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.

Gun Rights and the Supreme Court

Slate's Stern thinks this SCOTUS case involving NYC gun laws will be a big deal. I'm not as convinced.

Stern's argument that it might be:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found a right to concealed carry outside the home. So did the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, by contrast, found no Second Amendment right to carry a concealed handgun in public. And the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has split the baby, upholding limitations on concealed carry while invalidating restrictions on open carry.

Despite this circuit split, the Supreme Court has declined to take a public-carry case and resolve the matter once and for all. The main reason appeared to be Justice Anthony Kennedy, who compelled Justice Antonin Scalia to add limiting language to the Heller decision establishing an individual right to bear arms. Given Kennedy’s wobbly support of gun rights, the conservative justices avoided taking a case that might result in a 5–4 decision upholding public-carry bans. Now Kennedy is gone, replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a gun-rights enthusiast who takes a breathtakingly expansive view of the Second Amendment. With a firmly pro-gun majority in place, the conservative justices finally seem ready to supercharge Heller.

Well, I sure hope so. But I think there's plenty of room for a more limited solution.

The reason is that NYC's ban is extremely vigorous. It bars you from removing a lawfully-owned firearm from your home except to take it to a shooting range within city limits (and therefore subject to the city's restrictions). The lawsuit is by gun owners who would like to be able to take their guns to shoot in tournaments outside the city, which is currently illegal because they'd be removing their lawfully-owned guns from the city limits. One would think that NYC would be delighted to have you do this, even if only for a couple of days, since they apparently believe that having the guns physically present in their town poses some sort of danger all by itself. At least for the weekend, my gun won't kill anyone in NYC if the gun is moved to Ohio for a shooting tournament, right? But even this obvious concession to sport shooters is refused by the city, which makes no concessions to gun owners except under duress.

You could easily rule, thus, "Eh, a city can't justify a ban on removing the guns from homes on the grounds of the public safety of others in the city if the guns are also to be removed from the city. You could insist that they be removed only in an unloaded and locked condition, and shipped separately from their ammunition, in order to ensure that the transportation itself posed no danger to anyone." That wouldn't get you to any kind of robust 'public carry.' It would only permit you to transport an unloaded firearm, separated from any ammunition.

Maybe Kavanaugh will be bloodthirsty after his confirmation hearings, though. SCOTUS doesn't have to be nice.

NYC Celebrates Abortion

New York just passed a new law permitting elective abortion all the way up to birth. Although abortion is allegedly justified on the grounds that the woman should have control over her own body, this allows the mother to kill an infant who could survive perfectly well if simply removed from her body.

Naturally, New York decided to celebrate. They lit One World Trade Center up in pink to mark the occasion.

Fitting, when you think about it. It's mostly the girl babies who get aborted.

House Passes Package to Fund Govt -- Except DHS

So Trump's proposal is funding the government, plus a wall and extra border enforcement; the apparent counter proposal is funding the government, but leave DHS out. Maybe they'll get something in another bill.

Compromise sure sounds like it's right around the corner, eh?

Curious Kalashnikov

TS reports that in Texas this week, a man was attacked by 5 home-invaders with rifles. He returned fire with his own AK, killing 3.

“A neighbor who lives nearby said he was on his porch with his baby when two men showed up with large rifles,” KHOU writes. “That neighbor says he ran inside his home and took cover. He said he believes the men were at the home to rob his neighbor, however he says he does not know what they were after. He said he doesn’t know his neighbor’s name and only calls him ‘Flaco’.”

Good shooting, "Flaco," but I think maybe we all have some questions about why five guys with rifles came after you so close to the Mexican border. That suggests there might be a bigger problem that needs addressing.