That ship has sailed, I believe.
More on Communication in an Emergency
A couple of weeks ago I posted my thoughts about various means of communication in an emergency. Before that, I had posted about Thomas Witherspoon, a ham radio operator in Swannanoa, NC, whose mountain community was caught in Hurricane Helene.
Witherspoon has a new post up where he discusses his own community's plan to prepare for communication in future emergencies. He discusses some options I did not, including Meshtastic and PLMRS, and explains why his community settled on GMRS. He explains it all better than I can, so check it out over there if you're interested.
He has also continued posting on the recovery there and has one link that will take you to all of his recovery posts.
In the comments in my original post, Janet (who knows a lot more about this than I do) said in the next few years our normal cell phones will be capable of satellite communication, so all of this will be easier when that rolls out. Until then, I still think satellite communications are best if you can afford it, and GMRS is probably the best cheap radio option when the cell phones are down, unless you want to study for and take the ham test, and maybe even then depending on where you live. For comparison, the Garmin InReach is about $400 with a $15 / month subscription. Residential Starlink is $349 for the equipment and $120 / month subscription. GMRS handheld radios start at $15-20 each and require a $35 license (but do not require a test) renewable every 10 years.
If you want to look for GMRS repeaters to see what's around you, you can go to https://mygmrs.com/.
If you want to look for ham radio repeaters, check out https://repeaterbook.com/.
All of that said, the ham radio technician license is pretty easy. If you are at all interested, it's worth getting the license and trying it out. If you would like recommendations about how to study for it or have questions about it, feel free to ask in the comments.
Outlawed Tunes on Outlawed Pipes
I’m happy with my birthday present. Today I mounted Cobra pipes on it.
These pipes are illegal except for racetrack use in California, but here in the mountains of Western North Carolina the opinions of California legislators are a source of great humor.
A Brutal Ad
This ad is oddly framed, because it's mostly a return to Tulsi Gabbard's initial criticism of Harris: that she was evil as proven by her actions as a prosecutor. That's what most of the ad is about, and most of the voices you hear are female: her own, or those of a woman whose life she ruined or a daughter of a mother whose life she ruined.
Why, then, does the ad begin and end framed as a masculine complaint against Harris? It's a three minute ad, but only the first 15 seconds and the last seventeen seconds are about the frame. Discarding the frame entirely, the ad remains devastating and compelling -- in her own words she tells you what her intentions are, and her victims spell out what it meant to them that she behaved as a prosecutor exactly the way she says she did.
"As men and protectors of women and children," it closes, "you are simply a risk we are not willing to take."
Sisters
The work continues.
When Father Richard Sutter, a former U.S. Army Airborne Ranger Infantry Officer, summoned a handful of his strong-backed St. Gabriel Catholic Church parishioners for what he called a recon mission to Swannanoa, North Carolina, a community devastated by Hurricane Helene, we did not hesitate.Once there, we were surprised to learn that the earlier-arriving boots on the ground were not boots at all, but sandals, and small ones at that. Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity were already at St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church, our designated rally point, by the time we gents had arrived in town.
I was aware of the Missionaries of Charity and their service to the poorest of the poor. But I’d never seen them in action, and certainly never expected to do so two hours from my home. The strength of the hurricane notwithstanding, theirs was a masterclass display of the most powerful force in the universe: love.
The author doesn’t intend this as a comment on gender or gender roles, but it’s interesting to see that come out in a natural way. The important thing, though, is the work of helping people.
UPDATE: A video from the NC DOT showing work they're doing to 'put the river back so we'll have a place to rebuild the road.'
Satire/serious?
