The surprisingly reinvigorated Second Amendment

Next week this blog turns 18 (!).  That's a milestone that makes you think back on the journey.

This journey began in the lead up to the release by the US Supreme Court of the Heller v. District of Columbia opinion - in other words, this blog pre-dates Heller.  Looking back on the last 18 years here, things are really different for the Second Amendment.

It's all well and good to have a Constitution that's written down in black and white, but that doesn't help much if the Legislatures ignore it and the Courts refuse to strike down infringing laws.  That has changed, and while there are still pieces of broken Gun Control on the floor needing to be swept up, the change is profound.  Let's take a quick recap on that and then talk about what it means.

Heller v. D.C. (2008) stated as the plain law of the land that Second Amendment rights apply to individuals, not just to State Militias.  It kind of seems ridiculous to actually have to write this today, but that was the "accepted" legal understanding prior to Heller.

McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) held that Heller applied not just to the District of Columbia, but to all the States (via the 14th Amendment).

New York Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) was the hammer blow.  It established that the meaning of the Second Amendment as it was understood at the time was what it really meant, and that gun control laws had to demonstrate that the laws are consistent with that.  This flipped the switch - no longer would citizens have to demonstrate that they have a right, but the government has to demonstrate that they don't.  

This is what has left all those broken pieces of Gun Control cluttering up the floor.  Sure, they still need to be swept up, but look where things are now:

1. Gun permitting is not dead, but it's coughing up blood.  "Shall Issue" permitting is the law of the land - governments have to prove that you shouldn't be allowed to carry rather than you justify why do need to.
2. Most States were "May Issue" (you had to justify why you needed a permit, and the Goverment might - or might not - issue one) in 1990.  None are today.  In fact, half the States don't require you to have any permit at all to carry a firearm. 
3. "Assault Weapons" Bans are the last refuge of the desperate.  Liberal Legislatures that pass these today know for certain that they will be struck down.  Increasingly, the Courts are imposing restraining orders preventing the laws from going into force while they are being litigates.
4. The National Firearms Act of 1934 is a pale shadow of its former self.  Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" (which was anything but) repealed the tax on suppressors.  The Tax Code is really the main way for the Fed.Gov to impose the law here; no tax, no law.

So what does all this mean?  The biggest advancement in Second Amendment rights has been the normalization of the idea of firearms.  The biased media has a really hard time today in painting us as a fringe community. 

Heck, SCOTUS just ruled that the Fed.Gov cannot prevent firearms purchases by people who smoke pot.  The ruling was unanimous.  Conservative Alito and liberal Kagan co-authored a concurring opinion.  It's cats and dogs living together.

This has even been absorbed by the lower courts - the District and Circuit Courts of Appeals.  It's great if SCOTUS makes a ruling, but if the lower courts don't enforce it then it doesn't carry much weight.  We saw a fair amount of this during the years after Heller.  Now we don't.  Sure, there will always be the rogue District Judge who allows a plainly infringing gun control law, but these are getting struck down on appeal.

We're no longer the weirdos, the weirdos are on the other side.  The Class War against gun owners is pretty much over.

That's one heck of a change in 18 years.

 

Starship - Past and Future

The Silicon Graybeard (among others) links to a really interesting video from SpaceX about Starship:

Something that needs to be shared is a video from SpaceX, called Starship - Test Like You Fly and while it's nearly a half hour long, it's absolutely worth watching. 

That's near-term Starship past and (implied) future.  But watching it made me think about a 2021 post from Casey Handmer - Starship Is Still Not Understood.  In it, he remarks on just how far Starship had come in the previous couple of years:

While I am 100% certain that the Starship design will continue to evolve in noticeable ways, the progress in two years cannot be understated. Two years ago Starship was a design concept and a mock up. Today it’s a 95% complete prototype that will soon fly to space and may even make it back in one piece.

The odds of Starship actually working in the near future are much higher today than they were two years ago. Across the industry, decisions are being made on a time horizon in which Starship operation is relevant, and yet it is not being correctly accounted for.

He then goes on to lay it all out: 

Starship matters. It’s not just a really big rocket, like any other rocket on steroids. It’s a continuing and dedicated attempt to achieve the “Holy Grail” of rocketry, a fully and rapidly reusable orbital class rocket that can be mass manufactured. It is intended to enable a conveyor belt logistical capacity to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) comparable to the Berlin Airlift. That is, Starship is a powerful logistical system that puts launch below the API.

