The Old Year now away is fled…
Hogmanay Muted
The event was canceled in Scotland this year due to wild weather, high winds and rain that made the outdoor Fire festival untenable. Here we are having it without the customary venison steak pie because our oven has died, and will be weeks without replacement. Such is life.
So a very simple fire festival, expecting an intensifying winter. But today was warm enough to ride in the high afternoon, and I’ve plenty of wood that I’ve cut and split myself. We’ll be warm enough in the cold to come.
Black Moon Over Hogmanay
Tonight’s festivals will feature the second New Moon in a month. This is the “Black Moon,” a companion to the more-famous “Blue Moon” (i.e. a second full moon in a single month).
How the Victorians Celebrated Christmas
This is part of the Victorian Farm series, featuring some of the same people as the Secrets of the Castle and the Tudor Monastery Farm. I enjoyed this series quite a bit as well.
18th Century Hot Drinks for New Years
A bit of history interspersed with some cooking -- punch, egg nog, and hot buttered ale.
Good news updates
I wrote some days back how delighted I was to be able to help save two Corpus Christi dogs. One came to me last Friday for a short stay before he was to be picked up by transport to a rescue operation in Wisconsin. Within 24 hours he'd gotten away from me and disappeared. After 48 hours, however, he was safely caught up about a mile from here, thanks to the work of a lot of neighbors who kept watch and reported sightings. He won't even miss his transport, scheduled for Wednesday evening. I have another couple of days to try to fatten him up.
In the continuing saga of nanopreemie Riley, he went home with his parents yesterday, weighing a little over 5 lbs. He still hasn't reached his original due date.
The 12 days of Christmas on a Tudor Monastery Farm
This is part of the Tudor Monastery Farm series, which has the same experimental archeologists and historian who worked on Secrets of the Castle living on a recreation Tudor farm for a year. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Newly Relevant: US Army Equine Funeral Unit Troubled
Carter was Navy, but it's the US Army that runs Arlington, and their horse-drawn funeral unit has been having some serious problems. Somewhat ironically, as you can see from the formal photos, it's blue-cord Infantry from the Third Infantry Regiment that are running this equine operation, not a US Cavalry unit.
The plan as announced will have him buried in Plains, GA rather than Arlington, but it's very likely this unit would have been involved -- and may yet be. In any case the horses deserve better treatment than they've been getting at the hands of our Old Guard, another sign of the notable decline even in treasured elements of a once-unmatched military.
Requiescat in Pace Jimmy Carter
On the day I was born he was Governor of the Great State of Georgia, where I happened to come into the world due to my father's work having taken him from Tennessee to Atlanta. Georgia in the 1970s was far from the worst place in the world, and in fact a very nice place to grow up. For whatever he had to do with that, I thank him.
When I was young he was President of the United States. At the time I knew almost nothing about what that meant, and for whatever he did to keep a world in which children could be blessedly ignorant of politics, I thank him.
It is also due to him, at least in part, that I grew up in Reagan's America. That too is a matter of some gratitude he is partially owed.
De Mortuis nihil nisi bonum.
The Feast of Holy Innocents
Today is the most somber of feast days. James had just invoked it the other day following the shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School.
A Handsome Beast
Rare to get a photo of the tiny puppy, soon to be a father, not running around in circles banging everything with his teeth like a shark. Conan is going to be a pretty dog when he finally slows down a little. A pretty good dog, too.
The Feast of John the Evangelist
Such is the third day of Christmas.
UPDATE: In the Roman Catholic tradition; I realize Tom has a whole different set of dates to deal with.
Some Welcome Sunlight
Though we have not yet left the ancient regime for the new era that begins late next month, some welcome changes have already begun. The State Department's Global Engagement Center (GEC) has been shut down. I've mentioned the GEC once before in this space. My old think tank used to attempt to bring it to bear on its mission -- I once spoke to the Heritage Foundation about its lawful role and why it wasn't performing it, and how important it was that it might begin to do so instead of not -- and yet they never were interested in doing their job of engaging foreign publics to address damaging anti-American information wars by the Chinese or arising incidentally out of the various religious wars worldwide. The only thing the GEC actually got interested in doing was censoring American free speech.
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.
Now today the Brownstone Institute has a tremendous report, summarizing 500 pages of findings, on the work of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). CISA has only been mentioned here once before, quoting RFK's endorsement of Donald Trump in which RFK notes that CISA was among those brought in to spy on and disrupt his independent campaign. Federal Judge Terry Doughty called the White House's censorship project, quote, "The most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America."
CISA was one of the ways that those who called themselves 'the Resistance' attempted to get the first Trump administration to give it the rope by which they would be hanged; and while their attempt to tie him to Russia failed when the Mueller investigation found no evidence of any Americans participating with Russian intelligence, at least in the 2020 election CISA largely succeeded. They were at the heart of changing the way that election was conducted by 'handling' election security in that race as well as in the surprise-victory of Democrats in 2022. The whole report merits reading.
This report should be trumpeted from the mountains and read widely. These are two government agencies that have abandoned their Constitutional mission, and become what the Declaration of Independence calls "any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [i.e. protecting the natural rights of the citizenry]," activating "the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it[.]"
It's time for some alterations and abolishments. CISA should follow the GEC; let them be the first of all such institutions that have betrayed their mission.
Swannanoa
Asheville is slated to get quite a bit of rain this weekend. It’s still recovering from the hurricane, as the French Broad and Swannanoa Rivers have their confluence downtown. The nearby town named after the Swannanoa River was also hard hit. That’s where the Harley dealership that was turned into a makeshift heliport by a bunch of veterans is located.
Hopefully no cave-ins this time.
Christmas Morning
I gave away the motorcycle I have ridden for about fifteen years, to the boy who grew up riding on it. I told him that it was the best gift I had to give him aside from the existence that I gave him almost 23 years ago. I hope he has the same good luck with her that I had.
Merry Christmas.
Christmas Day
May God be praised for bringing us all together again on Christmas Day. My gratitude knows no bounds.
Let us feast together as friends and brothers.
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