Honesty in Journalism
Cowboy State Daily: “Shooting Drones is Illegal, But a Shotgun Would Work Best”
Magic & the German Shepherd Dog
Tonight Conan found two of his tennis balls in the basement, where they had fallen down the stairs and become lost. I picked each one up in turn and threw it up the stairs, to the main floor. Each time he thought I had thrown it across the basement, and went and searched the other side laboriously.
Then, after I finished lifting weights, we went back upstairs where he found the balls. He grabbed one and was running around showing it to everyone as if to say, “Daddy is a wizard! He threw this ball in the basement, and it reappeared on the main floor! Look! Wizard!”
A Poem by Czeslaw Milosz, Translated By Czeslaw Milosz & Robert Pinsky
The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame.
Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.
I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.
But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own—but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.
The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious.
So darned unfair
For Schadenfreude, it's hard to beat about 90% of the election post-mortems in the last 5-6 weeks, but this Salon piece is a truly virtuoso performance in Looking Glass world analysis. Apparently Trump unfairly skunked the Democrats by sticking to big-picture themes and speaking about them consistently to national audiences. At the same time, he employed a "divide-and-conquer strategy while simultaneously building a multiethnic MAGA coalition." Harris, for her part, micro-targeted to splinter groups, which was apparently better because it had more details.On the other hand, Trump unfairly micro-targeted those same splinter groups with ads that purported to praise Harris's position on just the issue each group would hate. He targeted Muslims with her pro-Israel positions and Jews with her anti-Israel ones, or alarmed oilfield voters with her threatened ban on fracking, which she didn't even mention while she was campaigning this time! Evidently the ads implied they were from Harris fellow-travelers if not the Harris campaign itself, which research shows makes voters more receptive, again very unfair. It seems Harris's splinter groups were bored by her targeted message, assuming they believed a word of it, while the splinter targets of the Trump effort were galvanized by video evidence of her actual messages over time, which they totally believed.Salon quotes the NYT's lament that people don't seem to believe experts any more, and they couldn't hear Harris's message of joy/brat/whatever because they were so angry about feeling broke. Evidently nothing can be done to improve this state of affairs except for Democrats to stop playing so nice and try to dominate the culture that is upstream from politics, which they've never tried before and certainly didn't succeed at for decades by capturing most institutions from the press to the justice system to public schools to universities.
Bee Stings
Running Low On Ideas, God Makes Oklahoma
It's a fair cop, though the southeastern and southwestern corners of the state as well as the panhandle have bits of interesting topography. Really, though, is there any interesting topography from Galveston, TX, on up through Kansas?
However, an even worse heresy has recently arisen: Die Hard is a Harry Potter movie!
Updates
"OTTAWA — Former Rightful-President Hillary Clinton has been awarded an honorary medical license by the Canadian Minister of Health due to her decades of experience providing dignified euthanasia services to men and women in America."
(It's actually worth the half minute it takes to read the whole article.)
"The pardon will reportedly cover any crimes that Sauron may have committed during the entirety of the Second Age of Middle Earth."
Home for the Holidays
Country Cooking at the VFD
I arrived home last night just in time for — literally within an hour of — the Volunteer Fire Department’s Christmas party. It’s always fairly early in Advent so as to preserve the actuality of Christmas for the family: after all, the Fire/Rescue service takes members away from their families often enough throughout the year.
Especially this year! We are grateful and fortunate to have come through so much so well.
The food at this feast reminds me so much of my childhood, when this kind of ‘country cooking’ was almost the only thing available even in local restaurants. Now, it’s hard to find. Just a simple meatloaf, fried chicken, potatoes with gravy, green beans (not pictured), rolls, and a selection of dump cakes and fruit cobblers for dessert. Water, tea or soda to drink, like the dry South in which I grew up. My wedding was dry: Georgia on a Sunday in the old days always was, except perhaps in Atlanta.
It’s good to be home.
UPDATE: I am reminded of this joke about Appalachian Southern cooking.
