Bird Thoughts

This piece in the Atlantic is rambling and undisciplined, but the subject is one of great interest.

It is alternatively described as the last frontier of science, and as a kind of immaterial magic beyond science’s reckoning. David Chalmers, one of the world’s most respected philosophers on the subject, once told me that consciousness could be a fundamental feature of the universe, like space-time or energy. He said it might be tied to the diaphanous, indeterminate workings of the quantum world, or something nonphysical.

These metaphysical accounts are in play because scientists have yet to furnish a satisfactory explanation of consciousness. We know the body’s sensory systems beam information about the external world into our brain, where it’s processed, sequentially, by increasingly sophisticated neural layers. But we don’t know how those signals are integrated into a smooth, continuous world picture, a flow of moments experienced by a roving locus of attention—a “witness,” as Hindu philosophers call it....

It was likely more than half a billion years ago that some sea-floor arms race between predator and prey roused Earth’s first conscious animal. That moment, when the first mind winked into being, was a cosmic event, opening up possibilities not previously contained in nature.

If Chalmers is right, the evolutionary picture the author takes as "likely" is wrong. There is no 'first mind,' because consciousness is a feature of reality itself. The thing to explore is how consciousness is experienced by different forms of organization of this basic reality.

The author is also wrong (typically) in his description of the thoughts of the ancients and Medievals on the subject. This view Chalmers is advocating is quite ancient; it was Plato's opinion, and Plotinus' model. The name for it is panpsychism, and it happens to be my opinion as well.

Aristotle thought that discursive reason was a feature of the human soul, but not the animal soul. He did not thereby assume animals were 'unconscious automatons.' For Aristotle, three kind of souls 'stack,' as it were: plants have a limited capacity to sense the sun and turn towards it, and to distinguish nutrition and absorb it; animals have an additional capacity for locomotion in search of food, which grants a higher degree of consciousness. This is because you have to be able to recognize that the thing over there is different from you, and that you need to go over to it and eat it. The capacity to reason abstractly and discursively, however, Aristotle thought was an additional layer of capacity that only humans had.

Really, the opinion the author attributes to the ancients and Medievals is most properly an Enlightenment opinion. Kant seems to have thought something like that about animals. For him, access to the order of reason is the basis for the "integrat[ion] into a smooth, continuous world picture," which was a process Kant called "transcendental apperception." Thus, if animals lacked access to discursive reason, they couldn't be conscious because reason is what does the work on Kant's model.

As is often the case -- nearly always, I think -- we find that the ancients were closer to correct than the Enlightenment thinkers, the Moderns, and so forth. This whole period from Hobbes to Kant, from Newton to Hume, from around 1500 to today, someday our descendants will regard it as a useful detour from the path of wisdom. By exploring a whole new set of false ideas, we made some rapid advances toward what might really be true. In the end, though, we will return to the path the ancients laid out, but with a better set of models for how that path is actually realized.

Plotinus will ultimately prove to have been right about everything, I'll wager.

Trial by Ordeal in Egypt

Tom posted a bit about trials by ordeal a little while ago, suggesting that they were effective through a combination of incentives and magic tricks. With that in mind, watch this video of a woman in Egypt licking what purports to be red-hot iron (after reciting a verse of the Koran to ensure divine protection).

As you can see, it plainly doesn't bother her. Iron turns bright red above 1400 degrees Fahrenheit, which would destroy the sensitive flesh of the tongue on contact. She calmly licks it twice, and does no screaming afterwards.

I don't know how exactly this test is carried out by the imams, but I agree with the author of Tom's piece: "For example, in the early 13th century, 208 defendants in Várad in Hungary underwent hot-iron ordeals. Amazingly, nearly two-thirds of defendants were unscathed by the ‘red-hot’ irons they carried and hence exonerated. If the priests who administered these ordeals understood how to heat iron, as they surely did, that leaves only two explanations for the ‘miraculous’ results: either God really did intervene to reveal the defendants’ innocence, or the priests made sure that the iron they carried wasn’t hot."

So either God intervenes in ordinary civil cases in Egypt, or it's a kind of magic trick whose secret remains known only to the few who work it.

There's Something New

Polar bears raiding cities in packs.

Self-Excommunication

It is my understanding that any priest who does this is excommunicated by his own action.

One 1998 report focused on Africa observed that “sexual harassment and even rape of sisters by priests and bishops is allegedly common.”

“When a sister becomes pregnant, the priest insists that she have an abortion,” the report added. ‘‘The sister is usually dismissed from her congregation while the priest is often only moved to another parish — or sent for studies.”

That leaves me with a set of questions for those who understand all of this better than I do myself. If a priest like this remains a frocked member of the priesthood, what is the status of his capacity to perform the rites? What becomes of the faithful who trust that his rites are efficacious?

Slow Learners

A woman completing her college education writes.

When you ask a question at a lecture, is it secretly just your opinion ending with the phrase “do you agree?” If so, your name is something like Jake, or Chad, or Alex, and you were taught that your voice is the most important in every room. Somewhere along your academic journey, you decided your search for intellectual validation was more important than the actual exchange of information. Now how do you expect to actually learn anything?

American society tells men, but especially white men, that their opinions have merit and that their voice is valuable, but after four years of listening to white boys in college, I am not so convinced.

Four years? Students at these elite colleges must be a little slow. I didn't even need two paragraphs to come to doubt the merit of her voice.

Somebody apparently told her otherwise, even to the point of soliciting and publishing this article. That was deeply unfair to her.

New fashion trends

Just think of everything as valuable fishing structure.

A local volunteer group pulled cubic yards of debris off of rookery islands, but this was the most interesting.  Second look at footwear ornamentation?

The American Dream is Freedom, Not Wealth

Not that there's any reason to be opposed to wealth, which can to some degree sometimes increase practical freedom. Still, most Americans seem to grasp that the essential thing was always liberty.

What our survey found about the American dream came as a surprise to me. When Americans were asked what makes the American dream a reality, they did not select as essential factors becoming wealthy, owning a home or having a successful career. Instead, 85 percent indicated that “to have freedom of choice in how to live” was essential to achieving the American dream. In addition, 83 percent indicated that “a good family life” was essential.

The “traditional” factors (at least as I had understood them) were seen as less important. Only 16 percent said that to achieve the American dream, they believed it was essential to “become wealthy,” only 45 percent said it was essential “to have a better quality of life than your parents,” and just 49 percent said that “having a successful career” was key.

This pattern — seeing the American dream as more about community and individuality than material success and social mobility — appeared across demographic and political categories. In the case of political party affiliation, for example, 84 percent of Republicans and independents said having freedom was essential to the American dream, as did 88 percent of Dem­ocrats; less than 20 percent of those in either party held that becoming wealthy was essential.

Contra the NYT's summation, they didn't say "community," they said "family." There's a crucial, biological difference there. The nation grows out of its families, and whether or not it sustains and supports healthy families is an important measure of its success. Blood ties remain important. People care less about whether they are 'living a better life than their parents' than about whether their children and grandchildren will still have prospects for a good life, even if they happen to define that life in terms of less-marketable choices.

Ultimately this is all very wise, and I'm glad to see it.

"A Plan to Reduce Emissions"

The more I think about yesterday's fiasco, the more I realize how little these people understand what they are talking about. I have to conclude that they don't actually care about the stated goal -- reducing emissions -- at all.

For example, this discourse on how to 'pay for' the Green New Deal misses a major step.

This is equivalent to saying that of course we can afford a starship line to Alpha Centauri, because we can afford anything that is for sale in our own currency. Even if it's true -- as is quite debatable -- that you can really inflate the currency without damage to the economy, there is no such product for sale in our currency.

