Rock Castle Gorge

Yesterday was a get-out-of-the-house day. The hike was to Rock Castle Gorge near Floyd, Virginia. The trail is near the Blue Ridge Parkway and is on land owned by the National Park Service. The trail follows a fast-flowing creek through the gorge. Many years ago, the area was sparsely settled. Now the pastures are mostly overgrown, but one abandoned house remains, with a well-preserved barn and outhouse. There are trout in the stream. We saw at least three fishermen.

These are iPhone photos. I didn’t want to carry the heavy Nikon camera on a six-mile half-uphill hike.

A real-world test for the authoritarian mind

There are three conditions of the human psyche that are puzzling and frightening to those of us who don’t have those conditions. Those conditions are authoritarianism, religious fanaticism, and not being very smart. All three of these conditions are commonly found in the same person. To have even one of them can be debilitating. To have two is doubly debilitating. Donald Trump, for example, is not a religious fanatic. But he is an authoritarian, and he is not very smart. For convenience in this post, let’s call the people who have these conditions Trump-Susceptibles, or Reds. Let’s call those who don’t have these conditions Not-Trump-Susceptibles, or Blues.

There is a certain symmetry here. Just as Blues are puzzled and frightened by Reds, so Reds are puzzled and frightened by Blues. Each group sees the other as dangerous. There is a certain way, though, in which the symmetry breaks down. Blues can understand Reds. Blues just look down on Reds as mean, addled, and stupid. But Reds cannot understand Blues. Understanding Blues is beyond the capacity of Reds. I would argue that Reds cannot understand Blues because of what I call Webster’s First Law: People cannot perceive above their own level. So Reds, lacking the capacity to understand Blues, say that Blues are under the influence of Satan, or that Blues are the agents of evil conspiracies such as Pizzagate. Smarter people can easily understand the thought processes of the not-so-smart. But the not-so-smart cannot easily understand the thought processes of smarter people. Religious fanatics who have no doubt that they know the mind of God and even the mind of Satan think that there is something wrong, and wicked, in those who don’t have their innate knowledge of the mind of God. God speaks to Reds; Blues wickedly refuse to listen.

Let’s consider the Satan angle, for example. A must-read this morning is the Washington Post piece ‘I would rather die than kill the country’: The conservative chorus pushing Trump to end social distancing. The article quotes R.R. Reno, editor of the religious journal First Things, as saying that “sentimental humanists” are behind the closing of public accommodations because of the corona virus. “Satan prefers sentimental humanists” to do his handiwork, Reno said. There you have it. Reno believes that he knows the mind of Satan. And Reno believes that Blues are doing Satan’s work. According to Wikipedia, Reno holds a Ph.D. from Yale. Presumably he is smart, so he has two of the three debilitating conditions — authoritarianism and religious fanaticism.

They claim that their concern is about the economy, or about the world that their children will inherit. I don’t buy that. Either they’re trying to deceive us on their true motivations, or they’re deceiving themselves. Their true concern is that they might lose their power.

Reds are a minority. Yet somehow we Blues find ourselves in a nightmare in which Reds hold the White House and the U.S. Senate, and the Reds all around us are gloating. Trump’s fear, obviously, is that a collapse of the economy will take away his only hope of holding on to Red power. Because Trump, and other Reds, see nefarious conspiracies and Satan behind anything that frustrates what they see as God’s work, they see the corona virus as a wicked plot — a hoax — invented by Blues. Reds all over the country have gotten the message, and now Reds out in the hinterlands are all abuzz about it. (See the Facebook meme below, which came from the Republican Party group in my county. Note the message of the meme, that this is all just an evil conspiracy by Blues.)

I would not be at all surprised now to see Reds organizing gatherings (not to mention defiantly going to church) to teach us Blues a lesson.

No one knows what course this pandemic will take. But certainly one possibility is that people who are authoritarians, religious fanatics, and not very smart are going to get sick and die in larger numbers. Their defiance of the devil’s work done by us Blues could cost many lives, though, and not just Red lives. If thousands of students return to Liberty University as the corona virus is spreading rapidly, what might happen? Jerry Falwell Jr., like Donald Trump, is so sure of what’s inside of his Red mind that he’s willing to bet a great many of other people’s lives on it. Red power is at stake, so to them it’s God versus Satan, and they expect God to protect them.

