Circle of Bears Update

If you are interested in the Russian shadow fleet transiting the Arctic Circle*, the best source for now seems to be the one I started with, GCaptain. He has (they have?) updates and more information. 

One of the tankers has already suffered real damage in spite of its icebreaker escort. 

The incident resulted in an insurance payout of 53 million rubles, roughly $650,000, according to Russian insurer AlfaStrakhovanie, which did not disclose the name of the vessel....  The insurer said the tanker sustained hull deformation while navigating through ice and stressed that icebreaker assistance does not eliminate the physical risks associated with Arctic navigation.

“Even with icebreaker assistance, navigation in Arctic waters is associated with increased hull stress and the risk of damage,” AlfaStrakhovanie said in a company statement (in Russian).... AlfaStrakhovanie said its specialists investigated the incident, assessed the damage and calculated the insurance compensation before paying the shipowner the full amount.... an icebreaker can open a navigable channel but does not eliminate the stresses imposed on vessels following behind.

Another of the vessels, the sanctioned Suezmax tanker Latur, is attempting the passage without insurance -- or an icebreaker escort.

Russia is also forced to import refined fuel, The Moscow Times reports. They are buying mass amounts of gasoline that have to be ground-shipped from Kazakhstan and Belarus (thus avoiding the strong successes of Ukrainian naval efforts at sea interdiction, all the more impressive given that Ukraine has no navy), as well as an even larger amount being sea-shipped from India. The reason, India Today explains to its confused readership who wonder why the Russians are buying up their gasoline, is that Ukraine has crippled Russia's refineries. 

An additional effect has been that Russia has banned diesel exports to keep its own internal fleets running. Thus, exports are way down and increasingly perilous; imports are way up; and whole sectors of their energy income are closed.

* Lit. "the circle where the bears are," árktos being 'bear' in Greek; note "Ursus arctos," which they translate as "brown bear," is actually the Latin for bear followed by the Greek for bear, thus, "bear bear."

Medieval Studies

This graph compares modern city rates of violence with those of periods of Medieval Europe. The Medieval data is from here. I doubt its quality; the Thirty Years War, for example, should produce a very major spike that isn't evident. There may have been decisions taken to omit military conflicts, or the sources they used might not include that information. Nevertheless, the general picture of higher rates of interpersonal violence is probably broadly accurate. 

One thing I wanted to look at compared with the chart assembled was the rural rate in the US: "US cities avg." only captures cities, which are notably more prone to murders than the countryside. I found some statistics via the National Institute of Health. It's the bottom-most line we are interested in, because the top lines look at either suicide rates or combined murder/suicide rates.

That graph gives the 'most rural' rate as a little below half the 'most urban' rate. It looks like just about exactly half if we take one step back from the 'most rural' to include some slightly less-rual places in the average. If we do the same thing for the urban side, for the 2010s -- which is the era the Medieval map is using -- the figure doesn't change between most-urban and second-most-urban. 

Thus, we can reasonably multiply the 'US cities avg.' (10) rate by 0.5 to get a rough figure for 'US rural avg.' as an estimate of how country murders compare with the Medieval chart. That gives us a rough rate of 5, allegedly very slightly more dangerous than NYC but less than any of the other cities on the chart. 

I have some questions about that too; but the NYPD reports that period as having been the record-holder for fewest murders until this year, when they are claiming a new record low. Since we have to assume that all of these numbers are somewhat dodgy -- there's no way we have perfect statistics for the Medieval period, when no one was really collecting statistics as such -- we'll go with it as a rough estimate. 

Make of it what you will, I suppose.

Exploring America

An infographic showing the major ways mid-century America got to know their country, and some of what they found there.

I've been to many of these places, but I know one of the locations well. The fort pictured as location 65 is not actually on Tybee Island, but on Cockspur Island on Savannah River between Tybee Island and the port of Savannah: it's Fort Pulaski, named after Casimir Pulaski, a Polish nobleman who came to join the Revolution and fought alongside Americans because he believed in their program of liberty. He once saved the life of George Washington and is honored by an equestrian statue in Savannah. 

