9/11 and the Bab el-Mandeb

Overnight, Houthi militias crossed to the center of the Bab el-Mandeb strait and took an island in the middle of it. This is a cyberpunk story of a band of misfits using widely available frontier technology to take on giants, at least initially with success. The Houthis made such a rapid and aggressive advance into territory held by their enemies because their command elected to encourage them with an AI-generated fake of their enemy commander ordering his forces to retreat. It turns out that, though the order was fake, the resistance that Saleh's forces were capable of was not so great that it couldn't be overcome with a push. However, it helped that the Houthis could use Claude for targeting their missiles -- a usage that Anthropic generally won't license to the Pentagon. 

They won't be able to keep that island, of course, should we decide to take it back. It is what is called in military science "a Forlorn Hope." With these Islamist movements the promised reward can be delegated to Allah, who will allegedly reward anyone who dies in the operation with paradise; the Houthis are Fiver Shi'ite Muslims, aligned with the Twelver Shi'ites who run the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and what is left of Iran. Iran claims it does not control the Houthis, but the Houthis are functionally a proxy with IRGC advisors.

Opposing them are rag-tag Yemeni government forces who have Saudi and American advisors. Not for the first time!

But hanging over the US effort are the memories of years of controversial targeting support American forces provided to Riyadh during the Obama and first Trump administrations that critics said contributed to a high number of civilian casualties.

Naturally, since the Houthis are very difficult to distinguish from civilians themselves and they take shelter among civilian populations. That has been a universal constraint in all of these wars we have fought since 9/11 happened 25 years ago today. 

Five years ago, I posted my 9/11 poem for the last time. I was wrong to say the story had ended; some stories never do, like roads that go ever, ever on. The old al Qaeda is dead, but sandal-wearing guerrillas are still showing off captured American equipment, what very well may be an AI clone of bin Laden's descendant gave a speech celebrating it -- the US reported him dead in 2019 -- and there is little doubt that the United States will not find it tolerable to have Bab el-Mandeb closed, no more than we could tolerate having our skyscrapers knocked down with hijacked jetliners. 

Unprincipled

I guess everyone understands by now. 

The Invincible Prior Assumption

The judge admonished Long for carrying the gun and told him he has to think before he acts.

"Fortunately, you weren't injured, but nonetheless, you had a gun there in the first place which was poor judgment," he said. "And what do you need a gun for protection in a mall, in the first place?

What indeed could possibly go wrong at a mall that might require a gun for protection? For an instructive example, let's look at the actual facts of the precise case that was in front of this particular judge at the time he said this.

A shooting at a Michigan mall in July ended when a 19-year-old drew his own pistol and shot a man who had already taken one life and was firing wildly.

The 19-year-old was sentenced to two years probation after this act of civic service at risk of his own life, following the admonishment by the judge for his foolishness in carrying a gun. 

Happy Birthday, Jimmie Rodgers!

He was born 9/8/1897, so I'm a day late with this. Here's a few of his less well known songs.

Do it Once Right

The I-40 saga turns expensive, but they might be avoiding what the British like to call 'a false economy.'

"Getting rid of the driver was a little bit of a false economy..."

Taking the trouble to get it right this time might prevent another disaster like the one provoked by Helene's fury.

In some places along the 5-mile-long worksite, the bedrock is exposed. In others, it’s more than 50 feet below the surface.... Reaching the deeper bedrock requires longer steel piles, which has increased the estimated cost and timeline to complete these repairs....

As planned, the reconstruction is extremely robust. The combination of roller-compacted concrete walls, interlocking pipe pile walls and associated elements are designed to withstand forces that were exerted by the Pigeon River during Hurricane Helene. It is intended to make the interstate more resilient to the hydraulic forces associated with future extreme events.... Experts from every discipline of engineering have been involved, working collaboratively instead of one after another like most projects. Each discipline overlaps with others — leadership, hydraulics, geotechnical, geomorphological, environmental, structural — creating an incredible team of engineers. 

Now, my faith in government to get it right is not very great; but at least they're talking about trying to get it right. We'll see. So far it's nearly two years on and you still can't reliably get through the pass, and even when you can there are paralyzing delays during any hour involving significant traffic.

Bounty Hunters and the Migrant

I guess we'll find out if bounty hunters are better at this than inadequately-trained ICE agents. 

In fairness, I'm pretty sure that cops usually kill a lot more citizens than bounty hunters do. In fact, while the police statistic runs to well over a thousand a year, I don't see any statistics suggesting that bounty hunters are likely to kill anyone at all. This makes sense. Bounty hunters aren't immune from prosecution. You can sue them for damages, too. 

This may actually work out even though it is a characteristically reckless move by DHS. If so it is a point in favor of voluntaryism -- even this may be better done by private citizens than by government agencies. 

Looking at Germany

The infamous European cordon sanitaire may collapse first in Germany rather than France. 

Voters were asked by pollsters on Sunday if they considered the AfD a danger to democracy, as Germany’s mainstream parties do. About half saw the AfD as a threat, according to exit polling released by a public television network. They voted almost exclusively for its rivals, from the far left to the center right.

The other half of voters said there was no threat.

Nearly all backed the AfD.

It was a vivid illustration of the growing divide between Germany’s mainstream parties, which govern from the center-right and the center-left, and populist voters who have grown convinced that politics as usual can no longer solve their urgent problems.... 

To the AfD’s supporters, particularly in the country’s economically struggling eastern states, the AfD has become a last, best shot for making their voices heard — a feeling only reinforced by governing parties’ refusal to work with it.

The AfD is weird: a predominantly east German party that has both pro-Russian and anti-Russian factions, depending I assume on how well one's ancestors got along with the East German republic; allegedly Nazis but led by a lesbian engaged in an interracial relationship with a foreigner. Germany's ruling coalition isn't sure how to respond. 

