Col. Kurt: Reject Freaks and Weirdos

Kurt Schlichter does have a way with words.

Have you noticed the absolute freakshow quality of the people who want to keep us in chains? Perhaps it’s one thing to be repressed by people who are at least nominally badass, like Romans or Mongols. But these geebos who make up the Democrat Party’s loudmouth wing? The sexually hopeless toads outraged because other people who might someday know the loving touch of another human can’t whack their babies? No. Not only does their tyranny fail the freedom test, it fails the aesthetic test....

[J]ust look at the antics of that fascist disinformation girl. She sings show tunes. She’s into Harry Potter – non-threatening sensitive and magical boys are sooooo dreamy. She’s also eager to shove you into a train car headed to a gulag, and as it pulls away from the station she’ll be shouting at you ruffians to use your inside voices.

That’s right – the mediocre girl who played the lead in your high school’s production of “Hello, Dolly!" – which you skipped to go pound Buds with your pals like normal people – is the harbinger of tyranny.

Young Arlo Guthrie described the crowd at Woodstock thus. Somehow they've taken over.

UPDATE: On reflection, COL Kurt is of course being too harsh here. That's his thing. Yet there is also an Aristotelian point about power and virtue. Power is the most dangerous human quality, and a wise society strictly limits its existence to only absolutely necessary cases, and then further limits its concentration. Where power is unavoidable, power should not be entrusted to people who are not virtuous; having the right virtues to exercise an office is in fact the major qualification for holding that office. These are the true virtues, the classical ones: wisdom, courage, moderation, self-discipline. 

We use the phrase "virtue signaling" to indicate what is actually a vicious behavior. People who engage in it are trying to exercise power that they haven't earned. The Biden administration is engaging in attempting to govern almost exclusively as a performance of virtue signaling, and these appointments are themselves signals of that sort. It's no wonder that everything is falling apart.

 

"Ultra MAGA"

Now MAGA stands for "Make America Great Again." Therefore, "Ultra MAGA" would imply an intense devotion to doing things that would make America great again. 

Old Uncle Joe Biden seems to think that is a bad thing. What's his alternative? Not making America great again? Making China or Iran great? CNN refers to this as him 'sharpening his midterm message,' but it had better get sharper than this if he wants to make any sense to voters -- who happen, ex officio, to be Americans.

Let Me Explain the Two Rules of Business

 

LAT: Roe Was Never That Great

I expect to learn that the draft we've seen is merely Alito's argument to the court, rather than a final decision; but it is interesting to see no less than the LA Times admitting that Roe was actually a badly reasoned decision. "Shaky legal foundation" means that we understand why we're going to lose this thing we really care about. 

Confer Mt. 7:24-27.

Philosophy on Abortion

I've written about this at length over the years, but I find this morning that search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo can't find anything I've written on the subject. So let's run through it one time quickly.

1) Abortion kills a living, individual, human being. 

1a) Living: Philosopher Hans Jonas points out that the activity that is life, what makes a living being different from a rock, is that the living being is taking resources from nature and putting it into its own order. Your body does this all the time. You eat, your body digests the food and breaks it into constituent elements or molecules, and then puts those things into the order of your muscles, bones, organs. That's life. That's what life means; that's what life is. A child is doing that from the moment of conception, dividing and ordering, taking resources from its mother to bring itself into the order that also is itself. 

Cf. Aristotle Physics II.1: "Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes." That's what he meant too: the baby in an important sense causes itself to come to be ('by nature'), whereas the rock came to be because of forces not its own. Heat created magma, uplift created cooling, weather broke it from the earth and made it a rock rather than a part of a mountain. Life entails having a nature, an order of your own, taking from the world and putting a part of the world into your own order.

So: abortion kills a living being.

1b) Individual: The order that the being is putting itself into is its own. It is not its mother's, nor its father's. Even in the case of twins, quickly the orders begin to diverge from each other and are subtly different. The child is a unique being. The child is not you: the child is himself or herself.

1c) Human: Nevertheless, all children have an order that is recognizably human. It is genetically distinct and different from other sorts of beings, e.g. dogs or bats.

Therefore: It is proven that abortion kills a living, individual, human being.

2) Aborted children are usually innocent in the strict sense of the word.

2a) Innocence implies absence of guilt. As a rule, guilt is a matter of the will. The child's will, before birth, is in a minimal state of activity: the child can move about the womb of its own free will in the later stages, but for the most part his or her actions are informed by instinct rather than will. Growing, for example, is an act of the child but not a chosen or willed action.