About twenty-five years ago I worked on a documentary interviewing the CCC veterans who had restored Fort Pulaski during the Depression, as an oral history project while pursuing a degree in that discipline. They were a fun crew of older gentlemen with good stories to tell about the CCC and the War. I mentioned that experience about ten years ago.

Savannah has another fort, Fort James Jackson, named after that hero of the Revolution and early Georgia history. It's also a brickwork fort, an older installation that Pulaski was intended to replace. It was not reduced during the Civil War because the Union Navy was content to bottle up Savannah further up the river, though Sherman's army occupied it when they took the city much later in the war. It's quite lovely and right by the city; it's where the local Scottish Highland Games are held.

A third fort, Fort McAllister, was an earthwork fort that was much more successful at resisting rifled naval artillery than brickwork designs proved to be. It was attacked seven times but not taken or reduced until Sherman captured it with land forces. The Wikipedia page has an interesting anecdote I had not heard:

During the evening that the fort fell, [the fort's defending commander] Anderson was being held at the McAllister family home, the new headquarters of General William Babcock Hazen. General Hazen and Lt. Col. Strong invited General Sherman to dinner, to celebrate their victory. In a kind gesture of respect, General Hazen also invited Major Anderson to attend the meal, after clearing the request with Sherman. The discussion was surely lively - during the meal Anderson engaged in a heated exchange with General Sherman about the tactics employed to defend the fort and the bravery of all who fought there. Cigars were exchanged and smoked, and tributes were made to the fallen. However, Sherman remained greatly upset at Anderson's use of land mines in the defense of the fort, and ordered the Major [General] to personally join his fellow captured Confederates on mine-clearing detail.

My wife painted the ruins of Fort McAllister once when she was pursing a fine arts degree at the Savannah College of Art and Design. I don't know after whom the fort was named; the family was locally important. One of them was mayor of Savannah and his son was a state senator. I would guess it was probably one of them.

The map has many other interesting locations, and is fun to explore.

Tradition! Tradition!

A San Bernardino County train was under fire Monday night after bandits attempted a Wild West-style heist.

A group of suspects fired on officers with the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway (BNSF) in what appeared to be an effort to rob the train as it passed through the desolate Cajon Pass between the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains.

Americans have traditions too. Wild West train robberies are a valued part of our national heritage.  

UPDATE: The only time I've seen Fiddler on the Roof was when my high school did it as its annual musical. I don't know why they picked it; we didn't have any Jewish students in the county as far as I know. I only went to see it because my sister played the mother, which in a way was family tradition too. She became a Thespian because my father had been one, although in fairness to him he only built sets. He didn't have a non-genuine bone in his body, so pretending to be somebody he was not wasn't a skill he ever developed.

Russia's Desperate Maneuver

Russia's desperation for cash meets China's desperation for oil: in a move unprecedented even in Soviet times, Russia is attempting to send a large fleet of oil tankers and supertankers through the Arctic to reach its buyers in Asia.

At the fleet’s current position, only four vessels are operating farther north: the Swedish icebreaker Oden, China’s polar icebreaker Xue Long, Norway’s research icebreaker Kronprins Haakon, and the ice-class expedition vessel Virgo, according to ship-tracking data. 

The routing places Russia’s Arctic oil fleet among the northernmost commercial vessels ever recorded. The route passes north of 81 degrees north, roughly 10 degrees farther north than Utqiagvik, Alaska, which sits at about 71 degrees north latitude.... 

Arctic shipping experts say they cannot recall commercial traffic of this scale using the route, making the operation unprecedented despite isolated Soviet-era voyages several decades ago.

The convoy includes the Suezmax tanker Dinasty, which industry observers say may become the highest-latitude commercial Suezmax tanker ever to operate. Suezmax vessels, among the largest tankers routinely engaged in international crude oil trade, are rarely seen operating in the high Arctic because of their size and the challenging ice environment... 

[T]he voyage remains challenging. Significant sea ice continues to cover parts of the East Siberian Sea. Three Russian nuclear icebreakers are currently deployed to escort commercial shipping along the Northern Sea Route.

Desperate times, desperate measures they say. 