A Marian Carol
I came across this link on Twitter, and it leads to a post not just presenting the video, but the history, language, and musical evolution of the carol. Quite interesting. Reading that I came to suspect that the term for young ladies in the UK in the 60s- "bird"- may not have to do with the animals, but rather with a Middle English term (berde) that was resurrected with a modern spelling and understanding. Turns out that may not be exactly the case, but perhaps there's a relationship there regardless. Turns out she did a whole thread of carols, but I've not had time to go through them all yet. Something to help get you in the spirit of Advent.
Mordor Ascendant
Back in the District for three nights. With the expected transition coming in days, the bureaucracy is off the chain. Crazy times.
Assateague
A good day spent with wild horses (or feral ponies, depending upon whom you ask).
The horses are pretty calm, as long as you treat them with proper respect.
The island itself is very beautiful.
The Heart of a Bull
Peruvian cuisine tonight. The waitress carefully explained to me, after I ordered it, that it would be the actual heart of an animal. It was delicious.
The Great Eggnog Riot at West Point
Come for the riot-worthy recipe, stay for the story of Cadet Jefferson Davis's eggnog rebellion.
The lightbulb comes back on
A crazy thought from disappointed Democrats: maybe the Constitution has some answers for how to rein in government when we find ourselves in a minority. It turns out there's federalism, separation of powers, and all kinds of stuff we might want to look into.
Syria
A friend writes:
Events are moving quickly in Syria after Hezbollah was crushed. The Turkish terrorists have taken Hama, the Iraqi parliament has authorized troops to enter Syria, and Russia has pulled its fleet from Tartus. Because Turkey has closed the Bosporus to them, the Russians will have to sail to northwest Russia to reach a friendly port. What a mess. I blame Israel ;-).
Travels Before Yule
I’m making a final swing for business before settling down to winter on the mountain. I’ll be on the road until the 13th. Posting may be light.
What I been sayin'
Several reports of the surprising-but-not-surprising Hunter Biden pardon have mentioned that Hunter will no longer be able to plead the Fifth if called to testify in future probes of corruption on the part of his family, especially his father Joe and his uncle Jim. What that observation immediately suggested to me was that Hunter will be exposed to contempt charges if he does not testify and perjury charges if he does--assuming he won't simply tell the truth, a possibility I discount for the present. Jonathan Turley makes the same point in today's Hill article.Strangely enough, Still-Sort-of-President Biden could have avoided this trap by commuting Hunter's sentence instead of pardoning him. That was the approach followed by President Bush in the conviction of Scooter Libby. President Bush reportedly felt it was wrong to pardon a crime he actually believed had been committed, but it was reasonable to commute the sentence in light of the unfair and persecutory nature of the prosecution. That ostensibly is also Biden's explanation for the pardon.Like many, I look forward to pardons for the J6 participants, or commutation to time served at the very least, for any as to whom there may be credible evidence of violence. They've all already experienced more punishment than any rioters I can think of for the 2020-2022 period. Ditto for anyone convicted of standing around outside an abortion clinic praying.
Experimental Archeology and Notre Dame Cathedral
In 1997 an experimental archeology project was begun near Treigny, France. The project was to build a new castle, Guédelon Castle, using only the materials and methods available in the 13th century, in order to learn more about how castles were built. It took 25 years and involved hundreds of craftsmen, bringing about whole new generations of masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, etc., who had years of experience in medieval building methods. In 2019 Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burned down and many of these craftsmen went to work on the rebuilding project.
Wikipedia article explaining the castle project -- lots of pics
Guardian article on the Guédelon Castle craftsmen going to work on Notre Dame
For anyone who is interested in 13th century castle building, I can't recommend the five episodes of the BBC series Secrets of the Castle highly enough. It seems to be available for free on YouTube. (That said, if you already know a great deal about the topic, the series was made for a popular audience and may not be all that exciting.)
Here is the Guédelon Castle website, especially useful if you plan to visit.
