The Stone Games

The Fortieth Year of the Stone Mountain Highland Games has come and gone.  I've been going for twenty, excepting years when I've been out of the country.

The carving on the mountain is the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world.

The Games for me are a lot of work.  I spend most of the weekend on my feet in the ring, teaching history and the physics of medieval warfare, and telling stories of how American freedom and culture has deep roots in Medieval Scotland and Britain.

The best part of the Games for me, though, comes before and after the crowds.  When the Games are not going on, we spend the weekend camping and feasting with old friends.

Nobody said a word to me about the sword strapped to the bike.

The mountain at dawn.

Rise early, and there is a quiet moment to read by the fire before others get up.

It was good to see reader V. R., who stopped by the ring to chat as she usually does.  For her as with me the Games are mostly work, as she is associated with a charity aimed at helping the elderly and disabled enjoy the festival.  It's a noble thing.

Screwtape for the quantum age

God doesn't play at dice, but the Devil can't get enough of it.

Slow down

Take it easy, and enjoy a lightning strike at 7,207 frames per second.  XKCD explains some things about lightning here.

Super-cheap blood tests . . .

. . . developed by Cambridge non-profit funded by the Gates foundation.

H/t Instapundit.

Inconvenient religion

King's College, an evangelical Christian school based in Manhattan, has kicked out Dinesh D'Souza for getting engaged before he's quite finished divorcing his wife.   D'Souza is making quite a stink about it. ("I had no idea that it is considered wrong in Christian circles to be engaged prior to being divorced.") Ann Althouse also is puzzled, as are many of her readers; the discussion wandered into the usual weeds over the image of God as the lawgiver vs. the kindly old gentleman (as C.S. Lewis put it) who didn't have very firm ideas about prohibiting bad behavior but instead "liked to see the young people enjoying themselves."   Gradually, however, a couple of traditional thinkers waded in and tried to stem the tide of rampant moral relativism.   All of commenter Paddy O's posts are worth reading:

Jesus, as you note, took the rougher part on himself, while giving grace to others.  Again, it just seems curious that of all the very tough demands Jesus makes on us, some are seen as selective and some are seen as absolute, the selective ones seeming to be applied to that which we would rather not give up, and the absolute seeming to be applied to others who we would like to manage.

Paddy O also offered the useful suggestion that D'Souza should follow the example of Henry VIII and start his own college.

Whether we look at the issue from the point of view of religious principles or just etiquette or mental health, I think it would take a strange view of marriage and commitment to get engaged before you finish divorcing.  Isn't there some essential confusion here?  I've never understand the point of marrying at all if one takes that vague a view of whether he's in a marriage or not.

America's New Poet Laureate

Natasha Trethewey, originally of Mississippi and now at Emory University in Atlanta, is America's nineteenth poet laureate, and the first Southerner to hold the post since the original.

What kind of writer would you have become if you had been born outside the South?

I have no idea. I can’t begin to imagine myself without the fate of my geography. I feel lucky to have been born into a troubled and violent history and a terrible beauty.

Here is the poem cited in the first part of the review. You can see her annoyance at the refusal to see the South she loves -- which is, in a way, different from the one that I do. Yet we are both of the thing, of the place.

The Al Smith Dinner

Four years ago, John McCain killed at this event. This year, well, see for yourself.

I Just Want To Make Clear: Our Sons Are Entitled To Every Form Of Nutrition

H/t: D29.

What Do You Mean By 'Entitled To'?

The difference between Joe Biden and Mr. Obama includes this fact: when Joe Biden says he wants to be clear about what hemeans, he usually proceeds to be quite clear about what he really means. This time I'm not sure.

BIDEN: I want to make this clear so there no misunderstanding anybody. I got a daughter, lost a daughter, got four granddaughters, and Barack has two daughters. We are absolutely — this is to our core — my daughter, and my granddaughters and Barack’s daughters are entitled to every single solitary operation! EVERY SINGLE SOLITARY OPERATION!

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a transcript of the remarks, so I'm not sure what he means by "entitled to" in this case. Does he mean that no operation should be unavailable to 'daughters' who want it? It's not clear that this is right: what if 'someone's daughter,' to use Biden's phrasing, wants to amputate her hands for no medical reason, as part of an art project? I would think that a doctor's oath would, or ought to, forbid participation.

Does he mean 'entitled to' in the sense that the operation should be not only available to them, but free to them? That's a highly problematic view, but if you want to endorse single-payer health care, say so. (Is the proposition that only women should have single-payer health care, or are women just the wedge to force it on everyone?)

Or does he mean 'entitled to' in the sense that no one should forbid access to an operation that is common practice? In that case, Hot Air raises a good point about Obamacare's IPAB board, which will in practice deny care to some 'daughters' -- even if their parents are likely to be long dead themselves.