The same is true for this deal. Take just the provision that we're going to refit or rebuild all the buildings in America in ten years. I read a claim yesterday that this roughly means refitting 39,000 buildings a day. It might be twenty thousand or fifty thousand a day, but let's go with 39,000 as a round figure. To make it easy to accomplish, we'd start with America's 100 largest cities, so we'd need 390 teams in each of these 100 cities, each team capable of refitting a building per day. So we've got 39,000 such teams nationwide.

Maybe it's possible to hire 39,000 teams, 390 teams per city. Maybe it's possible to buy all the stuff that all 39,000 teams would need to refit a house today. But what about day two? We're going to have scoured every hardware store and warehouse in America by day two, or certainly by day three or four. But we've got to keep going, every single day for ten years. Where's all the stuff we'd need? It doesn't exist. It's not for sale.

That's just one bullet point. To make the goods available for sale in our currency over a ten year period, you'd first have to build thousands of new factories. You're also going to want to build massive new amounts of wind farms and solar panels, so you'll need to make lots of electricity-expensive aluminium. You want to build a railway system that is so big and active that it eliminates air travel -- so you'll need lots of new trains, and new steel tracks, and to cut down lots of trees to make the cross-ties, and you'll need to boil lots of tar to make the creosote to soak the cross-ties as a preservative.

This plan is going to reduce emissions?

While we're building all this stuff, we don't have it yet, so even while we're building up all this renewable electrical power we'll have to ship it from the factories to wherever it's going to be set up and put to use. Since we don't yet have electric trains, we'll need to do that shipping with diesel fuel. We'll thus need more diesel fuel -- so we need new oil refineries, to make a lot more diesel, which we're going to burn moving all this stuff.

Reducing emissions is the point of all this?

Why don't we just buy the starships instead, and export people to the Offworld Colonies? If practicality like money is no object, why not shoot for the stars?

Development is good because it's developed and stuff

My little community wants to establish something called an "Economic Development Corporation," a 501(c)(3) entity that under some circumstances (but not ours) can glom onto a half-cent local sales tax.  It has to operate under open-meeting and open-records laws like a governmental entity, but as far as I can tell it doesn't have any authority.  There are said to be 700 of them in Texas already.  They look to me like a sort of souped-up chamber of commerce, though I'm told that our local Chamber of Commerce doesn't do the same sorts of things at all.

Actually it's very hard to talk to the supporters about why an EDC would be a good idea.  Luckily, ours apparently would be pretty low-risk, since it will have to subsist on modest handouts from local governments plus private donations, and will have no power that I can discover to make anyone do anything in particular.  Most EDCs seem to operate pretty good websites with information of the sort that prospective employers would want, like demographics, available real estate, zoning philosophy, educational opportunities, tax abatements or other financial incentives, and links to local elected officials.  I thought that was Chamber territory, but apparently not.  Or, if it's Chamber territory, the Chamber doesn't have enough money and people to do it effectively.  It's surprisingly difficult to get supporters to answer a question like, "Are you going to do what the Chamber does, but more of it and better because you'll have more money and staff?  Or are you going to do completely different things, and if so, what?"  They kind of look blank and say they're going to do "economic development."  What does that look like?  Well, it's development.   Of the economy.  I never understand these sorts of conversations.

On the other hand, I'd be pleased to see someone put together a good website with information that prospective employers would want to know.  I've never understood why we don't have one already.  You'd be amazed how hard it is just to find basic information about local codes and ordinances.  Our local leadership is not what you would call wildly enthusiastic about the digital revolution.

Another question I found it hard to engage supporters on was, "How do we find out whether the 700 Texas cities who have EDCs experience better economic development than the many cities who don't?" I'm told I can easily get a list of the 700.  Sure, but you see how my question is different? Not really.  Well, the 700 cities worked really hard on economic development, which is obviously a good thing.  Right, but concrete results?  ... It's as though I were speaking a foreign language.  It's just intuitively obvious that this kind of activity, whatever it is, is valuable.

Earlier this evening I managed to find a few articles nearly on point. One was a master's thesis that couldn't find any statistical correlation between imposition of a Texas EDC sales tax and anything identifiable as economic progress.  The author admitted, however, that she was unable to put her finger on what people meant by economic progress:  was it simple growth in key metrics like per capita income, or something to do with a qualitative change in economic activity?  Either way, the pattern was murky.  Another article confidently explained that you get economic development when you can attract and retain talent, but that's tricky, because it's the nature of talent that it can relocate whenever it wants, so you have to have quality of life.  What's that?  Whatever talent wants.  Then there's probably something about making the environment business-friendly.  That's actually the only part I can readily grasp:  low taxes and regulations that are transparent and predictable.  But then there is so little consensus on whether it's a good idea to attract businesses if you can't be sure they won't degrade quality of life, as they surely will if they're not heavily regulated!  You can't trust those dang businesses!  At the same time, the coolest little town ever won't last long if there aren't any jobs.  It's a tough one.  I remain skeptical that governments can help much.  Maybe businesses can't either, but at least they employ people.

Well, as I say, the possibilities for mischief appear minimal.

"The nature of the economics didn't make sense."

Lookie here, young feller, if you wanted the economics to make sense, why were you trying to operate a socialist restaurant?  This Panera chain tried to base its business model on not just a proverbial free lunch but a literal one.

Company founder Ron Shaich explained, "We had to help [customers] understand that this is a café of shared responsibility and not a handout." Now, see, that was a big problem. People weren't smart enough to pick up on that important distinction. It goes to show you that socialism can't work unless we get smarter people. I blame the schools.  But I wonder whether the customers' level of understanding improved after the restaurant "helped" them with this concept?

Shockingly, the restaurants reported an atmosphere of increasing resentment and disappointment before they went broke and shut down. Maybe if they had taken advantage of economies of scale and expanded the experiment to include an entire country . . . ?

A Modest Proposal

Details on the Green New Deal are out.

As well as calling for the dramatic expansion of the country’s renewable energy resources, the plan proposes:

*“Upgrading all existing buildings" in the United States to make them energy efficient, and developing a smart grid.

*A radical overhaul of the country’s transport infrastructure to eliminate emissions “as much as technologically feasible.” This would involve expanding electric car manufacturing, installing charging stations “everywhere” and developing high-speed rail links to “a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.”

*Restoring threatened lands and hazardous waste sites.

*Working with farmers to build a more sustainable food system that “ensures universal access to healthy food” and clean water.

*The plan also includes social justice objectives such as "high-quality health care" for all Americans, a guaranteed job "with a family-sustaining benefit provisions.” Another goal is “to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, de-industrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.”

Converting America to a centrally planned economy might lower our emissions just by depressing economic output, although even that isn't certain. China's Communist economy worsened pollution.

The plan is, however, just as advertised: an attempt to take over the entire American economy, so that close to 100% of what we are doing is directed by the government and paid for by the taxpayers. It is unlimited in its ambition; even if all you wanted to do was 'upgrade all existing buildings,' that would probably be too hard to accomplish in practice. But that's just bullet point one, and we'll throw in all the social justice goals as well.

You knew we were lying, why'dya believe us?

Fascinating testimony from Thomas P. Miller of the American Enterprise Institute in his Statement before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health Hearing concerning Texas v. Azar, the Republican AG lawsuit that recently yielded a U.S. District Court ruling that the Obamacare mandate was both unconstitutional and unseverable from the statute as a whole. Miller's analysis focuses on the probable impact on Americans with pre-existing conditions and pretty much tries the usual ecumenical scolding, but now and then he makes some clear points about how badly Congress blew it.

Determining the legislative intent of Congress regarding the role of the individual mandate as it related to the rest of the law is at the heart of the severability component of the Texas v. Azar litigation. The plaintiffs contend that the Findings of Fact included in the ACA statute by the 111th Congress that passed it should be determinative on this point. That Congress essentially said that the individual mandate was essential to the functioning of several other ACA provisions, including protections against exclusions of coverage or higher premium charges for individuals with pre-existing health conditions (hereinafter more commonly referred to as “guaranteed issue” and “adjusted community rating”). Whether or not those “findings” have been borne out in practice or the economic and policy connection was quite as tight as that Congress officially assumed, the plaintiffs are not out of bounds in holding Congress to its past word, and in building on the similar reasoning used by other Supreme Court majorities to strike ACA legal challenges in NFIB v Sebelius and in King v. Burwell.

In other words, if that’s the “story” for ACA defenders, they should have to stick to it, at least until a subsequent Congress actually votes to eliminate or revise those past Findings of Fact already embedded in permanent law.

Whatever the 111th Congress “may” have really intended is far more complex. At best, one might conclude that, in the final analysis, it really aimed to pass whatever surviving, though problematic version of the ACA it could, by whatever legislative and political means would work, and then try to implement it and fix it up later, as needed, as it went along. However, this gap between what was officially said with a “wink” and what actually was the political calculation is far harder to recognize in the courts as official legislative intent.

To be blunt, one of the primary ways that the Obama administration “sold” its proposals for health policy overhaul was to exaggerate the size, scope, and nature of the potential population facing coverage problems due to pre-existing health conditions ACA advocates then argued that the only way to address those problems was with a heavy dose of (adjusted) community rated premiums and income-related tax subsidies, complemented by an individual mandate. Unfortunately, this combination also made the coverage offered in ACA exchanges less attractive to younger and healthier individuals, who were asked to pay more for insurance that they valued less. We ended up with the worst of both worlds, a mandate despised by many (low-risk) individuals that largely failed to accomplish its intended goals. To the extent that net insurance coverage gains still were achieved under the ACA, they were due overwhelmingly to the combination of generous insurance subsidies for lower income ACA exchange enrollees, plus an aggressive expansion of relatively less-expensive (but even more generously taxpayer-subsidized) Medicaid coverage in many states.

* * *

It’s important to remember that the problem of pre-existing condition coverage, before the ACA was enacted and implemented, was limited almost entirely to the individual market. A host of semi-specialized risk pools and other pre-ACA legal provisions already offered various types of such insurance protection to many otherwise vulnerable Americans. Of course, public policy to address remaining problems could and should be improved in other less prescriptive and more transparent ways than the ACA’s tangled web of less-visible regulatory cross-subsidies and income-related premium tax credits (for example, extending HIPAA’s continuous-coverage provisions and risk protections to the individual market).

* * *

Hence, if the ACA’s current, overbroad regulatory provisions involving guaranteed issue, adjusted community rating, and prohibition of coverage exclusions for pre-existing conditions were stricken down in court in the near future as inextricably tied to an unconstitutional individual mandate, there are better policy alternatives available to lawmakers.

* * *

I don’t want to neglect pointing out the disappointing results and collateral damage caused by the ACA’s execution of its stated objectives. Yes, U.S. taxpayers spent more money, or we borrowed it, and millions more Americans were covered with insurance than before while others had their coverage upgraded and subsidized more generously. At the same time, less-visible victims of the ACA lost the coverage they had preferred to keep or had to pay much more for it if they fell outside of the law’s more generously subsidized cohorts. Insurance and health care markets were substantially destabilized for years, although, with enough premium hikes and Silver-loaded subsidy alchemy in the last two years, that’s begun to change. Nevertheless, the overall size of the individual market actually have grown smaller than its pre-ACA levels.

Powerlifting and Natural Performance Enhancement

It's an irony that America's Islamic officials are the ones pushing the transgender movement in sports, but as the article from the other day pointed out it's an easier fit for some traditional cultures than accepting homosexuality.

What caught my eye about this story, though, is that this powerlifting group has a completely different standard here than strongman sports. Strongman Corporation is completely willing to accept transgender competitors. They just want you to provide evidence that your testosterone levels in the blood are low enough if you want to compete as a woman. This is what Rep. Oman is claiming is unnecessary, as I understand her remarks.

Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar recommended Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison investigate USA Powerlifting for barring biological males from women’s events, according to a Jan. 31 letter she sent USA Powerlifting.

Omar called it a “myth” that men who identify as transgender women have a “direct competitive advantage” and copied Ellison on the letter, “with a recommendation that he investigate this discriminatory behavior.”

Lest you think she's out in left field here, it turns out that another American powerlifting organization -- USPA -- has no relevant rules at all. They just say they welcome everyone, compete however you like. USPA, however, also doesn't test for performance enhancing drugs of any kind -- so if you're pumped up on steroids, and can inject as much testosterone as you like, what's the big deal about some natural testosterone?

I suppose free associations can do whatever they want here, and all of these solutions make a certain degree of sense. The American way, as it were.

Obamacare & Death

Death rates may have risen since the passage of the law.

A Reality Show for the Hall, Maybe?

The History Channel's Forged in Fire is something I just discovered today by accident.

It has a reality-show format and each episode pits 4 blade smiths against each other in a particular competition. Some past competitions have included forging a katana, creating a "Templar Crusader Dagger," and transforming failed blades into functional cutlasses.

It also introduced me to the American Bladesmith Society, which I know nothing about but which looks worth checking out.

Part of me is fascinated by the skills displayed, but part of me is repulsed by the reality-show format. I dunno. See what you think.

"America Will Never Be A Socialist Country"

I am reminded of Fritz Leiber's wizard poem: "Never and forever are neither for men/ you'll be returning again and again."

All the same, consecrate yourselves to it for your lifetimes at least. We were born free, and we can at least swear to die free.

What comes after us is not ours to write, but that far at least we can write for ourselves.

Basing stories on uncorroborated allegations

I lifted this from Ace.

In short, the Lt. Gov. of Virginia is threatening legal action against a major newspaper (The Washington Post) for reporting details of "an allegation of sexual assault against him from 15 years ago".  Yes, he also accuses them of "smearing" him, and various other grandstanding statements about how this has never been done before (*gag*), but none of that is relevant to what I find interesting about this.

I fully support the Lt. Gov. in lambasting the Washington Post, and actively encourage him to sue them and just about every other news organization that repeats the details of an allegation of crime with no factual basis other than one person's story.  Now, I'm not saying he'll win, but I think he absolutely ought to sue.  Because this idea that an accusation is something that we must blindly accept as factual (i.e. "believe victims") and therefore report-able is toxic to responsible reporting.  If literally anyone can say "Person X sexually abused me" and that story makes the newspaper, then we've entered an era of sexual McCarthy-ism wherein an accusation is just about as good as a criminal conviction as far as a person's public reputation is concerned.

Now, I want to be crystal clear.  I'm not saying the Lt. Gov. is innocent, or that his accuser is a liar.  I'm saying a responsible news agency should not publish such an accusation unless there's either a criminal report, or a civil lawsuit filed with the accusation (i.e. a legal filing of some sort).  And yes, I absolutely believe that Brett Kavanaugh ought to have sued anyone repeating Dr. Fords' accusation unless and until some form of legal filing was made (though I will consider the argument that the accusation being read into Congressional Testimony may very well count as a legal filing).  And the reason is simple.  Reporting based upon uncorroborated accusations is nothing more than rumor-mongering.  If the news organization reports on a legal action, then that is responsible and in line with the public's interest.

Now, of course, the surest defense against libel or slander is that the accusation is true, but if Lt. Gov. Fairfax knows he is innocent, then he should have no fear of that defense working (likewise for Justice Kavanaugh).  But if the veracity of the accusation simply cannot be ascertained (i.e. "he said, she said" and no further evidence) then the responsible way to report the story (absent any other form of legal filing) is simply not to report the story.  And I absolutely do want newsrooms to fear a lawsuit when they publish rumors and unsupported accusations.  Because I think in the Trump era far too many news organizations (both major and minor) have become comfortable with posting the most scurrilous of accusations with no more concern for the actual truth of the matter than they have concern for the heat death of the universe.  A little fear of having consequences for reporting those accusations would go a long way to cleaning up that problem.

I'll Keep Looking Until I Find It

The Speaker of the House on her favorite Bible verse:

“I can’t find it in the Bible, but I quote it all the time,” Pelosi said as she introduced the quote. “I keep reading and reading the Bible—I know it’s there someplace. It’s supposed to be in Isaiah. I heard a bishop say, ‘To minister to the needs of God’s creation … ’ ”

In fairness, the bishop may well have said something like that. Some priests sometimes feel very free in their translations from the Latin, especially if they have prayed about it and feel like this is the version of the message that their flock needs to hear right now. Pelosi's version of Catholicism strikes me as very likely to be led by priests of that spirit.

Man Kills Mountain Lion, Apparently With Bare Hands

It's not impossible -- C. Dale Petersen once killed a grizzly bear with his bare hands and teeth (by using his teeth to close off a blood vessel to the brain, rather than by tearing out the thick, tough throat).

This lion was young, too, and not full grown.

The runner, whose name has not been released, fought off the cougar-- killing it in the process-- and hiked out of the area and drove himself to a hospital. The Denver Post reported that the runner suffered serious injuries that included facial bite wounds and lacerations to his body. He is expected to recover.

Wildlife officers searching the trail found the juvenile mountain lion's body near several of the runner's possessions. They estimated that the animal weighed about 80 pounds.

Still, an impressive feat! Colorado's government has confirmed that he did not use a weapon, but suffocated the animal while it was trying to kill him.

Women's Brains Differ From Men's (and Vice Versa)

This science is publishable, according to the "Althouse rule," because it can be portrayed as a way in which women's brains are better. Actually, it shows they are different -- surprisingly, and both pre-puberty and post-menopause, for reasons the scientists don't understand.

Scientists found that healthy women have a “metabolic brain age” that is persistently younger than men’s of the same chronological age. The difference is apparent from early adulthood and remains into old age.

The finding suggests that changes in how the brain uses energy over a person’s lifetime proceed more gradually in women than they do in men. While researchers are unsure of the medical consequences, it may help explain why women tend to stay mentally sharp for longer.

“Brain metabolism changes with age but what we noticed is that a good deal of the variation we see is down to sex differences,” said Marcus Raichle, a neurobiologist at Washington University school of medicine in St Louis.... “The great mystery is why,” said Raichle. The researchers suspect something other than hormonal differences are at work because the difference in metabolism stays the same when women enter the menopause.

“I refer to things like this as the curve balls of Mother Nature,” said Raichle. “Maybe women start off with this difference and it’s perpetuated throughout life.”

It is not clear what the difference means.

The fact of the difference is important enough on its own.

Rich-Soaking Very Popular

...polling suggests that when it comes to soaking the rich, the American public is increasingly on board.

Surveys are showing overwhelming support for raising taxes on top earners, including a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll released Monday that found 76 percent of registered voters believe the wealthiest Americans should pay more in taxes. A recent Fox News survey showed that 70 percent of Americans favor raising taxes on those earning over $10 million — including 54 percent of Republicans.

You'd think that tax cuts followed by the most robust economy in decades would suggest that this is the opposite of wisdom.

A Tea Party of Their Own

This is such a familiar complaint, except that it's normally a complaint by insurgent right-wingers against "Establishment Republicans" rather than "radical conservative" Democrats. The left is having its own moment along those lines.

“I am talking about the radical conservatives in the Democratic Party,” said Saikat Chakrabarti. “That’s who we need to counter. It’s the same across any number of issues—pay-as-you-go, free college, “Medicare for all.” These are all enormously popular in the party, but they don’t pass because of the radical conservatives who are holding the party hostage.”

Not long ago, this would have been an outlier position even among American liberals. Today, it’s the organizing principle of a newly empowered segment of the Democratic Party, one with a foothold in the new Congress.

Chakrabarti is chief of staff to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez... Although it’s Ocasio-Cortez who gets all the headlines, she arguably wouldn’t be in Congress in the first place without the group Chakrabarti founded: Justice Democrats, a new, central player in the ongoing war for the soul of the Democratic Party. It was the Justice Democrats who recruited her in a quixotic campaign early on, providing a neophyte candidate with enough infrastructure to take down a party leader. And it is the Justice Democrats who see Ocasio-Cortez as just the opening act in an astonishingly ambitious plan to do nothing less than re-imagine liberal politics in America—and do it by whatever means necessary.

If that requires knocking out well-known elected officials and replacing them with more radical newcomers, so be it. And if it ends up ripping apart the Democratic Party in the process—well, that might be the idea.

“There is going to be a war within the party. We are going to lean into it,” said Waleed Shahid, the group’s spokesman.

So far their ambitions have mostly failed, even compared to the TEA Party's initial moments. However, in the young Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, they have an extraordinary platform to draw attention to their movement.

Resume Inflation

Gov. Norham turns out to have inflated his service during Desert Storm in order to push his gun control agenda.

Well, he was indeed a doctor during Desert Storm, according to the NPRC... He was a child neurologist working at the Army’s Landstuhl Hospital in Germany. The way I understand neurologists, they treat brain diseases not gunshot wounds. It looks like he specialized in child neurology before, during and after the time he was at Landstuhl.... Now, he didn’t exactly lie about his service, he was a Major, he was a doctor, he served during Desert Storm, but I’m pretty sure a child neurologist wouldn’t be treating wounded soldiers, except in emergency circumstances – extreme emergencies.

"Take Care Of" Like a Hitman

Rather than say anything about this image, I'm just going to let it sit there a while for quiet reflection.

Is anyone home?

Again from Maggie's Farm, this rather wonderful Jordan Petersen clip that speaks to the thing that's been occupying me lately:  when we speak to someone, are we getting through to a person?

I'll repeat here a comment I just left there: Someone recently quoted a similar passage from Dietrich Bonhoeffer--was it here? I forget--about how essentially stupid we become when we surrender our judgment to an ideology. He was talking, of course, about how Nazis got ordinary people to behave so horribly. The ideology no longer is a way to order our thoughts but instead something that makes us unthinking tools, one-note Charlies spouting empty superficial trash. And there tends to be someone standing nearby who's more than happy to use us as tools for a horrible purpose, while our brains are turned off and our souls numbed. Not by accident will it be a horrible purpose, because people with good purposes aren't as drawn to using other people as tools, rather than fighting with them as free brothers. And that's the difference between God and the Devil. Well, obviously, a difference.

Jordan Peterson is a rare exponent of moral heroism.

 

Salt of the earth

My little town is losing an excellent police chief to retirement, just as I was getting to know what a rare find he is.  If you're familiar with the true story on which the 1991 movie "Rush" was loosely based, he's the straight arrow cop who was brought in to clean up the mess after the two undercover cops flamed out and went to prison. Their original police chief was acquitted of evidence-rigging upon testifying he had no idea what they'd been up to, but after acquittal he was quietly chased off.  So my currently outgoing police chief stepped in to straighten things out under more than usually fraught circumstances.  Not too long after that he came down to my neck of the woods and ran our police department for several decades.

Last night's retirement party was in minor part a study in local politics, as revealed by the presence of a certain contingent and the absence of another.  All that political tension largely faded into the background, though, as a group of very old loyal friends and family enjoyed each other's company and honored the chief.  He has three grown sons who I imagine to be much like Cassandra's boys.  Something about the chief and his wife also put me in mind of Cassandra and her husband--what was it she used to call him?  The Unit?  The young men gave some extremely touching tributes to their parents.  At first I thought, "What a fine father he must have been to raise those sons." Then I met his wife and realized she was equally extraordinary, so I found myself thinking, "You don't get sons like that by accident, even if your husband is a superb father."  Many of those present were the solid core of the local Baptist Church.  I knew it must be an amazing congregation from the central role it has played in coordinating volunteer storm relief over the last 18 months.  Now I can see more clearly what they have going for them.  These people's love of God goes right down into their bones.

I have spent too much time lately in the "mean-girls" atmosphere of small-town political intrigue.  I meet people who sound like they'll be reliable comrades in arms and others who obviously can't be bothered or relied on.  This party made me realize there's a big society out there to be met and cherished.  These are people who will know what's right and stand up for it.  They don't give off the signals that are so familiar to me from my law firm days, or even from some of the more unpleasant local political gatherings, that everyone is faintly drunk and wondering, upon meeting me, whether it's to their advantage to be nice to me.  They're just good people, exhibiting warmth, and ready to get to know anyone they sense will behave well and stick up for what's right.  It will be an honor to serve them and be their voice.

Welcome to Februrary

I've been enjoying old Waylon tunes for a little while now. He was inventive. I haven't ever been to Spain either, although I'd like to go; a Spanish girl once bought me a bottle of Spanish wine, to share a little of what her country was like, and I've never forgotten that.

Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings rented a place together, once. You can hear about it here, when he was young and clean-shaven.



Here he is a little bit later, in the late 1970s I'd guess. It was a different world.



Shel Silverstein gets mentioned here. He was a bigger force in Outlaw Country than you'd think, if you know him from books like "Where the Sidewalk Ends"; he wrote the lyrics to "A Boy Named Sue," and some other hits. He was one of my mother's favorite poets, he was. She used to read me his stuff when I was a boy. Not that one, though. That one had to wait until I became a man.

Comfort

Some kind of tipping point has been reached, evidently.  Virginia Governor's bizarre chat about keeping newborn infants comfortable while we arrange to snuff them was a bridge too far, especially in the same week someone dug up yearbook photos in which he was either in blackface or wearing a KKK hood. As "the greatest chyron ever" points out, the Governor's heartfelt apology doesn't make it clear which.

Instapundit bounces the rubble with this:

UPDATE [GRIM]:

Some more rubble gets bounced.

UPDATE [GRIM]:

California here I go

From Maggie's Farm, a link to a thoughtful treatment of what extreme success in one area does to the population mix of a hot town like San Francisco, since the area of hot success is suitable for a completely different demographic from what used to succeed there.  Rents stay in the stratosphere, so obviously it's not that the town is literally emptying out.  Still, the whole county sees the phenomenon of the California boat people.   Some are emptying out just as others are pouring in. It's happening fast enough to be unusually disruptive.

A Man Speaking Plainly

A gay man -- and drag performer -- has some things he'd like to get off his chest about this whole transgender movement. His opening isn't that interesting to me, but his closing argument is pretty good.

The old paradigm presented effeminate men as homosexuals who could be cured of their sexual desires. The new paradigm presents effeminate boys as children who can be cured by declaring them girls. And since we have (falsely) decided that their sexuality is irrelevant because they are children and because gender has no relationship to sexuality, proponents can make their case without discussing the off-putting issue of sexual urges. Each child must be raised according to what the child perceives to be their “true gender.”

In some cases, the phenomenon described as gender dysphoria is real and permanent, of course. But giving children the power to decide their true gender—or allowing them to decide that they have no gender whatsoever—makes little sense to me. Children who haven’t gone through puberty lack perspective on the ultimate consequences—both psychological and physical—of their choices. ... [W]hat if, as a child, I had decided to take hormones in order to stave off puberty? What if my penis shrank into my body? Imagine how that would affect me as an adult, when my sexual pleasure—an unknown impulse at the time I was knitting those Barbie-doll clothes—became connected with that penis. It turned out my erotic stimulus came in the form of being a man with other men, something I could never have completely understood as a child. As with legions of other gay men and women, the whole arc of my life only makes sense if one acknowledges the connection between gender and sexual attraction.

If I had self-declared as trans, hormones would have stopped the development of my penis, and there would not be enough sensitive phallic flesh to create a sensitive vagina. This would have been problematic even if I turned out not to be gay, or trans, but simply a straight man whose body now was marked by surgeries and powerful drugs. What if, as an adult, I were only turned on by being a man when I was having sex with a woman—but I now had a female body? How would I feel then?...

When I was 12 years old, I was terrified of being gay. I knew the sexual implications of my gendered behaviour. I also knew—even at a time before I experienced real sexual desire—that it was “bad” to be gay, and that being gay meant ending up alone and lonely. My mother took me aside, and quietly reassured me: “You might be gay, you might not be, but I think you’ll have to wait until you are older to think about it, because you’re just too young to think about it now.” I’m wondering if, had all this happened in 2019, she would have instead been persuaded to raise me as a girl.

I have issues with my mother. Don’t we all? I have called her names—to her face and in print. I will not repeat them here. But I want to publicly forgive her, now, for whatever I have accused her of, because she had the kindness and grace to respect my budding sexuality as I then perceived it. And she had enough respect for me to say, “You’re just too young” when I wondered what lay in store for my future. If only we all had the courage to say these same words to our own children.

I would say this focuses too much on the pleasure aspect of sexuality, and ignores the greater question of fertility: what if a child takes drugs that render him or her sterile, and then learns as an adult of a longing for children? What if the child were a girl, who destroys her body's ability to create life and then comes to regret it? The therapist who talked her into that will have murdered her children, all of them, and a part of her soul that she cannot get back.

Ultimately there is much to be said for patience in these matters.

In Capitalist America, Your Groceries Shop for You!

Walgreens is testing out cameras to watch shoppers, analyze them for demographic information, and refine their marketing systems. And they aren't the only ones.

Impossible!

One of many, many affectionate tributes to the late Richard Feynman, whose delight in a surprising phenomenon knew no bounds.  He was well guarded against the danger of refusing to acknowledge inconvenient truth, because his joy came from grappling with it.  His "Impossible!" really meant "What a wonderful toy you've given me to play with!"

This is a Penrose tile, I think, and below is a supposedly forbidden pentagonal natural array from a quasi-periodic crystal.

Eat the Rich, Eat Your Zoo Animals

Rep. Omar calls for considering a 90% top marginal tax (apparently 70% wasn't enough).

Also, cuts in Defense:

“I’m also one that really looks at the defense budget that we have, Rep. Omar said. “That has increased nearly 50% since 9/11. And so, most of the money that we have in there is much more than with we spend on education, on healthcare.”

That's not remotely true. Medicare alone consumes more money than the DOD. Medicare spending was north of $750B in 2017; the DOD's budget for this year is $686B.

People on the Left get confused about that because their professors put up charts on the wall with the "discretionary budget," which DOD dominates. That gives you the impression that we spend more on DOD than anything else. But most of the Federal budget isn't defined as discretionary, but as entitlements. Social Security and Medicare are each larger than DOD's budget. Military spending is only 16% of the total.

Now you might want to get that down to 2%, and spend the rest on Green New Deals or Free College or Universal Health Care.

By the way, even with a 70% marginal tax you'll still need a lot more money. Even should you zero out defense, you'd save around seven trillion dollars in a decade, and Medicare for All is expected to cost $32 trillion in that time. Add that to the $720 Billion you'd get from the 70% tax, over that decade, and you'd still be over twenty-four trillion short.

Elizabeth Warren, who is smarter than these two younger Congressfolk, has a "wealth tax" that gets you closer. Total wealth in the United States is estimated at $54 Trillion, so you'd only need to take about half of everything.

To cover the first decade of Medicare for All, I mean. The Green New Deal and Free College are another story. And presumably there will be a second decade -- will you have regenerated that $24 Trillion, while operating under such a punishing set of taxes?

There's just not enough money, no matter the tax scheme.

No problem: just print it. The author thinks it could be done without sparking Zimbabwe-style inflation, but really? You're going to dump $2.4 Trillion a year in new money into the market, and it's not going to cause runaway inflation?

This is how you kill an economy. Even the greatest economy in the world.

Whited Sepulchers

A moving condemnation of New York's new infanticide law.

I have been hearing defenders say that the only women who would seek an abortion at nine months are those whose child poses a mortal threat to them. The argument is that the child must be removed for the mother's health, and is probably dying itself anyway. If so, you could see an argument that some sort of abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother, and the child cannot be saved; and in that case, at least utilitarians would think it unethical not to abort. (Catholics, of course, are taught that it is never right to do an evil action, even to prevent another evil.)

However, this study of later term abortions suggests that medical reasons aren't really the main reason.

Later abortion recipients experienced logistical delays (e.g., difficulty finding a provider and raising funds for the procedure and travel costs), which compounded other delays in receiving care. Most women seeking later abortion fit at least one of five profiles: They were raising children alone, were depressed or using illicit substances, were in conflict with a male partner or experiencing domestic violence, had trouble deciding and then had access problems, or were young and nulliparous.

"Nulliparous," if you don't want to look it up, means that they've never delivered a baby before.

Now this study is for 'after 20 weeks,' rather than 'nine months,' but it's interesting that "experiencing a medical emergency" isn't even one of the five profiles.

As I think of Mike's point, I wonder how this law could be constitutional. The 14th Amendment says "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside" and that no state shall "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Once the birth occurs, the argument that 'it's the woman's body, so it's her choice' clearly does not apply; and the child, having been born, is a citizen due the protection of the laws.

Unless, of course, the child is not a person. That's been the dodge all along.

The Backchannel

The core insight -- that people put on a public face different from who they are in confidence -- is so obvious as to be undeniable. Apparently, journalists really don't like to admit it.

And academia:

Since the beginning of my graduate education, I have been someone who other academics feel that they can come to in order to voice their shock and dismay at just how toxic the culture within academia has become. They tell stories about petty witch hunts and show trials within their departments. They share their fear about objecting to arguments they find unfair or unsupported. They say they feel compelled to follow current academic fads for fear of being labeled. They are convinced that stepping out of line with the constant search for offense will render them permanently unemployable, even though they are themselves progressive people. You’ve heard the litany before. They share it with me.

Because they know that they can trust that I won’t ever betray their confidence, and because of my (self-aggrandizing, I admit) indifference to my professional reputation, they email me. They find me at conferences. And they always say the same thing: I could never say this publicly, but…. The Tuvel situation is just one example of a pervasive culture of fear, a feeling that even when one has the strong sense that an injustice is being done, academia is not a place where such reservations can be freely voiced.

Some will insist that this is just the secretly conservative saying what they truly believe, that this is all white men decrying a changing academic world. I suppose on balance the backchannel to me is paler and maler than the academy writ large. But the truth is that all kinds of people discuss this stuff with me: white and black, male and female, trans and cis. And the people who approach me aren’t mostly those rare academic conservatives, who barely exist these days, but rather liberals and leftists who believe in the movement for equality but find that the way that movement operates in the contemporary university has become toxic and unjust.

I've had similar experiences. Not everyone in the academic world is completely sure of gun control; not everyone is committed to abortion rights. Some -- maybe most -- of the women doggedly pursuing academic careers would rather be home with their children.

They just can't admit it, not in public.

Up Helly Aa AAR

Sounds like the fire festival was a lot of fun.

However, it sounds like the festival may not be around much longer. It sounded like entirely too much fun for the current version of the UK, and the decision to form a "new squad called #MeToo" looks like an attempt to destroy it before any more fun is had.

I have no clever title for this

New York State passed the most permissive abortion law in US history.  Virginia says "hold my beer".

Now I've made few bones about the fact that I find the Federal government to be far too obtrusive in our lives.  I'm a (small 'l') libertarian who would rather let people figure out complex issues in their own lives and keep government out of it.  As such, while I find abortion morally hateful, I'd rather not have the government put it's greasy paws all over the issue (indeed, my solution is to leave abortion laws up to the States).

But let's be clear, this proposed law in Virginia legitimizes blatant infanticide.  No civilized nation on the planet has any qualms referring to a child born and breathing on its own, separated from the womb completely, as a human being.  Virginia's proposed law would then let the mother and two doctors declare "yeah, but it's inconvenient so put it to death".  Not withhold extraordinary care, not take it off life support, no... actual positive steps to kill the baby.

I literally cannot type coherently about this.  It's beyond insanity.

Everything is Racist? Mary Poppins and Coal Miners

The NYT runs a piece examining the underlying racism in Mary Poppins, the 1964 movie about a book from the early 20th century. The books were moreso, the movie eliding almost all of that content out. But it remains, sort of: there was an association with lower class men who got very dirty doing their work, and blacks whose condition was thought lower by nature. I recall reading about a similar thing from the Raj days, in which a British military officer was stunned to realize -- while his men were taking a communal bath on maneuvers -- that the lower-class infantrymen were white underneath their uniforms. All the marching in the sun made them darker, and he assumed they were somehow of a lower (i.e. darker, according to the fashion of the times) race.

A photo of coal miners relaxing after work receives similar treatment.

I might have thought this was all evidence of progress; even in 1964, people realized the old mode was a problem and began to elide it into non-racist forms. They were still classist, but those classes in Britain were rapidly fading even in the 1960s. That class consciousness was a major source of humor in Monty Python just because it was on the way out. The racism of the earlier period was already embarrassing in the 1960s, and was being written out.

Progress on classism, too, in the fact that working men no longer show up at the bar covered in filth from head to foot. Working conditions have improved dramatically, even for coal miners. If that weren't true, people wouldn't look at this photo and think, "Blackface!" They'd look at it and think, "Oh, coal miners."

But apparently actual progress is forbidden by progressives. We need to make sure to hold on to the grievances that actual progress might weaken, since the real goal isn't progress but power.

Authoritarians and "Patriotism"

Listen, it wouldn’t be fair to accuse presidential hopeful Kamala Harris of supporting state control over the means of all production. To this point she’s only focused on the energy, health care, auto-manufacturing and education sectors. Good candidates prioritize....

Human Dragons on Piles of Rubies

Hot Air was pretty close to agreement on that point last week.

Ocasio-Cortez is basically stating a premise that most Christians would hear in church — that the gross hoarding of wealth violates the self-sacrificing love that should exist among God’s children in terms of overall distribution of Creation’s bounty intended for all. Calling the system “immoral” might be a bit hyperbolic, but many people would at least agree that recent outcomes of our economic system have become imbalanced, if not warped. The problem isn’t capitalism itself but in our lack of effort to enforce anti-trust laws to keep wealth — and therefore political power — accruing into fewer and fewer hands. That trend has accelerated the rise of populism on both sides of the ideological divide and corroded confidence in our public institutions....

Shotgun Weddings in the UK

More knives and hammers than shotguns these days, I guess. But still.

Well, the practice is a little different too in that the forced marriage happens before sex, rather than as a consequence of it. And it might not lead to sex, either.

That's Just Orthodoxy

Headline: 'Co-founder of Satanic Temple: Pence "really scares me"'

Ivanhoe:

“I uncanonical!” answered the hermit; “I scorn the charge—I scorn it with my heels!—I serve the duty of my chapel duly and truly—Two masses daily, morning and evening, primes, noons, and vespers, 'aves, credos, paters'—-”

“Excepting moonlight nights, when the venison is in season,” said his guest.

“'Exceptis excipiendis'” replied the hermit, “as our old abbot taught me to say, when impertinent laymen should ask me if I kept every punctilio of mine order.”

“True, holy father,” said the knight; “but the devil is apt to keep an eye on such exceptions; he goes about, thou knowest, like a roaring lion.”

“Let him roar here if he dares,” said the friar; “a touch of my cord will make him roar as loud as the tongs of St Dunstan himself did. I never feared man, and I as little fear the devil and his imps. Saint Dunstan, Saint Dubric, Saint Winibald, Saint Winifred, Saint Swibert, Saint Willick, not forgetting Saint Thomas a Kent, and my own poor merits to speed, I defy every devil of them, come cut and long tail.—But to let you into a secret, I never speak upon such subjects, my friend, until after morning vespers.”

Ain't No God in Thailand

CNN:



Fox:

A Belarusian model, who said she had proof that President Trump’s campaign colluded with the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential election, has now backtracked and says she made up the claims....[T]he model now claims her story was just an effort to attract media attention and save her life while she was detained in Thailand.

“I think it saved my life, how can I regret it? If journalists had not come at that time and that story had not come to the newspapers, maybe I would die [be dead by] now,” she told CNN.

Can't blame her much for that. It's an old story.

A Reasonable Plan

Headline: "Abolish the Federal Government and Realign the Nation Based on Football."

It actually works out pretty well!

Reason: The Shutdown Proves We Can Shrink the Government

I'm willing to believe.

I do wonder, though, if Americans' emotional reactions to having government workers unemployed doesn't make it impractical. Nobody likes suffering, but the suffering associated with losing a job is inherent to private capitalism. Government jobs provide security, and who doesn't like security? Seeing all those people upset at losing their security was clearly upsetting to lots of ordinary Americans who sympathize.

To make the government much smaller is the wise move. Is it still within the realm of the possible, without waiting for the whole thing to first collapse under its own weight?

The Worst Candidate of All

We've seen a bunch of people throwing their hats in for 2020, but one of them is head and shoulders worse than all the rest: Sen. Kamala Harris.

How awful is she? Let us count the ways. Of course we know about her recent argument that membership in the Knights of Columbus should be thought disqualifying for judges, meaning that she violates her oath to uphold the Constitution and its prohibition of religious tests for office.

She is a politician who is confirmed in the Jackboot Thug approach to authority. She strongly supported granting search warrants against you based on no evidence beyond the fact that DNA found at the scene of a crime was similar to that of your relatives.

Harris was also a big booster of familial DNA searches, a controversial technique whereby investigators compare a DNA sample to other samples in a DNA database to find possible relatives, then use additional genetic testing and analysis to confirm the match, all in order to solve crimes. Due to privacy concerns, the technique hasn’t been adopted in Canada, and was outlawed in both Maryland and DC. Among the concerns are the not-infrequent cases of human error in DNA evidence, the fact that familial testing would disproportionately impact communities of color, the potential revelation of family secrets, and the already existing instances of mistakes being made with the technique....

In fact, California’s use of familial DNA testing is particularly invasive, as the state allows the collection and preservation of DNA samples from anyone who is arrested, even if they’re not charged with a crime. The ACLU originally sued to block California’s DNA collection when an Oakland woman had been arrested during a San Francisco protest against the Iraq War and forced to give a DNA sample despite not being charged with any crime.

She also supports civil asset forfeiture, in which the state can take your property without proving you guilty of anything, and you have to prove your innocence to get it back. She made it a practice to withhold exculpatory evidence from defense lawyers in criminal cases.

She also celebrated "using the stick" to make American families "behave," including sending poor parents, even single parents to jail if their kids were truant at school.

She has expansive ideas about how she'd like to use the new power she hopes to win.

But the queen of the ban was just getting starting. Along with banning private health insurance, Harris also wants to ban for-profit colleges, assault weapons, fossil fuels, personal cars, and presumably members of the Knights of Columbus serving as federal judges. It’s quite a list, and a sign of the times in the party of Jefferson and Jackson.

Speaking of health insurance, did you ever get any you only kind of hate after Obama's promise that you could keep the stuff you liked? Too bad, it's gone again.

And, of course, she's a committed opponent of the 2nd Amendment. She'd have to be. You couldn't leave Americans in possession of firearms before you made them give up their cars.

There may be no good candidates next year, but so far this is by far the worst one.

Up Helly Aa

Tuesday, 29th January is the annual Up Helly Aa festival in the Shetland Islands.

One of these years I just need to set aside January to spend in Scotland, with a slight trip into England for the Jorvik festival in York.

BB: Calvinist "Choose Your Own Adventure"

You'll never guess how it ends.

What we click on

From Jim Geraghty: North Dakotan columnist Rob Port with a difficult but accurate observation: “Free markets and democracy are very good at delivering people what they want, even when they claim they don’t want it.”

51st Highlanders

A part of the Dunkirk story you may not have heard.

A Documentary Debut

You're meant to be clever enough to understand that this is clever.

I always think, 'Abyssus abussum invocat,' and display a Tolkien-like wariness about even using the name. Perhaps that means I'm not clever enough. I do appreciate the attempts to defend a Constitutional principle; I don't, especially, appreciate the way in which actual religious belief is viewed as dispensable. There are many things I would do to tolerate and make room for sincere religious feeling that I wouldn't do at all for someone who's just trying to make a political point. The toleration of sincere religious belief is humane, in the strictest sense of the word; the other applies a kind of acid to the humane principle.

The worker's lament

David Burge on the carnage among the clickbait factory workers.

A Bishop Apologizes

Covington Catholic's bishop has submitted a page-long written apology for his conduct in last weekend's scandal.

The Smell of Death

What follows is an essay I wrote many years ago now on Winds of Change, which is now defunct. I hadn't thought about it in years, but I went to find it again today and discovered the link was dead. I decided to dig it out of the Internet Archive. I don't know how much it is still of interest to anyone, but here it is, minus the internal links which are all now broken:

The Smell of Death

Armed Liberal has, I gather from his posts, been taking some time to reconsider his posts on killing your own meat. Since he seemed to feel like he and I were talking about the same things, let me venture a few words on the topic.

Today I took a long morning walk -- six miles or so over the Georgia hills, a good stretch of the legs. Much of this was along country backroads, but for two miles in the middle, it was along a two-lane highway. Logging trucks went roaring by, their wake turning the stagnant, humid air into a brief cyclone.

As one such truck tore past, the rush of air behind it whipped up a smell that some of you will know. I knew at once that some large animal was dead nearby, and sure enough, as the air settled the smell remained.

It grew stronger and stronger as I kept my pace, until off in the forest, just away from the road, I could see the corpse of a buck, bloated with the heat of late summer.

