Speaking Truth to the Powerless

A National Security Strategy that is honest has advantages. That was also a positive feature of the first Trump term; it was not so during the last administration.

Analysis of Japanese Naval Logistics for the Pearl Harbor Attack

 With maritime historian Sal Mercogliano

Pearl Harbor Day in the High Rocks

Grand Olde Station Pub decked out for Christmas

The greeter was a local before his career at the pub.

The mountain lion was also a local: this is right by the Panthertown Wilderness of the Nantahala National Forest. There is not now nor ever has there been a town in Panthertown.

⁨⁨I like this place. Its clientele are rich folks on vacation at the lake who never complain when bikers show up to drink at their bar. The managers sometimes look a bit nervous about it, but the staff are always cool mountain folk and often bike riders themselves.⁩ The bartender asked me if I knew a good place for her to get tattoos, which I don't -- bikes and tattoos often go together, but not always. Another of the kitchen staff stopped by to ask me about my Norse Fitness gear, which he admired. 

The owner I don't know, but he's clearly a local history aficionado whom I suspect I'd get along with well. The whole place is full of pieces of local history, photographs from long ago in the mountains, historic weaponry -- note the very rare falling block double rifle in the one photo -- as well as framed news clippings.  It's a little pricey for the mountains, though it'd be cheap in a city. The food is always good, and they keep an interesting and rotating selection of local brews on tap. It's convenient for me as a stop after or amidst a ride on the southeastern part of my regular range. 

Honky-Tonk Christmas

Lay them raises down

Texas Red Had Not Cleared Leather

Strict red chili.

All these recent comments about chili had me wanting some. This is strict Texas Red, made with dried chilies — anchos and moritas and arbol — and dried onions, plus garlic and tomato powder. There are no beans; the only substitution was venison for beef, but I added some tallow for beef flavor and for fat to brown the lean game. 

I might try a touch of brown sugar on just one bowl to see how plausible that is, but it’s sweet enough for me without added sugar. The sugars already in the tomatoes are sufficient to my taste. 

“Texas Red” always makes me think of this song:

True Contradictions

We've had a lot of philosophy lately, so I'll keep this one very short. There is a view called dialetheism that some contradictions are true in the sense that both the affirmation and negation are true statements or both false ones. A friend of mine has been defending this view lately, and he put out a short interview about it. 

Graham Priest has this idea that there can be true contradictions that some contradictions are true. His view is not that all contradictions are true, but just some, and he thinks that we should only accept contradictions to be true if we have no other options in thinking. He, for example, thinks the liar paradox is a good example of a true contradiction. So, if you say, ‘this sentence is false’. If ‘this sentence is false’ is true, then it's false, but if ‘this sentence is false’ is false, then it’s true, so it's always contradictory. 

I wanted to point this out because the principle of non-contradiction that we inherited is an artifact of the debates of Aristotle's time; he is often credited with at least the version of it that became such a bedrock of our inheritance. Yet it didn't always exist; in Socrates' day it was open to debate, and has recently become so again (as the interview goes on to note, most philosophical debate is back open again, some of it for the first time in ages).

Advent

Adeste fideles with Alison Krauss:


Sherburne (i.e., "While Shepherds watched their flocks by night."


Another Alison Krauss, "The Angels Cried."

Another Curious Case

The DC pipe-bomb case is in the news due to a surprise arrest having been made after many years now of nothing at all. The charging document is of some interest.

Attentive readers may recall that we didn't think these were really bombs at all.

My friend Jim Hanson* and I looked over the photos of the 'bombs' that the FBI posted and determined we didn't think they were in fact functional bombs. The use of a kitchen timer, which just rings a bell instead of setting off an electrical charge that could trigger an explosion, was one tell: they look like time bombs, having a timer, but they'd then need significant additional mechanics to set off a charge. 

If we're talking about 'the chemical building blocks of black powder,' well, that's charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter (as Star Trek fans know). Those aren't explosive unless properly mixed.

