It’s 8 AM. I left DC at six. I have crossed the Shenandoah and put a mountain range between me and the city.
I’m stopping for breakfast at a truck stop on I-81.
Prayers answered
This has been a busy dog-rescue week. I had no business taking in another dog, with 3 of my own and 3 fosters already, but the local rescue group took responsibility for a dog in my neighborhood whose "owners" couldn't keep him once he got flea infested and severely irritated their landlord, who didn't allow dogs in the first place. The young couple casually let him stay for the last 9 months after he wandered in during a storm, but I guess they don't know much about dogs. He's shockingly emaciated, every rib standing out, and has heartworms. After the current possessors relinquished him to the local rescue group, they took on the cost of his food and medical care, including plans to treat his heartworms, but won't have a place for him until next week, so I'm keeping him briefly. Lovely dog with lovely manners, no trouble at all.
On Friday, having posted a picture of him, we got word from a woman in a nearby town that she was sure he was her dog. She'd given him away two years ago to a friend of her son-in-law who had a large property and said he could give the dog a better life. Then the son-in-law's friend abruptly disappeared without a forwarding address. The rescue group, which has custody now, is deciding whether the original owner is an appropriate adopter, having once given him up so fecklessly. That owner really would like him back, and I hope she'll persuade the rescue group that she's a safe bet now. She has convincing pictures of him as a puppy and an adult. The dog, a Catahoula-Leopard-Chocolate-Lab mix, is down to 58 lbs. from the 120 lbs. he weighed when the original owner had him.
Also last week, what looked like a Labradoodle was spotted in my neighborhood but not caught up at the time. Word circulated on NextDoor, and because someone in town had found an eager foster mom for him [her, as it happens], I felt comfortable encouraging everyone to bring him [her] to me if he [she] could be induced to be confined. Early Friday morning, a neighbor jogging by my house encountered him [her] and slipped him [her] in my gate. Sadly, I didn't see the neighbor's text message until several hours later, and never caught sight of him [her]. I was afraid he'd [she'd] jumped the fence and moved on. Then a few minutes ago, late Sunday night, up he [she] trotted! He [she] must have been in my woods for the last three days, though I never saw any sign that he'd [she'd] found food that I left out for him [her]. He's [she]s safely ensconced in a kennel overnight with food, water, and a bed. Tomorrow his [her] foster mom will take him [her] . Surprisingly enough, he's
[she's]not really emaciated, just a solid matted mess of fur. [Well, fairly skinny, though.] We'll shave that off and let him [her] start over.
Demonstration Ride
Far smaller than the 2019 Rolling Thunder rally, the Rolling to Remember rally still fielded tens of thousands of motorcycles. Veterans from around the country and many wars were present to solemnize the holiday.
It was executed safely by everyone I saw, and we didn’t pass any incidents from the riders in front of us. Lots of folk came out to watch.
BLACKFIVE Reunion
The guy with the Vespa and the teddy bear is a Green Beret
Tomorrow is the Rolling to Remember demonstration ride. I don’t think he’s going to ride the Vespa in it. There will be five of us from China Post, though.
Riding
I rode an easy 405 miles today, according to Google Maps’ measurement. It took about ten hours, adding in stops for lunch, water, gas, and rest. I could have made the last hundred miles to Arlington, but I decided to do that tomorrow. It would have been rush hour(s) when I got there, and I’d have been tired. Tomorrow is a holiday weekend and I’ll be fresh.
Stopped to help a biker near Natural Bridge who had a broken rear brake line. It is the Code to always stop and help fellow bikers in need.
Like the Pirate Code 🏴☠️, the Biker Code is more like guidelines. But there’s honor involved in keeping the Code.
He was a nice guy from the Roughnecks MC, Tennessee. This is a public safety MC, cops and firefighters and such. As soon as he spoke to me I knew that he was originally from New York, and indeed it proved that he was headed back there to visit his daughter this weekend.
Tomorrow I should see old friends and have good conversations. Also, grilled meats. The holiday will be honored with feasting as well as solemn observances.
These People Just Hate Historic Flags
They hated the Confederate flag, sure. Then it was the Betsy Ross flag. Then it was the Gadsden flag. Then it was just the plain old American flag. Then it was that flag, upside down. Now it’s this one:
One might say, well, they don’t like Biblical language. This, though, is a partial quote from Patrick Henry’s patriotic — or rebellious — and most famous speech. “An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts is all that is left us!"
Henry had the phrase from Locke; it was well known in the era that when a government violated its obligations and just limits, the people still had the right to ‘appeal to heaven’ by taking up arms. As, indeed, they have.
Riding North
This Memorial Day, I think I'll attend a motorcycle rally in Arlington built around Veteran riding groups and clubs. I don't know if Joel Leggett is around and is likely to be up there this year; we missed each other at the big Rolling Thunder rally of 2019.