Women in Power
As a student of Medieval history I have read a vast number of papers by other students of such history. As the academy has grown more and more heavily female, the proportion of papers about Medieval history that are feminist has waxed larger and larger. Young women who go to college and then grad school are very likely to be feminists, and they want to study women and power-struggle issues because that's what they're interested in anyway. As a consequence, I have read variations of the following paper probably thousands of times:
As a feminist historian, I study the ways in which women were able to pursue and achieve their goals in spite of the restrictive patriarchy of the Middle Ages. In my study of X, I examined the way that she/they were able to achieve a remarkable degree of success in pursuing her/their goals. Even more surprisingly, given the strident patriarchy of the era, I found that her/their chief allies were often the men in her/their lives rather than other women.
I have read this paper many, many times -- about individual women or groups, across social classes whether nobility in Ireland or criminals in France, laity or nuns or abbesses, bakers and brewers and housewives. The conclusion of their research always comes as a surprise, an exception to the reality they assume held sway.
Except it's not an exception; all these papers find the same things, everywhere they look. Just because I have read it so often, I have long been waiting for the breakout female historian who will similarly read such papers and come to question the assumptions they brought to their initial work. Maybe we've been sold a bill of goods about how men and women related in the Middle Ages, as we were about the idea that medieval people thought the world was flat. At one time everyone 'knew' that was true, but it just wasn't the case.
The woman who makes this breakthrough -- and it will have to be a woman, because a man making that argument would never get anywhere, especially not in academia -- will one day be recognized as a historian of the first water. She will overturn the whole field of Medieval studies by showing that some of its basic assumptions are false. She will also improve her contemporary world, both by speaking the truth, but also by improving the relationship between educated men and women who are now taught to view each other as oppositional classes of beings.
While we aren't all the way there yet, historian Erika Graham-Goering has taken us a major step further. She studies especially the area of France around the early period of the Hundred Years War, sort of the height of High Medieval feudalism. What she found ought to be astonishing: she found that women held exactly as large a proportion of positions of power in Medieval France as they do today -- and more than they did after the modern revolution in France.
When historian Erika Graham-Goering checked the number of women who were in power worldwide five years ago, she was surprised. The proportion was the same as it was in France in the 14th century: one in five.
Graham-Goering’s area of expertise is power, who held it, and how it was exercised in the late Middle Ages....
Graham-Goering focuses on how society was organised. An important finding is that the exercise of power was much less authoritarian and more productive than the impression created in later times. It was about finding practical solutions to situations that arose in the moment....
“Women were somewhat more vulnerable to coups, but nonetheless, one in five of those in power were women. When Jeanne married, she remained the legitimate owner of the land.”Noblemen and women performed many of the same leadership tasks, although few women went to war. An important exception here is Joan of Arc (1412–1431), now a saint in the Catholic Church. For a period during the Hundred Years’ War, she led the French army in the war against England.“It’s a thought-provoking fact that women lost power after the French Revolution and the introduction of democracy. They could neither be elected nor vote themselves. Whereas when positions were inherited, they actually had a reasonably good chance of being at the top of the hierarchy and in power,” Graham-Goering concludes.
The rise of science in the early modern period has a similar feature: people like to think that history is the story of progress, so that the rise of science should align with a greater acceptance of women and an end to superstitions like witch-burning. In fact, we invented science when we started burning witches. The rise of science and superstition went hand in hand, accompanied with a rise in cultural misogyny.
By the way, in the US Congress it's a about one-in-four: 25 Senators plus the Vice President as a tiebreaker, 127 of 435 in the House. The fact that I didn't know that without looking it up suggests that we don't really view it as that big a deal; I know how many Republicans and Democrats there are in the Senate without having to look, for example. Among governors, it'll be 13 of 50. It's interesting that these very different times and places have settled on about the same ratio, in spite of having completely different methods of selection. That might also be worth studying, but it is not properly a question for historians.
"Rebels" Seize Aleppo
Yesterday a surprise offensive led to the fall of Aleppo, Syria's largest city. The most important question to ask yourself when trying to understand the various wars in the Middle East is, "Whose proxies are these?" The struggle for dominance and control in the region is led by different factions, and if a surprise offensive happens it means that one of them has provided clandestine support at sufficient scale to enable a breakout.