Or is this just about abortion? If so, it's questionable whether it's reasonable to describe that as an "operation." In a sense it is a medical operation, because there are medical personnel involved. But the point of an operation is health, and the point of abortion is the destruction of a human life. An execution is not an "operation," and in that sense an abortion is not one either.

Guess I'll Be Getting Some Phonecalls Soon...

The NRA is loving the last debate. After four years of Democrats being afraid to even pretend to symbolically embrace gun control, good old President Obama went all in. Gives them somewhere to spend their big campaign bucks, and no doubt it's going to give rise to another round of fundraising soon.

Well, you know what? He has it coming. You pay the money, and you take the ride. If there's one thing the folks down Ohio way don't like very much, it's gun control. Georgia gun laws are little looser.

What's the Economy on This?

ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS: Is this Aston Martin 77. Santa, are you listening???? I’ve been a good girl, sort of. :)

-Elizabeth Price Foley

That's a two-million dollar automobile. I'd have settled for a new Harley. C'mon, Santa. The best ones are a hundred times cheaper. Surely a bad man is worth 1/100th of a good girl?

Yeah, OK, probably not. Can't blame a man for trying.

Speaking of Vigilantes

You're probably aware of Anonymous, the hacker group. You probably haven't heard much to recommend them to you before now. Here's their argument for vigilantism. It's well worth considering.

So is this.

Terror

It's time to mothball the term "terror" for a while.  It's lost all meaning.  It was being steadily drained of meaning years ago when people started asking, "Isn't it terrorism when someone makes me uncomfortable?  Isn't all force terrorism?"

What the Obama administration has been lying about is not whether the attack and murder of our ambassador and other Americans in Benghazi was an act of terror in some ineffable sense.  It has been lying about whether the attack was a spontaneous mob reaction to a provocative video, or a professional and pre-planned armed assault by an al Qaeda affiliate in a region where the administration had been crowing over the demise of that group.  The fact that the President vaguely alluded to the word "terror" in his remarks the day after the attack is not the point, as even Candy Crowley admitted shortly after the debate concluded.  The important point is that the President and his spokespersons repeatedly insisted that the attack was an unpredictable eruption of crowd hostility sparked by a YouTube video, long after it was crystal clear the attack was heavily armed, carefully coordinated, and took place in the complete absence of any crowd demonstration, video-related or otherwise.

I'm sure the attacks were terrifying.  They would have been equally terrifying whether they resulted from a proto-military assault or a crowd that suddenly lost control of its humanity.  The issue is not whether they inspired fear but whether they were an assault by a previously identified enemy about whom we had solid intelligence, or some kind of bolt-from-the-blue mass hysteria that no one could have planned for.  I fear the distinction is being lost in the endless parade of fuzzy blathering.

If Romney wanted to nail Obama on his prevarications, he'd have done better to focus on when Obama or his surrogates first admitted publicly what he'd known all along, which was that there was no public demonstration of any kind out the Benghazi facility that night, and that the attack was a sudden, coordinated onslaught by men with RPGs, whom we quickly learned were associated with al Qaeda.

Armed Posse Patrols Timber Land in Sheriff's Place

Story from Oregon here, about citizens stepping up to do local police work. One part I do not get -

Policing expert Dennis Kenney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, says neighborhood watch efforts can be positive but turn into problems when volunteers "decide that instead of supplementing law enforcement, they are going to replace law enforcement. Then you cross potentially into vigilantism."... Nichols says what his group is doing is "not vigilantism at all."

Okay, I get why an academic might say it, and why the word carries emotional freight that would make someone want to deny it. But I never heard before that was the distinction. Vigilantes at their best, if I remember, could and did work with official law enforcement (when there was any), and hand their prisoners over to the courts for trial (when, again, there were any). The crowd in The Ox-Bow Incident turns evil, not when they decide to apprehend suspects in a murder, but when they follow a leader who decides that they're going to do their hanging on the spot - "because they don't think the courts are fast enough."

What an Unpleasant Debate

Not because I think it didn't go well, although it wasn't the walkaway stomping of the first debate. The tone was what made it unpleasant.

Still, the final arguments were convincing. Romney gave the best answer I've ever heard him give. Obama started off by saying something implausible ('I believe in free enterprise'... 'I don't believe that government creates jobs'), and went on to level a series of negative arguments designed to undermine what his opponent had just said.

Some other observations: Obama didn't answer the question on Libya at all. Apparently Mitt Romney was the only person on the stage or in the audience who knew the difference between an AK-47 and an "assault weapon." I couldn't understand why Romney didn't answer the outsourcing question by coming back to his energy policy -- you can't outsource North American oil production -- but maybe he felt he had landed all the blows he wanted to in the first part of the debate.