Powerline's Week in Pictures featured this headline, which I assumed was a joke: "New Study Reveals That People Who Make Good Decisions Have an Unfair Advantage." No, it's a real article title, but I will say that the point is not necessarily that making good decisions is itself an unfair advantage. The authors appear to be arguing that white supremacy unfairly endows the wrong kind of people with a magical power of making good decisions, and in that sense the healthy results of the good decisions are an unearned benefit. The argument still gets a high Lame-O-Meter rating from yours truly, but it's not quite as absurd as the headline implied.Here's the crux:
[T]hose who make good decisions tend to enter a virtuous cycle: good decisions lead to better outcomes, which in turn provide more opportunities and resources to make even better decisions in the future. This compounding effect also leverages white supremacy to result in an ever widening gap between those who make consistently good choices and those who do not.The idea is that people make bad decisions because they lack the opportunities and resources to make good ones. One example might be starting a savings account early in life and benefiting from the power of compound interest.I'm afraid the argument leaves me unmoved. Granted, the more money you have in youth, the easier it would seem to be to set some of it aside as savings. Honestly, though, it's not a pattern I've ever detected in real life. Whether people live within their income appears to be remarkably untethered to whatever their income happens to be. Some people are dirt poor and manage to make ends meet and set aside money for a rainy day; my Depression-Era parents were a good example. Others are rich as Croesus and consistently overspend. It's not a question of how much you earn but of your ability to see reality clearly and control your own impulses: if you can't afford it, you can't afford it, no matter what you think you deserve to be able to afford.
World War... VII?
Since people stopped keeping track after II, it's hard to say how many more such conflicts have occurred; the GWOT was supposed to have been IV, as I recall from twenty years ago. The current conflict is at least six.
That the current conflict is a world war became crystal clear this week when the WSJ printed proof that Russia has been providing targeting solutions to the Houthis. Such solutions have been used for attacks on shipping, allowing the almost-closing of the Red Sea global supply route. The Houthis have been presented as chiefly an Iranian proxy, and indeed they are also that; but they have also been carrying on a Russian effort to punish the rest of the world for supporting the war in Ukraine.
And indeed, such a move by Russia is entirely fair play within the rules (such as they are) of warfighting. It isn't even aggression, but reprisal: the United States has been providing targeting solutions to Ukraine that have allowed damaging attacks on ships offshore (and many other targets). The United States and NATO countries have also been providing weapons to Ukraine, though these come with restrictions on just how far the strikes with those weapons are allowed to penetrate.
We could see an end to this war starting this week, if everything goes right. As this podcast linked by AVI notes, the Iranian ballistic missile attacks on Israel demonstrated a capacity to cause damage that Israel cannot prevent even with US efforts. Last night's strikes by Israeli F-35s demonstrated a parallel capacity that Iran cannot stop. Both parties stopped short of damaging their opponents' energy sector -- Israel has only a handful of major power plants; Iran's oil and gas fields, its shipping ports, and also its nuclear technology facilities are likewise vulnerable. Both sides now know their opponent can hurt them fatally if it decides to do so; both sides also know that doing so will not disable the enemy's reprisal blow, as the time delay between suffering the damage and dying will not prevent the counterstrike from occurring. They are both heavily incentivized to stop fighting, according to the once-doubtful logic of Mutually Assured Destruction.
Especially if the election here brings about a regime that will seek peace in Ukraine on terms at least minimally acceptable to Russia, the closing of that theater will also reduce pressure on the Middle East. The Houthi could lose their capability to effectively close the Red Sea; weapons shipments to Hamas and Hezbollah could be reduced; the proxies themselves are badly degraded already. The war could close with minimal Russian gains in Ukraine balanced by massive strategic losses in manpower and equipment, with Iran's proxy war network exhausted for years, and Israel relatively secure but newly chastened about its ability to escalate without consequences.
Peace is at hand. Maybe; bad decisions by anyone could tip the scales towards another round of escalation instead. That could be ruinous as only World Wars can be, especially since the China/Taiwan theater hasn't tipped into action yet. One cannot hope in the wisdom of elected officials, nor in the unelected ones; but perhaps we might hope, at least, that their sensitivity to pain will suffice.
