Remarkable!
Owens Gap
No smoke plume today from the huge Table Rock fire. The storm must have helped.
Clear skies.
Blindness
A commenter at Althouse responds to a post about art museums:
"Museums, monuments, and public institutions should be spaces where these stories are held with care, not suppressed for political convenience."A lot easier to do, when so many of the monuments you don't like have already been torn down.
Yes, exactly. So much of this stuff that is arguably wrong from first principles is being done because those principles were already violated by the other side. Somehow they can't see that they did it first, emphatically and regularly.
That doesn't make it right. There's a sense in which it is fair, because 'turnabout is fair play.' Getting them to at least recognize that they started the ball rolling might help, but how do you do that?
Democracy
I and some friends were asked to test the quality of Egypt's 2018 election. The election was scrupulously fair, down to the maintenance of unbroken, numerically-keyed locks on the ballot boxes. Both the army and the police watched over each polling station as they didn't trust each other.
They could afford a fair election because they'd removed all the opposition candidates from the ballot beforehand. The only choice except Sisi was his friend who, as a campaign promise, said he'd withdraw if elected and endorse Sisi instead.
We're getting that way in Europe. We almost were that way here, last time around. It's getting dark out there.
No Third Terms
At least half of what the current administration is doing is highly praiseworthy: the DOGE inquiries into unconstitutional/evil spending, waste, fraud, and so forth; the desire to craft peace out of the bloodbath in Ukraine; the move to shrink the Federal government substantially.
Some other things are not: the police state tactics, masked Federal agents arresting people off the street, foreign prisons that violate the 8th Amendment, censorship of disfavored words. These are not in line with America's best traditions and deserve outright condemnation. Insofar as we have any power -- one of the dearest fantasies of Americans is that we have some sort of power over the Federal government apart from the occasional elections -- they deserve our opposition.
A third class of things is both at once: bringing in aggrieved non-experts to run agencies is a necessary breath of fresh air, but will inevitably lead to amateur errors because amateurs are employed. They're not bad people, but we have to expect mistakes. That's ok, but there will be errors.
Two things so far are clearly wrong, at least to me. The desire to take over Gaza from Israel reminds me of nothing more than JFK's decision to take over Vietnam from the French; that's not our fight and we shouldn't want any part of the decades of war it would entail. There should be no third terms, not for anyone. Washington's standard should hold.
That's how it looks to me, at least, so far.
This Is a Song about
Um ...
Can I get an amen?
A Magic Sword
USMC veteran Jackson Dodd has purchased the sword that was, reportedly, at one time responsible for 80% of Marine enlistments.
You probably know the one.
The sword is eight and a half pounds, which is insanity. Even the two-handed swords in Albion's museum line don't cross three and a half. One of them is two and a half, which is in line with my experience training in historical European martial arts. All that decorative heraldry built into the hilt, I imagine.
Bluegrass and the Byrds
…and Dylan. I assume Earl Scruggs is known to everyone here, but if not meet him now.
Gee, I wonder why schools are a mess?
My neighbors, lovely, smart, kindly people, are trying to persuade us to try out Netflix's new series "Adolescence." A sentence or two into the description we were doubtful. It's a mockumentary about a 13-year-old UK schoolboy who kills a schoolgirl. The show immediately shocks some audience members by portraying a school in complete chaos. What could be the cause of this collapse? I hope I won't ruin the suspense by revealing that the culprit is social media. Apparently neither parents nor schools have any power to detach children from the pernicious influence of the outside culture.I'm sure if either parents or teachers made any attempt to turn off the phones, even during class, they'd be brought up on hate crime charges.My verdict: for decades now the schools have been in the control of crazy people, and kids need to get sprung out of them. It would be bad enough if all that was happening was mission creep, so the eternally and rapidly ballooning budget was only eaten up by all the non-education goals, such as adult employment programs, babysitting, and political indoctrination of captive audiences. But increasingly the kids not only don't get an education, and not only have their time wasted and their intellectual dignity assaulted, but they also are lucky to survive without serious injury.
Brewing in Iran
Her grandfather made his own beer from things he grew in his garden. Her family helped her reconstruct it in Georgia.
Reminds me of the talk about the date wine that used to be popular in what is now Iraq.
Just a Little Red Tape
This video, which you may have seen elsewhere, explains why there's no broadband yet in spite of years of government machinery turning.
Enormous red tape in the bush.
UPDATE: A DOGE interview. A summary.
For me the take away quote is, "We're talking about elementary financial controls that are necessary for any company to function. If a commercial company operated like the Federal government, it would immediately go bankrupt, it would be delisted, and the officers would be arrested."
Reflections
A series of cartoons by the AI about itself.
I hope there's not really a consciousness there. We are making a tortured thing.
UPDATE: Some further insight.
