Gotta Give Him This One

Via Whiskeyriff, a man in Georgia was arrested for leaving his kids to play at the McDonald's playground while he went to a job interview.

Chris Louis was arrested on March 22 after leaving his three kids, including a 1-year old, 6-year old and a 10-year old, unattended at a McDonald’s (which had a playplace, by the way) while he went to a job interview.

Louis reportedly dropped the kids off after walking them to McDonald’s from his apartment, and returned to check on them before leaving again. He then returned to find police waiting for him, and was arrested for deprivation of a minor.

But the internet is rallying behind the father of 3, arguing that he was forced to make a tough decision while simply trying to get a job to provide for his kids.

As many of the comments pointed out, he left them in a place with air conditioner, a bathroom, and adults nearby who could help in case of an emergency, as opposed to simply leaving them alone at his apartment. And while some people were uneasy with the idea of leaving the 1-year old behind, they pointed out that he was forced to make a tough decision in order to try to get a job, and that the 10-year old was old enough to take care of the infant for a short period of time.

It's definitely not ideal, but a crime? The story points out that the 10-year-old was born when the man was 14, just a boy, and here he is ten years later still trying to support his kids. 

Sometimes 'as good as it gets' has to be good enough. It's a hard world. 

Requiescat in Pace Val Kilmer

Without a doubt his most famous and enduring role was as Georgia-born gunslinger "Doc" Holliday in Tombstone. 

However, I particularly loved the performances in Willow. He and his beautiful female opposite in this movie went on to marry in real life and had two children. 

I don't know what to say about a man who played many parts, but about whom I know nothing of himself. Fortunately, E. M. Burlingame -- a fellow Small Wars Journal alumnus --  wrote a poem about it that is worthy.

I Had No Idea 'Star Wars' Was Based on a Norse Saga

 

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?

I heard the optics were great!

This is possibly how I'll go, unless they collapse on me in an earthquake.

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. 

Boom Boom

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.

Group Chats

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.