Starship is designed to be able to launch bulk cargo into LEO in >100 T chunks for <$10m per launch, and up to thousands of launches per year. By refilling in LEO, a fully loaded deep space Starship can transport >100 T of bulk cargo anywhere in the solar system, including the surface of the Moon or Mars, for <$100m per Starship. Starship is intended to be able to transport a million tonnes of cargo to the surface of Mars in just ten launch windows, in addition to serving other incidental destinations, such as maintaining the Starlink constellation or building a big base at the Lunar south pole.

The fact that Starship flown expendably would be perhaps 10 times cheaper, in terms of dollars per tonne, than even Falcon is not relevant.

Jerry Pournelle used to say that the only space metric that counted was cost per ton delivered to orbit.  I don't see this as a Berlin Airlift; it's a Liberty Ship.  Mass Produced in huge numbers and able to shuttle large amounts of generic cargo to and from space.  Handmer emphasizes this point:

Historically, mission/system design has been grievously afflicted by absurdly harsh mass constraints, since launch costs to LEO are as high as $10,000/kg and single launches cost hundreds of millions. This in turn affects schedule, cost structure, volume, material choices, labor, power, thermal, guidance/navigation/control, and every other aspect of the mission. Entire design languages and heuristics are reinforced, at the generational level, in service of avoiding negative consequences of excess mass. As a result, spacecraft built before Starship are a bit like steel weapons made before the industrial revolution. Enormously expensive as a result of embodying a lot of meticulous labor, but ultimately severely limited compared to post-industrial possibilities.

Starship obliterates the mass constraint and every last vestige of cultural baggage that constraint has gouged into the minds of spacecraft designers. There are still constraints, as always, but their design consequences are, at present, completely unexplored. We need a team of economists to rederive the relative elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a new set of design heuristics for space system production oriented towards maximizing volume of production. Or, more generally, maximizing some robust utility function assuming saturation of Starship launch capacity. A dollar spent on mass optimization no longer buys a dollar saved on launch cost. It buys nothing.

The implications are huge, and probably require a change in the institutions themselves (e.g. JPL and NASA):

NASA centers and their contractors build exquisitely complex and expensive robots to launch on conventional rockets and explore the universe. To take JPL as an example, divide the total budget by the mass of spacecraft shipped to the cape and it works out to about $1,000,000/kg. I’m not certain how much mass NASA launches to space per year but, even including ISS, it cannot be much more than about 50 T. This works out to between $100,000/kg for LEO bulk cargo and >$1,000,000/kg for deep space exploration.

Enter Starship. Annual capacity to LEO climbs from its current average of 500 T for the whole of our civilization to perhaps 500 T per week. Eventually, it could exceed 1,000,000 T/year. At the same time, launch costs drop as low as $50/kg, roughly 100x lower than the present. For the same budget in launch, supply will have increased by roughly 100x. How can the space industry saturate this increased launch supply?

...

This is where the risk to the space industry originates. Prior to Starship, heavy machinery for building a Moon base could only come from NASA, because only NASA has the expertise to build a rocket propelled titanium Moon tractor for a billion dollars per unit. After Starship, Caterpillar or Deere or Kamaz can space qualify their existing commodity products with very minimal changes and operate them in space. In all seriousness, some huge Caterpillar mining truck is already extremely rugged and mechanically reliable. McMaster-Carr already stocks thousands of parts that will work in mines, on oil rigs, and any number of other horrendously corrosive, warranty voiding environments compared to which the vacuum of space is delightfully benign. A space-adapted tractor needs better paint, a vacuum compatible hydraulic power source, vacuum-rated bearings, lubricants, wire insulation, and a redundant remote control sensor kit.

I suspect that Jared Isaacson understands this.  The Space industry five years from now will be very, very different that any projections we can make today.  Starship's future - while brightly described in SpaceX's outstanding video - is much more interesting than almost anyone suspects.

G'mar tov

The Day of Atonement is a day for reflection.  This is good for all of us, Tribe or not. 

To our Jewish readers, Shanna tovah. 

Face Vocal Band - The Parting Glass

This is an old, old traditional song of parting, popularized by The Clancy Brothers and often played at both New Year's and funerals.  This song is especially poignant to me in a year where I lost both Younger Brother Borepatch and my deeply missed Wolfgang.  May 2024 be better.