No one knows what’s going to happen, so I am not going to make any predictions. But the probabilities don’t seem to be on Trump’s and Falwell’s and Glenn Beck’s side. How many Reds will follow them, and for how long? If thousands of Reds go along with them and expose themselves to the virus, then that would be, at the very least, a fascinating test of the real-world consequences of the Red world view. It also could diminish the number of Reds in the American population.

As for me, I’ll be watching their experiment closely. And I’ll be doing my damnedest to stay as far away from them as I can.

Update 1: During the Trump era, Russian propaganda as carried by RT.com has shown a peculiar alignment with Republican propaganda in the United States. As with all propaganda, we need to do our best to figure out whose interest it serves.

From RT.com:

Decadent like the late Roman Empire, the West is committing suicide through its irrational response to Covid-19

West can’t cope with Covid-19 because of DOCILIANS, the pampered herd whose demand for ZERO RISK actually risks killing thousands

Compare this with Fox News:

Fox News’ Brit Hume: It’s ‘Entirely Reasonable’ the Elderly Would Want to Die to Save Economy

Update 2: New York Times: The Road to Coronavirus Hell Was Paved by Evangelicals.

Update 3: Politico: A far-right rallying cry: Older Americans should volunteer to work.

Are you focusing on food, too?


Cabbage, just planted

I confess that, a week ago, I felt as though this all might be just a game of Doomsday. As the news gets worse, everything has started to feel more and more real. After thinking about it for a while, it seems likely to me that food is even more important than avoiding the virus, though both, obviously, are the top priorities. With food in mind, Ken finished planting the spring garden today.

The calculus may change according to the situation, but right now the protocol is to go out for fresh foods (and as much storage food as possible) at the early-morning seniors-only hours that many stores have scheduled, including Whole Foods and Walmart. At that hour, the shelves should be better stocked, and there should be fewer people in the store.

I got out the books on foraging today. Who knows how bad this might get? Wild foods might be a great help.

As always, please comment with ideas and reports from your part of the world.


Burning brush on the garden plot


The old tiller gets a workout.


Ready to plant. The soil here is naturally red. The dark color is from all the organic material that has been added to the garden over the past 11 years.

Some light and color for Black Monday

Just as the self-quarantine began two days ago, a car rolled in with the abbey’s best friend, who promptly got to work on the overgrowth. If such a bleak and scary time had to occur, what good fortune it is that spring (rather than a winter) is bursting out all over. The neighbors are out walking and visiting and gathering flowers, but everyone maintains the six-foot distance of self-quarantine. The refrigerator and the cabinets are full. The kitchen is running full tilt. I hope that all of you are as well situated.

The news is terrible and seems to be getting worse. The whole world seems strangely unified, focused on the same thing. Then again, I think I’ll take that statement back. Here in the U.S., at least, we seem divided into the usual two groups: Those who try to understand and work with reality, and those who try to deny reality and work against it. It feels as though something historically important is happening.

I’d love to see your comments on how things are in your part of the world.

Goodbye, Pete Buttigieg

I am saddened this evening to learn that Pete Buttigieg has dropped out of the race for U.S. President. I admire him for doing it, though. He is a realist, so he has taken a realistic look at the numbers. I feel sure that one reason he announced this decision two days before Super Tuesday was to give Super Tuesday voters a chance a chance to rethink and redirect their votes. I see that as noble act and as a mark of his high character.

Here in North Carolina, early voting has been going on for two weeks and ended yesterday (Feb. 29). I am greatly surprised to see that overall early-voting turnout by young Democrats is down from 2016. Early voting by older Democrats, age 71 and up, actually rose 39.8 percent from 2016, a stunning increase. What does this mean? I’m afraid we won’t really know until the final results are in after Tuesday and we see who those older voters voted for.

Both my favorite candidates — Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg — are now out of the race. I’m afraid that, as an older Democrat, I may not be typical. It would seem that most older Democrats don’t trust young people as much as I do.

Update: There is a saying in the corporate world, “Hire for character, train for skills.” Being able to recognize character (or the lack of it) is the key to that. This is character:

Lest we forget: Nature bats last


“The Course of Empires: Destruction.” Thomas Cole, 1836. Click here for high-resolution version.