If they continue to have a Frankenstein coalition of communists-to-socialists-to-Christian-nationalists just to keep the plurality winner out of power, that's quite unstable and likely to be ineffective at governance. The fact that the ruling coalitions can't govern is an argument in favor of an alternative, which is what the "A" in "AfD" means.

If they break the cordon sanitaire and allow a populist 'far right' party to wield actual power -- is a vote total of 44% really compatible with the idea that this is 'far' right? -- it's a new game in Europe.

A Thoroughgoing form of Empiricism about Arithmetic

If that description doesn't light up your heart, you may not be the right reader for this new book.

Some of the logical empiricists defended the claim that the basic mathematical axioms are definitions and that the theorems of mathematics are consequently analytic. This position has subsequently fallen out of favor. Critics have alleged that the position was refuted by Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, that it is obscure what “analytic” and “definition” are supposed to mean, that there are no “analytic” truths, or that the axioms cannot be definitions. True by Definition revisits this debate. It introduces the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths and explains the controversy around the distinction in the philosophy of mathematics and beyond. The book also defends a radical new position. It is argued that, in certain contexts, the axioms of arithmetic have the status of definitions; however...

I don't want to spoil the suspense. I am of course immediately suspicious of the impulse to introduce the synthetic/analytic distinction. 

The author is a guy I know; he and his wife are both quality philosophers. Some of you might be into a work of philosophy of math.

Colby Acuff

I was a little surprised to learn that this young man apparently has no relation to Roy Acuff, the very famous Grand Ole Opry performer ("For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God"). Young Colby is not bad, and not traveling on a family name. About halfway into one of his standards, he transitions into a Hoyt Axton song that Elvis and Waylon Jennings covered as well. 

Nice to see a young man keeping up traditions. 

Search for the Real Killers

Since this just came up recently, the claim caught my eye. I don't know what AI was used in that claim that is going around on social media, but I ran it through Claude as follows: "Help me check this statistic that is going around: Women since the 191h Amendment have aborted 5-10 times as many babies as all the men have killed in all the wars and murders over the same time. Leaving aside all the ways in which the comparison is problematic,* does the statistic hold water as a bare factual claim?"

Claude has a more nuanced response than this one: 

Short answer: no. Not because it's too aggressive, but because it isn't a number that falls out of any consistent scoping. Depending on how you define the denominator, the true ratio is either three to six times *larger* than claimed, or less than 1.

**The numerator.** Cumulative U.S. abortions since Roe are reasonably well documented: roughly 66.1 million from 1973 through 2025, built from CDC surveillance and Guttmacher provider censuses. The widely circulated 63,459,781 figure comes from National Right to Life tracking the same two sources, current to about 2021. The 1920–1972 portion is the weak leg: the standard 1955 estimate of 200,000–1,200,000 illegal abortions per year rested on qualitative assumptions, and a range that wide over five decades means the pre-Roe addition could be anywhere from ~5 million to ~40 million. Call the full-period total 66–100 million with genuine uncertainty in the upper half.

**The denominator, U.S.-scoped.** Since the 19th Amendment is a U.S. fact, the natural like-for-like comparison is U.S. war deaths plus U.S. homicides:

| | Deaths |

|---|---|

| WWII | 405,399 |

| Korea | 36,574 |

| Vietnam | 58,220 |

| Gulf War | 382 |

| Iraq + Afghanistan + GWOT | ~7,100 |

| **All U.S. war deaths since 1920** | **~508,000** |

| U.S. homicides, 1920–2025 (est.) | ~1.5 million |

| **Total** | **~2.0 million** |

The homicide figure is mine, built from decade-average rates against decade-average population — roughly 9 per 100,000 in the Prohibition years, near 4.5–5.0 in the 1950s, a peak of 10.2 in 1980 and 9.8 in 1991, and 5–7 since. It's good to maybe ±15%, which doesn't matter at this scale.

That gives a ratio of about **32 to 1**, not 5–10 to 1. On its own terms the claim substantially understates itself.

**The other scoping.** If "all the wars" means all wars everywhere, the denominator explodes. WWII alone killed an estimated 70–85 million, and one aggregate estimate puts 20th-century war deaths near 110 million, with others running to 130–142 million including civilians. Add global homicides (~440,000/year currently, so tens of millions cumulative) and you're at roughly 120–160 million. Against 66 million U.S. abortions, abortions are the *smaller* number — ratio about 0.5. The claim fails in the opposite direction.

Global-versus-global lands back in the same neighborhood as the U.S. comparison: global induced abortions currently run about 73 million a year, so the cumulative figure is in the billions and the ratio is again in the tens.

**Verdict.** The "5–10x" is the one answer no consistent pairing produces. It reads like a hedge — someone with a sense that the number was very large, picking a multiplier that sounded defensible. If you want to use the underlying comparison, the U.S.-vs-U.S. version is the only internally coherent one, and the honest figure is roughly 30-to-1, with a caveat that the pre-1973 leg is an estimate resting on 1950s guesswork rather than data.

One measurement note that isn't just framing: homicide totals count victims, not male perpetrators. Since men commit roughly 88% of U.S. homicides, correcting for that shrinks the denominator slightly rather than growing it — it doesn't rescue the ratio.

Emphasis added. O.J. had nothing on this.

* There are many of these ways in which the comparison is problematic. In addition, the comparison leaves out justification entirely: some homicides are clearly justified and even proper, and some wars can be, and some abortions are on most ethical schema if they are necessary to save the life of the mother in a case where both the mother and child will otherwise die. (The exception is the Catholic standard of 'never actively choose and perform an evil action,' where the killing of an innocent is always evil; the Church argues that it is morally better not to take on performing the evil action even though it results in letting both die instead of saving the one who can be saved. I dissent from that teaching.) 