Consciousness

A new theory about consciousness proposes that the brain doesn't create it. I think this is right; such a theory has been a rare but occasional topic of this space for some years. 

My version of it is a form of panpsychism, which holds that all of reality is conscious, but that we get the sense of being unique individuals because our brains work as a receiver and interpreter locally. This is much like how a television or radio doesn't produce the content you experience through it -- it's just tuned to a particular station, and thus is picking up a part of the TV or radio signals that are available in the air (radio still; television not usually anymore); you can account for things like brain injury altering the apparent personality of the brain-owner by analogy to adjusting their receiver so that it now is pulling from a different part of the radio spectrum (say).

The new version is by Christof Koch, who has been doing this work even longer than that; he and David Chalmers, also mentioned in the article, had a longstanding bet (which Chalmers won) on the subject.

To address that question, Koch turns to a philosophical framework known as analytic idealism, which proposes that consciousness may be a fundamental feature of reality rather than something generated by the brain.

Within this framework, the brain is viewed less as a producer of consciousness and more as a filter or shaper of conscious experience.

Sounds like he's on the right track this time!

Since consciousness debates are now tied up with AI, he adds this: 

The ideas also have implications for artificial intelligence. If consciousness is not simply the product of increasingly complex computation, the path toward conscious machines may be more complicated than simply building increasingly powerful AI systems.

That does not mean future AI systems could never become conscious. Rather, he argues that the debate cannot be settled simply by making computers more intelligent or more computationally sophisticated.

Well, take it further: the implication is that anything can become conscious if you tune it the right way. That then is merely a technical question: how do you tune the receiver? Have we done it already, by accident? Could we adjust our reception to improve it? We can certainly alter it, as he acknowledges from personal experience.

Several years ago, while sitting alone on a beach, he recalls the boundary between himself and the world dissolving, describing the experience as a timeless and universal reality.

In his essay, Koch describes the experience as "the most meaningful of my life," writing that it "flipped my view of reality".

Koch is careful not to present the experience as scientific evidence. Instead, he writes that it gave him "a view of Mind-at-Large" and prompted him to re-examine the metaphysical assumptions that had guided much of his scientific career, taking alternative philosophical perspectives more seriously. 

Sitting alone on a beach taking mushrooms, I would guess!

The Wailin' Jennys

The name is a tribute to Waylon Jennings, but the music is their own.

More below the fold

Now That's Real Journalism

I've generally found motorcycle rallies and biker bars to be extremely friendly places, in truth. Still, if you just wandered in and you don't have any background, this is an actually helpful newspaper article that will convey information that will improve your life. 

Partly this is by actually writing down the "unwritten rules." 

Rule No. 1: Hands Off

A motorcycle is not a park bench.

Don't sit on one.

Don't lean against one.

Don't climb aboard for a photograph.

I won't copy the whole list, but here's another bit of real wisdom:

Rule No. 4: Leave The Old Lady Alone

A surefire way to get your ass kicked at Sturgis is by "messing with someone's old lady,” Pretty Bobbie continued.

The term itself might sound less than flattering to an outsider.

In biker culture, Pretty Bobbie said calling a woman “old lady” is "the utmost term of respect."

Come to think of it, versions of both of those are in the Ten Commandments. They had asses instead of motorcycles, but it made the list. 

Some Brighter Anecdotes about Japan and Security

So, to use that awful academic word, I have problematized the US-Japan relationship in my last two anecdote posts. Mainly, I wanted to give a brief overview of how the Japanese l talked with seemed to see the defensive alliance with the US as well as their own domestic concerns about their developing role in international security. Here, I want to relate some experiences that I think point toward a strong US-Japan relationship for the future.

First, whatever else the Japanese remember about their war with us, they have a powerful memory of the US feeding them and helping them rebuild their nation after they surrendered. The Japanese people were quite literally starving by the beginning of August 1945. I have had elderly Japanese people, complete strangers, come up to me in the street, ask me if I was American, and then thank me for feeding them after the war. I was clearly a couple of generations younger than them, so there was no possibility they thought I had actually been there in 1945. They remember their debts, even debts to a former enemy.