About two years ago, I reviewed Kyle Harper’s book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. Harper drew on new climate research and what we might call archeological microbiology to remind us that political histories are only partial histories. Nature bats last. Are you listening, Donald Trump?

Harper’s book was reviewed in all the right places. Here are some short reads on the book in the L.A. Review of Books, The Atlantic, and Foreign Affairs.

About the painting: The painting above by Thomas Cole is part of a series called “The Course of Empire.” There are five paintings in the set: “The Savage State,” “The Arcadian or Pastoral State,” “The Consummation of Empire,” “Destruction,” and “Desolation.” You can see all the paintings on Wikipedia.

Trump & Company have been saying this week that the coronavirus is being hyped by Democrats to spook the stock market and take down Trump. As for hype, I don’t know. But one thing is certain: We Democrats are delighted to see Trump swept up in a situation that he and his goons can’t lie, cheat, and spin their way out of (though they’re trying). We’re daring to hope for the near-impossible: That Trump’s inability to control a pandemic and the stock market will help members of the Trump cult see how feckless and corrupt Trump really is.

The downturn in global markets is looking pretty serious. My guess, though, is that the coronavirus is the last straw, not the cause, of the market correction. There have been many warning signs and ominous economic indicators. I’m surprised that the market held up for as long as it did.

How scared should we be of the coronavirus? There are some things that I think are particularly disturbing. Rush Limbaugh says it’s just a cold. But colds — or flu, for that matter — don’t have fatality rates approaching 2 percent. The words “difficulty breathing” are very scary words. Bloomberg has reported that two-thirds of the critically ill patients required a month or more on mechanical ventilators. Just how much equipment do hospitals have available for providing “invasive breathing support”? You don’t want to get this virus.

Much has been written about how to prepare for the possibility of pandemic. The most important thing, it seems to me, is to have enough food and supplies stashed away that you can stay home, possibly for weeks at a time. That preparation, if not already done, needs to be done now. If the situation worsens, groceries stores may be overwhelmed even as supply lines break down.

I want to mention a powerful voice for sanity and support in a time of plague and poison politics. That’s Heather Cox Richardson, who posts on Facebook pretty much every day on each day’s significant events. She is a professor of history at Boston College. I have pre-ordered her new book, which will be released April 1: How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. If you search Facebook for her name, you’ll find her.

Update: I have long identified as a left-wing prepper. Here’s a nice piece in the New York Times about what that means, by someone who, like me, has a San Francisco attitude toward being prepared: How to Be a Smart Coronavirus Prepper: Instead of freaking ourselves out, we need to plan for a difficult future every day.

I would add a bit of advice to the ideas above, based on my experience. Canned food and frozen food are practical only if you are diligent about rotating your stock and watching expiration dates. Otherwise, I’d suggest looking into the storage food that is sold mostly into the right-wing prepper market. These are large buckets of dried foods. The food is packed in Mylar, and vacuum and nitrogen are used to extend shelf life. These foods are supposed to keep up to 25 years if properly stored.

Quorn Stroganoff

I had not thought of Stroganoff in years. If ever I had even made beef Stroganoff, I don’t remember it. But, a couple of weeks ago, the New York Times mentioned beef Stroganoff in its beautiful weekly column, “What to Cook This Week.” Once you get Stroganoff in your head, you might as well give up. You’re going to make some.

I’ve made it twice since the New York Times piece. I used the faux ground beef version of Quorn. Much of the appeal is the egg noodles. I had not had egg noodles in years. If I’ve ever even bought egg noodles, I don’t recall it. I’ve probably acquired a new bad habit. Oh well. Too bad.

You could use any good recipe for beef Stoganoff or hamburger Stroganoff, but you might need to consider some minor changes. Recipes probably will have you brown the beef first, then set it aside while you cook the mushrooms. Since Quorn doesn’t release any fat, I’d suggest changing the order. First, cook and brown your mushrooms in olive oil. Set them aside. Then gently brown your Quorn in olive oil. Then add your flour and brown that along with the Quorn. Then deglaze the pan with white wine or stock, and put the mushrooms back in. If you didn’t use stock, I suggest adding some Better Than Bouillon to give the gravy more oomph and brownness. At this point you should have browned Quorn and browned mushrooms in a thick gravy. For the final touch, you can use sour cream, crème fraîche, or even heavy cream. I used Greek yoghurt.