Still, here as elsewhere sorting out the problematic issues with the comparison doesn't save abortion's bacon. Even in an unjust war, the enemy one might have killed was probably trying to kill you; even in gang violence, the other gang likely was. The abortions not only happen on a vaster scale, they always target the morally innocent. 

A Return Home

From Mount Pisgah, NC.

Homemade ice cream at the Harley shop’s Labor Day weekend party. 

UPDATE:

I love American biker culture. I just got caught in a huge rainstorm. I found some shelter and soon enough was joined by another group of bikers. They were busily making fun of their group leader for steering them into the storm, and he was making fun back, and one of them handed me an airplane-sized bottle of Kentucky bourbon whiskey without asking or introduction.

Had to stand there for an hour waiting for the storm to pass anyway, so there was no reason not to warm the blood a bit until the rain went over. 

UPDATE:

I saw a healthy adult black bear running across the road in front of me on my ride today. It looked like a male, though I only saw it for a moment. It always makes me feel happy to see a bear in the wild, being free. 

Matria Potestas

In ancient Rome, the father who headed a household had extreme power over it -- a genuine patriarchy led by a patriarch, or in Latin, paterfamilias. In his legal powers he was patria potestas, which included the right to kill his sons (or sell them into slavery) even into adulthood. Willingness to kill a son who refused military orders was seen as a proof of the honor of the father and the family, as it placed the needs of the society over the needs of the family or the individual. Such sacrifices for the common good were taken as an exercise in virtue. 

Two years ago, a writer in the New Oxford Review proposed that modern women are insisting on a similar power over their children, mater potestas. 

Roe created an adversarial model of the mother-child relationship, one that the elite or mainstream culture imbibed and prizes, perhaps without even consciously examining its implications.

Its implications, however, are profound: Maternity has been turned into the matria potestas, a 21st century American version of legal rights over offspring, not just to give them a name but even an acknowledged existence. Berg and Wiseman claim that one-third of women in the prime years of becoming mothers insist they must have a matria potestas, the power of life or death, over their offspring. Let’s also be honest about the slavery part: a mother can sell her offspring (though prices might be regulated) to another person through surrogacy, a trafficking-in-persons most recently legalized in Michigan.

What I think is missing there is the scale, which is captured in the X post linked under the screenshot of the post. The scale of the killing is very hard for people to grasp: if unborn Americans count as Americans, then abortion is the leading cause of death of Americans. It's not close: even omitting at-home 'Plan B' style abortions for lack of information, it's on the order of a quarter million a year more than the next leading cause.

I don't think we can easily grapple, either, with the point about the moral harm to the fabric of our society of having blood-guilt spread that widely. Societies have had large-scale populations of killers before; in The Tigers of Baluchistan, an anthropological survey of that ancient people, Sylvia A. Matheson pointed out that no Balochi man could hope to marry until he had killed another man. Like the Romans, the equally-ancient Balochi believed that this demonstration of a willingness and ability to kill was a proof of personal virtue. 

What does it mean to have so many of our women bearing this guilt? And not openly as the Balochi or the Romans would: they bear it without admitting it, so many of them preaching loudly about empathy while neither conceiving nor granting empathy to all the innocent dead children? What do we get from so many women preaching so often about the violence of men, and convinced of how much better society would be with more women in power? If 25% of men were killers, let alone killers of children, it would be a very different world. 

Road Dog

A new truck-driving song, which is a genre we occasionally like to host around here. 

Coming Right At Us

South Park anticipated, as they occasionally do, this line of retreat being posed by a Georgia police department that shot a baby donkey in its own field. 

A Cedartown police officer has been placed on administrative leave while the department investigates the shooting death of a baby donkey.

Hannah Israel, whose family owns Elsberry Riding & Farm in Rockmart, said officers shot and killed HeeHaw, a bottle-raised donkey, early Sunday.

Israel said the officers claimed they were in danger after HeeHaw ran toward them while braying. The officers used a Taser on the donkey before shooting him, she alleged in a Facebook post Sunday morning.

"HeeHaw was raised in the house and did petting zoos. He never knew a stranger and was shot and killed in his own pasture for doing what donkeys do, alerting to a stranger," Israel wrote. "There is no way this is legal!"

Sadly, that is not true. It will prove to be perfectly legal to murder your farm animals on your own land, just as cops tend to shoot our dogs with abandon.  

Comments Issue

Blogger comments seem to be down, both here and at other Blogger-hosted sites I visit. This is a Google problem, not a local problem that I can fix; standby and hopefully they'll come back soon.

UPDATE: This seems to be fixed. Feel free to test in the comments to this post.

An Airport in Taiwan

Tom Tugendhat is the new Shadow Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom; I met him on the Taiwan trip because he happened to be there too. Cool guy, with a military intelligence and special operations career and a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan. 

He has an article (W.Post original, but paywalled) on a concern in Taiwan around an airport on an island that, while currently under Taiwan's jurisdiction, is physically quite close to the mainland by comparison to the Isle of Formosa that is Taiwan's main island.

It's somewhat inside-baseball for most Americans, but it's an aspect of the conflict that I'm fairly confident Hall readers haven't heard about. 

A Prophet Without Honor in Her Own Country

It is unsurprising to see disparaging remarks about the late Gloria Steinem on the political right, nor especially the political wing with Christian ideas about abortion's immorality. What is perhaps more surprising is to see how strong the reaction against her at the hour of her death happens to be on the political left, which views her as a CIA-funded effort in mind control, and her version of feminism as an attempt to suborn and subjugate genuine liberation movements in the name of American/Israeli hegemony. 

