The Renaissance Nerd

The Root of Capitalism

2012-01-27T14:13:00.000-08:00

It is obvious to all, that in a nation of any tolerable extent of ground, three fourths employed in agriculture will furnish food to the whole. Were this land divided to all, except a few artificers to prepare instruments of husbandry, the whole nation must want all the pleasure arising from other arts, such as fine convenient habitations, beautiful dress, furniture, and handy utensils. There would be no knowledge of arts, no agreeable amusements or diversions; and they must all be idle one half of their time, since much of the husbandman's time is now spent in providing materials for more curious arts. Would it be advisable to any impartial mind, who regarded the good of the whole, to keep them in this state, and to prohibit all arts but husbandry, with what was absolutely necessary to it, confining them to their huts, and caves, and beasts skins, to secure them from cold; allowing them no farther compensation for the conveniences they might procure by industry, than the pleasure of idleness for half their lives? What other answer do we need to this question, than what every one will give for himself?

What man, who had only the absolute necessaries of meat and drink, and a cave or a beast's skin to cover him, would not, when he had leisure, labour for farther conveniences, or more grateful food? Would not every mortal do so, except some few pretended gentlemen, inured to sloth from their infancy, of weak bodies and weaker minds, who imagine the lower employments below their dignity? Does not the universal choice of mankind, in preferring to bear labour for the conveniences and elegancies of life, shew that their pleasures are greater than those of sloth, and that industry, notwithstanding its toils, does really increase the happiness of mankind? Hence it is that in every nation great numbers support themselves by mechanic arts not absolutely necessary; since the husbandman is always ready to purchase their manufactures by the fruits of his labours, without any constraint; which they would not do if the pleasures or happiness of idleness were greater. This may shew us how little justice there is in imagining an Arcadia, or unactive golden age, would ever suit with the present state of the world, or produce more happiness to men than a vigorous improvement of arts.

--Francis Hutcheson

Why such poor candidates this primary cycle?

2012-01-26T14:45:00.001-08:00

Hate Newt Gingrich? Hate Romney? Wish you had another Reagan to vote for this primary cycle?

Look in the mirror. You're to blame.

That's right, it's your fault. When Bush had the White House, and Republicans had both House and Senate, you went back to sleep and kept busy with your own business. There were a few moments during the Bush presidency when you woke up, to stop a foolish Supreme Court appointment, for example. For the most part the entire conservative movement was somnolent.

There were of course plenty of voices complaining, complaining, complaining. Uselessly, as complaints are always useless.

There were grandiose and impossible schemes hatched all over the internet. Strangely enough, impossible things never really come into existence.

You fought with other conservatives, back-biting, declaring some 'RINOs' or 'CINOs' because they disagreed with you. You admired your own purity and consistency while damning the slightest heresy. You annoyed your friends and neighbors with your self-righteousness and assurance. Instead of trying to find common ground, you preferred to stake a claim and despise any who did not fit into that tiny space.

You voted for incumbents in Congress who were moderate or even liberal, because they brought home the bacon to your district or state. You lobbied Congress for earmarks to pay for ridiculous and pointless projects that could never be funded by the private sector because they're ridiculous and pointless. You took the money from the Federal government and used it in your district, because 'everyone else is doing it.' You paid the deficit no mind, because the economy was rolling along pretty well, and rocking the boat is for times of danger, not for times of ease and content.

You aided and abetted the destruction of conservatives and Republicans by holding them to higher standards than are required for Democrats and abandoning them before the truth could even be known. You bought into the politics of personal destruction and fought fire with fire. You broke Reagan's 11th commandment again and again and again and again and again and again and again...

You decided that small, intellectually homogenous groups are better than larger, intellectually heterogenous groups, and that the Big Tent should be retired and replaced by a motley assortment of tents and cabins and lean-toes, as it's much easier to plot against the enemies among your allies if you're not in the same living space. You damned moderates as sell-outs and proclaimed those who only slowed the march of socialism your enemies. You intentionally lost elections rather than voting for those who compromised, even when they were sincerely trying to do the best they could. You voted for a 'hand grenade with a bad haircut' and gave the presidency to a huckster because of a broken promise, never realizing that demagogues, always, always say what the crowd wants to hear, regardless of the truth, and sometimes promises are broken by the gullible.

You pretend to hate the press, and talk a good game, but then use their talking points, their research, and their arguments, allowing them to frame the debate. You watch their programs, read their papers, and visit their websites, so anxious to make sure you're taking in all points-of-view while despising the points-of-view of your allies who agree with you only 80% of the time.

You started a revolutionary movement, and then lapsed back into complacency, being content to snipe instead of charge into battle. You whine about the 'establishment' choosing your candidates, but then who else was there? An amorphous, leaderless, squabbling collection of disparate interests is always going to be defeated by a zealous, organized team. You peddle conspiracy theories instead, pretending to be powerless to assuage your guilt, but you remain guilty, because you didn't take over all the grass-roots organs of the party, just popped up at a Town Hall meeting and vented a bit.

Worst of all, you damn the losers in national elections as the cause of all your woes, when YOU failed THEM. George H.W. Bush, Dole, McCain--oh, gee, they didn't enthuse you enough? They didn't rev you up to get out of your chair? That's not their job nor their fault. You're adults--you make your own decisions. Blaming others is a child's game. Then after taking the child's way out, you curse them as 'moderates' who weren't pure enough for your holiness.

Meanwhile you take all the government bennies you qualify for, join the AARP for the discounts, never mind their lobbying for ObamaCare, and sit around waiting for someone to come and lead you out of the wilderness.

This is a Constitutional Federal Republic. Federal means power is divided into federal, state and local governments. The federal government has usurped far too much from the other levels, but that doesn't have to remain so. Winning the presidency won't turn back 100 years of socialist creeping doom. Get busy in your town, your county, and start turning things around at the grass roots. You want a 3rd party, because the big two are too similar? Start in a township. Show us how it works. Then you might have a chance.

When I say you, I also mean I. None of us has done all of these things, but as a group, the conservative movement has. We're conservatives. We don't need, don't want, and won't accept leaders who'll tell us how to live, where to go, and what to do. We expect loyalty to our principles, but then don't bother much about them once the election is over, because we're busy. We have lives, jobs, families.

That's no excuse, not for me, not for you. If you're too busy, then your right to complain vanishes. Complacency and content are the hallmarks not of the intellectual conservative movement, but of the garden-variety reactionaries of many different nations, who work only hard enough to feather their own nests. Any friend of liberty has work harder, donate more, and spend their precious time to ensure the survival and success of liberty. Slavery is waiting in the wings, as always, itching for the chance to drag us all back into the clutches of a Pharaoh or Priest-King, no matter what they call it these days.

Look in the mirror and tell me I'm wrong.

Once and future liberalism...my response

2012-01-25T09:02:00.000-08:00

http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1183

Above is the link to a long and very interesting article by Walter Russel Mead, much of which I agree with. Mr. Mead describes the Glorious Revolution as Liberalism 1.0, the American Revolution as 2.0, the early Republican Party (Manchester Liberalism) as 3.0, and the early 20th century progressivism as 4.0.

This simplifies a bit too much, and leaves out that there were several intermediate levels, and more especially the conflicts and changes in each.

I have no quarrel with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 being the origin of all forms of liberalism; constitutional monarchy was one of the first truly revolutionary changes in history. The American Revolution was another real change, but it started and remained a conflict between two differing concepts. Often called the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian schools, they remain in conflict to this day, though what they are and how they relate to each other changes frequently.

I call myself a federalist, mainly because my beliefs are mainly constitutional, but I don't believe in what I would call 'too-strict' construction. I think there should be some wiggle room, because I simply don't believe that any document, even one (as I believe) inspired by God, can cover every situation. As written, the Constitution is inadequate for the modern world, as many things have changed so completely. That doesn't mean I think it is a 'living document' that can be altered at the whim of a judge. Instead I believe it's central framework is sound, but some of the details need adjustment.

In other posts I've written about how I'd like to reorganize the government if I could--federalism to the max, with possibly multiple regional congresses etc. I think this is in line with the Constitution even though as it is written any such radical changes would be illegal. Our nation is 100x larger than it was when the Constitution came into being, and in order to maintain its principles we must make changes that will allow the same kind of representation.

I'm fully aware of the danger that involves. I wouldn't want to let a Barak Obama or a Harry Reid anywhere near the necessary amendments. Petite-fascism is intrinsically anti-American and regressive both, and that's what Liberalism 4.1 (in Mead's construction) has become.

Liberalism 5.0 should be based on the Roman military model, as all successful republics have been, including ours. Our present military is constructed on the same lines--no matter how great the officers, it's the sergeants who really hold things together. The Roman military created a central plan at the highest levels, which was desseminated to all the officers so that everyone knew their part. But as Helmut von Mulcte observed, "No plan of operation extends with any certainty beyojnd the first contact with the main hostile force." It is usually paraphrased thus: "no battle plan survives contact with the enemy." Once the fighting started, each officer, from optio to Primus Pilus, would have to use his own judgement. They had a specific signal for the trumpets that 'released the legions,' so that any officer who saw an opportunity could exploit it. Roman bloodthirstiness and imperial ambitions have been shared by many other nations that never reached such greatness; their true strength only became obvious in hindsight. The combination of central and decentralized authority gave extreme tactical and even strategic flexibility to their legions, as opposed to the vast phalanxes of the Macedonians where every man had to remain in place, and officers were leaders only in the most basic sense--file leaders, the front rank of each syntagma of 256 men.

We already have the structure necessary. We have county and city governments, state governments, and the federal government. The problem is concentration of power along with a vast increase in bureaucratic regulation. Central power is necessary, to a degree, at every level, but as human history clearly demonstrates, those who receive a little power immediately lust for more, and concentration of power is the way history always flows. Wars and revolutions are the only things that break this cycle. Fortunately revolutions don't have to be violent, as the almost bloodless Glorious Revolution showed.

A second American Revolution is in the offing, and it's interesting that its first emanation is called the TEA Party. The reactionaries call themselves liberals or progressives, fighting desperately to protect their privileges, but they are already on the wane. Those who hope to replace the truly innovative concepts of classical liberalism with the failed ancient beliefs of socialism are doomed to failure, because the genie is out of the bottle. Nobody wants to go back to a Pharaonic system, no matter how they dress it up with new-sounding titles.

The run of history is against the formation of a less centralized system. However we Americans have gone against the grain many times before, and hopefully this will be another. It's going to be nasty and painful, without a doubt, but I hope and pray we'll choose well.

Republican socialists now??

2012-01-10T07:09:00.000-08:00

I guess we can all stop worrying about who's the real conservative in the race. Gingrich, Perry and Huntsman all decided that getting nominated was more important than defending capitalism; they've all now attacked the very 'creative destruction' that is at the heart of an economic system. So much for any of them being conservative. They're apparently socialist sleepers. There are plenty of reasons to dislike Romney as a presidential candidate, but Bain isn't one of them.

Kudos to Santorum for not joining in the attack, and so far I haven't hear Paul's reaction. I like Santorum best of the bunch, but I don't think he's got much chance overall. I HOPE rather than THINK he might pull it off, but with these self-proclaimed conservatives channeling Marx it's looking more and more like Romney's going to get it. If he's the man who'll do anything to get elected, what does that say about the Three Anti-Marketeers?

Did Jesus Own His Clothes?

2012-01-05T19:45:00.001-08:00

Several years ago I came across a website passionately devoted to the true place of Drake's landing in California. The author advocated a site six miles away from the state monument marking the spot, and wove a tale about a grand conspiracy by government officials to mock and belittle him while continuing to lie about the true location where Drake made landing.

I read the whole thing, fascinated that somebody could care so much about something so completely pointless. It reminded me of the debate between the Papal envoys and the Franciscans in 'The Name of the Rose' about whether Jesus owned his own clothes or not. Talk about an irrelevancy! Yet such debates are common especially among the intelligent.

I'm seeing signs of this among the 'anybody but Mitt' crowd. When exactly did so many people gain the right to determine who is a conservative and who isn't? Who is a RINO and who is a 'true' conservative? The purism is disgusting, especially when the purported hero of these purists is Ronald Reagan. I consider him the greatest president of the 20th century, but he was not a pure conservative--he compromised by making George Bush his Vice President, he allowed Congress to spend tons of money so that he could get them to support his military buildup, and he never said nasty things about other Republicans, all of which would disqualify him from the purist no compromise wing of the supposedly conservative movement. Think on that--Reagan did several things as governor that were considered liberal at the time, such as no-fault divorce. The current 'anybody but Mitt' dogmatists wouldn't accept him either.

I'm no great fan of Romney, even though I'm a Mormon. I think it's fairly obvious that Mormons don't agree on everything, what with Romney, Beck and Reid being the most prominent in politics and hardly on the same page. I hate everything I've read about Romneycare and he wouldn't be my first choice--of the current crop I like Santorum best, but despite his present surge it doesn't seem likely that he'll get the nod, and it's by no means certain that a man known only to political nerds like me would be able to win the election.

No candidate is perfect--I don't know of a single human being who agrees with my political philosophy completely. No matter who gets the nomination, I'm going to disagree with something, maybe even something very important to me. I'm never going to get everything I want, even if I could become President myself, which nightmare thankfully will never come to fruition.

At the moment I'd be grateful if any candidate would talk about the possible instead of the pie-in-the-sky. All the Paulists out there seem to think that a President can just wave a magic wand and instantly undo 100 years of progressivism, liberalism, and petite-fascism. Never gonna happen. If you really want to go back to McKinley, it'll take a minimum of several decades of slow, steady change.

The purists don't want that. They want to posture and prove themselves the most righteously and rigorously conservative. I've ready many comments on conservative sites proclaiming the desire to see Obama win four more years so that America will suffer enough to finally turn back from the abyss. This takes the dogmatic approach to an obscene level--we're not talking about an abstraction, we're talking about millions of people out-of-work, millions more underemployed, and no end in sight. There's a word for this kind of elitist purism--liberalism. Love an abstraction while despising reality.

Despite the protests of the petite-fascist (grotesquely mislabeled 'democrats'), the right in America is quite intellectual in bent, and has grown much more so over the past couple of decades. TEA Partiers are well-informed and can speak on many political topics with great facility and wide knowledge. The trouble is that intellectual prowess brings with it a deadly peril--intellectual arrogance. How many times have you read a comment or blog post including a wake-up call? In other words, a cry for all America to heed the wisdom of the person doing the writing. Conservatism and free market economics differ from all the Romantic movements in one key, indeed essential area, and that is a sense of humility. Adam Smith's insoluble conundrum regarding the true cost of a common workman's shirt is a reminder that no human mind can even comprehend, much less control the myriad relationships of an economic system. Conservative politics are centered around the idea that free individuals make better decisions than kings, rulers, and bureaucrats...yet here we have self-proclaimed thought police attempting to enforce their own prejudices on others, attempting to excommunicate as 'RINOs' anyone with whom they disagree.

Can any conservative seriously argue that the nation is better off with Obama as president than it would be with McCain? I am no fan of McCain either, but he is an order of magnitude better than Obama, and would've made a far better President. Here's what I said on the subject: http://renaissancenerd.blogspot.com/2008/02/it-may-be-hard-but-get-enthusiastic.html

Romney is marginally more conservative than McCain, but I really don't like the whole managerial approach to the presidency. It really irked me who Pres. George W. Bush would demonstrate leadership for the military and then attempt nothing of the sort with the people, all while lying down for the press. He had to be led in several cases, just as with Harriet Meirs. She's a fine person, but that doesn't necessarily mean she'd be good on the Supreme Court.

I worry that Romney will take the same tack, but there are indications otherwise. His track record with corporate turnarounds require the essential requirement of leadership: moral courage. Anyone who thinks it doesn't require moral courage to lay off a bunch of people in a failing business have imbibed too much socialism. It's a desperately hard thing to fire or lay off anyone, as anyone who's owned a business (as I have) can confirm. Hard times often require hard choices, and Romney has done it. He may seem a child of wealth, but his father was a self-made man. I don't resent his wealth at all, nor envy it; I want to be less wealthy, agreeing with Defoe that the upper middle class is the best place to be.

I tend to agree with Harry Harrison that anyone capable of being elected president should in no wise be allowed to have the job. Still, somebody has to take the position and a willing victim is better than a draftee. Those who argue that Romney will be worse than Obama are effectively shills for the left, and their hard dogmatism is both counter-productive and repugnant. Politics is not religion; it is not even philosophy. It's a truce while we try to figure out how to live together without bloodshed. The American armistice has lasted a long time since the Civil War, and I believe it's in everybody's interest to uphold it. If the fighting time comes, as is always possible, then the pure doctrinaires will be in even worse shape, because all their potential allies will be alienated. I'm not more willing to sacrifice my time or life for a rapid pack of conservative busybodies who demand I agree with their every belief than I am for Big Brother. I'm with Katniss in Mockingjay on that one. If you're willing to cast aside allies because they agree with only 80% of your beliefs, if you're willing to stoop to the tactics of the petite-fascists to demonize your own side who aren't perfectly doctrinaire, I'm against you.

I took a bunch of political tests a few weeks ago and according to Pew I'm a 'staunch conservative.' Others placed me as a libertarian. But to the 'anybody-but-Mitt' commissars, I suppose I must be a RINO.

Every Increase in Security = Decrease in Efficiency

2011-12-11T12:53:00.001-08:00

I work in the IT world, and the efficiency has been going downhill dramatically over the past several years. Once upon a time I had root access to everything; I could log onto any customer or internal server and do whatever I needed done. I would get a ticket for a new server, I'd go onto the customer server and make the changes needed to install my application, then install it, add the new machine to the DNS server, and have it up and running in much less than an hour. I've done thirty in a day, including setting up all the parameters on my application server.

That was then. The good old days, 3 years ago.

Then came 'change control.' A six-page form has to be filled out and permission granted from several different people before any of the above can be done. Then changes to the DNS were sequestered to another group, nobody else was allowed to touch it. Then all customer servers were cut off. Now I don't even have root access on my own application servers.

What used to take 30 minutes now takes 3 weeks.

Now there's change control at every level, and it only gets approved once a week instead of daily. Now every new server has to go through each group several times, because the change control managers have no idea what's happening when a new server is added despite endless repetition. We've added three new layers of bureaucracy to do what I could do all alone--takes twenty people to do 30 minutes of work. Just filling in the form takes 30 minutes now. And it has to be filled out by the OS team, the Network team, the Backup team, the DB team, the application team...and each stage has to be approved separately. And when Backup wants the ports opened so backups will run, it has to be done again because it's never done the first time Network has it. So now we need project managers and service delivery managers just to guide us through the completely pointless maze of paperwork.

It does nothing for security, because the same people who used to have root access and somehow managed to never maliciously erase any customer data are still here. We're all just as trustworthy as before, but now we spend half our time navigating bureaucracy instead of you know, working. This diminution of trust bought nothing but an increase in inefficiency. Worst of all, if you take a shortcut to get things done faster, because your customer needs it, you'll be fired. The paperwork is more important than customer satisfaction; it's more important than EVERYTHING ELSE.

The reason for this ridiculous turn of events is a philosophical fallacy that is unfortunately common in the modern world. It's the gospel of management. The simple fact is that people make mistakes. Oddly enough, when you've been awake for 48 hours desperately trying to find a solution to a problem there's an increased chance that you'll make a mistake. The reason you work 48 hours straight? There aren't enough people, not because there aren't enough to do the work, but not enough to do the work AND the busywork. So it's 'heroic measures' all around despite the fact that the official management policy is 'no heroic measures.'

No matter how perfect the policy, no matter how perfect the instructions and runbooks and procedures, there will still be errors at every level. Most of the time they'll be minor, but sometimes they'll be great horrendous problems. A perfect manager won't be able to prevent them, and...this is most important...THERE ARE NO PERFECT MANAGERS.

This idea that human beings can be perfected by clever tricks comes out of the Romantic movement, but its origins can be found in Plato's Republic. The trouble is that 'the divine Plato' was simply wrong. Nobody could survive a moment in his Republic. It would be a horror story and nothing more. The trouble is that a true philosopher king, if he did indeed love wisdom, would know his own weakness and might make a good king, but wouldn't even attempt to control everything the way Plato would wish. The first rule of wisdom comes from Plato's teacher, and apparently he never learned it: know that you know nothing.

All the followers of Plato have the same impulse, and never recognize their own inadequacy. The hatred for 'capitalism' comes from that same place. The essential message of Adam Smith's two books is that an economic system is simply too large and complex for the human mind to comprehend, and so humility is a must. That doesn't sit well with Romantics who are so convinced of their own intelligence and purity of heart that they actually think they have a right to redesign the world according to their own imaginings. This is well beyond hubristic; it's arrogance so pure it amounts to stupidity.

Yet it's rife throughout the supposed champions of 'capitalism' in corporations everywhere. Change control is among what they call 'best practices,' which of course are really just fads that run through managers periodically. It's one of the things that really irritates me about the Baby Boomers. This is not just the whacko wing, it's the whole generation. They go for fads like no other generation. It's astonishing to see sixty-year-olds giddily explain the latest thing like they were teeny-boppers salivating over Elvis. The fact that it's some new vitamin or some new 'best practice' is irrelevant; what it really comes down to is an irrational desire to be 'with it.'

So they swallow fallacies to be 'with it,' and meanwhile our economy is slowed to a standstill because efficiency takes a back seat.

It all comes down to trust, both in the business world and the political realm. Those who want to control everything have a low opinion of human beings and therefore don't trust 'ordinary' people to do the right thing, as if they aren't ordinary too. Those who want to allow people to choose are extending trust to others, as reality demands.

To those who believe that they can't trust anybody, I wonder how they manage to wear any clothes, or drive, or live in a house made by those incompetent boobs, or EAT food grown and prepared for them by complete strangers. The reality is that we trust others continually and constantly. When you go at a green light you trust a bunch of strangers to stop at their red light. You trust the chef in a restaurant to give you food that is well-prepared and not poisoned. You trust that the pipes running under your house aren't going to explode any minute. You trust that your roof will stay up because it was built by competent contractors. You ingest medicines created by the evil 'Big Pharma' trusting that you won't instantly die.

The list is nearly infinite. Not only do strangers do you constant good, you trust them to do so. Everything you buy, eat, see, want--you can't live five minutes without extending trust.

That is the miracle of an economic system, aka 'capitalism.' Increased trust means increased efficiency, which benefits everyone. Decreased trust means decreased efficiency, which harms everyone including the busybody bureaucrats that love it. This is what Ben Franklin was referring to when he said "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Security and freedom, i.e. trust, are always at odds. When I had root access to hundreds of customer servers I could have done immeasurable harm to their databases. Guess what? I still can, but it would be slightly harder. For all this inefficiency barely any security has been purchased. Yet I never did one tiny bit of harm to any of those servers; never stole any data, never opened them up to the internet so somebody else could steal data...what I did was live up to the faith and trust given me. Now that I am many times less trusted, I have nothing much to live up to, but I am just as worthy now as I was then.

A citizen too, of any polity, tends to live up to the faith and trust placed in him. If trusted, he wants to demonstrate that he is worthy, he wants those around him to believe in his faithfulness. There are and will always be those who take advantage of trust to rob or work other evils. It does not follow that EVERYONE will do so. Most human beings want to be trusted by those around them. However if every incentive is against probity, then deception becomes more acceptable, and if dependability and honor are widely scorned, then children are less apt to struggle to master such difficult virtues. Lack of trust promotes a lack of trustworthiness.

Treating seasoned professionals as if they were wayward children who don't know how to handle their own work is an insult continually paid by managers everywhere. The same insult comes from many in the political class towards every citizen. Some of a particular skin-color or ethnic background get a double insult, by first being treated as children because of their descent, before the general insult that 'ordinary' citizens are incapable of knowing their own good.

It's not a perfect world, and no human agency can make it perfect. The pendulum swings from trust to mistrust over and over, many times down through history. The whole point of a Republic (not Plato's), is to lessen the length of that swing. Right now we've come to the point that at every level adults are being treated as incompetent children, at work, by the government, etc. This is just plain wrong, and should be resisted by all who value themselves as something more than hapless fools.

Conan the Barbarian 2011 -- Worse that the First

2011-11-28T19:35:00.001-08:00

I don't really like the 1982 version of "Conan the Barbarian." It was alright, but Conan only appears for a few moments; most of the time the character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger is somebody else, but not Conan. The new version from this year...Conan doesn't appear at all.They copied the revenge fantasy from the first movie that of course is nowhere in the original stories, and they decided Conan should be a little more dull and undeveloped than the Rock in "Scorpion King." That movie wasn't what I'd call good, but it was watchable--and I've actually seen it twice. Astonishingly enough this movie is worse than "Conan the Destroyer" AND "Red Sonja," and that's saying a LOT. I won't be watching this one again. It's just too painful. They did everything wrong, especially by complicating the story needlessly and fruitlessly. This one makes me cringe for the John Carter movie coming up. I hated it almost as much as "Starship Troopers"I've been hoping for a real Conan movie since I first read Howard's work in the mid-80s. There are several of the Conan novellas that would make a perfect movie: "Red Nails," "Tower of the Elephant," and many more. "Red Nails" I'd especially love to see on film. The comic book version was marginal; it would've been better as a "Savage Sword" style but it isn't. Too bland. I don't review movies often here, but sometimes I just can't help myself. If you're thinking about renting or buying this movie get "The Beastmaster" instead. It was done on a shoestring budget but came out ok; "Conan the Barbarian" 2011 cost many millions, and all of it wasted.

