Range War

Let's say your ancestors put up a fence 75 years ago, and your neighbors never said anything about it in all that time. So you put up a 'No hunting/trespassing' sign on the fence, some hunter comes by and sees it, and complains about it because he has permission to hunt on your neighbor's land and he thinks your fence is in the wrong place. You and your neighbor get together and agree to survey the land and determine where the boundary really is, and move the fence if necessary.

Then your neighbor sends an armed man to threaten you with ten years in prison.

A South Dakota ranch couple is fighting federal indictments served to them by a U.S. Forest Service agent who allegedly showed up unannounced on their front steps — armed and in tactical gear. The agent was there to serve them with indictments in a modern-day range war between the ranchers and feds.

“It’s is stressful, financially and mentally. It’s something nobody should have to go through,” rancher Charles Maude of Caputa, South Dakota, told Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday.

He and his wife Heather, who is a Wyoming native, were served with separate federal grand jury indictments June 24, for alleged theft of government property. The government claims the fence put up by the ranchers is over a boundary with federal grasslands.

The charges carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine.

If it sounded to you like they had a good-faith agreement that shouldn't be occasion for indictments, it sounds that way too to some retired rangers the paper interviewed about it. 

[T]he situation in South Dakota might have been one in which the old standard of a “common sense, reasonable interaction” would have been more effective — and not left the Forest Service looking bad, he said.

Brauneis said that in the wake of what happened in South Dakota, and similar incidents eroding the Forest Service’s relationship with the public, some soul-searching might be in order for the agency.

To illustrate how things used to work, he recalled an incident from his career... “I drove out to talk to the land owner who was an elderly lady. She invited me in and we had coffee. I explained what happened and she understood,” he said.

“We concluded that if we burned the slash on her property along with ours and planted trees the same as on forest that we were all good to go,” Brauneis said. “We shook hands and I left. Old-school community in a Christian culture.”

Another ranger they spoke to wasn't surprised, and said he would have expected the agency to send armored vehicles and a dozen agents to deliver the indictments. The culture of the agency has changed, he said.

Admission of Limits

There's only so much a man can do.

Orcadian Stonehenge

A fingerprint of the Altar stone proves that it came from Scotland, not Wales as long thought. 

Viking Age Costs

A new interpretation of a Viking Age runic inscription tells us some things about costs and fines.

The new interpretation shows that the Vikings had a system where both oxen and silver served as units of payment. This system allowed for multiple types of units of accounts to be used concurrently, reducing transaction complexity and making it easier for people to meet their financial obligations. The new interpretation also aligns better with how the system functioned later according to later regional laws and is, according to Rodney Edvinsson, significant for our understanding of both Scandinavian and European monetary history.

"As an economic historian, I particularly look for historical data to be economically logical, that is, to fit into other contemporary or historical economic systems. The valuation of an ox at two ore, or 50 grams of silver, in 10th-century Sweden resembles contemporary valuations in other parts of Europe, indicating a high degree of integration and exchange between different economies," says Rodney Edvinsson.

A human thrall was six times as expensive, if you're keeping score at home. 

Jealous

I’m not myself; I have complete faith in my wife of 25 years. Some are though. 

Faker Fake News

The news headlines you see may be written by political campaign operatives rather than editors. 

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign team has been quietly editing news headlines in Google search ads to make it seem like major news outlets are on her side, according to a report.

The altered headlines — appearing on Google ads and paired with a “Paid for by Harris for President” banner — were changed without the news outlets’ knowledge, Axios reported Tuesday.

Nearly a dozen publishers were swept up in the faux headline campaign, including major companies like the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News, the Associated Press and PBS.

This is an amazing scandal because the news is already so deeply on her side that there's no need for it. Let's do a quick review of Google News' headline aggregator. There are five stories about Trump, all of them negative, highlighting his weaknesses and losses; one of them compares his appeal to Harris', casting his as "old" and "White," while painting her vibrantly as youthful and energetic.

There are four stories about Harris, all of them either positive or actively defensive of her where she needs help. Two of them are 'fact checks' by the press intended to correct storylines they think are hurting her; one of them uncritically quotes her aides to defend her lack of specifics on her economic/climate plans. 

All of the major papers seem to be reporting on polls that show Harris tied or ahead; I dug into the crosstabs of the NYT poll that found her four points ahead and found that it assumed a +3 Democratic advantage was natural in those states, and the margin of error was +/-5.1. The assumption that Democratic turnout will beat Republican turnout by three points is doing almost all the work, in other words; and even then it's within the margin of error. But it turns it into a 'She's got momentum!' headline, so it's everywhere.

Yet in spite of this atmosphere of complete support and devotion, her campaign isn't satisfied until they actually get to rewrite media headlines to be even more in her favor. That seems like a lack of confidence to me, perhaps a sense that there's really nothing holding up the magic carpet they're floating upon.

An Edgy Joke

I heard an Australian comedian tell the following joke, and actually laughed out loud at the punchline. It's the sort of humor that's right on the edge of what we allow these days; I suspect many of the folks who object to humor that touches on protected racial/ethnic/sexual minorities would want you not to tell it. For that reason, I'll put it after the jump, so you only have to read the joke if you want to do so. Then I'm going to talk about why I think it's a good joke, and a joke that's reasonable to tell even in this environment.

Blogger Comments

Google is being a real pain. I can’t comment myself half the time. It really hates VPNs right now; if I turn mine off long enough to post the comments they usually work.

It also seems to hate Windows. My iPhone seems to work better. 

I checked for comments wrongly and automatically marked spam yesterday and didn’t find any new ones. 

Aristotle, Tyranny & Today Part I

Tom expressed several of Aristotle's political points on tyranny in the comments to a recent post. Thoughtful people on both sides of the political aisle are thinking about Aristotle's account of tyranny; the above video was posted on Facebook by a left-leaning retired academic I know, and generated a discussion of how well Trump fits the model Aristotle described. 

Imperfectly, actually, but there are some qualities that do apply. For example, Aristotle says that tyrants use 'the meanest group of people as leaders' to avoid challenges from within, and Trump historically has empowered some pretty low-class people like his former lawyer (the one who later confessed to perjury, but on whose sole testimony was Trump convicted of all those 'felonies'). He's also accepted leaders from within the group of his enemies, though, which was probably his single biggest mistake from his first term.

Perhaps he's learning on that score? Vance is a fairly strong choice with a genuine intellectual center (a point unrecognized by these left-leaning academics, for whom his intellectual influences are déclassé, a quality they confuse with stupidity). On the other hand, Trump outright rejected Heritage Foundation Project 2025's collection of cleared people who could work for his administration and had the right values and temperament. That could mean that he is rejecting qualified people in preference to ones he can control; or it could suggest he does not trust anyone in DC, even on the right. It will have to be seen if he is better on personnel choices than previously.

What is likely obvious to readers of this blog is how well Aristotle's account fits the establishment -- except that the establishment is definitely not a tyranny on Aristotle's terms, because there isn't a single ruler. It is an oligarchy, where even the President is now a figurehead (and that will certainly remain true if Ms. Harris should succeed to the office, as she has no accomplishments of her own: she will also be a puppet). Rule is being exercised extra-constitutionally by a group of people who were never elected to the relevant office. 

I am going to put further reading, from the left side of the conversation, after the jump. In a second post I will later do an analysis of both positions and try to summarize where I think they are right and wrong.

The Outlaw Saloon

This is a charming review of Dubois, Wyoming's best dive bar, as well as the other bar. I've been to the Outlaw Saloon and it is described much as I remember it. I liked the place. I never went in the other one. 

In just about a month I'll be back out West to visit my mother and sister, if any of you will be in the Wyoming/Idaho border region. Thos., I remember that you live out there. I'll be around for a couple of weeks. 

Killing Your Dogs

Police interacting with American citizens often kill their dogs as a precautionary practice -- indeed, not just 'often,' but at least 10,000 times a year and possibly into "six figures." DOJ itself admits the matter is now "epidemic."

While officers in this country kill far more people than any other highly developed democracy and are shielded by powerful police unions, dog shootings still receive extensive national attention. “Given that there’s no shortage of actual human beings getting shot by police officers, pointing these stories out can sometimes seem a bit callous,” says Radley Balko, a journalist who has done much to expose cops killing dogs. “But I think they’re worth noting."

A database project that hoped to document and give better statistics on this had to shut down its collection efforts because there were too many submissions. 

It shouldn't be a problem for you, since none of you should come into conflict with the law. Well, at least that's how things used to be. 

The Real Enemy is not Islam

This piece at PJ Media on the problems associated with radical Islam -- murders of children, sometimes on a grand scale, among those problems -- would like to make the case that we should all be much more concerned about it. Yet the thing we should really be concerned about is mentioned later in the piece: it is that our own governments are increasingly turning their force against the citizenry.

Indeed, the “Regime” believes that ordinary white citizens and working-class people are the problem—not jihadists, Pakistani groomers, rampaging Muslim mobs, “undocumented” refugees, Palestinian demonstrators, or foreign criminal gangs. Heritage citizens are, apparently, the greatest threat to the status quo, purveyors of “disinformation,” by which the social and political elite mean what Steve Sailer in an important book has called “Noticing”—that is, seeing what is happening around one and to the culture by using common sense and honest observation. 

Thus, to say what you have noticed—and suffered—is to be guilty of disinformation, racism, bigotry or hate speech. To look the reality of immigrant and refugee violence in the face, to confront visibly corrupt two-tier policing, media duplicity, and Regime hypocrisy, and to describe it accurately is to be tarred by the state as a far-right extremist, a hooligan, a fascist or a white supremacist. 

The British government has decided to release a lot of violent criminals from prison in order to free up prison spaces for ordinary people of this sort. Five hundred prison spaces are more of a threat than a real capacity to beat the issue: if the people rise up in their millions, that won't be a drop in the bucket. So, the government is cracking down on disapproved speech, even just a remark on Facebook or X, and they aren't alone. They are afraid of their own people far more than anything else. 

We all remember the way the Canadian trucker convoy was targeted in Canada -- in a manner later found unconstitutional by its courts -- to the tune of freezing the accounts of people who donated, even though the cause to which they donated was not a terrorists group but a 501(c)3 charity lawfully formed under Canadian laws. They arrested and put into solitary confinement a preacher who gave an inspiring benediction to that convoy -- hardly an act of violence. They did this because they realized that the ordinary people involved in the trucker movement could shut down Canada's economy if they chose, and they feared their own ordinary citizens more than they do anything else. 

Nor is our own government immune. This piece at Hot Air helpfully summarizes several of the recent affronts that have come to light, including the VP nominee declaring that there is "no right to free speech" if the speech is deemed hateful or misinformation by the government; placing Tulsi Gabbard, who served her country faithfully when called up by the National Guard (not to put too fine a point on it), under a terrorist air watch that has her followed by armed men onto airplanes; the security state burying any discussion of its failures (we hope they were failures!) leading to Trump's almost-assassination; a swing state announcing that it won't be prepared to count votes on election day, and that its expected changing vote totals "are not evidence" of cheating; and many more. Our media has taken to declaring that there 'is no evidence' on many controversial issues, rather than exploring the evidence for different propositions in order to help readers get to a good judgment. It has accepted a duty to oppose with hostility one side on this election, while doing everything it can to support the establishment side. 

What's with all this 'fortification'? It suggests that our establishment is likewise motivated by a fear, not of criminals or terrorists or invasions across the border, and certainly not of Islam, but of ordinary Americans. What sins are they trying to hide from our eyes that justifies such fear? What do they tremble to think we will learn if the levers of control pass out of their hands? 

Bee nails it as usual

I still can't embed images, but the caption is "Tim Walz backs out of VP nomination after learning VPs sometimes have to deploy to dangerous places overseas."

This Would Be Really Embarrassing if His Defenders Understood the Culture

One of the old milblog crew came up with this. This is a challenge coin made up by our Mr. Walz with a Command Sergeant Major insignia on it. 

His former battalion commander put out a statement affirming that "he did not earn the rank or successfully complete any assignment as an E-9. It is an affront to the Noncommissioned Officers Corps that he continues to glom onto the rank." He does express satisfaction with his performance at lower ranks, so it's not like he's 'denigrating military service' per se. Just this one little aspect of evading an assignment and yet pretending to the rank he didn't earn because of that evasion.

But remember, these claims are made "without evidence," a term of art meaning that there is clear evidence but we're all supposed to pretend otherwise. It's very important that we all make-believe very hard in cases of these claims made "without evidence." 

Brotherhood of Bikers

My wife's rear brake blew up near Waynesville today. I had just inspected it when I replaced her rear tire a couple of weeks ago and didn't see any metal fatigue, but obviously I missed something. Nobody was hurt, but she found herself with the brake locked and the axle locked by the parts of the exploded brake right in the middle of an intersection off US 276.

Her bike isn't that heavy, so I picked it up and moved it out of the road. Then my son and I worked at it with the tools we had in the tool bags until we managed to free the brake and axle so it could roll again. As befits the brotherhood of bikers, we had several people stop and offer additional tools. 

In addition, a guy driving a Budget rental truck asked if he couldn't just fit the thing into the back of his truck and take it to the nearest shop. Well, of course we would be very happy if you would do that! So we wheeled it up the ramp and tied it down, and he transported it to the cycle shop maybe twelve miles off where we left it. 

Possibly it'll get stolen before they open on Tuesday, but if so it's insured. I locked the forks and hid the key where nobody is likely to look, and left a message on the shop's answering machine so they'll know what's going on when they open Tuesday morning. Then we rode home with my wife in the passenger saddle, the way we used to before she decided she preferred to ride her own machine.

His what?

Walz's "manliness" is vewy scawy for Wepublicans. If a voter "doesn’t need traditional gender and racial hierarchies to validate his life choices, then what does he need Donald Trump and JD Vance for?"

That’s a terrifying question for a Republican ticket that offers little beyond resentment, rage and a promise to restrict the freedom and democratic power of its opponents. It explains why Vance immediately began smearing Walz’s military record, claiming — without evidence, of course — that Walz had “abandoned” his unit when he ran for Congress before the unit was deployed to Iraq.

I wish I could be more sure that voters will ever get a chance to hear the stolen-valor case about Walz, not to mention his positions on communism, COVID snitch lines, the benefits to schoolchildren of closing schools, genital mutilation of minors, full-term abortion, denial of care to babies who survive abortion, abandoning police stations to rioters who have their hearts in the right place and need space to vent, and raising taxes after quickly blowing through a large state budget surplus. Instead, Walz is a manly Mister Rogers! As the Bee said, Workers of the world, let's get together sometime for a potluck!

Without evidence, of course. In any case, the evidence might violate community standards. Which is lucky for Walz, because he's enjoyed full political cover for years from a compliant Minnesota press, so he's feared nothing from exposure, and most of these positions are extremely well preserved in print and on camera. Not that that will matter much if a now-compliant national press simply memory-holes them and concentrates on his Presbyterian green bean casserole recipe.

I've been reflecting on this. I'm fairly certain I don't need traditional gender and racial hierarchies to validate my life choices. Trump's family life isn't much like mine, but I'm still voting for him for the third time.

Lying

Remarkable interview:

J.D. Vance: I think it's a problem for Walz to have lied about having gone to war.

Dana Bash: They've corrected that.

J.D. Vance: They've corrected it by admitting that he lied.

Dana Bash: Let's move on.

And it's not as though he lied about it once. He's been dining out on stolen valor for a long time.

Magic

Arthur C. Clarke's Three Laws: The laws are:

(1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

(2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

(3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Apropos of Law 3, SpaceX’s new Raptor-3 methane-fueled engine is so advanced the CEO of ULA doesn’t understand it.

Our SpaceLink internet service continues to give us fantastic speed and zero problems, as well, while the Spectrum cable connection drives my neighbors up the wall. Long live Elon Musk, who has done more than anyone else I can think of lately to preserve free speech on Earth.

In Fairness, However...

She's just right about this. This point is completely correct.

Her classism is showing, because she’s talking in terms of dormitories; but it’s also exactly why the services use barracks until they get young soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines married off to someone else who will look after them.

The Incoherence of Joy

So there's a recession on, one that is likely to get worse for at least a year or two. What's the plan for that? There isn't one, a fact even the New York Times has begun to notice.

It is impossible to make a similar estimate for Vice President Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent this fall. She has not laid out any tax or spending plans, or other economic policy proposals, with enough detail to estimate whether they would add to deficits or reduce them.

In fact there aren't any plans at all, and all of the old positions are recanted.

Ms. Harris, who began seeking the Democratic nomination late last month immediately after Mr. Biden stepped aside and endorsed her, has no policy proposals posted on her campaign website — economic or otherwise.

The media has settled upon a new idea, whose unity of expression shows that it is clearly coordinated with her campaign: she is the candidate of joy!

But she was selling herself as a prosecutor, remember? There's nothing joyful about prosecution. Alongside executioners, prosecutors wield the hammer of the state against members of the public. It is to be hoped that this is done in the interest of justice (as it manifestly was not in her case, as Tulsi Gabbard pointed out). It is not a happy job, however.

I suppose this makes sense to the media because they feel joyful when contemplating four years of being governed by a prosecutor like her. Too, there's a kind of sense to the promise that if only she's elected the media will do its best to fill our screens with joy instead of the rage, bitterness, and anger that will be our daily bread from them if we don't listen.

Still, it's another astonishing maneuver, akin to the earlier attempt to sell us on the basis that she's a career professional politician -- akin to a practiced surgeon. 

Obviously the election isn't really about any of this, because none of this makes any sense. I can't decide if they're doing this because they can't think of anything better, or if they're so sure of the election's 'fortification' that they don't feel they need to run a real campaign. You'll find out what our economic policies are after the election, peasants. 

The Chaplain Speaks

It's pretty tough when your chaplain reads you out from the altar, as it were. 

The chaplain of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s field artillery regiment said there is no excuse for the Democratic VP pick to have abandoned his National Guard unit before a critical deployment — not even running for Congress.

“In our world, to drop out after a WARNORD [warning order] is issued is cowardly, especially for a senior enlisted guy,” retired Capt. Corey Bjertness, now a pastor in Horace, North Dakota, told The Post.

Bjertness, 61, was the chaplain for the 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery, of which Walz was command sergeant major before retiring in 2005, two months before the unit deployed to Iraq....

“Running for Congress is not an excuse,” Bjertness said of Walz’s decision to quit. “I stopped everything and went to war. I left my wife with three teenagers and a 6-year-old and I was gone for 19 months.”

Several other of his unit mates have choice words as well, as does the mother of one of them who didn't come home.

Thomas Behrends, the command sergeant major who replaced Walz, previously told The Post of the Minnesota governor: “He had the opportunity to serve his country, and said ‘Screw you’ to the United States.”

...

Walz’s old unit, whose main job was running security for US convoys in Iraq, suffered three casualties during the deployment he missed — including Kyle Miller, 19, who joined the National Guard while still in high school, and David Berry, 37.... 

Miller’s mother told the Daily Mail this week that Walz had taken “the coward’s way out” by retiring before deployment....

“Honestly, I think we lucked out when we got Command Sergeant Behrends,” he said of the CMS who took over after Walz retired. “Maybe Walz resigned because he knew he wasn’t up to the job, that he didn’t have the confidence to lead.”

Behrends, who is from Brewster, Minn., called the Democratic vice presidential candidate “a traitor” for the timing of his retirement.

“When your country calls, you are supposed to run into battle — not the other way,” the retired command sergeant major told The Post Tuesday. “He ran away. It’s sad.”

Meanwhile his brigade says that they were was informed that they were selected to deploy during 2004, months earlier than first reported, and before he made any decisions about running for Congress.

Not How That Works

While discussing the CSM matter, a left-wing fellow said to me, "Well, he was against the Iraq War. He couldn't go serve in it, could he?"

For socialists, that's a remarkably egotistical view of the ethics of national service. What about your oath? What about the men you trained with, who were depending on you to look out for their interests as their CSM? Even if you were staunchly opposed to the war, don't you have duties to your word, to your comrades, to the country you swore to serve? 

Amazing.

A Pyramid of Falsehood

Picking up on yesterday's topic, an investigative reporter I've met decides to press on the Stolen Valor bit. He finds a couple of actual lies built upon the initial falsehoods about the CSM status.

The first falsehood might have an innocent explanation, but Waltz never appears to have attempted to correct the report:

Bloomberg’s Joshua Green, then employed at The Atlantic, was the first major reporter to profile Walz. In an interview with the then-congressional candidate, Green writes that in 2004, Walz left his hometown in Minnesota “to serve overseas in Operation Enduring Freedom.”

It’s unclear if this is Green, a veteran reporter, omitting major facts, or if Walz, the interviewee, is selling Green on a particular narrative. Nonetheless, the assertion is incredibly misleading, as it leaves the reader under the impression that Walz served as boots on the ground in the Global War on Terror, when in reality, he merely deployed to Italy in 2003 for a six month stint.

It gets much worse.

During a confrontation with the hated George W. Bush's team, Waltz engineered a claim that the Secret Service might "arrest" him over "opposing the president." He then challenged them in a way that made it into the press:

Green discusses a 2004 visit from former President George W. Bush to Gov. Walz’s hometown, in which a protesting Walz (who was still serving in the military) told the reporter about him supposedly demanding to speak to the then commander in chief.

“Walz thought for a moment and asked the Bush staffers if they really wanted to arrest a command sergeant major who'd just returned from fighting the war on terrorism,” Green writes.

This was before the Warning Order, so not only had he not "just returned from fighting the war on terrorism," he hadn't even been asked to fight the war on terrorism. We now know that, when asked, he found a way to evade his orders and responsibilities. 

The piece closes with another set of outright lies by Waltz, one intended to disarm fellow veterans of the rifle with which they can best defend their families:

On Tuesday, The X account for the Kamala Harris campaign posted a video of Governor Walz discussing the need to disarm American citizens.

“We can research the impacts of gun violence. We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war,” he tells the audience.

1) The AR-15 is not a 'weapon of war,' but a purpose-designed civilian rifle capable of only semi-automatic fire.

2) It is therefore not the same as the M-16 or M-4 carbines that Waltz's fellow servicemen carried in war.

3) Waltz never went to war, and therefore never carried any sort of rifle at war.

4) In fact, Waltz not only didn't go to war, he abandoned his unit and left them to go without him even though as the assigned CSM he was their senior enlisted advisor. In other words it was his job to defend the interests of the enlisted servicemembers in that battalion to the commanding officer.

Instead, he abandoned them. 

UPDATE: The National Guard officially disputes his claimed biography. 

As Governor, he’s ex officio their commander, and you might expect them to avoid embarrassment for their commander if they could find a way. Far from taking steps to protect him they’re out with their top PAO to officially state that his claim is false. That underlines that he doesn’t have the respect of those who serve under him. 

Warning Order

A 'warning order' or WARNO is an official order alerting you to expect another order that is coming soon. It's meant as a heads-up to let everyone start getting ready for something in advance of the complete information about what they are going to be commanded to do.

What you're supposed to do when you get one is to start taking appropriate steps to prepare for the command, in this case to prepare to deploy on a combat mission to Iraq. What you're not supposed to do is use the warning to figure out how to evade the command.

Two retired Command Sergeants Major accuse our new VP nominee of having done the latter.

On May 16th, 2005 he quit, leaving the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its Soldiers hanging; without its senior Non-Commissioned Officer, as the battalion prepared for war. His excuse to other leaders was that he needed to retire in order to run for congress. Which is false, according to a Department of Defense Directive, he could have run and requested permission from the Secretary of Defense before entering active duty; as many reservists have. If he had retired normally and respectfully, you would think he would have ensured his retirement documents were correctly filled out and signed, and that he would have ensured he was reduced to Master Sergeant for dropping out of the academy. Instead he waited for the paperwork to catch up to him. His official retirement document states, SOLDIER NOT AVAILABLE FOR SIGNATURE.

On September 10th, 2005 conditionally promoted Command Sergeant Major Walz was reduced to Master Sergeant. It took a while for the system to catch up to him as it was uncharted territory, literally no one quits in the position he was in, or drops out of the academy. Except him....

The 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion was deployed for 22 months in 2006 - 2007. During this time, they were restricted by Army regulations and could not speak out against a candidate for office. In November 2006 he was elected to the House of Representatives. 

Is it true? Well, he doesn't deny it.

A spokesperson for Walz previously said this topic has been covered before and referred Alpha News to a past story where Walz said “normally this type of partisan political attack only comes from one who’s never worn a uniform.”

Yeah? Ask John F. Kerry about what happens to those who betray their comrades in arms.

She May Argue With Her Logic

From the Easy Rider soundtrack, which is why I know the song, the lyrics came to my mind for some reason this morning and I was struck by how odd they are. The name of the song is "Wasn't Born to Follow," and this is how experts quoted by Wikipedia talk about the lyrics:

The lyrics of "Wasn't Born to Follow" celebrate the freedom that hippies enjoyed in the late 1960s. They express the need for escape and independence. Music critic Johnny Rogan describes the lyrics as an "evocation of pastoral freedom and the implicit desire to escape from the restrictions of conventional society." Music professor James E. Perone describes the singer as "a rugged individualist at one with nature."

But that's not what the lyrics are about at all. They're about a guy who is trying to seduce, and then later abandons, a young woman who is part of the hippie culture.

And when it's time I'll go and wait
Beside the legendary fountain
'Til I see your form reflected
In its clear and jeweled waters
And if you think I'm ready
You may lead me to the chasm
Where the rivers of our visions
Flow into one another.

That is a non-subtle metaphor if I've ever heard one. Though this song is called 'wasn't born to follow,' the young man expresses not only his willingness to follow ("you may lead me") but even to be judged ("if you think I'm ready") until the act is completed. Only then will he leave her in spite of her pleas:

She may beg and she may plead
And she may argue with her logic
Mention all the things I'll lose
That really have no value
Though I doubt that she will ever
Come to understand my meaning
In the end she'll surely know
I was not born to follow.

The song is much less romantic than it sounds over the music; and rather than being an 'evocation of pastoral freedom,' or an 'escape from conventional society,' it's just about betraying a woman's love after a moment's pleasure. 

Civility and Collegiality

These are qualities I respect, but I notice that they like everything are turned into weapons these days. On civility:

With less than a month before the primary, however, Smith withdrew his candidacy and endorsed Nethercott. Smith’s decision came after he and Nethercott met for coffee to discuss the campaign and the issues at stake.

Another topic over coffee was the tenor of politics in Wyoming these days...the scorched earth nature of campaigns, the deluge of misinformation presented to voters, the intensely personal attacks and the overall feeling of nausea that results from seeing our political process degenerate into a gutter fight.

Smith, not wanting to contribute to this political angst, withdrew and endorsed his opponent.

I’ll correct myself. There are two examples of political statesmanship evident here. 

The first being two political rivals setting differences and all the attendant bullshit aside to sit down over coffee and pick each other’s brain. That is almost a revolutionary act of civility in today’s atmosphere. It should be applauded by voters and emulated by other candidates.

The second act of statesmanship is Smith stepping down. This took courage and suggests that both candidates were motivated by reason instead of emotion. Politics in Wyoming needs a lot more reason and a lot less emotion these days. And this act, too, deserves to be applauded and emulated.

So, my sweaty ol’ Stetson is tipped to both Tara Nethercott and Gregg Smith. 

I really do appreciate that, but I notice that the rest of the column is devoted to running down "the Freedom Caucus" and "Young Americans for Liberty," and so forth and so on. So civility is great, as long as the right wing guy steps down and endorses the left wing girl.

Meanwhile, collegiality:

Of late, Justice Kagan has been pushing the latter conception of collegiality–that it entails having an open mind, and a willingness to be persuaded. I have to imagine this push is part of her effort to corral Justice Barrett's votes at every opportunity. If there is any common thread with Joan Biskupic's reporting, is that Justice Kagan flipped Justice Barrett in several cases. I've yet to see any indication that a conservative Justice has flipped a liberal member of the court to reach a conservative outcome. Flipping is not ambidextrous–it only works on the left.

There's got to be a way to be civil and collegial without giving away the store. 

UPDATE: Related. 

Facebook Crime

Not a joke: in the UK, you can now be arrested for comments on Facebook.

Unbelief

But Mark was come of the glittering towns 

Where hot white details show, 

Where men can number and expound, 

And his faith grew in a hard ground 

Of doubt and reason and falsehood found, 

Where no faith else could grow. 

Belief that grew of all beliefs 

One moment back was blown 

And belief that stood on unbelief 

Stood up iron and alone.

-GK Chesterton, Ballad of the White Horse

It would be reckless indeed to vote for someone who has repudiated all their claimed beliefs. Perhaps they were lying then; perhaps they are lying now. Perhaps they have no core principles from which to reason, and will simply say or do whatever seems to help them in the moment. Either way, how could you know what you were voting for? 

This is a very strange election; indeed it is not an election yet on the Democratic side, because all the votes were also repudiated in favor of a new candidate appointed by acclamation. Given her walk-back of all of her existing positions, we are in a situation in which no one has voted in favor of a candidate who has no positions. She gives no interviews; she takes no questions.

I don't know what we're doing here, but it isn't American democracy. This is something different, something I have not seen in this country before now. 

Philosophy of Plants

This article has a nice introduction to a fairly new problem: what should we think now that we know that plants communicate with each other and, therefore, have a degree of agency? The article helpfully spells out the origin of our thoughts on the subject, which unsurprisingly lies with Aristotle's work. 

Plants have a teleogical end of existence, survival, and reproduction: that was known from Aristotle's time. Now we know that they can pursue this end through the emission of organic compounds that cause not only themselves, but nearby plants as well, to erect defenses to further their survival against dangers. They're not especially good at it -- I have cut down quite a few trees in my time, and though I prefer to cut dead ones rather than living ones I have sometimes had to cut living trees too -- but it does show that they have a kind of consciousness, and are pursuing an end in communication with each other. Thus, they also have a kind of community.

These are ordinarily significant considerations in ethics. Why wouldn't they be here? And if they are, what does that mean for us in how we treat with these conscious beings and their communities? 

Slaughtering Girl Children

So until I saw this today, I didn't understand that the children murdered in the knife attack in England were all girls. Somehow the media failed to convey that to me in their reporting.

The point of that post is that the British government has turned hard against anyone who is upset by that. All this gender neutrality is working out badly: Gods of the Copybook Headings badly, if you ask me. All those old rules may not all be necessary, but maybe we should rethink this commitment to treating sex as if it were subject to the rule of cæteris paribus rather than mutatis mutandum. 

UPDATE: The post I linked was deleted, and Janet denies a part of it in the comments below. I'll take her word that she's better informed about that aspect. 

Below Waterrock Knob

UPDATE: I met a biker turning 70 today who was riding the whole Blue Ridge Parkway while he still could. His lungs were ravaged by COVID back when it was new and nobody had any resistance. Still, he survived and now gets to take his ride. He was cheerful, and we had a long talk. I’ve done the ride several times, and was happy to help. His comrade on the ride was a firefighter.

More Google Cleanup

I went back through a few months of comments and restored the ones Google wrongly marked as spam. There were a lot of them, including some Mr. Hines made multiple times, along with a comment that he couldn’t understand why they kept disappearing. 

The effect of AI is likely to include increased speech suppression. Disapproved ideas will be much harder to express because human attention will no longer be a limiting factor on how much suppression can be done. 

FPC Wins Again

These boys are on a roll. This time they managed to have several of Maryland's firearm carry bans struck down as unconstitutional restrictions on the right to bear arms. 

Maryland is one of only twelve states where I cannot carry a handgun with my North Carolina permit, because Maryland only respects its own permits. North Carolina will accept the permits of forty-nine other states as well as its own; Maryland zero other states. This is common among states run by gun control regimes: they routinely disarm everyone they can, and disallowing any other states' permits means that they can insist that citizens of other states be disarmed while in their state. The FPC lawsuit doesn't help that issue.

However, it does allow Marylanders with permits -- not easy to come by in Maryland, but easier now thanks to groups like FPC -- to carry in places they were formerly forbidden from doing so. Everything that can be done to dismantle the disarmament regime is good; a free people have the right to defend themselves from harm, and therefore they have also the right to the necessary conditions of an effective defense to include the tools they need.

Drones

Recently drone warfare came up in the comments. Here are some videos I've found helpful in understanding this evolution of battlefield technology. There's a lot of focus on drones in warfare, but it's not exclusively that.

I would be very interested in any other sources any of you consider useful for understanding this aspect of warfare.

Task & Purpose offers a 16-minute overview of the development of drone warfare going back to the 19th century and bringing it up to about November 2023. (There's a sponsor ad in it after the intro. Skip to 2:17 to miss that, although it is a drone ad if you're interested.)

T.REX ARMS / LABS has a good series on drones. The first is a 25-minute dive into drone warfare in the Ukraine/Russia conflict. I've then posted the rest of their 5-part series below that.

Community Standards Vary

My wife has houseguests this weekend. I am of course detailed to cook for them. I just made dinner (bacon-wrapped jalapeño shrimp, with bruschetta and honey/balsamic Brussel sprouts as sides). To decide how much jalapeño to use, I yelled downstairs:

"Dear, verify your friends' comfort level with spice?"

"I like spicy!" one of them yelled back.

"I like spicy!" the other one yelled back.

"OK, here it comes," I said and walked away. 

Downstairs, I could hear my wife panicking. "No! No! You don't know what you asked for! Mildly spicy! Mildly!"

Strong Work, SECDEF

I met Lloyd Austin once briefly in Iraq, when he was the commanding general of the war effort. This is what I want to see from a man like him.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III on Friday relieved the overseer of the war court at Guantánamo Bay and revoked a plea agreement reached earlier this week with the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and two alleged accomplices....

In taking away the authority, Mr. Austin assumed direct oversight of the case and canceled the agreement, effectively reinstating it as a death-penalty case.

Because of the stakes involved, the “responsibility for such a decision should rest with me,” Mr. Austin said in an order released Friday night by the Pentagon.

“Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pretrial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024.”

That's what I'm talking about. 'You are relieved and we're going to do it right' is something we need to hear a lot more often pointed at the senior officers corps. Well done. 

Rumors of War

You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. 

Mt. 24:6

It's looking like a real war is brewing in the Middle East. It's the long-expected war between Iran and Israel, which Iran will be fighting from a disadvantage because they haven't finished their nuclear program yet. The rocket strikes are ongoing, but ineffective so far; Israel has designated medical facilities and emergency radio frequencies in expectation of a larger barrage. There are no-fly zones in the north. The United States appears to be evacuating our diplomatic personnel, but has deployed 12 additional warships in addition to the carrier group already in the Persian Gulf. 

As mentioned on Wednesday, Iran is throwing away its most effective strategy in favor of a more dangerous but less effective one. It will do more damage in the short term, but it will end the deniability of the proxy war and expose Iran to direct retaliation. Iran is a lot more fragile than it looks, and has only survived this long by avoiding being drawn into a real war.

Coincidentally, Sen. Cotton has opened a probe into Kamala Harris' national security adviser over ties to Iranian networks. Now that's not necessarily anything untoward; it can be helpful for your national security guy to have a backchannel to the people you're worried about. Sometimes you want to talk to them, or hear their perspective. Still, it's the sort of thing that ought to be interrogated, so good for the Senator for pressing them on it. 

Recession

Unsurprisingly, the economy slipped into recession according to a usual test. Dad29 has been pointing out that indicators have been unfavorable for some time. The price of copper, another heuristic, is at a four-month low as manufacturers don't expect to be making as much stuff. At the same link you can see that the price of lithium is way down, as the much-vaunted shift to electric vehicles stalls out in the face of both technical difficulty and consumer resistance. But the price of gasoline is also down, because people aren't traveling as much -- little money for summer vacations.

It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good, but it's hard to see much good here. As D29 points out, even if the recession were to get a new president elected he's going to have a rough couple of years.

One of the Good Ones

Someone of significant importance to my life died just a few days ago. She was, inter alia, the heroine of Grenada. This is not a secret any longer: here is a declassified cable between the CIA and the State Department describing her arrival under official cover. Her name was Linda Flohr.

She arrived three days before "the 1st and 2nd battalions of the US Army's 75th Ranger Regiment, the 82nd Airborne Division, and elements of the former Rapid Deployment Force, U.S. Marines, US Army Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and ancillary forces, totaling 7,600 troops, together with Jamaican forces and troops of the Regional Security System (RSS)." She is the one who took photographs of the airport and other assault sites, and smuggled day-glo spraypaint to the hostage students somehow so that they could mark the roof of their building for the SEALs.

(Relevant to current events also involving hostages, the UN was hotly opposed to this rescue mission. "The invasion was criticized by many countries.... The United Nations General Assembly condemned it as "a flagrant violation of international law" on 2 November 1983, by a vote of 108 to 9.")

I met her shortly after 9/11, when I was still young and highly adventurous. She taught me a great deal, and trusted me enough to introduce me to her old friends, who taught me more yet. My life would have been very different without that friendship and trust. The last time I saw her was at the deathbed of one of those old friends, Dewey Clarridge. 

These Reagan-era spies that I've met were all intensely patriotic, and conservative politically in spite of the wild tales they found themselves involved in over their careers. The Agency is not what it was in their day; a lot of reforms were made starting in the Clinton years to try to turn it into something else. Too bad: it used to draw some of the good ones, and put them into service of a nation that still deserved it. 

Boxing is a Male's Sport

This could be the year a male wins both the Men's and Women's boxing events in the Olympics. Incredible showing by Imane Khelif, whose opponent surrendered in the first round after taking a few shots to the head. 

I don't remember ever seeing a boxing match end in surrender before. Apparently it happens on very rare occasions, and is the subject of introspection when it does because it points to some extraordinary condition that should have been avoided. We will see if there is any introspection on this occasion.

Don't Do That

Kamala Harris follows Hillary Clinton in faking a Southern accent in what we shall call a deplorable manner. 

Why do they do this? 

Clinton's was demonstrably worse -- there are clips of both at the link -- but for Harris it's a pain point. Her inauthenticity issues are not going to be improved by fake accents. Whatever else she may be, she's not a Southerner, and nobody raised in Canada or California ever did a plausible Southern accent. It's obviously fake and skin-crawling.

Dune Style

Readers of the famous novel Dune -- I think everyone here, based on a recent discussion of a movie made from it -- will remember the assassination attempt carried out by a Harkonnen operative who was walled up inside the building well before the Atreides moved in. 

Apparently Israel used a similar technique with a bomb long-hidden in a room their target was known to use, detonated at least months later after they confirmed he was inside. There's no clarity in the reporting where or how the bomb was hidden.

I do admire that the Israelis straightforwardly use the word "assassination" for what our government would insist on calling "targeted killings." It's the same thing; the euphemism doesn't change the moral standing of it. If you've decided that ethics permits killing selected leaders instead of much larger numbers of lower-level soldiers, surely the ethics of speaking the truth rather than lying shouldn't trouble you. You might as well be honest about what you're doing. 

Train Songs on a Cigar Box Guitar

Ben Gitty Baker is a big name in the very small cigar box guitar world. I just discovered that a few years back he travelled across the US on trains and made a number of videos of him singing train songs on the trip. Here are a few of them.

Ancestry and Diversity

As is his wont, Donald Trump decided to throw a rhetorical grenade today.

"I've known Kamala a long time... She was always of Indian heritage... I didn't know she was Black until a couple of years ago when she happened to turn Black"

The media and the administration are apoplectic about this, which is silly because it was a major subject of discussion among Democrats when she ran for President in 2020. Reuters put out this fact check about it then. A whole lot of Democratic voters thought what he just expressed, which I think is an artifact of her diversity-candidate approach to politics: because there had been lots of black officeholders by the time she came of age but not many South Asian ones, she had prominently billed herself as "the first South Asian" whatever to get that "history making diversity!" headline. It's no wonder people knew that she had been billing herself as Indian but not as prominently or frequently as black, because they'd heard the line over and over again.

Perhaps they've forgotten how interested people were in this back then, so here are a couple more items on the subject from 2020. The Irish are interested in it too, because her Jamaican family claims descent from a prominent slave owner/trader who paid a huge damage compensation for their part in the slave trade. (So, she's Irish, and black, and Indian, and female, and you know, diverse.) Reuters’ fact check on the slave trading business is typical of the genre:

While it is true that Kamala Harris’ father claimed to be a descendant of a slave owner, Harris and her family’s relationship to Hamilton Brown remains unclear.  

In an article published by the Jamaica Globe (here), professor Donald Harris wrote: “My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town),” a town in Jamaica.  

According to the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership, Hamilton Brown was an Irish resident slave-owner in Jamaica, and founder of Brown’s Town (here). Snopes, which investigated this claim (here) in 2019, reported that Brown owned at least 121 and 124 slaves in 1826 and 1817, respectively.  

These in-depth Fact Checks by Snopes and Politifact (here) have determined that while there is no clear evidence to prove Kamala Harris is a descendant of slave owners, it is likely that she is a descendant of both slaves and slave owners. 

We've discussed the fact-checker and media love for the phrase "there is no evidence." Here we just get that "there is no clear evidence." But there is clear evidence: we have the direct testimony of her father, which was written down and published. Any historian would consider a direct, published testimonial to be evidence. That in fact is the primary and preferred sort of evidence with which historians work. You can perhaps argue that evidence does not suffice for proof, but you can't deny that there is clear evidence.

I imagine Trump is just throwing bombs because it's fun, but he does incidentally point out a major problem not just for Kamala but for the ideology she represents. The White House is responding that no one has any right to interrogate someone's identity; but if you're going to run a DEI program, in which preference points are assigned based on identity, you have no choice but to question the identities that people claim. Otherwise you end up with Elizabeth Warren cases everywhere. 

Further, there is a serious and unaddressed division on identifying as (say) a man/woman versus (say) black or Indian. In fact, let's use the American Indian for this example -- in Warren's honor, the Cherokee. The Cherokee will definitely interrogate your claim to be one of them, and they have a developed methodology for doing it. They defend this methodology in court and use it to deny some people (especially black people descended from Cherokee slaves) status as Cherokee. Because we have a very elaborate set of preferences and awards for verified Native Americans, businesses owned by them, land owned by them, and so forth and so on, this sort of interrogation is unavoidable. If you want a world in which no one can interrogate your identity, your identity can't be used to assign employment or benefits. If it is, others with whom you are in competition have a right to question whether you really deserved the preferences you received over them. They have standing, as the courts say.

When the Surgeon General of the United States adopts female pronouns and dress, however, we're told it's totally improper to question it. Yet here too, women have a lot of protections and advantages -- scholarships not least, but also physical spaces from which they can exclude men in moments of vulnerability -- that are imperiled if everyone can just identify and nobody can question it. So of course there are fights about this everywhere, in legislatures and in courts and in homes and schools. 

In addition, Trump is pointing to something that isn't often discussed because it's considered wildly impolite to mention, but that I wonder if a lot of black people don't have concerns about. I'm not the least bit black myself and don't pretend to be, but if I were I would wonder about how different not only Kamala but Barack Obama are from the Black American story. The smaller concern would be that they are each only half black, and are on the other side children of extraordinary privilege: on his white side Obama was a cousin of George Washington and descended from wealth and social connection in the white community; Harris' mother was a Brahmin who received advanced education 60 years ago, being about as well connected among the elite caste of India as Obama's white family was here. 

The greater concern is that neither of their black parents shared the Black American experience of slavery and Civil Rights. Obama's father was not descended from slaves or Freedom Riders; he was a Kenyan whose ancestors did not share any of the American experiences. Obama opted in without any of the historical lack of privilege that most Black Americans descend from, and which has defined their struggle. Harris' family, as discussed above, were in her father's generation self-declared descendants from slavers and slave traders, not slaves. 

Again, I'm not black and this isn't my fight. I can't help but think that if I were, though, I'd be asking myself how it was that the first black President and Vice President were both of this strange stripe: not really like us, not at all, neither by blood nor by lived experience. I'd ask myself why they both came from such privilege, and opted into our community only when they found an advantage. At least that's what I think I'd ask myself.

But again, it's not my fight. I wonder if it isn't a fight that just got started, though.

The Red Flag of Revenge

Iran raises its sacred red flag of revenge over its holy city of Qom. (H/t Richard Fernandez.)

The flag's appearance doesn't necessarily mean that anything very bad is going to happen; the last time they raised it was before a large-scale but ineffective drone attack on Israel. Iran's problem is that it is probably being almost maximally effective already, via deniable proxy war; the more they create a conventional war the more they pit weakness against strength. They have no real air force, and their missiles aren't very accurate. They have no way to transport their ground forces and sustain them in action; the proxies are their best card, unless they actually build a nuke.  

Still, it reminds me of the Oriflamme. 

The Oriflamme (from Latin aurea flamma, "golden flame"), a pointed, blood-red banner flown from a gilded lance, was the sacred battle standard of the King of France and a symbol of divine intervention on the battlefield from God and Saint Denis in the Middle Ages. The oriflamme originated as the sacred banner of the Abbey of St. Denis, a monastery near Paris. When the oriflamme was raised in battle by the French royalty during the Middle Ages, most notably during the Hundred Years' War, no prisoners were to be taken until it was lowered. Through that tactic, they hoped to strike fear into the hearts of the enemy, especially the nobles, who could usually expect to be taken alive for ransom during such military encounters.

One of the greatest knights of the Hundred Years War died with the Oriflamme in his hands.

Froissart vividly describes porte-oriflamme Geoffroi de Charny's fall at the side of his king at the Battle of Poitiers in this passage:

There Sir Geoffroi de Charny fought gallantly near the king (note: and his fourteen-year-old son). The whole press and cry of battle were upon him because he was carrying the king’s sovereign banner [the Oriflamme]. He also had before him his own banner, gules, three escutcheons argent. So many English and Gascons came around him from all sides that they cracked open the king’s battle formation and smashed it; there were so many English and Gascons that at least five of these men at arms attacked one [French] gentleman. Sir Geoffroi de Charny was killed with the banner of France in his hand, as other French banners fell to earth.

Both of these red banners are supposed to have been sacred, but the idea has a purely profane variation in history. Pirates famously raised a black flag, including the "Jolly Roger," to indicate piratical intentions -- but it also promised quarter if a surrender was given at once. There was a red flag, "the bloody flag," that some would raise to signal that they intended to murder their prey without mercy no matter what.

Coincidentally I was wearing a t-shirt with this flag printed on it during my flight experiences. Sadly, in spite of my massive black beard, no one got the reference. 

Just tone it down a little

The Bee.

More Air Travel

Yesterday was not a very successful travel day. I was supposed to fly to Charlotte and then Asheville. I wake this morning still in Charlotte. After two delays we finally boarded our plane and went promptly into standby on the edge of an active taxiway for another hour. We then flew to CLT, where we were allowed to land but the field was closed due to lightning. Thus, we sat on the plane for another hour. 

Once I finally got out into the airport, I found that my remaining flight had been delayed as well. I had some hope it might leave near midnight, but no, they finally canceled it. Weather related, so of course the hotel is on me and not the airline that turned two short flights into a two day ordeal. 

Somehow the majesty of flight has become a very unpleasant chore. I dread air travel, but once in a while I have to get on a plane. It’s such a crapshoot as to whether it’ll be on time, or nowhere near so. 

Lotus Blossoms

Stopped by an aquatic garden today. 

John Wayne Loved Chess

 

John Wayne playing chess, with the cast of Rio Bravo looking on.

Apparently John Wayne loved to play chess. It's featured in McClintock, but apparently it was a big thing of his. One of his wives was a a major tennis player or something like that, and he would come to her events and put up a sign outside their trailer: "Play Chess with John Wayne!"

I like chess myself. I taught my son to play, and probably beat him 10,000 times in a row until he really learned to play. Now I have to really watch myself when we play together.

Another Victory over Unconstitutionalism

This one is another occasion of the ATF trying to change the definition of laws without the bother of getting Congress involved. It's a technical issue, but the principle that only Congress can legislate -- no taxation without representation, no laws of any kind without representation -- is a crucial one. 

A Polite Society

There's no newspaper that covers the area in which I live, but there are a few in nearby towns. One of them, the Sylva Herald & Ruralite, likes to pull stories from archives as it has been around a while. This story is from 1926-7.

A young local businessman had gotten wind of apparent indiscretions between his wife and a young man contracted to work on the road from Sylva to Balsam who had recently arrived in the area. He’d apparently become quite worked up, and on a quiet Friday morning in Sylva the alleged suitor pulled up in front of the Woman’s Shop on Main Street.

Before he had a chance to get out of his vehicle, the husband stepped from the sidewalk, pulled a revolver and began shooting, striking the man in the face and twice in the right lung. The man emerged from his car and began running, the husband still firing, hitting him once more below the right shoulder. 

The husband then went into Hooper’s Drug Store and handed his gun to a town alderman, then on to the jail with a deputy. The shooting victim was rushed to the hospital in Bryson City.

The young local businessman was apparently well-regarded, because the judge flatly refused to convict him of any crime. 

In October of 1927 the Journal reported prayer for judgment for the shooter was continued for two years by Judge W.F. Harding. The paper reported Harding remarked from the bench, “Mr. Solicitor, you may get some judge to pronounce judgment in this case; but you will never get this one to do it.” 

The shooter, who entered a plea of guilty of an assault with a deadly weapon, offered testimony of his good character and witnesses who testified to the affair, in addition to letters the wife had written to the suitor. The latter lead the judge to remark “it appeared the wrong man was on trial.” 

The judge opined there was no statute the suitor had violated, but said the legislature should make provisions for such cases, as, the Journal reported, “as the law stands there is little left for an injured husband to do except use a shotgun. (The judge) asserted that this is one place in which our law falls down, and that he would like to issue a bench warrant for (the suitor), if there were a law under which be could be tried.

The paper goes on to note that the young businessman must have remained in business for many years, as their paper hosted ads for his store. The young suitor was never mentioned again. Apparently adultery was a much more serious matter in those days. 

The Herald ends with some musing on the state of society, which we always think is getting more violent.

It’s certainly been a long time since shots rang out on the streets of downtown Sylva, but given the drumbeat of other acts that flicker across our screens daily, the question often comes up if we’ve become a more violent society over time.

It is worth noting that the front pages relating the above incident also carried stories about a fight and shooting at the Glenville polling place, the murder of a man in the Southern Railway waiting room in Dillsboro, and an assault with a pistol with intent to kill Sylva Police Chief Allen Sutton.

Given that, the aforementioned question is one we’ll leave for sociologists and other experts to answer. 

UPDATE: I related this story to my wife, who expressed her opinion that the judge showed excellent sense and that the young businessman's conduct was entirely understandable. "Of course he has a genetically predisposition to react badly to another man stealing his mate," is how she put it. 

The story reflects what may be a culturally Appalachian or Scottish/Scots-Irish sentiment that such cases call for violence against the other man, but none against the woman. Violence by men against women is always wrong, I was taught when I was raised, almost regardless of provocation. Women could slap a man across the face to demonstrate displeasure, not in self defense against an actual threat; a man was not to respond in any way. I remember that I was quite shocked when I first heard Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger and discovered that the protagonist -- a preacher at that! -- actually killed both his wife and her lover. Yet I think that is a more common standard globally, and the restriction a cultural artifact that is probably fading as we move to emphasize the concept of equality in everything.

Controversial!

Out Wyoming way, there’s some upset. 

Although Wyoming Democrats are mad because Rep. Hageman called Kamala Harris a 'DEI hire,' Hageman said, “If you don’t want people to say she was hired only because she’s a black woman, then maybe Biden shouldn’t have said he was only gonna hire a black woman.”

Kind of a fair point, right? It’s not slandering her to point out that that was the condition her employer clearly stated was his criterion. If diversity hiring were improving things as advertised, people would be proud to be diversity hires. As it is, the chief advocates of the practice are generally outraged if you suggest they are one themselves. 

More on the Recent Riot

All that flag burning, police-assaulting, and so forth turns out to have an explanation. Only 29 officers were detailed when it was known that thousands of protestors were coming, and when it's well-known how they behave. Much as the Capitol Police were very understaffed on J6, on a day when it was likewise well-known that there would be a mass demonstration about an event happening right then inside the Capitol, force posture was arranged to be unusually weak. 

Those 29 officers did manage to make 10 arrests while being attacked. 

And what happened to those 10 protesters who the police successfully arrested after assaulting police? 

They're out already--released the SAME DAY. At least some of them. I am not clear whether they all were released, but this is Washington D.C., where the only crime is being a Republican. Some January 6th protesters were held in solitary confinement for over a year before they were even tried. 

It seems likely that policing in DC, like prosecuting in NYC and elsewhere, has become a political tool. It was desirable that there be riots on these days, to make Netanyahu look unwelcome within the United States (though he is more popular than many of our own politicians) or to make Republicans look like they were dangerous insurrectionists (though surprisingly few of the 'insurrectionists' brought guns to their 'insurrection'). 

Coincidentally, police force posture was set to be provocatively weak in the face of those two protests. 

On the prosecutorial side, punishment was harsh for the one side and evaporated against the other, to transmit whose rioting is welcomed in the service of the state. The one set of decisions seems likely to have been intentional; the other set inarguably was.

A Real Victory

The most valuable man in industry strikes a blow.

Elon Musk's SpaceX turned a smallbore squabble about an alleged unfair labor practice into a massive assault on the administrative state that could result in the entire enforcement structure of the National Labor Relations Board being declared unconstitutional.

Lots more like this!

That's A Bold Move, Cotton

Gretchen Whitmer made a strange claim today: that Kamala Harris "has more experience than the whole GOP ticket put together." 

At first I couldn't understand what she thought she was talking about, since half of that ticket actually has four years of experience being President. That's like saying that the guy who spent four years being Battalion Commander, Deputy Commander at Brigade, and then Brigade Commander has less experience than the guys who've never been a commander at all. 

But she's making a much wilder claim than that.

“Kamala Harris in and of herself has more experience than the whole GOP ticket put together. They only have six years of public service experience, and I often point out to people, you wouldn’t go into brain surgery and ask for the freshest neurosurgeon out of medical school,” Whitmer said[.]

"Ladies and gentlemen, unlike our opponents, our candidate is a career politician." 

Here I thought the prosecutor thing was a dangerous ploy. Or Maybe Whitmer's trying to sabotage Kamala to keep her from being in the way in four years?

'Raise Hail & Praise Dale'

A metal-loving friend of mine recommended this album for its, ah, concept.

That Reminds me of a Joke

Apropos of the last two posts, a Jewish business associate of mine is visiting Asheville next week and wanted to meet up. In case he wanted to meet over a meal, and in case he keeps Kosher, I was trying to see if there are any Kosher restaurants in Asheville. Yelp suggested this one.

I don't know a lot about Kosher, but I do know that shellfish isn't on the list! It turns out there aren't any Kosher restaurants in Asheville, and not many Jews either -- the closest synagogue I know of is actually a Methodist church that loans itself out to them on Saturdays. The very small Jewish population has been around long enough that there's a Jewish section in one of the old segregated cemeteries near Hendersonville, but the population has never grown large. It's no surprise that there are no restaurants that go to the very substantial trouble of maintaining a Kosher kitchen -- you have to have a whole separate kitchen, as well as separate utensils and all the rest -- to cater to such a tiny populace. 

However, the Lobster Trap bit reminded me of a joke I read in a book by Isaac Asimov. I no longer have the book, but the joke goes approximately like this:

On the holiday of Yom Kippur, the solemn day of atonement, a synagogue's congregation sat waiting for their rabbi to turn up. He was late, and later, and still hadn't appeared well into lunchtime. In addition to being hungry, they were very worried that something had happened to him. So they began calling all around town to see if they could locate him or get word of what might have happened to him. 

Finally someone reported that he had been seen at a local seafood restaurant. The congregation went to find him, and discovered him eating a big plate of oysters. Looking on in horror, they exclaimed, "Rabbi! Rabbi! How could you do this, on today of all days?"

He looked at them quizzically and replied, "What? There's an 'r' in 'Yom Kippur.'"