It had died of blunt force trauma, struck no doubt by one of those same trucks, limping off to die a few feet in the forest. I could tell this because it was not butchered, as a poacher would do. Anyone who has found where poachers keep court knows that deer who meet their end that way are found in a far worse condition. Heaps of gore are common, where unwanted hooves and organs, and sometimes the heads, are left to rot after venison is stripped from the bones.

The smell of death is a singular one. Anyone who has smelled it once strongly will know it again immediately. Like all smells, it is hard to put into words. It disgusts, and repels.

A scientific mind knows why. The smell is only the way that the human brain interprets certain chemicals, in certain quantities, touching certain nerves in the nose. The sense that comes with it is a chemical reaction in the brain. That we can smell it, and recognize it, is only a feat of engineering -- the work of evolution, no different for men as for any beast that smells.

What is interesting, to a philosopher, is that is smells bad. It is only a collection of chemicals, as is the breath of a rose: it might have smelled as sweet.

Evolution explains this too. For untold thousands of years, men -- aye, and beasts before we were men -- had no better protection than their senses against disease. However it arose, by mutation or design, those for whom rotting corpses smelled bad had an advantage. We shy from the bloated corpse, and it is well for us that we do: its flesh is putrid, harbors disease and deadly microbes, sickens and kills. No good comes from the association.

This is not the only thing about death that repels us. Return for a moment to the alternative scene, the one where a buck is killed by a poacher. It is clear why death smells bad, but why does the death of a butchered animal look worse than the death of one killed at a blow by a speeding truck?

There is a reason, but it is not as immediately obvious. We have been hunters since before the beginning, as far as Mankind is concerned. Why should it be true that the sight of a butchered animal should bother us? The sight of a steak does not: it makes us hungry. It is not the simple fact of blood, or flesh, or parts of an animal slashed and chopped to order. It is the encounter with an animal that was plainly slain by a predator.

To understand this factor of ourselves, we have to reach back to a time when we were not the top of the food chain. We have to remember that Man grew up with lions.

Nor was it only lions. Our brains carry memories more ancient than our species, and far more:

Marco Iacoboni and associates at the ucla Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center used fMRI machines to observe the neural impact of Super Bowl ads in five volunteers.... For example, during a Fed Ex ad a caveman ends up being crushed by a dinosaur. Although subjects described the ad as funny, it also elicited a strong response in the amygdala, which governs responses to threats or fear. They may not have consciously experienced fear, but their brains were assessing the threat of that dinosaur.

We see the pile of gore, and something deep within us lights up in alarm. We are on guard, to see if we might be next.
All those ancient lessons are whispering in our minds at the sight of a corpse. They work on deep and secret parts of us. Yet there is still one more, the greatest secret of death magic. It is the mystery of the severed head.

Today, among Americans, only hunters have encountered this directly. It comes in the time when you are cleaning a kill. You cut the head from the body, and hold it in your hand. Though you slew the beast yourself, though your own knife did the cutting, seeing the head disjoined from the body is the most disquieting experience it is easy to know.

Indeed, the hunter finds, it is as if the whole power of the animal were in the head. The body, with the head set aside, no longer really resembles an animal at all. It is plainly dinner, and a hide to use as a blanket in winter.

We do not react to the severed leg as we do a severed head: a drumstick is a delight to the eye; the haunch of a deer or a pig both looks and smells fine as it roasts on the fire. Or think of a fish, if you have ever had one served as they serve it in China: with the head still attached. It is a very different experience to eat such a one, than to eat a fillet.

This is why some hunters take the heads of their beasts, and place them as trophies upon the wall. It is why the ancient Gael took the head of his famous and noble foe, and tied it by its own braids to his chariot as a warning to others. It is why the more ancient Celt built temples to the severed head, with alcoves and emplacements specially constructed for displaying honored skulls.

It is why we have legends of Mimir, and Celtic tales of other severed heads that spoke wisdom to the wise. They conversed with us from the realm of death; they kept the power of great men.

All these things move us at a level deeper than we know how to understand. It is easy to explain why the smell of death repels us. Though not so obvious for a hunting people, it is yet still possible to understand why the butchered corpse is more upsetting than the whole one. The power of the severed head, though, is not easy to explain. Yet it is just as universal among mankind.

Armed Liberal wrote about the problem of those who 'keep their hands clean,' never hunting, buying meat prepackaged and without an awareness of the moral cost. I disagree: there is no moral cost. We are monsters, who butcher though it creates mounds of gore: who sever heads, and find it moves us though we know not why.

But it isn't killing that makes us monsters. We are exactly that same kind of creature, whether we have ever killed or not.

The moral problem of 'the clean hands' is that it is an illusion. It makes people believe they are better than they are, and therefore that others can also be better than they can be. It creates a class of people who feel clean, because they have never felt blood on their hands.

Yet all these things arise from things buried deep in the genetic code. You cannot walk away from them. The failure to experience these things does not mean you would not react to them in just the same way as everyone else: it only means that you cannot understand how you would react, and how others do.

The man with clean hands is just the same as the hunter. It is only that he does not know it. He does not understand that part of his soul, as it lurks beyond his experience. He comes to believe that there is a kind of human that is and can be clean: perhaps that sweet, aged lady on the corner, who in her youth broke necks every night before dinner.

Failing to understand what Man really is, he opens himself more than is wise, and defends himself less. The man with the clean hands believes in diplomacy but not the force that makes diplomacy viable. He believes in staying clean, because he believes it makes him better than you. He does not understand that it only makes him blind.

This is not a call to amoralism, but precisely the opposite. It is a call for true morality, which can only begin with awareness of sin. It can only come from a recognition of how deep-set, how permanent, how personal sin is in each of us.

It is only in that way that we can begin to put real chains on sin: by recognizing the truth about it. We must learn to face the truth about ourselves, so that we can better ourselves: we must learn to face the truth about others, so we will recognize when murder is in their hearts.

In Zen Lessons: The Art of Leadership, translated by Thomas Cleary, there is a lesson to which my mind often returns. It is a lesson taught by a great master of early Zen Buddhism, called Chan in the Chinese. He had made a life given to fasting and simplicity, relinquishment and moderation. One day he visited a hermit, preparing a simple meal of rice:

The master said, "Why do crows fly away when they see a man?" The hermit was at a loss; finally he put the same question back to the Chan master. The master said, "Because I still have a murderous heart."

So do you. And so do I, and know it. For which cause I set guards on myself, chains of chivalry and courtesy, forgiveness in spite of anger. Our ancestors knew it, for which cause they learned to fight duels instead of wars, and make laws that legitimized violence in defense but not aggression.
Armed Liberal is right. Modern society has given many, for the first time, the problem of clean hands. It has yet to teach them how to overcome that problem.

Iran may teach them, soon. Al Qaeda has already tried, and failed. I counsel them, as [Armed Liberal] tried to do, to take up hunting: for this is a lesson that can only be grasped by hunting or by war. If you do not grasp it soon, war is coming to teach you. Yet there is still time, now, to learn the better way.

A Hate Incident

Excommunicabo Vos

The NY law is drawing calls for Cuomo's excommunication.

The Strength of Diversity

Let us count the ways in which this is a diverse group. Ideology?  Age? Socio-Economic class? Preference for Macs?

I'll bet it's 'views on abortion.'

UPDATE: A folksong.

What A Weird Coincidence

As the longest government shutdown ever continues, new applications for jobless benefits have dropped to a low not seen since 1969.

It's as if there were some connection between less intrusive Federal government and more employment. But you know, correlation doesn't equal causation and all that. It's probably nothing.