Thanksgiving Day!

2011-11-24T06:17:00.001-08:00

I've made many lists of all the things I'm thankful for and there's simply no end. What I'm thankful for especially today is the free enterprise system. Been thinking about it for a few days (along with years of contemplating the 'common workman's shirt) and Adam Smith had it. I'm writing this on a 5-year-old iMac, which is the work of hundreds of people who I don't know. I've put thousands of books, movies and songs on it, tens of thousands of photos, dozens of applications, and over 6 million words of my own writings. All of those things were made possible by people I'll never know, and who meant me in particular no good. Yet they have blessed my life in quite literally countless ways. I am indebted to strangers for some of the things that matter most to me.

That in a nutshell, is what an economic system comes down to.They didn't mean me any good; they wanted to make money, and did their jobs well in order to be paid. Yet the consequences of them working hard for their pay are blessings to total strangers on the other side of the world. The same goes for all my books. I'm looking at a wall full of books, mostly reference, but also anything from graphic novels to Dungeons & Dragons rule books (which I use for reference anyway). Every one of those books came about because of a crowd of people, none of whom knew me from Adam. Some had a single author, but it took editors, printers, artists, truckers, retailers, and advertisers to get the book to me. It took people willing to risk money they had in their pockets on the chance that they would make more money by trusting in an author or group of authors. Every time I look around me I see the work of hundreds of strangers who not only don't know me, but will never know my gratitude. I am truly thankful for all of them. They have no idea in many cases what will happen with their work; the guys who milled the lumber in this house will never know that it was transported to Arizona to become a house. It might've been used in countless other ways other than to put a roof over my head. But I can tell they did a good job because the houses is still here after years of strong winds, snow and rain.

Most miraculous of all is the power grid. Holy frijoles, what a disaster waiting to happen. Yet every day, literally every day, hundreds of thousands of workers keep the power system running--a use it or lose it system. They have to come up with the right amount of power and there's no way to measure it. They have to guess--and they get it right, day after day, month after month. It's an interlocking system, too; one part goes down others have to take up the slack, and they do. And yet I don't know them--they don't know me. They are blessing my life every minute of hour of every day, and they have no idea I even exist at all. My computer with all my important stuff, family photos and writing etc, is useless without electricity.

The simple fact is that we are all dependent on the kindness, integrity, and skill of an army of strangers. Our specialized society makes it hard to know what good we do in the world, because we each have such a small part in the whole. In my job I rarely see what help I am, but sometimes I can: when some individual among our customers accidentally erases a file they've worked on for weeks or months, finding and restoring it from backup often brings gratitude. Yet I don't often think how nice it is that I can bring back their lost files. I wonder at the dimwits that are continually deleting their important files, or somehow erasing their entire email databases, or wreck their servers (especially Windows servers) because they didn't take the trouble to update. I don't really know any of them, and my brushes with them are fleeting, yet in truth I do them service, and they provide my paycheck--indirectly. Any employment is worthwhile--you get paid because somebody considers your work worth more than their money. At a time when so many people are out of work it's worthwhile to step back and realize that no matter what you do, it's worthwhile. It has benefits to others, humanitarian benefits, that are hard to see but not inscrutable. And paid service is not the only worthwhile kind, either; there are countless blessings we each provide to others without ever knowing it. Being a good driver--being honest--being kind to the kid in the drive-through--walking our neighbor's dogs...The world is a marvelous place filled with wonderful people who do endless service for each other.

Ever wonder why God doesn't just smash the world as not worth saving? Wonder no longer.

Why I'm a Federalist and not a Conservative

2011-11-15T13:17:00.001-08:00

I have often said in many venues how much I dislike the term conservative, and yet I'm almost always lumped in with conservatives anywhere I go. I recently sought out about 15 internet quizzes to see where they placed me on the political spectrum. I was all over the map. Some had me as a fiscal conservative/social liberal, some put me as a hard libertarian, Pew placed me with the 'staunch conservatives,' and in a couple of cases I rated as a 'Blue Dog' democrat.

There's reason to all this; the questions they ask don't actually cover enough ground. For example, I'm for abolishing all Federal drug laws, but letting the states, counties and even cities decide for themselves what they want to do about drugs. Where does that put me when there's no option for that in any of these quizzes? And yet that's the solid basis of our whole Republic: devolution of authority as close as possible to the citizen.

Arizona, where I live, has a larger population than the whole United States of America when the Constitution was adopted. Once might easily posit that I think the Constitution is outmoded, and it is, after a fashion. At the same time I'm a fairly strict constructionist. Many of my positions seem contradictory to allies and foes alike, but they really aren't. They're perfectly consistent, when taken in context.

I am a Federalist. I believe in strict but not too strict construction. I believe in State's rights, but not to an extreme. I believe that a township or city has the right to restrict the sale and use of arms of any sort--but the State and Federal governments do not, because of their Constitutions. That said, I believe that there should be few if any restrictions, and I wouldn't live anywhere like Washington D.C., where only criminals have firearms.

If I could wave my magic wand and make America what I want, 3/4 of Federal laws and 95% of Federal regulations would vanish--but many of the same laws and regulations would remain at the State level. I'd have a House of Representatives with about 2,500 Representatives. I'd reorganize all the states into 10,000-person districts each with a state representative, with two state senators for each county. I'd have governors and legislatures for every county.

Sounds like I'm multiplying government tremendously, doesn't it? There would certainly be a lot more elected officials in the nation. On the other hand, there would be far fewer bureaucrats at every level. The rule of the expert has only shown that experts can be far more stupid than any ditch-digger regarding ditch-digging.

The only Constitutional changes I would make would be to change the number of electoral votes away from matching House districts, and rescinding the 17th Amendment making State legislatures again responsible for choosing Senators. Each 10,000-person district would elect an elector for the Electoral College, and they would elect the President.

While I'm waving my wand I would also break up several states. California would become 3 or 4 States, Texas, New York and Florida 2 or 3, etc. Large-population counties, such as Maricopa in Arizona, would be broken into several.

Of course I don't have a magic wand. And the most difficult thing in the universe is to get a politician to give up the tiniest particle of his supposed power. So I fully recognize that my dream of what should be simply ain't gonna happen.

That doesn't mean that the underlying principle is wrong, and I certainly believe it to be right. The whole point of a Republic is to pit the various forms of government against each other, to use the ambitions of the ambitious to nullify each other. In the name of increased democracy we have a functional petite-fascist state; corporations crawl on their bellies to government bureaucrats, who do everything they can to get the rest of us to do the same. And we're expected to be grateful for our enslavement, for turning us all into incompetent children who can't be expected to know our own good.

My beliefs often put me in the conservative or libertarian camp, as they exist today, but I don't believe in either per se. Conservatism is particularly useless as a description, because it's relative; in Russia right now the Ultra-Conservative is a Communist, while the Paleo-Conservative would be a Tsarist.

In America this doesn't fit well either. Is a Paleo-Con one who believes in the Constitution? Supposedly yes, however they tend to side with the Anti-Federalists/Jeffersonians on most questions. It cannot be disputed that the Democratic-Republicans were pro-Slavery and anti-industrial. So the modern Paleo-Con picks and chooses what he likes from the days of the Articles of Federation and Constitution and ignores the rest. The uselessness of conservative as an accurate descriptor only gets worse as one chooses periods in America's history. Want the 50s back? What about Segregation? True, Eisenhower was instrumental in bringing Segregation to an end; but he is hardly considered a great conservative by Paleo-Cons, for example. The Republican Party has a much more distinguished history than the Democratic; there is nothing in Republican history to compare with slavery and the Jim Crow laws that were the raison d'être of the Democrats. However again Republicanism isn't really an 'ism;' it's much like a Republic, a collection of competing interests; and most often that brings defeat due to internal disagreement. Even now, the epithet of RINO is being thrown at several candidates for President. Big Tent is all very well, except that there aren't enough unifying beliefs to make a united front even when it's terribly necessary.

I think Federalism could be the ticket, but there is one great problem: moderation and balance do not make great bumper-stickers. 'Long live the Checks and Balances' won't win elections.

There are some, such as Glen Beck and many Paleo-Cons, who detest the Federalists and are quick to point out the nefarious Alien and Sedition Acts. Leaving aside their acceptance of a leftist take on those laws, the question remains: what prompted them? Why did the Federalists think it necessary to create those laws? The Alien Act sought to curb the Democratic-Republican practice of literally paying newcomers to vote for them. The Democratic Party continued the practice into the last century, and in reality remains little more than a plutocratic conspiracy to buy votes. The Alien Act in all its evil did nothing to prevent suborning alien votes. And today, one does not have the chance to become a voter right off the boat, so the problem was eventually fixed by the xenophobic racist elitists of the progressive era.

What then of the Sedition Act? Hardly in keeping with the freedom of the press! However there's more to the story; people were shooting at tax collectors. They were publishing addresses in newspapers so tax collectors could be found, tarred and feathered. There was a real problem with Federal officials being endangered simply for being Federal officials. The Act attempted to mitigate the danger for those who were not villains. Was their enforcement taken too far? Probably, but it doesn't follow that the reasons that urged its necessity were all false.

The early Federalists don't really need to be defended to defend the underlying philosophy of Federalism. The idea of keeping power diffuse and as close to the individual as possible is an ideal that has never, and likely will never be fulfilled, but that doesn't mean we can't do our best to bring pieces towards that goal. Every advance of Federalism is an advance for liberty, and every defeat for Federalism means an increase in slavery. Right now our nation is still mostly free, but mainly because of individual beliefs. A person can literally be free by believing it. Yet that is exactly what is under attack EVERYWHERE. Universities preach cosmic nihilism to impress us all that nothing we do matters, as the outcome is always the same. The Democrats constantly remind African-Americans and Latinos that the institutions of America are racist (and they ought to know, as they control most) so there are no real choices, except crime and prison, or accepting Democratic largesse. Sociologists and anthropologists, feminists and psychologists, evolutionary biologists and garden-variety leftists all have something to say about how our choices are made for us by society or the patriarchy or the system etc. Conspiracy theorists do the same by abdicating individual responsibility, whether they blame the evil on the Council on Foreign Relations or MK-Ultra and the CIA. Many religions get into the act as well, as well as plenty of philosophies and political groups. From all sides comes a bombardment of words and images telling us we're really slaves, and that liberty, especially political liberty, is an illusion. That's the only unifying theme of the Occupy protests, too. Just one more conspiracy theory among thousands.

Federalism turns all this on its head. Diffusing power among many different levels of government, instead of compounding the same laws through city, county, State and Federal governments, has a freeing effect. It's not necessary to be a PhD to understand the duties of the local dog-catcher and sheriff, but it's beyond the power of any single human mind, or even 10,000 human minds with no knowledge overlap, to understand how a nation as large as the United States actually works. World government is even more problematic. It is simply impossible. So instead of trying yet one more time to do the impossible, which results in death, destruction and slavery every time, we ought to work in the other direction, at the county and town level and then work upwards. Improvements can be made, but first must come the unifying basis for all the rest. As a Federalist I don't claim to have all the answers, or even any answer to any big question. I think We the People can come up with the answers, by utilizing our brains collectively. The ultimate irony of a devolved power structure is that it increases the efficiency of community by allowing more ideas to flow. In the end Federalism is far more egalitarian and collective than any communism can hope to be, but doesn't require individuals to be subsumed into a faceless horde of drones who do as their told by their betters. There are no masses--only people. Embracing Federalism is a step towards understanding that truth.

Liberals are Stupid--and I'll tell you why

2011-10-21T11:22:00.001-07:00

For at least a century we have heard about the high intelligence of liberals. It's so ingrained in the bedrock of our national debate that it is taken as a given. We hear endlessly about 'the smartest man ever to be president' or 'the smartest woman in the country,' and instead of being ridiculed these statements are taken as gospel.

It's just one more big lie.

All liberal education and learning is template-based. Get outside the template and liberals don't know what to think, nor how to think. Witness the complete absurdity of President Obama demanding more of the same when the policy has already failed--not decades ago, but less than three years ago. He can't think of anything new or different, because he learned everything he needs to know by the time he reached his early twenties, and has learned nothing since.

It's easy to wonder at this blind spot; how can anyone not learn from example, from evidence, from experience? Many of us believe it is a measure of blindness caused by being true believers, but there's more to it than that. It comes from the acceptance that all things fit into a template, or as a post-modernist would say, a narrative.

Think of any news story. Once upon a time one got a simple recitation of facts: who, what, when, where, and sometimes a little why. Now all we get is why--all the other factors are elements of why. How did they manage that? By cramming every story into a preexisting template. We always hear of Republicans when their corrupt, or adulterous, or homosexual while pretending not to be. Democrats get a pass. Why? A corrupt Republican is news, a corrupt Democrat is not. Hypocritcal Republicans fit the known pattern, hypocritical Democrats do not.

Once one knows how the templates work, being a reporter today is as easy as filling out a Mad Libs booklet. The stories are already written, they just need the new names and dates plugged in. And then news organizations wonder why their credibility diminishes, and newspapers slide towards death, and network news slowly withers.

But it's like totally different for Hollywood Liberals, right?

Not at all. The reason why movies seem to have the same characters going through the same stories over and over is not because there are no new characters or stories in the universe. Everything has to fit the pre-qualified narrative. How many times has there been book converted into a movie and every character must suddenly be a stock character seen a thousand times before? How many times does the story have to suddenly change to make sure there are personal reasons for everything? All must fit the predetermined model, or be cut. As fewer people go to movies, movie studios wonder why, but it's obvious: we've already seen this movie, so why pay $10 (or $15) to see it again?

But not professors. They come up with new ideas all the time!

Try reading some books coming out of universities these days. They follow the same pattern. They use prefabricated conclusions and use cliches to demonstrate them. There is so little originality that one wonders that they aren't constantly suing each other for plagiarism. This applies to all too many scientists as well, which is the most frightening development of all. Science, properly understood, precludes the use of preexisting templates for things as yet undiscovered. When scientists manage to discover only things that fit into a predetermined worldview (see: Darwinism) they have ceased to be scientists, and have become politicians.

So what about politicians? Have anyone ever heard anything new from a liberal politician? They've been singing the same tune for nearly two centuries, and no failure makes them change. Rich are bad (wink wink) but we'll take their donations and guarantee their profits. Hard-working Americans are good (wink wink) but we'll tax them into poverty. Lazy slobs are misunderstood helpless victims (wink wink) and we despise them so much we'll make sure they get a horrifically bad education so they stay lazy slobs. Institutions are racist (wink wink) and we certainly know because we control almost all of them, and the few we haven't got sewn up (like churches) we've got on the defensive. We love soldiers (wink wink) but they're all wicked stupid miscreant baby-killers.

It doesn't take intelligence to be a liberal. Once one memorizes the templates, it's never necessary to think about anything ever again. No need to learn, no need to stretch the brain, no need to contemplate and argue. Anyone who disagrees has a predetermined pigeon hole and never need be engaged directly, just call them the appropriate name. One can be a journalist, a Hollywood director, a professor or scientist, or a politician, and the others who believe in template-based learning will help one succeed, because they all have a vested interest in keeping anything from breaking the molds that are so essential to their worldview.

Ever wonder why the people who proclaim themselves anti-hatred hate Conservatives so much? Wonder no longer. Conservatives refuse to stay in the mold they were assigned, and despite all the attempts to put them back in, they simply won't behave the way they're supposed to. So liberals forge onward, holding to the templates in defiance of reality, and slowly drift into Neverland.

Which of course, is what their mass of templates call reality.

That isn't smart, nor intelligent, nor wise. It's very, very, extremely very stupid.

Walking Dead...no just Dead

2011-10-19T22:48:00.000-07:00

I just watched episodes 4-6 of the first season and the premiere of the second season of the Walking Dead. I've heard from several people I respect that it's one of the best shows around, but I gave up on it mid-season when it came out because I dislike soap opera.So just to demonstrate that I can be open minded I watched up to the present.It's a soap opera with zombies. Why can't there ever be just one smart person in these shows? Lots of people make lots of stupid mistakes, including me of course, but does it have to be so uniform? Everybody has to do the dumb thing over and over? I haven't seen the comic, I've heard it's much better than the show, and I believe it. It certainly couldn't be any worse.Now that I've wasted a few hours listening to people whine and moan and cry and worry about relationships while in a desperate survival situation, and then yuck it up over a momentary lull in the angst before almost being murdered by a government employee, and then make every dumb mistake possible afterwards...I want my time back. I won't be watching any more. I don't care what happens to any of them--amazingly hard to make a show where I don't like any of the characters at all, but they've done it. "It's about the people not the zombies."Riiiiight. Pull the other one! I don't see any people, just the standard cardboard cutouts that stand in for characters all too often. Since Hollywood, television, and journalism are all based on fill-in-the-template now, and every character is just a stock character we've already seen a bazillion times before, they could at least use some of the likable stock characters instead of a whole slate of whiners. The fun of any kind of 'after the disaster' movie is thinking about what one might do in these situations. The problem with Walking Dead is that I wouldn't ever be in any of the situations they depict. Camping out in TENTS while there are monsters slowly closing in? Assuming that guns are the only kind of weapons in the world? Oy!The one zombie movie with a good character was the 1990 remake of 'Night of the Living Dead.' Patricia Tallman's Barbara was about 1000 times better than the original, and she was savvy. She was clever. She figured out what to do, and did it. She couldn't save all the idiots, but at least she could figure out how to survive on her own. And she started out as a scared fool, so she grew into a tough chick. I had a little hope for this show when I first saw Steven Yuen's character Glen. A clever nerd in a zombie movie? But he's not all that clever after all, and lets everybody else do the thinking. After all, can't have a nerd as a hero. His character faded into a obscurity because he doesn't have a soap opera relationship to worry over. If I were Steven Yuen, I'd be most put out.Oh well. I've wasted enough time on it.

Poem for my Grandfather

2011-10-11T09:27:00.000-07:00

A joke and a laugh,A ready smile,Nuggets of wisdom,Given with style,Heart full of love,Friendship and cheer,Always inspiring,A gramps without peer,Ready to work,Ready to play,A heartening word,Ever ready to say,In tempest a rock,In fear a shield,In sorrow a comfort,On life's battlefield,Thankful are we,And privileged too,And lucky to have,A grandpa like you!I wrote this for my Grandfather's 90th birthday a few days ago. I sure hope I'm like him when I reach such an age!

RIP Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T08:16:00.001-07:00

I really don't know what to say about the death of such a great innovator--he certainly changed the world for the better. Without him we'd be still we using Windows ME, and be waiting impatiently for Windows XP, coming soon in 2023! That's enough of a monument, I reckon.

A pistol is a woman's best friend

2011-09-30T14:54:00.000-07:00

I had the privilege of seeing Ann Coulter speak last night, and it was just a BLAST. She is about as funny as humanly possible. Among the many thought provoking things she had to say was a story about her time living in Washington DC. She was walking home in the dusk, and noticed a man checking car doors as he walked along ahead of her. He didn't notice her until he was out on a bridge she needed to cross, and then he realized she was coming and stopped, just sort of standing around, waiting for her to pass. She used the story as an example of the problem with gun control--she looked like an upstanding, law-abiding citizen, so certainly wouldn't have a gun. Nor did she. The doorman of her building saw her and came out to the rescue, and the miscreant went on his merry way. Perception is so much a part of reality. What if, instead of women being seen as more liberal then men in general, and hence less likely to be armed, women were seen as more conservative and more likely to be packing a nice little belly gun? Anyone who thinks a 200-pound man who attacks a 100-pound woman isn't a coward is wrong-oh. Criminals go for the soft target, and perception (and experience) has led them to believe that women are easier targets, and of course that is an advantage as they prefer raping women. What if after a few dozen dead would-be mugger/rapists it became normal to assume that any woman walking alone after dark was heeled? What if women who weren't armed only had to reach into their handbags and take a ready stance to scare off attackers? Two things. Women need to change the perception of themselves as being mostly liberals, i.e. victims who love being victims, to being mostly conservatives, who suffer no nonsense.Then the 15 million women who currently have concealed carry permits need to grow into 30 or 40 million. Or 50 million. Then criminals won't have so many soft targets--at least they won't THINK they have so many soft targets, which is good enough.Handguns are almost useless in war. But for a woman, a handgun is the equalizer. A 105-pound woman can't taken on 240-pound man in a fistfight, despite Hollywood myths to the contrary. But even a .22 pistol can put down any man with one shot if she knows what she's doing. A pistol is a woman's best friend.

The Great Fear - The Middle Class and the Two Faces of Conservatism

2011-09-28T07:42:00.000-07:00

The bogeyman of George Orwell's 1984 is a the capitalist, a caricature of the breed not unlike the little cartoon used by the game Monopoly: stovepipe hat, black coat, striped pants, and no soul. Variations of this bogeyman have been used by the romantic movements of the left from their earliest days. Romanticist hatred has for the most part been directed not at the upper class, which has many romantic qualities, but rather at the stodgy, stolid, dull middle class. Marx considered this bourgeoisie as the primary obstacle to his promised utopia, and hatred towards the middle class has been commonplace throughout history, long before Marx christened them 'class enemies' of the proletariat.

In this instance Marx was correct; the middle class is the enemy of change and innovation, whether good or bad. The natural state of the middle class is to protect what they have, economically and politically. This natural form of conservatism does not exist in the lower classes, because they have little or nothing, and blame their state on anyone other than self. It does not exist in the upper classes past the first few generations, as those 'to the manor born' remember the deeds of their ancestors with pride and reckon themselves above the possibility of loss. The fear of loss is not necessarily irrational; as Machiavelli wrote:

It has never chanced that any new Prince has disarmed his subjects. On the contrary, when he has found them unarmed he has always armed them. For the arms thus provided become yours, those whom you suspected grow faithful, while those who were faithful at the first, continue so, and from your subjects become your partisans. And though all your subjects cannot be armed, yet if those of them whom you arm be treated with marked favor, you can deal more securely with the rest. For the difference which those whom you supply with arms perceive in their treatment, will bind them to you, while the others will excuse you, recognizing that those who incur greater risk and responsibility merit greater rewards. But by disarming, you at once give offense, since you show your subjects that you distrust them, either as doubting their courage, or as doubting their fidelity, each of which imputations begets hatred against you.

The fear of loss, the reactionary natural state of the middle class, does not only pertain to money, but also to rights and privileges. It is not necessarily acquisitive, because in many cases in many nations the middle class has calmly accepted the changes of fortune due to weather or war, but the moment their customary rights are infringed or challenged, they rise in revolt. Jealousy for accustomed or traditional rights is the essence of this form of natural conservatism, though it includes as well physical possessions such as land, homes, and capital.

In the case Machiavelli states above, a new prince would be foolish to take away weapons from those who already own them. It is not necessarily the weapons themselves that are of importance, but the privilege of having them. This was certainly true in Europe for many centuries, and has been true around the world, that weapons were a privilege of a particular segment of the middle classes. Peasants and slaves rarely received weapons, except in the direst extremity, but even they, in some cases, were given both arms and the right to use them, which instantly turned them into middle class partisans for their rulers. The best examples are the Janissaries and Mamelukes, both of which came to exercise great authority in the Turkish sultanates.

This tendency is so commonplace and natural that we see it on all sides of the political spectrum. The behavior of the unions in Wisconsin in 2011 was classically reactionary. They quite literally threatened violence unless their 'rights' were maintained. The right they speak of is not an enumerated Constitutional Right, but rather an accustomed right, tradition rather than law. So-called progressives prefer to rebel if their traditions are threatened, because anyone who has something fears losing it. The more one has, the greater the fear, until possessions are so great that they lose meaning and become purely environmental, as in the upper class.

With regard to rights, however, the same elemental fear can strike anywhere, no matter the class. The reason it has such power in the middle class is because of history--middle class rights have been under assault since Hammurabi's code. Setting prices on bread and grain might've seemed like a benefit to the poor, but in truth such laws are attacks on the middle class. They seek to restrain and curb the improvement of middle class lives, and as the lower classes are usually more numerous, there is rarely much political price to pay. When hundred or thousands of the poor starve because of such laws, the ruling classes rarely are held to blame, so it costs them nothing to continue making the same mistake for the last 3,000 years. This dynamic killed millions in Communist countries yet still we have highly educated intellectuals preaching the same false gospel. In our day, however, they cannot always escape responsibility so easily as Hammurabi and his priestly coterie of learned intellectuals.