I'll probably start up Friday morning.
Admire the Effort
Almost every internal combustion engine would benefit from a turbo. Superchargers are usually not necessary. Air rams?
Maybe not.
Recognizing the Imaginary
Norway, Spain, and Ireland took the unusual step of extending diplomatic recognition to a state that does not exist. They recognized "a" Palestinian state, but not any of the two entities that claims to be a government or a territory of Palestine. They are recognizing not any state that actually exists or has ever existed, but the one they wish existed.
Ireland said that it hopes its recognition will press Israel, the Palestinians and the international community toward a two-state solution, one that includes the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian state drawn on the borders as they were in 1967, with Jerusalem as a shared capital.That long-imagined dream — the goal of generations of U.S. diplomats — has never seemed so far away.
The attempt to bring the wished-for into reality by an act of pure will is magical thinking. This sort of diplomacy is akin to holding a ritual under the full moon designed to summon an otherworldly being, except that one might more readily believe in the ability to summon demons than a workable and demilitarized 'two-state solution.'
There's at least a chance that demons are real and able -- willing -- eager -- to be summoned. No one who might become a leader of that demilitarized second 'state' wants it or wants to be part of it. They are certainly not eager to summon it into the world. They've had every chance for decades, and have summoned this state of affairs into the world instead.
One might usefully list all the similar magical thinking going on so hot and heavy in the editorial pages: to summon 'gender' in place of sex; 'a woman' in place of a man who's on hormones; 'a vibrant President the young aides can barely keep up with'; inflation that is transitory... the incantations continue not only under the full moons but under every moon, by day as well as night.
The House Rent Blues
Yeah, Elvin Bishop. Sounds like he'd fit in here, or show up in a Grim novel. From Tulsa, studied physics at U Chicago, joined the Butterfield Blues Band. Got mentioned in a Charlie Daniels song, too.
A Genuinely Shocking Finding
The most astonishing thing in this congressional report on government conspiracy to censor and silence right wing media and views is that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) was apparently an effective and enthusiastic part. As far as I know, this is the first time it’s ever been effective or enthusiastic; turns out they were really taken with silencing American citizens instead of doing their actual job.
The GEC is assigned by Congress the role of aligning all American foreign communications in pursuit of national interests. This means diplomatic messaging aligns with Army psychological operations and CIA special activities of a communications sort; broadcasts of American state media align with the values and policies of the administration.
Especially when Republican administrations have existed, the GEC is wholly uninterested in its mission. But even when Democratic heroes have held the reins, they’re ineffective. For one thing they’re entirely too small to actually perform the job effectively; for another, they are at State. Most of the communications infrastructure we have is military, and the military doesn’t respect the State Department. More, the State Department itself views actual diplomacy as its real job, and “public diplomacy” — that is, talking to ordinary citizens instead of other diplomats — has a lesser stature.
So it’s a second-rate sinecure for bureaucrats who lack prestige, resources, or interest in doing the crucial job assigned to them. Occasionally they take meetings and accomplish nothing, which normally makes them one of the less harmful government bureaucracies.
Give them a chance to play secret police and violate the constitutional rights of their own citizens, though, and apparently they were hot to trot.
Flower of Scotland
Dad29 sends the story story of a priest from the Society of Jesus who ministered to his flock during those hours when Catholicism was banned in Scotland, then joined the Jacobite army that invaded England in the '45.
Fr. Alexander Cameron was a convert to the Faith who served the exiled Stuart king of England and Wales at his court in Rome. Cameron later became a Jesuit priest and returned to Scotland to minister to the illegal and underground Catholic Church in his native land. For four years he served as a “heather priest” in the Scottish Highlands, risking arrest and the harshest of weather conditions to provide spiritual succor and the sacraments to his outlawed flock.
The "harshest of weather conditions" just means that he was a priest in the Highlands of Scotland.
The rest of the story is impressive, though.
"White People" and Spicy Food
Via Instapundit, a blog post from a Chinese girl person*** in the San Francisco area who has a German boyfriend. It is, as she(?) herself says, patronizing* about white people's inability to eat spicy food, which is a stereotype that I notice is employed pretty frequently.
Like many stereotypes, it is not completely without justice: my in-laws from Indiana are incapable of handling any sort of spicy food. My wife, over the years of our association, has learned to handle fairly hot foods -- far hotter than anything made in China, where we lived in 2000-1 -- though still not as spicy as I like them.
But also like stereotypes usually, this one has limits. There's the usual fault of stereotypes generalizing too much. A German isn't "white" the same way someone from Ohio is, and Cincinnati chili isn't much like Texas red chili, which isn't much like New Mexican red chili.
