Everyone Hates to Fly

A columnist at the Washington Post raises her complaint, but the force of the article is a discussion she had with a reformer who has some thoughts on how to fix it.

Flying for me is a mixed bag. Because I am what the government is pleased to call 'a trusted traveler,' and because I fly out of a small regional airport rather than a big hub, the experience can be not-so-bad. I object to being disarmed on a philosophical basis, but aside from that it's mostly just a minor set of annoyances punctuated with expensive beers at airport bars if there are long waits. 

If anything goes wrong, though -- and it so often does -- it can quickly become an ordeal even with those advantages. The last trip was bedeviled by honesty horrendous weather, which is nobody's fault (not even the Romans'), but the airline abandoned me in Charlotte and didn't ever try to reschedule the flight. I had to get my son to drive halfway across the state and back to collect me. (At least I didn't have to hitchhike: few are going to pick up a bearded biker!).

So I'm sympathetic to the complaint and the desire to make improvements. Unfortunately most of the suggestions here are either (a) government regulations, or (b) pipe dreams like 'building a high-speed train network.' The author is wise enough to realize the latter isn't going to work out -- "pipe dream" is her choice of words for it -- but it still makes the list. 

Competition usually improves things more than government regulation (which is more likely to break things), but as she also points out there are very high barriers to market-entry with airlines. You can't just open up another airline like you can another bakery or machine shop. It requires a substantial amount of capital just to buy the planes and recruit the skilled labor necessary to operate them. 

So it could be the answer is really just to fly less: use more internet and phone instead of in-person meetings, travel by car instead, take the train if you live in the northeaster corridor (which is basically the only place in America where that option makes sense). The fewer people who fly, the less stress on the system.

A Rose By A Different Name

I’m not sure who told Stephen Green that the CIWS ‘had never been fired in combat’ before. Maybe it is true that the Navy never fired one, as his article says. 

When deployed on land, though, the same weapon system is called the C-RAM, and we fired them all the time against Iranian rockets and mortars in Iraq. Multiple times a day, sometimes, during the hottest months of the fighting. 

RIP Mojo Nixon

Tough week.

The Uselessness of International Institutions

I attended an online talk today by Justice Professor Elyakim Rubinstein, formerly a senior diplomat and Deputy Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, and Abraham D. Sofaer, formerly a federal judge and Legal Adviser to the US State Department and an emeritus senior fellow at Hoover. They were discussing, from the Israeli perspective, the recent preliminary ruling on Israel and genocide by the World Court.

As you may know, the court heard a challenge brought by South Africa's government against Israel, and issued a preliminary finding that genocide was possibly occurring. It then issued a series of orders that Israel is, of course, perfectly free to ignore because all these international institutions are a joke.* 

I was curious to hear the Zionist** perspective on this, so I tuned in to hear what they had to say. They pointed out that this court doesn't operate like a real court, and thus did not actually do a real finding-of-fact. What it did was pile all the allegations together, call it 'evidence,' and the ruling says that given 'all the evidence,' there's a high probability of finding some proof in there somewhere once it's evaluated. 

To put it in layman's terms, then, the ruling isn't actually a ruling that Israel is doing anything wrong; it's a ruling that a lot of accusations have been made, and 'where there's smoke there's fire.' 

A real court wouldn't issue even a preliminary injunction without a sufficient review to determine whether or not a case was likely to succeed on the merits. No such effort was made here. 

That's what the Zionists say. Unlike the clowns at the UN, they do at least mean what they say.

* The head of the UN declared that these sorts of rulings are "legally binding," and he "trusts" that Israel will abide by them. He knows perfectly well that they will not abide by any one of them, let alone all of them, and no one can do anything about it. In other words, the rulings are not in any sense "binding." Thus, there's not really a law; and a court that issues bootless rulings while draping itself in the costume of jurists is not really a court. 

The head of the UN's pantomime to the contrary just shows you how much of a joke these institutions really are. I also have a good laugh when they do things like appointing Saudi Arabia or Iran to the "Organization for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women."

** This term is usually employed as a perjorative and often unfairly, but here I am using it accurately and non-prejudicially: the institution that hosted this talk is explicitly and formally a Zionist organization.

Another from Keith

Toby Keith also did this piece, which I don't hate and kind of like. Note the ways, though, in which the video is much more transgressive than the lyrics -- up to and including the transgender in the men's room of the celebrated bar. Likewise, all the Confederate flags in the video that aren't hinted at in the lyrics. That's also true of the earlier video I posted of his.

Now this is obviously a tribute to an earlier (and better, no disrespect to the dead) song by David Allan Coe.

You have the same basic setup: a bar with bikers, cowboys, and hippies/yuppies coming into clash. The Keith version has this as a suitable resting place, a thing one could love and accept as home; the Coe version is stridently resisting it, striving to escape it and to move beyond to something better. But he can't, because "Country DJs know that I'm an outlaw; they'd never come to see me in this dive." The dive where nobody recognizes him: they tell him he 'sounds like' David Allan Coe. 

This is what I think Rollins was getting at in his letter. Keith often seemed to offer acceptance of the status quo; Coe was clearly fighting against it, and trying to transcend it through bare effort. He still played the gigs in the dives, but he wasn't accepting them as his ultimate fate; and in time, he rose above them, and became something more. 

Ironically Coe is still alive, one of the last of the old Outlaws, though he had to have drunk as much beer as Keith ever did. As younger star Sturgill Simpson says, life ain't fair and the world is mean.

More from Henry Rollins

I want to draw your attention also to these things that Henry Rollins did, which I like espeically among his works.

The first is a meditation on playing against Iggy Pop as a rocker.

The second is about the transformational quality of iron weightlifting on the young.

A Few More from Toby

Toby Keith was from Moore, Oklahoma, so he can make fun of us like this.

The Vesuvius Challenge

A high tech attempt to read scrolls cooked in the Pompeii explosion has succeeded. The first work they can read is Epicurean philosophy, and much more remains. It is hoped that even some of the lost works of Aristotle might be included. 

The Late Toby Keith

Country music superstar Toby Keith died last night, apparently after a long battle with stomach cancer. My wife was shocked, not so much that he died but to realize that a long-time fan of her artwork, who corresponded online with her under the name "Toby Keith," turns out to have been the actual Toby Keith and not just a pseudonym. 

I was never a huge fan of his music, sharing some of the concerns about it that Henry Rollins puts forward in this letter: sharing also, however, Rollins' appreciation for his faith towards our military and veterans. There's nothing wrong with a playful drinking song, of course; but his was a living made on celebrating the weekend bacchanalia of workers whose lives are otherwise empty of joy.

Still, I will put up my favorite of his songs. It shows humility and the ability to laugh at himself, which are good traits. 

Likewise, I trust -- based on his comments about his faith -- that death for him brings about only an end to what must have been significant suffering. It was surely nothing to fear. 

UPDATE: I was reminded of this story of Keith stepping in to save Merle Haggard’s final concert, an act of honor for which he deserves remembrance. 

Some Good Country Songs

More younger stuff, since you won’t find it on the radio. 

Axe-Throwing Bars

Prima facie this concept sounds both dubious and awesome; it is in fact awesome.

My son has a good arm for it. We didn’t keep score, but halfway through I started throwing left-handed and racked up several bullseyes. I quoted The Princess Bride to him, but he was too young when he saw it to remember. Another worthy thing to do, then!

Up Helly Aa

The Viking fire festival in Shetland looks to have been a success this year. But look at this version in Ramsden, West Yorkshire! Apparently a community of Shetlanders there does it up right. 

UPDATE: Or maybe it was just an AI picture. Too bad; we could all use a Viking fire fest around February. 

Candlemass

Technically yesterday, the feast of Brigid: Saint or goddess is still debated. Of old it was called Imbolc. 

Lex Victoriam

Ironically I was just discussing this idea in the comments of the last post. Richard Fernandez links to an essay on the subject this afternoon. I was calling it Right of Conquest; this author prefers “Law of Victory.”

Its absence, we seem to agree, creates permanent conflict instead of an end to war. 

Wartime Definitions

I remember my father complaining that Congress had never had the courage to pass a declaration of war in the Vietnam Conflict, preferring the fig leaf of calling it "a police action." It certainly was a war, fought between two hostile foreign powers -- Ho Chi Minh's and ours, with his side backed by China and the Soviet Union. A police action would seem to be an internal use of force, which might be quite violent but which happens in a territory over which one claims sovereignty. A military action to counter an actual insurrection could plausibly be a police action rather than a civil war; the debate Tom mentioned below over whether "the Civil War" was actually a civil war is one that remains hot among historians.

That makes what is going on in Israel a debatable case. Is it a war or a police action? On the one hand there is no actual Palestinian state, only a notional one with divided leadership; Israel is said to be occupying parts of, well, Israel, parts that notionally belong to a proposed Palestine but that are actually within Israeli borders. The action in Gaza is similar to a counter-insurrection action over a part of the territory where sovereignty is being contested by a hostile army (and an irregular one, also, guerrilla and without uniforms or other distinguishing marks that attend to regular military forces).

On the other hand, there is a substantial amount of diplomacy across decades that has treated Palestine as an entity that exists at least potentially, and that they were trying to create actually. It has a notional territory even if it has not actually been agreed to by anyone yet, and a notional government even if it is divided and mutually internally hostile, and people who claim to belong to it as citizens. It is treated as if it were a nation for diplomatic purposes, even though it has never had full control over any territory; the United Nations deems it a "non-member observer state," emphasis added, since 2012. 

