Mice in a Maze

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Arnade, Chris. Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America. Penguin Publishing Group, 2019.

Chris Arnade certainly seems to have been called, and may well have been chosen, to help mitigate one of the great divisions of our time. Dignity complements, among others, Charles Murray’s Coming Apart with interviews and photos from what Murray would call “Fishtown,” or rather its extreme margin, whose inhabitants are simultaneously transient and rooted, strategizing to survive in ways often incomprehensible to the more cognitively gifted and emotionally stable. Learning to extend compassion and respect rather than mere pity (in its more negative variant), glib political “solutions,” and outright contempt is a challenge far too few Americans are willing to undertake. Matthew 22:14 seems unnervingly relevant in this context, and while the church as it is depicted among the people Dignity portrays is an overwhelmingly positive influence, more “front row” believers might take a moment to consider just how much better than the vast majority of us Arnade, a secular liberal, has done at reaching out to desperate communities. My advice to them is to buy and read this book, pray over it, maybe lend it out to others for discussion, and—without reinventing the wheel—do the Tocquevillian thing and organize/volunteer, with an eye to Luke 15. Because if the parables in that chapter aren’t about “back row” people, they don’t mean a damned thing.

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The Compleat Spy Requires AI

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China’s intelligence services appear to be using LinkedIn, with profile pictures generated artificially, for the recruitment of agents.

Chinese intrusion into US affairs has not generally gotten anywhere near the attention that Russian intrusion…real, attempted, or imagined…has gotten, but it needs more visibility.  See my related post So, Really Want to Talk About Foreign Intervention?

Iran’s Limpet Mine Tanker War

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The US Navy has caught the Iranian Revolutionary Guard removing a limpet mine from Japanese Merchant Vessel Kokuka Courageous. The crew abandoned ship after seeing the second — failed — limpet mine on its hull and was picked up by the  Dutch tug Coastal Ace.

There was then a race between an Iranian Hendijan class patrol boat  and a US destroyer to pick up the Kokuka Courageous crew from Coastal Ace. The destroyer, USS Bainbridge, won the race.   The video below is of a IRGC Gashti class patrol boat that approached the M/T Kokuka Courageous afterwards.   It is digital video recorded from  USS Bainbridge or one of its aircraft showing the removal of the unexploded limpet mine from the M/T Kokuka Courageous.

https://news.usni.org/2019/06/13/u-s-destroyer-responding-to-distress-calls-in-the-gulf-of-oman-amidst-reports-of-attacks

The earlier tanker attack on the Norwegian Front Altair saw the IRGC take the crew hostage and transport them to Iran.

This Iranian behavior is the classic “Irrational regimes become more so under pressure” hypothesis in action.

The basic concept is that for certain unstable regimes (or even stable ones with no effective means of resolving internal disputes peacefully, particularly the succession of power) domestic power games are far more important than anything foreign, and that foreigners are only symbols to use in domestic factional fights.

What you are seeing here with the “Limpet Mine Tanker War” are the externals of the internal mullah factional power games of “Who can be more nutball than thou” to gain more short term power without regards to external reality.

(“Nutball” in this case meaning “Attack the Great Satan” to show you are more daring, militant, and blessed by Allah.   Thus deserving of power, money and followers inside the Iranian mullahocracy.)

Now, as an exercise in pattern recognition, use this template and replace “foreigners” with “other political party”.

Hint — In political parties and other NGOs it’s all about being captured in a “patron-client” relationship by the narrow interests with the most money.

If you want to know why things are so crazy in world and domestic American politics, applying the “Irrational regimes become more so under pressure” hypothesis, which is driving  Iran’s Limpet Mine Tanker War, will do much to answer the question.

 

Adventures in the Indy Author Trade

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The Daughter Unit and I spent most of Saturday morning in the lovely little town of Wimberley, Texas. Wimberley is situated on a particularly scenic stretch of the Blanco River, in the hills to the west of San Marcos. It’s closer to Austin than to San Antonio and seems to have become even more of a weekend tourist draw, since we first visited it in the late 1990ies. Then there were just a handful of little shops catering to tourists, and one restaurant with had memorable hamburgers and an outside deck which overlooked the riverbank, all grown with cypress trees, great and green. There were a fair number of hippie artisan types; potters, glass-blowers, metal-fabricators and the like, plus the usual number of antique shops, which tended more towards the ‘quaint old country junk’ side of the scale. On the first Saturday of the month, Wimberley stages a mammoth open-air market something we’ve been to a number of times. It’s supposed to be the oldest and biggest one in Texas.

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