The challenge for a 'movement' conservative is to recognize that natural conservatism does not always favor movement conservatism. In the present day, the TEA Parties are hailed by many as the conservative movement finally coming into its own. On the contrary, many if not most are not movement conservatives. They are natural conservatives who happen at present to agree with many things movement conservatives believe. The Pharaohs of Egypt always took a coronation pledge to 'restore all things as they were at the beginning.' This desire to move back into a time where things were predictable is natural reactionary conservatism. The fear of loss is the reason why the economy of 2008-2011 has been so stagnant; the lack of certainty makes people want to hunker down until the storm passes. The Democratic Party has done nothing to curb this, blaming everything except their own policies, taking responsibility for nothing, and so it continues, on and on, and will continue until a sense of constancy is restored. In times of crisis change becomes less anathema to the natural reactionary conservative, but though at times this allows for radical innovation, most of the time such a conservative wants the certainty of a past time--sometimes only a few years past. This is a problem for the Democrats, and of benefit to the Republicans and movement conservatives just at the moment, but it is not a fundamental change in the political makeup of America...yet it could be.

There is a chance for movement conservatives to gain a generational advantage in the present crisis. Messianic libertarianism will not do; it must be simple, concrete changes that have obvious benefits to businesses and individuals, and then the big changes must stop. Small incremental improvements afterwards will keep natural conservatives in the movement conservative camp, even if at the same time many of that movement are disappointed and perhaps even disaffected. There is no chance at all for a complete transformation of America into a perfect 'Era of Good Feeling' republic, as the libertarians dream, nor will we see a complete revolution of 60 years of leftist changes in a single 4-year presidency. There are many parts of the 'Great Society' that we are stuck with for the foreseeable future, and slow, steady changes that do not disturb the mostly somnolent natural conservatives of America have the best chance for bringing about a prosperous and free society. Nearly half of the people in this nation have become rent-seekers; they cannot be killed or exiled, and they cannot be taught the error of their ways overnight, if at all. They cannot be cast aside to perish in the hedgerows even if some of them deserve it. And programs such as Social Security need to be phased out VERY slowly, lest the natural conservatives revolt from fear.

The Democratic Party, for all its pretensions, understands this truth far better than any conservatives, Republican or otherwise. It is their bread and butter; they spend every ounce of political capital playing on natural conservative fears. Many have wondered why so many African-Americans or Latinos are Democratic when they agree with so much of the Republican platform; look no further. Natural conservatism includes both rational and irrational fears, and the Democrats live and breath fear. Almost every statement from the DNC works on the fears of some group or other, no matter how crazy. They threaten African-Americans with images of lynchings by Republicans, never mind that every KKK member was a Democrat--every lynching was carried out by Democrats, and every jury that let off the perpetrators was exclusively Democratic. Jim Crow laws were 100% Democratic in origin. By playing on the rational fears (possible loss of real rights), and irrational fears (a return to a bad past instead of a good past, and the loss of imaginary rights) the Democrats have tricked non-movement conservative African-Americans into voting their way.

This can all be reversed, if movement conservatives come to understand the reality of human nature. Despite the general grounding in reality, movement conservatives believe a lot of romanticist nonsense that comes through the culture, or even from parents. One especially prevalent belief is the innate goodness of human beings. This is antithetical to Burke and the Scottish Enlightenment, especially Adam Smith, but they are not the only influences upon the conservative movement. It is not necessary to believe in the doctrine of original sin to believe that human beings are not naturally good. They are not inherently evil either. It takes very little observation to see the mixture in children. A 5-year-old child is innocent; not good or evil, but without understanding of either. One moment angelically generous, the next moment cruel and brutal, followed by sweetness and kindness, and then stubborn and irritable. All in less than 60 seconds. This is a good measure of human beings in general--the innate qualities are not good and evil in themselves, but without training they tend towards evil. It is natural to protect one's own interests and sacrifice for one's own children, but unnatural to guard the interests of unknown parties and sacrifice for strangers; a balance must be reached between the two, and equilibrium is very difficult to achieve among human beings. Yet that is the purpose of the American Republic--to create a government of equilibrium.

That should be the goal of movement conservatives, and if achieved, would gain the support of natural conservatives permanently. Efficiency and balance should be the goal, rather than revolution, even though an efficient and balanced government is intrinsically revolutionary. Words matter, and it is through words that these changes can be made, but only if those who wish to restore our Republic to greatness remember to beware the wrath of the natural conservative majority.

Quote from C.S. Lewis

2011-09-26T16:22:00.001-07:00

The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were "gods" and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him—for we can prevent Him, if we choose—He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said. --C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Adam Smith quote of the month August 2011

2011-08-28T10:03:00.001-07:00

The happiness of mankind, as well as of all other rational creatures, seems to have been the original purpose intended by the Author of Nature when He brought them into existence. No other end seems worthy of that supreme wisdom and divine benignity which we are led to by the abstract consideration of His infinite perfections, is still more confirmed by the examination of the works of nature, which seem all intended to promote happiness, and to guard against misery. But, by acting according to the dictates of our moral faculties, we necessarily pursue the most effectual means for promoting the happiness of mankind, and may therefore be said, in some sense, to co-operate with the Deity, and to advance, as far as in our power, the plan of Providence. By acting otherwise, on the contrary, we seem to obstruct, in some measure, the scheme which the Author of Nature has established for the happiness and perfection of the world, and to declare ourselves, if I may say so, in some measure the enemies of God. Hence we are naturally encouraged to hope for His extraordinary favour and reward in the one case, and to dread His vengeance and punishment in the other.

Adam Smith's quote of the month

2011-07-27T06:35:00.001-07:00

Would you awaken the industry of the man who seems the most dead to ambition, it would often be to no purpose to describe to him the happiness of the rich and the great, to tell him that they are generally sheltered from the sun and the rain, that they are seldom hungry, that they are seldom cold, and that they are rarely exposed to weariness or to want of any kind. The most eloquent exhortation of this kind will have little effect upon him, if you would hope to succeed you must describe to him the conveniency and arrangement of the different apartments in their palaces. You must explain to him the propriety of their equipages, and point out to him the number the order and the different offices of all their attendants. If anything is capable of making an impression upon him this will. Yet all these things tend only to keep off the sun and the rain, to save them from hunger and cold, from want and weariness.
--Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (pp. 266-7)

Hope in a Uniform

2011-07-04T21:39:00.001-07:00

A short haircut, a uniform,
A youthful face between,
Draw forth a hopeful feeling warm,
Of future unforeseen,

Age makes one a pessimist,
As the heart grows ever colder,
As death looms close, that final tryst,
But hope grows slowly bolder,

Such are these who serve us all,
Their bodies frail us shield,
With courage answered they the call,
With blood our future sealed,

One way to admiration show,
Now write a check to the USO.

My Immigration Program

2011-06-22T12:20:00.000-07:00

Here's my idea for resolving the illegal immigration situation:

1) Build the fence, enforce existing laws
2) Reciprocal punishments for any illegal aliens; after capture, the laws used in the nation of origin shall be used to determine the punishment, and then they are deported back to the nation of origin. This shall not include the more cruel and unusual punishments of some nations.
3) Once the inward flow of immigration is stopped, blanket amnesty for all those who pay a fine and pass the test to become a permanent resident alien--anyone who entered the USA illegally may never become a citizen and may never vote, but their children, including minors who entered illegally with them, can become citizens through the normal immigration process for resident aliens
3) Streamline the immigration process and remove as many layers of bureaucracy as possible. Hold immigration agents who interview applicants legally responsible for allowing criminals or terrorists into the country. Moratorium on immigration of men from all Muslim-majority nations until the threat of terrorism recedes. Women and children may still apply for asylum. Men may receive an exemption to the moratorium if they belong to a persecuted minority such as Coptic Christian, Druze or Zoroastrian
4) Require that all communications of government, especially ballots, be English-only
5) Any government expenditures on illegal aliens be charged back to their nation of origin, including incarceration and back taxes where applicable. If the nation of origin refuses to pay damages, then a tariff system will be implemented on anything that nation sells to the United States

Favorite Adam Smith Quote of the Week

2011-06-21T11:40:00.001-07:00

He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person, and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion which covers the deformities of his own conduct. Rather than see our own behavior under so disagreeable an aspect, we too often, foolishly and weakly, endeavor to exasperate anew those unjust passions which had formerly misled us, we endeavor by artifice to awaken our old hatreds, and irritate afresh our almost forgotten resentments, we even exert ourselves for this miserable purpose and thus persevere in injustice merely because we were once unjust, and because we are ashamed and afraid to see that we were so.
--Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments

Weiner is a schmuck

2011-06-06T15:59:00.000-07:00

Weiner's last name means 'from Vienna,' and for all of his ancestors, that's the full extent of its meaning. Anthony's managed to disgrace his name in all too many ways. He should change his name to Schmuck, which is accurate in all senses of the word. What's he going to say when he see his great-grandaddy in the afterlife and the old fellow asks 'what did you do with my name?'

I don't want to be anywhere nearby when that explanation happens.

This is worth the read

2011-06-03T09:19:00.001-07:00

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_2_otbie-homicide-studies.html

There is no simple life

2011-05-29T08:23:00.000-07:00

Imagine a simple life. Let's say a nice house on a lake somewhere, a large kitchen garden, everything paid including a car so there's no bills and no worries, no annoying neighbors, no visible power or sewer lines, a nice idyllic setting that's protected from development by county and state, roads maintained by the county and forest service...

Wait, that's a tremendously complicated life...for everybody except the person who has all the complications hidden behind a layer of ignorance and/or stupidity.

Let's imagine a true simple life, let's say the Chippewa. Simple, right? Live in a birchbark wigwam, hunt and fish and gather wild rice for the men, grow squash and corn for the women, and all is perfect and simple. Except you can't hunt without a bow or spear--those have to be made, which requires skill. Arrow-making too. Then you have to know about how to track animals, how to find them in the wilderness, because they certainly won't walk up and ask to be eaten. Fishing's more complicated too, because you're not fishing for pleasure and a meal or two. You have to catch a LOT of fish and smoke it for the long, long winter. That means nets, dams, fish traps. Gathering wild rice is easy...except you need large canoes to hold it, which means building the frame and covering it with birchbark, and without metal nails and without ever having heard of a screw or screwdriver, or a nut and bolt. Think growing corn and squash is easy? It doesn't take all day, but then there's curing animal hides, making clothes, cooking meals, which requires utensils and bowls and mortar and pestle. All of life is centered around preparing for the winter--having enough food, fuel and clothing to last through the cold months. At least, so long as nobody comes a raiding. There are plenty of enemies around who would love to steal a slave or two, or defeat a great warrior of your village. Violence is always disruptive, so anything of the sort has a ripple effect on the simplicity of the village--complicating it.

The point is that there is not, and never has been, a SIMPLE life. It is foolish to wish for what can never be. The hardships of other lifestyles seem like nothing because we haven't experienced them. Those in America who live closer to the edge have experienced them, and no doubt they'd love to trade the dangers of their own existence for a 'more complicated' life.

The lamentation for lost simplicity is simply an illusion caused by a limited understanding. The brief sketch above of a mesolithic culture can be expanded to show the true measure of knowledge required to survive in such a situation. There was trade in pre-Columbian America of course; goods from the coast of Maine can be found in Georgia. The complicated web of an economic system, what we generally call capitalism, was just as important to a Chippewa or Lakota as to a Wall Street trader. We pretend that we've suddenly stumbled into a new world, a 'knowledge based' economy. All economies are knowledge based, whether it's knowing where the beavers have their dams or knowing how to run a hot backup on an Oracle database. Creating a stone-age bow requires tools to be made first--you have to cut and shape the wood. You have to know what wood is best. You have to know how to use leather to make a grip and sinews to make the string, and how to keep both from rotting away immediately. Then you have to shape arrows and arrow-heads. Which feathers are best for the fletching? Which stone is best for the heads? Obsidian? Flint? Quartz? Which kind of flint? The brown, flaky kind that falls apart easily? The white, harder sort? Then more sinews to attach the head and feathers to the as-straight-as-possible shaft. Then start over and do another, because you'll need at least a dozen.

Complications are often nothing more than a figment of imagination. And despite all the whining about it, people LOVE complications the way Democrats LOVE crises. It gives them a sense of purpose and allows them to pretend to do something important, instead of taking care of business.

If you want simplicity, learn to think simply. Marcus Aurelius wrote a great deal about this kind of thinking, among other things writing "ask of each particular thing, what is it in itself, in its nature and constitution..." The idea being, ignore the complications and look at a thing at its root and barest meaning. But then others might call you simple-minded, which for some reason isn't a compliment, if complexity is so horrible. Occam's razor is really just a restatement of Marcus Aurelius, just as Chaos Theory is a restatement of Adam Smith's economic theory.

Things appear to be chaotic and uncontrollable and too complex not because they are--there is an underlying order to everything, from subatomic particles to galaxies. Our minds are simply incapable of understanding all the pieces that make up the whole. The real central tenet of Adam Smith's LONG books is that we must be humble enough to recognize that we simple cannot easily or skillfully control what we cannot comprehend, and if we try, we're apt to cause more damage than any improvement.

If you feel overwhelmed by complications and complexities, stop trying to understand them all. Work on what's in your reach instead of what is both out of your power and beyond your mental capacity. If you spend all your times pondering the incomprehensible, likely you'll just end up with a broken mind instead of wisdom. It doesn't hurt to recognize the amazing magical matrix that ensures that there's milk for you to buy at the store, and Italian shoes on your feet, and a Chinese cell phone in your hand. But instead of despairing at it all, simply be thankful for those utter strangers on the other side of the world who made your life better without ever knowing who you are or even caring whether you lived or died. That is a simple enough answer, and is a lot better than moaning at the unfairness of all the complications. Gratitude is a necessary component of happiness, and don't we mean 'a happy life' when we say 'a simple life?'

Usama bin Laden is dead

2011-05-01T21:51:00.000-07:00

I hate to be grateful for the death of anyone...but there are exceptions. In this particular case, I'm VERY glad bin Laden wasn't taken alive. I don't even want to think about what a circus any trial would've been, and I hope the guys who took him tried REALLY REALLY hard to take him alive. I'm hope they thought about it for at least 4-5 nanoseconds, and then squeezed the trigger.

I tried really hard not to be critical of the President's announcement, but really, he needs to fire all his speechwriters. At a moment like this I want to forget all that divides us and just be American, but he kept jarring me out of it. Oh well, I expect he just can't help it.

I reckon that at this moment Usama is very very confused. We Mormons believe that the dead live in a Spiritual world divided into a paradise and prison, and that those who live in the paradise work to free those in the prison--there's a missionary church for you, we don't think missionary work even stops with death. The spirit prison is a thing of the mind; obsessions, passions, lusts--anything that sucks away free will in this life--are retained, and those who are in prison can leave if only they can break away from the parts of their lives that bind them in darkness. A man of such monstrous hatred and lust for blood will be stuck in an endless repeat of his favorite revenge fantasies, probably hardly noticing he's dead. I've often said that it's good to be a Mormon, but there's one thing about it that is sometimes a bit hard. No doubt there are missionaries around him at this moment, trying to convince him to come to Christ. I ought to be glad of that, after all, God want's everybody, so it behooves us (Mormons or otherwise) to want them too--want them to repent and come to Christ. My mind knows it and I accept that it should be so...but in my guts I hope he doesn't listen. Hell is too good for him.

I guess an angel won't be showing up to ask if I'd like to be assumed into heaven tonight. Imperfect I remain, more's the pity. At least I don't feel like rejoicing, just a sense of satisfaction and completion, and pride in the team that pulled this off, not excepting the President, no matter how much I disagree with him on other matters.

I reckon "justice delayed is justice denied" is a saying that definitely qualifies for exceptions.

A Republic, if you can keep it.

2011-04-28T07:22:00.000-07:00

Ben Franklin's famous quip is particularly apt in the present times. The penchant for calling a representative federal republic a 'democracy' has finally reached a stage of pure madness. As events unfold in Egypt and Libya, and similar movements stir, rumble, or sell out (as in Saudi Arabia) it seems more ridiculous than ever to grant the Romanticist assertion that human beings are naturally and essentially good, and so will automatically choose a good government.

The truth is that all governments are democracies. The people have the power to resist, revolt, destroy, and build. That power cannot be abridged, but it can be deceived, which is the method by which every other form of government operates. Unless the people believe in the divine right of the priest-king, Pharoah, Imperator, Chairman, General Secretary, or what have you, they won't do as they are told. It is essential to every repressive form of government to indoctrinate the people with the belief that their power is nothing compared to that of the king, aristocracy or party. If people believe they are powerless, they are. If they believe there's no hope, there isn't. Yet even those who have been crushed for generations can reach a breaking point when their deceiver government becomes intolerable. At that point they prove their power, by casting down the intolerable government and tolerating a not-quite-so-bad government instead, and that is democracy--the people get just as bad a government as they will stomach.

Unfortunately the governments cast down aren't really always that bad. The government doesn't actually have to BE intolerable so long as people begin to feel that it is. All governments are democracies, but they are also oligarchies, as power tends to concentrate into cliques or cadres that work for or with the government. This is a universal tendency, as true of a republic as a dictatorship. America has been a republic for a long time, and has gone through many oligarchies, and the strength of the republican system of government is that those oligarchic groups can't consolidate their power and hold onto it for long periods of time. There are many power groups right now trembling in their boots because of the TEA party and the recession. The storm of change is here, and some oligarchic groups will survive scarcely harmed, and others will vanish into history.

The reason for the strength of the American system is the fractured nature of our republic. Power is diffused through many levels, not just in the 'checks and balance' of the federal government. Power has been trending towards Washington for a long time, but all it took to bring out a general revolt was a bit of overreach by the statists. No doubt they can't understand why everybody is so incensed, as socialized medicine isn't anything new or particularly weird. Most of the world has had it going on for more than a century, so why not the US? What's the big deal?

The left believes that deep down everybody agrees with them. They think the majority of people are on their side, even though the poor hicks are tricked into opposing them by crafty plutocrats and religious hysterics. Thus democracy, in their minds, is on their side, giving them carte blanche to do whatever is needed to bring about their vision.

The problem is that most people don't really go for the solipsistic cosmic nihilism the left preaches. For the most part they believe in family, in God, in freedom, and free will. They believe in the common sense of the Scottish Enlightenment, even when they've never heard of it. Their vision of the future is narrower than that of the left, focussing on their own family. Instead of a perfect and glorious society where all humans will have perfect equality, 'from each according to ability, to each according to need,' they want their own children to have a brighter future. Sending their children out to die for the cause defeats the purpose. Convincing their children to sacrifice everything for the mythical future paradise is antithetical to their reasons for living.

Which is why the left only wins elections through trickery. Their worldview is at odds with the reality of common sense--i.e. universally held beliefs about what IS. There is nothing more universal; if you ask a parent anywhere on the planet, no matter what culture or religion, you'll get some variation on 'what I want for my child is a better life than mine.'

The genius of the American Republic is that our Constitution is built on accepting common sense instead of shilling for some airy theory. The fact that its most radical ideas were considered crazy at the time does not matter now; they have stood the test of time better than anything else has. The concept of equality before the law has not been ruined because of Slavery or male-only suffrage; each step in increasing the franchise has increased its reality and its universality. It has been subverted many times by many groups; early on by the Masons, but somehow they fell to a tiny minority. Jim Crow laws were another aberration, but they are now history. The diffusion of power makes such things difficult to maintain over time. As depicted in the movie 'Rosewood' a few liars set off a bloodbath that might've spilled over into other counties. It's difficult to tell how many died in this horrible orgy of violence; the ridiculous official estimate was 2 white and 6 black deaths, while other estimates reach up to 400 or more. At least 120 murdered African-Americans have been verified over time. But at the county line there were militias of white men who set roadblocks to keep the mobs from spilling over into their own counties; risking their own lives, in Segregation era Florida, to protect black lives. That is what diffusion of power gains for people everywhere. If one county goes mad, the whole nation doesn't have to follow. It's little enough comfort to those trapped in the areas where madness has overflowed, but then it's a lot easier to escape into the next county than across the sea.

America has followed the universal trends towards concentration of power into an oligarchic structure, and has also reared back from it in horror several times. The political winds sometimes shift only slightly, and it is difficult to tell one party from the other. Every so often comes a permanent change, and that could be what is happening now. The same thing is going on in several countries around the Mediterranean, but unfortunately they don't have the tradition of diffused government. Except while being rules as colonial fiefs, the only local tradition is one of autocracy; benign neglect being the best exception to the rule of cruel repression.

It is possible that the leaders of these movements, who might be called bourgeoisie in embryo, will build a better nation than what came before. They have two examples before them, the American and French Revolutions. The bourgeoisie were the architects of both those revolutions, and these educated but powerless rebels are not so very different from those who led the rebellions in colonial America and France. Will they embrace a mix of tradition and innovation like the American Revolution, or try to create a 'year zero' like the French, and use a reign of terror to try and make it stick? Time will tell.

Unfortunately George Washingtons are in short supply. Even if they get a Madison and Hamilton to craft a wonderful constitution, and a Jefferson and Paine to fire the minds of their partisans, without a George Washington it's all for nothing. How often in human history as the leader of a rebellion refused to become king/dictator/president for life? How often has one voluntarily relinquished power?

Though I wish to hope for the rebellions in northern Africa, the Arabian peninsula and especially Iran, hope is hard to come by judging by history. But then George Washington himself was practically without precedent, and nobody in Europe could believe it when he turned the presidency over to John Adams. And then Adams turned it over to his worst political enemy Jefferson. Two unprecedented steps in history that have now become routine in America. It could happen, as it has before.

Alexander Hamilton back in the news

2011-04-28T07:01:00.001-07:00

It always irritates me when Hamilton is described as a 'big government' conservative. He was a Federalist, which means a strong central government, yes, but also diffusion of power throughout the political subdivisions of state, county and township. The Anti-Federalists were against a standing army and navy, preferring a weak central government, indeed preferring the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution.

I haven't seen the documentary about Hamilton, and while I'm glad to see his life and work being discussed, the tendency of the documentary and those writing about it seems to read too much present-day definitions and beliefs into his time. It's a common, nearly constant error in trying to understand people of other times. Many don't seem to realize that they were actually doing something completely new at the founding of this Republic--they paid heed to history but were fully aware that they were doing something never done before. With the advantage of experience in our own time it's easy to judge with too much harshness, or too little. George Washington was the father of the nation, and Hamilton was its architect. One does not have to agree with everything Hamilton advocated to recognize the greatness of his contribution. The Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian divide doesn't apply today; would that it did! There are no Jeffersonians except a tiny fringe of the Libertarians and the anti-tax crowd, and the Hamiltonians of the Federalist era would be well to the right of Rush Limbaugh. Many who describe themselves as libertarian (but not Randite) are really Hamiltonians, whether they realize it or not.

Hamilton of course was imperfect, and made many mistakes. This does not make his great deeds any less; indeed, it makes them greater, as he accomplished them despite his flaws. Like many others of that remarkable time, he was a hero, almost in the Greek sense, touched by Heaven. Trying to cram him (or Jefferson, or Washington) into a present day pigeon hole is a waste of time.

Child murder is the rule; respect for life is the exception

2011-03-15T12:13:00.000-07:00

Dennis Prager wrote a good piece about the horrible murders in Israel which included a 3-month-old baby girl. His essay is at http://townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2011/03/15/the_other_tsunami.

There is only one part of his article that causes me to disagree: "As morally wrong as it is to murder innocent adults, mankind seems to have a built-in revulsion against killing babies. If a baby does not evoke any tenderness, if a baby is regarded as worthy of being deliberately hurt or murdered, we know that we have encountered a degree of evil that few humans -- even among murderers -- can relate to."

That 'built-in revulsion' has been overcome too often by too many peoples to be able to believe in it. To give a particularly gruesome example, Vikings used to play 'catch the baby' with captured infants, tossing them up in the air and spitting them on swords. Hrolf the Baby-Lover was an exception to this rule, so great was his oddity that he was remembered in history.

This is not a Viking thing by any stretch. It is the standard for tribalist peoples, and too many civilized peoples. Whether it's Canaanite Molech-worshippers tossing babies into a fire, or Mongols killing every living thing in a city, or Mayas dropping children into a well, barbarians as well as city-folks have overcome their revulsion with ease. Even today, just in the last few weeks, the barbaric practice of live-birth 'abortion' in Philadelphia has been in the news.

The reason I even mention such a horrific subject is because it touches on an important fallacy in leftist, but also generally modern thinking. This fallacy is simple enough. It is the belief that human beings are basically, even naturally good.

I'm a Mormon, and we don't believe in the doctrine of original sin. Instead we believe in free agency, which is free will on steroids. Evil has to be allowed because of free agency. Good isn't good if it isn't chosen, and without being able to choose evil as well as good, we can't ever be virtuous. Opposites require each other. In the Book of Mormon it says "For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so...righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one."

This is bourn out by experience and history. The same Vikings that practiced such a horrible barbarism also brought into the world many of the concepts of freedom and independence that made America possible. Any member of any tribe could be kind, generous and loyal within his tribe, but to those outside he would be cruel and brutal. Nazi camp guards and administrators were good husbands and fathers. Human beings, no matter how wicked they may be, are also capable of good. The reverse is also true.

The romantic ideal that humans are naturally good has no basis in history or experience. Power corrupts, no matter how idealistic the original impetus. Corruption captures integrity. Ambition trumps dignity. Lust overcomes restraint. The reverse is also true. Murderers save the lives of children. Abortionists become pro-life. Corrupt officials turn whistleblower despite prison time. God holds out hope for each of us, no matter how wicked we've become. He never stops striving until we are too far gone to ever listen again.

The dehumanization of the 'other' is the rule, a near constant in human history. What is new and unusual, is the concept of universal humanity.

While the concept has been around for quite a while, it only conquered much of the world in the last few hundred years, and ran in fits and starts. It is not a Jewish concept, per se, nor a post-Apostolic Christian concept. The Zoroastrians and Buddhists have similar beliefs. Early humanists pulled various strings together and the idea of human life being sacred came into being as a political and ecumenical religious belief. The shorthand is Judeo-Christian Ethics.

Not everybody in the world accepts this concept. Those who believe in natural human goodness do not, strangely enough. They too succumbed to the tribalist impulse, because any human who disagreed with natural human goodness must be the corrupting influence that must be expunged.

Hence Jacobin and Communist mass murders, including children. Nazis took it to a racist extreme, but every romanticist movement eventually reaches the point of implacable hatred for those who disagree.

These belief systems, while supposedly hyper-modern or even post-modern, are instead truly throwbacks to the same old evils that plagued humanity from the beginning. Call it National Socialism, promote vegetarianism, persecute smokers (unless they're soldiers), denigrate religion, plant trees, and create a top-down extremely organized society that promotes the arts, and all you end up with is Auschwitz for a memorial.

Still many won't learn the lesson. They don't care that they agree with ancient and modern evils, because they are naturally good, and won't be corrupted.

Even when I'm at my angriest, and feel like violence might be an answer, I cannot see my opponents are non- or sub-human. The concept of sacred human life has been ingrained into me by family and religion. I have never done violence to anyone, not even with my fists (since childhood). I hate the very idea, and pray every day that it's never necessary. Despite this fact, I am fully aware that I might be capable of terrible violence if I ever allow my emotions to get the better of me. Respect for the sanctity of life makes me worry about myself, and prompts me to command myself. Even if violence were necessary to protect my family, I would not simply give in to hate. Instead of dehumanizing an enemy I would strive to pity him--even as I shot at him.

That is how important I consider this matter. Rather than trying to force everybody in the world to agree, my primary focus is to rule myself. That's a lot harder than dreaming up a wonderful scheme to fix everybody, especially because it earns no plaudits. Nobody on earth will ever know how near I've come to violence, nobody but me. This cannot be forced, because it requires each individual to believe and act accordingly. It can be preached, but not enforced.

Hence the disdain the whole culture of life engenders in the left. Abortion and euthanasia derive from the belief in humans as machine parts, and society as the machine. Teaching respect for life allows no positions of power, no interfering in the lives of others. Treating humans as cogs in a vast clockwork gives the 'masters of the universe' the illusions they desire, and the human cost is irrelevant so long as the illusions remain.

The sanctity of human life is simply a truth. A lie might circle the world twice while truth is still pulling on her boots, but truth seeps in, slowly but surely, and infects those who officially reject her, which is why murdering children is now seen as an aberration by most. It is MARVELOUS that it should be so, but we should never forget that it is not the natural position of humanity. Just ask the Palestinians, who celebrated the murder of three children, including an infant, by dancing in the streets and tossing candy to each other.

This is long but worth the read

2011-02-18T09:03:00.001-08:00

An excellent commentary on the TEA Party: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/how-to-think-about-the-tea-party/

Utopia will never happen because socialists are selfish

2011-02-15T14:24:00.000-08:00

The central tenet of all the various socialist belief systems is that at some point in glorious future, selfishness will vanish. Everyone will embrace the whole, and become cogs in the machine, rather than caring about themselves.

So in order to achieve that magical future, they preach selfishness. Then they practice selfishness to a degree vulgar even to a Borgia.

What is the whole class struggle meme but an appeal to the selfishness of the 'oppressed' classes? They have it, you deserve it, they should give it to you...what is that but selfishness of many, set against the selfishness of a few. The only difference is in quantity; the quality is the same.

Once the socialists (whether nationalist or internationalist) take power, they demonstrate their selfishness perfectly. They loot other nations, line their own pockets, and live high while encouraging others to embrace austerity. Stalin never went hungry while millions starved in the Ukraine. He never ran out of caviar, much less toast to spread it on.

This is the strangest bit of magical thinking in the known universe, yet it is completely passed over by every version of leftist in history. Right now it's best exemplified by Al Gore, who wants us to ride bicycles while he flies around in private jets. Who lives in several massive mansions and criticizes 'suburban sprawl.' This intrinsic hypocrisy is everywhere evident, yet it never earns the name it deserves because the intentions are good, or at least so we are told.

Jesus said 'By their fruits ye shall know them.' This is good advice whether one believes in Christ or not. Don't bother about professions and pretensions, just look at the actual deeds and judge accordingly. Al Gore has made himself fabulously wealth by preaching environmentalism. Mao Zedong lived like an Emperor, complete with an endless supply of 12-year-old girls whenever he wanted them. Castro lives like a Don. Et Cetera. But more importantly, look at the lower ranks of the leftist movement, government employees, NGO magnates, and tellingly the out-for-themselves thugs at ACORN and now Planned Parenthood.

Selfishness pervades the leftist movement top to bottom. It is practically a religious belief, such importance does it hold. So when I hear that these pure selfists are going to lead me into the promised land where selfishness does not exist, I can only think 'qui bono?' Who benefits by having me believe in this mythical future? And the answer is plain. If I make the sacrifices demanded of me, Al Gore gains, the Sierra Club gains, SEIU gains, Democrats gain, etc. But I don't get anything real, just a pat on the head for being a good boy.

I'll take rabid capitalists any time. At least when dealing with a capitalist you get something in return. If I pay too much for something, at least I still get SOMETHING. Lining a the pocket of a selfish Democrat/ Progressive/ Communist/ Socialist/ Jacobin/ Romanticist/ Nazi/ Whateverist so I can feel good about myself isn't worth the trade.

God Doesn't Care About Sex

2011-02-13T07:37:00.000-08:00

Over the last few years extramarital sex has become steadily more commonplace among people who believe in God, especially those who claim to be 'Bible-based Christians.' There are lots of excuses for disobeying God's quite specific commandments, but one which has grown in currency might be called the 'littleness argument.' Since the Universe is so large, and God has lots of very important matters on His mind, can He really care about two people bending His laws when they really love each other? Isn't love the greatest virtue in Christianity?

So far the argument is on solid ground, as I agree that God doesn't really care about specific actions or sins. In my opinion each particular action contrary to His will is just as bad as any other, and ALL of them, without repentance, bar the sinner from His presence. However despite the size of the Universe, and the littleness of each of us, He has the capacity to care very much about each individual, and it is for this reason that He has commanded us to avoid extra-marital sex. He doesn't want us to hurt ourselves, He wants us to be happy.

The Book of Mormon uses the phrase 'Plan of Happiness' in lieu of 'Plan of Salvation,' and Lehi's words, 'Adam fell that man might be, and men are that they might have joy,' is a recurrent theme in LDS theology. The reason for all of God's commandments, great and small, is to make us happy. He phrased them as commands because we won't listen to suggestions. But the 10 Commandments in particular are just a guideline on how to obtain happiness in this world, which translates into the next.

1: Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.
Worshipping a false god or philosophy is no way to be happy, and the horror inflicted on the world by such false religions brought neither the perpetrators nor their victims joy. Obeying the first commandment adds to happiness.

2: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.
This is very similar to the first, and regards material things being worshipped. It is impossible to have enough possessions to make one happy, and the saying 'money can't buy happiness' is literally true, as there are endless examples of miserable people who are fabulously wealthy, and even more examples of the poor but happy. This commandment is often violated in the world of art, and artists who put their passion for beauty above all things have given us many examples of how to live a truly miserable life.

3: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
This means both not to curse God, and be a person of integrity. Happy people never curse God, as gratitude is an essential component of happiness. And happy people do not make promises they cannot keep, and earn the regard of others by dependability. We might all like to pretend today that we aren't supposed to care what others think of us, but this is an idle vanity; we all of us care deeply. Being trusted by others enables one to give trust as well, and diminishes the uncertainty and fear which is so much a part of the human condition, and so adds to happiness.

4: Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Today this is ignored completely by many purported Christians. Having a day to forget the cares of the world each week, to think, learn, and worship, is both an expression of gratitude and a pleasant change from the constant tumult of the world all around. As more people ignore holiness to engage in fun, they forget that it requires other people's labor to keep theme parks and grocery stores open on the Sabbath, and engaging in commerce even for recreation removes the possibility of retreating a little from the world. Fun is not happiness, it only lasts as long as the ride does, and pursuit of fun can lead one away from the deeper, fuller joy that God wishes for all of us.

5: Honour thy father and thy mother.
This works in two ways; first, it is impossible to gain more than transitory happiness without gratitude, and being thankful to those who bore and reared us is both practice for the deeper gratitude owed to God and an example for our own children. Secondly, showing honor to parents sets an example for children so that one may also receive good treatment and respect into old age.

6: Thou shalt not kill.
We all tend to think of murder as harming the victim and the family of the victim, and rightly so. More recently we have learned that it also harms the perpetrator psychologically in many ways, and we know that only God can provide the miracle that heals the scars that taint the mind and soul of a murderer. The example of the Anti-Nephi-Lehis in the Book of Mormon is instructive; such was their joy at being redeemed from their murderous past that they would not fight even in their own defense, but died to avoid the possible return of the terrible pain and lust of killing. A murderer is cut off from joy, and any happiness is fleeting.

7: Thou shalt not commit adultery.
At last we reach the command that regards sex, and it is not as ambiguous as it might appear. Some pretend that as the word in English is adultery, extra-marital sex is not included, but this is sophistry, as the accompanying explanations in the Bible are quite specific. What's more, Jesus raised the bar by saying "But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." God meant for us to be married and to have sexual relations with only one other person, and His reason was to make us happy. Instead of imagining the pleasures lost by keeping this commandment in the sense it was intended, imagine the pleasures won by keeping it. In the words of Parley P. Pratt: "I received from [Joseph] the first idea of eternal family organization, and the eternal union of the sexes in those inexpressibly endearing relationships which none but the highly intellectual, the refined and pure in heart, know how to prize, and which are at the very foundation of everything worthy to be called happiness." All of the sexual sins cause unhappiness, many murders are committed over adultery, families are torn apart, and people young and old are ruined by diseases or psychological wounds that they never feared. So many of the worlds ills rise from sexual sin, yet becoming an eternal family instead is the surest way to gain a truly heavenly joy while yet on Earth, which prepares us for Eternal Joy. That is why God cares about it; He cares about us.

8: Thou shalt not steal.
Theft is often set aside as a minor thing in modern times, yet it is at the heart of so much unhappiness in the world that the mind boggles. Has anyone ever feared to stop to help a stranded motorist because he might be a brigand instead, bent on robbing those who tried to help? Why are there locks on our doors, passwords on our accounts, even to comment on a blog with a readership of eleven? Thieves, even petty thieves, cost us all in terms of money, fear, and security. Many excuse thieves because their hungry or desperate, but without thieves everyone in the world would be more open-handed, because it would not be so dangerous to display generosity. Win some sweepstakes and a thousand grifters will beat a path to your door, all with a sob story, but which are true and which are just attempts at larceny? The difficulty of getting food to market is hard enough, but every bite we eat costs more because of thievery. And yet stealing doesn't make the thief happy either, because it's never enough and he's never grateful for what he didn't earn. Everybody loses from thievery, no matter how desperate the thief.

9: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
Satan is called the 'father of lies' for a good reason. Dishonesty harms everyone, liar and deceived alike, for the liar gets lost in a web of his own weaving, always unsure of the truth, and the deceived suffers in the same way, never sure what to believe. False witness in court can deprive another of life, but gossip harms many more and likewise steals bits of life away from those slandered. Deception is one of the few ways to destroy agency, and by far the most common, for if one doesn't know a choice exists, or believes that there is no choice, then that path is closed. There are some false witnesses that may seem to cause no harm, i.e. 'no that dress doesn't make you look fat,' but in the long run honesty would be better for everyone. We build up defenses against truth throughout our lives, struggling to avoid looking at things squarely to maintain pride and vanity, but all that spinning amounts to nothing at last. We will have to stand before the Throne of God with a bare soul unless we repent and embrace the truth, so a little temporary salve for our pride adds less to happiness than simply realizing the truth. Pride is the ultimate deception, and is bearing false witness against ourselves, and it was pride that led the father of lies into his rebellion against happiness and earned him eternal misery.

10: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.
This commandment is also wrapped up in pride, for what difference could it possibly make to any of us if a neighbor has a better lawn mower? Comparing ourselves to others is pointless, as we are all going to be measured against Jesus Christ and found wanting. Yet envy and greed are endemic even among the very elect. The desire to be seen as wealthy or important, and worse the belief that 'I deserve more,' is at the heart of most crimes and sins, and can become an incurable sickness of the spirit, bring not just envy, but resentment and hatred. This is quite often used as a battering ram in politics, and whole nations have been murdered because of class envy. If each of us could simply be glad for the success and wealth of others, we would instantly be happier, but then so would those who are more successful and wealthier be willing to be generous.

If everyone in the world followed these commandments the sum of human happiness would burgeon dramatically. Everyone would be wealthier, healthier and more kindly; life would be so good that the whole planet would have to be translated into heaven. We would each be full of joy, and that's precisely what God intended when He gave us these commandments. These are not restrictions but signposts on the road to happiness.

So no, God doesn't care about sex. It makes no difference to the Universe, destroys no star, wastes no planet, ruins no galaxy. But it does ruin God's plan for YOU, and THAT is what He cares about. We exist to learn how to deal with our free will, and to be free means avoiding the slavery endemic in all these things that are against God's will. He gave us freedom, but He cannot give us happiness. We have to learn that, but He gave us the simplest roadmap imaginable. Can anyone wonder that it irritates Him when we refuse to follow it? That is why God hates sin, because it harms the sinner in addition to all the other pain it might cause, and God hates the things that hurt those He loves: each and every one of us.

Diffusionist versus Romanticist

2011-01-26T18:33:00.001-08:00

Some have decided that instead of liberal/conservative we should use instead centralist/decentralist. I disagree with these replacement terms because neither really applies. I prefer to call myself a Federalist instead of a Conservative because I believe in Federalism: the diffusion of power. It's not decentralized, but spread out between many levels, from the Federal to the States to counties and cities and townships and the individual. I want there to be overlapping areas of authority, and counterpoised stresses such as the 'checks and balances' of the federal government. The GOAL of a Federal system is the maximum amount of freedom for the individual. It's one of the reasons I disagree with Libertarians; legalizing drugs or prostitution at the federal level treads on the rights of states and localities. At the same time I also disagree with criminalizing drugs at the federal level. What I want is decisions to be as close as possible to those who have to live with them at each level.
The other side is romanticist. They're shooting for a perfect world, and that is the central problem. They go for concentration of power because they're trying to run down all the counterpoised stresses with the biggest bulldozer they can find. This applies equally to all the utopians/liberals/socialists/nazis/communists/progressives etc. What they have in common is a romantic view of human nature and a romantic ideal that turns any countervailing argument into proof of perfidy. They don't believe in centralizing power for its own sake; well at least those who actually believe the crap they peddle don't. The leaders are all cynics, and spew the honey-scented rhetoric to keep the flies circling the trap. The true-believer on the 'left' lets the Lenins and Stalins and Hitlers and Maos and Kim Jeong-Ils and Castros and Pol Pots get away with horrific mass-murder because that's what's needed to cut away all the hindrances to the perfect society that's just around the bend. It's often hard to tell who is merely venal and who is a believer, because they all use the same rhetoric. But concentration of power serves them both; the venal get power for its own sake, and the believers get 'progress,' but most importantly they get revenge on the wicked forces that are keeping them from Utopia through sheer meanness.
It's awfully hard to come up with labels that fit reality, and every word ever used has lots of misuse in its history. I think Diffusionist and Romanticist work better than Conservative/Liberal or Decentralist/Centralist. They also provoke discussion, and I doubt either side would object. Conservatives can mostly already see the relevance of diffusion, and liberals are wondering how I could possibly use 'Romanticist' as a pejorative, since naturally everybody should crave such a label.

Thank heaven for the wonderful world

2010-12-23T07:45:00.000-08:00

I amazes me continually what a wonderful place we live in, and how many astonishingly good people live in it. There are many organizations that demonstrate this easily; the Boy Scouts, the Salvation Army, many other churches including my own Church of Jesus Christ, and the USO. Discovered a new one today thanks to Karl Rove

Marvelous stuff! So many people coming up with clever ways to help others. Too many people don't realize that the reason the world looks so awful at times is because the wickedness stands out BECAUSE IT IS THE EXCEPTION. Everyone sins, of course; nobody is perfect. And some of the things we do are just plain rotten. But most people, even those who seem impossibly evil, do lots of good things too. Just as the human eye looking at a beautiful mountainside is instantly drawn to movement, we don't see that goodness around us because it's so common that it's just the backdrop to the things that stand out. Newspapers and great cities have been the principle causes of this slow change in outlook over the last few centuries. The anonymity of cities allows much greater latitude for wickedness, and the constant focus on the newsworthy, i.e. sensational wickedness, makes it seem more common than it is. The old Chinese curse is: "may you live in interesting times." Nobody wants to read about a few decades of peace and prosperity--there's nothing to tell. Wars, revolutions, schisms and controversies are what make for interesting reading, so fiction too focuses on these things to the detriment of a realistic world view. Charles Dickens, considered by many the greatest of novelists, did a lot of good by bringing wickedness to the attention of those who would reform it, but that is a true exception. Mostly the evil displayed by characters in novels is for titillation rather than edification, or perhaps to demonstrate the superiority of good characters by contrast. Much of the artistic world has the same inclination, from painting to poetry.

There's nothing wrong with knowing the evils of the world exist, both to guard against and fight against them. Indeed, naivete is a dangerous thing, and innocence is for children. This doesn't mean that we cannot know and appreciate the marvels of our brothers and sisters in the world, and recognize that God works through us in so many different and wonderful ways, even those of us that seem entirely lost. God never gives up on anybody until there literally is no hope, like the Nephites in Mormon's day who had become completely hardened in their wickedness. As God and His Son are the examples we ought to follow, we too should remember that hard hearts soften, and cruelty is often a mask for agony. If we recognize the pervasive goodness in the world, it make it much easier to hope, and something we should all remember in this Season of Hope.

Thanksgiving Day Poem

2010-11-25T07:30:00.001-08:00

Family Fun

Outside I hear a horn honk,
And run straight to the door,
The door's already open,
There's a suitcase on the floor.
Hiya kids! yells uncle Mark
And bear hugs all around.
There's Aunt Raquelle and cousin Nick!
And my heart begins to pound.
They're just the first arrivals,
There are many more to come,
Soon the windows are shakin,
As the crowd begins to thrum!
The kitchen is off limits,
While moms and grandma work,
Football blares on two TVs,
And in the back yard children lurk.
We'd all rather have the Xbox,
But our dads hoggin it bad,
We come in to watch them struggle,
And soon they're spittin mad!
But then the countdown's started,
The dinner's coming soon,
And everybody's starvin,
It's at least two hours past noon.
At last we all are seated,
And grandpa's goin strong,
We're thankful when he finishes,
Never heard a prayer so long!
At last we're eatin turkey,
Mashed taters and stuffin and yams,
Everyone talks with their mouths full,
Cause all of my cousins are hams!
Pies and skits and football come
And the day just rushes by.
Soon we all are partin,
While my youngest cousins cry.
I yell goodbye but I'm not sad,
My cousin Nick's still here.
He'll be gone tomorrow but
Tonight'll last all year.
It's two when we stop yakkin,
How I wish that he could stay!
But at least I'll see him next year,
How I love Thanksgivin Day!

(originally written 12/8/09)

Thanksgiving Thoughts

2010-11-24T08:43:00.000-08:00

Every year for about a month before Thanksgiving I start thinking of everything that fills me with gratitude. There are so many that the mind boggles, and I always come up with a few more I hadn't thought of before. This year I thought of self-adhesive stamps and about 30 new Apps on my iPhone. And the iPhone of course. My brother called me from Georgia on my birthday and I had my first experience with FaceTime--talk about coooooool.

But beyond the long, long, long, long list of things I'm grateful for, the thing that has particularly impressed me this year is the accumulation of knowledge. I am tremendously grateful for it above almost everything else. And the more I think of it, the more profound my gratitude.

I started thinking of this while watching a movie about time travel, and getting annoyed at how little the time traveler knew she knew. While it's true that many of us don't know much about the specifics of engineering and chemistry, couldn't explain how to build a foundry or steam engine or anything else that might be made in a low-tech society, all of us know countless things that would be revolutionary in an earlier time. We just take it for granted.

An ordinary trained private in the military today has enough knowledge of military tactics and history to take over the world in an earlier time. He might not know the formula for gunpowder, or be able to build a single weapon with which he was trained, but he still knows enough to change the outcome of just about any battle in history.

All those people who took the trouble to write--not just scientist, but philosophers, charlatans, apologists, novelists, playwrights--have given us a legacy that can never be repaid. Simply the ability to read their thoughts and reflections enriches us, increases our understanding of people and the world around us, and enlightens a world that often seems very dark. It is this connection with the past that makes progress possible, which is why the disdain of 'progressives' for historical context causes cognitive dissonance in observers. At the most basic level, without knowledge of the past we can't even know we've progressed at all. Unlike some conservatives I do believe in new things, and I believe that while Utopia is unattainable it is possible to build a better society. It's only a glimmering of science fiction at present, but the beginnings are here, and unlike some the future looks bright to me--if we can avoid the errors of the past. Socialism is just feudalism of the intellectuals, which is in every way inferior to a commercial, middle-class, federal republic. Yet our current society is extremely inefficient and wasteful, especially of talent. Our education system is dismal, but returning it to 19th century standards isn't the cure--it needs to be redesigned completely to take advantage of things that had yet to be imagined in the 1890s.

Without the knowledge given to us by those who came before, and the steady accumulation of information and its astonishing availability today, our present society could not exist. And our future society, if it is to be better than the present, won't exist unless we preserve our own knowledge in the same way. My gratitude to all those thousands of writers, and tens of thousands of scribes and printers and copyists who made it possible for me to own thousands of books and have access to hundreds of thousands, is simply beyond description. And I haven't even gotten around to the engineers both hardware- and software-oriented who designed the computer I'm using now, and all those who made it possible to reach this technical stage.

As always, I'm particularly thankful to Adam Smith, not only for his invention of what we call capitalism today, but for his methods of learning. Without him I wouldn't know to be thankful to all the faceless, nameless people who make my life possible. I will never meet any of them, perhaps, yet I bless their names and will be glad to testify before God at the great and wonderful things they gave me without ever knowing my name. Like the guys who somehow keep our ramshackle insanely complex electrical system working. Just think of the difficulty of a use-it-or-lose-is system that has to perform the daily miracle of getting juice to every house in America (and Canada) from a hodge-podge of dams, nuclear plants, coal- and oil-burning plants, solar and windmill farms, etc. And don't forget the crews who go out and replace parts of high-tension lines from a helicopter at risk of life and limb. The world is filled with people who are doing constant favors for others, which in many cases save lives very frequently if not hourly, and yet none of them know each other, or even OF each other.

It is a marvelous, miraculous world, filled with great-hearted men and women, and I couldn't be more thankful to have my chance to be here.

RED is worth the full price of admission

2010-11-22T20:48:00.000-08:00

I saw RED tonight based on the opinion of a reviewer at Pluggedinonline.com; he described it as a 'chocolate drizzled deep fried twinkie' from the State Fair.

Right he was.

This is not a serious movie. It's light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek, and a whole lot of fun. You could see that the actors were having a good time, just a crazy, silly, goofy movie with barely a nod to reality.

They should make more movies like this.

I am so very tired of the 'save the world' thing, and even worse, the 'save the universe' thing. Why can't anything just be an adventure? I'm very afraid that the next "Chronicles of Narnia" movie is going to screw it up by going too serious with a book that was more adventure than epic. Nothing against epics, but the best epics are made up of a connected series of adventures. But sometimes a Conan-type adventure is worthwhile too.

This is a Conan-type adventure, except no pointless nudity and no torrents of blood. Barely any cussing, believe it or not.

The plot is ludicrous, but in a good way. I paid $9.50 to see it, and it was worth every penny. That's the new rating system: price percentage, and this one is 100%.