More, though, there's a real corollary to this stereotype: while many white people don't like spicy foods, the white people who do like spicy foods like the spiciest food in the world. In fact the hottest chilies were mostly developed in the US, UK, or Australia. There's a reason that the second hottest chile pepper in the world is the Carolina Reaper, not something made in China (although this is obscured by the fact that all of them are part of the family capsicum chinense, which is due to a misconception by early Spaniards that the habanero and Scotch bonnets were from China; they were actually native to South America).
In 2001, Paul Bosland, a researcher at the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University, visited India to collect specimens of ghost pepper, also called the Bhut Jolokia or Naga king chili,** traditionally grown near Assam, India, which was being studied by the Indian army for weaponization.
We put it in food, bred hotter versions of it than nature ever dreamed, and put those in food too. If you go to any festival around the South, there will be a booth selling hot pepper sauces and/or pastes. These will definitely include not just habanero sauces, but sauces made out of Reaper peppers, Scorpion peppers, Viper peppers, and so forth. The super-hot peppers are new, but the love of spice in the South is not. Even when I was a boy, every truck stop restaurant had three kinds of pepper sauces on the table, including one that was just packed with hot peppers and white vinegar. In Smoky and the Bandit, from the same era, the sheriff orders a "diablo sandwich" in a hurry.
A friend of mine down the road was born in Acapulco, and married a Cherokee woman up here; his son is thus half-Mexican and half-Cherokee. That son ate chili with us exactly once, and then pleaded that he was full and wanted to take the rest home. He offered it to his father, who declared that it was too hot to eat; my wife likes to point out that I'd made that batch mild because she had a stomach bug.
* She's also wrong. The heat of the chile isn't in the seeds, and isn't removed if you remove the seeds. Usually if you're going to be patronizing on purpose, it's a good idea to make sure you know what you're talking about.
** There's not a universal standard on the spelling. Around here we use "chili" for the meat stew made with peppers we call "chiles," which is eaten whether or not the weather is "chilly." It's actually good in hot weather, as it makes you sweat, another reason that spicy food has long been popular in the South -- it's cooling.
UPDATE:
*** I assumed it was a girl because of the story being about a boyfriend, but I forgot how different San Francisco’s community standards are from the ones we have here.
UPDATE:
Back on the “part of this stereotype is justified” hand, I found this cookbook on the “Free! please take it!” shelf of a used bookstore in Waynesville, North Carolina. Apparently there was limited interest. That is too bad! It’s a fantastic cookbook that has great stuff from around the world. I recommend it highly.
High Angle Training in Paradise Gorge
I imagine Mike G. knows of Paradise Falls and its attendant gorge. There are innumerable waterfalls around this part of western North Carolina, but this is one of the most dangerous for several structural reasons. It's also very popular among risk-seeking college kids who obey no safety precautions whatsoever, drink and smoke dope, and sometimes try to leap from the top of the falls to the pool below (not always successfully).
Naturally, therefore, we train there regularly and operate there regularly as well. Tonight a high-angle team came into the district for a training exercise, which we were invited to join.
What Could Go Wrong?
The recent movie Oppenheimer pointed out that they set off the Trinity test bomb knowing that their calculations showed a non-zero chance it would destroy the atmosphere and kill all life on Earth. Turns out, that wasn't the craziest idea that came out of the Cold War.
The idea of Project Retro was simple: 1,000 huge rockets, normally used to launch nuclear weapons and spacecraft, would generate so much thrust that Earth’s rotation would briefly pause.This would mean that Soviet nuclear missiles would overshoot the missile bases they were aimed at.
That's true, it would have meant that if it were technically feasible. But also...
[T]here were several flaws in the plan, Ellsberg realized.The ‘angular momentum’ of rocks, air and water on Earth’s surface would mean that everything on the planet would continue moving sideways at enormous speed (at the equator, the speed of Earth’s rotation is just over 1,000mph....'An awful lot of stuff would be flying through the air. Everything, in fact, that wasn't nailed down, and most of what was as well, would be gone with the wind, which would itself be flying at super-hurricane force everywhere at once.’Ellsberg explained that cities on the coasts would be wiped out by huge tsunamis, and the apocalypse unleashed by Project Retro would, ironically, be as bad as anything that thermonuclear weapons could do to our planet.Ellsberg wrote: ‘The Minuteman launch control officers, safe in their capsules deep underground, would have even less reason than in the foreseeable conditions of nuclear war either to launch their missiles or to come above ground, since there would be nothing left to destroy on the surface of the Soviet Union, or the United States, or anywhere.‘All structures would have collapsed, with the rubble, along with all the people joining the wind and the water in their horizontal movement across the face of the earth, into space.’
Fortunately, it wouldn't have worked anyway. You'd need a lot more than a thousand rockets to stop the earth.
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