Most recipes will call for mustard and Worcestershire sauce. Mustard is probably more authentic. But I found that I prefer a touch of tomato sauce (or tomato paste) instead. The red improves the richness of the brown and adds some umami.

I mentioned beef Stroganoff to some neighbors a few days ago, and, like me, they had not thought of it for years. They made some the next day. Resistance is futile.

It’s the mushrooms and gravy and noodles, really, that make this dish, as far as I’m concerned. You could even double the mushrooms and not go wrong.

ATV’s: a new reality of rural life

Yesterday we had the first snow of the winter. It wasn’t a particularly heavy or pretty snow, but the neighbors, who have not one but two ATV’s, invited me to ride with them on today’s equivalent of a sleigh ride: the ATV ride.

These neighbors have property on three sides of the abbey’s woodland, and fortunately we get along well. Most of the people in this area, actually, have some form of off-road conveyance. Given that something like half a million ATV’s are sold each year in the U.S. (and the market is growing), this is happening everywhere.

In the hands of the irresponsible, ATV’s can make a serious mess, causing erosion from the ruts they can create. Fortunately my neighbors are responsible. I gave them permission to build a bridge where one of the old rights-of-way crosses a stream on abbey land. Not only does the bridge look much better, a bridge avoids the mud and erosion that can happen where ATV’s ford streams.

These vehicles are not just an American phenomenon. They’re being sold in large numbers all over the world. On the Scottish islands of Mull and Gometra, which I visited in 2018, there are no real roads, so ATV’s are the new mule carts.

Sometimes neighbors ask me why I don’t have an ATV. The real reason is that they cost too much. But I show them my walking stick (which is always with me when I wander) and say that I already have one — an economy model that I picked up in Scotland.


An ATV bridge of all-local materials. Two streams come together here at the lower end of the abbey’s woodland.

ᚱᚢᚾᛖᛊ : Escaping with Anglo-Saxon


With Lily. We escape together.

Among the teetering stacks of books by my bed, I always keep some books for what I call fill-in reading. This is light reading for short reading sessions — for example, when I know that I’m going to fall asleep after only a page or two.

One such book is a 1950s textbook on astronomy, which I’ve been studying for years. Another, for many months now, is A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. The first edition of this book was published in 1894. It has been through several revisions and new printings. My copy is from 1970. Later editions include a supplement, not because new words are being invented in Anglo-Saxon (that’s supposed to be funny), but because the scholarship continues.

Why read dictionaries, or, at least, historical dictionaries? One reads these dictionaries to get a feel for the kind of words a language had. And because Anglo-Saxon (also called Old English) is an early form of my native language, and because I have a good bit of exposure to Latin through Spanish and French, a better grasp of the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary helps provide a better feel for how Old English and French came together after the Norman Conquest to give birth to modern English.

As an editor, I have argued for many years that writers need to know the difference between the Anglo-Saxon components of English and the Latin components. This is because, when we write in Anglo-Saxon, the writing is clearer and is much more useful for persuasion and evoking an emotional response. For telling stories, only Anglo-Saxon English will do. We resort to Latin only when we’re obliged to get technical or abstract. Still, Anglo-Saxon, like German, is rich with a vocabulary of abstraction and objects of the imagination, for example, gēosceaftgāst — a doomed spirit, a word which is found in Beowulf.

It’s almost impossible now to think of Anglo-Saxon without also thinking of J.R.R. Tolkien, who not only wrote a few of the most famous novels in the English language but who also aroused our curiosity about the roots of the English language.

Do you recall when you first saw the runes in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings? The runes then seemed very magical and obscure. Tolkien’s runes are part of a language he invented. But real runes are not so obscure, because they’re an alphabet used for Germanic languages before the Latin alphabet was used. It’s almost a letdown to learn that runes are so well-supported today that they are included in the Unicode table of international characters, which means that most computers can reproduce runes. (If you see question marks in the headline on this post, rather than runes, then your computer must not be fully Unicode compliant.)

While reading through the Anglo-Saxon dictionary, I found a number of words that I recognize from Tolkien. The page below, Page 105, contains the word ent, for example. It means giant.

