is there ain't a future in it." 

All this intensified culturally during the Bush administration, and sprang into outright governmental hostility towards ordinary Americans in the Obama administration. The Trump administration didn't even provide a break: the President spoke kindly of ordinary Americans, but "The Resistance" began treating Americans of that ilk as the chiefest danger facing the government. Under the Biden regime, it has only intensified -- spies in church, as we were discussing. 

Keeping Enemies

This is an observation that sounds like a reliable indicator of genuine privilege.

…the observation from William Dean Howells that the problem for a critic isn’t making enemies but keeping them...

I get the point, but none of us have trouble keeping enemies. We have been the declared enemies of the powerful since at least the 90s. I mean that they declared enmity for us; and they have never wavered. 

From a piece on the expansion of the surveillance state, in which the American government proves to have turned its formidable intelligence and influence apparatus against its own people. 

Joe Biden Praises the Scots-Irish

You probably won’t read this in an American paper, and the speech was carefully given overseas. Specifically, in Ulster. 

The family ties the pride in those Ulster Scots immigrants, those those Ulster Scots immigrants who helped found and build my country, they run very deep, very deep. 

Men born in Ulster are among those who signed the Declaration of Independence in the United States pledging their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honour for freedom’s cause. 

The man who printed the revolutionary document was John Dunlap. He hailed from County Tyrone. And countless, countless others established new lives of opportunity across the Atlantic. Planting farms, founding communities, starting businesses, never forgetting their connection to this island. 

As a matter of fact as you walk into my office, the Oval Office, in the US capital, guess what? You know who founded and designed and built the White House? An Irishman. That’s not a joke. Not a joke. Passing it down generation after generation. 

Your history is our history. But even more importantly your future is America’s future. 

7 Revelations in the US Intelligence Leak

An insider I talked to this week characterized this as "worse than Manning," a locution that I notice avoids assigning a first name to the infamous traitor.  

(My personal opinion is that he shall always be Bradley Manning, precisely because a traitor like him doesn't deserve to have his preferences respected. In this I suppose I reprise Kant's opinions, expressed in Metaphysics of Morals 6:334, in which he discussed two Jacobites one of whose preferences about punishment deserves respect, and the other not, because the better man was "acquainted with something that he values more highly than life, namely honor, while the scoundrel considers it better to live in shame than not at all." Ironically this meant assigning death to both men, also an appropriate punishment for Manning. But I digress.)

Of these, the most significant in terms of the outcome in Ukraine is that their air defenses are about to be exhausted.  Russia would have won this war on the first stroke if they had been able to establish air superiority in the American way. They reportedly lost two companies of paratroopers to having their planes shot down en route to the drop zone, and their advance was on all sides bedeviled by not being in control of the skies. If that changes, Ukraine is not going to win -- regardless of the outcome of their spring offensive, which now has to be reshuffled at the last minute because the details were exposed.

The skeptics have often overstated their case, sometimes because they are leaning on pro-Russian sources in order to find anyone independent of the groupthink that has overtaken all American and prominent Western media. Unfortunately, that means absorbing also some of the Russian messaging, which finds its way into such sources even where they attempt independence. The fog of war has been itself here, as always, but there is no getting around the fact that the war has been fought mostly on Ukrainian territory, and it is Ukrainian infrastructure that has suffered. To some degree the West can backfill munitions, if it has factories or stockpiles (which it doesn't for Soviet-era air defense missiles); it can't replace the power grid. 

Discuss, if you like. I suspect things are far more dire even than these leaked reports suggest, as the pressure to produce positive thinking in US intelligence is higher than ever (witness Afghanistan).

Spies in the Church

This has a kind of Reformation-era feel. 

Justice through Pardons

Probably many of you remember this case.

On Friday, 37-year-old Army sergeant Daniel Perry was found guilty of fatally shooting Garrett Foster, an Air Force veteran and BLM protester.

Perry’s defense lawyers say he shot Foster in self-defense at a demonstration in downtown Austin, Texas, on July 25, 2020.

Texts from Perry in which he wrote he “might have to kill a few people” who were “rioting” outside his apartment were used in the trial, which began on March 27.

He said he felt threatened after 28-year-old Foster pointed his AK-47 at him, though witnesses said they never saw Foster raise his weapon.

I was of course not there, but I notice that witnesses 'never seeing' things at these kinds of events is a common defensive strategy. There's a case in Atlanta right now around the so-called "Cop City" protests where a Georgia State Trooper was actually shot, and the witnesses -- who are mostly members of various activist groups and anarchist circles -- claim that they never saw a gun, so the cop must have been shot by one of his own. The police say they recovered his gun, can show that he purchased it, and that forensics establish that it was definitely the one that shot the trooper. The protesters say that they haven't seen or independently verified the police's forensics, so they will continue to hold that the trooper was shot by other cops.

It's possible. In the old days we would go to court and hash it out, trusting the jury to make a fair decision. In the current climate, juries and jury pools are selected for being subject to confirmation bias -- and so are prosecutors. Here as in the DC cases we've been watching, the prosecutor from Austin is biased and the jury pool draws from the most left-wing community in Texas.

On Saturday, Abbott wrote Texas has one of the nation’s “strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive district attorney.”

Noting that, unlike other states, the governor in Texas is only allowed to act on a recommendation from the Board of Pardons and Paroles, Abbott said he had already “made (the pardon) request and instructed the Board to expedite its review.”

Abbott also noted he’s “already prioritized reining in rogue district attorneys,” likely referring to Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza.

This points to a failure of trust in our system so basic as to make certain areas very dangerous even to visit. Armed and violent riots are being coupled with an official system of punishing not the rioters, but anyone who defends themselves. This was prominent in Venezuela, where roving gangs loyal to the Communist government were enforcers of terror, protected by the law rather than restrained by it.  

Conan Report

I took the dog to his first VFD meeting and training session, which was on the setting up of helicopter landing zones for extractions. As you know, this is something that comes up from time to time and it's important for younger or newer members to learn. 

He was a big hit with the firefighters, although being a puppy he slept through most of it. I did pass him off to our training captain to hold for a little while during my turn at operating some of the equipment. She enjoyed the opportunity to hold a puppy.