Science makes a rotten God

2010-11-06T21:48:00.000-07:00

I don't have any faith in science. It's no good as a God, because it's constantly changing its mind. One minute it's scientifically proven that black people are inferior to white people, then suddenly it's not true. Oh wait, yes it is; just ask the most avant-garde scientists in the world in Nazi Germany. But they lost the war, so it's not true again, and we all should've known it from the beginning. And of course, we really should have, because the scientific explanations used to support those concepts were really stupid. But then, how can you argue with a guy in a lab coat?

Then there's spontaneous generation. True for centuries, proven false, then taken up again as 'evolution.' Now everyone is expected to believe in spontaneous generation or else be called a neo-barbarian idiot and Christian. See, spontaneous generation happens, lots of times on lots of planets, but only once on each planet. Then after that animals adapt themselves...or inherit learned behaviors...or change slowly over many generations through minor changes and natural selection...or are mutated randomly and the lucky ones survive...or wait, we were right the first time, they just adapt themselves. Or maybe it's all of them together, but the important thing is that everyone MUST believe in spontaneous generation or else!

Then there's oat bran. I have nothing against oat bran. I like oatmeal and cookies made from it. But it never occurred to me it would cure cancer. Actually I never believed it would, but wow there was a bunch of talk about it's marvelous magical qualities for a while there. Then...well...actually it doesn't cure cancer. Science was mistaken again.

And eggs are really really bad for you don't eat them. Wait, no they're ok, not great, but pretty much neutral. Um, actually they're good. Very good. Best source of protein in the known universe.

Oh and babies are little blobs of protplasm, not babies at all, just a few cells, not human in any sense because they change from worm to fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal to human all in the womb...needs a cool name...Encegenation! Now if we can only get some evidence. Never fear, Haekel is here, evidence galore. Ooops, it was fraud, and whoopsie! The cells once combined have a unique genetic structure that is 100% human. And protoplasm doesn't exist, just like od. Well we'll call something else protoplasm and then all the old scientists don't look so foolish.

The moon is x billion years old so it must have 50 feet of cosmic dust collected on the surface. Got to be careful of that when we land. Only 1/2 inch? Well we miscalculated the rate of collection.

So what else did they miscalculate?

The earth is old. Yep, 40,000 years old. Well, 180,000. Okay, it's really 3,00,000. And eventually, it's 4.3 billion. How do we know? The oldest thing on it is that old. How does that tell us the whole earth is that old? Because we assume it was all formed at once. Do we know that? Stop asking questions! This isn't science...oh wait, this is science, but stop asking questions damn it!

No need to mention the Piltdown Man or Nebraska man. Oops, I did it anyway!

And then there's genetics. Scientists managed to copyright more genes than existed in the human genome. How'd they do that exactly? DNA is far less complex than expected. So how does it work? We used to know, but now we don't.

As I said before, science STINKS as a God. There's a reason for that. It has no authority. When somebody declares something is 'authoritative,' what they're really doing is saying 'stop arguing!' When they declare the debate over, it's because they know they've lost the argument but they've got a lot of money and time invested in the failed theory and aren't going to give it up just because it's WRONG! What kind of idiot would do that?

Well, a scientist. But they don't exist. It's an ideal that only happens in science fiction stories. Science cannot answer questions. It can only exclude probabilities. That's what the scientific method does. Pure science is no more grounded than the most airy of philosophies, because a grand scientific house of cards built on what often turns out to be false premises collapses much more quickly than a logically consistent philosophical fallacy. The problem is that we think of science and technology as the same, when they're totally different things. Science feeds technology, but creating new technological products is not a matter of science. It requires all sorts of other inputs that are often artistic, or even just gut feelings or WAGs. Mathematics and engineering are sciences, but they are also arts. If they were the entirety of science then nobody would be trying to deify a method of eliminating improbabilities. That's cause mathematicians and engineers tend not to say, 'I see 0.00000000131% of an elephant's ear, and with this superior knowledge I will now explain the entire universe.' They deal in reality, even mathematicians, while theorists deal in fantasy. Whoever makes up the best fantasy wins.

Science can't answer the most basic questions about life. It can only describe a few of the processes of life, and even that imperfectly. As Gods go, extreme ignorance is generally not what one looks for. And extreme ignorance coupled with grotesque hubris is even less attractive. I'll go on loving my iPhone and computers, and I'll be grateful for every research scientist that invents a new way to glue ceramics together or comes up with softer toilet tissue. But I won't be setting up altars for the worship of the inventor of patent number 86-kagillion-328 because in the first place, I wouldn't want to offend a person I respect, and in the second place, he's too damn busy squinting through a microscope to care that I don't believe in the One True God of Science.

Come back to me when you can explain exactly how spontaneous generation works without all the jumped assumptions and guesswork, and know what? I still won't buy science for God. A process of elimination is not a deity. Get used to it.

What I wish I could do

2010-10-09T23:48:00.000-07:00

I was listening to Michael Savage the other night, something I don't do very often but I happened across him while he was listing all of his ideas for what would be best for the nation. I agreed with a lot of them, but not with others, but overall they wasn't much to them. Some things would be really useful, but overall the change they envisioned was very minor, and could be easily gotten around in time.

Got me to thinking. Unfortunately I haven't thought about it deeply enough yet, and I don't have a real program to put together. But I have a couple of ideas that I want to get on the record.

The principle problem with all governments, no matter how they start out, is that they always, always devolve to oligarchies. Whether you begin with a democracy or a tyranny, a communism or a republic, eventually it turns into an oligarchy, where are few liars, robbers and too often murderers run the joint for their own profit.

A republic is supposed to prevent that by pitting the different forms of government against each other. In the USA we have the three branches; legislative, executive and judicial, and the legislative is divide into two houses so that the four basic forms of government are covered. House of Representatives: democracy.
Senate: aristocracy.
Executive: monarchy.
Judiciary: timocracy. (Many might not be familiar with this term--it's the rule of honor)

Now the Senate has ceased to be aristocratic, it is democratic. And the Judiciary has become aristocratic at best, and oligarchic in the main. But the Executive has grown oligarchic too, as it's a myriad of departments with unelected bureaucrats really running the show. The political appointees get captured by the system with the greatest of ease.

Part of the problem is the Constitution itself. It was designed for a relatively small nation. Arizona, where I live, is presently almost twice the size of the 13 original states combined.

So how can the Constitution be saved if it can't handle something as large as a population of 300 million? The left of course wants to chuck it and set up an open oligarchy. They can call it progressivism or communism or socialism or social democracy, but it's really just oligarchy. Look how the 'stimulus' was spent. Cronies and political donors, especially unions, got the bucks, the rest of us got a few empty promises. That's how oligarchy works, the ins get what they want, and the outs foot the bill.

All oligarchies eventually break down, because the outs eventually get tired of it and start running around rebelling, and sometimes lynching the ins, whether it's Vercingetorix or Alaric the Visigoth or Simon de Montfort (the elder) or William Wallace or Wat Tyler or Lenin or Pol Pot or Lech Wałęsa or Václav Havel. As that list demonstrates, it doesn't always turn out well, and the cure is sometimes worse than the disease.

So how do we do it? What is really required?

In a word, Federalism.

But not just lightweight rearrange the chairs Federalism. I mean hard-core 200 proof full bore Federalism.

How about six Houses of Representatives for different regions of the nation, each with its own budget that still has to be approved by the single Senate and the President. How about tax structures devolved closer to home, instead of one size fits all (very badly). How about each House has 5,000 members, 1 for each 10,000 people. No more concentration of power, because you've got to REALLY work to get a bill passed by 2,501 Representatives. That would also see the end of the two party system in the legislatures, because even the Libertarians would be able to get at least 3 or 4 of their candidates elected if they had 30,000 seats to choose from.

How about Senators are no longer elected directly but are appointed by state legislatures and can be directed how to vote as ambassadors from each state to the federal government.

How about public employee unions are made illegal. If you are on the government payroll, you work at the sufferance of those you serve. Public servant rather than employee.

How about electors elect the President again--we don't try to learn everything about some guy far away that we can never really understand. Instead we elect an elector, a guy who represents no more than 10,000 people in the presidential election. 1 in 10,000 it is possible to know about. He'd have to be local, he'd have to have roots in the community, and people would've done business with him, go to church with him, etc. You could know enough about him to have a good idea if he had honor and integrity. And then instead of 100,000,000 people voting based on vague notions of television debates, 30,000 would battle it out on our behalf.

How about the states do the same thing. Counties become like states in the original Constitution, moving power away from state governments as much as possible. Some stats, like Texas, California and New York Especially, become three or four states. North, South, East and West Texas. North, Central, East and South California. New York would be harder. But limit each state to 10,000,000 inhabitants, so that governors and state legislatures are more accountable to their people.

Of course this is all sheer dreamin. It would require a Constitutional Convention to get this sort of thing enacted, and it would require our current representatives and senators to vote power away from themselves. And that's something oligarchs never do. There are some who might go for it, but only if it were possible, which it probably isn't. Nonetheless, the thought is worth thinking, because after all, worldview is what drives everything else. If the idea that devolving power instead of centralizing it ever became popular things might change. Not the sweeping change of my own personal Wonderland, but here and there, in small ways that can add up. A state could reorganize along Federalist lines, a mini federal republic within the Republic, rather than a mere commonwealth. Some states are very small, and could do it quite easily. But first the goal has to become more widespread, else nobody will ever think of it.

So at least the 5 or 6 people who read this blog will know about it. Better than nothing, by a long shot. My gratitude to all who read these words.

Martyrs of the Revolution

2010-10-07T11:56:00.000-07:00

We have a lot of progressives in the United States, all of them working hard at the revolution. Some belong to the Cult of Gramsci, toiling away to change minds through the institutions, other belong to the Cult of Frankfurt, chipping away at the foundations of America. All of them believe, as does our President, that America would be much better off as a statist nation. The real question is: what happens to the progressives if they win? There can be no doubt that many progressives are willing to give their lives for the revolution, but are they all so selfless?

In his classic allegory of the Bolshevik revolution Animal Farm, George Orwell described such a character, the horse Boxer. He was selfless, tireless, and firm in his conviction. He was a hero of the revolution, a courageous fighter, the hardest worker, and the most fervent believer. Old Major, the founder of the revolution and its beliefs, promised that when Boxer was too old to work, he would be put out to pasture until he died of old age, and under no circumstance be sold to the glue factory before his time. Old Major died before the revolution itself, and the new leader, Napoleon, sold Boxer to the glue factory the moment he was no longer of use.

The Bolshevik revolution wasn't the only progressive revolution in history. There have been many successful revolutions, and many more failures. All of these revolutions, whether successful or not, included thousands of people working toward the same goal, and many of them willing to do anything for its ultimate triumph. The true believers of each of these revolutions were often willing to commit brutally inhuman acts for their beliefs, sacrificing their very humanity for the revolution, turning themselves into monsters because their ideology was so pure. Most however, were students, intellectuals, teachers, and professors, the elite revolutionary vanguard who led the masses towards the promised land. In the failed revolutions, many of these leaders ended up in prison or dead, some lived in exile, and others survived hardly scathed, able to return to their old professions and take up their lives again.

What happened to the revolutionary vanguard in the successful revolutions? Did they lead the masses to the promised land, or did they end up being martyrs of the revolution? The answer to that question is grim and horrifying, and inevitable.

The intellectual component of a revolutionary conspiracy is extremely important in the early days. Highly skilled thinkers are needed to proselyte recruits, dissemble to the authorities, create useful propaganda, and plan the uprisings. The masses, the beneficiaries of all this noble largesse, aren't much use in the early stages due to lack of education and intelligence. Besides, it may take a clever speaker to stir up a mob, but the mob itself doesn't need much by way of brainpower. They'll join when the time comes whether they understand the reason or not. Most victorious revolutions have all followed this pattern, America being a notable exception. The many intellectuals of the revolutionary elite lead the revolution, and when they have the victory, they settle in as leaders of towns and villages, as teachers and professors, or as functionaries in the government. Right?

Not at all. Once the revolution is accomplished, the revolutionary vanguard has got to go. In every case, they have either been slowly whittled away or purged with lightning speed, because once the revolution is over, their skills are not only useless, but highly dangerous. From the Jacobins to the Khmer Rouge, the revolutionary vanguard gets the axe as soon as possible after the revolution is successful.

The professionals who never survive a progressive revolution are always intellectual in orientation. Lawyers, journalists, professors and teachers are either exiled to slave labor or killed outright. They are rarely allowed to practice their professions in the new regime. In Cambodia wearing glasses was enough to get one killed. Labor unions are outlawed, because the new regime is of course the best friend workers ever had, and doesn't want any challengers, especially organized challengers. Those who fomented revolution once can do it again. Better to get rid of them, including those who are ideologically progressive, because true believers are more dangerous than anyone else. In some cases this process lasted many years, such as the Fascists in Italy and the Bolsheviks in Russia. In other cases it happened like lightning, such as the communists of Cambodia and Cuba. In China it happened in waves, and lasted more than two decades. Some Chinese professors thought they were safe after surviving twenty years past the revolution, but there is no safety if one is a potential threat and of little use to the revolutionary regime.

The idea that the revolutionary vanguard will be useful after the revolution is laughable on its face. What use are poets and professors of literature once universities become war factories for the protection of the revolution? Who needs intellectuals when all the questions have been answered, and asking new questions is forbidden? Teachers who learned to teach before the revolution are too hard to retrain; better ship them off to Siberia and train new teachers who owe everything to the revolution.

The question for America is: how any of this could possibly happen here? There are plenty of progressives doing everything they can to bring about their particular vision of Utopia, some by way of overthrow, others by fomenting collapse, and the largest group by indoctrinating or seducing as many young people as possible. How exactly can their revolution happen in a nation where nobody admits belonging to the masses, and with a large proportion better armed than the militaries of many other nations?

Signs of the terrible answer are beginning to appear. Because the leaders of the progressive movement in America share the ideology of their predecessors and fellow travelers, it is reasonable to believe that they will have no more compunction in allowing their Boxer-like followers to pay the price for the success of the revolution. Indeed, they might be used to foment the revolution, to give up their lives en masse to make the revolution possible and successful.

This recession has brought to light many of the inequities in America, but one of them has caused more anger than any others. States are on the verge of bankruptcy not simply because they have spendthrift legislatures, but also because their public employees are unionized, and are owed massive pensions that the states simply can't afford. Some states may well cut back on those pensions, but others might go bankrupt trying to do the impossible. The federal government is in the same boat, with two tiers of pensions breaking the bank--pensions for unionized federal employees providing a retirement of idle wealth, and Social Security, providing subsistence-level poverty for those who were forced to pay into the system throughout their lives.

Don't they see a problem developing here?

Paying taxes is always onerous and grudging, but paying ever increasing taxes to ensure that union members enjoy a cushy existence while the productive members of society can only look forward to grinding poverty is a recipe for terrible resentment. What if a progressive turned the tables and started preaching against the unions? What if 'social justice,' instilled in many children while they were still ignorant enough to be tricked, is propagandized against those it currently protects? What if armed citizens were collected into militias or mobs and sent to arrest teachers, professors, and bureaucrats so that the government could confiscate their ill-gotten pensions? While they organized the militias, they could also collect information on just who is armed, and what sort of weapons they have.

Mob justice is not un-American. There have been plenty of mobs murdering many people over the years. A clever politician who is willing to sacrifice his revolutionary elite while simultaneously wiping out possible intellectual threats could conceivably make such a scenario work. Many would like to believe it impossible, but as ignorance is intentionally propagated by schools failing in their duty, whether intentionally or not, ever more Americans are governed by emotion rather than reason. The whole progressive movement is evidence of that; they care only about feeling good about themselves, and care not a fig for the actual results of their ideas. They advocate what cannot be, and what will be if they were to succeed would include a purge of their own ranks.

Perhaps some wouldn't feel much sorrow over the lynching of progressive teachers who betrayed their students by preaching the revolution and doing everything possible to indoctrinate instead of instruct. If it were possible to be certain which were voluntarily teaching such things and which were doing as they were required by their administrators, it might be just. However the guilty would be punished with the innocent; a lazy and corrupt government worker would hang next to a conscientious public servant. Every progressive revolution to date has betrayed the revolutionary vanguard because the oligarchies they set up can only be ruled by a few. Would any progressive leader shrink from ridding himself of possible threats within his own camp while simultaneously obliterating the intellectuals that might challenge his rule from without? This while also earning the trust of armed citizens who know very little about their history but who feel very strongly?

Of course this is not inevitable, nor is it even likely, thank heaven! Schools may not teach children to be free citizens, but there are other ways to learn, and many Americans are doing just that. Armed citizens won't be so easily turned into a mob, and any progressive leader who cynically turns on his fellow travelers will not be trusted by a large proportion of Americans.

The real lesson of history is that all those progressives who labor for the success of the revolution will never survive in the revolutionary workers paradise. They will be purged long before socialism magically transforms into true communism. A book has asked: 'What's the Matter with Kansas?' The writer posits that the ordinary folks in Kansas are fools to not know their own interest, that a government that hands out goodies is better for them, and they ought not to oppose it. The question might also be asked, 'What's the Matter with California?' Is it possible that progressives don't know that they will be sacrificed to the revolution the moment they are no longer useful? Can any reporter or professor or intellectual truly believe that he or she would survive in a progressive regime? They don't know their own interests. The fond imaginings of happy peasants working collective farms while benevolent intellectuals watch over them or teach their children to be perfect are nothing but pipe-dreams (often enough literally so). Reality will intrude before the revolution is complete, and like every other progressive revolution, what will emerge is not socialism, or communism, but oligarchy; the rule of an elite few over everybody else. It is painfully obvious that an ordinary 2nd grade teacher or junior-sub-under-assistant secretary of parking meters in California or South Dakota is no more likely to be a member of that progressive oligarchy than Rush Limbaugh.

The BlackBerry Nightmare

2010-10-06T12:13:00.000-07:00

I'm one of the weirdos that has an iPhone and a Blackberry. My iPhone works flawlessly all the time. It does anything and everything I want, has never had any connection problems, and can be backed up, synced, updated etc with nary a problem. iPhone 4 is the coolest thing ever.

I also have a BlackBerry curve 8530. It is a phone. That's it. Anything else I try to do is a constant problem. The phone itself works fairly well, but connecting to a computer is a nightmare.

I've had this thing a bit over a year. My employer decided they wouldn't pay $60 per month for my iPhone, but would much rather pay $110 per month for this hunk of junk. The software that came with it was from 2006, and the updates they've been doing lately are just insanely bad. When I installed the 5 update it erased everything on the phone and every setting I had on the computer. Now that 6 is out I've been more cautious--but without reason, since it won't work. Instantly crashes when I connect the phone. Now one might think this was an unusual problem, but it's not. There are complaints all over the net about it, and nowhere could I find an actual fix. Everybody is going back to 5 or even 4 rather than try to figure out how to get around the fact that there's nothing from the company at all. NO answers no nothing. The hurly-burly about the iPhone 4's connectivity issues was everywhere, but not a peep about this issue, which actually goes back to the 5 update--they still haven't fixed the problem for those who ran into it back then.

Bottom line--this is my third BlackBerry over the years, and I hated every one. Thank heaven I didn't have buy this thing myself. Every time I switch from my iPhone to the BlackBerry it's like going back 6 years in time to my first POS BB. BlackBerry is like Microsoft--it may be crap, but at least it's standardized, commonplace crap that everybody uses.

I think I'll try downloading the BB software on my Mac. Maybe it'll work better than on my Vista and XP machines.

The rise of the new agnostics. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine

2010-09-07T11:13:00.000-07:00

This interesting piece on agnosticism The rise of the new agnostics. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine had approximately 2.8 kagillion comments on how atheists don't absolutely disbelieve in God or claim to know He DOESN'T exist. This is literally true, in most cases--all the books on Atheism that I've read have the de rigeur claim that of course they're not TOTALLY sure that there's no God, only 99.999999% sure, and naturally anybody foolish enough to believe in that 0.0000001% chance is an idiot.

Which is another way of saying that the so-called 'New Atheists' are true believers, even though what they believe is a negative.

I have no respect for the integrity and character of any atheist. Simply taking the position is proof of dishonesty. Agnostics, however, I can respect, even though I disagree with both their logic and claims. Agnosticism is relatively consistent, while Atheism is more of a temper tantrum against the God of childhood, a 'rebel without a cause' kind of angst, rather than a position of any intellectual strength. Atheism is utterly devoid of reason, which without any other evidence is demonstrated by propriety claim to reason by Atheists themselves.

In short, an Atheist is a fool beyond the reach of reason and logic. An Agnostic is a fool who may be moved by reason and logic. Naturally I prefer the latter. Lest one assume I think all Theists are wise, let give the assurance that I reckon practically everybody in the world a fool, including myself. Many Theists are every bit as dishonest as Atheists, and many are as unwilling to take the risk of trying to learn the truth as Agnostics. I divide the world into fools who recognize their limitations are are trying to learn and grow and are willing to admit to being wrong, and fools who have learned all they need to know and refuse to listen to anything else. Of the latter Joseph Smith said "...and I say unto you there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over the ninety-and-nine just persons who are so righteous; they will be damned anyway, you cannot save them."

The American Spectator : America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution

2010-09-07T10:41:00.000-07:00

This long article in the The American Spectator : America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution is a great breakdown of the divide that currently faces our nation. It's worth the time it takes to read, and even though the author never mentions it, his article underlines one of my favorite pet arguments. Every single thing his "Country Party" undertakes needs to be defined by two governing principles: "Is it Constitutional?" And "Does it promote freedom?"

Those two touchstones could unify the disparate group that make up the opposition to the oligarchy that currently has our nation on its knees. It won't fix itself, because all government is by nature oligarchic--dictators need secret police and bureaucrats every bit as much as monarchs, and every version of democracy and republic eventually turns into an oligarchy too. It requires an effort of will and faith to rebuild a republic and do away with the oligarchy, and republics take the longest to devolve into oligarchy, so that it can have a lasting impact unlike trying another new! improved! form of government. I'll believe new and improved when I see it; socialism and all its cafe-au-lait imitators are just oligarchy with a nifty new scheme to make the proles think they're in charge. It's just the Medieval Church under different management. The TEA Party movement is largely incoherent at present, because there is no single defining principle other than a distrust for the would be rulers of us all. Distrust isn't enough. Freedom should be the goal both actual and expressed.

One More Chance for the GOP?

2010-06-19T07:53:00.000-07:00

While there is broad agreement between the recently stated principles of the TEA Parties movement and the garden-variety conservative principles that have been a part of the Republican Party platform for decades, it is no exaggeration to say that the TEA Parties are not comprised of GOP loyalists. There is an undercurrent within the movement, plainly evident in meetings and all over the web, that is even more angry at the GOP than at Obama and the Democrats. This is not the anger of purists for impure politicians, but rather the wrath of those who feel betrayed.

The GOP has many excuses for the growth of government during the last Bush presidency. Bush himself was not a firm conservative, the Republicans in Congress never had solid majorities, especially in the Senate, there were overseas wars to fight and Democrats had to be bribed to pay and equip the troops--and all of the excuses are true enough. Reagan had a similar excuse, which was just as valid: the Cold War needed winning, and he had to bribe the Democrats to side with America, hence the increases in domestic spending. His tax cuts (created with Democratic help) doubled tax receipts in the Eighties; the Dems who controlled Congress through most of that decade simply did more than double expenditures.

True as those excuses may be, they aren't the whole story. The 'Bridge to Nowhere' is emblematic of the problem; the GOP wasn't really sure about the whole shrinking government thing. Too many were captured by the system. Too many thought that bribing people to vote for them was just the American Way. And though there were nearly 80 Republicans who partook sparingly, they weren't the highly visible Chairs and other leaders. They were back-benchers because they weren't playing the game; they actually meant it when they said they were in for only 6 or 12 years. They were serious about getting rid of the Departments of Education and Energy, and fully intended to reign in the entitlements. But there weren't enough of them, and the 'Old Bulls' ran things the old way, and earned themselves the epithet 'RINO' fair and square.

Right now it's beginning to look like hope and change is really coming. The earthquakes in diverse places may soon be followed by a political earthquake that will set the press abuzz for years to come, unlike the quickly forgotten real live temblors.

If it does happen, and both houses are won, the GOP will be at a crossroads that will change everything for good or ill. They had their big chance in '94, and for a year or two it looked good. But slowly they started 'governing.' They forgot the Contract With America and started trying to find reasons to waste lots of money and get themselves reelected.

Another chance is coming. The TEA Parties are favoring the Republicans at the moment, and that's unlikely to change soon--it's not like the current crop of Dems are suddenly going to turn fiscal conservatives. This election could be the earthquake foretold over at RealClearPolitics.com. The GOP may get another chance, a bigger and better chance, to fulfill the many promises they've made over the last several decades.
And it may be the very last chance.

There's no doubt that third parties traditionally act as spoilers--the Perotistas in '92, Ralph Nader in 2000. It goes back much further, and has pretty much always been that way.