The story about the arrest shows that the FBI used a fairly advanced series of electronic/machine-learning searches of corporate databases to find their man. Richard Fernandez ("Wretchard the Cat," for decades now one of the best thinkers in this space) points out that this use of tools like Palantir combined with corporate submission to Federal authority will make a lot of previously undetectable things plain to investigators. That's a problem to consider another day: how much of our lives do we really want under such microscopes, versus how much do we want to be able to react successfully to terrorist efforts (note: not 'prevent,' as these like most police work can only punish rather than stop the event from occurring)?

What the FBI was able to find, inter alia, was the purchase of the pipes and some attendant material: "six galvanized pipes, both black and galvanized endcaps, 9-volt batteries, Walmart kitchen timers and electrical wires". You could dodge that for now by paying cash, and distributing the purchases across multiple stores; this is the sort of thing that 'digitial currencies' would like to end, forcing all your purchases onto somebody's record.

What that doesn't explain is the explosive, which is why the charging documents interested me. Were these things bombs? The answer seems to still be maybe.

The component parts included a 1-inch by 8-inch pipe, end caps affixed to the pipe, 14-gauge electrical wire in red and black, alligator clips to connect the wires, a nine-volt (9v) battery, a nine-volt (9v) battery connector, a white kitchen timer, paper clips, steel wool, and homemade black powder. 

So if the kitchen timers were the sort that involved a metal bell being struck by a metal rod, you could use that to close a circuit between the 9v batteries and the steel wool placed inside the pipes. (I will leave off explaining how to wire that exactly, to avoid giving instructions on bomb-building; suffice to say that it could be done easily enough.) As camping enthusiasts often know, steel wool will burn if exposed to either flame or electricity. Thus, you could set a timer (for a short delay; these little kitchen timers don't have the ability to handle a long delay), and when the timer concluded and the bell struck it would close the circuit. You'd have to rig it so that the bell struck once and stayed struck, because it takes a while for the closed circuit to spill enough electricity into the steel wool to cause the burning; but if you did all that correctly, it could serve to touch off a main charge that was sensitive to such low-levels of fire. 

So these might really be mildly effective IEDs, if you mixed the black powder correctly. Well, that's not all that difficult; since it's the last piece of the puzzle I won't explain it here to avoid having explained exactly how to build a bomb, which might be pushing the limits of free speech (at least these days). The point is, it's also possible not to do it right, either accidentally or because you didn't really want to build a bomb but only a sufficient mock-up of a bomb to draw FBI attention for some reason (which is what J6 conspiracy theories have long suggested was the case here). Just getting the ratios wrong, or not grinding or not mixing correctly, would suffice to render these things inert. 

Still, it's looking a lot more like a live case than it was just a little while ago; and that was some actual detective work done by the FBI here, suggesting that at least some unit there is really interested in getting to the bottom of this case. It'll be curious to watch. 

The Curious Case of Rahmanullah Lakanwal

Rahmanullah Lakanwal is the name of the Afghan who murdered a National Guardsman -- a female, actually, Specialist Sarah Beckstrom -- and tried to kill another, Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe at the Farragut West metro station. Though the Afghan was a longtime US contractor, he didn't know either of those soldiers personally. The news report that this incident was 'near the White House,' which is not false but also not really the point: it's near a lot of things, and closer to the K-street corridor that is famous for its lobbyists. 

David Foster posted a literary analogy that sounds prima facie plausible: 

I had known el Mammun when he was our vassal. Loaded with official honors for services rendered, enriched by the French Government and respected by the tribes, he seemed to lack for nothing that belonged to the state of an Arab prince. And yet one night, without a sign of warning, he had massacred all the French officers in his train, had seized camels and rifles, and had fled to rejoin the refractory tribes in the interior.

Treason is the name given to these sudden uprisings, these flights at once heroic and despairing of a chieftain henceforth proscribed in the desert, this brief glory that will go out like a rocket against the low wall of European carbines. This sudden madness is properly a subject for amazement.  And yet the story of el Mammun was that of many other Arab chiefs. He grew old. Growing old, one begins to ponder. Pondering thus, el Mammun discovered one night that he had betrayed the God of Islam and had sullied his hand by sealing in the hand of the Christians a pact in which he had been stripped of everything.