Voices of sanity
Mark Halperin has been getting good press today. I found this YouTube broadcast featuring Mr. Halperin and a campaign pro from each party, with time set aside for viewers' questions. There are annoying signal glitches with one of the pros, but the information that gets through is interesting and delivered civilly. Around the 29:00 mark, the public comments give some excellent insight into what motivates people to choose a candidate. The first speaker is a libertarian who is disenchanted with the Democratic party, sat out the last two presidential elections, and now has concluded she must vote for Trump. The next speaker is a strident Harris supporter who can't articulate what's good about Harris and is obsessed with outrage over Trump. Halperin works hard to keep the discussions on track, very gently attempting to steer the conversation back to particulars rather than extended venting.The dominant concern is that Harris will not reveal her policy.I'm seeing a lot of commentators begin to emphasize the need to prepare for one's candidate to lose next month, no matter which candidate each of us supports.
Levers of power
I probably was drawn to this Zachary Faria piece because I am angry with Biden and the party that propped him up before they ditched him in order to position his even worse VP for success. But it's also interesting as an illustration of the sources of true power. No doubt the office of the President is a formidable tool, but the human being parked there still has to be able to use the tool in order to get any sizeable fraction of his country, or the wider world, to jump when he says "frog." Devastating tyrants like Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot can't do spectacular damage without plugging into a widespread and elaborate social system that contains many individuals who are willing, for whatever reasons and to various degrees, to go along.
“No one is listening to [Biden] anymore, and his words have little power and less reach.” It was clear since he dropped out of the race that Biden was going to be an absentee president, but to have people who work for him admit that now “no one is listening to him” is a damning indictment of Biden when he is still the one ostensibly in charge of the executive branch for another three months.
This is what will cement Biden’s legacy as a failure. Biden spent three years ruining everything he touched: making inflation worse, botching the withdrawal from Afghanistan, watching wars break out in Ukraine and Gaza when he inherited a peaceful global situation, and running moral interference for terrorists while antisemites swarmed college campuses. There is not one aspect of Biden’s presidency that could be described as successful.Meanwhile, the candidate I hope is going to blow him out of the water in a few days is literally Hitler, according to an unimpeachable source who discovered this five years, kept working for him afterwards until he was fired, then stayed quiet until a couple of weeks before the election. So we're definitely not to conclude that we're simply being lied to 24/7 and should decline to be alarmed or even interested in the next piece of garbage that is served up breathlessly to us.On a lighter note,
When he left McDonald’s, [Trump] promised, if elected, to fix the ice cream machine and make Taco Bell pay for it.
Curses Foiled Again
Red State reports on Reddit witches:
In the subreddit "r/WitchesVsPatriarchy," user "feelmycocobeats" claims that witches have been mentioning that doing spells "directly against tRump are not as effective as we might hope as he seems to have some kind of protection around him."The user then begins to strategize about spell casting, saying a "freezer spell against Project 2025 would likely be useful," but even if what she was suggesting was actually based in reality, it wouldn't matter because Project 2025 isn't Trump's, it's the Heritage Foundation's plan. Trump's plan is Agenda 47.The user then suggested "uplifting" spells to help Kamala Harris and the Democrats.
This is apparently an ongoing thing. There are news articles at least from 2017 and 2020 about this.
Hanging in there
My friend's grandson, the micro-preemie born at something like 23 weeks, is still doing pretty well for a micro-preemie. His weight gain stalled, but now he's begun to gain again. Although he's still tiny, not quite 2 pounds, we try to remember that he wasn't due to be born until December. His lung function has been surprisingly good from the start.
'The Remarkable Redneck Airforce of Asheville'
Run out of the Harley-Davidson shop, no less.