2b) Occasionally guilt can occur accidentally. When a child's body embeds itself in an intratubal manner, the child through no act of will is going to be guilty of killing his or her mother. Other times, children die in the womb and cannot be ordinarily expelled. These children, likewise, are accidentally guilty of killing their mother through sepsis and the like. This is not guilt in the strict sense, but by analogy; but it is nevertheless the sort of thing that might license violence in self defense (see 3, following). If someone is accidentally about to kill someone, and there is not time or space to reason with them about it, you might reasonably use violence to stop them from doing so.

3) Usually violence towards another individual human being is only justified by defense of self or another who is innocent.

3a) From 2b, I can see limited cases in which abortion is fully justified. If the mother would die and, therefore, the child will also die, it is sensible to save the one life that might be saved. If there's a legitimate choice between saving either life but not both, the mother might sensibly defend her own life if she chooses to do so. This is not the position of the Church, please note; it is a place where I dissent from the Church's teachings for what I take to be honest and honorable reasons. I trust in forgiveness if I am in error.

4) Thought experiment A: The Deer Hunter

4a) Though it is here proven that the child is a living, individual human being, it is sometimes argued that we cannot really know if the child is a 'person' or not. This strikes me as a fiction created for the purpose of creating an ambiguity that might allow for an immoral action, exactly like 'race' was invented as a concept in order to create a class of human beings whose interests might be ignored for convenience. 'Personhood' separate from 'the category of being a living individual human being' is almost nonsense; it could in principle extend to aliens or some such, but even then it would still embrace all living individual human beings.

4b) However, consider the case of a person who has a duty to feed his family. Times are hard and they are hungry. He takes his rifle and goes out into the woods to hunt for food. After a long time, he sees movement. At that distance, though, he cannot quite be sure if what he is seeing is another person or a deer. It could be a deer, but it also might be a neighbor who is walking in the woods in a deer-colored coat. May he morally shoot what might be another person, being uncertain? 

4c) He may not. If he fires and it turns out to be a deer, all is well; but if he fires, and it turns out to be his neighbor, he is guilty of manslaughter. Choosing not to fire, by contrast, is always guiltless. 

4d) The needs of his family for food might be considered a mitigating factor in determining just punishment, but not a sufficient justification for the manslaughter.

4e) Therefore, uncertainty about the personhood of the child is not a defense for killing it. The only certainly moral choice in cases of uncertainty about personhood is not to choose to kill.

5) Thought Experiment B: The Artificial Womb

5a) Another defense of abortion that is sometimes made is that women should not be forced to harbor a child to term if they do not wish to do so. Consider -- as is not hard -- a technology that would allow the child to be safely transferred to an artificial womb, so that the woman did not have to carry the child if she did not wish. Would she still have the right to kill the child, if there were an alternative?

5b) I submit that her bodily autonomy would be adequately preserved if she were free to remove the child to an artificial womb. However, notice that in such a case she would still have duties to her child. Just as a father has to pay child support even if he is not otherwise involved in the child's life, so too would she -- equal rights, equal duties -- have to pay for the support of a child she engendered even if she did not otherwise wish to be involved with the child.

5c) The current status allows a pernicious inequality of rights and duties between men and women, by allowing women to dispose of the child and/or their duties to the child (many states have surrender points where a living child can be abandoned without questions), but requires men to be responsible for 18 years regardless of their choice. This is a basic unfairness in our legal structure.

5d) More, it violates natural law as regards the woman and the child. The purpose of traditional institutions like marriage is the recognition that humanity naturally produces children, and children by nature need to be supported and educated to adulthood so that they can assume proper places in society. Children are due this from their parents by nature. That is true for both parents. It is a natural duty that our society has for decades attempted to relieve for women.

Conclusion: Except in rare cases as provided in (3a), abortion is morally wrong. It ought to be dealt with accordingly. 

Punk Voters Not Entirely Happy With 'Their' Party

“We, therefore, vow to use every procedural and political tactic possible to guarantee every woman imprisoned for seeking abortion access is given a $50 tax credit for the fourth quarter of the fiscal year 2023. All they have to do is fill out and sign ten simple forms at our web portal, which we expect will be up and running at some point in the next one to three years.”