If so, it might demand to be treated according to the laws of war; that would make things like this Israeli raid on the Ibn Sina* hospital an act of perfidy that would be prosecutable. Police can put on disguises and conduct such raids, but soldiers can't -- not if they are fighting other soldiers in a lawful war.

Of course, in order to demand such things Palestine would have to start adhering to the laws of war itself. That would be a tremendous step forward and not one anyone actually expects to see: Hamas' raid was intended to violate the laws of war, and the humanity of its victims, as much as it was possible to do. They aren't about to abandon acts of perfidy, hiding among civilian populations, and the like. That makes the issue somewhat moot according to the basic law of (human) nature: "Turnabout is fair play." 

* Ibn Sina, better known in the West as Avicenna, is a titanically important philosopher. Though Muslim, his metaphysical account of the universe ended up being largely incorpoated into Catholic theology by, inter alia, Thomas Aquinas. 

How did that hapapen? Avicenna was a genuine expert on Aristotle, and -- the story goes -- was mystified when he received a book entitled The Theology of Aristotle (that was actually a collection of works of Plotinus, founder of the Neoplatonic school). He had his doubts about it because he'd read and understood the Metaphysics, which doesn't sound anything like anything Plotinus ever wrote. After thinking about it for a long time, though, he came up with a way of making the two approaches compatible, which turns out to be his own novel metaphysical view.

When his view and other Islamic philosophy came into the hands of the Catholic Church via the reconquest of Spain, it answered a big problem that Aquinas and his contemporaries were facing. They wanted to incorporate the thinking of Aristotle into their world, as it had been lost and was much stronger than anything they had to go against it. However, many early Christians had been at one point Neoplatonists -- including Augustine -- and therefore Aristotle's basic view of the universe was not compatible with the one they had inherited from earlier saints. Not being saints themselves yet, they could hardly go against those who already were. 

Yet here comes Avicenna with an answer to that problem: he had made the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian views compatible! All that they needed to do was work in his explanations, which they did -- chiefly without mentioning him, as it would be embarrassing to admit that they were borrowing large parts of their theology from a Muslim. Aquinas does mention another Muslim philosopher often, Averrores, but only as 'the Commentator,' i.e., one who commented on 'the Philosopher,' i.e. Aristotle. Avicenna only gets one mention from him that I'm aware of, but if you've worked through the two thinkers' metaphysics the influence is obvious. 

Plagarism wasn't looked down on as much in the medieval university, I guess. Well, even today the standards are only enforced under duress. This footnote is now longer than the original blog post, but Ibn Sina merits extended attention. I should note that he thought of himself chiefly as a physician rather than a philosopher; his metaphysics is contained in the thirteenth book of a larger work called Healing (usually translated as 'The Healing,' but Arabic like Romance languages just likes to stick articles in front of everything: thus, as La France is just 'France' in English al-Shifā is properly just Healing). It therefore makes perfect sense that a hospital is named for him.

The End Is Nigh

In a further sign that the end times are near,* Ben Shapiro raps.

I'd never heard of Tom MacDonald before this, but apparently he's an independent rapper who's been hitting the top 10 in digital sales reasonably regularly for the last 5 years.

It's an interesting synergy. Both have very different audiences, but they share an anti-woke sentiment, so this is getting a bunch of cross-audience exposure.

So how did this happen?

The Grey Mouser

His name is actually Gandalf. Last night he caught a mouse and brought it to my wife, alive, and dropped it in her lap while she was reading in bed. 

She recovered admirably from the experience, during which the mouse’s escape was foiled by the cat. She then brought the mouse to me, holding it by the tail. I offered to kill it, or to feed it to the chickens, but she wanted to release it safely in the wild instead. 

Good kitty. 

The 2nd South Carolina String Band

For Texas:

According to the band's intro to this next song over on YouTube:

The theme-song of General J.E.B. Stuart’s famous cavalry is attributed to the leader of his camp band and banjoist, Sam Sweeney. This signature song, the words possibly penned by Stuart himself, was “Jine the Cavalry”. Though the composer is uncertain, it is thought to have been adapted by Sweeney, who, after enlisting in the cavalry in 1862, soon came to the general’s attention and suddenly found himself a member of Stuart's staff and his personal minstrel troupe. 

As Burke Davis wrote in his great biography of Stuart, “JEB Stuart - the Last Cavalier”, 

“Stuart must have more music.…there was always music. Sweeney on the banjo, Mulatto Bob on the bones, a couple of fiddlers […] Sweeney rode with Stuart on the outpost day and night. Stuart often sang and Sweeney plucked the strings behind him. . . .”

