Desperation

Thy name is Bud Light. 

[UPDATE: This post was flagged and determined to violate the Blogger Community Guidelines, but I can't see any way that it does. It's not a copyright violation, because (a) commentary on ads is squarely within "Fair Use," and (b) Bud Light has no reason to object to me re-broadcasting their message that they're prepared to pay $10,000 a week. This post certainly is not obscene, nor does it advocate anything illegal or dangerous, nor is it abusive; it's merely commentary on the fix that Bud Light has gotten itself into, and the extraordinary steps that they are prepared to take to try to get out of it. Nor is anyone who reads this blog going to buy any Bud Light as a consequence of the post, if drinking the beer is the supposed harm the post incurred, and not because of the controversy but because they always had better taste.]

The Magic of Waffle House

It’s not the sort of place you’d expect to be magical, but sometimes…

Building Industry

Via Raven, a look at what it takes to establish industry where there isn’t any; it’s in Pakistan, but it may matter for reestablishment of industry in America someday. 

He writes:

The man who posted it, comment # 1, a synopsis of the content, and his reply, comment #7, a brief work history, are of interest also.

This is a man who was trained in the 1960's, and worked around the world in primitive conditions setting up machinery for local power plants ,and industry.

Although the subject matter may be somewhat esoteric, and of most interest to the trade, I found his observations on working in rough conditions with a crew of foreign nationals fascinating.

It’s a Conspiracy

 

How Would You Start Over Today?

We all have stories we tell ourselves and each other about how our lives went, how we became whoever it is that we are. What if you were starting over today, though? If you were just out in the world for the first time, with all the difficulties and changes coming online -- the ChatGPTs undermining ordinary college degrees and entry level white collar careers, the government dysfunction and even outright hostility to starting businesses or succeeding as an individual -- what do you think you might try? The military used to be a good option, but it looks like a much less attractive one now; interest rates are rising, so buying investment properties with whatever you can keep from your labor is probably out for those without established credit and substantial capital; a lot of the old ways are off the table.

Just to make it hard, assume that you're a young white male with no fortune or family -- so no affirmative action, no preference points, and none of the actual privilege that those things are supposed to compensate for either. Maybe you have a regular public school education as it is done today, so you can barely read or write and advanced math has never been taught to you. Just some poor kid who gets nothing from anybody for free, and who has to figure out how to try to make it in today's world.

If the Shoe Fits...

National treasure Dolly Parton was admitted to the Rock 'N Roll Hall of Fame and declined, stating that she wasn't actually a rock musician. (She has also refused the Presidential Medal of Freedom, twice.) They refused her refusal, so she's put out an entire rock album just so she feels like she qualifies for the honor they're insisting on bestowing upon her. As befits a rock album, there are controversies about it. 

One of them is that she has a song bashing politicians but not naming any (which is pretty good marketing when you think about it -- other brands could learn from that). Asked about which ones she meant, she points out that it applies to "any of them" because none of them are really trying hard enough. 

Another controversy is that some of her left-leaning fans are annoyed that she did a piece on the album with Kid Rock. Right-leaning fans long ago learned to tolerate celebrity opinions that disagree with their own, as almost all of them do; nobody seems to mind she did some with other people too. Indeed, gay-culture outlet the Advocate lists the rest of her co-stars and notes that they're almost a litany of LGBTQ-friendly icons: "Paul McCartney, Stevie Nicks, Lizzo, and Debbie Harry, and queer artists Melissa Etheridge, Miley Cyrus, and Elton John." 

The whole thing's not available yet, but you can hear an initial piece here if you are so inclined. To some degree it points out that she really does have a pretty good claim to being there: a lot of her contemporaries in Tennessee music, including Elvis, were the founders of the genre. She sounds more like they do than the people working today because the genre has long moved on to other things. (Indeed, reportedly the Kid Rock tune -- which I don't think is out yet -- is about faith and charity, which are at best irregular subjects for contemporary rock).

Manly Skills: Knot Tying

Probably because I first learned about knots and their many excellent uses in the Boy Scouts, I think of them as a particularly manly skill that is appropriate to coming of age and proving one's worth in that regard. Nevertheless the last complex knot I learned was actually taught to me by a woman I know, the one listed here as "Bowline on a Bight." (This is the knot list for Technical Rescue: Ropes Basic, and yes, I can tie all of these knots and more).

It's a neat skill that you can practice while sitting in the interminable meetings that seem to bedevil much of contemporary life. Here's a great site with animations for the many knots you might want to learn.

Where Were the Marines?