The CIA connection is not a conspiracy theory in the usual sense of the term; it is well-documented, including by the CIA. 

Was at least her feminism, or a strain aligned with it, a CIA project to destabilize traditional societies? It's not a ridiculous idea. We know that USAID -- often said to be a CIA funding/action arm -- supported similar transgender movements globally. The aim seems to have been to build out and identify networks of people with deep, existential grievances against their own society and its mores -- an ideal recruiting base for agents who would act against their own governments. The CIA also funded modern art as a psychological warfare approach against traditional societies. 

In a way, such efforts were at once revolutionary and counter-revolutionary. The disruption being wrought by left-leaning movements to traditional societies is inherent in Marxism, which aspires to revolutions against agricultural/feudal societies towards capitalist/industrial ones and, then, against capitalist ones towards communist/socialist ones. Marxism always advocated for the equality of women as a liberation from traditional roles, even though women who joined Marxist and Maoist movements rarely found themselves in positions of power once the revolutions carried the day. Trying to find a way to suborn and redirect this feminist thrust to support the position of America and its allies was an insight that made a lot of sense to the American elites who ran both State and the Agency.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum. I merely note the controversy; may she rest in peace. 

A Classical Lesson from Football

Louisiana being itself, the judge in the state-level case is reportedly a season-ticket holder for LSU football, who appears here with the LSU coach giving the LSU football hand sign; the lawyer representing LSU had endorsed the judge's wife in her election campaign; the Louisiana Attorney General began her remarks on the case with "Geaux Tigers!"; and the ruling was compared to 'a cup of cold gumbo.'

The South collectively having been subject to many rounds of legal and judicial interference in its culture and laws, the SEC knew not even to wait for the state-court ruling before filing its own case in Federal Court so the state court can be overridden. Southern football rivalries being what they are, it filed this suit in a Federal court not in Louisiana but in Alabama. 

This is a very nice illustration of Aristotle's point in the Rhetoric about why you can't trust judges in matters of justice. 

Now, it is of great moment that well-drawn laws should themselves define all the points they possibly can and leave as few as may be to the decision of the judges; and this for several reasons. First, to find one man, or a few men, who are sensible persons and capable of legislating and administering justice is easier than to find a large number. Next, laws are made after long consideration, whereas decisions in the courts are given at short notice, which makes it hard for those who try the case to satisfy the claims of justice and expediency. The weightiest reason of all is that the decision of the lawgiver is not particular but prospective and general, whereas members of the assembly and the jury find it their duty to decide on definite cases brought before them. They will often have allowed themselves to be so much influenced by feelings of friendship or hatred or self-interest that they lose any clear vision of the truth and have their judgement obscured by considerations of personal pleasure or pain. In general, then, the judge should, we say, be allowed to decide as few things as possible. But questions as to whether something has happened or has not happened, will be or will not be, is or is not, must of necessity be left to the judge, since the lawgiver cannot foresee them.

Emphasis added.

Wheels Down

My last flight has landed at Asheville. No more flying for a while! I’ve crossed the international date line twice in a week and spent long days working in time zones 12 hours off of each other. I’m glad to be back to my mountains. 

My Second Favorite* Anglican Priest Gets Interviewed by My Favorite** Orthodox Iconographer

The Rev. Dr. Malcolm Guite has just published the first volume of an "Arthuriad," a projected 4-volume ballad that retells the Arthurian stories. It's made a bit of a splash.

If you're interested in Arthur, Tolkein, CS Lewis, poetry, fiction, history, the role of imagination in modern life, Christianity, or just hearing two interesting people talk about storytelling, you might enjoy this interview.

* My favorite Anglican priest will always be Fr. Terry, who was a kind and generous pastor when I was asking whether Christianity might be the right path or not.

** To be fair, he's the only iconographer I can name of any denomination, so it's not as impressive as I've made it sound in the title. His Symbolic World podcast / YouTube channel is what he's famous for, but "... Interviewed by a Podcaster" was a less-interesting title.

Back in the USA

I did hear a David Allan Coe song in a bar in Taipei, but this still feels more like home. I won’t actually be home until late tomorrow night. 

Rest in Peace, Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry passed away yesterday.

Some advice he gave to himself, but which seems to profit others as well:

How to Be a Poet
(To remind myself)

i
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill -- more of each
than you have -- inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Taipei

Downtown, with Taipei 101 on the skyline

Closer to 101.

An unexpected angel. It’s mostly Buddhist here; I saw many Buddhist monks and a few nuns, but no other signs of Christianity except that in the hotel room there was both a New Testament and a Teachings of the Buddha.

The Formosan Bear is, unofficially, the national animal of Taiwan (of old called Formosa Isle).

Taipei Main Station. I caught the High Speed Railway from here. Recommended.

The Most Important Store. Only very recently is it legal to buy a Harley in Taiwan. Until late, large displacement motorcycles were banned by law.

Kind of a rainy afternoon on the first of September, and my last day in country. 

Tetraphobia

A lot of American skyscrapers don’t have a 13th floor, in the sense of a floor with that designation, because the number was thought to be bad luck. 

In East Asia, the number omitted is four. The word for four and the word for death are the same syllable with only a slightly different pronunciation. 

Fare Thee Well, Dolly

Dolly Parton and Carol Burnett

Dolly Parton giving an impromptu performance in Paídi Ó Sé's Pub

(I've started this video just a bit before she starts singing, skipping over several minutes of people milling about, a t-shirt being given, mic testing and so forth.)

Merle Haggard talks about falling in love with Dolly

Probably my favorite of her songs, recorded with Chet Atkins

What a joy she was. 