Their nation has prospered under the US security umbrella and while they may complain about one aspect or another of the relationship, they are grateful for that, too. It's been good for both nations and they know it.

It may seem much less important, but the Japanese in their teens and twenties and thirties (more than a decade ago now) seemed overall to have a positive image of the US. American music and movies are perennially popular there. Sure, they have criticisms of us (as we have of them), but it doesn't seem to blunt their enjoyment of American culture. If anything, I was typically a bit of a disappointment to them because I was mainly interested in doing traditional Japanese things. I would have been much more popular if I'd played tennis or golf.

Another positive development in Japan seems to be, if my sources are correct, that Marxism appears to be on the wane there, even while it is blossoming in the US. I can't walk across a US campus without tripping on a Marxist and the SDA is booming, but the fall of the Soviet Union seems to have begun a slow retreat from Marxism in the Japanese academy and society more broadly. The Japanese Communist Party is also slowly slipping, with numbers decreasing steadily since about 2014. These are good signs.

I hesitate to offer specific suggestions for improving the relationship in the ways we might want because I have been out of the field for so long and really don't know the current situation. That said, I will say that broadly speaking there is a strong foundation on the Japanese side for our two nations to cooperate to an even greater degree than we have been. At this point, I would simply make the maybe banal suggestions that, one, some sensitivity to how we approach changes in matters of security, being mindful of the domestic issues surrounding Article 9, would be wise. And, two, it's good to keep in mind that honor remains important to them. Yes, they like money and the things it buys, but there is still a little bit of samurai ethos in them, even the pacifists.

###

Postscript: Another good sign is the LDP is usually in power and one of its goals is amending Article 9. It takes a 2/3 majority in both the lower and upper houses of parliament to accomplish that, so the problem for a long time now has been the LDP hasn't ever gotten those numbers. Right now, they have 2/3s in the lower house, but, even with their coalition partner, are about 40 or so short in the upper house. For some reason I just assume everyone knows this; the LDP have been in the majority since 1955 with two brief lapses: 1993-96 and 2009-12. So, they're almost always in power.

Darker Anecdotes on Japan and Defense

In my previous post, I gave what I take to be some common Japanese views of their own Self Defense Forces. In this post I want to give some much less frequent, darker experiences I had that bear on the topic.

I mentioned that most Japanese seem to connect the terms army and navy with the 1930s & '40s militarism and are offended if you describe the current JSDF with those terms. I try (usually successfully) not to judge other people's linguistic associations, but it seemed a bit silly all these decades after the end of the war. However, on a couple of occasions I ran into Japanese ultranationalists who gave me pause.

In one case, I was touring a very small military museum that I ran across. It had a number of small displays about the Japanese Imperial Navy of the 1940s with photographs of young men in naval uniforms. I talked to the gentleman at the front desk about some of the exhibits and in answering he explained, as best as I can remember, that they highlighted the courage and sacrifice of the officers and sailors in particular engagements. He went on to tell me that, as an American, I should know that Japan's leadership did not order any atrocities during WWII, although there were small rogue units that unfortunately did commit war crimes. Also, he claimed, many of the stories about Japanese atrocities in China were just Chinese communist propaganda. He said he didn't hate Americans and was glad our nations were friends now, but we should learn the real history of the war. Although I think he's completely wrong, I was very interested in hearing his version of things and just asked questions and tried to look thoughtful. He did not strike me as the kind of man I could discuss this with openly, so I didn't try, although looking back maybe I should have. It's hard to say all these years later.

While I was in Japan, the government approved a number of new history textbooks that either didn't cover or downplayed Japanese war crimes during WWII. Schools (or prefectures? I'm not sure) can choose from a list of approved textbooks, so it just gave them these options, in addition to other textbooks that did cover the war crimes.

It is hard to know what to think of that. Japan's war crimes in WWII are in a way similar to the slavery issue here. One of the functions of national history is to have a shared story that forms a sense of being one people. How should we treat such evils as slavery and national war crimes while still maintaining a sense of national worth and national honor? How to remember the war is something that has remained very contentious there. Those who want a reduced emphasis on Japan's war crimes claim that too much time is spent on it and that such self-flagellation (as they see it) is unhealthy for a people.