Happy New Years, everybody.

Richard Dawkins is a midwit

Aesop brings the Hammer Of Truth down on the good professor:

One cannot have "only a quarter of an eye, only a hundredth of an eye, or half an eye, is better than nothing " (3:50ff).

Basic physiology disagrees:

It doesn't work like that.

 

In the trade, there's a technical term for what you are when you have a half, a quarter, or a hundredth of an eye (and by this we mean not just the eyeball itself, but the entire cascade of processes enabling vision): BLIND.

There's a lot more in the post, and even more in the comments.  But what I find most interesting is the fact that Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and so he knows this. Aesop has a simple answer to why Dawkins still tells this sort of lie  (he's a lying liar).  Well, sure.

But that's not particularly interesting.  Why does he lie?  Moldbug explained this 15 years ago:

Nonetheless, it’s my sad duty to inform the world that Professor Dawkins has been pwned. Perhaps you’re over 30 and you’re unfamiliar with this curious new word. As La Wik puts it:

The word “pwn” remains in use as Internet social-culture slang meaning: to take unauthorized control of someone else or something belonging to someone else by exploiting a vulnerability.

(At least here at Unqualified Reservations, pwned alliterates with posse and rhymes with loaned.) How could such a learned and wise mind exhibit such an exploitable vulnerability? And who—or what—has taken unauthorized control over Professor Dawkins? The aliens? The CIA? The Jews? The mind boggles.

Ah, those crazy kids and their barbaric slang like pwned.  Good Lord, do I really have over 400 posts with that tag?  Ahem.  

Continuing with Dawkins' failure to adequately explain the difference between Science and Religion:

My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian atheist. He is a Protestant atheist. And he is not just a Protestant atheist. He is a Calvinist atheist. And he is not just a Calvinist atheist. He is an Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In other words, he can be also be described as a Puritan atheist, a Dissenter atheist, a Nonconformist atheist, an Evangelical atheist, etc., etc.

This cladistic taxonomy traces Professor Dawkins’ intellectual ancestry back about 400 years, to the era of the English Civil War. Except of course for the atheism theme, Professor Dawkins’ kernel is a remarkable match for the Ranter, Leveller, Digger, Quaker, Fifth Monarchist, or any of the more extreme English Dissenter traditions that flourished during the Cromwellian interregnum.

Frankly, these dudes were freaks. Maniacal fanatics. Any mainstream English thinker of the 17th, 18th or 19th century, informed that this tradition (or its modern descendant) is now the planet’s dominant Christian denomination, would regard this as a sign of imminent apocalypse. If you’re sure they’re wrong, you’re more sure than me.

Now I must warn you, Moldbug is pretty thick going.  Fosetti has a very accessible overview that will give you 95% of Moldbug's arguments.

One other interesting comment at Aesop's place concerned science as a process.  As I've pointed out repeatedly over the last few years, science as practiced today is very, very sick, and the reason is The Iron Law of Bureaucracy in action:

I can't seem to find and data about the number of scientists working today, vs. the number a century ago.  I can't even find decent proxy data for this - say the number of scientific articles published in 2010 vs. the number published in 1910.  But we can all agree that there has been a vast increase in the number of working scientists and the number of published articles (which may be up to 50 Million by now).

And yet we are not seeing any obvious acceleration in the pace of scientific discovery.  Nigel Calder again:

While the modern advances are all impressive, are they really more impressive than those from a century ago?  Especially when you adjust for the army of scientists at work today - perhaps a thousand times as many as at the dawn of the 20th Century - the question becomes why has science slowed down?

The post about how sick science as practiced today is gives the reason:

Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics. One experiment after theother is returning null results: No new particles, no new dimensions, no new symmetries. Sure, there are some anomalies in the data here and there, and maybe one of them will turn out to be real news. But experimentalists are just poking in the dark. They have no clue where new physics may be to find. And their colleagues in theory development are of no help.

...

This is a long and detailed discussion which is hard to excerpt.  This bit seems very important as to the institutional rot:

Developing new methodologies is harder than inventing new particles in the dozens, which is why they don’t like to hear my conclusions. Any change will reduce the paper output, and they don’t want this. It’s not institutional pressure that creates this resistance, it’s that scientists themselves don’t want to move their butts.

How long can they go on with this, you ask? How long can they keep on spinning theory-tales?

I am afraid there is nothing that can stop them. They review each other’s papers. They review each other’s grant proposals. And they constantly tell each other that what they are doing is good science. Why should they stop? For them, all is going well. They hold conferences, they publish papers, they discuss their great new ideas. From the inside, it looks like business as usual, just that nothing comes out of it.

This is not a problem that will go away by itself.

The people who run the institutions of Science don't see that there's a problem.  I mean, hey - there's a ton of grant funding coming in and nobody can be allowed to rock that boat, amirite?  And so it's all gatekeeping and name calling.

The result? Scientific Progress has essentially ground to a halt.

Note that this doesn't apply to Engineering, which we can call "science that works".  SpaceX is Exhibit 1 for the Prosecution here.  But Science as currently practiced is a game for fools and liars. And Richard Dawkins, but I repeat myself.

Retractionwatch is Exhibit 2 for the Prosecution.  A few minutes thought will produce another dozen Exhibits.

And yes, I was an Engineer not a Scientist by training back at State U.  Because of that, I haven't been (intellectually) pwned, like Dawkins has.  But good gravy, it's getting to where the term "scientist" is almost as pejorative as the term "intellectual".  The last word goes to Aesop, who explains why:

I doubt, with Dawkins being so invested, intellectually and morally, in the lifelong lie, he'd ever be intellectually honest enough to admit that he, just like Darwin, had a grudge against the idea of the divine or supernatural, and both had therefore sunk their spurs into the idea that there is no god, because it makes the rest of their pathetic existence tolerable and comfortable, not to mention lucrative.

He's entitled to go to hell in whatever way he sees fit to do so; that's free will in action.

But to make it his life's work to try and bamboozle others by deliberately ignoring the utter lack of any scientific underpinning for his delusions, and furthermore the evidence to the exact contrary, and outright lying about both in support of his line of twaddle, is quite inarguably and inexcusably monstrous and damnable.

Thinking about Grace

I have posted special Easter posts for most of this blog's history, despite the fact that I've never really studied theology.  I've done my poor best, but have leaned repeatedly on someone who was a theologian.  Frederick Buechner was a ThD and an ordained Presbyterian minister, as well as a best selling author and Pulitzer Prize winner (back when that meant something).  I found him exceptionally insightful and thought provoking.

Rev. Beuchner passed away last summer at the ripe old age of 96.  As a tribute to him - as well as a meditation on Grace, and Easter, and the human condition - here are his quotes that I've used in the past.

A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do ... There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can only be yours if you'll reach out and take it.

- Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith

To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment nonetheless. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love Him.

  - Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is…the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back – in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

-Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

But there is another truth, the sister of this one, and it is that every man is an island. It is a truth that often the tolling of a silence reveals even more than the tolling of a bell. We sit in silence with one another, each of us more or less reluctant to speak, for fear that if he does, he may sound like a fool. And beneath that there is of course the deeper fear, which is really a fear of the self rather than of the other, that maybe the truth of it is that indeed he is a fool. The fear that the self that he reveals by speaking may be a self that the others will reject just as in a way he has himself rejected it. So either we do not speak, or we speak not to reveal who we are but to conceal who we are, because words can be used either way of course. Instead of showing ourselves as we truly are, we show ourselves as we believe others want us to be. We wear masks, and with practice we do it better and better, and they serve us well –except that it gets very lonely inside the mask, because inside the mask that each of us wears there is a person who both longs to be known and fears to be known. In this sense every man is an island separated from every other man by fathoms of distrust and duplicity.

- Frederick Beuchner, The Hungering Dark

Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you . . . remember that the lives of others are not your business. They are their business. They are God’s business . . . even your own life is not your business. It also is God’s business. Leave it to God. It is an astonishing thought. It can become a life-transforming thought . . . unclench the fists of your spirit and take it easy . . . What deadens us most to God’s presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort . . . than being able from time to time to stop that chatter . . .

- Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

Here are Beuchner quotes that I don't know the source.

The love for equals is a human thing--of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles. The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing--the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world. The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing--to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints.  And then there is the love for the enemy--love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured's love for the torturer. This is God's love. It conquers the world.

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you. There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.

