Sacred Stones 2024 Nov 6
There is apparently, a little north of Chico, California, a Trappist Monastery. It's in a town called Vina, on land once claimed by Peter Lassen and later purchased by Leland Stanford who used it to create the largest vineyard. Their abbey built in a classic Cistercian style, with stones imported from an abandoned 800-year old monastery in Spain. William Randolph Hearst illegally imported them 99 years ago in order to build a swimming pool and bowling alley at his Wyntoon mansion. His plans were canceled however by the Great Depression, and in a deal to abate taxes he surrendered the stones to the City of San Francisco. The city held them in Golden Gate Park until the monks in 1995 negotiated with the city to use them to build their chapel, on the condition that the chapel be open the public. Securing funding only in 2004, with the help of Sierra Nevada Brewing, they used 1,300 stones (of the original 10,000) in the construction. Finally completed in 2018, the chapel is now, as they agreed, open to visitors.

Anti-Zionism has always been thinly-veiled Anti-Semitism 2024 Nov 4
In 1967 hostility between Israel and its Arab neighbors broke out into the full-fledged Six Day War.

There were the predictable protests against Israel from around the world, but especially from the USSR, which withdrew diplomatic relations. Poland, then a member of the Soviet Bloc, was at the time experiencing a mass student protest against the Communist party in charge. The Polish government responded by not just cracking down on the students, but by also blaming the crisis on "Zionists" who they said supported "imperial" and "nationalist" Israel in the Six Day War. Except this supposed anti-Zionism was actually a coordinated purge of all officials of Jewish ancestry from the Government and Party and Military, regardless of their support of Israel.

One antisemite in particular, Mieczysław Moczar, led this Polish campaign as a diversion of energy away from the student uprisings, channeling people's frustrations away from party leadership and instead to "Zionists" aka Jews. He eventually even claimed the student protests were originally instigated by Zionist troublemakers (complete nonsense).

Moczar of course rebuffed accusations of that he was an antisemite and said also by the way Poland had no role to play in the Holocaust. Which considering that Poland was once again singling out Jews and forcing them from their Polish homes, with both the right- and left-wing politics expressing distrust of Jews, that is certainly an interesting thing to say. Let us remember that prior to the Holocaust, Poland was home to 3.5 million Jews. After, only 350,000. By the time Moczar was removed from power, only 5,000 Jews remained in the country. The goal of ridding Poland of Jews finally complete, Polish Communists officially closed their campaign of "Anti-Zionism" in 1968.

A silver lining to the whole affair, if one can be allowed, is that the open campaign of antisemitism so discredited party leadership in the eyes of Poland's intelligentsia and emigrants that it eventually led to the collapse of the Communist Party in the country and Poland's official apology to the world's Jews and Israel in particular in 1988, and additional condemnations afterwards.

But let us remember that Anti-Zionism has always just been antisemitism.

Wikipedia's List of the Indian Wars in California's history 2024 Oct 31
I grew up here in California, going to school in the regular public education system. It's been a long time, but I do not remember covering in much (or any) depth the Native Americans who lived in this state prior the wars and genocide which killed them off. Indians weren't completely forgotten -- our curriculum did at least acknowledge that the Indians were killed off, but we were told it was primarily through disease and the word "genocide" definitely was not used. I used to think "how nice it is to live in a place where there's never been a major war."

That was pretty naive of me, right? A recent quick glance through this list of California Indian Wars on Wikipedia left me noticing a stark trend, one which I feel should have been taught to us:

1. White Americans move into California Indian lands and push them out so they can take those lands over for agriculture and mining.
2. California Indians make what peace they can with their new white neighbors. It's not great, but it's not so bad. But one white neighbor in particular hates that Indians exist at all, and despite the relative peace, goes about raping and murdering Indians.
3. The Indians get tired of being raped and murdered, and kill that asshole.
4. The white townspeople hear of this, and don't care that the white man in question was an asshole and that the Indian's lethal revenge was justified. They only see race, and can abide no Indian killing any white man, so they step up the revenge and go and murder and burn entire Indian villages in reprisal.
5. Repeat the massacres until there's almost no Indians left.

So many of the entries on the list follow this pattern, it's shocking. (Maybe not shocking if you're Indian and grew up knowing this.)

Republic of Molossia 2024 Oct 30
On May 26, 1977 someone broke away from the State of Nevada to make their own country. It's current population is 39 (35 humans, 4 dogs).

Australian Central Western Standard Time 2024 Oct 30
This time zone is an obnoxious UTC+8:45 (yes, really) and covers a tiny a nearly-uninhabited strip along Western Australia's southeastern-most coast. But not entire uninhabited, obviously, or else why exist? But for these few hundred people, they live in a world where their clocks are 15 minutes off the hour.

Perhaps this is less a weird time zone, and more a community staunchly holding out against the idea of time zones in the first place, back when each community set their own local noon and inter-state commerce just happened when it happened.

Who knows what really happened to Robert A Levinson? 2024 Oct 30
Robert A. Levinson was working for the CIA, supposedly investigating cigarette smuggling, when he disappeared on the resort island of Kish off the coast of Iran. Not a CIA agent, but a retired FBI special agent working a contract for the CIA which the agency paid his family $2.5m/yr to keep quiet about, Levinson's death remains merely speculation at this time based on his age and the length of his captivity.

A US judge ordered Iran to pay $1.45bn in penalty for his kidnapping, which Iran has not, as far as I can tell, done. In March 2020 the Iranian foreign minister said "According to authentic evidence, the person had left the Iranian soil for an unknown destination years ago."

Cases like this expose weird rough edges of statecraft, such as that when Obama's team negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran in 2016 in exchange for some other hostages, Levinson's name was not mentioned. Was this a tacit and unofficial way of acknowledging his death?

There remains to this day a $5m reward for information leading to his return.

Shadow of the Sun 2024 Oct 30
Linked a book review of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski's notes on his travel around Africa in the 1950's and 60's, Shadow of the Sun. The review, by Matt Lakeman, is fascinating on its own because Lakeman took Kapuscinski's notes and then went and traveled to many of the same places, albeit half a century later, and his blog is full of his own responses to that travel. But regardless of that, understanding Africa is among the things which hold my interest, and based on this review, I've added the book to my reading list (but have not yet read it).

David Neagle 2024 Oct 27
David Neagle led one heck of a life. Raised amidst the California Gold Rush, he was a gunslinger and prospector and saloon owner and mining foreman and marshal and bodyguard and when he was arrested, his case went all the way to the US Supreme Court where a precedent-setting ruling is now named after him. He was deputized as sheriff in the town of Tombstone, Arizona and worked alongside the Earps keeping the law, but most interesting of all is his involvement with Justices David S. Terry and Stephen J. Field.

David S. Terry was a monumental asshole who somehow became one of California's earlier state supreme court Chief Justices (voted in during a special election). Although when his pro-Southern Slave State politics failed to earn him re-election he blamed his good friend the free-soil Senator from California David Broderick, and then resigned his place on the bench to kill Broderick in a duel. A generally violent man, Terry was known for threatening people with a bowie knife he kept on his person. After a stint fighting in the Civil War (on the wrong side) he returned to California as a lawyer and represented in court a woman named Sarah Althea Hill against her former lover, William Sharon.

William Sharon was another monumental asshole (perhaps even a bigger asshole than Terry) who was a banker and also briefly the Senator from Nevada (although he rarely showed up to do anything). Sharon used his position as bank agent among the Comstock Lode prospectors to control their operations, loaning them money only to starve them out and forcing them into bankruptcy so that the bank could foreclose on the mineral rights. He also swindled his business partner William Ralston out of his fortune. The part relevant to this story, however, is that Sharon kept Sarah Althea Hill as a mistress.

Until he got bored of her, that is. Hill was significantly younger than him and something of a firecracker, having a reputation for threatening those who crossed her with a Colt revolver she kept in her purse. And so when Sharon dumped her, she filed a lawsuit claiming that he actually couldn't do that because they were secretly married.

And in that lawsuit she was represented by David S. Terry, the first asshole. Although Terry and Hill weren't just working together, they were also sleeping together, and soon got married.

Stephen J. Field was also a judge and also something of an asshole, although more known for being rude than for threatening people with knives of swindling them of their fortune. He was one of the judges in the Circuit Court that heard Hill's case, and the one who spoke the ruling that Hill's documents were forgeries. She did not care for this ruling, and screamed and reached for her gun. The marshals subdued her, and lawyer/husband Terry sprung to her defense with his bowie knife. David Neagle was there, however, shoving his gun in Terry's face and arresting the pair of them for contempt of court.

When Judge Field returned to California the next year, Neagle was assigned to protect him. Which proved fortuitous, as Field and Terry (along with Hill and Neagle) had the misfortune of catching the same train from LA to SF. When the inevitable happened and Terry confronted Field, presumably with some violent intent, Neagle proved himself once again quicker on the draw, shooting Terry in the heart and ear, killing him.

It was this act of self-defense which landed Neagle in jail, as prior to this instance what Neagle did was not technically legal. But to nobody's surprise, when Neagle's case reached the Supreme Court, the judges were happy to rule that someone like Neagle defending their lives was, in fact, quite legal actually thank you very much, even though Field himself recused himself from the vote.

Neagle's reputation now well-cemented, his later years were spent as a bodyguard for hire, working for various wealthy and powerful men. He finally passed away in 1925, at 78 years old in Oakland.

New Mexico is not named after the country of Mexico 2024 Oct 27
They probably teach you this if you go to school in New Mexico, but somehow this information is new to me. "New Mexico" predates the country of Mexico by several hundred years.

New Mexico received its name long before the present-day country of Mexico won independence from Spain and adopted that name in 1821. The name "Mexico" derives from Nahuatl and originally referred to the heartland of the Mexica, the rulers of the Aztec Empire, in the Valley of Mexico. Following their conquest of the Aztecs in the early 16th century, the Spanish began exploring what is now the Southwestern United States calling it Nuevo México. In 1581, the Chamuscado and Rodríguez Expedition named the region north of the Rio Grande San Felipe del Nuevo México. The Spaniards had hoped to find wealthy indigenous cultures similar to the Mexica. The indigenous cultures of New Mexico, however, proved to be unrelated to the Mexica and lacking in riches, but the name persisted.

Why was there a bucatini shortage in America? 2024 Oct 27
What even is a bucatini? (It's a pasta in the shape of a straw.) Why was there a shortage during 2020? (All pasta was running out, and bucatini is both more involved to make and under less demand.) Why am I linking this article now? (Because it's writing is amazing.)