Hercules
Manual steering on that monster. It'll be fun pushing it around these mountain roads.
Hasn't even been started for years and years. Got it going today. Needs brake pads.
Sin
Yesterday I heard someone say, "Sin feels like freedom until you try to stop."
That's a thought that has stuck with me.
Fire Season
Ever since the hurricane blew down millions upon millions of trees in Western North Carolina, we've known that the drying wood would create substantial wildfire hazard. Much of it is in inaccessible regions, and there aren't adequate resources even to clean up populated regions -- there's been very limited government response, both state and federal, though the locals have done yeoman work. Wildfire is going to happen sooner or later, unless we get a very wet few years that eventually reduces it to rotting wood.
Right now all of the evacuation zones are on the other side of I-26 from me. It's a pretty good firebreak, being a wide concrete interstate. I saw that Montana has sent us some firefighting aircraft, for which I am grateful. I imagine they will be staged at AVL airport, very near to the evacuation zone. UPDATE: They are staging out of Chattanooga. Big lake there.
Locally to me we rolled on two fires yesterday, but neither of them got out of control. There's a statewide ban on outdoor burning here and in South Carolina as well. This morning our local Emergency Management team went to Readiness Plan 5, which is their highest level of staffing in expectation of trouble.
UPDATE:
Just across the border in South Carolina, there's a mandatory evacuation zone too.
A Quick Word on Signal
I've used Signal for years and years for unclassified information that was very sensitive. It's not thought to be unbreakable -- probably NSA can break it -- but it is managed by IT/privacy experts who seem to be genuinely committed. There's no suggestion here that Signal itself failed at all; the failure was, as is usual in espionage, on the human side. Somebody let a reporter in, either by accident or on purpose.
Apparently the Biden administration thought Signal was OK for coordinating about stuff that was classified, as long as the classified stuff was kept on the high side (i.e. in airgapped networks like SIPR and JWICS). In my day, as the old timers say, we never did that. Any discussion of classified information was treated as needing to be kept on the high side.
Occasionally you'd draft a document on a SIPR computer that was really meant to be unclassified, and want to move it to the regular internet so you could send it to people. The only authorized way to do that was to save it to a CD-ROM, by itself, transfer it, and then break the CD-ROM. You were never allowed to connect even a thumb drive to the SIPRnet for transferring files between it and non-airgapped computers connected to the regular internet.
SECDEF Hegseth is younger than me -- which is amazing to me -- but his service was in the right period to have come up with all that same stuff. Why he felt comfortable putting out flight times for combat sorties on Signal is unknown to me; the fact that the CIA/National Security apparatus had apparently endorsed Signal during the Biden administration may have been instructive.
There seems to have been no harm done, and it's a good opportunity to learn from the mistake and tighten up their shot group on Operational Security. Mistakes happen. You can't freak out about every one of them, but you should learn from every one of them.
Library Security
A public library is not secure almost by definition. It is open to the public, meaning that anyone at all can expect to enter and remain more or less as long as he or she likes. It can have rules, and it can call the police to remove people who blatantly defy those rules, but it generally won't have police on the premises nor have gates or metal detectors -- certainly not out in the countryside where Sylva, NC happens to be.
“We had an incident last week, the police were called, somebody found what they thought was a gun in the restroom at the library,” Smith said. “When the deputies got there, and examined it, it was an airsoft gun. It wasn’t operable, but still that brings the question, could it have been a real gun?... What’s the danger if it had been a real gun?” Smith said. “I don’t know what kind of signage we have; I’m not saying signage would stop it.”
I happen to know the answers to each of those questions. We all know what the dangers of real guns are, but few would leave one hidden in a public restroom for long because they are valuable. The library has signs that clearly state that no firearms nor any other weapons are permitted. Those signs can't stop anything.
“The other issue is the cleaning crew, they clean some while the library’s open, but they clean past the time where the library’s open and they’ve had some instances where people have come out that had been hiding in the library after the library closed,” Smith said. “That presents a danger to the cleaning crew, and I think that opens up the county for lawsuits, especially if they’re our employees.”
Commissioner Jenny Hooper said “it’s suspected that a lot of that is homeless because they are doing hair dye in the sinks. I don’t think it’s easter eggs.”
The homeless are a problem for all public spaces for which we generally lack good answers. Public libraries usually accept part of the burden of providing for the homeless, e.g., providing them with free public restrooms they can use. Relatively pleasant much of the year, the mountain regions of this state have lots of homeless in the cities -- Asheville was overwhelmed with them until the police there relatively recently decided to crack down, and the hurricane washed away the larger camps (and many of the homeless).
Sylva, a mountain town with a nearby university that adds a strong progressive political element, has been struggling with what to do about the homeless for a while. There have been talks about adopting no-begging rules, but those have faced stiff opposition. I don't think they have any real answers to these problems.
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