The relief effort after Hurricane Helene is powered by private citizens, and volunteers have discovered that it's better to ask forgiveness than permission.At a Harley-Davidson dealership in Appalachia, one expects to encounter the occasional roar of some serious horsepower.Less expected is the sight that has accompanied that sound in Swannanoa, North Carolina, for the past three weeks: helicopters, many of them privately owned and operated, launching and landing from a makeshift helipad in the backyard of the local hog shop. According to the men who organized this private relief effort in the wake of devastating floods unleashed by the remnants of Hurricane Helene, more than a million pounds of goods—food, heavy equipment to clear roads, medical gear, blankets, heaters, tents, you name it—have been flown from here to dots all over the map of western North Carolina."We're not the government, and we're here to help," says one of the two men standing by the makeshift gate—a pair of orange traffic drums—that controls access to and from the Harley-Davidson dealership's parking lot and the piles of donated items neatly organized within it. "We can do it quicker, we can do it efficiently, and we genuinely just want to help our neighbors." He identifies himself only by his first name and later asks that I don't use even that. It's an understandable request, as what he's doing is probably not, strictly speaking, totally legal.
From Reason magazine, the story of bikers and helicopter pilots and former Green Berets, churchgoers and the 101st Airborne falling in on and taking orders from civilian volunteers who know better where they're needed.
It's everything you ever wanted to believe about America, and it's really true. Read the whole thing.
Cave Emptori
Long-time Milblogger CDR Salamander has a reminder for anyone who might think about bothering now-balding Generation X gentlemen shopping at Home Depot.
Addendum on Eating
Not only do you need to eat living things, it turns out that your brain needs you to eat meat. Refusing to do so is possible, just as refusing to eat at all is possible; but either entails harm to one's self instead, on a greater or lesser basis.
The Big Leak
Probably the biggest surprise in the story about the US intelligence community leaking classified data on Israel's attack plans is how non-surprising it is. Look at the classification markings on the document:
Those of you with the right kind of experience will know what that means; those of you with very good memories will remember "TK" from Hillary Clinton's classified email scandal. In fact I'll reproduce that post's bit on classification markings because almost all of them appear here as well.
TOP SECRET is information whose release could cause "exceptionally grave damage to the national security." No one may access this information who has not been through the very thorough background investigation, and even then you must demonstrate need to know.SI means "Special Intelligence," and is a subset of SCI, or "Sensitive Compartmentalized Information." This information is tightly controlled, so that not only do you need to have need to know, you must have been properly read into the specific program from which the information comes.TK is "Talent Keyhole," which governs our best aerial and satellite reconnaissance. It is always SCI information, and is extremely sensitive because it gives enemies a sense of exactly how good our reconnaissance technology has become.NOFORN means "not releasable to foreign nationals." This caveat is discouraged because "NOFORN" means not the British, not the Canadians, not the Australians, not New Zealand. You can mark the data to be shared with the other Anglosphere powers, our very closest allies, with the caveat "FIVE EYES," or "FVEY". We have a treaty with them that governs the controls of sensitive signals intelligence. If the Inspector General has determined this item was properly marked NOFORN, it means that the information was so sensitive that we shouldn't share it with the British or the Australians in spite of that treaty.
RSEN means information that is restricted due to special sensitivity, requiring specialized handling methods (which, needless to say, do not include dumping it into social media). FG ISR means 'foreign government intelligence/surveillance/reconnaissance,' which is mostly a warning that some of the data is coming from allies sharing things with us rather than something we produced ourselves.
Note that the overall report is classified NOFORN even though most of the quotes are releasable FVEY, but if you look through the document you can see that some of it is only releasable to Great Britain (GBR), and a couple of paragraphs are not releasable even to them (NF). There is likely some collection method for that paragraph that we aren't comfortable even letting Great Britain know that we have; also, one kind of missile being discussed isn't even in the open sources as a thing that exists ("Golden Horizon"). The media reports about this are only guessing what is being discussed -- that's how secret these documents are meant to be.
Yet who can be surprised that there are people within the US government, including the intelligence community, who would leak such information if they thought it might hamper Israel? Clearly the ruling party includes many who are outright opposed to Israel, not just to Israel's war; some of their electoral difficulties arise from an internal dispute over what should be done about all this.