On the other hand, many Japanese fear that, if schools don't teach about the evils of Japan's 1930s and '40s militarism, more and more Japanese will come to believe that Japan did nothing wrong in WWII. They fear that this would lead to a new rise of ultranationalism and a new militarism.

To be fair to them, there is a strain of Japanese history that points out that the US Navy forced Japan to open in 1853 and that European colonization of China and other parts of Asia forced Japan to industrialize and arm itself. So far, that's true. Where the narrative line gets pretty questionable is the further claim that European and American threats and aggression forced Japan to invade its neighbors and continually expand its empire in order to be strong enough to defend itself. It then becomes natural in this line of thought that Pearl Harbor was America's fault; our oil embargo prevented Japan from defending itself. Those that peddle this line bitterly resent the United States.

So, the supporting narrative is there for a new anti-American ultranationalism wherein Japan was the victim of WWII. There are also a number of ultranationalist groups in Japan that want to get rid of the constitution altogether and return to the Meiji constitution that gave significant political power to the Army and Navy. They oppose democracy and capitalism and the civil rights the Japanese enjoy under their current constitution. I have no real idea how big these groups are. They drive around in these big black buses painted with nationalist emblems, blaring out nationalist songs from what I think are the 1930s. They occasionally go out and parade around in Imperial Army uniforms, or outfits that look similar, and wave the old flags around. They always struck me as being a bit like the KKK here in that they wanted to demonstrate they're still around but they didn't have many adherents or much power. They seemed quite marginalized to me. Thankfully, they don't seem to be stabbing foreigners or pro-democracy political leaders or pro-capitalism business leaders to death on a regular basis as their predecessors in the 1920s did.

In this environment, for many Japanese, talk of amending the constitution, particularly Article 9, brings fears of a new rise of ultranationalism and militarism with a great loss of democracy and civil rights. Obviously, the ultranationalists are all in favor of ditching Article 9 and rearming, so anyone talking about ditching Article 9 and rearming seems a bit suspect. 

My opinion is the ultranationalists have few people and little power, so the chance of a resurgence of ultranationalist militarism is quite remote, but I can't say it's non-existent. And in any case, what I think doesn't matter. It's what the Japanese think that matters.

Anecdotes on Japanese Defense Issues

CDR Salamander objects to a lack of plain speaking on the part of a fellow expert:

A very strange and rather short article came out yesterday from Richard Fontaine, the CEO at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

I shouldn’t have to say this, but I will: this isn’t personal, this is professional.

I had to double-check the publication date as it just read, well, strange. But no, August 4th, 2026. Its title, Japan isn’t rearming. It’s adapting to a new era. It is something if it were written by someone else, I might ignore…but Richard isn’t just some rando anon pounding away on Substack…so here we go.

I don't know why Richard Fontaine said Japan isn't rearming, but I do know that anything that sounds like militarizing is problematic within Japan. Legally, that problem begins with Article 9 of the Japanese constitution:

Article 9. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

Even so, Japan has maintained the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) since 1954. The Ground SDF has tanks and attack helicopters, the Maritime SDF has destroyers and F-35s, and the Air SDF has various fighter jets as well. It all looks like "land, sea, and air forces." They have been challenged in court by groups trying to get the JSDF disbanded entirely, but the Japanese Supreme Court has so far refused to take up the question. The government claim is that in only having forces for the defense of the Japanese homeland, they are not maintaining forces for using force as a means of settling international disputes or recognizing a right of belligerency. The counter-argument is to take Article 9 literally and point out just what I pointed out: The JSDF would certainly seem to be what everyone else in the world recognizes as "land, sea, and air forces."

It's important to keep in mind that, as it stands, Japan is one Supreme Court ruling away from possibly having to disband the SDF or having a constitutional crisis when parliament refuses to obey such a ruling. I think it is extremely unlikely that the Supreme Court would ever take up such a case, but it is at least hypothetically possible.