But the Republican Party is not a permanent fixture in American Society. There was a time before and there will be a time after. The Democratic Party has been the party of vote-buying from the beginning, so we already have the permanent party of venality and corruption with occasional fits of Truman. But the Federalists eventually became Whigs, who then became Republicans, and from that time the GOP has lasted a good long while.

That doesn't mean it'll last forever.

When the Republican Party was founded, most of its members were former Whigs. Much of the old party structure ended up in the new party, and many of the Whig candidates became Republican candidates. Tellingly, the Whig Party had become the go-along-to-get-along party, and the Republican Party is past halfway there. They were in minority a long, long time, and many of the remaining 'Old Bulls' came up when Democratic Party majority seemed to be an institution. They learned how to chum it up with the Dems so they could get their pet projects through. They supped at the same trough, boasted of pork-barrel projects.

And when they were in charge, they made a few cosmetic changes and went back to the same old slops.

The advantage of an earthquake is that it will demonstrate the will of the people in a way that ordinary elections don't. If the GOP wins big in November, tsunami big, and then goes back to the same old song then a third party will go from speculation to certainty. And those who think that the Republican Party will easily survive that kind of change are deluding themselves.

The Republicans in Congress voted every one against Obamacare. Well done! Kudos and applause. Now they're talking tough about repealing it. Well done again! But if the TEA Parties give the GOP their chance in November, they had better take it and not just slow, but stop the progress of this nation towards social democracy and socialism.

The message of the TEA Parties is still developing, but it can be stated quite succinctly, and it goes out to both parties: YOU CAN BE REPLACED.

And if the GOP goes from repeal, repeal, repeal to reduce, massage, and lubricate after November, replaced they shall be.

The Tea Party vs. the Intellectuals

2010-06-15T12:01:00.000-07:00

Lee Harris makes a lot of good points about the TEA Party movement in Policy Review - The Tea Party vs. the Intellectuals. One point I believe he missed is that a lot of TEA Partiers are anti-intellectual for reasons other than ignorance or lack of education; some despise intellectuals because they are conversant with the actual meaning of the word, and disagree with the philosophical basis for the term. The idea has been around forever; Pharaohs and Priest-Kings held power with the help of educated elites, and every tyranny has a large body of highly educated 'intellectuals' to prop it up, from Hammurabi to Hitler and beyond.

But where Harris really shines in this essay is in the definition of the TEA Party movement as more about attitude than intellect. No doubt there are many in the movement who cannot clearly explain the origin of the idea of political freedom; they might mention the Magna Carta or Anglo-saxon Common Law or other early components, or perhaps they're familiar with Locke or Burke etc. But tracing the whole history of the concept of freedom as a political ideal would probably be difficult for a lot of them. The Scottish Enlightenment gives us the key to this attitude, however. Common Sense, in the philosophical sense, is why each and every one of the TEA Partiers knows at a gut level that freedom is worth a struggle. We all know that we have free will, which is why there are so many religions and philosophies and political movements and elite theories of breeding or 'scientific' arguments trying to explain it away. We all know in our hearts that we do get to choose, and it is only through self-delusion that we can ever believe our free will doesn't exist. If most of humanity doubted the existence of free will, instead of 90% of all intellectual output being yet another attempt to prove it's non-existence, nobody would bother to even mention it. It wouldn't be the core theme of almost every belief system from the worship of Marduk and Ishtar to New Atheism and 'Progressivism.' Just do a quick check today: liberals blame bad human behavior on society (and the bourgeoisie). Feminists blame the patriarchy (and the bourgeoisie). Communists & Socialists (ie 'progressives') blame the bourgeoisie. Environmentalists blame industry (and the bourgeoisie). Fascists blamed capitalism (and the bourgeoisie). Nazis blamed Jewish capitalism (and the bourgeoisie). There are Christians and Muslims who blame the devil for bad human behavior (but not the bourgeoisie). Dig a little in nearly every belief system around and you will find two things: an attempt to deny the existence of free will, and an inadvertent acknowledgment that free will is inescapable.

All those belief systems have a villain. And in every case, the villain is assigned free will, while the pitiful victims, be they the poor, women, minorities, German volk, etc, don't have free will cause the bad guys took it away. THEY have the freedom to take freedom from US, so we have no choice but to behave badly.

Sound like excuses to behave in ways that would otherwise be shameful? That really is the crux of it. In ALL cases the point to not feel ashamed when raping marmots, or whatever other perversion strikes the fancy. And yes indeed. The Nazis murdered millions of Jews, Gypsies and other minorities just so they could justify their particular perversions. The Communists murdered millions for money; they are the world's most successful gangsters. Feminists get to behave like the village bicycle and justify misanthropy, Environmentalists get the pleasure of hating human beings, etc, etc. And in all cases there are more than a single pleasure in the cross-hairs; the goal is always the exercise of free will at the expense of others, despite all the pious pronouncements and preening self congratulation.

The question is why the attitude of the TEA Partiers is different. It really comes down to the genius of America, which is to embrace what everybody knows is true rather than try to deny it. So there's an actual tradition of "I'm responsible for myself" in America, and it's part of the bedrock, so deep that many of us don't even realize it's there. But there it was all along, and simply flying the original Navy Jack will bring it out in an instant. The intellectuals who have spent years learning how to deny the existence of free will so they can rape marmots with casual cruelty (or whatever it is they want so badly) can't recognize it because they don't want it to be true. Years spent building a fortress of self-serving lies are all too easily breached by truth, so additional self-deception is required. The TEA parties are racist!! Yeah, that's the ticket! Fortress of deception once more intact.

Some might call me an intellectual (but hopefully not to my face, them's fightin' words) and I've got all the symptoms, especially overweening arrogance and extensive information. The saving grace is that I really and truly believe in free will. It's one of only a very few things I reckon solid. Because of that I not only don't want to rape marmots, I don't need an excuse to allow me to do it with a clear conscience. Since I believe I'm free to choose my destiny, I don't want to be a marmot-raping intellectual. What I'd really like to be is a knight errant, but I'm too fat, so I'll settle for sage--just as soon as I managed to turn some of this information into wisdom.

Cliff May : Kurdistan: the "Second Israel" - Townhall.com

2010-05-28T09:40:00.000-07:00

A most interesting article: Cliff May : Kurdistan: the "Second Israel" - Townhall.com

I first started learning about the Kurds when I was 9 and extremely interested in the Crusades. Saladin (supposedly Saddam Hussein's personal hero) was a Kurd, and as I had never heard of them, the name struck me as very funny. Rather like Turkey and Greece. I remember laughing my head off over a book that said "Alexander sets out to conquer the world" because I had never heard of Alexander the Great.

Later on after reading a bit about Kurdish history I became more and more interested, and today I'm just peeved about the raw deal they've gotten in the modern world.

Americans have no better friend in the Middle East except the Israelis. And if there was such a nation as Kurdistan we'd have the best ally possible. Kurds don't share the same hatreds as Arabs or Persians because they've always been a small nation among large ones, or a minority in other nations. They were promised their own homeland after WWI when the Ottoman Empire was broken up, but instead of creating Kurdistan Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson just drew lines on maps and created a bunch of fake nations, not even based on the existing timars of the Ottoman Empire, not based on the ancestry of the people in each region, but just arbitrary boundaries invented by a couple of arrogant old fools crawling around on a giant map.

A lot of people think that helping the Kurds form a national homeland is a bad idea because it will stir up a hornets nest in the middle east. So it would, but the question remains--would that be a bad thing for the USA? Turkey, Syria and Iran all have Kurdish regions that would want to be part of the new Kurdistan, but the governments of those nations cling to the territory despite the fact that they don't want the Kurds. The problem with so-called 'realpolitick' is that it includes the assumption that existing borders are sacred and inviolable and must never ever be changed. Considering the origin of many of those boundaries that's a foolish dogma. If the Kurds were allowed to form their own nation, and managed to get the territory from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey to create Kurdistan, it would certainly set off a bomb in the middle east--every people would want their own homeland. What we call 'the Arab world' is nothing of the kind. Most Arabs are descended from other peoples, and are only being held together by the artificial national boundaries that turned them into Syrians or Jordanians etc. So-called Arabs are descended from many Turkic tribes or Mongols or Greeks or Egyptians or Sabataeans or Phoenicians etc. Many of those peoples have lost their identities in the long, gruesome history of the Saljuk and Ottoman Empires, but not all. Quite a few nations most of us have never heard of would suddenly be clamoring for birth if once Kurdistan was a reality.

Holding these artificial borders as permanent is a foolish and dangerous dogma. Kurds presently have plenty of good will for America. Any of these possible new lands we might midwife into being would also have goodwill towards America. Wilson's follies might be done away. 'Big Oil's' creation of the Saudi kingdom might be forgiven. While it would certainly be more difficult for diplomats to remember the names of all the tiny new nations that might exist, the existing power blocs would be broken apart and while small wars might be more common, big wars would be harder to manage. It wouldn't bother me in the slightest to have a nuclear Kurdistan, but nuclear Iran is a nightmare. And even Iran is not a real nation; Persia ceased to exist as a separate nation long before the modern era. Iran 'land of the Aryans' is a creation of modern eugenic and racist beliefs. If Iran broke up into its component regions some of them would remain hostile towards America without a doubt. Others would be our friends, not least the Kurds of Iran.

The simplistic view of the 'Arab World' or the 'Muslim World' has got to stop. The stupid orientalists haven't fixed anything. All they managed was to convince everybody that there's a monolithic culture where no such thing exists. The Ottoman Empire looked very strong from Istanbul, where most westerners saw it. In reality it was always a mess, with near constant rebellions all over the place. Mughal India and Persia was the same way.

Supposedly Americans are all for nature these days. They pretend to be on TV all the time with the 'Green' propaganda. In this particular case perhaps we should let nature take its course instead of trying to prop up impossible situations for another century. I'm not always a fan of nature--letting Yellowstone burn down was foolish. But thus far nothing has been able to change human nature except religion, and even then only slightly. It might be time to let the middle east work out its own salvation in fear and trembling, helping those who are our friends and leaving the rest to fight it out as they care to. And the Kurds are friends, and deserve our help after having been left in the lurch lo these 90 years.

New Statesman - The republican moment

2010-04-29T09:52:00.000-07:00

While I disagree with a lot of the ideas in this article in the New Statesman - The republican moment by Richard Reeves and Dan Leighton, there are several good ideas as well. One thing I've been thinking about a lot lately is "too big to fail."

These writers in the New Statesman argue that republicanism should be about Big Citizens rather than Big Government and Big Business--and of course the TEA Party movement couldn't agree more. Nobody in the movement is arguing that GM should be ever bigger and the government should hand another bag of money to Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac--and a lot of economists are saying that we should just let 'too big' banks or corporations fail.

"Big Business" really has grown too big--too big to succeed. The larger a corporation grows, the more adverse to risk it becomes, hence the government bailout mentality. The risks taken by these corporations were minor, because their sugar daddy was there to cushion the fall. And who's the sugar daddy? Ordinary folks who pay taxes.

And this makes sense--because if GM were to completely fail, there are millions who would be at risk of losing their jobs. Dozens of industries are centered around the auto industry, and if both Chrysler and GM vanished overnight (impossible, but stay with me) the disruption would cause a domino effect as suppliers, dealers, and ancillary products manufacturers went joined the death spiral.

Wherein lies the problem. The government HAS to keep those businesses alive to avert disaster. But there's the rub--why allow a company to get so big in the first place?

Now if we actually had a market economy and a federal republican government I don't think any corporation would ever get so large, because government is colluding at many levels. Tax cuts and incentives to put plants in particular towns are the most common, and as Goldman says, 'we partner with regulators.' Try partnering with the fire inspector who comes to see if the tiny addition to your house is up to code. Yeah, right.

Corporations CANNOT grow so gigantic without government collaboration, because putting all those eggs in one basket is an intolerable risk, unless you have the government sweetening the pot at several levels, smoothing the dangers, leveraging the regulations. No corporation would be as big as GM if it had to rely on its own merits to survive.

I have written many times that the primary motivating factor in large corporations is fear, and that fear would keep corporations smaller all by itself.

We have federal form of government. A federal form of corporation would be leaner, meaner, more innovative and more competitive. It already exists on paper, as every large corporation is made up of 'independent' divisions. If you think they're really dependent, try getting a new idea up the chain. If you have the best idea that ever happened (like personal computers for example) getting a large corporation to take a chance is just not going to happen. Doesn't matter if the middle manager of a supposedly independent division loves the idea. When there's a risk to capital involved, middle managers find that they are not leaders, but order-takers and spear-carriers.

What would happen if large corporations broke into smaller pieces? Some would die. Some would thrive. And if it were handled correctly, each division breaking away could make a whole lot of people fabulously wealthy.

What is not often perceived is that the greed of Wall Street bankers is not based on creating wealth, but on guarding wealth and making a percentage to increase it. The derivatives that were one of the catalysts that caused the current recession were not risky--they were mixed risk. The irrational fear that drove down their prices made them worth less than their real value, because only small percentages were based on bad loans. It was not really a risky move, but it demonstrates that the whole belief in the magic brains of financial leaders is a false.

The same arguments that apply to big government apply to big business. The more power is concentrated the more harm can be done. Diffusion of power is the best idea of all time in government, and the same goes for corporations. Concentrating financial power into the hands of a few fools who think they are gods is insane.

So what do we do? Trust-busting? Make laws limiting the size of corporations?

Naw, not necessary. Make it illegal for government at every level to favor corporations. No more condemning churches to make room for a new CostCo. No more sweetheart deals for companies that agree to move into town. Not deregulation, but a start-from-scratch revision of regulations to make them clear, just, and possible. No more legislation demanding that the tide cease and desist.

The largest size corporations will find their own level, because nervous bosses won't want to be responsible for the increased risk. Corporate alliances, rather like united states, will take the place of giant multi-nationals. Imagine a GM plant opening as a independently owned franchise.

Of course I'm dreaming. Unions will hate this idea. They LOVE having one big company to work against. The Democrats and most of the Republicans will hate the idea, because dealing with one big company is easier than 1000 small companies. And of course all the big banks and corporations will hate the idea because power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. It's so much cooler to be CEO of a $100 billion corporation than a $230 million corporation.

Nevertheless, it would be the most republican outcome. Freedom flourishes when individuals have power over themselves. Taxing individuals to help egomaniacs pretend to be masters of the universe is anti-liberty, anti-republican, anti-democratic, and anti-American.

New Statesman - The economist manifesto

2010-04-29T08:59:00.000-07:00

So nice to find I agree with a Nobel Laureate, who loves Adam Smith at least as much as I do. Unfortunately the article is very sparse, but still worth the read: New Statesman - The economist manifesto by Amartya Sen

Reading "Theory of Moral Sentiments" after having read "Wealth of Nations" casts the latter in much better light. Libertarians everywhere need to read it so they can give up on the whole magic market and realize that human nature is neither naturally good, nor perfectible. If you buy "Wealth of Nations," you gotta buy "Theory of Moral Sentiments" because they are not discrete philosophies, but one philosophy.

Now Arizona is more like Europe...and still they complain?

2010-04-28T14:04:00.000-07:00

So now that non-citizens are required to carry their papers with them in Arizona, we hear that this reminds us of Nazi Germany where they can demand you papers at any time...or like every European, Asian and South American country right now. You can be stopped and asked for your papers EVERYWHERE except America. So now Arizona, after being abandoned by the Feds, has come up with a law that attempts to do what the Feds won't, and has hence become more like Europe, the glittering dream of every liberal and Leftist since WWII.

And still they whine about it. I think we all know they wouldn't be whining if it were US citizens that were being questions, it's only because any attempt to catch illegal aliens and send them home is BAD to the left. Question non-citizens? Demand their papers? OUTRAGEOUS! US internal passport? Brought before Congress (by the Dems) every Congress in memory.

Forgive me if the deceitful wailing over this law doesn't impress me. Emerson said "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." I reckon a continual and deceptive inconsistency is the hallmark of even smaller minds. Petite-fascist indeed.

Pigs won't fly

2010-04-27T08:55:00.000-07:00

I think this review: Literary Review - Kenan Malik on What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmerini is very interesting, but while the author claims that the books he's reviewing made a critical mistake in understanding Darwinism, he makes a critical mistake in his review. The reason the authors of the book are suggesting pigs might fly is because they have everything they need to grow wings in their DNA. The external myopia of Darwinist evolution is evident even in his rebuttal, because his assumption that external lack = internal lack is the very fallacy the book is attacking. The biggest question that currently has the scientific world stumped is how DNA actually works. Mapping the human genome made things harder to understand, not easier. But the new questions won't be answered until the current generation of scientists die out. For every open-minded scientist there are thousands who see no need to learn anything new. Darwinism is already dead, but those who have invested their lives in it are not, so it will continue to be preached until the priesthood dies out and the new generation of priests rise up with a new idol to worship. Somewhere in middle age scientists (just like those of pretty much every profession) decide they are DONE. They understand everything they need to, and learning from that point on is merely finding little tidbits to add to their already finished work. Additional footnotes can be added, but never EVER something that makes the whole thing obsolete, or even a major part of it.

We're in paradigm-shifting times. Those of us who grew up with computers are reconciled to the fact that we'll never be done learning, and it won't be long before that attitude will be the prevailing attitude. 20 years from now scientists of the old school will be found in old folks homes everywhere ranting on about how Darwinism will never die, evolution by blind natural selection is the TRUTH, dammit, and that will be the epitaph.

David Brooks is amazingly naive

2010-04-23T14:09:00.000-07:00

As usual David Brooks doesn't know what politics are about. I'd love to live in a system where we were just arguing about little minor changes to the few understandable Federal laws and regulations and spending most of my political thoughts on my city/county and state issues. The reason for The Government War as he terms it is the growth of government. I don't want to care about federal politics. I'd be ecstatic to vote for an Elector who would vote for president and not even worry about foreign affairs etc. I don't get to choose, however, 'cause the government is deciding how much water I get to flush in my toilet, among so many other things that the mind boggles.

Us 'small government' folks are only defending ourselves from attack. The left wants the war because they want to tell us how to live in every way they possibly can. The left is trying to force us to adopt their religion ('gay' marriage) and force us to adopt their politics ('social justice') and force us buy into their new & improved racist eugenics (abortion) and so on ad infinitum.

I don't want this fight at all. Most conservatives/libertarians/small government types don't. We want to be left alone to work out our own salvation. But that's not possible anymore. 25% of the GNP is being confiscated by the government, and the left wants want more more more. We're in the fight because we're under attack. 'Those who have not swords can still die upon them.'

Brooks has the same fallacious idea of government as both Presidents Bush. They think the president is a manager, and politics is a nasty, plebeian business beneath the dignity of the office. They actually think that government is about managing the real problems of our nation.

If only it were true. It would be nice if it were true. But until the small government side wins, it will never actually BE true. Talk about wishful thinking!

Go Home, Mae West

2010-04-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

There is an excellent essay from yesterday at the American Interest by Walter Russell Mead. Federalism is making a comeback under several different names and with parallel ideas.

What really needs to happen is that Libertarians and Federalists need to be reconciled.

Libertarian is a word almost as useless as conservative, because it covers way too much ground. While it's not so relative as conservative, it gets pulled in too many directions to be very descriptive anymore. There are plenty of people calling themselves 'libertarian authoritarians' and similar things today, and 'libertarian fascist' has started to become popular as a pejorative. These things ought to be, and really are, contradictory, but I think they make sense nonetheless. The problem is that a lot of libertarians DO advocate top-down federal fiats such as legalizing drugs or prostitution. There is also a utopian strain among a lot of libertarians, magical thinking that markets will simply fix everything no matter the morality of the people in the market.

It's also the reason the Libertarian Party has never gotten anywhere politically; grand sweeping changes to the whole country via a central command structure flies right in the face of the ideals being preached.

What libertarians, conservatives, etc, need to remember is that the power of government really does reside in the governed. Just about everyone in every political party keeps fighting over the scraps in Washington and wishing and hoping for change to come from Washington. The Reagan and Gingrich Revolutions failed over time because they were top-down. People reckoned all was well and went about their business. And there is the fatal flaw in the plan.

Roman legions once conquered the 'known world.' They were extremely disciplined and followed the orders of their generals very well, especially great generals like Caesar. But on many occasions they got beat to pieces because the generals wouldn't let go of the reins. There was a trumpet call that had been around for centuries that might've saved many a legionary. When the fighting was too confused and the general no longer knew what was happening, he could release the legions, which made every centurion a general. Each of the centuries was then free to exploit the advantages that they could see and the overall commanders couldn't. That's what our federal system is designed to do. Ever since Adam Smith it's been obvious that governments can't understand economics, nor can any human being. Our republic is 90x larger than it was at the founding, as Dr. Mead points out; the founders knew that they weren't wise enough to order the lives of 3.9 million people. Do we really believe that our current crop of politicians are able to order the lives of 350 million? Are they that much wiser than the founders?

The TEA Parties of course say 'No Way' and the Republican Party ought to say the same. Libertarians should join the chorus. We need to devolve power by engaging locally. Start fixing problems that are close enough to be fixed. This does not mean that the huge central juggernaut must be ignored, or it will undo any progress. But the states and counties and cities have plenty of room to work in. A lot of things have been swallowed up by the central government, but not everything.

It's time to rebuild the federalist system, and you don't start a building with the cupola. You start with the cornerstone, and in America that ought to be liberty, which means individual autonomy to the greatest degree possible. We need to remember that if we are free individuals, our rights bear responsibilities that CANNOT be removed without removing the right itself. If you have a right to bear arms, you're responsible for your weapons. The two things are inextricably intertwined. If any of us wishes to retain our rights, we have the responsibility to defend them. The TEA Parties are a part of that; so many of the partiers keep talking about how they've never demonstrated before, never become politically engaged in such a way before. Why not? It was always their (and all of our) responsibility. But as the old saying goes, everybody's business is nobody's business.

Time to make it our business, and start working on every issue possible, from the local PTA to the county commissioners to the junior-sub-under-assistant dog-catcher.

The era of big government really is coming to an end. Clinton called it even though he didn't believe it then or now. But Europe can only afford to be Europe because America is America (as Jonah Goldberg said recently). And as we're seeing America can't afford to be America if she tries to be Europe. And even that old paradigm is coming to an end, because Europe is going broke too. Turns out 'Democratic Socialism' is unsustainable.

The question is: what replaces big government? From where we stand now the easiest move would be fascism. We're mostly there already; government controls big business and supposed capitalists are licking any boot that comes into range. And if you think 'progressives' can't be fascists, 'cause fascist myths from the past, check out any union website you like, and look at the history. There are glorious myths of the past everywhere you turn. They just need a better Horst Wessel than Jimmy Hoffa.

We could also break apart. It's not impossible, and the coasts have lorded it over the rest of the nation so long that a lot of people might feel it's worth it. I disagree, and hope it never comes to that.

The usual path for a democracy is to devolve into an autocracy or monarchy. Our petite-fascist government would easily transform into such a state, but Obama certainly won't do for the autocrat. The democrats may pretend they're not racist, but they are and everybody knows it. They'll never follow Obama-as-king. Luckily there is no democrat popular enough to be king right now.

This being America, the most likely outcome will be for ordinary Americans to do it themselves and rebuild the republic. Pessimism be damned. There may be many millions of Americans who live pointless, meaningless lives, drawing their basic living stipend and ignoring their children as much as possible. These are not beyond the reach of amendment. Much of the difficulties of the past 50 years have been due to the earthquake of the Civil Rights movement. It produced a fundamental change in America, and gave the Left (however mistakenly) the moral preeminence that has brought about so many changes for the worse. We're now on the 3rd generation since those times, and most people my age and younger have no memories of Segregation and for most of us organized racism is incomprehensible. The last great hurdle to creating a republic of the people, ALL the people, has been passed.

So run for town council or county board of supervisors or school board and DON'T try to fix everything with the stroke of a pen. If you want our federal republic to survive, stick to your appropriate level. This means voters as well as office-holders. Hugo said 'if you want to change the world start on the grandmothers.' Well the Baby Boomers may be a lost cause, but my generation is just starting in on grandchildren.

Want a real revolution? Start from the bottom and turn the power-base of Washington into quicksand. The current generation of soldiers won't be shooting civilians any time soon. They risk their own lives very often to avoid shooting at Iraqi and Afghani women and children. I don't see them changing into SS death camp guards any time soon. There's still time--and hope for the future.

Nat Hentoff

2010-04-21T17:44:00.000-07:00

I don't always agree with Nat Hentoff but I sometimes do, and this is a worry I share with him: autonomous robots that can make the decision to kill human beings.

I read Asimov's Laws of Robotics long ago, and though the brains they were created to control remain science fiction, it dismays me that many governments are just forging ahead with autonomous robotic killers.

Currently our unmanned drones require a kill order from a human commander, and a button has to be pushed by a human remote pilot. This is a good thing, and should remain the standard in my opinion. Obama's willingness to waste any suspected terrorist out there worries me too; who knew that the alternative to Club Gitmo was death. If we don't capture anybody we don't have to decide what to do with them after all.