Let's see how the NY Times covers this to help its readers understand what is going on in Syria.
Headline: "Rebels Seize Control over most of Syria's Largest City."Subhead: "The rapid advance on Aleppo came just four days into a surprise opposition offensive that is the most intense escalation in years in the civil war."First paragraph: "Rebels had seized..."Second paragraph: "...antigovernment rebels..."Third paragraph: "...some rebels..."Fourth paragraph: "...surprise rebel offensive..."
By the fifth paragraph, we finally get a hint of whose side these 'antigovernment rebels' might be on, at least in the negative:
"The timing of the assault suggested that the rebels could be exploiting weaknesses across an alliance linking Iran to the militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as the Assad regime in Syria and others."
So, they're not Iranian proxies. But who are they?
Sixth paragraph: "...well-armed rebel fighters... opposition forces..."
Seventh & Eighth paragraphs: "...rebels..."
Finally, in the ninth paragraph we learn that the Times knew all along who it was, and just didn't want to tell us:
"Within hours from Friday into Saturday, Syrian government soldiers, security forces and police officers fled the city, according to the war monitoring group. They were replaced by the Islamist and Turkish-backed rebels sweeping through on foot, motorbikes or on trucks mounted with machine guns."
Oh. They're Turkish and Muslim Brotherhood forces. Erdogan, who has been aligned with and backed the Muslim Brotherhood across the region, is making a play to take advantage of the recent crippling of Hezbollah by Israel to strengthen his power versus Iran. This is part of the long-running Sunni-Shia competition to dominate the Middle East, and Erdogan's personal quest to restore Turkey to the leadership position of the Islamic world. The Ottoman Turks held that position (and the title of 'caliph' of the 'caliphate,' which the Brotherhood exists to try and restore) for centuries; and while the oil and gas wealth of the Gulf states gives them power and independence from the traditional Sunni leadership in Egypt and Turkey, it's a goal of Erdogan's to reclaim that place.
Iran is the leading challenger to that traditional Sunni leadership, and it has had a good run for decades now following our deposing of Saddam and their consequent establishment of a 'Shia crescent' stretching from the gulf across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to the Levant and the Mediterranean. They use this to supply Hezbollah, and then Hamas and the Houthis. Their Houthi proxies at the mouth of the Red Sea have given them an ability to threaten shipping throughout the Middle East.
So what you're really seeing is an unintended consequence of Hamas' attack on Israel, which has led to the savaging of one Iranian proxy (Hamas) and the at-least-temporary crippling of another (Hezbollah). Assad is now under a push from the Turks -- these 'rebels' are actually the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army and their paramilitaries -- and Aleppo is closer to Turkey's border than it is to Damascus.
Turkey is a nominal American NATO ally, but in fact is no friend of ours; they frequently shell our own proxies, the Kurds, with whom we have SOF embedded. However, the enemy of your enemy is at least an opportunity; Turkey here is fighting another Iranian ally/proxy, and drawing off some Russian attention as well.
Recall that the Russians have also been supporting the Houthi with targeting data, without which they would far less effective as Iranian proxies. This is to punish us for supplying similar targeting support to the Ukrainian forces, who are functionally NATO proxies to bleed Russia; so too here the Turkish proxies are functionally NATO proxies in the world war we are in, even if they're really pursuing Erdogan's and the Brotherhood's agenda rather than NATO's.
Most likely Erdogan started moving the clandestine support for this play about the time Israel and Hezbollah started their clash, realizing he'd be able to expand and consolidate his zone of control in Syria in the wake of that. He has several times threatened Israel over the war in Gaza as part of asserting that claim for leadership of the Islamic world, but as you can see, he's functionally on Israel's side -- even if he's actually only on his own. His actions damage the Iran/Russia/Assad axis, and therefore are bad for Israel's enemies. Whatever he may say out loud, what he's doing advances their interests: accidentally, but actually.
UPDATE: Sure enough, Syrian “rebel” leader Abu Tow gave a statement to Israeli public broadcasting station Kann assuring that Israeli interests won’t be targeted by his forces “due to shared enemies.”
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