The chorus is:

If you want to have a good time, jine the cavalry!
Jine the cavalry! Jine the cavalry!
If you want to catch the Devil, if you want to have fun,
If you want to smell Hell, jine the cavalry!

And a Union song that apparently became popular on both sides during the Late Unpleasantness.*

The 2nd plays Civil War reenactments, among other things.

*I found this blog post from a Southern historian in looking up the origin of this way of referring to the Civil War and like what he has to say (although apparently he disagrees with calling it the Civil War).

Hypotheticals

With Biden’s encouragement of millions of illegal aliens entering and taking up residence in the United States along with 2024 being an election year, we might be in for a wild ride. Like Will Rogers, all I know about this is what I read on the internet (loosely paraphrased), but from what I’ve read lately I can easily imagine some bad scenarios. I am very interested in your takes on this, what you think is likely, what you are preparing for, and where you think I’m just being paranoid.

Up to this point, I have thought in terms of short-term disruptions, and that’s what I have been preparing for. This level of prep is also good for natural disasters, so it would be appropriate for everyone to prepare for a week or so of disruption. However, given that any foreign actor who wants direct action teams (terrorist, guerrilla, etc.) in place in the US has had plenty of opportunity to get them here, I’ve been thinking in terms of scattered small-scale actions like, e.g., maybe squad-size terrorist cells shooting up festivals or concerts, maybe even coordinated attacks so several of these squads hit at the same time in different places. Also, infrastructure sabotage, like taking down parts of an electrical grid, seems quite possible. Any of these could produce significant disruptions, but would probably not last too long, so preparing for a week or two of civil unrest seemed reasonable.

However, the recent letter on uncontrolled immigration by ten retired FBI leaders got me thinking in much larger scale terms. I encourage everyone to read the whole letter, but the following paragraph from it sparked this post:

It would be difficult to overstate the danger represented by the presence inside our borders of what is comparatively a multi-division army of young single adult males from hostile nations and regions whose background, intent, or allegiance is completely unknown. They include individuals encountered by border officials and then possibly released into the country, along with a shockingly high estimate of ‘gotaways’ – meaning those who have entered and evaded apprehension.

Several paragraphs later, the letter says:

… elements of this recent surge are likely no accident or coincidence. These men are potential operators in what appears to be an accelerated and strategic penetration, a soft invasion, designed to gain internal access to a country that cannot be invaded militarily in order to inflict catastrophic damage if and when enemies deem it necessary.

So, “multi-division army” caught my thoughts. What if – just thinking through that – we are not looking at possible action by disparate squads, but by platoons or companies? A company-sized element, hidden as smaller elements on different patches of private land around a target area, could carry out repeated coordinated attacks in that area, effectively rendering the area uncontrolled territory. Now, add in that several company-sized units could be coordinating attacks within a state. How long would it take National Guard units to get things under control? And if this were to happen in multiple states at the same time, federal assistance could take a while to arrive in any given affected area.

Or, the October 7 attack in Israel was carried out by about 3 battalions of terrorists, I think. I guess really good intelligence work would be the only thing that might prevent battalions of terrorists in the US from hanging out in small groups in geographically distant areas until the order to go is given and then gathering for and conducting a mass attack. Really good intelligence work is by no means assured.

I think we can all imagine other possible scenarios, and of course it is possible none of this will happen. I certainly hope and pray that none of it happens.

What do the rest of you think? What is likely to happen, in your opinion, and why do you think that? What should we as private citizens be prepared for this year, while we might still have time to make those preparations?

Edit: I just want to clarify that I'm thinking of what preparations to make, not a "let's go down the worst-case scenarios rabbit hole" conversation. Clearly, other than being ready to escape or make a good account of myself and die well, there's nothing I can really do to prepare for a 10/7-sized assault on my city. 

But if I'm not in the targeted area and just affected by loss of services, etc., how should I be prepared? I'm asking because I respect the regulars here and hearing what you think will give me a better idea of what's reasonable. It is a kind of check on my own imagination, if you will.

Burns Night

Forfar Brides, Neeps & Tatties, and Cock-a-Leekie. 

To the immortal soul of Robert Burns. 

Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led;
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to victory!

Now's the day, and now's the hour;
See the front o' battle lour;
See approach proud Edward's power—
Chains and slavery!

Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha can fill a coward's grave!
Wha sae base as be a slave?
Let him turn and flee!

Wha for Scotland's king and law
Freedom's sword will strongly draw,
Freeman stand, or freeman fa',
Let him follow me!

By oppression's woes and pains!
By your sons in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!

Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty's in every blow!—
Let us do or die!

Scottish shortbread and an Old Chub Scotch ale.