No Pictures Today

All day exercises from before dawn until well into the dark today. Tomorrow we resume early again, but will end a little earlier. Perhaps I’ll have time for something I can post then. 

Our Taiwanese allies are very enthusiastic, disciplined, and intelligent. I won’t say more about it, but you should have a warm place in your heart for Taiwan. 

Robots on the March

This one is a waiter who brings your dinner from the kitchen to your table. It is very polite about not bumping into people; they seemed to pay it no mind, trusting its sensors to stop it running into them. 

UPDATE: At another restaurant on another night, I saw a robot come out to ‘sing’ Happy Birthday to a patron. This one displayed an appropriate light show on its monitors while doing so. 

A Bevy of Dragons

7-Eleven in Taipei

For some reason my 10-year-old niece in Idaho had strong opinions about the superiority of 7-Elevens in Taiwan. I went by one to get pictures for her. I don’t know where this is coming from, but she likes Korean boy bands too. No account for taste. 

Yay, fungus ramen.

Seaweed flavored potato chips!

What is a century egg, you ask? You shouldn’t. 

Soybean paste noodles with chili sauce and a Snickers bar.

Past the jump, more pictures of shelves of stuff. They also sell hard liquor. 

A Gun Thread

Good academic research. 

Wheels Down Taipei

I didn’t make it Friday. It was quite a journey. 

I did get to spend many, many hours in the San Francisco airport. On the international terminal there is an outdoor terrace with a sculpture garden. 

Melting clocks are also common features in prison tattoos, where they also symbolize the distorted nature of time when you are trapped in one place by unhappy circumstances.

No idea about this one.

Lovely succulents.

That California minimum wage? Fully robotic coffee bars. 

Before I left DC I had a “half smoke,” a locally famous sort of chili dog. They aren’t great. DC isn’t known for its food or culture. 

Taiwan pictures after the sun comes up. 

Ah, The Good Old Days

 

Eight Slapping Pistons

Not sure this Boeing does. Frisco by late morning, then a 15 hour delay (so far).

Up the Privateers

US to revive prize courts. 

Once you have prize courts in place, there’s no reason not to revive letters of marque and reprisal. 

Why?

Someday I need to stop coming back to this town. 

L’adventure Commence

I’m starting for the other side of the world this morning. Taipei by Friday — local time. 

Requiescat in Pace, Dolly Parton

A very young Dolly singing in Fountain City, Tennessee.

Dolly Parton will be missed here in Appalachia. I don't doubt that such a forward-thinking and cunning operator -- for she was that, as much as she was a darling of everyone and a much-beloved singer and songwriter -- will have set up all the proper contingencies to keep her charity for the poor children of her home running long into the future. She will still be missed for her example. 

Dolly was the same age as my mother, who is still alive. As such mom, who grew up in nearby Bearden, Tennessee, got to watch Dolly from a very young age and all her long career. That show whose (silent) video opens this post was a Cas Walker show, a local politician and shopkeeper to the Knoxville area who used country music and his radio show to advance his position (and thus was a sponsor of such events).*

From her beginnings from the age of 10 as an extra on a local politician's radio show, she progressed to real success as a songwriter first. She then got on with Porter Waggoner's show -- he is usually though incorrectly credited with having the first all-female backup band in country music (in fact it was David Allan Coe who did that first, but he wasn't famous enough yet to be remarked for it). From 1967 to 1974, when she left the show and broke with Waggoner professionally, her duets with him were some of her biggest successes. In 1973 she had a real independent hit with the famous "Jolene" -- thus the name of one of my second cousins' only daughter -- and then went off on her own. The song she wrote about that departure is "I Will Always Love You," a song later more famously covered by another female vocalist.

She had a long and varied career, but what I always keep coming back to in my mind is all the good she did for those growing up poor in the place where she once did. Music has the ability to last forever; some songs are so old that we don't really know when or where they came from. Some of hers may, if not exactly as she wrote them than in the manner of folk songs. Yet her good deeds for the poor of the mountains, that is what I will always remember about her and her life's work. 

Rest in peace.

* Cas Walker was a noted character. Dad's favorite Cas Walker story was from the radio show, The Farm and Home Hour. Shortly after radar guns became a thing that the state police were using, Cas gave an editorial against them on the show. "Some of our best citizens," he said, "are being caught in these traps." 

UPDATE: Widespread mourning. 

The Commancheros

In American history, the Comancheros were a group of Europeans who traded with Comancheria, the Comanche Empire, during its period of dominance in the Southwest. In the John Wayne movie of that name, these traders deal especially in weapons, making them enemies of the Texas Rangers. 

In Australia, for some reason it's the name of a Motorcycle Club. Like the Texas Rangers before them, the Australian police are hot enemies of theirs for reasons chiefly related to firearms (though the press release mentions seizing large amounts of tobacco as well as cannabis and meth). 

All of this explains, if it does not quite make sense of, the current Kafka-like attempt to send a biker down for 15 years because he played Duck Hunt at a carnival shooting gallery to try to win his daughter a teddy bear. 

During the festival, the Comanchero outlaw motorcycle gang member allegedly tried his luck at a sideshow game where players use an air rifle to shoot plastic ducks and win prizes.

Footage obtained by 7News showed Simpson loading and firing the rifle while attempting to win something for his daughter.... Detectives from the South Australia Police Crime Gangs Task Force launched an investigation after learning about the alleged incident. Simpson was arrested in Adelaide on August 21....

The firearm order charge carries a maximum penalty of 15 years behind bars or an AU $75,000 fine. Being unlawfully present at a shooting gallery can result in up to 10 years in prison or an AU$50,000 fine 

It is not the first unusual object to trigger weapon rules. A six-year-old was suspended for biting a sandwich into the shape of a gun, while another child faced punishment after bringing a tiny LEGO gun to school.