Recently in Sudan, we had another experience of the US State Department abandoning American citizens to their fate (as more infamously in Afghanistan). The Marine Corps Commandant was asked about this recently by Congress: isn't this part of your job?

The Marine Corps' top general expressed serious regrets over the fact that Marines were not available to help in two major crises in recent months because of a lack of available Navy ships to position units in nearby waters.

"Places like Turkey or, the last couple of weeks, in Sudan -- I feel like I let down the combatant commander," Commandant Gen. David Berger told members of the House Armed Services Committee on Friday.

"[Gen. Michael Langley] didn't have a sea-based option -- that's how we reinforce embassies, that's how we evacuate them," Berger added, referring to the head of U.S. Africa Command.

I appreciate the Commandant being willing to step up and at least take verbal responsibility for this, since that kind of thing was sorely absent in the Afghanistan 'withdrawal' (I use scare quotes because it definitely did not live up to the military standard for the conduct of such an operation). However, there is blame to go around here as elsewhere: the Navy is holding a big part of this bag as well. Partly, too, it's that the two services aren't communicating well.

Read the Commandant’s statements and it’s the US Navy to blame as it hasn’t provided (or built) enough amphibious ships to transport the Marines.

Make no mistake, the “amphib navy” is not the US Navy’s fair-haired child. Spending money on amphibious ships is only done grudgingly.

But in this case, the Navy might argue a degree of confusion about what the Marine Corps wanted. A year or two ago it seemed the Commandant and the Marines just wanted 30 new light amphibious warships.

It's hard to imagine this having happened even a few years ago. And, as the second article points out, the Chinese were able to do better -- they evacuated 1,300 of their own citizens and the citizens of other nations also.

Perfect Timing

PJM points out:

Addressing the committee, [Senator] Goldman said, “You’re trying to gaslight us up here, as if Antifa—which Mr. Rosas is apparently the expert now in organized terrorist activity, has overruled the FBI director who says, there’s a headline that says ‘Antifa is an ideology not an organization.’ No, no, no. Let’s not listen to the FBI director. Let’s listen to—sorry, what’s your title? Senior writer at Townhall, who is going to tell us that the FBI director is wrong.

Oh, well, if the FBI Director Christopher Wray said it…

‘Breathtakingly Corrupt’ FBI EXPOSED in Durham Trump-Russia Report

Is Christopher Wray Covering up for the Biden Family or the FBI Itself?

Christopher Wray Needs to Comply With House Oversight Committee Subpoena; He’s Not Above the Law

CONFIRMED: The FBI Has Spies in Catholic Churches to Hunt for ‘Domestic Terrorism’

More at the link.

I think this is actually the perfect time to invoke the FBI as a credible organization in an incredible cause, because the general public hasn't had time yet to absorb the devastation of its credibility on display in the Durham report. For now most people probably still hold the view of the FBI they've absorbed from Hollywood and television. It'll take time for the truth to seep in.

So, for now, it's a fire sale. Use it up while you can, politicians, because it's going fast and will not return. 

A Medieval Exercise

OK, but scroll to "Dante." 

New Maimonides Text

Here's something you don't see everyday: a new, handwritten text by the Medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides. He is best known among non-Jews for his work on Aristotelian interpretations of Judaism, Guide for the Perplexed, also sometimes translated as Guide of the Perplexed, as there is an ambiguity in the text as to whether Maimonides or his students were supposed to be suffering. If you read the text, there is no ambiguity as to whether he thinks he knows what he's talking about, however.

He was an interesting person.

He influenced thinkers as diverse as Newton and Aquinas and set forth the philosophic foundations of Jewish belief and wider philosophy in works such as the Guide of the Perplexed. Maimonides also served as Head of the Jews in Egypt and was renowned for his medical and scientific knowledge. In addition to being one of the Jewish faith’s most important thinkers and philosophers, Maimonides was also physician to the court of the Muslim sultan Saladin.

The text itself has a minor revelation.

The pages are a glossary of basic terms relating to herbs, basic foods and colours and were identified by José Martínez Delgado, a visiting professor to Cambridge University Library’s Genizah Research Unit, from the Department of Semitic Studies at the University of Granada.

Around 60 fragments written by Maimonides have been found in the Cairo Genizah manuscripts, and most are written in Maimonides’ customary Judaeo-Arabic (Arabic language written with the Hebrew alphabet). His writings include letters, legal rulings, and early drafts of his important works.

What makes this fragment unique, however, is the fact that Maimonides has added the translation in a Romance dialect below some words. It is the first evidence for Maimonides knowing Romance, an evolving dialect version of Latin that is a pre-cursor to what would eventually become modern-day Spanish dialects and language.

Pretty neat. 

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.