By the way, note well Mr. Schindler's explanation of who is responsible for investigating this leak:
Whether the Biden-Harris administration possesses the political will to let the counterspies do their job is another matter. In normal times, such a high-profile investigation, touching multiple agencies, would be coordinated by the National Security Council, specifically by the NSC’s director for intelligence programs. That big job is currently held by Maher Bitar, who in his position has access to every IC secret. He is no hardliner towards Tehran. When he was a student at Georgetown University, Bitar held a leadership position with Students for Justice in Palestine, a radical group that’s an apologist for HAMAS (itself an Iranian proxy) which has coordinated anti-Israeli protests at campuses nationwide during the Gaza War.
Emphasis added.
One can be opposed to Israel without being in any way disloyal to the United States, of course; one might even be a former leader of a Hamas-aligned student group without being a traitor to the United States (although there are limits on how far one can go with such alignment without breaking criminal laws, since Hamas is a designated foreign terrorist organization).
Leaking American secrets, however, is inherently disloyal unless the secrets themselves show the government betraying its duty to the American people -- in that case only, good citizenship could include leaking secrets so that the public can know and take action to repair the matter, as the citizens and not the government are the proper sovereigns of the United States. Here, where the leak endangers American collection methods that were merely being used to inform ourselves internally about what Israel is up to, there's no such excuse.
Yet one has to wonder, as Mr. Schindler puts it, whether there will be 'the will' to prosecute this matter as it deserves.
Abortion as The Fundamental Freedom
What constitutes a 'fundamental freedom'? That question struck me when reading this account of a query about whether or not to provide a religious exemption in abortion laws, e.g. one that would allow a surgeon to refuse to perform one for religious reasons. (Hat tip: D29)
NBC News Senior Washington Correspondent Hallie Jackson asked, “So, is a question of pragmatism then, what concessions would be on the table, religious exemptions, for example, is that something that you would consider if the Republicans control Congress?”Harris answered, “I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body.”
I think we may be approaching the point at which abortion is the only 'fundamental freedom' recognized by the one side of the debate: freedom of religion, for example, isn't 'fundamental' if it always and everywhere must give way to this other freedom.
Yet if one of the things that one might make decisions about doing with one's own body is having an abortion, another such thing is performing an abortion. Surely if the fundamental freedom is the right to make decisions about one's own body, it is just as fundamental to will -- for any reason -- that your body not be involved in killing* (whether a fetus, a child, or anyone at all).
Another candidate for 'fundamental freedom' might be the freedom not to be forced to do such things against one's will and/or conscience. That seems inadmissable even if it's not religious, here: this sort of thing is why I say that the only 'fundamental' freedom must be abortion, because it not only mustn't be restricted by law, it mustn't admit of (say) some physician having the freedom not to participate.
(Or else our physician must exercise that freedom very early, as for example by not choosing to become a physician but pursuing a different line of work. This is similar to how women's 'freedom of choice' here entails unrestricted abortion rights, but men's 'freedom of choice' entails only the right to choose not to have sex that might lead to a pregnancy in the first place -- and this from the party of equality.)
It is striking that this 'fundamental freedom' actually entails a power to compel others to be unfree in exactly the same way. That kind of logical contradiction in the will would offend Kant; if 'the maxim that could be willed as a universal law' is 'everyone should be free to make decisions about his/her own body' then the maxim entails a contradiction, and is thus fundamentally immoral on his model of ethics. Of course, Kant was already against abortion, so perhaps that's not very telling.**
Still, it is noteworthy that the 'fundamental' freedom they have adopted is one that requires other people to be unfree. But perhaps that too is nothing new: after all, abortion necessarily entails removing the child's freedom to make any decisions about what to do with his or her body.
* In fact this turns out to be physically impossible to universalize. One cannot avoid killing something with one's body: one has to eat, for example, and only living things can provide the advanced carbon chains like proteins that we need to survive. One could choose not to eat, but then one is still using one's body to kill something, i.e., one's self. A fact of the reality we inhabit is that killing is unavoidable, and one is simply making decisions about what to kill rather than whether to do so. You can certainly choose not to kill other human beings, but you cannot choose not to kill.