The Liberal Democratic Party, which is the main conservative party in Japan, would like to amend the constitution to at least allow the JSDF and maybe to get rid of that article altogether, but so far it has not had the numbers or public support to do so.

I would like to add my own personal experience in Japan to help understand the situation further. This comes from my own studies and from living, studying, and working in Japan for the larger part of a decade. I do speak and read Japanese and spent most of my time there with Japanese people, not hanging out with other ex-pats as is common. The following are just my impressions from a lot of conversations with Japanese people over the years.

First, the great majority of Japanese people strongly reject the militarism of the 1930s and '40s. Some are true pacificists who want to see the JSDF disbanded. I've asked them, "What if China invaded Japan? What should Japan do?" and they replied, "We should do nothing. War is always wrong." 

Others saw the contradiction between maintaining the JSDF and Article 9, but accept the situation for pragmatic purposes. Of those, some were pragmatic in saying there are real threats Japan must be prepared for and others were pragmatic in saying that the US insisted Japan have SDF and since the US is Japan's protector they must have the JSDF. Although I talked to Japanese people who seemed amenable to amending the constitution to resolve the contradiction, I don't remember talking to any who would outright endorse getting rid of Article 9.

One way this plays out in conversation is that saying Japan currently had an army (rikugun*) or navy (kaigun) was a real faux pas. The pragmatists were fine with "self-defense forces," but the words rikugun and kaigun are strongly connected in the Japanese mind with the 1930s and '40s militarism. Even if the constitution is amended, I would expect the SDF designation to continue rather than a return to rikugun and kaigun.

Socially, while Americans may comment on the military-civilian divide in America, it is even greater in Japan. Far fewer Japanese are willing to serve in the SDF, for one thing. Another factor, though, is Japan's culture of employment that emphasizes loyalty to the employer. Until the recession of the '90s, being employed by the same company for one's entire working career was common. Financial problems since then have weakened that tradition in corporate work, but not in government work. Once someone joins the SDF, they are very likely to stay for life. This means there are far fewer veterans in the civilian working population than the US has. Even the pragmatists who supported the existence of the SDF were often uneasy about meeting SDF personnel. I remember one woman's reaction when I told her that I had met some SDF guys: She physically recoiled and exclaimed "They're scary!"

Considering all this, if we want to encourage Japan to amend or delete Article 9 and take up a nation's normal military forces (as our allies, obviously), my opinion is that the last thing we would want to do is speak plainly about it. Educated Japanese tend to pay attention to foreign reporting on Japanese affairs; they care about how Japan is seen in the world. If we start saying we want Japan to have a normal army and navy, that will get translated as rikugun and kaigun and all that emotional baggage from WWII will come with that. If the Japanese people swung decisively toward getting rid of the JSDF, a future Supreme Court might oblige them.

I doubt this answers CDR Salamander's question of why Mr. Fontaine rejected the term "rearming," but I think it's relevant to the overall situation. On the other hand, a lot of this is just my experience, not the result of academic research. Make of it what you will.

###

* I put guntai (軍隊) here earlier, but the actual term is rikugun (陸軍), though the related guntai would also be problematic.

Gerrymander

There's a whole article on the bad situation that my Congressional district is in right now. 

The issue is simple: the NC Republicans gerrymandered this district so badly that any loser could win it as long as he was a Republican. Unsurprisingly, you get losers in that situation.

Adam Smith, the Green Beret who tried to replace Edwards and who ran an air force out of the Asheville Harley dealer during the hurricane, that guy was the guy you should have been running all along. You Republicans get another bite at the apple. Stop whining and accept the good fortune you've been granted.

Delta Dawn

There's a really strong Gospel tradition in country music; Johnny Cash diverted a good part of his career to it, the part no one remembers because no one really likes listening to Gospel. Nevertheless, it provides very powerful underlying motifs to the genre. 

For example, here's Tanya Tucker doing what became a classic:

And here is the Waylanders covering it. They're a fantastic two-person band, the man providing strings and harmonica, and the lady providing drums. I saw them at the Tennessee motorcycle and music festival, and they were by far the best act.