It's the kind thing to do

Beltane

From Wikipedia:

Beltane (/ˈbɛl.teɪn/) is the Gaelic May Day festival. It is held on 1 May, or about halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice. Historically, it was widely observed throughout Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. In Irish the name for the festival day is Lá Bealtaine ([l̪ˠaː ˈbʲal̪ˠt̪ˠənʲə]), in Scottish Gaelic Latha Bealltainn ([l̪ˠaː ˈpjaul̪ˠt̪ɪɲ]) and in Manx Gaelic Laa Boaltinn/Boaldyn. It is one of the four Gaelic seasonal festivals—along with Samhain, Imbolc and Lughnasadh—and is similar to the Welsh Calan Mai.

Apparently they've been doing a fire festival in Edinburgh since 1988. The BBC has pictures from this year's seasonal fest. 

Orienteering

There’s one of those map overlays, which we discussed in the comments to the last post on topic. 

It turns out that I do know how to do this stuff, which was gratifying to learn. 

A Tragedy in Rooster

This is one of the saddest songs ever written about cock-fighting. It's a sport that I understand remains popular in Mexico and among the Mexican population -- I mean those born in Mexico, rather than Americans of Mexican descent. But it was also popular in China, when I lived there: there was a place called Hangzhou Birds' Paradise that featured daily cock fights. Perhaps there's some ambiguity in the word "paradise" in Mandarin.

In any case, rope in if you decide to listen to this. It's a genuine tragedy.

The Cathedral of May

Happy May Day from the mountain. 

The devil you say

Next these extremists will start talking about patriotism and the U.S. Constitution.

[M]otherhood is used in women’s Jan. 6 legal defenses to make women appear more sympathetic, by emphasizing their caretaking roles and status as “good” mothers and grandmothers who are devoted to their husbands and families. Such defense strategies paint a picture of these women as nurturers who love their families and are committed to raising productive citizens in an attempt to outweigh the serious charges they face.

My favorite parts of the article: the "historical" context of mothers sewing KKK hoods and homeschooling. My guess is that they're teaching the kids to sew KKK hoods in those homeschools.

Thank goodness no one is teaching the tykes anything horrifying in the government schools.

There's an even worse image-rehabilitation program afoot: the effort to humanize fetuses by revealing their gender, which makes birthing persons more reluctant to kill them.

The new DGB has its work cut out for it.

Orienteering Preparation

It's proven to be hard to locate the proper gear for orienteering -- at least in the timeframe required, i.e., by Monday night. We're supposed to come up with enough baseplate compasses for everyone, plus the kind of map layovers that make grid-finding easy. The latter do not exist at all in any local hiking or outdoors outfitter. The former are sold out in most of the nearby towns, as the one thing tourists know they need before going into the Wild is a compass -- although most of them probably barely have an idea how to use one. Still, A+ for effort on behalf of the local hikers. Maybe we'll have fewer search and rescues this year.

I've taken on this particular task, and have so far been to "hiking" stores in Cashiers and Highlands that were completely barren, an "outdoors outfitter" in Sylva that had five, and a similar store in Bryson City that had two (but better ones). We already had a couple up at the department, so that's probably enough: but we may all have to share the same gridding overlay. 

Today while I was in Bryson City I ate at the worst 'Italian' restaurant I have ever encountered. I'll avoid giving out the name, but it's the only Italian restaurant in Bryson City. Western North Carolina has much to recommend it, but not its take on ethnic food. The tendency is to strip out every kind of spice,. reducing to the absolute basic ingredients. 'Mexican' food -- if you don't go to the increasingly common taco trucks run by actual Mexicans -- is likely to be meat, beans, cheese and sour cream, plus tortillas, with no spice of any kind beyond salt and maybe black pepper. (Especially near and over the Virginia border, there's a local 'white sauce' that is truly horrendous.) 

Now just to be clear. this only bothers me when it's presented as something it's not. There's a restaurant down the street called The Iron Skillet whose flavor profile is more or less exactly the same. It's fine. You can get pork chops (seasoned with white flour, salt and pepper), bacon, eggs, gravy, and it's authentic home cooking. Nothing wrong with the food not being spicy; and the local cuisine is just not. What bothers me is going into a "Mexican" restaurant or an "Italian" restaurant and receiving something that is very much not.

In this case, the food was also bad. The black bean soup I had was literally just black beans from a can, heated in water, with plain white rice and a dollop of sour cream added. This was followed by 'chicken parmigiana,' which was clearly a frozen patty they bought somewhere and reheated, served with overcooked spaghetti and what tasted exactly like Ragu spaghetti sauce on top of it. 

It was terrible, but because I weigh 240 pounds and am a Strongman competitor I ate every last bite of it, desperately needing the protein and calories by lunchtime. The waiter kept commenting on how much I must be enjoying the food since I was demolishing it as fast as he put it in front of me. I didn't have the heart to tell him. 

There is at least one exception on the 'ethnic food in Western North Carolina' rule. There is -- for Mike G, or others who may be passing through the area -- a fantastic Thai restaurant by the railroad tracks between Sylva and Dillsboro. The lady who owns and runs it is really from Thailand. It's amazing, but order at least two dishes because her idea about the amount of food a man needs at a meal is honestly Southeast Asian. So is her cooking, though, so spring for the pair.

There are also some great native Western North Carolina restaurants in Dillsboro, including especially the Heywood Smokehouse. The local barbecue is great, maybe as good as barbecue is anywhere. Nothing wrong with the local cuisine when they're making their own food. 

Rough Weather

Spring can bring rain, but May and October are usually the two most pleasant months of the year. Nevertheless earlier this week, AVI was talking about an old song that I happen to know well. In the discussion I mentioned that exposure to hard weather will take it out of you in about three hours -- after that, if you haven't got shelter, you're going to start making mistakes. 

This wasn't a random fact off the top of my head. We're doing Search and Rescue training this month, and I attended a four-hour training session on Monday night. The point was about setting priorities if you happen to be the first person to come upon someone, wounded or hypothermic or alone in the wilderness. People tend to think about food in survival situations, but you can survive without food for a long time. Water? Days. But you can die of exposure in less than a day, as our musical guest explains.

Our instructor is a man I greatly like. He's some kind of old Army, though he hasn't copped to it exactly; post-Nam Ranger, I'd guess. In his sixties he still BASE jumps and does SCUBA diving into caves. He's an old hillbilly who hates cities and has every kind of Deplorable instinct, another old Southern Democrat like me. 

And just now and then, amidst his long discourse on all these topics, he'll depart into extraordinary explanations that quote physics formulas from memory and then explain how they apply to survival situations. Somebody asked him about those Mylar 'space blankets' they sell. Shouldn't we carry them to wrap up hypothermia victims so they'll warm? Nope, it turns out: his account of why they're useless in those cases was one of the most erudite things I've ever heard, coming from a guy you'd probably have thought a backwoods redneck if you didn't stop and listen to him talk for a long while. 

Here's the formula, by the way. The example is of the surface of the moon, but this is physics, so it applies to the hypothermic guy who fell in a mountain creek with exactly equal force. 

Next week is orienteering, which I think I know how to do. I learned it many years ago and have done quite a bit of it, but I won't be surprised if I understand it better after he's done teaching us.

Quit showing our evidence to people

If I understand the problem correctly, the DNC worries that leaks from the January 6 witchhunt are causing voters to care even less about the agenda they hoped to push just in time for the mid-terms. If they'd been able to keep the evidence under wraps, it would been much more convincing later when they finally decided to unveil it with the proper dramatic flourish. Voters stubbornly keep telling pollsters they couldn't care less and wish their representatives would focus on inflation and the economy.

The only solution I can think of is to censor discussion of irrelevancies like inflation and force everyone to focus on the approved narrative.

Speaking of inflation, Chuck Schumer has a brilliant solution: raise taxes. Schumer didn't try to explain how raising taxes could curb inflation, but the WSJ notes that it's a recognized tenet of Modern Monetary Theory or, as I like to call it, Magic Money Tree. The theory is that raising taxes "removes spending power from the rest of us." Of course, it hands that spending power over to the government, which cheerfully indulges it, but because the money will be spent on things like solar panels it doesn't lead to inflation. That's where part of the Magic comes in. I think the idea is that you decrease demand (you won't) without decreasing supply (again no). As I see it, you decrease demand from citizens while matching it with demand from the government, so no net change in demand, and you decrease supply because government spending is never as economically efficient as citizen spending. At best you leave supply unchanged; I sure can't see how you increase it.

November can't come too soon. Mad economics must be voted out of office.

Those tea leaves are hard to read

Manchin keeps saying he doesn't want to spend a boatload of tax money, because it's making inflation worse. But it's so hard to understand what he means. We keep asking and asking, and all he does is repeat that he's not going to support that program. We ask what it will take to get him to support that program, and he says there isn't anything, he's just not going to do it. And now time's running out, with the mid-terms coming up. It's so unfair. Why can't he stop being so coy?