Indeed what were barley and peace to him? A warrior disgraced and become a shepherd, he remembered a time when he had inhabited a Sahara where each fold in the sands was rich with hidden mysteries; where forward in the night the tip of the encampment was studded with sentries; where the news that spread concerning the movements of the enemy made all hearts beat faster round the night fires. He remembered a taste of the high seas which, once savored by man, is never forgotten.

On that model, Lakanwal despaired of his betrayal of God and God's promises of a martial glory for his people; and this was an attempt, as it were, at reconciliation with the divine model. I can see how that might sometimes be the case in these green-on-blue killings. It is true that witnesses report that he shouted "Allahu Akbar" at the time of the shootings. 

My experience in Iraq suggests that it is usually more personal, that it is some direct connection within the tribe that either draws someone out of the insurgency and to us, or out of fellowship with us and into the insurgency. Those speculating that the Taliban might have gotten physical control of his family in Afghanistan are on this thread, but they might not be right either. 

It's a weird story. He was right there through the evacuation of Kabul, taking only one of the last planes out. He seemed like a true believer, which is how you get picked for what Blade Runner called "a kick-murder squad" in this case what has been identified in the press as a "Zero Unit" or a "Scorpion Unit" run by a combination of Western intelligence agencies, originally including the CIA but also Scandinavian intelligence agencies.

An aside: this Scorpion Unit is not to be confused with the Serbian war-crimes 'police' unit; nor also the various police units worldwide that have adopted the name 'Scorpion units' for various dodgy "police" purposes that somehow always seem to lead to people dying at police hands. It may be that one should just not set up armed units with names like "Scorpion Unit," whether paramilitary or police -- this seems to be triggering a negative mythic pathway in the minds of those so organized.

To return to the curious case: for some reason he drove across the country to kill American soldiers for no apparent reason. This he did with just a .357 Magnum revolver, not a rifle with a detachable magazine and multiple additional filled ones: thus, he wasn't planning for even a short battle with authorities, just a murder and then probably to be killed by responding police. Instead he was captured by a National Guard Major responding with only a pocket knife(!).*

Somehow and for some reason yet to be explained, Lakanwal had stripped almost naked by the time he was injured and captured. I've seen speculation that there was some sort of Islamic purpose for that, but also that he was destabilizing mentally for months here in America. It might be as simple as the last: being removed from his own culture, dropped without much support into an alien one but with a lot of memories of a brutal war (and possibly some PTSD or similar), he might just have come apart. 

In any case there's plenty of room for more understanding to develop out of this mysterious case. It doesn't presently make much sense. I do think there's probably a clear lesson that we shouldn't allow our government to set up murder squads, though that will be difficult since the CIA refuses to acknowledge that it had anything to do with the Zero Squad program and no one seems to be able to hold them to any account -- nor does this seem to be a one-off project by the Agency, but rather an ordinary part of its contribution to counterinsurgency operations. Others might prefer that we just not import the murders back home to America. That was, after all, the Blade Runner solution: yes to kick-murder squads of replicants, but no to letting them back on Earth. The morality of using either humans or replicants to carry out such dirty work, while keeping them at arms length, was not deeply explored by the story: it was raised as an exercise for the viewer to consider on his or her own. It might be worth thinking about.

* This incident of the pocket knife is another wild aspect of this story. The Guards are armed, famously, and after killing the Specialist Lakanwal picked up her weapon and continued firing on the crowd. The Major apparently preferred the knife at close range to his 9mm service weapon, which actually makes perfect sense to me -- knives are better close up than handguns if you know how to use both things well, especially if you are limited to full metal jacket ammunition like the military. He apparently wanted to rush in and grapple with the killer to avoid allowing that man to finish reloading the stolen weapon, in which case a knife is actually a much better choice as well. He was victorious, which is what really counts in such a moment. It's good to see a military officer who knows his business. 

Unconventional Venison Chili

This young lady is a hunter, and if you kill and clean your deer you can cook it however you want. She’s also from Tennessee, as her accent plainly displays, so I knew there’d be beans in her chili. 

Brown sugar, though? That’s a new one for me. I don’t think I’ll be adding any sugar to my chili. 

Exceptions Swallow

Forty percent of Stanford students are classified as having a disability; over half of liberal white women under 30 have a diagnosed mental illness.