The words you’ll find in the Anglo-Saxon dictionary fit roughly into three categories: words that are very familiar and common in English (stēam, for steam or moisture), words that are easily recognizable with a little thought (fordrīfan to drive, sweep away or drive on), and words that are interesting but that make no sense at all (dwæsian, to become stupid).

Our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon is based on about 400 surviving manuscripts. Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries took a heavy toll, though it cleansed England of catholicism. The monks’ revenge, though, is that much of what survives was written down and preserved by monks. Consequently there are a lot of ecclesiastical words in an Anglo-Saxon dictionary. If you subtract the ecclesiastical words, then you have a language that is perfectly suited for describing Tolkien’s Shire, or for telling the kind of stories that Tolkien told. It’s a world of fairy tales and adventure and unspoiled landscapes, a world of people, their surroundings, their thoughts, and their deeds. There’s even the stars. See eoforðring on Page 105. It refers to the constellation Orion. (The ð character is the letter eth and is pronounced like the “th” in “that.”)

It’s a great luxury to be retired and to have time for such pursuits as pursuing the history of the English language. Can you imagine how much fun it might be to do that for a living? Of all the lives that have been lived, I think I most envy the life of Tolkien. I could do without the World War I parts. But I greatly envy his life at Oxford. I can’t find any good photos of Tolkien that don’t require royalties, but here’s a link to some good ones at Getty Images, in which it’s clear that his natural habitat was sitting in a library, reading, wearing his tweeds, and smoking his pipe. The pubs! The Inklings! The books! The walks! The Oxford dinners! It’s all such a wonderful place to escape to in the imagination, and it’s all much easier for me to imagine after a visit to Oxford last summer.

As for escaping, I’m not ignoring the state of the world, or the state of the United States, or the exasperation of reading the news. In fact, I’ve had a lot of little local political responsibilities to deal with of late, such as precinct meetings and fundraising. It’s all a bunch of endwerc †, which you’ll find on Page 105. But that’s all the more reason to have a slosh of ale, or a cup of tea, and to spend a little quiet time trying to think like an Anglo-Saxon.

† Note: The source for the word endwerc is Leechdoms, Wortcunnings, and Starcraft of Early England, which looks like a book I need to read. The book is important enough that Cambridge University Press released a facsimile version, in a three-volume set, in 2012. It’s 1,496 pages.


Click here for high-resolution version


Some of Tolkien’s runes, with translations

Sherlock Holmes ★★★★


Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, 1943

When my search for newer fiction fails to come up with anything that I want to read, I start looking for classics. I vaguely remember reading Arthur Conan Doyle many years ago, but if I’ve ever read The Hound of the Baskervilles, I don’t recall it.

What fun! It’s light reading, which is just what we want for escape fiction. The gothic, old English atmosphere is infectious and comforting and makes you want to go make a cup of tea. Doyle’s command of English is relaxed and confident, strangely formal and informal at the same time, musical enough to be read aloud.

It was interesting to note that Doyle had been dead for only nine years when Hollywood, in 1939, started producing a series of 14 Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. According to the Wikipedia article, 20th Century Fox made the first two films, then Universal took it over in 1942. Amazon Prime Video has 12 of the films.

I started with “Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon.” I will certainly watch more of them.

Movies of that vintage seem more like plays to me, but that is not a criticism, because I love plays. The exterior sets may be a little flimsy, but the interior sets are rich and beautiful. And the costumes! The men are almost always wearing tweed. The tailoring is classic and superb.

I have to admit that I pay particular attention to the tailoring, having developed a fetish for Harris tweed while on the Isle of Harris last summer. (I now have five Harris tweed jackets in my wardrobe.) The classic tweed jackets of the 1970s and 1980s were cut just the same as the 1942 jackets in “Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon.” Some things never change. Some are what we today call “slim fit,” for men who have the figure for it. The jackets of more portly men are cut to flatter their portliness. Rathbone often wears tweed Norfolk jackets. Norfolk jackets, whether vintage or new, are much more difficult to find. (I’m still looking.)

As you can see, I’m in escape mode. The Trump impeachment trial went as well as it could have gone. The Democratic candidates for president are slouching toward Super Tuesday, the first event that really matters. I immerse myself in reading the news every day, as always, but my impulse has been escape rather than writing about what has been happening of late.

It’s pouring rain here. So now back to The Hound of the Baskervilles, and a cup of tea.