Month: August 2012

Rerun Season at Photon Courier

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As Jonathan pointed out last month, the blog format tends to focus attention on recent posts; the older ones tend to sort of disappear into the archives.

I’m not sure whether there is a good general solution to this, but for my blog, Photon Courier, I’ve declared August to be rerun month, and will be pulling out and reposting a selection of posts that I think have continuing relevance, some of which were also cross-posted here and some of which appeared only at Photon Courier. I’ll still be posting new content, interspersed with the reruns.

The first rerun batch is up today.

The Nueces Fight – Conclusion

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Late in the fall of 1862, under the mistaken assumption that they had been offered a thirty-day amnesty by the Governor of Texas and allowed to depart Texas unmolested rather than take the loyalty oath, a party of Unionists gathered together at Turtle Creek in Kerr County. They elected a settler from Comfort named Fritz Tegener as their leader, and Henry Schwethelm as second. Their number included Phillip Braubach, who had served as the sheriff of Gillespie County, and Captain John Sansom, a Texas Ranger before and after the war, and also the sheriff of Kendall County, two sons of Edwin Degener, a prominent free-thinker from Sisterdale, Heinrich Steves, whose large family had helped establish Comfort, and the Boerner brothers, one of whom had married a Steves daughter. Heinrich Stieler was also one of them; he was Henry Schwethelm’s brother-in-law and son of Gottlieb Stieler, an early settler whose family later established a ranch between Comfort and Fredericksburg which still exists today.

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A Little Bit of History – The Nueces Fight

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As I am going up to Comfort, Texas on the 11th of August, to take part in the 150th anniversary observences of the Nueces Fight, and since this Civil War event is very little known outside of Texas — herewith some background. It’s longish, so in two parts, the second part posted tomorrow.)

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TSA fail: the end of the road is now visible

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There was an attack in Saudi Arabia using internally placed explosives up the lower GI tract. These explosives cannot be detected by pat downs, metal detectors, or millimeter wave machines. Much more powerful scanning machines would be required or a cavity search. But no follow up bombs have happened using this method. I’d always wondered why. Now things are becoming clear. Apparently there’s been something of a theological problem. It appears that butt bombs are not permitted due to Islam’s prohibition of sodomy. But that prohibition seems to be loosening.

It will take years for the theologians to digest this new complication but once it has been let loose, it is clearly foreseeable that some portion of islamic scholars will hold this position. The consequences for our travel security regime are rather scary. We’re going to have reached the end of the line because routine x-rays at each flight segment are just not going to happen. The accumulated radiation would cause too many cancers. And cavity searches are simply unreasonable. So where does that leave TSA’s current security strategy?

Like most of their terror innovations, I expect that this will take some time for them to organize. It looks like they’ve already put 4 years into it. It may take them another 4 before they’ve worked the theological problems out sufficient to recruit bombers. But then what?

Update – Chick-fil-A

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The daughter unit was working today, so we waited and had late-lunch, early dinner. The local Chick-fil-A nearest us was jammed, even more than it was last Saturday, and the line of cars for the drive-through window went around the building, through the parking lot of the business next to it, out to the access road through the shopping center, down the access road to the highway access road. The cashier told us that at lunch today, the line went all the way to the Costco, about a third of a mile away.

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