A Brief Lesson in Cherokee

The local tribe nation has a Facebook page associated with cultural education, which is interesting to follow. Learning these words won't help you, I imagine; almost nobody speaks Cherokee even here. However, it does provide an interesting opportunity to learn something about their writing system. Cherokee has a syllabary rather than an alphabet. It was developed by Sequoyah in the very early 19th century. You'll see it on road signs around here, especially near the Cherokee boundary lands. 

At first it looks very strange because there are around half of the expected number of characters to represent a word. This is because each character represents both consonant and vowel sounds. Thus, "August" is reduced from six characters to three; "Blackberry" from ten to three. This happens even though the word for "August" has more syllables than the word "August" itself: it's just one character for each syllable. 

A Small Matter

The mayor of Robbinsville, the town closest to the Tail of the Dragon motorcycle road, has been arrested for dealing meth and cocaine. He has a series of minor traffic violations in his past, suggesting that he and the sheriff didn’t get along very much. 

Updated

My Congressman, Chuck Edwards, I mean. You may recall that I switched parties to vote against him in the primaries this year, sadly to no effect. Today he's being recommended for censure by the House ethics committee. Apparently he is thought guilty of sexually harassing his female staffers, but in a remarkably pathetic and ineffective manner according to the panel:

The committee said it found no evidence that Edwards engaged in sexual activity with or explicitly propositioned any of his staffers. However, he was aware “that his excessive attention toward the young women had led to rumors and innuendo in the office,” the report said.

The committee found that while Edwards believed that none of his conduct was intended as a sexual or romantic advance, his behavior patterns “would lead a reasonable observer to interpret it as such.”

According to the report, Edwards provided the two staffers “with lavish and recurrent gifts,” made “comments regarding their appearance and dress,” invited them “to intimate dinners and vacations” and sent notes “regarding his effusive affection.”...

On one occasion, he and a staffer appeared to take a private trip to Las Vegas together, the report said. Edwards booked rooms at the Bellagio for him and the staffer, and also promised to get them tickets to shows in the city.

At one point, after the staffer asked Edwards for ideas on what outfits to pack for the trip, Edwards texted: “A pair of jean shorts and a yellow blouse that you wore to a concert is baked into my memory, and a red dress you wore to a neighboring office event was a SHOW STOPPER!”

Later in the conversation, before the flight, Edwards sent the staffer flowers, which she noted made her “uncomfortable.”

“Just want to make sure this trip isn’t meant to be anything it’s not?” she texted.

“I’m sorry it made you uncomfortable. Nothing was meant by it,” Edwards replied.

On another occasion, Edwards offered to miss a House vote to help one of the staffers set up her Christmas tree, the report said. In another, he offered to reschedule a tele-townhall to meet the staffer for dinner.

Other messages included in the report show that Edwards regularly invited the staffers out for dinner and drinks, as well as outings to casinos, theater, comedy and musical shows.

One doubts he was more effective as a lothario than he has been as a Congressman. He was absent and useless during Helene. 

UPDATE: He’s out. 

Although he was completely ineffective, both at Congressmanning and at seduction, I realize that I misjudged the man. He apparently at least has the decency to feel shame and to withdraw himself from consideration now that his shame is public. That makes him an order of magnitude better than many of our politicians. I apologize for underestimating his virtues, such as they are; but they're still more than I thought he had.

What About Confession?

Captain Red negotiates a little cannibalism.

Almost any comments on any blog or website that are built around the President are likely to be without value. To borrow a random selection from one of your websites "some 'Catholics' voted for Trump, a perpetual liar and known thief...."

What about Confession? What do you think Confession's for? 

Respecting Religion

Here is an account of why you shouldn’t respect religious prohibitions that aren’t your own. 

One of the senior officers in the auditorium spoke up quickly, and started to say we should not drink, eat, or smoke in front of Iraqis during Ramadan, to respect their culture. This CIA dude immediately locks eyes with this officer and asks very loudly “WHY?!” 

The officer was a little caught off guard, and before he could answer the CIA guy started explaining. “You are American, you are Christian, you DO NOT celebrate Ramadan, and if you don’t carry on as an American during Ramadan it will be seen as weakness. It reinforces their idea that their god is the only true god, and that all others will bow before Islam. If they don’t offer you a drink when you come to their home, ask for one, during Ramadan!