In Mr. Hentoff's article it appears that the only member of Congress who has registered any concern over these extrajudicial killings is Kucinich, and normally I'd disagree with him if he said the sun rises in the east. Considering the bureaucratic nature of the CIA, I am not sanguine that they're going to paint a target on the right guy every time, and the unconcern with collateral damage rather chills me.

I believe that both Afghanistan and Iraq were legal and necessary conflicts, and that our military around the world is fighting the good fight against the modern equivalent of pirates. And while I'm not happy about ANY collateral damage, I'm fully aware that there's no way to avoid it entirely. Our warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown themselves to be extremely noble in not shooting at terrorists hiding behind women and children at the risk of their own lives. I'm sure that the pilots of the Predators and Reapers are of the same mold, and would avoid harming any innocent if it's possible.

However I'm not so certain that those developing the information and feeding them targets are quite so noble, and I know that a lot of the human assets the CIA and other intelligence agencies use are by nature corruptible. It's not above some of these people to use the CIA to revenge themselves on enemies that aren't necessarily our enemies, or to remove impediments to their own rise in their native lands.

Which is why I've felt uneasy ever since I learned that we've doubled and trebled the number of drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Our informants on the ground live in a tribalist world of warlords and ancient hatreds and rivalries, and cannot be wholly trusted to only point at real bad guys. The callousness towards civilian casualties of these attacks worries me even more. While I have a hard time imagining a company of Marines firing into a crowd of American civilians, a political operative quickly trained to pilot a Predator might be much more willing to drop a few missiles on that same crowd. And as for an autonomous robot? Well garbage in garbage out. If you program it to waste the crowd, it will.

And then there are some of those unmanned tanks and scout robots I've seen on the Military Channel.

I prefer the whole remote pilot thing. The idea of an autonomous robot tank rolling in to suppress a crowd while armed with a Vulcan Gatling gun is enough to turn my uneasiness into queasiness.

Asimov! We need those Laws of Robotics again please!

Thanks Wikipedia:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Sounds like a better plan to me.

Let the Founders speak for themselves

2010-04-14T14:18:00.000-07:00

One of the best blog entries anywhere yesterday at PJM: Eject Eject Eject

I have nothing to add except admiration.

Allen Hunt : The Polanski Pedophilia Pendulum - Townhall.com

2010-04-13T11:50:00.000-07:00

The conclusion of Allen Hunt in The Polanski Pedophilia Pendulum - Townhall.com is that the pendulum has swung too far back from the ho-hum attitude of yore. Here's the problem with that conclusion. It hasn't swung at all.

The left is still ho-hum about seducing/statutory raping underage teenagers unless priests do it. The right is still agin' it. The problem with the story Mr. Hunt describes, of an 18-year-old out on a date with a 14-year-old and engaging in petting, is not whether or not the act is wrong, but whether it should be illegal--can a 19-year-old only rape a 17-year-old? Is the difference in age important to the question? Common sense says yes. The point of statutory rape is to protect young teenagers from adults who can very easily seduce them. And the idea that an 18-year-old is suddenly an adult is and has always been silly.

The real problem is not that the laws are wrong--it's that the law itself has been destroyed by lawyers and judges. The vast number of laws governing everything and ignoring the reasonable person standard have made law into an arbitrary justice system. You might get justice--you might not. But because it's arbitrary, even when statutes are followed precisely, it cannot be relied upon and makes all of us less secure in our persons, property and freedom. While I think an 18-year-old making out with a 14-year-old is wrong and weird (as I did even when I was 18, and a 14-year-old was after me) I don't think the 18-year-old in question deserves to be in prison and ruined for life with the stigma of a 'sexual offender' hanging 'round his neck. That's unreasonable. If he were 20, I'd change my mind. 25 and I reckon throwing away the key is the way to go. The difference in age makes a big difference.

Now part of the problem is that children mature at different rates, and 18 is an arbitrary age; there are some kids who are as mature as they're ever going to be at 13--they may be 60 and they're still irresponsible, stuck on potty humor, and think sex is salvation. Some are far more mature at 13 than your average 21-year-old. All this may be true, but a sliding scale won't do when there's no fixed criterion for what constitutes the ability to think as an adult. Since an arbitrary age has to be selected, 18 is suitable, but lawyers and judges need to remember that the point of the law is justice. 'Legal' has no meaning unless it is tied to justice. This is one of the fallacies of the left in America. They think that legal means right and illegal means wrong, but it works the other way around. If it's not wrong there's no reason to make it illegal.

This divorce of legality and justice happened despite the opposite intention. Clarence Darrow's win-by-any-means strategy to defeat the death penalty, which was in his opinion legal but wrong, has made lawyers into mercenaries, and laws into the rules of a game. Winning in court is winning a game, not serving justice.

This is not a federal problem alone. None of us has the least idea what is legal and what is not. We're all in danger of the law, because the original idea of common law being tied to a reasonable person is gone--there may be ridiculous laws or overly strict laws that are totally useless and arbitrary but have teeth. The idea that ignorance is no defense is still extant in our legal system, despite the fact that even lawyers and judges are ignorant of the laws. Not one person in this country knows all the laws of city, county, state and nation. I doubt that even the best lawyer or judge knows ALL the laws of his particular city/county/state/nation.

Dealing with unreasonable statutory rape laws is a band-aid. Forget the pendulum and try to fix the systemic problem. It may look incurable, but the only way you fix these symptoms is by curing the disease. So long as justice and legality are only distant acquaintances justice will remain elusive and eventually will become entirely absent. After all, 6 million Jews and 4 million other 'undesirables' were legally murdered by the Nazi regime. Anybody want to claim that because it was legal it was right and just?

Thoughts on Holocaust Day

2010-04-12T17:37:00.001-07:00

On this Holocaust Day, we must stop and wonder why once more the Jews are facing grave dangers despite all the lip service world powers give to 'never again.'

It's not hard to guess why the Left abandoned Jews and more specifically Israel; they had the bad manners to win wars against vastly superior numbers. How dare they! Israel ceased to be poor, pitiful and picked-on because they won several wars. And the Left needs victims, otherwise they are irrelevant. Self-confident, courageous, stalwart Jews are as despised by the Left as self-confident, courageous, stalwart anybodies.

It's also worth noting that a primacy of the middle class in the western world is due in no small part to Jewish influence. There's a reason we call them Judeo-Christian ethics instead of just Christian; after all there were centuries of Christian ethics in Europe that resulted in a very slow increase in wealth and freedom, with the largest uptick caused the Black Death of all things. While plenty of Protestants were anti-semitic, many others were not, and were much more mindful of the harmonies between the Old and New Testaments than the Roman and Greek churches ever were, and much less dependent on philosophy-as-science.

There's more to it than that of course. Perhaps the most telling reason is that the Left is romanticist; victim Jews being persecuted are romantic figures in need of help from great intellectuals. Warrior Jews defeating multitudes of enemies are the wrong sort of romantic.

As one who is proudly bourgeois, I am grateful to Jewish culture and scholarship for making my life possible. The United States wouldn't exist without that influence.

Hence the danger.

When Islamo-fascists and petite-fascists (i.e. 'Liberals' or 'Leftists' or 'Progressives') point the finger at the Jews, they're correct in fixing the blame. The Jews are to blame for the economic and social freedom we enjoy. That's not to say that Minutemen and the Continental Army didn't do their part; but the underlying intellectual framework of Locke and Burke and even Newton, of Smith and the entire Scottish Enlightenment, would never have existed without Jewish influence, acknowledged or not. Mostly not, as it would've been unpopular at the time.

The slow and subtle change from universal antisemitism in Europe took a lot of work, some by artists, some by statesmen. Sir Walter Scott in 'Ivanhoe' portrayed Isaac of York as a fairly conventional caricature of a grasping Jew, current in his time; but Isaac's daughter Rebecca was the modern view thrust back into the middle ages, the most sympathetic character but also the most familiar to a reader of his (or our) time. A victim yes, but a brave, wise, strong victim, both sympathetic and admirable. There have been countless examples since, and all of them have slowly moved many minds away from antisemitism.

Then after WWII for a while antisemitism was as unpopular as racism generally remains. There was a difference, however. In all too many cases it was the sympathy of superior for the inferior; the compassion of the noble for the utterly pitiful wretches. Condescending but also a little contemptuous.

But of late that's been changing yet again. Once more in subtle ways, and unfortunately in some cases by Jews. There have been a lot of movies showing Jews and more often Israelis of being cruel and brutal and most importantly powerful and exploitative. There are examples from the 60s, and more recently movies like Munich by Spielberg. The idea of Jews as anything other than helpless victims annoys those who see the world as a smorgasbord of hapless fools who just need a firm hand guiding them, and no trouble guessing whose hand they expect to take the reins.

That Christians no longer even figure in Jewish persecution is a wonderful improvement on the world of yesterday; that Leftists are now complicit in attacks on Jewish persons and synagogues not so much. Christians (for the most part) have finally taken to heart Paul's pronouncement: "And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise." (Galatians 3:29) With which comes the rather obvious corollary: it's not right to persecute your cousins, whether they admit the relationship or not.

Which is something Muslims ought to think about too. Of course, the vast majority of Muslims are not descended from Ishmael, but those who are actually Arab, which is a minority of those we generically call Arab, ought to stand up for their cousins instead of being among the worst offenders.

The reason the Left is winking at intra-Ummah antisemitism is because now Muslims are the poor, pitiful, picked-on victims. Haven't won a real war since the 17th century, can't even build proper muskets, let alone AK-47s, without help. It's telling that even sword blades ended up being exported to the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century, when before that the best blades had always come FROM the Islamic world.

These things are not really true, of course--Malaysia, for example--but it doesn't have to be. The Leftists have their illusory victims to pine for, and if the price of that is a few Jews, well, the Left never has worried much about broken eggs, since their omelet is going to be SO GREAT!!!

Meanwhile I'm not really sure what's to be done. Our current excuse for a President is trying to show his disdain for the Zionist Entity and doing a good job of it, and since nobody seems to think my idea of starting health-care reform at the state level I reckon we'll just have to wait for November and pray. The big thing right now is 'what if Iran 'Land of Aryans' gets the bomb? It won't be any consolation to me that Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Qom and Tehran follow Jerusalem into destruction. I'll pray it never comes to that.

American Thinker - Comments

2010-03-24T11:44:00.000-07:00

My comments on Selwyn Duke's piece at American Thinker

I also came to a similar conclusion when I was a teenager, very soon after crowing over Reagan's victory in my AP History class. My teacher was of course a Democrat, and was very quiet that day, and I did not take the advice of my female classmates and moderate my exuberance. Today I regret what I said, not because I believe I was wrong, but because I now value the concept of the gentleman, and it is ungentlemanly (and unmanly for that matter) to kick a fallen opponent.

I think a large part of the moral decay of our nation comes from religion rather than any political movement. Over time strange currents have appeared in theology, which of course may have come from the communists who started trying to infiltrate churches in the '20s, but that can only account for a part.

One of the ideas that I've seen in many places and many religions regards sexual activity--the idea that God is too big, too powerful to care about silly ideas of pre-marital or extra-marital sex. He could care less about whether one is gay or straight, etc. He's got bigger fish to fry, and how could our silly antics matter to Him?

This idea comes from the mistaken belief of why God gave commandments. Most see whichever commandments they want to ignore as pointless restrictions, and think God is mean for trying to spoil the fun. But what was the purpose in giving commandments at all? It's simpler than it seems. Jesus said it best: "where your treasure is, there your heart is also."

The commandments don't have any effect on God; they have an effect on us. God wants us to be happy; not in the skin-deep fun 'n excitement sense, but in the sense of the bone deep contentment that comes from understanding and grace. The commandments are rules that will make us happier, plain and simple. Another commenter mentioned the cycle of righteousness to prosperity to wickedness to hardship in the Book of Mormon. I'll add a quote from Alma 41:10 "I say unto you, wickedness never was happiness."

Consider the consequences of sexual activity unhindered by any morals or qualms. The Hollywood perfect romantic moment of sudden passion leading to perfect love doesn't exist in the real world 999 times of a 1,000. Singles bars are depressing, moody, melancholy places, filled with men and women vainly hoping that this time they'll somehow find the Hollywood ending. Pornography keeps men from being able to relate to actual women, because they "aren't dirty enough for me," as if any woman actually longs to hang around for 5-6 hours to get the money shot you see on the screen, or would even pretend to enjoy humiliation and degradation without the abuse and molestation that most such 'actresses' suffered. Adultery is the source of murder, lies, recrimination, broken families, scarred children, poverty, suicide, and countless other ills. Young people 'getting busy' find out too late that children are only one possible consequence. One of those consequences, abortion, has deprived us of 40,000,000 fellow citizens, and since 15,000,000 of them were black and 8,000,000 Hispanic and the rest mostly po' white trash I guess we're supposed to assume that we didn't want them anyway. According to the 'progressives' they were useless throwaways all.

Running through all of these things is one constant--deceit. Singles lie to each other about anything they think will gain an advantage. Pornography is not art because it is all deceit with no truth, and those who live immersed in it imbibe deception until they can no longer see truth. Adultery is all about deceiving one's spouse, and lies get built on top of lies as truth becomes an enemy. Young people trust the messages they see and hear from their elders and find out when its too late that falsehood often comes with sweet and pretty packaging.

In all these cases, self-deception is necessary. No husband or wife thinks 'I'm going to betray my spouse because I'm selfish and cruel, and want to hurt her/him because I care more about fleeting pleasure than the good of my partner in life.' There are always rationalizations and excuses, and that goes for all of the examples I've listed.

God is the God of Truth; He won't need to judge you at all if you come into His presence with a mind and soul stained with lies and deception. You'll be wishing for a mountain to fall on you rather than have to see Him without the protection of the web of lies you've woven all around yourself. Truth will set you free; but most people prefer comfortable slavery to painful honesty, even when they know the latter leads to real happiness. God really doesn't care about your actions--He cares about YOU. And because so many have lost sight of this, and so many preachers have run away from this truth for either 'hellfire and damnation' or 'don't worry we'll all be saved,' the comforting lies of romantic sentimentalism (which comprehends socialism, communism, nazism, fascism, etc) are a highly desirable alternative.

Decline and downfall are not inevitable. Unlike the Jaredites and Nephites in the Book of Mormon, Americans are not yet to the point where the Spirit ceases to strive among us. We're not even close. So chin up, fight on, and embrace truth wherever you find it.

Repeal takes too long--steal a march RIGHT NOW

2010-03-23T17:29:00.000-07:00

Like many others I have been alarmed and disgusted by the recent attempt by a certain portion of the Congress to inflict their morals on the rest of us. Despite pretending to be against 'legislating morality' they've certainly outdone every other such attempt since Prohibition. After being despondent for a few minutes, I decided it would be more productive to think of a way to fight this usurpation of the rights and liberties of the People of the United States.

The disdain of the Democratic Party for the voters and our Republic is not surprising in any way except in its openness; we have rarely seen these petite-fascists without their masks, but now there can no longer be any disguise. They have decided to embrace tyranny in a way that America has never seen before, and I hope will never see again.

Despite the claim that this is 'comprehensive' health care reform, the bill passed on Sunday did not address any of the major causes of the increase in health care costs. These are well-known and have been much studied and mentioned in the last year. They are in brief:

• Over-regulation via Medicare and Medicaid

• Third-party payment of medical costs via Health Insurance

• No interstate market for insurance companies, making insurers de facto public utilities and in some cases monopolies

• Lack of choice in Health Insurance, giving only a few options for employer-provided insurance that do not suit individual needs especially for young adults

• Jackpot lawsuits increasing costs both for malpractice insurance and needless defensive medicine

These are not new problems. They have been lamented for decades, and no serious national attempt has been made to address most of them. Some of them have been successfully if partially addressed in the several states, and that is more cause for hope than some might allow.

Most of the conservative commentary today is a variation on a few themes. Some claim that repeal is the answer, which means keeping up momentum until November and then again until 2012 so that the Republicans can undo this monstrosity before the it gets really going in 2014. Many expect the courts to knock down some or all of the unconstitutional portions of the bill. Others hope the TEA parties or the general anger of the public at this travesty of tyranny will roll back the tide with a seismic political shift. A few are hopeless, assuming that nothing can be done, that we're now stuck with an American NHS before many more years pass, and that it means the eventual end of the Republic.

All or none of these things may be true. The Republican Party cannot entirely be relied upon. The courts are arbitrary in many ways, and the 5-vote oath-keeping majority at the Supreme Court is fragile. Public anger is a fickle thing; it might last and it might not. But it will take a full generation before Americans are willing to put up with the terrible care available in Canada or Britain unless one has the means to pay for a private clinic.

Most of the commentary is about momentum, and how it must be maintained if anything is to be done.

So how do we keep momentum going for more than 2 years? How can we wait for 9 months while more and more people are lulled into a false sense of security that the Republicans will fix it, that the Roberts Court will stop it, that the anger of the no-longer-sleeping giant will be as mighty as that of the WWII generation after Pearl Harbor? Or worse that they will be lulled by the constant drumbeat of the Ministry of Propaganda (also called the legacy media): "I am no devil, for there is none."

I hope that the lawsuits prevail, the People rise up, and the Republicans repeal. Meanwhile I think we should just get started right now.

Reform health care now. NOW NOW NOW. Don't wait for Congress and the federal government. We know what needs to be done. We've known for a generation. So let's quite talking and whining and waiting and just get it rolling.

Last I heard there were 37 states that introduced or passed legislation that in some manner attempts to opt out of the new federal health care 'reform.' Well I say let's go a step further. Not down the most dangerous road toward a constitutional convention, but instead start reforming the health care system among the freedom-loving states that refuse to dance to the anti-democratic tune of the misnamed Democrats.

Instead of waiting for congressional Republicans to repeal, start implementing Republican ideas right now. We know what they are, they were ignored very effectively at the Blair House charade. We should do it not in each state haphazardly and individually, but as a body. Let the states that want to preserve the liberty of the people join together. We could call it the Free States Alliance. And not only could the states reform health care, they could simultaneously build support for real reforms at the federal level, and keep the momentum going so that not only are people mad at the assault on their liberties, but hopeful that there's a way out of the trap.

Individual states, via their governors and state legislatures, can join into a coalition of sovereign states that can act as the laboratory of freedom as they were always expected to in the Constitution.

1) Member states can create and join a health insurance exchange that allows interstate commerce not by having multi-state insurance companies, but instead by creating one standard for health insurance among the several member states. These standards can include all of the best ideas brought forward by the Republican congressional representation at the recent Blair House meeting, especially allowing different levels of insurance to attract younger people currently uninsured, including medical savings accounts. This will allow insurance companies to operate in several states as independent corporations, but with one standard and similar pricing structures in a stable, competitive market.

2) Member states agree to standardized tort reform, so that insurance companies both for health care and malpractice will have a much better ability to calculate costs due to the stability of normalized laws and regulations. In addition this will attract doctors from other states where malpractice insurance is onerous, and will attract citizens as well, anxious to escape from the statist coasts.

3) Member states would create a collective high-risk insurance pool to provide for those who cannot afford insurance due to pre-existing conditions. This might be funded by a special fee on insurance companies who agree to operate in the Free State Alliance.

4) Each Member state will agree that the standards will be reviewed and best practices may be changed every 3 or even better every 5 years, giving insurance companies at least a year to adjust any major change before it goes into effect.

This will not sit well with the Federal government, because after it's not as if the Democrats actually care whether they improve medical care for anybody in the United States, they only care about increasing their own power and buying votes. This is nothing more than a gigantic vote-buying scheme, and unfortunately many millions of Americans are willing to sell their sacred franchise for a little bread and an exciting circus. It may well be that the petty-tyrants who lorded it over us on March 21, 2010 will attempt to force any such alliance to break apart.
That is not an argument of much weight. Those of us who love liberty can only do our best to promote and defend it, and this proposal has a possibility of creating a free zone within the United States that will attract freedom-lovers from other parts of the country as well. This is not a call for secession, or anything like unto it. It is a call for the states to reassert their constitutional rights and to do it in partnership with other states, forming a coalition that will not easily be broken.
There are two Americas as the unlamented John Edwards often said, however they are not divided between haves and have-nots. There is free America, where individuals are responsible for their own destinies and accept the consequences of mistakes when they come, and there is unfree America, where the middle class is detested by high and low alike who would much rather blame all circumstances on anyone or anything rather than themselves. Free America has borne the weight of parasitic bureaucrats, plutocratic petite-fascists and their hapless captives long enough. Enough with the pity-party; it is time to damn the torpedoes and steam ahead.

Not all of the issues can be handled in this manner. Medicare and Medicaid are federal programs that need Congressional attention--they'll simply have to wait. The tax advantage of employer-paid (and chosen) health insurance will remain the province of the Congress as well. But instead of waiting to tackle everything at once, we need to start somewhere right now.

When confronted by an overwhelming amount of work, the smart worker begins on something small, establishes a clear area of success, and then sets about tackling the larger issues with renewed confidence and the knowledge that even if bigger problems await, at least one issue is resolved. I've been in this situation professionally many times, and know what it is to have 6 problems at once after two days of steady work with no sleep. At that stage it's hard to think, and harder to come up with a brilliant solution to a problem that's been running on for many hours or days. As a nation we're at that point; years of problems have been allowed to deteriorate and now we're on the brink of a new petite-fascist state. America could be over with--the possibility has grown in probability. We need to get a few of the smaller issues behind us to bring the seemingly impossible issues into perspective, because they are not impossible, only difficult.

I read today that no nation has ever recovered from the nanny state, that entitlements always expand and never can be repealed, and that we've already gone over the cliff. I say that's a steaming pile of balderdash. This is America, we are Americans, and YES WE CAN!

American Thinker Blog: Obama's hypocrisy on the environment exposed

2010-03-18T15:28:00.000-07:00

This story at the American Thinker Blog is about Obama's hypocrisy regarding the environment, but it raises a further question. How long are the American people going to accept this kind of tyranny?

Thousands of businesses and farms have gone under in the San Joaquin valley to protect a fish that is a species only in the sense that it looks slightly different from others of its kind. It's not an actual species--it's the sort that gives biologists and zoologists their chance for immortality by discovering a new species. Never mind that it's a very common species that can interbreed successfully with its kind; they remove the sub- from sub-species today so they can increase the importance of minor discoveries. If we applied the same standard to humans we'd have to pretend there were over 3,000 human species instead of one.

This junk-science approach is treated as gospel by the environmentalist petite-fascists who are really just looking for any excuse to circumscribe human activity of any kind--except of course for sex-acts that don't result in an increase in human population. If the so-called Delta Smelt vanished tomorrow it would have minimal effect on the species as a whole, and nature wouldn't even notice. Only the uber-Victorian hyper-sentimentalist/romanticist/puritans (aka 'environmentalists') would notice or care, and then only because they'd missed a chance to cause human misery.

So thousands have been impoverished for no reason than to scratch the tyrannical itch of a pack of petite-fascists, and there was no rebellion, no shots fired, no EPA or Fish & Wildlife offices torched, no government officials murdered or kidnapped--in short, the people just took it and didn't fight except legally.

And now the supposed species that was SO important turns out to be less important because Obama needs a couple more votes to increase his party's ability to tyrannize still further.

So the water gets turned back on, and all the dead trees and lost jobs will just spring forth from Obama's brow helmed and armed like Athena, right?

The damage is done. And who in their right mind would trust the government in this area? Are all the businesses going to open again only to find themselves shut down once more when it's no longer expedient to 'risk' the Delta Smelt?

As usual power corrupts, and the more you have the more corrupt you become. That's why we have a federal republic in the first place. By rights California should've refused to comply and then tied it up in court, instead of accepting the destruction of a few million acres of cropland to please a few petite-fascists. But that requires courage, something not in great supply among politicians.

Which is a lesson in itself. At some point it will become too much. And cowards that they are, the petite-fascists will run for cover, leaving behind a few mostly innocent scapegoats to satiate the wrathful public. Can't let them get away with that. No point in putting a teacher in jail when an administrator is guilty, no point in putting away a park ranger when it's the cabinet secretary that's to blame, and especially no point in tossing away the promising future of a deluded young person when the professor and NGO that deceived them.

Cosmic justice is only possible when God takes a hand directly. We'll have the settle for the best humans can manage, but we should also accept no less than the best. This farcical situation is nothing but injustice worthy of a Peron or Castro. It shouldn't happen in America.

Where Feminists got it Right?

2010-03-10T10:32:00.000-08:00

Jonah Goldberg wrote a good piece at National Review today.

Feminism was right about lots of things, and the trouble is one can't just separate 1st, 2nd & 3rd wave feminism cleanly. There is a lot of spillage between the various versions. The reason the 1st wave was so successful was because it redressed real and glaring injustices. 2nd and 3rd wave feminism have focussed too much on petty or false injustices, so that while the media makes it seem that feminism is the de facto religion of America, it really isn't nearly as popular as all that. And you'd have to hunt really hard to find anyone who would disagree with the 1st wave. I don't know of any group other than a few whacky individuals who want to take the vote away from women, make it illegal for women to own property, etc. 1st wave feminism is totally mainstream now. It's the later varieties that have done to feminism what leftists have done to words like liberalism and progressivism.