Anyway, we'll see what the independents thought soon enough. I imagine they will have been put off by the tone. If I was, surely they were also.

Well, now I feel bad

I know how it feels when the media won't give you a fair shake.   So now I'm full of warm fellow-feeling toward the courageous freedom fighters who shot that 14-year-old Afghan girl for advocating education for girls, only to suffer under a deluge of scorn and contempt locally and abroad.

“The Taliban cannot tolerate biased media.”  The commander, who calls himself Jihad Yar, argues that death threats against the press are justified:  he says “99 percent” of the reporters on the story are only using the shooting as an excuse to attack the Taliban.

You carry out a perfectly justified attempted murder against a dangerous heretic, and then you make death threats against the biased press that cover the story, and suddenly you're the bad guy?

Mullah Yahya agrees with Jihad Yar that the media and the Americans are side by side against the Taliban.  “But I would blame the Taliban as well,” he says.  “If they allowed independent media to visit Taliban-controlled areas, it could have a very positive effect on their coverage.  In fact we have suggested this to their media department, but they’re only interested in kidnapping reporters, not in cooperating with them.

I thought journalists were supposed to be sensitive to other cultures.  If kidnapping is part of their culture, who are we to object?

.

Women setting up men

Hillary Clinton's treatment of the President today puts me in mind of a favorite old song, "The Baron of Brackley" (Child Ballad #203):



From the YouTube poster:

[A] sobering tale of medieval Scottish married life.  It is believed the incident occurred in September 1666, but what the ballad does not tell us is that it is a reprisal raid by John Farquharson of Inverey on John Gordon of Brackley for a cattle raid.

The "Dee" and the "Spey" are rivers.  When the raiders arrive, Brackley's treacherous wife goads him into a hopeless opposition.

Down Dee side came Inverey whistlin' and playin',
And he is to Brackley's gates ere the day is dawnin'.
Saying, "Are ye there, Brackley, and are ye within?
There are sharp swords at your gates, they'll gar your blood spend."

"Oh, rise up, my Baron, and turn back your kye,
For the lads frae Dunmurray are driving them by."
"Oh, how might I rise up, and turn them again?
For where I have one man I'm sure he has ten."

"If I had a husband, the like I have nane,
He'd no lie upon his bed and watch his kye ta'en."
Then up spake the baron, said, "Gi'e me my sword;
There's nae man in Scotland but I'll brave at a word."

When the baron were buskit to ride o'er the close
A gallanter Gordon ne'er mounted a horse.
Saying, "Kiss me, my Peggy, nor think me tae blame,
For I maun go out, love, and I'll never come hame."

There rode wi' false Inverey full thirty and three,
But along wi' bonny Brackley just his brother and he.
Twa gallanter Gordons did ne'er the sword draw,
But against three and thirty, wae's me, what is twa?

Wi' swords and wi' daggers they did him surround
And they pierced bonny Brackley wi' monys a wound.
Tae the banks o the Dee, tae the sides of the Spey,
The Gordons will mourn him and ban Inverey.

"Oh, came ye from Brackley's yetts, oh, came ye by there?
And saw ye his Peggy a-rivin' her hair?"
"Aye, I came by Brackley's yetts, and I came by there,
And I saw his bonny Peggy:  she was makin' good cheer.

"She was rantin' and dancin', she was singin' wi' joy,
And she swears this very nicht she will feast Inverey.
She laughed wi' him, danced wi' him, welcomed him in,
And lay wi' him till morning he who slew her good man."

There's grief in the kitchen, but there's mirth in the hall,
For the Baron o' Brackley lies dead and awa'.
Then up spake his son on his own nurse's knee:
Saying "Afore I'm a man it's avenged I'll be."

Conservatism for Seculars

An article by Razib Khan at the Council for Secular Humanism, a view I find highly congenial.

On the English Language as Informed by the Battle of Hastings

Dr. Mead is turning out some good pieces lately. Many of you will enjoy this one.

If we hadn’t cleared all this useless rubbish out of the language we would still be spouting nonsense like this: I sit on thi biggi rocki, I throw thum biggum rockum, tho rocko is bigo. Tha girla, however, is biga and I go with thai biggai girlai to thi picturi showi. And so on.

The girla is biga? My guess is that we probably wouldn't have been saying that out loud even if we hadn't simplified the language.

"Loathsome, inhuman edifices"

Or what we generally refer to as "Stalinist architecture."  The Daily Caller puts the spotlight on "U. Gly" -- the university campuses whose design makes them "flawed slices of hell."  They remind me of the stuff my church's architecture firm churns out. 

I'm surprised they didn't include the University of Houston, full of truly hideous examples:

Rice University is another matter entirely.  I still have such fond memories of the old loggias there that they figure prominently in my dreams: