Grim's Hall: 6/23/24

Open the System

In the Cowboy State Daily, Rod Miller cites Thermodynamics and offers a solution.

The only solution I can come up with is Ken Kesey’s Corollary to Newton’s Second Law. Kesey’s Corollary states that, “If the amount of energy in a closed system is finite, open the system.”
Opening our system – open conventions, for example – might truly allow our cream to rise to the top and prevent two inept has-beens like Biden and Trump from clogging our pipes.
Opening our system so that the best among us have an even chance of election will give the entrenched powers-that-be a serious case of the dropsy, and they’ll fight that notion tooth and claw. But I think its worth a shot, given what I saw Thursday night.

Department of own goals

"How dare you accuse me falsely of being prone to filing lawsuits! I know just the thing to clear my name."

Update July 1:

Every American Newspaper

It’s been a tough day for the literati.

Worthy Point

The dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor actually made the case for the majority opinion.
She wrote... “Litigants seeking further dismantling of the ‘administrative state’ have reason to rejoice in their win today, but those of us who cherish the rule of law have nothing to celebrate.”
Of course we want to dismantle the administrative state. We’re American citizens, not British subjects.

Dismantling the administrative state is one of my major political goals. Independence Day is next week.

On a professional call this morning, the Europeans I was talking with -- it's afternoon for them -- had a lot to say about the debate last night. I had the restraint not to tell them what I thought of European opinions about how America governs itself.

I didn't watch the debate. I didn't need to watch it to know how I'm going to vote. However, it's clear that America's international position was badly weakened last night.

The Old .30-30

The NRA on the great American deer rifle.

Today, while we tend to look at the .30-30 cartridge and the guns it is chambered in as being suitable for close-range deer hunting, it is a fact that the cartridge has been used to take every species of North American big game. Elk, moose, black bear and grizzlies have all fallen to the .30-30 in the hands of hunters....

Interestingly enough, the .30-30 cartridge and the guns chambered for it became quite popular during the Mexican Revolution (1911-1920). Quite a large number of these guns were exported, legally and otherwise, to arm the revolutionary forces. Even today, south of the border, you will hear the Mexican folk song, “Carbina Treinta Treinta,” honoring the part that the cartridge played in that conflict.

I have a Winchester '94 downstairs myself. I had never heard of the song, though. It's not my favorite genre of music, but it's pretty punchy.

Georgia 2020

People keep advising to stop talking about the stolen election, but it really matters. (H/t D29)

All in-person votes in Fulton County, roughly 375,000, have no ballot images from the original results, and, according to the complaint, there are 17,852 missing ballot images from the recount. Statewide, there were 1.7 million ballot images missing or destroyed after the Election. By McGowan’s own admission, Georgia does not have a paper trail to justify its results.

Yet the press keeps telling us that there is "no evidence" of fraud, claims about which are "unfounded."

RIP Kinky

Kinky Friedman is dead at 79 years old. He was responsible for a number of questionable songs, and was a friend to many of the greats of the era. The world is lessened by every such loss; eternity, perhaps, prospers.

And so we should . . . what?

You have to wonder what policy preferences we're supposed to glean from this mess of an analysis from WaPo, a "newspaper" that probably needs to die in some kind of combination of light and darkness, both of which apparently could simultaneously contribute to disaster:

It is widely accepted that humans have been heating up the planet for over a century by burning coal, oil and gas. Earth has already warmed by almost 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times, and the planet is poised to race past the hoped-for limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

But fewer people know that burning fossil fuels doesn’t just cause global warming — it also causes global cooling. It is one of the great ironies of climate change that air pollution, which has killed tens of millions, has also curbed some of the worst effects of a warming planet. Tiny particles from the combustion of coal, oil and gas can reflect sunlight and spur the formation of clouds, shading the planet from the sun’s rays. Since the 1980s, those particles have offset between 40 and 80 percent of the warming caused by greenhouse gases. And now, as society cleans up pollution, that cooling effect is waning. New regulations have cut the amount of sulfur aerosols from global shipping traffic across the oceans; China, fighting its own air pollution problem, has slashed sulfur pollution dramatically in the last decade.

The result is even warmer temperatures — but exactly how much warmer is still under debate. The answer will have lasting impacts on humanity’s ability to meet its climate goals.

“We’re starting from an area of deep, deep uncertainty,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and research lead for the payments company Stripe. “It could be a full degree of cooling being masked.”

When you start from a "widely accepted premise" and reach a self-contradicting conclusion, it might be time to re-examine the areas of wide agreement. Besides being popular, do these ideas hold any water at all? And what do these writers think "irony" means?

For Father’s Day, and also our anniversary, my wife bought me this cup “so you can drink from the skulls of your enemies.” I don’t actually have any living enemies, but I was charmed all the same.

The idea that Vikings drank from skulls is based on a misunderstanding by antiquarians of a line from Krákumál. The kenning was trying to allude poetically to drinking from horns, which of course are attached to skulls. Vikings would have understood the joke. It’s a fine sentiment all the same.

The knife was another gift of hers, some years ago: the blade is forged out of shards of an IED that was deployed against American forces in Iraq. Turning your enemy's weapon into your own is power. It was forged by the Stek family in the Pacific Northwest. Stag and buffalo horn hilt. One might argue that it is a literal magic blade.

Trusted to Defend Democracy

The Washington Post wonders aloud:

President Biden and his Democratic allies have cast his reelection campaign as a battle for the country’s survival, warning that a second Donald Trump presidency would present an existential threat to American democracy.

In speeches and campaign ads, Biden points to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, his incitement of an angry mob that ransacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the former president’s boasts that he will use the powers of his office to punish his political enemies....

In six swing states that Biden narrowly won in 2020, a little more than half of voters classified as likely to decide the presidential election say threats to democracy are extremely important to their vote for president...

Yet, more of them trust Trump to handle those threats than Biden.

How can this be?

You might start by asking people what they think the threats to democracy actually are.

UPDATE: These two bits deserve separate mention.

Trump has tried to flip the democracy issue, claiming falsely that he and his allies are facing multiple criminal investigations because Biden is weaponizing the judicial system against him. The former president also continues to undermine the legitimacy of elections with baseless claims of widespread fraud.
...
David Dunacusky, a 61-year-old from Phoenixville, Pa., who serves as a constable, an elected law enforcement officer, is among those who believe that the threat to democracy is coming from the left. A staunch Trump supporter, he echoed Trump’s unfounded claims that voter fraud swung the 2020 presidential election to Biden and suggested that FBI agents were embedded with Jan. 6 rioters. He also expressed concern that the election won’t be legitimate this year. He said it’s “propaganda 100 percent” when Democrats say Trump is a threat to democracy because “they’re scared to death” of their corruption being exposed.

The journalist does not, of course, similarly characterize Biden's or Biden supporters' claims.

Were FBI 'agents' embedded with the rioters, by the way? It may depend on whether you intend the word in the specific sense of 'a Special Agent,' or in the generic sense of 'an individual acting on behalf of another entity.' In the latter sense, it's established fact that they were: so many the FBI claims to have "lost count" of how many they had there.

Lies & Statistics

The Surgeon General of the United States has issued another attempt to distort the public's understanding on the danger of firearms. FPC dismantles it.

Essentially, in order to achieve the desired result -- "firearms are the leading cause of death for children" -- the government (a) included adults, both 18 and even 19 years old, and (b) excluded children who had not reached their first birthday. Including the latter pushes firearms way down the list even with the inclusion of the adults as "children," because there are several causes of death for infants that exceed the whole total for firearms.

Likewise, the majority of these firearm deaths are gang members shooting each other with illegal weapons. That doesn't really crop up with true "children," but begins in the teenage years. Keeping the lights on for 18 and even 19 year-olds allows them to finally cobble together enough deaths to (barely) exceed automobile accidents.

Leaving out the fact that most of these deaths are with firearms that are already illegal also tints the imagery towards their desired goal of more gun control; in fact, the illegality of the weapons shows that gun control has already failed. Enforcing the existing laws would suffice, if they could manage to do that. If they can't even manage to do that, what good are new laws going to be?

Well, those laws would disarm ordinary people -- and that, as always, is the real goal of all these lies and statistics.

Ancient Cave Signs

Constant Striving

Small Numbers

The Washington Post notes that the US Postal Service is helping the government spy on your mail.

Postal inspectors say they fulfill such requests only when mail monitoring can help find a fugitive or investigate a crime. But a decade’s worth of records, provided exclusively to The Washington Post in response to a congressional probe, show Postal Service officials have received more than 60,000 requests from federal agents and police officers since 2015, and that they rarely say no.

Each request can cover days or weeks of mail sent to or from a person or address, and 97 percent of the requests were approved, according to the data. Postal inspectors recorded more than 312,000 letters and packages between 2015 and 2023, the records show.

I yield to none in my disapproval of government spying on its own citizens. Nevertheless, these figures are shocking mostly because they're tiny. There are 335,000,000 Americans, more or less. They found 60,000 requests over 8 years. Check my math, but I make that approximately 0.00223%.

All things considered, that's remarkably restrained given that the Postal Service basically never turns them down when they ask. Of course, it could be that they don't often bother to ask because people don't often plan crimes by mail (though perhaps any prospective criminals among you should, given their relative inattention!).

On the other hand, your mail would be a reliable indicator if you were "in the military, or religious." Apparently that's a matter of concern these days.

High Costs of War

An excellent point by Luttwak (h/t Instapundit).

Today, however, with the average fertility of women across Europe less than two and still falling — the EU average was 1.46 in 2022 — there are no spare children.
The extreme case here is China, with its fertility rate of 1.1. President Xi is, by all accounts, a bellicose man who enjoys threatening war against Taiwan. And yet, curiously, in 2020 he took eight months to reveal that one PLA officer and three soldiers had died during the fighting on India’s Ladakh frontier. During that period of official silence, the families of the four were re-housed and provided with welfare payments or better jobs; the officer’s wife who taught piano in a village school was elevated to the Xi’an Conservatory of Music, with a new house to go with it. Each of the four also became the subject of dedicated media campaigns, which portrayed the youngest as cinematically good-looking and the officer as so conscientious that, up in cold Tibet, he would wake up before his soldiers to prepare hot-water bottles for them. Later, the names of the four were added to many highway bridges to remind all of their sacrifice.
Why the grand acts of remembrance? The answer is demographic. Thanks to China’s one-child policy, imposed in 1980 with the abundant use of forced abortions, the four deaths extinguished eight family lines.

Emphasis added. I only have one child, by fate rather than policy; if he were drafted and killed at war, it would end my family line. I only have one cousin in my father's line; he has one son as well. We're only two sons away from my grandfather's line being extinguished.

Under those circumstances, how important is Taiwan? Quite a bit, really, and more important yet is control of the sea lanes nearby; but those are the concerns of nations, not families. Not our family's, and not Chinese families'.

Aristotle held that the polis is an outgrowth of the decisions of families, not (as modern political theory has it) of individuals. When the interests of the families as a whole comes apart from the interest of the polis, the political project is in grave danger of being fundamentally illegitimate. It seems this new demographic reality has changed us, but the archaic political systems at work here and in Europe and in China all date to the era in which National Glory was something for which children could be sacrificed.