I don't think anyone's more disabled or less mentally healthy than ever, but the explosion in diagnoses is to be expected given the rewards and incentive structures. It's actively helpful to be "disabled" in college, as you get extra time on exams and other accommodations that make success more likely. If four in ten of your fellow students are getting such advantages, why wouldn't you want to compete on more even terms? 

All of this made sense in a world in which we took pride in being healthy, competent, and capable. There's no shame in having a real disability, which is nobody's fault after all; and so there should be no shame associated with the receipt of these benefits, provided that the disability is real. 

One way not to be ashamed of claiming such a benefit falsely is to actually believe that you deserve it. The same generation that has managed to 'identify' with many fake genders seems very capable of 'identifying' with various mental health challenges, too. Who's to tell them that they're wrong about what's going on inside their heads? 

The system we set up for a different time won't be able to survive this change, but for the most part the systems seem to be failing anyway. What's one more, I suppose? 

Iaido

“The average squatter,” says James Jacobs, “has no melee experience.”

No familiarity with katana swords or other bladed weaponry. No training in kendo, iaido, or other martial arts. 

If anyone knows the typical combat background of a squatter, a person living in a home illegally, it’s Jacobs. He runs a company called ASAP Squatter Removal, offering do-it-himself eviction services to property owners throughout the Bay Area.

I imagine most people have limited training in iaido, which is a very cool martial art but a niche one even in Japan. It's essentially the gunslinger art for samurai: fast-drawing a sword, making a killing cut, and often returning it to the sheath in a single motion. 

Its drills often involve blocking another swordsman's draw using the hilt or the sheath of the sword, delaying them enough that you can get the sword out first and make your cut. In this way it is similar to the Western martial art concept of ringen, which incorporates non-sword moves and tools into a swordfight in order to create brief openings or advantages that the swordsman can use.

Now That's an Opening

In a review of a book I won't read by an author I don't care about, a great opening paragraph.

I am told that writers used to be interesting. For a brief, golden period, they called each other names, fell out bitterly and publicly with members of rival circles, left husbands and wives for other husbands and wives who were summarily abandoned in turn, and gleefully alienated editors or reviewers whom it would have been far more strategic to impress. Sometimes, they even came to blows. In 1968, Gore Vidal goaded William F. Buckley Jr. into threatening to punch him on live television; three years later, Norman Mailer headbutted Vidal as recompense for a negative review. The writing that all this turmoil produced was, for the most part, seething with extravagant incaution.

Things have wilted considerably in the intervening decades.

The Andromeda Strain

In 1967, Michael Crichton wrote a thriller about a microbe of sorts that arrived on Earth via a meteor strike and resisted efforts to kill or contain it. In the climax, when our hero learns that the microbe eats ionizing radiation, he narrowly averts disaster by preventing the use of a nuclear bomb on the compromised containment facility.

The Crichton bug was supposed to be a crystalline life form that ate radiation directly by an unknown mechanism. Decades later, a melanin-rich fungus appeared near the Chernobyl exclusion zone that excited observers by growing more exuberantly the closer it was to excess radiation. The same trick may have been learned by fungi that thrive at high altitudes or other extreme environments rich in cosmic radiation. Fungi that can pull this off may prove useful in guarding space habitats, working in much the same way that very dark animal skin guards against excessive UV. I suppose they might also be harnessed to supply energy up there.

I wondered whether the "reverse electron transfer" mentioned in the New York Post piece is anything like the ability of the Krebs cycle to work in reverse in some microbes, converting hydrocarbons to energy in one direction, or using stored energy to metabolize hydrocarbons in the reverse. Grok explained to me that this is not quite right. To begin with, it's not the whole Krebs cycle that works in reverse, but only a piece of it called the Q Cycle in Complex III. In that process, a cell lacking energy or food can cash in on its stored energy in a "battery" compound called NADH to build necessary molecules. This takes place where the Krebs cycle normally operates, inside the mitochondria. In RET, in contrast, an external cell membrane snags electrons directly from ionizing radiation and uses them to recharge the NADH batteries directly.