If the world is sane, then Jesus is mad as a hatter and the Last Supper is the Mad Tea Party. The world says, Mind your own business, and Jesus says, There is no such thing as your own business. The world says, Follow the wisest course and be a success, and Jesus says, Follow me and be crucified. The world says, Drive carefully — the life you save may be your own — and Jesus says, Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. The world says, Law and order, and Jesus says, Love. The world says, Get and Jesus says, Give. In terms of the world's sanity, Jesus is crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without being a little crazy too is laboring less under a cross than under a delusion.

Rest in Peace, Rev. Beuchner, and may flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest.  I expect that you went to Heav'n a'shouting love for the Father and the Son.

All of Man's virtues, with none of his vices

If Ike wants a friend in Washington, he should get a dog.

- Harry Truman, on Eisenhauer's 1953 Inauguration

It was 2012.  I was done with the Atlanta-Austin shuttle.  What I found was that my family liked me being away from home all the time, as long as the paycheck cleared.  My soon-to-be-ex was increasingly angry and dismissive; my two surly teenage sons were, well, increasingly surly.

And so I channeled my inner Ike and got a dog.  I wanted something that I knew would love me, without asking for anything in return (except for love and kindness, that is).  This was Wolfgang's introduction to this blog.

I didn't know just what an extraordinary friend I had brought into the house.  I did a better job socializing and training him than I had on my old German Shepherd, Jack.  30 years of me growing up helped a lot there.  But Wolfgang was something special.  He loved going to the dog park (morning and evening) which I never did with Jack, and so he became comfortable and social around all the other dogs.  I took Wolfgang on walks in the woods, like I had with Jack.  But as Wolfgang grew, so did his personality.  He had a gusto for life when it was him and me spending time together.  I was his Dad, but he was my friend and companion.

My marriage augured into the ground, and I met The Queen Of The World.  Wolfgang discovered what I was learning, that she was extraordinarily caring.  She made sure his food and water dishes were clean and full.  She gave him a bed (a folded up blanket, but it was his place) which he had never had before.  She gave him his first stuffed toy, which we called his "baby".  He'd never had one before.  I was his Dad, and did things with him.  She quickly became his Mom, and did things for him.  Wolfgang loved her immediately.  

He loved her even when she took his baby and put it in the washing machine.  He lost his mind - it was HIS baby!  He relaxed when she took it out of the washer, and then lost his mind all over again when she put it in the dryer.  But The Queen Of The World made sure he had his own bed to sleep on, and his baby to sleep with him.

Pretty soon she replaced the blanket with an actual bed for him.

She was a great Mom for him.  She got him his first Frisbee.  I threw tennis balls for him to chase, and she noticed that he would catch them when I lobbed them to him.  So she got soft Frisbees and he took to that like a duck takes to water.  He would get huge hang time jumping for them - it was like a shark hitting a tuna.  The Frisbee in the photo below is at least seven feet off the ground.  We met most of the folks in the neighborhood because everyone noticed the big, good looking dog carrying the Frisbee.  The neighborhood kids in particular all wanted to throw it for him.  Wolfgang quickly learned that kids just wanted to play with him.  He loved kids, and they loved him.  The neighborhood Moms all relaxed when they watched everyone having fun with the big Frisbee dog.

Unlike Jack, he also loved being around other dogs.  He would play at the dog park, and was always good about sharing his Frisbee.  I've never seen a dog get along with other dogs as well as he did.

The Queen got him a raincoat, because I would take him out, rain or shine.  She called him the "Morton Salt dog".

You see, we'd go look for deer lurking around Castle Borepatch and sometimes it rained.  Sometimes it didn't.  Whichever, we had our time together every day.

The Queen Of The World and he had time together every day, too.  Christmas was always special, because she filled his stocking to overflowing.  He always got excited when she hung his stocking with ours.  He knew she was taking care of him, in a way he hadn't ever had before.

The move to Florida was good for him, as it was to us.  His back and hips were going bad, and he didn't have cold and snow to deal with, or stairs to navigate.  And while there weren't many deer, there were a lot of cows.  He loved saying hello to the cows.

But time and tide wait for no man, or dog.  His back became nothing but arthritis, and the sockets of his hips were jagged bone.  It got harder and harder for him to walk.  If you look closely in the next picture, you can see that he couldn't quite get his back end all the way up, and his back legs are tangled up.  He'd fall and have trouble getting up.  That was two months ago, and it continued getting worse.

