Lovecraft Friday

This is more of a homage to Lovecraft than one of his stories:

Where’s the Ambien when you need it?

Chris Kyle, the Lying Sociopath

Ever heard of Chris Kyle?

If you have watch Faux News in the past couple of months, he made some minor headlines by claiming to have committed criminal assault against former Minnesota Governor Jessie Ventura.  He claimed to have knocked out the man in a bar after Mr. Kyle alleged to have heard him say that soldiers deserved to die (specifically it was SEALs or Green Berets, I can’t remember which).

All of these claims came out when Ventura himself was on the road to Mexico for the winter, as he has currently refused to fly commercial airliners due to the TSA’s love of groping his genitals.  This claim also coincided with Chris Kyle’s release of his ghost-written memoirs, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.

Jessie Ventura, as far as I know, was never given the proper chance to rebut this Chris Kyle’s claims, except on Alex Jones’ show, but I am certain that he is lying about the whole incident.  He probably did this in order to promote his book since Ventura has been in the limelight a few months before shouting about the injustice of the his civil case against the TSA.  He probably also did not like how a former SEAL reservist would be pointing out how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are misguided and wrong.  In any case, I am convinced that he was lying about the whole incident.

But what was more alarming about Chris Kyle is not so much his willingness to lie on national television in order to promote a book, but the contents of the book itself.  William N. Grigg did a good overview of the book on his own blog, so I am just going to sum it up in one word: sociopath.

Chris Kyle boasts about killing Iraqis, who he refers to as savages and evil, all the while saying he did so because it was his duty.  I suppose he would be a wonderful candidate for Milgram’s obedience test and I’m sure he would gladly throw the lethal switch for the subject and ask the instructor if there were more.

Kyle claims to have killed over 160 people as a sniper in Iraq, including women in front of their children, all in the name of saving American lives.  Now, I am not going to question the heat of combat and certainly anybody making aggressive actions against your compatriots gets what is coming.  It is not the people he killed that I find horrific so much as the fact that he does not regret any of it.  Most soldiers (and normal people in general) always regret the killings they have done, even if it was justified in self-defense or in the course of duty.  Most normal people seek to avoid killing people unless it is absolutely necessary.

I am reminded of that scene in Gran Torino where Walt Kowalski explains to Thao that he once killed a man in Korea who was unarmed and scared and how it has haunted him all his life.  This is the mark of true man: one who is willing to kill if necessary but does not hold it up as a virtue.  Chris Kyle reminds of a child playing a video game and expressing regret that he didn’t get the high score.

Chris Kyle’s manner reminds of Odysseus who boasted to total strangers of how he raided villages and raped women.  He is a man without a conscious and believes wholeheartedly in the moral authority of the State.

But what is most chilling of all is not his exploits in wartime nor his lack of guilt or shame in the deeds he did in the name of his “duty”, but the fact that he is currently training our police.  A man with an attitude that the enemy is evil or a bunch of savages will almost certainly translate this philosophy unto the people he is instructing.

Kyle represents everything that is wrong with our military and police force.  He believes in the virtues of the State, never questions the moral or ethical issues of what he does, nor does he appear to care either.  As long as he gets to kill people in the name of the almighty State, he is content to not question the reasons.  He is, in essence, the perfect soldier for the oligarchs who presume to be our gods.

Whether or not you support the wars in the past decade, you have to agree that this man is not someone you would let babysit your kids or hang out with at a bar.  And you definitely would not trust to be with him in a dark alley somewhere.

Unfortunately, I fully expect more people like Chris Kyle to come out of the woodwork and start promoting the virtues of murdering for the almighty State.  I have nothing but pity for these men who are so screwed up in the head that they cannot make any moral decisions on their own.  This is how the police state grows: through the tireless work of sociopaths like Chris Kyle.

The Constitution Goes Out of Style

It looks like the principles of the United States Constitution, and thus the principles of liberty and limited government, are now considered to be taboo in the newly emerging governments of the world:

In 1987, on the Constitution’s bicentennial, Time magazine calculated that “of the 170 countries that exist today, more than 160 have written charters modeled directly or indirectly on the U.S. version.”

A quarter-century later, the picture looks very different. “The U.S. Constitution appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere,” according to a new study by David S. Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia.

When I read this I was reminded of the Canadian television show Kevin Spencer in a scene where Kevin’s father, Percy, confronts a border guard at the US-Canadian border.  When the border guard gives reverence to the US Constitution in order to justify his search of contraband, Percy retorts, “So what?  It’s just a fucking piece of paper.  It’s not like you guys actually follow it.”   Percy Spencer, by the way, was a character who embodied everything that could go wrong with a person, being perpetually on welfare when he wasn’t in prison, constantly smoking and drinking, and always cheating on his wife whenever he could.  And let’s not forget about his IQ, which was probably in the legal range for being retarded.  So if a legally retarded moocher from Canada can grasp this fundamental truth, so can you.

Indeed, that is the attitude of the entire Federal government and the entire spectrum of the political groups, from the Left to the Right.  They revere the United States Constitution but only the parts they like.  When it comes to limiting government in ways in which they do not like, often times people will flat out ignore it.  And there are always politicians who have no problem ignoring the US Constitution in order to meet the demand of the dumb masses.

So what does the rest of the world have to do with the fact that nobody here adheres the the constitutional principles of limited government?  Well, for starters, if we are supposed to be an example of freedom and representative democracy, we’re doing a bad job.  We’re like all those wonderful sports athletes who are caught cheating on their wives.  We constantly lecture the rest of the world on the principles of liberty and freedom but when they come through our airports, they are groped by thugs in uniform, they are constantly monitored by law enforcement via GPS devices and data stream monitoring, and they see that we love bombing the ever-loving Hell out of foreign nations for no real good reason.

What I found laughable about that article is their explanation of why this is occurring:

There are lots of possible reasons. The United States Constitution is terse and old, and it guarantees relatively few rights. The commitment of some members of the Supreme Court to interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning in the 18th century may send the signal that it is of little current use to, say, a new African nation. And the Constitution’s waning influence may be part of a general decline in American power and prestige.

In an interview, Professor Law identified a central reason for the trend: the availability of newer, sexier and more powerful operating systems in the constitutional marketplace. “Nobody wants to copy Windows 3.1,” he said.

In a television interview during a visit to Egypt last week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court seemed to agree. “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” she said. She recommended, instead, the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights.

The rights guaranteed by the American Constitution are parsimonious by international standards, and they are frozen in amber. As Sanford Levinson wrote in 2006 in “Our Undemocratic Constitution,” “the U.S. Constitution is the most difficult to amend of any constitution currently existing in the world today.” (Yugoslavia used to hold that title, but Yugoslavia did not work out.)

So let me get this straight.  Because our Founding Fathers knew that a strong central government was essentially tyranny and therefore limited the potential for it to be modified (unless the leaders just ignore it), they made sure it was incredibly difficult to change it.

There is a reason that a system of government and the laws it enforces should be static: because if you have limited government, you have no need to change how things are done.  The whole reason for the disdain for the static nature of the Constitution has to do with the fact that the Statists, who presume to be our gods, want to be able to control every aspect of our life.  And in order to do that, you need a government that can change its directives and objectives on a whim.

The entire static nature of the Constitution speaks to its timeless support of basic liberty and human rights.  And while something more malleable may work well in other nations, I feel nothing but disdain for the people who support that in our nation.

Ultimately though, I firmly believe that the Constitution is out of style because of our lack of adherence to it and our own status as the great bully of the world, not because the Constitution is not a living, breathing document.

When you have no God, you believe in anything

The problem I have with modern secular leftists is that they completely lack any sense of history, logic, or downright common sense.  Case in point, here is an illustration: