An American Latina Looks at Spain

The hatred of one's origin ends up being a damaging hatred of the self; Grim's Hall has long argued that some sort of patriotic forgiveness and acceptance of one's ancestors is necessary to one's own health in much the same way that such forgiveness and acceptance of your parents and their mistakes is for us. I've spoken of that in terms of Germany and Japan, also America and the American South (passim); but here is a lady writing from the perspective of Latinos looking at Spain. The finding is the same in spite of the difference of points of origin. 

A reader named Victor wrote to me this week with a confession. A United States Latino, steeped in the Chicano Movement, he had gone to Spain braced to hate it. He had been educated to loathe the brutal colonial country of the Conquistadores who raped, pillaged and genocided his — our — ancestors. He expected, upon landing in Spain, to feel the old inherited grievance rise in his throat [but found that] Spain was a diverse land of many different kinds of people, and none of them, now, were conquistadores. He grew to love it. He learned to hold the present beauty and the tragic history of Spain — real Spain, not the idea of Spain — in the same hand. “It’s complicated,” he wrote.

Those two words are the most honest thing anyone has said to me about our complicated American Latino history and Spain’s role in it in a long time.

We are primed, as Latinos in the United States, to hate present-day Spain. It’s a litmus test of belonging the right way. How do you feel about Spain? The question never means modern Spain. For United States Latinos, Spain froze back in 1540, when it toppled Moctezuma’s empire, a Forever Inquisition onto which we have projected all the simplified racialized sins of United States slavery, only brown instead of black. How do I feel about Spain? we answer, standing before the proverbial class, all eyes upon us, fingers hovering over the big red cancel button. If we want to fit in as real woke U.S. Latinos, there is only one correct answer: Spain is the colonizer, and because we are enlightened Latinos, we hate Spain and we hate Spaniards.

American Latinos are trained to look at a modern, democratic, post-Franco country and see nothing but the Inquisition wearing a fresh suit and ridiculously shiny Italian loafers. For educated U.S. Latinos, Spain ceased to exist and evolve in the 16th century, and is nothing but a racist, colonizing land full of white people. In reality, Madrid itself is home to 1 million Latin American immigrants in 2026 — meaning there are more Latinos in this one city in Spain than there are in the entire nation of Uruguay. And Spain itself has never been a monolith. Far from it. But like everyone else in the United States, U.S. Latinos gravitate towards simplistic racialized stories of Good versus Evil to explain every fucking thing in the world. And it’s exhausting.

Emphasis in the original. I often elide curse words in the interest of keeping the Hall family friendly, not because I personally oppose them nor their usage. I'm going to leave that one out of respect for her voice. 

It's a much longer post that's worth reading. She's finding a lot to struggle with that is analogous to what any of us would; and, indeed, she's only part way there because she still does have good guys and bad guys in her conceptions. On the closest examination, everyone is imperfect; in the American context, for example, it's the very same people who freed the slaves who committed the genocide against the Lakota or the Cheyenne or the Apache. Not the same kind of people, the same people: Sherman and Sheridan and Custer and their commands. 

There may not ultimately be good guys and bad guys at all. Virtues are strengths, and thus the virtuous are "powerful for good and evil," as Theodore Roosevelt wrote of the Scots-Irish on the American frontier. The harmless are usually weak, not virtuous; the great usually have scores on both sides of the ledger. You end up forgiving either the weakness or the sins, or else you don't forgive and hurt yourself most of all. 

Bowie Knives and the Historic Argument

One argument being fielded in the circuit split driving the upcoming landmark SCOTUS case on the Second Amendment is a historical examination of Bowie knives.

In its landmark 2022 Bruen decision, the Court held that modern gun rules must be consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.... Applying the historical test to modern sporting rifles has produced conflicting results. A divided panel of the 7th Circuit recently upheld Illinois’ ban, noting that the ubiquitous firearm from 1791 through the mid-19th century was a single-shot muzzleloader. AR-15s with large-capacity magazines, the majority said, are “a far cry from these antecedents.” The court pointed to historical restrictions on Bowie knives as a relevant analogue.

Days later, the 3rd Circuit went the other way on New Jersey’s similar ban. In a 10-5 decision, the majority rejected the Bowie knife comparison. There was no evidence those knives were commonly used for lawful purposes before being restricted, the court noted. By contrast, tens of millions of AR-15-style rifles are in civilian hands today and are overwhelmingly used for lawful purposes.

The 7th Circuit opinion is here. The relevant part begins on page 20; the dissent also cites and challenges the interpretation starting around page 67. Of special note here is the majority's rejection of the idea that Bowie knives were particularly criminal-linked, asserting that they were in common use for lawful purposes -- but were still commonly banned by laws because of their occasional utility to criminals. This is a surprising attempt to deploy the Heller standard to challenge the Bruen standard. 

The 3rd Circuit opinion is here. New Jersey cited Bowie knife bans in its arguments, and the 3rd circuit rejected them "for two reasons: They are too late in time, and none enacted an outright ban on a class of weapons in common use for lawful purposes." To some degree that is a difference of historical interpretation: were Bowie knives in 'common use for lawful purposes,' or were they not? 

However, there's another issue that the 3rd Circuit is raising: the 'assault weapons ban' doesn't bar a particularly dangerous sort of semiautomatic sporting rifle, it bars the entire class of semiautomatic sporting rifles. These can be shown to be both in common use and, statistically, almost exclusively for lawful purposes. Though legislatures attempting to ban them point to highly visible mass shootings involving such arms, mass shootings are a tiny part of the class of shootings; separately, homicidal shootings involving rifles are a tiny class. Once you get to 'mass shootings involving sporting rifles,' you're at statistical noise: better than 99% of such firearms are used exclusively lawfully. Indeed in any given year, in that post the math works out to  99.9975%.

This brings us to an issue not raised in any of the cases so far: the vagueness of the restriction. In the frontier era, such statistical nicety was not possible and legislatures were going off of press reports rather than hard numbers. This, I think, accounts for most of the historical knife bans. "Bowie knives" were not a very well-defined class of knives, and indeed historians still debate exactly what Jim Bowie's knife looked like. The link says the original was 'like a butcher knife in profile,' and doesn't mention if it had a hand guard of any sort. Early attempts to replicate it vary widely: 

Early Bowie knives do not fit the popular image of the weapon. One thinks of a blade with a concave arch (clip point) cut into the end of the blade, and a cross-guard to protect the hand. Early examples, however, had a thick, heavy butcher-knife-like blade, with a straight back (top) and no clip point or hand guard. The blade varied in length from 8½ to 12½ inches and was sharpened on the true edge. Wooden handles were attached with silver pins and washers. The Searles knives of the 1830s were one-piece ebony, checkered, and decorated with small silver nails. Blacksmiths fashioned most of the subsequent Bowie knives and added rudimentary crossguards to keep the hand from sliding onto the blade. Eventually, they lengthened the guards as protection from an opponent's blade, but the owner often found the extended guards clumsy and cut them off. The clip point, a curve on the top of the blade back of the point, became popular. The clip was often sharpened so that a backstroke would inflict a serious wound. Spear-point Bowie blades also were forged, dagger-shaped, with both edges sharpened. Blacksmith-made Bowies were generally plain and unsigned, had iron or brass mountings, and hardwood, bone, or horn handles. The knife was both a hunting knife and a tool. With it, one could clear a path, hack a sapling, dig a hole, or butcher game. In the siege of Bexar in 1835, Texans used Bowie knives to dig through roofs and walls and engage in hand-to-hand combat with the Mexicans. The knife was not designed or balanced for throwing.... 

Bowie knife collections indicate that only about one in ten was American made. English cutlers applied clever motifs and blade etchings that appealed to American tastes and patriotic spirit. Examples include such labels as "American Bowie Knife," "Texas Ranger Knife," "Arkansas Toothpick," "Patriot's Self Defender," "Death to Abolition," "Death to Traitors," "Americans Never Surrender," "Rio Grande Camp Knife," and "I'm A Real Ripper." Handle and guard mountings also carried symbols and slogans with American appeal. Cutlers attached handles of ivory, pearl, tortoise shell, black and gray buffalo horn, India stag horn, and fine woods. Handle pommels of nickel silver featured horseheads, shells, and geometric designs. 

In spite of this great lack of clarity about what precisely was being banned -- note this part of the story is quite analogous to the 'assault' weapons ban attempts -- "Bowie knives" were quite commonly on ban lists and even today are often mentioned by name in knife laws. This is because of the tremendous fame of the Sandbar fight in which Jim Bowie's prowess became nationally (in)famous. Legislatures didn't know exactly what they were, but they knew they didn't want such things around whatever they might be. 

Other knife styles commonly banned by name include 'dirks' and 'daggers.' Today, a 'dirk' is most famously the heritage Scottish weapon; but legislatures don't seem to have intended it at the time they invoked the name in the laws. Rather, they often seem to have been worried about German submarine infiltrators, assuming the Germans would be armed with their naval knife which was at the time commonly also called a 'dirk.' It's actually a double-edged knife we would more usually call a "dagger," unlike the Scottish dirk which is single-edged and usually has fish-scaling ridges on the reverse. 

The American Took & Knife Institute here has a similar historical article about the dirk, which was so badly defined in the law that you could sometimes be charged for carrying both a 'dirk' and a 'Bowie Knife' under different statutes for the same knife -- which, whatever it was, wasn't both at once. Likewise: 

Yet another example of elastic application of a statutory “dirk” restriction appears in Virginia, where the dirk restriction was applied to a “butterfly” knife. In the case of Delcid v Virginia, 526 S.E.2d 273 (2000), the defendant argued at trial that his butterfly knife did not conform to the judicially established definition of a dirk which held it to be a knife with two sharp edges and a point and the knife in question had a single sharp edge. The trial judge ruled that the knife was “a dirk with one side,” thus avoiding controlling authority from a higher court in the state. The conviction was upheld on appeal.

The ignorance of legislators is, sadly, not without widespread historical precedent. Neither has been the willingness of police and even courts to apply laws vigorously without clear understanding of what they actually intended to mean. That is a species of unconstitutional vagueness that ends up being dangerous to our Constitutional rights -- and not only the 2nd! All such rights can be winnowed if vague laws are allowed to infringe upon them, especially if the laws are then enforced with the carelessness that is common to the system. 

Overnight Storms

Pretty wild night of storms with tornadoes and hail, but all is well here. Up on the Tail of the Dragon they got it in the teeth it sounds like.

Barnyard Jobs

An article distinguishes between two sorts of jobs with barnyard epithets. One sort is wearying and spiritually deadening; the other, mostly boring but with the benefit that it can sustain more interesting pursuits that are not themselves profitable. 

[T]here are hundreds of thousands—millions—of people who don’t have the talent to make a living at writing, art, or music, but who would love to do it seriously and are willing to live modestly, if necessary. These people deserve [such] jobs – modestly paying, undemanding, part-time jobs with benefits. The alternative is [worse] jobs, which would pay more but kill the creative spark and leave them exhausted and miserable....

Didn’t Marx promise that after the revolution we would hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and criticize in the evening? Yes, the young Marx promised that. The mature Marx had second thoughts:

Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production…Freedom in this field can only consist in the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature;…But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.

A Marxist I know tells me that the 'fish in the afternoon' quote was actually drafted by Engels, and that Marx included but always hated it. Pity; it was the only thing of value that Marx ever published. As an aspiration, who shouldn't want that? I quoted it just the other day while gently mocking a certain film critic. 

The Socialist Spectacle

The Clinton faction dominated the Democratic Party during the 1990s, while Bill Clinton enjoyed the powers of the presidency (and boy, did he enjoy them) as well as the early 2000s, when Al Gore's loss was presumed to be the result of a stolen election that would be righted by Hillary Clinton's return to the White House when she had established herself in national politics via a partial Senate term. In fact, as we all know, the Chicago machine stole a march on them and supplanted them during the Obama years, reducing Hillary to second-tier; and then she lost in 2016 in spite of all efforts by the media and the various urban machines to carry her over the wall. Since then, the remnants of that faction have been less important but are still consulted by members of the press. 

One such, Mark Penn, decided yesterday to go against the DSA faction that is now emerging as a challenge to the whole Democratic establishment. 

At the same time, there is a move to reconsider -- that is, condemn -- the Clinton faction and its legacy. Yesterday's Washington Post featured a piece by a Foreign Policy editor containing a charge that Bill Clinton was personally responsible for destroying welfare and for paving the way for DOGE-style efforts to further shrink the safety net.

For those of us who are not New Yorkers, the discussion about 'pied-à-terre' taxes sounds arcane. Obviously I have enough French to recognize that this means 'foot on the earth,' but in taxation it's a technical term whose meaning is obscure if you don't look it up. I did so. The concept is that wealthy people often respond to the difficulty of commuting to the downtown office (or downtown shopping) by renting a small space within the city that they can use to sleep in so they can do their travel in non-rush hours. Allegedly this reduces the amount of affordable housing for ordinary people because the wealthy can bid the price up for such spaces to something higher than regular folk can afford; so, taxing these spaces could drive the wealthy out of them so that poorer people could rent them. 

The poorer people would presumptively not be subject to the tax because they don't have another home somewhere else, which is a precondition for the tax applying. The DSA approach to this presumption is to reverse it, dragging almost every person who owns any residential property into the tax and then forcing them to prove that it shouldn't apply to them. Thus, unless you win your appeal and/or lawsuit -- who can afford New York city lawyers, especially when almost every homeowner in the city will need one? -- you'll be subject to this ruinous tax.

Between that and the grocery store scam producing bread lines, NYC will be an educational spectacle for a few years. Hopefully people have the right mindset to be educated. 

The Hyborian Age

One of the longstanding views of this space is that Robert E. Howard's view of history was closer to right than otherwise: civilization stretches back much further, and stretched further, than history does. There are stories we may never know about the eternal encounters between barbarian and civilized man, in eras long lost in the past. 

When Cleopatra became queen of Egypt, in 51 BCE, the oldest pyramids that graced her realm, constructed in the 27th century BCE, had already been standing for more than 2,500 years. Cleopatra is one of the most iconic figures from antiquity, yet she is nearer in time to the present than she was to those first pyramids – by a half-millennium, no less....

Hoards of Roman coins have been found well beyond the frontiers of the empire, from Scandinavia to India. A papyrus from Egypt in the middle of the 2nd century CE records the details of two contracts for the import of various goods from India, including pepper, pearls, silk and gemstones, shipped to Alexandria from the port of Muziris in Kerala, southwest India. What all of this implies is a far-flung web of transimperial commercial contacts.... 

Further east, near the oasis of Dunhuang, at the head of the Hexi Corridor leading into the North China Plain, a cache of letters from the early 4th century CE written by Sogdian merchants and addressed to recipients in Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, detail the Central- and East-Asian trade in precious metals, spices and textiles, including silk. These ancient commercial networks can be traced all the way to the Pacific rim of East Asia. The most spectacular finds come from the port city of Guangzhou, in southern China, where the tomb for Zhao Mo, the ruler of the regional kingdom of Nanyue in the mid-2nd century BCE (137-122), contained a number of exotic objects, including African elephant tusks and a silver box with motifs and craftsmanship derived from Persia.

The essay continues with an interesting comparison and contrast of Han China and the Roman Empire; it closes on a less captivating note, but you can skip that part if you like. 

Start with Plain Talk

Asheville has had three large-scale shootings in rapid succession, and it's probably not going to get better because the police chief won't even speak the plain facts about the matter. Asked if this was 'gang violence,' she said: 

"This is a group of individuals who know one another... these are groups, again, that are committing acts of violence against one another.... I would say these are two groups of individuals... there are ties to them knowing each other and committing ongoing retaliatory acts against each other." 

Two dead, seven injured, no arrests in that particular shooting. Police say they have identified 'persons of interest,' but won't say who they are. 

They do at least have a suspect in another recent shooting, one Elijah William Poore. Asheville police are asking for help from the community in locating him, but have released no physical description that might help people identify him. Height, weight, hair color, eye color, nothing distinguishing. He's supposed to be eighteen years old, which is all they will say about him other than that he's wanted for the shooting.

On the other hand they had a LOT to say about the firearm used. The mayor herself came out to talk about that alongside the police chief. While apparently it must be politically incorrect to accurately characterize the criminals, the gun was a Glock fitted out with one of those illegal 'switch' sear devices that lets you fire it automatically. Those are on the approved list of political targets, so that was something they couldn't say enough about. Apparently the gun is the guilty party, or something like that.

UPDATE: There has been an arrest made now in an earlier shooting, one they say led to the mass shooting that was 'retaliation' for this one. The alleged gunman from the earlier shooting now has a mugshot and a name. Still nothing from the larger retaliatory shooting.

A Catholic Question

Dad29 is asking about whether exorcists should be featured prominently; he thinks so. In addition to his argument, there's another angle on the question that this survey brings forward:

This 'all religions are mostly after the same basic truth' idea is one that G.K. Chesterton wrote about extensively. For example:

There is a phrase of facile liberality uttered again and again at ethical societies and parliaments of religion: "the religions of the earth differ in rites and forms, but they are the same in what they teach." It is false; it is the opposite of the fact. The religions of the earth do not greatly differ in rites and forms; they do greatly differ in what they teach.... They agree in machinery; almost every great religion on earth works with the same external methods, with priests, scriptures, altars, sworn brotherhoods, special feasts. They agree in the mode of teaching; what they differ about is the thing to be taught. Pagan optimists and Eastern pessimists would both have temples, just as Liberals and Tories would both have newspapers. Creeds that exist to destroy each other both have scriptures, just as armies that exist to destroy each other both have guns.

Even if one were not a believer, I think that one could usefully divide religions agnostically into 'ones that might be true' and 'ones that are definitely false.'  Even once you do that, though, eliminating the obvious falsehoods like (say) Mormonism, you're still left with a great deal of difference in what the teaching is. Christianity and Buddhism are two of the more defensible religions, and as Chesterton explored at length they have very different basic claims about reality and what a good soul should desire and strive to obtain -- so different, indeed, as to be 'eternal life united with God' versus 'an end to suffering through extinction'! 

There is no way that both of those claims can be true. Both could be false, but they simply cannot both be true. Likewise Christianity versus Hinduism: is life fundamentally meaningful or meaningless? Is the soul real and loved, or is it just a passing dream that will be forgotten when the Great God awakens? 

Exorcise that, if you can. 

Honky Tonk Sunday

I guess my memory is better than that. 

"Assault Knives"

Nobody seems to know if this is real or parody; I've seen it cited on both kinds of pages lately. 

As a longtime student of the Riddle of Steel, I have to admit that I don't know what an 'assault knife' might be. It's apparently twice as dangerous as a Rambo knife, though! 

I do recall that the UK went through a thing about "Zombie-style knives" a while ago, which apparently is defined in law as 'the kind of knives you see in Zombie movies.' I assume some equally precise definition is at work here. 

Half-Ton Van

I just did a video/music post, but what the hell, let's have two of them.

This reminds me of an older song.

Unrelenting Policy

Since I was doing a Paint Your Wagon clip recently, here are a couple more. Sadly, the frontier is closed for the moment.

Certain motorcycle rallies still resemble this, however. We have more women, which is one of the advantages of not being on the wild frontier. 

UPDATE: In the first video, Lee Marvin responds to an assertion of disagreement with, “I don’t want to hear about it.” That’s a novel concept today! A fair one though: I’ve considered my position adequately for my satisfaction, and I’m not interested in new ideas on the topic. For those of us with steel in our beard, or other hair, a fair assessment. 

The Wrong Dose of Medicine is Poison

Even if you are inclined to take psychological therapy seriously -- especially if you are, I suppose -- you should be mindful of the dangers of excessive intake. 

Imagine losing five years of contact with one of your parents and not getting contact back to make amends or work things out. A cancer diagnosis sometimes offers a runway, but a heart attack often does not. 

Sorting Out (by) Faith

Via Hot Air, a plea from a defender of Palestinian Christian communities. 

[A] number of... Palestinian Christian leaders assured me that they need our love and prayers—but they also badly need practical support if Christianity is not to die in our lifetime in the land that gave birth to our common religion....

The same holds true in Bethlehem (the City of Bread), where not only the French and Polish orphanages but the wider Christian community are literally depending on the Salesian Bakery for their daily bread. Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, jointly administered and run by a coalition of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, and the Roman Catholic Church, stands empty. The Franciscan hostel beside it is shuttered, as are the nearby rows of souvenir shops, while Manger Square is so empty it might as well be in a ghost town.

The all-Christian town of Taybeh, a little over an hour’s drive past Ramallah to the north, is likewise on its last legs. The Khoury family have shuttered their hotel, their beer factory is running at a loss, and, like for the rest of the village, settler roadblocks and vandalism stop them from accessing their crops. Faced with all this, Christians continue to flee via Jordan to claim refugee status in Portugal.

There is probably nothing that can be done to save them, speaking pragmatically. This strikes me as being partly a consequence of the war begun by Hamas with its October 7th blood magic, which designed to use mass human sacrifice as a prayer to Allah for a final reckoning with Israel. They seem to be getting their prayer answered, by whomever it is that answers such prayers; it is likely that this conflict extends beyond human hands, and that its final outcome will not be subject to our opinions but to higher judgments. Everything associated with Hamas, including "Palestine" and anything that chooses that name for itself, is likely to be brought under that judgment. So I guess; but it is not for me to say, or even to know for certain, in matters such as this. 

However, I am also reminded that this process has been ongoing for quite some time. Wars intensify and speed it -- the Iraq War, for example, led to the destruction of several Christian and Jewish communities in Iraq as well as the subjugation of other religious minorities. At the Aristotle University in Thessalonica, a recent conference pointed out that the shrinking of Christian communities is part of a trend more than a century long -- or longer yet, if you want to go back before the establishment of Islam, which provoked a great shrinkage through conquest and forced/coerced conversions.  

Likewise, Jewish communities across the region have shrunk by approximately 99% in the last century in the Arab countries plus Iran. The 1978 Iranian revolution is part of that story, but mostly it's a reaction by Muslims to a century of relative weakness -- they are attempting to purge the land clean of those who deny the truth of their religion, and they tend to hit the Jewish communities because they are weak and vulnerable to the kind of force that Islamic militants can bring to bear. That's true of Christians and other minority groups as well; it is less true of the Kurds, but even they have been subject to intense violence from ISIS and other Islamic militants as well as from nation states like Iraq (under Saddam), Iran (periodically), Turkey (very much still today), and Syria (under Assad -- the new government at least for now is trying to play nice with the Kurds). 

In that sense the current war is just another war, another accelerant thrown onto a long-burning fire. The real question is to what degree that fire will spread to Europe -- or Detroit -- rather than how it will eventually burn itself out in the Middle East. 

No Communities In Any Community Rooms

The vote was last night; on consideration, they decided not to allow community meetings in the Cashiers community room either. Only official agents of the state/local government may now use the spaces.

It's odd to me to see the Republicans on the side of restricting the access in this way, because in the 2nd Amendment debate this is the position they reject: 'only agents of the state may be trusted to deploy this liberty responsibly.' The idea that only agents of the state can be trusted to keep and bear arms is in obvious and outright defiance of our tradition of self-governance and human dignity. 

Somehow when it's the 1st Amendment, though.... 'you can't allow the community to rent the space from the county because then those weirdos will do something we don't like in a government building, which might give the impression that the community as a whole approves of it' turns out to be the logic, and locking it down to government agents only the accepted response. 

Admittedly the Democrats have the inverse contradiction going on, so it's not like they're better -- it may be that they're worse, because 2A liberties are even more fundamental than 1A ones since they get at your ability to enforce your dignity rather than merely express it. However, it remains a striking contradiction. 

Ah, Another Prince

Troy Jackson, a powerful Maine legislator now running for Senate, once angrily threw a water bottle in a meeting after he couldn’t persuade a lawmaker to vote his way. He yelled at another lawmaker, prompting her to post on social media that straight men were “too emotional” to be in politics. And he cursed and shouted in a meeting with the speaker of Maine’s state House, until she kicked him out of her office.

During the six years Jackson presided over Maine’s Senate, until he left office in 2024, his temper was a feature of his leadership, and one that Democratic lawmakers discussed among themselves as a problem and even raised with the governor....

His temperament is coming up as he is on the verge of replacing Democratic candidate Graham Platner[.]

Washington Post, so there's probably a paywall -- thus the longer quote. 

Probably he doesn't have Nazi tattoos though, so I guess he meets at least one objective standard for being an improvement. Still, don't they have any guys over there who don't act like this?  

"Five Cups"

When you say "up to five cups of coffee," do you mean a measuring cup, or my cup?

Wooster-Chester

The Mexicans have figured this one out. 

Offside

From xkcd.

"Workers Deserve More"

I generally agree that working men ought to receive fair, even generous pay -- that is orthodox, though less common in practice than it ought to be. 

Still, I'm a little mystified about how this plan has anything to do with improving outcomes for workers. "Workers deserve more! Step one, abolish the Senate." 

What?

All the Gold in California

Don't know how much gold is still in California. But, once, it was the promise of individual liberty.

Ignorance is Part of the Product

We all recall President Obama's speech guy explaining to a noted journalist that, unlike when they got started, journalists now are all 27 year olds who "know nothing." Apparently, at the Washington Post that now qualifies you to write a review of The Odyssey. [Long quotes because it is paywalled, and you shouldn't pay for what follows.]

We can discuss later whether my education was merely eclectic or an utter catastrophe, but somehow, having successfully avoided the spoilers for nearly 3,000 years, I went into an early screening of “The Odyssey” with no idea of what it was about.

I mean, ok, everybody's upbringing is different... but wasn't there someone at the Post who could have taken this assignment who wasn't completely ignorant of the subject? 

But hey, sure. Let's have a review by the girl who literally does know nothing. It'll be objective, or something. 

But first: what even is “The Odyssey”?

“The Odyssey” is a massively long poem.

Look, probably the rest of the audience actually does know a little bit about the Odyssey. You might be able to skip some of the preamble. She did skip part of it; she says she wrote and deleted 'several paragraphs' about disputed concepts of authorship among scholars, which I assume she found out about middle-school style five minutes before her deadline but thought she was qualified to discuss at length.

“The Odyssey” is a thing you can buy tickets to, and we’re going to talk about the movie, I promise; this is the journey part of the story.

You know, this does read like a middle school book report. The research is similarly exacting throughout. 

Some of Nolan’s casting choices immediately became controversial. He cast Kenyan-Mexican Lupita Nyong’o, one of the most beautiful women alive, as Helen of Troy, one of the most beautiful women alive... He cast Elliot Page, a transgender man, as one of about a hundred Greek soldiers, and this also ticked off a horde of commentators because, I don’t know, they are weird cashews.

I didn't think much of their complaints either. They probably knew who Odysseus was, though.

“The Odyssey” is a meditation on aging, Amy Poehler suggested to Matt Damon in a recent episode of her podcast, “Good Hang.” “The Odyssey” is a meditation on PTSD, Matt Damon suggested back, while also informing her that “The Odyssey” made him go gluten-free. “The Odyssey” is about “the urgent desire to get home and to belong somewhere,” according to scholar and translator Daniel Mendelsohn; it is about “what it means to survive violence, and what it means to come home,” according to scholar and translator Emily Wilson; it is, said Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy, “a journey of the soul.”

So now we are gathering celebrity opinions about the meaning of the poem because they were available on podcasts? Somehow a couple of actual scholars made their way into her field of attention, and thus the book report. 

“The Odyssey” is — and let’s be serious movie people for a moment — absolutely astonishing.

Yes, by all means. If this is what 'serious movie people' look like, we can surely all be one if we choose. Maybe I'll be one tomorrow. Why not? "To hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic."

After sitting in the theater, gobsmacked as the credits rolled, I felt strongly that I had come into the story in exactly the right way: completely ignorant.

Can I tell you whether the screenplay diverted from the original text in matters of importance? I cannot. If it did, it wouldn’t have bothered me. A colleague revealed that her 12-year-old was irritated by the absence of a scene involving the God of Wind which is, apparently, quite important in the original text, and that girl definitely went to a better middle school than I did.

You should have had her write the review. We'd have all been better informed if you had. Child labor laws, I guess. 

Justices say 'Whee!'

The Supreme Court of the State of Hawaii secedes from the Supreme Court of the United States, or so I gather from this rant in which they declare they will 'take no guidance' from Federal cases because they think the US is becoming a worse place.

Next up, the Hawaii Supreme Court explains that federal due process rights "keep sinking" so they'll take "no guidance" from federal cases. And here is where the attacks go from odd to deranged. Accusing the Supreme Court of "imperious ideology", it goes to other areas of law...

"The Roberts Court sees only white." The Hawaii Supreme Court follows with more Callais and Allen v. Milligan to accuse the Supreme Court of racism. It accused the Supremes of misinterpreting the Equal Protection Clause.... Now election finance and redistricting. Citizens United, Rucho v Common cause, Presidential immunity, and a recent (minor) election spending case. It's like they put their least favorite cases into Claude....

Now for the page revealing the cause is the tantrum. Wolford v. Lopez and Hawaii's attempt to evade the Second Amendment. It was stymied. These justices are not happy. In a spoke -word-poem style list of grievances, they attack the Supreme Court's recent jurisprudence. Wild!

As with all the rest of this stuff, it's not the first time it's come up. In fact, sometimes it works.

Unlike more notorious attempts by states to reject or nullify federal court decisions, these state laws and decisions remain in effect. How can this be?

The reason is simple enough: the Supremacy Clause is not a binary switch. Without complete preemption, our system of federalism leaves room for state law to supplement or stand alongside federal law. States often use that freedom to depart from federal law by passing laws or issuing judicial opinions that explicitly reject specific opinions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Hawaii is going to find it very hard to get away with that on these 2A issues, where the state's insistence would amount to pre-empting Federally defended rights in order to assert powers explicitly ruled unconstitutional. There's probably quite a lot of ground, however, where they can simply refuse to listen to the Federal courts at all. 

Vegetarian Animal-Lover...

...one of whose favorite books turns out to be, I learned today, Uncle Tom's Cabin. The recent Sons of Confederate Veterans' presence in the Veterans' Day Parade on the 4th has occasioned another of the endless attempts to convince everyone that there's only one correct way to think about the Confederate Flag. 

However, in Germany...

However, as a cultural historian writing on transnational fascism, I see the [apparently not-uncommon in Germany flying of the Confederate] flag as part of a longer history of German nostalgia for the American antebellum South. Germans’ identification with the region stretches back, paradoxically, to the very book that helped bring an end to that era of slavery: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”... 

This hazy romanticization was undergirded by racial prejudice, which found in Stowe’s depiction of Tom as a “happy slave” a justification for racial hierarchy. Though “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was originally cultivating sympathy for Black slaves, by the early 20th century it was invoked by both German progressives and conservatives as proof of Black inferiority and as a justification for colonization. An introduction to a 1911 German edition of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” describes how “the Negroes are undeniably an inferior race, and, now that they have been freed, are widely perceived to be a plague in the United States.”

Bettina Hofmann, a professor of American studies at Bergische Universität Wuppertal, argues that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” introduced racial terms to the German language that foreshadow the Nazi race categories. However, as she qualifies, “it would be an anachronism to accuse Stowe of having paved the way for Hitler’s thoughts on race.”

Still, it remains a dim possibility that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had at least some influence. Stowe’s novel was, after all, one of Hitler’s self-proclaimed favorite books.

You can't make this stuff up, really you can't. 

UPDATE: Meanwhile, in Croatia…

Gentlemen, No Communities Here! This is the Community Room!

In the ongoing local saga of the feud over the public library, the county commissioners are proposing to stop the community from using the community room.

The new policy states the room would be limited to library and county government uses only. The move is a part of the larger effort by Jackson County officials to establish new policies for the county’s two public libraries since its official exit from the Fontana Regional Library system that went into effect July 1....

The large community room was touted as one of the new JCPL Complex highlights during the capital campaign for the project between 2007 and 2009. Friends of the JCPL volunteer and retired school librarian Antoinette MacWatt said the room restrictions sting particularly hard given how integral the community was in fundraising for it. In total, community members raised over $1.8 million for the JCPL Complex project, while the county provided the remaining $7 million needed to renovate the historic 1914 courthouse.

“That’s something that’s been, really, a point of pride for this community that we were able to raise that much money,” MacWatt said. “It feels a little bit like a slap in the face.”

Since the other $7MM was also provided by the community, in the form of taxes, you can see why people might be a little annoyed at being told that they can't use a room that was built for the express purpose of providing a community room. 

Note that this does not apply to all libraries in the county, however. Just the one in the problematic blue city of Sylva. In the upscale vacation-and-second-home town of Cashiers, there will be no restrictions. The Smoky Mountain News has the good grace to call this 'puzzling.' 

Part of what is so puzzling about the new restrictions proposed at the JCPL is that no such restrictions are proposed in the draft policy for the community room at the Albert Carlton Cashiers Community Library that was also presented to commissioners at last week’s meeting.

In the proposed Carlton Cashiers library policy, there are no restrictions on who can rent out the community room for any permitted uses, including meetings, private celebrations, art shows and “other similar and appropriate uses approved by the county manager,” though library and county government employees would be prioritized over other groups.

No one is really puzzled about this. As I've mentioned, the library has been the #1 issue locally for years and multiple election cycles now. The Republicans who have taken over the county commission view the Sylva library as dangerous to the moral health of the people of the county, likening the regulation they think it needs to the alcohol board's control of the sale of strong spirits. Part of what drove the current commissioners to seek office was a desire to destroy the library as a source of what they see as moral rot.

The Cashiers library, by contrast, is in a very rich part of the county surrounded by golf courses and gardens. They are so comfortable there that this is where the Republican party held its debates during the primaries, even without the threatened ID checks and pepper spray for errant Democrats who might try to attend.

These feuds are getting to the point that they're destroying the goods the institutions were set up to create or preserve. However, so far people seem to prefer to blame the other side and concentrate on winning than to figure out how to restore the goods. 

The Odyssey Is Just a Travel Guide to Dining in the Med

 So here are some recipes and food parts of the story.

What a trip, though.

Ancient Fires

A site in the Levant offers extensive evidence of long-burning communal fires. 

On The Odyssey

The forthcoming movie treatment of Homer's epic has generated a lot of commentary, from most of which I dissent. I thought, for example, that Elliot/Ellen Page would have been an excellent choice for Achilles in the Odyssey, as in the Odyssey Achilles is dead. We don't meet Achilles in the Odyssey, we meet the Shade of Achilles. The treatment is largely a meditation on the passing of mortal glory for a hero who was once thought the greatest of men, and has now been unmanned by death. Though Page's situation is different, the actor is better fit than many to fill such a role. 

I do agree with this Chronicles suggestion that you should probably encounter Homer's Odyssey itself before seeing the movie. I dissent a bit from the suggestion as to how.

I’d like to urge those interested in the film to read An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, a 2017 memoir by Daniel Mendelsohn. Of course, you can also read Homer’s The Odyssey itself. Yet if you are looking for a brilliant exploration of the ancient poem, An Odyssey can’t be topped. 

Over the course of my life I've spent a lot of time with Odysseus, both in the Iliad and the Odyssey, but also as Plato treats him in the Lesser Hippias and the Laws. I agree with the suggestion to pursue the encounter; not to read anything. 

Both the Iliad and the Odyssey are works of oral epic poetry. They are meant to be heard, not read. You will find them shockingly more engaging if you listen to an audiobook version aloud rather than trying to sit down with a huge tome and read it. If you develop a taste for the form, as I did in my youth, I recommend The Singer of Tales by Albert Lord, based upon the research of his mentor, Milman Parry.

There is a lot of discussion about which translation into English is best; much recent commentary dislikes the 'feminist' translation referenced by the director, although I have frankly heard good things about it from academics I know. Dad29 recommended a different one a few years ago, which I reviewed very briefly. I retain my opinion that the Fitzgerald is the best in English. Here is an unabridged audiobook: it is ten hours of your life, well-spent.

If any of you are interested, here are some things I've written at the Hall on the topic:

The debate within the Lesser Hippias, which is also in praise of disagreeable men like myself.

A discussion of Odysseus' invocation by Plato in the Laws.

Also from the commentary on the Laws, a comparison of Conan and Odysseus -- as well as a discussion of piracy!

More Mottes and Baileys

Since I know several of you don't read Instapundit, here is something they linked overnight on variations of the Motte and Bailey fallacy, as identified by the originator of that very useful term. 

Harmeet

Hall favorite Harmeet Dhillon gets a nice writeup at Hot Air, covering several of her (many!) current activities.

EN I.3 and the ICE Shooting Deaths

In the discussion of the post below on ICE shooting two more people recently, Thomas Doubting expressed concerns that the media treatment of ICE meant that we can't expect the matter to be handled fairly in the press. That turns out to provide a practical example for the application of Nicomachean Ethics (EN) I.3, which I cited frequently during the discussion of the EN. 

To some degree the United States is transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society. Mostly it remains high-trust across its breadth and depth; but in certain cities now everything is locked up to prevent theft, and in politics there is deep distrust between factions. There are many costs to such a transition, and one of them is on display here. People on the right do not trust that ICE will be portrayed or treated fairly, and worry that the protests against it and obstruction of it create additional dangers that may sometimes merit (even lethal) force; people on the left do not trust that ICE will behave morally in any case, suspect it is recruited from bad people to begin with, assume any statements from the Trump administration or any of its subordinate agencies are lies, expect evidence to be hidden (or planted!), etc. 

As a result, the only way to address any of these shootings in a way that might gain broad public support for a proposed change is to conduct a thorough investigation, assemble and evaluate the evidence, and then publish the findings. Responsible people thus always call for this (Senator Collins did so in this case).

However! Because such an assembly, evaluation, etc., takes so very long, people who just want to avoid accountability and carry on misbehaving also call for such investigations. By the time the process can play out, ten or a hundred or a thousand more things will have happened. The public will have forgotten the details, also the urgency, and nothing will end up getting done. Thus, both the responsible and the irresponsible settle upon the same course of action; and the result is that nothing changes. 

The resolution of a problem like this lies in the principles expressed in I.3. 

Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions... We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline.... it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits[.]

So too here. When it comes to legal accountability for the shooter, of course the agent is entitled to a full investigation and -- should immunity be suspended -- a fair trial before a jury. In the subject matter of applying criminal law to past actions, that is the appropriate standard.

When it comes to deciding whether we need a safety stand-down to go over lethal force law in detail with ICE agents for a couple of weeks, with practical exercises and considerable reinforcement about the rights and laws protecting the people on the streets, we do not need such an investigation. That subject can be decided on the basis of the probability, inferred from repeated observations of this type, that such lessons would be wisely applied. The subject matter here is a current ethical decision about the best way to proceed given multiple fatal shootings of unarmed civilians by armed agents of the state.

Likewise a reconsideration of how long agents remain in training before they are deployed, armed and immune, on our streets; likewise, a reconsideration of whether immunity is a wise policy in these cases at all. 

The application of criminal law to a particular case is not the same subject as an ethical consideration about whether or not to call for a stand down for further training. A different level of certainty is appropriate to the decision. 

UPDATE: To their credit, DHS officials seem to have reached this conclusion independently.

Community Standards Differ

Via X. You probably know both songs, and some of you probably even know all the words to both songs. They are of course "Rocky Top" and "Copperhead Road." (Yes, it's an official state song, Tennessee's 11th. Home of Nashville and all that.)

Against Terror, not Arms

Here is a useful post going back to 1328. I want to pull just that one thread of it for today:

Go back to 1328. The Statute of Northampton made it illegal to go armed in public “to terrify the King's subjects.”1 This wasn’t a gun-control law in the modern sense. It's actually the origin of a distinction courts are still arguing about today: the difference between carrying lawfully and carrying to menace. (We'll come back to this. It shows up by name in the Bruen decision, 700 years later.)

Here's the statute:

Item, it is enacted, that no man great nor small, of what condition soever he be, except the King's servants in his presence, and his ministers in executing of the King's precepts, or of their office, and such as be in their company assisting them, and also [upon a cry made for arms to keep the peace, and the same in such places where such acts happen,] be so hardy to come before the King's justices, or other of the King's ministers doing their office, with force and arms, nor bring no force in affray of the peace, nor to go nor ride armed by night nor by day, in fairs, markets, nor in the presence of the justices or other ministers, nor in no part elsewhere, upon pain to forfeit their armour to the King, and their bodies to prison at the King's pleasure.

As the Wikipedia article points out, this was originally written in Anglo-French, the language of the court. It was really written as 'ne de chivaucher ne de daler arme.'

Now here's what Bruen said about that.

    To begin, respondents and their amici point to several medieval English regulations from as early as 1285 that they say indicate a longstanding tradition of restricting the public carry of firearms. See 13 Edw. 1, 102. The most prominent is the 1328 Statute of Northampton (or Statute), passed shortly after Edward II was deposed by force of arms and his son, Edward III, took the throne of a kingdom where “tendency to turmoil and rebellion was everywhere apparent throughout the realm.”... At the time, “[b]ands of malefactors, knights as well as those of lesser degree, harried the country, committing assaults and murders,” prompted by a more general “spirit of insubordination” that led to a “decay in English national life.”...

 The Statute of Northampton was, in part, “a product of . . . the acute disorder that still plagued England.”... It provided that, with some exceptions, Englishmen could not “come before the King’s Justices, or other of the King’s Ministers doing their office, with force and arms, nor bring no force in affray of the peace, nor to go nor ride armed by night nor by day, in Fairs, Markets, nor in the presence of the Justices or other Ministers, nor in no part elsewhere, upon pain to forfeit their Armour to the King, and their Bodies to Prison at the King’s pleasure.”...

 Respondents argue that the prohibition on “rid[ing]” or “go[ing] . . . armed” was a sweeping restriction on public carry of self-defense weapons that would ultimately be adopted in Colonial America and justify onerous public-carry regulations. Notwithstanding the ink the parties spill over this provision, the Statute of Northampton—at least as it was understood during the Middle Ages—has little bearing on the Second Amendment adopted in 1791.....

 The Statute’s prohibition on going or riding “armed” obviously did not contemplate handguns, given they did not appear in Europe until about the mid-1500s.... Rather, it appears to have been centrally concerned with the wearing of armor....  

 The Statute’s apparent focus on armor and, perhaps,  weapons like launcegays makes sense given that armor and lances were generally worn or carried only when one intended to engage in lawful combat or—as most early violations of the Statute show—to breach the peace.... Contrast these arms with daggers. In the medieval period, “[a]lmost everyone carried a knife or a dagger in his belt.”... While these knives were used by knights in warfare, “[c]ivilians wore them for self-protection,” among other things. Ibid. Respondents point to no evidence suggesting the Statute applied to the smaller medieval weapons that strike us as most analogous to modern handguns.

I mention all this because North Carolina to this day has a law that exactly mirrors the 1328 statute's language. I saw a guy was charged with it locally just the other day. The caselaw here shows that the state courts consider the issue to the be terror, not the arms, and so much so that they've convicted people for 'going armed to the terror of the public' in the absence of arms. Arms in North Carolina are commonly lawfully carried, and require no permit except in the case of concealed arms (which are normally forbidden entirely, excepting only handguns for those with a permit). 

You see people carrying arms here all the time; I do myself, like the Medievals a knife in my case. That's not illegal. It's explicitly legal. What's not legal is to go armed for the purpose of terrifying the community. That part has exactly the sort of long heritage in law that the Bruen decision sets up as a legitimating condition for proposed legislation. 

Two more ICE Shooting Deaths

You probably heard about the one last week in Houston, but this morning there was another one in Maine that has mostly received local coverage so far. 

It does seem like there are a lot more of these shootings that, say, shootings by other Federal agencies. Some of us raised the issue that training was being abbreviated in order to build the ICE agent numbers rapidly, and that it raised the danger of such things happening. Details are too few in the most recent one yet to know if that was the case, but I think given the frequency and scale it's worth asking the question again. Are they getting adequate training for this task before they're being sent out there, and them with Federal immunity to boot?

Fulton County

Atlanta is suddenly invaded by hundreds of FBI agents.

Viking Invasion

Although I'm not watching any World Cup games, I am enjoying the cultural production that's coming out of it all, whether it's the Tartan Army marching on Fenway Park, travelers' tales across the US, or short AI movies like this.

It did not quite turn out that way, I hear.

Hallelujah Trail

Since I mentioned Charley Crockett very approvingly just a bit ago, I thought I might also highlight this story. Many of you will likely approve of it. 

Self-Proclaimed Devil-Worshiping Duo Twin Temple Say They Were Removed From Charley Crockett Tour Due To ‘Our Satanic Imagery’

There are more interesting reasons to drop an opening act, but not many. Self-proclaimed satanic doo wop duo Twin Temple revealed this week that “The Hallelujah Trail” country singer Charley Crockett booted them from a planned opening slot on his tour next week because of their Satan-hailing image.

“Today we were informed that Charley Crockett has decided to remove Twin Temple from his upcoming shows next week due to our Satanic imagery,” [Twin Temple said]...

“Unfortunately, that means we will not be able to perform for you next week as planned. We are really disappointed as we were looking forward to getting back out and seeing you, and also what it means as far as bringing different types of people and music lovers together,” added the rockabilly/soul group whose songs include “Lucifer, My Love,” “Sex Magick,” “Burn Your Bible,” “Let’s Have a Satanic Orgy” and “The Devil (Didn’t Make Me Do It)” and whose most recent album was 2023’s God Is Dead.

I mean, you could hardly be clearer. Even Billy Joe Shaver said that the Devil made him do it the first time. Charley has confirmed the allegation, rather firmly.

I don't know if Charley means his song title to be reflective of the late 1960s movie, but if you've never seen it, The Hallelujah Trail is a fantastic comedy. I love it a great deal in spite of its ridiculous and insulting but very era-normal treatment of Native Americans. There was a time when I was called Oracle by a well known military unit that I won't name to avoid their embarrassment. (There was no whiskey involved for me: General Order #1. I was just good at telling them what was going to happen in the next week or two.) 

The parts I love best aren't even about that; they're about the struggle between women activists and the US military, which was already evident even at that era. It's beautifully explained and rendered, and not with any hostility to either side.

It's a great movie.

Fear of Arms

The British prime minister was given an engraved Turkish revolver, as were other visiting NATO leaders who were at the recent conference in Ankara. He left it in Turkey to be destroyed rather than bring a gun back to the UK. 

Wretchard points out: 

Gifts of presentation swords and guns (or other firearms) between heads of state have a long history in diplomacy. These items symbolize honor, alliance, martial prowess, cultural heritage, or goodwill between mighty warriors.

In rejecting the present Starmer made a negligable contribution to the reduction of firearms risk in the UK, but he sent a strong and largely negative symbolic message to the world at large and to Russia, China and the Muslim nations in particular. It conveys what Britain has become and the watching world will behave accordingly.

In addition to this, rejecting a symbolic gift from another nation is an insult. It is similar to but much worse than refusing to take the tea or coffee offered by a tribal leader when you come into his tent. Weapon-gifts are especially honorable because they transcend the offer of peace symbolized by the hospitality of tea, and convey that you are respected as one who can be trusted to be armed as well. The nation of Britain is humiliated by this action, whereas a nominal ally who needed to be reassured is insulted. 

Turns out Los Angeles Does a Pretty Good Independence Day Too

I certainly enjoyed seeing Grim's posts around Independence Day, and while I've done a few small town Independence Day events and enjoyed them thoroughly, Los Angeles actually has a pretty good time on the Fourth as well- in fact, it turns out you can see it from space, and it's spectacular:

NASA was kind enough to post this little video on X, which is where I caught it.

We live in the hills, so with the high fire danger we don't launch any fireworks ourselves, but we can go up our back hill and have a nice view out over the city and we watch the neighborhood below put on a show for us all night long.  Started before sunset and didn't end until well after midnight.  The dog's aren't so keen about it, but we enjoyed it.

For once I had something to be proud about living here in L.A. and had to post this.

He is Out, Actually

So I hear. The Party is not letting him choose his replacement. 

A nice moment of actual standards. We had to go a very long way to find the wall, but it’s there. 

It’s The Thing

If it’s got a steel guitar anyway. Funny story about that. Hawaiian thing. No obvious reason why it became so central. 

This one is solid. Boy knows what he’s doing. 

The Blue Ridge

Girl seems to understand the region.

When Veterans Have Kids

Or, at least, when Mat Best & the BRCC crew have kids ...

A Lost Documentary on the Crossing of the Delaware

"What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history? A fable agreed upon."

-- Napoleon Bonaparte (although he was probably quoting Bernard le Bovier de Fontanelle)

Addendum to the Previous

 

America

The beautiful. 

Independence Day, 250th Edition

Dillsboro all out for the veterans' parade.

Some of the local veterans parading.

I was just mentioning the Confederate flag thing and the local pride in heritage; sure enough, a group of them came out to march. Technically, by act of Congress, Confederate soldiers are considered American veterans for certain purposes.

Happy children celebrating in the tremendous heat.

A gingerbread cupcake at the Legion hall.

The Legion gave me a nice challenge coin after the run, too.

It was dangerously hot today, so much so that on the ride back I realized it wasn't safe to continue my ride. Fortunately I was along the beautiful Tuckasegee river, so I climbed down the bank and swam until I was cool enough to resume the ride. I also soaked my shirt so it would help keep me cool for the rest of the ride.

Quite a day. The pork butt came out beautifully thanks to my wife, who took over the smoking so that I could go ride with the Legion. We did a flag replacement ceremony in Robbinsville, the last town before the Dragon. We rode through the Nantahala Gorge to get there, which is a bit out of the way but beautiful. I’d never met these people before, but they put me in the tail gunner position based I guess on the firmness of my handshake. First time I’ve ridden tail for a group ride. I hope I did a good job. 

The article on Robbinsville claims that the mean daily maximum temperature in July is 83. That mean was somewhat exceeded today.

Independence Day

Have a happy one, warriors. 

UPDATE: I got the pork butt on before dawn. It smells just like old hickory out there.

Freedom Barbecue

I'm going to smoke a pork butt for the Independence Day feast. 

I made some Christmas barbecue sauce given the significance of the occasion. This batch was thinned partly with coffee and partly with chicken stock, since I had plenty of chicken stock and not a great deal of coffee. I was also out of molasses, so I added extra dark brown sugar -- which, in commercial sugars, differs from white sugar only by the addition of extra molasses. That's now how it worked historically, but these days they render it all to white sugar and molasses, and then make light or dark brown sugar by putting some molasses back in. Cheaper and easier that way.

I'm also going to smoke some Andouille sausage tomorrow, and a snakeskin hat band I made after Conan's recent run-in. Only a little smoke for the latter, to help preserve and waterproof it. 

Yoda: "No, There Is Another."

At the NY Post today, Eric Metaxas declares the American revolution to have been 'the only one in history that worked.' 

That's wrong, but his examples aren't the wrong part. 

Take the French Revolution, which began just a few years after our own Revolution, and was championed by some of the figures involved in our Revolution — like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. They all seemed to think it would be a happy reprisal of what happened here. It was anything but that, ending in a nightmare bloodbath of terror.

What went wrong? Just like us, the French decided they didn’t like the idea of monarchy. So they beheaded their king and queen. But the radicals didn’t stop there....

Then there are the even worse nightmares of the Bolshevik and Maoist revolutions in Russia and China.

OK, fair as far as it goes. But the American revolution stood on the shoulders of at least two earlier revolutions that had worked: the revolt against King John by the barons who fought him at Runnymede, which produced Magna Carta; and the Scottish Revolution led by William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, which produced a free nation that taught the Pope to accept that men could choose their kings. 

Revolution is a risky business, to be sure. Aristotle spends a good part of the Politics explaining how states grow unstable with an eye towards avoiding revolutionary moments. They often end up being destructive.

Not always, though. The one that just occurred in Syria ended a despotic Baathist regime and at least for now seems to have moved in the direction of a better society -- the al Qaeda-linked leader seems to be moderating pretty fast, making deals with the Kurds and the Israelis alike to try to reach a more stable society. The Vietnamese revolution against the French and then us, which we thought would turn them into another Communist hellhole, actually came off all right: the Vietnamese nation is now one of our better friends in the region. The Irish revolt of 1916 produced a nation that is pretty OK, even if they did send condolences on the occasion of Hitler's death. The recent revolt in Northern Ireland's Belfast is healthy, and might help push the whole UK in a better direction eventually. 

Sometimes it's the only way to fly. The Declaration sets the terms out clearly: "...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it... Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes... But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security."

Emphasis added, though little needed. Not only a right. Sometimes, a duty.

Georgia Gets a Hard Look

The FBI has made a priority investigation out of the 2020 election there. The article treats it as an open question that might go either way; readers of the Hall know that the matter was settled some time ago, and the remaining question is one of responsibility. 

It would be encouraging to see actual consequences for this sort of thing, even for an anarchist. That a political system should be corrupt is no surprise, but watching the powerful gleefully get away with it while the press proclaims that "there is no evidence" of the corruption is -- probably intentionally -- disheartening. For those who believe that government can be a positive good, it is even more important to see consequences for this.