To continue with Kant, for example, he treats ethical maxims that cannot be universalized as inherently immoral because they are out of order with reason: this would be one of the lesser immoralities, one that cannot be universalized because of a practical fact rather than because logic itself entails a contradiction. Still, taken seriously this fact makes pacifism immoral on Kantian terms (and indeed Kant is pretty heavily in favor of killing, as long as the state does it according to its laws, as he explores at length in the Doctrine of Right of his Metaphysics of Morals).
On a natural theological approach, since God made the world and its fundamental laws, a religious reading of this problem strongly suggests that God wants us to kill -- and indeed, this is also supported in scripture in all the major monotheistic religions, which give instructions about how and what to kill and eat. Christianity has the scripture in which those sorts of rules are set aside as a dispensation, but that doesn't lead to a more general pacifism from the Prince of Peace, but a wider permission to kill and to eat.
This is probably a bigger and more interesting problem than the one that was actually today's topic.
** Abortion and infanticide he condemns outright and absolutely, but he does suggest that in the case of the unborn child it is an immoral act that no one has a right to punish: the child was not yet a member of any legal community, on his conception, so no legal community could punish its murder. That is not obviously logical to me, but he clearly thought that whether 'personhood' or 'humanity' started at conception, 'membership in a polity' began at birth.
Hay for My Horses
Smoky Mountain News reports on another massive volunteer effort to help with hurricane relief. An underappreciated aspect of the storm is that it upset the food crops of livestock, and not just in the short term: the disruptions will be felt for at least a year. A livestock yard in Haywood has become another aid distribution center, this time for the beasts.
Although the pens normally used to hold animals awaiting their run in the sales arena haven’t held much livestock in the weeks following the flood, they are packed with tons upon tons of all kinds of feed. And that’s in addition to the dozens of round bales and hundreds of square bales of hay at the south side of the building.The whole thing morphed several times as it grew, and what started as an effort to provide for people who couldn’t provide for their livestock in the wake of the storm now coordinated deliveries of medication and oxygen, tents and sleeping bags, clothes and food.... In this case, because of the magnitude of the disaster and the large area affected, nonprofits such as Fleet of Angels and The Sanctuary at Red Bull Run took note of the operation at the WNC Regional Livestock center and started routing donations there.
Read the full report for more, including interviews with additional American volunteer aid groups, donors, and workers at the livestock center. If you're in a position to assist, you could contact those groups: there's a list in the article of the most current needs as of time of print. You can also follow this link if you want to try to help online.
I've mentioned before that Smoky Mountain News is a good outfit as journalism goes, and this article shows what I like about them. It's workmanlike reporting, getting out information that is informative and also useful to those who want to help. To paraphrase Beorn, if all journalists could tell as good a tale, they would find me more welcoming.
The Redcoats are Coming
Foreign election interference “for many years” confirmed, on behalf of the Democratic Party.
Assisted Suicide #5 Canadian Death Cause
This study doesn't capture the whole truth, because it doesn't consider abortion. In the United States, abortion is the leading cause of death of Americans assuming that unborn Americans count as Americans. It kills more Americans than cancer or heart disease; some years, more than both together. I'll bet that's true in Canada, too.
It's amazing how slippery this slope is: allowing people to kill other people they find problematic is always hugely popular.
Democracy in Action in Georgia
In my old 11th Congressional District, where I lived for several years, the Democratic Party elected a candidate in a democratic primary who has some conservative values. They are now running a write-in campaign against their own candidate in response.
The thing is, you couldn't possibly win the 11th District without some conservative values. It includes some of the wealthy northern suburbs of Atlanta, where all the conservatives moved in the 70s-90s, and stretched well up into the north Georgia mountains (the part I have lived in being there). No candidate without such values stands a chance. So the small-d democratic primary process worked: it identified the Democratic candidate most likely to win in a very conservative district.
There's very little evidence of faith in small-d democracy left in the Democratic Party, I fear.
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