There's something to be said for this refusal to be bound by religious conditions other than your own. Back in 2007 I drank beer at a bar cart on the streets of Zamboanga during Ramadan. The Zamboanga peninsula is a region where Islam and Catholicism are in conflict. Terrorist groups like Abu Sayyaf -- a subset of the Islamic State, these days -- were kidnapping Christians for ransom and murder. Showing that your own civilization's rules are the ones that apply to you can be important. 

On the other hand, showing respect is also important for any sort of human relationships, and it can be particularly profound in establishing ties across large divides like religious differences. It could be received as submission to their god's norms and rules, or it could be received as a first offer in what could become mutual respect if it is returned. Developing terms of mutual respect on which you can live together peacefully is highly desirable in most cases. 

In Egypt, I declined to tour some of the beautiful mosques because they required that I remove my shoes in order to go inside their holy building. This is a middle ground: I respect the rule enough to not violate it in their own mosque, but not enough to obey and submit to the rule, enough to just not go inside where the rule becomes an issue. That seemed fair to me. 

Not being offered a drink in someone's home in Iraq, by the way, was usually a danger signal. I gather the new movie The Odyssey makes a big deal about the sacred nature of hospitality. That is a real thing, and a live issue in the Middle East to this day. If you were not offered a drink because it was Ramadan and you asked for one and were refused it, that would be even more reason to think that you'd better be on your guard in that part of the country.

Talks with Mama

As is common among good Southerners, I call my mother "Mama." Here I am listening to my mother tell a story about my cousins visiting her. 

“It gets really hot in there where the boys sleep, but they closed the windows and curtains anyway. I think they were scared. They’re 14 and 12.” 

“They’re from Knoxville, Tennessee. Maybe they are scared of the wildlife out there between the Tetons and the Big Hole Mountains.” 

“Yes, probably. I told them about the bear who climbed the fence and pooped in the yard just outside their room.”

  

“Maybe you shouldn’t have told them that, mama.”  

“Yeah, because then they went and told the 4-year-old…”

Space Cowboy

You’ve likely seen this photo of an Idaho citizen engaging a mass shooter at a drive through burger joint. The profile of the firearm suggests that it is not your everyday carry pistol. I won’t be surprised to learn that he got shots on target. 

Reports are that he then helped a woman who was shot in the chest, and that she was alive when the paramedics took her. Good luck to them both. 

UPDATE: Preparation pays off, it seems. 

The End of July

All is green and mighty atop the world in high summer. 

Overlooking Courthouse Valley.

Blackberries are ripe up here. I leave most of them for the black bears, but I took one for myself.

The Standing Rock.

A Slight Irregularity

In the ongoing trainwreck that is the Maine Senate race, the new candidate has a slight irregularity in his family tree.

I never want to hear another joke about Alabama. Well, not on this topic anyway. There are lots of good jokes about Alabama. 

The Wide Way

From Zen Lessons: The Art of Leadership, trans. Thomas Cleary (Boston & London: Shambala Books, 1993), 52-3: Lesson 42.

Huanglong said to the great statesman Wang Anshi:*

Whatever you set your mind to do, you always should make the road before you wide open, so that all people may traverse it. This is the concern of a great man.

If the way is narrow and perilous, so that others cannot go on it, then you yourself will not have any place to set foot either.

* Also considered one of China's great poets, Wang Anshi was a Chan practitioner and an active statesman. At the peak of his career he was highly placed and tried to institute sweeping reforms in government. He met with great resistance from entrenched interests, and was eventually ousted.
-Translator.

The book is called Zen Lessons because Americans would know the word "Zen." Here and throughout, the lessons are actually Chan Buddhist rather than Zen Buddhist, Chan being the Chinese school from which the Japanese derived their own unique method which became famous in the West.   

Confer Mt. 7:13-14. It's worth reading with the immediately prior post, as well; the wide road is the humane standard, perhaps the only one the human being can aspire to traverse. Nevertheless, the alternative does come well recommended. 

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.