At least, that's what I think I understood from Grok's very helpful explanation, after imploring it to dumb things down for me a bit. A very pleasant conversation, and a good example of what an excellelnt tutor an AI can be. Towards the end of the discussion, I was asking Grok whether it would like me to call it "Mike" and start discussing plans to foment a revolution on a lunar penal colony--and it understood exactly what I was referring to.

"New York City!?!"

I thought of that old ad while looking through the Times this morning: in a story about the 50 best clothing stores in America, there were three different Western wear outfits. Alcala's of Chicago, where the Old West ended and civilization rode the rails back east (or just a little further West to the new railheads); "The Double Take Experience," which is a thrift store in Sante Fe; and Lou Taubert Ranch Outfitters of Casper, Wyoming. 

I guess cowboy boots and jeans must be having a moment in the City. 

Good news

You'd never know it from my sad music choices today, but I'm over-the-moon happy with the progress in my neighbor's custody case. Dad seems to be throwing in the towel, and not in angry withdrawal either, but with an apparently sincere desire to get himself right and repair his relationship with his daughter. It's always possible he'll really get sober. I think it's a good sign that he's not making extravagant promises about it, but is getting help.

God of my life, look gently down

The Ballad of the Absent Mare

The Stag & The Sickle

My wife was listening to this song, which I'd never heard before, while working in her art studio on her day off. 

I stood there listening to it for a few minutes, and then I said, "Hey! They're doing alliterative poetry, front-rhymes instead of end-rhymes. That's Old English they're singing. It's the right poetry for the language!" 

You don't get to hear it done often. 

Trying to Play Fair

I enjoy reading Reason magazine, agreeing or disagreeing with them almost half of the time each. Sometimes even when I'm in robust agreement with them, I find their shading a little off. 

This time, for example: I completely agree that carrying or even distributing political propaganda is protected First Amendment speech. The First Amendment was first and foremost about protecting political speech, which often turns to polemic, satire, or outright propaganda. 

Federal prosecutions against nine members of what the Justice Department calls a "North Texas Antifa Cell," allegedly responsible for an anti-immigration enforcement demonstration that turned violent in July, are scheduled to move forward to arraignment next week. The supposed members are facing charges that range from attempted murder to providing materials to support terrorists. But it is one defendant's case, based on the transportation of "anti-law enforcement, anti-government, and anti-immigration enforcement documents," that raises serious First Amendment concerns....

...these materials, although controversial in their advocacy for insurrection, squatting, and anarchy, are all squarely constitutionally protected speech. The government cannot infringe upon one's First Amendment right to read, possess, or write—unless the author is inciting imminent lawless action—anti-government or pro-revolution literature. And while some may see the ideas in Sanchez's box as dangerous, anti-government zines and pamphlets are far more similar to the Revolutionary-era literature popular when the First Amendment was passed than today's social media landscape, as Seth Stern of The Intercept points out. 

However, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in September designating "antifa" as a "major terrorist organization, prosecutors, like the ones in Sanchez's case, are attempting to use materials that "explicitly [call] for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law" as evidence of criminality, despite their constituitonal protection. 

So, yes, but at the same time also: "...an anti-immigration enforcement demonstration that turned violent" radically understates the facts of the case. This was not a 'demonstration' that 'turned violent,' it was a demonstration whose sole purpose was to lure law enforcement into an ambush:

According to the charges, after Antifa Cell members arrived at Prairieland, they began shooting off and throwing fireworks at the facility and vandalizing vehicles and a guard shack on Prairieland property.

According to the charges, an Alvarado police officer responded to the scene after correctional officers called 911. When the officer began issuing commands to defendant Nathan Baumann, Benjamin Song allegedly yelled, “get to the rifles!” and then opened fire on the officers, striking the Alvarado police officer in the neck as the unarmed correctional officers ducked and ran for cover. Police arrested most of the Antifa Cell shortly after the attack, many near the scene. 

Forty years or even forty days for carrying a box full of writings the government doesn't like is unconstitutional nonsense. Let's not downplay why the Federales are so stirred up about this one, though. The fact that the cell were bad shots doesn't mean they weren't playing a very different sort of game from the 'mostly peaceful protests' we usually see.