In another incident, this time from the UK, a man was sentenced to four months in prison for carrying a six-inch Master Sword replica from The Legend of Zelda.

As a general rule, any time a police agency starts giving its task forces hardcore names like the the Raptor Squad or the Scorpion Units, you should probably disband them and start over with a fresh crop. They've already lost the plot, and are no longer conceiving of themselves as peace officers but as some sort of commando operation targeting members of the public. 

Praise the Day at Evening

Give praise to the day at evening, | to a woman on her pyre,
To a weapon which is tried, | to a maid at wed lock,
To ice when it is crossed, | to ale that is drunk.

-Havamal verse 81 

This weekend a friend of mine texted "About to do what I hope is the last suspension related job on this thing. It SEEMS like it will be easy and only take an hour or two..."

I texted him back, '"The last job.” “It’ll be easy!” “Only an hour or two.” You’re already ******.' The original was not censored. 

Sure enough, he broke a bolt off inside the hole, and had to go buy a new cobalt extractor kit because it was a high grade bolt. 

I had a good shop day on Sunday. My son and I worked on three different motorcycles, just making minor adjustments and doing preventative maintenance and tune-up work like swapping spark plugs. I didn't say anything good about it, though, until it was all over. 

The Havamal didn't come down to us, even with the filter of Christian scholars writing it down centuries after conversion, as a book of commandments. It's not a set of prohibitions either, like the rules surrounding Kosher or Halal foods. It was apparently just intended as a collection of good advice. You don't have to do any of it, and the Wild Hunt isn't going to come get you if you don't; but things somehow seem to go better if you do. 

Foot-Washing

My great-grandmother and her folk were Primitive Baptists, for whom foot-washing was a crucial annual ritual (as it is for the Pope). My mother tells me stories about how carefully prepared were the feet of all the parishioners come Maundy Thursday, lest any rumors get around that they weren't perfectly upkept, those feet belonging to very hard working men and women from the mountains of rural Tennessee. 

Muslims do it five times a day, at least they're meant to do. In Texas there's a little controversy about it.

One of the justifications for installing the foot-washing stations is that travelers performing Wudu were washing their feet in ordinary bathroom sinks, which is disgusting and incredibly unhygienic. Can you imagine walking in on that? 

Indeed I can! I have encountered that fairly often in my life, first in China where a number of the folk in our residence hall were African Muslims. I don't know that it's any more unhygenic than washing their hands in the sink; our issue was that they washed their feet and their hands several times a day, but very rarely their armpits or other areas that might have benefitted from more regular attention. I was more than happy for them to wash. I only wished that they did a more thoroughgoing job of it.

There is probably a reasonable point of balance between "We don't want to favor any religion in public accommodations, especially not Islam as Muslims sometimes confuse accommodations with conquest," and "I really would prefer you not wash your feet in our shared sink." 

Dangerous Gentlemen

One of my county commissioners is apparently on a mission from God. 

Next time I run into that guy I'm going to ask him just what he means by "dangerous gentlemen." In principle it's compatible with my 2004 essay Social Harmony. All the same, religious angles make me suspicious when they come from a politician. 

In a California Rock Festival...

...you're supposed to bring your own rocks.

Arlo and their pickles is, you likely know if you hang around here, a reference to this old song:

Content warning, I guess -- 1970s drug and anti-authority lyrics. Ya'll were mostly all there, though. You probably can handle it. 

Range War II: The Ranchers Win

I noticed today this small note about a range war written up here in 2024.

Charles and Heather Maude, a small, fifth-generation farming and ranching family near Pennington County in South Dakota, were prosecuted by the Biden administration via the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service in 2024. Both parents were charged separately, facing $250,000 fines and up to 10 years in prison each, for allowing their cattle to graze on 25 acres of the Buffalo Gap National Grassland.

The Maudes, whose family has owned their farm for five generations, disputed the fence line that marked the edge of their property with the grasslands, and claimed the U.S. Forest Service had originally set up an informal agreement Biden’s administration later violated.

What would normally be a small civil dispute was used by Biden’s Forest Service to severely prosecute the Maudes for theft and purloining. Charles Maude also told The Daily Signal that government officials advised them to find separate living arrangements for their children in the likely event that both parents were locked up for a decade.

Rollins, Noem, and several state and congressional officials commended the Maudes, and announced new efforts by the Trump administration to not only review new disputes and concerns of bureaucratic overreach via a new online portal but vowed to review older government decisions against American farmers and landowners.

“The prosecution of the Maudes is now over. They will not be driven from their homes, they will not be failed, they will not be fined and their children will grow up with a mother and a father that they love and who love them,” Rollins said. “We are ending regulation through prosecution.”

A happy ending, just like a Western from the golden age. 

Notes for the Scrapbook

A clipping from last weekend’s chile pepper contest. 

Sic transit gloria Mundi.

How Safe is the US Compared to Europe?

The Economist poses a novel dataset as a partial answer to the question (archive version because of paywall; original is here for subscribers).

Short answer: if you're interested in how safe you are walking down the street or operating a business, no, probably not. Murder rates are higher in US cities -- again, it's a few neighborhoods in a few cities driving those numbers up in the US -- but murderers usually know their victims. Your house is far more likely to be robbed in a European city than in an American one. Your business is far more likely to be robbed in London than in New York City, and even Chicago and LA are less likely to involve a business robbery than the capitol of the UK.

Only Chicago ranks among the worst European cities -- and below both Paris and London -- for how likely you are to be robbed on the street. Vehicle theft is more likely in Chicago and LA than in Europe, but on the other hand, Americans are more likely to own a vehicle to steal. 