One night he fell and had to pull himself with his front legs to where he could stand up.  You could see the pain in his eyes, and while he never used to whine that became more common.  And so we spoiled him, and made the call to the vet.  The first picture of him is at the top of the post; this is the last photo I took of him.

The Queen Of The World made him chicken and rice, and he ate a huge lunch yesterday, and loved every bit of it.  We gave him Frosty Paws which we'd stopped because it upset his digestive system.  But all rules were suspended yesterday.  And then we went to the vet.

Yesterday was a bad day.  He gave us what I had hoped for when I got him - unconditional, devoted love.  The Queen Of The World and I returned that to him - we used to say that he was our child.  We would give him morning family hugs and tell him "I love you".  Soon he was saying it back to us: Ooo OOOOO ooo.  He would match the word length and tone perfectly.

But of course, he wasn't our child, he was our dog.  Rather than three score and ten, we had him for a decade and one.  We are now constantly reminded of him by his absence, where he should be waiting for us but is not.  Yesterday morning was the hardest; rather than him eager to see me get out of bed, it was silence.  I'm sort of wrecked, losing someone like that.  I am sure glad that I have The Queen Of The World with me.  

Wolfgang was hands down the best dog we've ever had.  He was so friendly with both people and dogs, so smart and easy to train, so well behaved, and so damned handsome that everyone in the neighborhood is sad, too.  He truly earned the words from Epitaph to a Dog:

Near this spot rests one who had
Beauty without Vanity;
Strength without Insolence:
Courage without Ferocity;
and all Man's Virtues with none of his vices.

This has been a long post, but it's his due.  I sure would rather not have the occasion to write it.  The Queen and I will never see his like again.

If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.

- Will Rogers

Ave atque vale, Wolfgang.  I sure miss you.

Alison Krauss and Union Station - When You Say Nothing at All

Wirecutter (you do read him every day, right?  I thought so.) posts a complete concert of Allison Krauss and Union Station, which includes this song.  Listening, it made me think on the weakness of Music Criticism, the dissection of songs.  It made me think on the saying "All you need are three chords and the truth."  This song is not sophisticated, musically speaking.  But it speaks directly to the heart, with the volume turned up to eleven.

It made me ponder that it's been a while since I've posted a love letter to The Queen Of The World, and shame on me.  But the lyrics here speak the truth: she literally caught me when I fell.

Allison Krauss and Union Station need no introduction; if you've never heard of them just listen to this.  And listen to how how when the band first starts to play the song the crowd starts to cheer, and then settles down to "quiet as a church mouse".  And at the end the applause goes on, and on, and on.  That's Allison Krauss and Union Station.  Oh, and this bit from her Wikipedia bio kind of sums up the phenomenon that is Allison Krauss:

As of 2019, she has won 27 Grammy Awards from 42 nominations,^[3] ranking her fourth behind Beyoncé, Quincy Jones and classical conductor Georg Solti for most Grammy Award wins overall.^[4] Krauss was the singer and female artist with the most awards in Grammy history^[5] until Beyoncé won her 28th Grammy in 2021.^[6] When Krauss won her first Grammy in 1991, she was the second-youngest winner at that time.

Three chords and the truth.  A Truth worthy of not just a love letter, but a love letter to my sweetheart.

When You Say Nothing At All (songwriters: Paul Overstreet, Don Schlitz):

It's amazing how you can speak right to my heart
Without saying a word, you can light up the dark
Try as I may I could never explain
What I hear when you don't say a thing

The smile on your face lets me know that you need me
There's a truth in your eyes saying you'll never leave me
The touch of our hands say you'll catch me if ever I fall
You say it best when you say nothing at all

All day long I can hear people talking aloud
But when you hold me near, you drown out the crowd
Old Mr. Webster could never define
What's being said between your heart and mine

The smile on your face lets me know that you need me
There's a truth in your eyes saying you'll never leave me
The touch of our hands say you'll catch me if ever I fall
You say it best when you say nothing at all

The smile on your face lets me know that you need me
There's a truth in your eyes saying you'll never leave me
The touch of our hands say you'll catch me if ever I fall
You say it best when you say nothing at all

I would be remiss if I didn't also mention the band, especially Ron Block (guitar) and Jerry Douglass (perhaps the world's greatest dobro player).

Thanks, Wirecutter.  And double thanks to my sweetheart.