Why don't you spend your money on what I want?

One of the funnier wails over Elon Musk's announced takeover of Twitter is the now-popular complaint that he could have used "his" (by which they mean "our") $44 billion to end world hunger or (insert pet cause here). I have my usual objection to the neverending quest of virtue-signallers to find a way to make other people pay for the sacrifices that will make them feel personally generous, but there's another idiocy about this complaint. For one thing, Musk hasn't spent the money yet, but for another, when he does, the money doesn't disappear. It just moves into the hands of all the people who used to own Twitter stock. All of those enlightened stockholders are free as a little blue bird to spend the money eliminating world hunger. Each of them can do his tiny part, or they can form a band of brothers and do it jointly.

Not that it's so easy to get a large group of people to march in lockstep toward the One True Goal for which their money is certified appropriate, but that sounds like an argument in favor of concentrating wealth in the hands of a few oligarchs. You can then hope they agree with you, or can be bullied into agreeing with you, or will submit to your confiscation their wealth for the one true certified worthy purpose.

Killing Giants

Dropped a big tree today. It was an old, dead Hemlock. I've been watching it for years, hoping it would lean and fall on its own where it wouldn't threaten anyone. But it was right over the road, which is really a right-of-way over my land and not a state maintained road. If it killed anybody, it was my responsibility. For a long time I hoped it might fall safely, though I always worried about it. Over the last few days, though, it began to look very dangerous.

So today -- after a VFD call in the morning -- I decided that it was time to take that responsibility. It seemed clear in its leaning and compression, but I had no idea what it was like on the inside. Once I started cutting, it might do anything. I took out the initial wedge where I wanted it to fall. In fact it almost fell after the felling cut, but instead settled back and collapsed it, becoming secure again. I made a second felling cut, three-quarters deep like the first one, and it still wouldn't fall. So now there were three very deep cuts were in it, and it seemed perfectly serene while also being totally unstable. 

I put a rope on it, but my longest rope wasn't as tall as the tree. I wrapped that rope around an oak, and got the thing rocking just by pulling it myself. Still nothing. 

Finally I brought my truck up, tied the rope to the hitch, and eased it taught. Then, in 4x4, I let it pull just a little more tension in the line until I heard and saw it break in the rearview mirror. Since I knew the rope was shorter than the tree, I punched the gas to break the rope and get out from under it. The thing fell exactly where I had been meaning to drop it seven hours earlier. 

I sawed it into logs, and rolled them off the road and down the mountainside. My neighbor showed up for this last part, which was physically the hardest part though definitely the least dangerous. 

My neighbor's wife had been there earlier, and she said that she'd noticed a couple days ago that it had gotten looking more dangerous. My neighbor himself said the same thing as we were moving the pieces, that it had really become clear that it was a danger. This evening the UPS driver showed up to pick up a package, and he remarked that he'd had his eye on that tree for a while, and had been worried about it for a long time. 

Big, dead trees will kill you. Malory's knights fighting giants did no greater feat than we do when we take one of these things down.  

USMC Knife Fighting, WWII Training Film

This knife-fighting video is extremely well-grounded. Some of it (like the low thrust they're teaching) only works with a long blade, though -- note how long that bayonet is they're using. That's not a Navy Mark 2, the immediate ancestor of the Kabar. Other techniques, like the double parry, are very solid even with shorter blades. The move to a quick hand cut followed by more deadly techniques is also very well-grounded, as is the inclusion of wrist-grabbing and other grappling as a way of controlling blades.

Those techniques are Great Masters of Europe fencing techniques, descended from the rapier fighting of the Spanish, Italian, and French masters and the Elizabethans who learned from them. They had long ago passed out of Olympic fencing. I had no idea they were still current as late as WWII. 

That said, they're all subject to George Silver's critique of them: He thought that the average brawler from the docks would easily overcome the finest techniques, though they would work against someone else schooled in this form of fencing. You'd probably get a lot further rushing them than adopting a proper fighting stance and trying to out-fence them, and that's assuming (as the video does) that they might be equally armed and not possessed of a rifle and friends quickly called-for. I doubt this sort of fencing made much of a difference in the Pacific Theater of WWII, if indeed anyone ever attempted it at all. 

Still, it's interesting to see the old ways so well preserved in an unexpected place.