The set doesn't include other offenses we might care about: assault, battery, violent sexual assault or rape. However, the picture that comes out overall is not the one you normally get from the press. If you compared the rural US, which has violent crime rates around half of our city average (i.e. not our very worst cities like Chicago), the safety of Americans would be even more stark.

Another Noble Victory

A judge rules the 'ghost gun' ban by the Biden administration to be unconstitutional. Most importantly, this governs the construction or finishing of your own firearms at home. 

State-level restrictions may remain, as with last week's victory; and once again, the judge's order might only apply to parties to the suit, which is a potential problem if you aren't a member of one of the organizations that sued.

Scales, Eyes

Long-time Milblogger CDR Salamander points out that this is really an indictment of the schools she attended rather than of her, herself. All those student loans were ill-spent if she came away thinking that Russia wasn't a colonial power. "I think it’s fair to say that they left her with a poor understanding of Chinese, Arab, and Turkish imperialism as well," he adds. "We can just assume Aztec imperialism was ignored as a cherry on top."

A Partial Answer

Last week we were talking about the divergence between polling results and the electoral outcomes in the Hong race. Partly, it turns out, it's because some of the polls were what is called in military provenance an "Information Operation."

Median Strategies was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification. 

Thank you for your understanding.

Believe me, the last thing they want is for people to understand what that means. 

An Era of Peace and Safety

One would not get the impression from the news that we were living through a historic era of peace, nonviolence, and safety. Apparently we are!

The FBI estimates that murder fell 18 percent in 2025 compared to 2024. There was an estimated 9 percent drop in overall violent crime and a 12 percent drop in overall property crime.

Overall, it was the largest percentage point drop in murder, violent crime and property crime ever recorded. With murder you have to go all the way back to 2024 to find the previous largest one-year drop in murder and before that the previous largest one-year drop was in 2023....

I wrote about this as well a few months ago here and noted the unreliability of those mid-1950s estimates and that the more modern estimates really begin in 1958. I think it’s fair to say that the US murder rate in 2025 was roughly the lowest ever recorded and there probably won’t be any ambiguity when the 2026 data is released next year.

Emphasis added. His project includes an attempt to estimate what the FBI statistics will look like going forward, which his method has shown success at with this year's data. So next year, he estimates this based on what we've seen so far of 2026:

The 2026 US Murder Rate Will Be By Far The Lowest Ever Recorded

...The 2025 murder rate should come in at between 4.1 and 4.4 per 100k while the 2026 murder rate should come in at an astonishing 3 to 3.8 per 100k based on the currently available data. Could that change? Yes. Is it a sensible forecast given all we currently know? Also yes. Will the 2026 rate be substantially lower than anything we've ever recorded (FBI murder estimates back to 1960)? Almost certainly yes.

Emphasis not added. That's the headline.

All of this at least correlates with a vast expansion of the number of firearms owned by private citizens, now well more than one per person, almost all of them unregistered (more than 393 million unregistered firearms, that is). The historically low murder rate correlates as well as with SCOTUS' expansion of gun rights -- including the insistence in Bruen that states, even New York, allow for some form of concealed carry rights by citizens. 

As I have pointed out in the past, America was already a very safe nation. The illusion presented by the news is a version of the availability heuristic: we have a lot of news when things go wrong, so a lot of information. The fact that things go right almost always almost everywhere generates no information for our brains, and indeed happens at such a scale that it is beyond human comprehension. Hundreds of millions of people live together in peace and safety every day. We can't calculate that, or comprehend it as a whole against which to measure the rare exception.

A fact about the United States that is apparently difficult to grasp is that almost all homicide happens in a very small number of neighborhoods. Most American counties have a murder rate of zero -- not zero percent, zero murders. The vast majority of the remnant have very few murders. The murder rate of the United States as a whole is driven as high as it is not even by a few bad cities. It is driven there by a few neighborhoods within a few cities. For the most part, America has no violence problem, no 'gun violence' problem, no crime problem.

An armed society is a polite society. Ours is getting downright peaceful. Too bad no one knows it.

Democratizing War

Russians have apparently decided that it's not safe to keep accounts on deposit in the wake of the Kremlin's financial woes. (WPost paywall; archive version here.)

Total withdrawals this year could nearly double the amount taken out in the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to Taras Skvortsov, a senior executive at Sberbank, Russia’s biggest retail financial institution.

The withdrawals are causing liquidity problems, according to Skvortsov and a former senior Russian finance official, overstretching a financial sector already strained by increasing levels of bad debts following a government-directed lending boom to ramp up military output.... Alexandra Prokopenko, a former adviser to the Russian Central Bank, said the withdrawals reflected deepening fear among the Russian public.

“It means people have no trust in the Russian banking system or in the Russian financial system,” Prokopenko said. “This is all a consequence of the fear that the government will do something with the banking system, that it could nationalize deposits.”

It's not just ordinary Russians, either.

Now, big businesses are also seeking to move money out of the reach of Russian regulators as anxiety grows over potential asset seizures. That is further exacerbating the problems, the former official said. 

In all, more than $9.4 billion was transferred out of Russia in the second quarter of 2026, according to Central Bank data.

Emphasis added. Ordinary people who pull their money can put it in the mattress or bury it, but big businesses can remove it from the country's financial system altogether.

Russia looks likely to be the first domino to fall in the new era of war made possible by drones. Wretchard argues that the effect of democratizing precision weapons could, ironically, be to limit state power in a way that benefits us all. The nation state cheerily sacrifices its citizens for its goals, but now starting a war like this can imperil the nation's survival even if another opposing army can't arise to conquer it.

Ironically the proliferation of precision weapon is a fact that can be used for peace. China for example, cannot assume that it can take Taiwan without putting the Communist Party of China at risk. The lesson of Ukraine is don't invade Taiwan.

The US has attempted to limit its engagement in the Gulf because it, at some level, understands this.

The natural order of the world in an era  of mutual vulnerability should be one of trade and grudging peace. The fact that it is not, I think (and I may be wrong) is due to the legacy habits of the 20th century when "special military operations" were in fact possible and also to the fanatical irrationality of apocalyptic cults.

Here, knowingly or not, he is echoing anarchist Edward Abbey's endorsement of the civilian ownership of rifles and firearms in general. 

It's a tool of equality, in other words. Edward Abbey said that was common to rifles:

The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an "equalizer." Egalite implies liberte. And always will. Let us hope our weapons are never needed — but do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.

Emphasis added. 

It'll be a good day when nation states fear to start wars because they know that the most likely effect is neither victory nor defeat, but the death of the leaders themselves -- as Iran's mullah's have learned, though their replacements still fight on. After that war finally grinds to its end, however, what political leadership will be eager to start another? They'll be the first ones to die, as likely as not. Defanging the nation state could be the start of a better world, just as an armed citizenry here at home has led to an era of unprecedented peace and safety (see next post).

Amphorae

A clever explanation of the odd shape used by the ancients. 

A Non-Mystery about Tryggvason

I guess it's hard to get published without claiming that there's some unknown to be solved, or a mystery to be explored, or novel information to be had. This time there really isn't. (H/t: Hot Air)

At [the center of the naval battle at Svolder] stood Tryggvason’s great warship, the Long Serpent, one of the most famous vessels in saga literature. Enemy ships closed in from all sides, capturing Norwegian ships one by one until only Olaf’s flagship remained.

From there, the king is said to have fought on the deck of his ship while his fleet was destroyed around him. But aggressors had the upper hand. Most accounts agree on the basic ending. Olaf disappeared into the sea.

“Everybody thinks that he jumped overboard and drowned because he was wearing full armour,” Hollway says.

This remains the view accepted by most historians. But not all.

When I saw the headline -- "He Was One of the Greatest Viking Warlords and His Death Is Still a Mystery" -- I thought the article was going to be about Sven Forkbeard. We know when Sven died, in England at the very height of his powers, but we have conflicting sources about how. Some say he'd been hiding a long illness, others that he fell off a horse. Either or both could be true. 

Olaf Tryggvason's death, by contrast, is clearly recorded in the Heimskringla. Snorri has quite specific details about the whole thing, a matter on which he seems well-informed. Some of the Heimskringla shades into legendaria -- Odin is mentioned towards the beginning as a founder of the kingly line in Norway -- but that is mostly confined to the early books. By the time of Tryggvason, Snorri is writing solidly about history.

Kolbjorn the marshal, who had on clothes and arms like the kings, and was a remarkably stout and handsome man, went up to king on the quarter-deck. The battle was still going on fiercely even in the forehold. But as many of the earl's men had now got into the Serpent as could find room, and his ships lay all round her, and few were the people left in the Serpent for defence against so great a force; and in a short time most of the Serpent's men fell, brave and stout though they were. King Olaf and Kolbjorn the marshal both sprang overboard, each on his own side of the ship; but the earl's men had laid out boats around the Serpent, and killed those who leaped overboard. Now when the king had sprung overboard, they tried to seize him with their hands, and bring him to Earl Eirik; but King Olaf threw his shield over his head, and sank beneath the waters. Kolbjorn held his shield behind him to protect himself from the spears cast at him from the ships which lay round the Serpent, and he fell so upon his shield that it came under him, so that he could not sink so quickly. He was thus taken and brought into a boat, and they supposed he was the king. He was brought before the earl; and when the earl saw it was Kolbjorn, and not the king, he gave him his life. At the same moment all of King Olaf's men who were in life sprang overboard from the Serpent; and Thorkel Nefia, the king's brother, was the last of all the men who sprang overboard. It is thus told concerning the king by Halfred:—

"The Serpent and the Crane
Lay wrecks upon the main.
On his sword he cast a glance,—
With it he saw no chance.
To his marshal, who of yore
Many a war-chance had come o'er,
He spoke a word—then drew in breath,
And sprang to his deep-sea death."

The following chapter gives eyewitness reports of his death. It describes a rumor that spread at the time that the king might have slipped out his mail-coat underwater -- try that sometime, if you have access to a hauberk of mail! Be sure you have a friend to pull you back out again, because you won't be able to do it -- and somehow escaped, but it also contains a poem scolding people for raising such stories that was written by one of Olaf's own skalds. 

I Won

At least initially. 

I won.

A Trill in the River

When I was a boy, we had a creek behind our house that had some stone cascades in it. I used to walk down with my dog and watch the water shooting across the stones, a cool place to spend hot summer days like these. You'd sit and watch the water, and watching it you would notice persistent shapes -- trills, you might call them -- that leapt up and curled as the water pressed against the stones just-so in its rush. 

Imagine that scene, or whatever version of it you grew up with yourself. Watching water flow over stones is almost universal among humanity. Imagine watching such a trill, and then you hear a rock upriver shift in the flow. This changes the pattern of the river ever-so-slightly, but the trill you were admiring for its beauty and perfect curves suddenly vanishes and can never be restored by anything you can do. 

Such, I realize tonight, is the human condition. We are like the trills in the river. All the parts of us that were us are already long gone down the flow. All the parts that are us are just coming to be us, will be part of us very briefly and will then flow on accordingly. And someday, when something in the world changes just-so, the trill itself will vanish and no human effort will be able to bring us back.

But what is it to love a trill? What is it to mourn one? What reality did it ever really have? It was just a shape of moving water.