Some have mentioned the idea of arming women in Muslim countries, and it's a sound concept. Firearms are one of the underlying and ignored reasons for feminism. One of the reasons women have needed protectors all these centuries is because men are stronger--when you're dealing with hand weapons men are always going to win, whether sword or bow or what have you. While it's true that individual women may be skilled enough in some areas to beat men handily (Queen Christina as a fencer, for example) it requires FAR more skill than a man needs. A woman who is a superb swordswoman can beat off almost any attacker, true; but it takes time, training, and dedication to the pursuit of the sword.

Then came the firearm, and a 93lb woman can kill a 300lb man with a little .32 pistola and strength won't help him. While I certainly agree that the American ideals of freedom and justice have helped along the cause of equality between the sexes, physical reason such as little bitty pistols easily carried in a handbag played a significant role as well. And for this reason modern '3rd wave' feminism has gone far down the wrong path by aligning with Frankfurt-school socialism. Women even more than men need handguns, and need to know how to use them. Every woman doesn't have to have one, but the perception that any woman might have a .38 special in her handbag needs to be kept current, because those of us who would die twice over rather than commit rape aren't the only men around. There will always be barbarians, but like the Vikings, they go for the soft target most of the time. The native cowardice of anyone who thinks rape is a good idea will protect lots of women if firearms are common enough to increase his uncertainty.

The good news is that the choosing of sides is becoming obvious. Fairly soon now either the crypto-fascist masquerading as Democrats will bring down the nation or they'll fail to do so; and all their dupes and pawns will either whine themselves into obscurity or give up their belief in fantasyland. I'm betting they fail, and I think 4th wave feminism will be completely different than what passes for feminism now. After all, the essential argument of 3rd wave feminism is that everything masculine is better than anything feminine. I reckon that before long women will be proud of being women again, and that without being expected to comply with only one template for success.

Point Blank: Is Obama Stupid? (Wizbang)

2010-03-05T14:11:00.000-08:00

There's a little piece at Wizbang with an included poll about whether or not Obama is stupid. I voted 'yes' along with 63% of respondents (up to that time). Some will of course object that he can't be stupid--high IQ, ivy league degrees, etc--but as Forrest Gump would say, "stupid is as stupid does."

I have written before about how my concept of intelligence, wisdom and charisma came from Dungeons & Dragons, and since that time my ideas of how the mind is constructed has evolved considerably. I do not think Obama is stupid because he was born unintelligent; I'm fully aware that he has much great education than I do. He is not stupid because of some farcical concept of racial IQ-levels, nor because Democrats are congenitally stupid as
some apparently think of conservatives.

He's stupid because he doesn't use his brain. He hasn't learned anything since he was a teenager.

I don't mean he hasn't picked up any information. I mean that the information he's learned hasn't produced any effect on his worldview. It is fixed, hard, narrow-minded and immune to facts, truth, and logic. It's one of the things that makes me laugh at the studies linked above. Conservatives are far more open-minded than "liberals;" there's no comparison. Liberals allow no deviation on their most important subjects, while the real problem with the GOP and conservatives in general is the inability to simply get along despite differences. I know plenty of conservatives that used to be one-issue and have expanded, and others who used to be generic RINOs who have become single-issue. The only thing that holds conservatives together at all is a belief in freedom, but how it works and how to protect freedom produces no agreement.

Most of the Democratic party has been venal and corrupt from the days of Thomas Jefferson. For all the nastiness written about the Alien and Sedition Acts, few ever ask the question: WHY did the Federalists pass such laws? The answer has not changed a whit from then to now. The Democratic-Republican Party and successor Democratic Party are together little more than a long-running criminal conspiracy to buy votes and retain power, while using soaring rhetoric to hide their real purpose. Obama doesn't appear to belong to the majority, however. It seems possible that he might actually believe some of the Frankfurt School crap that has been floating around the Democratic Party since the days of Wilson. (I've always hoped that Wilson was English and had no relationship to the Border Clan of my own ancestors, but no such luck)

If he does believe it, and cares more about destroying the bourgeois system than retaining power, then he is indeed stupid--he has managed not to learn anything about how our society fits together, and keeps the childishly simplistic view that comes from Marx and all his many successors. The Peter Pan syndrome of the Baby Boomer Elite, mixed with a generous dollop of genius disease. I've been hoping (and praying) that at some point Obama would recognize the vast difference between FDR the foolish fascist faddist manager prolonging the Depression with all his might and FDR the great war-time leader who deserves our praise and reverence. But it begins to seem obvious that my hope (and prayers) are vain. Not even God can pry open a closed mind, because He knows the eternal importance of freedom, none better. God can't teach them that won't be taught. That's why know-it-all types never really know it all. One must be teachable to learn anything new.

There's really only one thing a president, any president, could do to "fix" the economy at the present moment. Make the Bush tax cuts permanent, declare that there will be no new taxes and a freeze on spending, and then get out and talk up America and the American economy with all the power of the bully pulpit. The problem now is fear. Whether or not the Bush tax cuts are a good idea, whether or not spending cuts or freezes are a good idea is irrelevant. Real people are suffering and things will continue to get worse until the fear ceases and confidence grows. Obama could fix the economy in just a few months, but instead he's wasting all of his political capital and the rhetorical power of his office (the only real non-destructive power of the presidency) on something that few want and that our nation can't possibly pay for.

That's stupid, no matter the native intelligence, no matter the great reams of information that might exist in his head. Because his kind, by which I mean useless over-educated drones who add nothing of practical value to the world, cannot exist without the capitalist system. Why do socialist revolutions fail? Because they cannot support the next generation of intellectuals. Even Russian Communism, which lasted 70 years, was really a one-generation project. Gorbachev was the first of the 'young men' of the Kremlin--and the last. China was the same way until they adopted fascism instead of communism to pay for their young useless drones to prolong the agony a few decades more. The dark ages were the last example of what happens when a capitalist economy is really destroyed. It's not because Roman Emperors were capitalists, but because an economic system is simply the way it works--all governments can do is goof things up. Many Roman Emperors tried to destroy their economic system, but it was so large and diverse that it laughed at their efforts outside the city itself. Once the ability to protect the Empire vanished, though, the economic system fell apart, as commerce can't function if contracts can't be trusted, goods can't be shipped, and money is too variable in value. The Frankfurt School thinks that a new dark age will usher in a new Socialist Utopia, but what happened in Rome will happen again--all the intellectuals will learn how to farm or die (and most likely just die), because getting enough food will trump abstruse arguments about the extremely important issues of gender imbalance in literature.

That is stupidity indeed. Anything to achieve a goal that will turn back the clock and call it 'progressive!' My profession, and my long wished-for profession, will vanish just as rapidly. But fortunately for me I'm an Eagle Scout, and in making up fantasy worlds for my novels I've learned a little about almost everything in a low-tech society, so I might get to stick around after the light blinks out. I've also got first hand experience with building, carpentry, gardening, farming, canning, bottling, and flour-grinding. If only I was a worthwhile blacksmith and chemist I'd call myself a real renaissance barbarian instead of only a renaissance nerd.

Though I've prepared for the disaster of a new dark age I don't want one. I'd much rather continue working on data centers that are around the world and writing novels nobody reads on a lovely 24" iMac. My swords are just for show--but I keep one of them sharp just in case.

Virgins? What virgins? | Books | The Guardian

2010-03-01T15:28:00.000-08:00

This is a piece that needs to be read all over: Virgins? What virgins? | Books | The Guardian

Democrats' ambitious legislative agenda pushes K Street salaries skyward - TheHill.com

2010-02-23T15:21:00.000-08:00

This is good news: Democrats' ambitious legislative agenda pushes K Street salaries skyward - TheHill.com.

So how do I get one of these jobs? At least some part of the economy is still growing, and I want to be in that part.

Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “On Taxes, Violent Revolution, Michael Medved, and the Late Mr. Stack”

2010-02-22T14:41:00.000-08:00

Off caps for Big Lizard. This is a very well thought out argument for the 'tipping point' after which armed revolution is the only option--in other words defines when that 'only option' actually comes along. Very well done and thoughtful. Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “On Taxes, Violent Revolution, Michael Medved, and the Late Mr. Stack”

The American Spectator : The End of History

2010-02-22T12:13:00.000-08:00

James Bowman as usual makes many good points in his recent article: The End of History

I think there's a little more to the vanishing of history from art than the po-mo rejection of all things past no matter how worthy. It's a desperation move by dying art forms. The problem with 'high brow' art is that it requires a certain amount of leisure that simply isn't available to working stiffs. Among the reasons for the demise of gentlemanly (and ladylike) behavior is the lack of leisure time to acquire all the attainments necessary to become a proper lady or gentleman. The three original 'thinking professions' of doctor, lawyer and parson have multiplied into approximately 11 kagillion different professions, and many of them require constant study to keep up with the constant change. I myself have had to completely retrain six times in the 26 years since I started working in high tech, and within each different type of position I had relearn constantly.

The midlands English landed gentry had an amazingly easy time of it from the Glorious Revolution until World War I; no more writs of attainder, entail laws that kept the estates whole, and not a single war on their own soil. We inherited that concept from England and as the frontier kept moving west we got our own landed gentry especially in the South, but the idea of a well-to-do gentleman farmer, even in New England, kept going really all the way until the Depression.

The idea of a gentleman got pared down a bit as the means for sitting idly through life gently managing a large estate as a steward did all the real work vanished from the world, and has been getting smaller and smaller ever since. Most of the pieces lost are educational--and despite having opera singers touring grade schools, the popularity of opera is doomed to wane. It's not merely the advent of video games and dvd-players that make many other forms of entertainment possible, and it's not only the difficultly of learning to enjoy something in a language one doesn't speak. There is also the lack of time, in short leisure, for more sophisticated forms of entertainment. You can drop a video game after 20 minutes if you have to take a call from work; you can pause a DVD and even television programs if you have a DVR. And of course you can download all the TV programs and watch them at your own pace later. Walking out of an opera that cost a pile of money is a much bigger thing. Even in the hinterlands of Phoenix plays, operas and symphonies are available but they are EX-PEN-SIVE. I pay $75 for a ticket for something I'm damn well sitting through the whole thing. The payoff just isn't there. It's 3 hours at $25 an hour, not counting parking, travel etc. The greatness of the art is lost because it's lost in translation; so they're (in desperation) trying to translate it. It is of course a failure--because if you take away the context, the art is gone too.

The larger point is that there are many people who still believe in honor, and duty, and integrity, etc; who live a code that is not far removed from that of a proper Victorian gentleman, but who would never ever go to an opera, or a symphony, or even a broadway musical, not even 'The Sound of Music.' Not because they're not smart or sophisticated enough, but rather because they have priorities more in line with their own sphere and work. Opera today is a plaything of the wealthy and highly, one might even say overly educated, and it is the cossetted class that has abandoned all pretense to honor and gentility. They are the elite of the past, but not the future.

At some point every bubble bursts, and the massive bubble of social democracy is starting to look cracked. The latest and greatest push for the antiquated 'intellectual' class to rule the world has failed due to the few emails that started 'Climategate.' After trying various brands of socialism, communism and fascism (and environmentalism), the intellectuals still haven't managed to conquer the world to rule for their own profit. They have destroyed everything they could, but the best parts of many things have been conserved in little corners of the world waiting for them to finally die out or implode. The only real question is if they'll manage to destroy the world in their death throes, as environmentalism certainly tried, and still tries to do.

Despite the fact that I'm now middle aged, I still look on the future with a sanguine hope. Opera will not be lost even if the present generation of singers are the last to sing for a century. Great art will survive, even if individual pieces are destroyed. There is far too much emphasis on physical things at present, and even if the originals are destroyed, it doesn't mean that the art itself is gone forever. Art is at a low point right now, of a certainty, but it doesn't follow that it will always remain so. The history of the world is not a long slow climb from ignorance to knowledge to wisdom, but a series of cycles, rise and fall, rich and poor, honorable and base, ignorant and learned, over and over and over again, and sometimes more than once within a single lifetime. A down-swing doesn't mean ruin necessarily; even the fall of Rome wasn't the end of every life of every person; the slaves of Rome certainly had it better afterward, and the Barbarian successor kingdoms kept as much of the middle class as possible, adopting many Roman ways. Much was lost, certainly, and the dark ages in my opinion deserve the name, mainly because I don't see Rome as the light; it was plenty dark from Commodus to Romulus Augustulus.

The fact remains it is the elites that most need to fear a collapse such as the fall of the western Roman Empire. If the banks fail lots of ordinary folks will lose their shirts, true; but they're already used to working for a living. The elites will lose everything. This is not like the Great Depression, when the wealthy owned companies, mines and oil-wells. The current crop of elites have hardly any tangible assets, and those can be taken very easily. In a collapse guns and bullets become more precious than gold, and paper money becomes worthless. How will wealthy people survive when they can no longer pay for ANYTHING because their assets are all paper? And when the common folks who got badly hurt are mad enough for mob justice?

The point is not that we're going to go down the tubes so buy a lot of ammo. Rather that there are some among the elites that know everything I've just written and more; they know perfectly well how fragile their power really is. And when the elites get desperate they cling to somebody who may save them. It may be another Hitler, true; but it may also be another George Washington. In our case Washington is more likely because he pretty much formed the American character with the example he set for his officers. The elites haven't done very well with Obama as their man on a horse, have they? Deep as their hatred runs, their cowardice is stronger. If the winds of change start blowing them down, they'll cling to Rush Limbaugh if they have to.

So chin up and don't worry so much that history is gone from art. The wheel will turn sooner or later--and when it does there may be many who will rediscover the good things of the past, and be very glad to know anybody who can tell them about it from experience.

Scientific Failures are NORMAL

2010-02-18T15:26:00.001-08:00

We're all used to thinking of science and scientists are somehow outside the normal human condition, rather like the medieval peasants looked on educated and erudite priests as belonging to another, and a better world.

As more and more evidence arises demonstrating that the global warming scare was essentially a political scam, it seems perhaps we ought to reassess our blind faith in the priests of the new religion.

I think the problem is that we tend to equate science with technology, and technology is tangible stuff--we all use it every day. I don't just mean computers and diet pills, either; every time you flush a toilet or use a plastic hairbrush you're utilizing technology that is of recent origin. Unfortunately for this view of things, scientists mostly don't create technology--that comes from engineers and geeks and worst of all lucky empirics. Scientists do research, and some of that research is based on reality, but a lot of it is not. Many scientists spend their entire lives working on something that turns out to be flawed beginning to end, and what they were sure they would eventually prove turns out to be nothing more than a vanquished paradigm.

Scientists are human beings, however; and they fight for their vanquished paradigms long after it's obvious they'll lose. There are countless examples of this in history, and it goes all the way back. Today scientists like to point at Galileo and the persecution of the Roman Catholic Church heaped on him; they like to forget that the charges of heresy were brought against him by other scientists who had a lot of time and research invested in the Ptolemaic theory of the cosmos. They didn't want their firmly grounded and easily observable paradigm to get the boot, and resisted what newer, better observation could tell. Then they all died and the next generation ignored their paradigm as nothing more than the balderdash it truly was, and the Ptolemaic theory is now just a historical curiosity.

This has happened countless times. Today we look at racism as a dark leftover of the past, but when it was first formulated it was cutting-edge science. Even now encyclopedias and science textbooks include the concept of the three main races of humanity: Caucasian, Mongoloid and Negroid. Indeed, you can still check Caucasian on your census form and many other official documents, though now they just say African as if all Africans are a single 'race.' Genetics has demonstrated conclusively that this way of dividing people as if they were discrete species that could be identified by observation is totally false. Yet though racism has had an ugly past, and only vestiges of this failed scientific theory remain, it is not attributed to science as a failure.

There are countless other examples of scientific failures, and nearly all of them are the result of hubris on the part of the scientists--especially regarding other human beings. It is in studying humans that scientific failure is almost all that exists, with very few successes outside of medicine. Sociology, psychology, archaeology, etc, are relegated to the arts colleges at universities and given the derogatory name 'fuzzy studies' as if they're the only areas of scientific enquiry to massively fail. But science itself is a history of failure, because failure is what science is about, whether for Thomas Edison finding 109 ways not to make a light bulb before getting it right to the dozens of different ways to describe an atom during the last century. Science is trying to understand a vast underground system of caverns with a pen-light. Little pieces fit together and eventually patterns emerge--but scientists are human beings, and for many the moment they get a few pieces they immediately proclaim to understand the whole. If you sit still long enough you're sure to hear the whole history of the universe from a physicist, and it sounds impressive until you realize it's just a myth. There is almost no direct evidence for any of it. It's just a consensus of learned opinion, based on theory nested in conjecture based on conclusion jumping.

Which is not to say that the Big Bang Theory is bushwah. It might very well be correct. But thus far there has not been a single observation that can account for it. No theory explains how everything came from nothing--just the jumped conclusion that it must have done, otherwise how could it be here? But the reason it is pushed as fact is because of human reasons, not scientific reasons. Scientists want to be admired and respected just like anybody, and want their work to be important. Imagine how it feels to work in a field requiring years of training that suddenly becomes obsolete; how years of preparation and high hopes and dreams can all vanish in an instant. Being a scientist may be less rewarding in some ways than having a job at a toothpaste factory screwing on the caps. After all, at least there's a visible, tangible cap on the end of the toothpaste tube when you're done. Imagine how heartbreaking it would be to have spent years on theoretical mathematics in order to figure out a problem that somebody else solves--or even worse, proves to be insoluble because it's gone in the wrong direction.

Being a scientist is no picnic, and allowances need to be made. But just like with medieval monks, abuses happen. Whether you're a bishop married on the sly and angling to get your son into the episcopate or a researcher holding a press conference and announcing that you've discovered cold fusion, or even that oat bran cures or at least prevents colon cancer, it's the same kind of betrayal of trust.

And then there's the fame angle. Predicting doomsday has gotten many scientists all over the news, onto TV programs on the Discovery Channel or National Geographic with fun discussions of how the world could fall apart, and in some cases has both generated piles of money and 'rock star' status. Imagine being a geek in school and then finding a way to be a 'rock star' without having to play an instrument and come up with silly lyrics.

We just have to realize who we're dealing with. You could find plenty of monks or Templars in medieval Europe willing to perjure their souls for a little profit or pleasure, and scientists-as-priests are just as likely to jump off the same cliffs. We expect too much when we attribute superhuman powers to scientists--or anybody else for that matter. It was always a mistake to give scientists more than human credit. And this latest example of global cooling I mean warming I mean climate change should simply make what is obvious all the more glaring.

The Paradoxical Union of Federalist Libertarians...or Libertarian Federalists...

2010-02-17T15:03:00.001-08:00

I read and signed the Mount Vernon Statement today (http://www.themountvernonstatement.com) and found myself unhappy with one major aspect of the ideas therein--the word 'conservatism.'

The US Constitution and the founding principles used to create it has always been inadequately served by the term 'conservatism,' even though I certainly wish to conserve those principles. The problem is that conservative and conservatism are relative concepts; a conservative in other nations might be trying to conserver communism, or national socialism; the word can serve equally well for either if once those nations held those beliefs.

Conservatism in America runs into the same problem. It's too easy to caricature, and to impute the desire of conserving some of the not-so-fine aspects of the early Republic. I refer not only to slavery; there were several unsavory practices and beliefs in early America. Mob rule was rife, there were riots and rebellions of many kinds, few of them idealistic in nature, vote-buying was the rule from the beginning, and the same elitism that informs the Democratic Party and 'progressive' movement today existed in the Democratic Republicans in even greater concentration coupled in the same way with their professed love for the 'common man.'

I have argued many times with libertarians or 'paleo-conservatives' who want to bring back the Articles of Confederation, or who detest Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln because of their 'statist' actions. Even more lots of conservatives of different camps spend a lot of time and effort trying to find a common thread of good and evil in American history so they can divide all the 'good guys' from the 'bad buys' and understand history from their current perspective. It's not a bad idea in itself, but it too easily lends itself to narrow viewpoints.

I've been longing for a new label ever since I was a teenager. I've gone with several other names over the years: classical liberal, federalist, libertarian, constitutionalist, and several others. The closest fit is constitutionalist, but even that isn't quite right; I believe in strict construction, but not too strict. Like the Muslim concept of ijtihad, we have to leave a little room to wiggle as unanticipated changes come up that need to be reconciled to the original document.

Using the Mount Vernon Statement as a baseline, we can divide the bullet points into two currents of conservatism. Here are the bullet points:

Limited Government & Rule of Law
Individual Liberty
Free Enterprise
Prudent but Energetic foreign policy
Traditional ethics & moral code

The two main currents of conservatism are presently called 'fiscal conservatism' which is akin to libertarianism, and 'social conservatism' which is more cultural in orientation. The 'national security conservatives' are a definite minority but with outsized influence in the party because both of the others need national security too.

Thing is all of these currents are very similar--the difference is in emphasis. All believe in balance, just have different weights to different parts.

Libertarians/fiscal conservatives emphasize limited government, individual liberty and free enterprise.
Federalists/social & national security conservatives emphasize the rule of law, prudent (social) and energetic (national security) foreign policy, and traditional ethics (national security) and moral code (social)

The Libertarian Party might seem like a natural fit for a lot of conservatives, but it has always remained a fringe party even though libertarian principles are so much a part of the conservative movement. I think it's because they subscribe to magical thinking not unlike that of liberals; they think people are naturally good, and the market will magically make everything wonderful. Liberals think people are naturally good, and the government will magically make everything wonderful.

Despite the complete failure of the Libertarian Party to amount to anything, it hasn't ruined the word libertarian. Nor has the Constitution Party ruined the constitutionalism. Republicans have managed to sully republicanism which is why it isn't much use anymore, even though it's the best descriptor; after all, what do I believe in but a commercial democratic federal republic, the best form of government yet devised? But Republican now describes a party, a team rather than a philosophy, and while I am a registered Republican I look on it as a temporary alliance in the hope of furthering my goals, not as an irrevocable oath of fealty.

So what can I use to describe my views? I'm like a large proportion of Republicans and conservatives; my ideas are fairly mainstream and moderate. Moderate should be the proper term, but that won't work because it's been ruined by the congenitally wishy-washy. So I've decided that the best descriptor is to combine two supposedly contradictory terms. I'm a Libertarian Federalist. Or Federalist Libertarian. Either way, it works. I believe in freedom to a degree that almost makes me a radical in the original sense, but I also believe in law and order. I believe in a strong military, especially the Navy, and that it is perfectly reasonable for our Navy to protect our shipping, and that a war for oil is not only not immoral, but could be easily considered a just war. I think that Adam Smith was so prescient as to be almost a prophet, and his ideas are both profound and just unanswerable. Chaos Theory in mathematics and physics is really just a restatement of his Wealth of Nations. And like Adam Smith I don't believe that a free enterprise system can work at all without a minimum degree of ethics and morality. The market won't fix it if money isn't sound, contracts either written or spoken cannot be relied upon, and property and profits are not believed to be the property both morally and legally of those who made the improvements and took the risks.

I think Paradoxical Union of Federalist Libertarian s is a catchy name--Puffles for short. Or maybe Association of Libertarian Federalists--the Alfs. No wasn't that a TV show? Or how about the Free Federalists League? Not to be confused with Federal Firearms License. Maybe somebody else should do this. But I had to try, y'know?

Comment on American Spectator article

2010-02-12T11:32:00.000-08:00

I left the following response to http://spectator.org/archives/2010/02/12/whos-to-blame at American Spectator and thought of a few things to add.

Comment:
The escalation of legalized theft is of a piece with many other parts of life. Once the Darrowite lawyers began no-holds-barred tactics to prevent capital punishment, all in a good cause of course, the prosecutors had to escalate right back. Same thing happened in civil law; once the ambulance chasers started calling an expression of 'I'm sorry' for running over a kid who ran in front of somebody as an admission of guilt, lawyers for insurance companies and anybody with deep pockets had to escalate too. Now the only thing certain in any courtroom is that nobody will tell the truth unless it benefits their side.

Same thing happened with unions vs. management, advertising, men vs. women, military vs. civilian, etc, etc. There are so many feuding rivalries these days that the mind boggles.

And the worst part is, you can't blame them. It really doesn't matter which side started it. Once the escalation begins, it's not always the one who started it who escalates the most or does their worst. In most cases you'll find abuse, corruption etc on both sides.

Right now a slight majority of the people in the United States are thieves--they rob the minority of their money for their own benefit. In most cases this amounts to very little. If one pays $5,000 in taxes and receives $5,001 in benefits, he's a net thief; but it doesn't follow that he's evil and wicked and a bandit who longs to cut your throat at night. Lots of people don't even realize that the Earned Income Tax credit is giving them back more than they paid. They look at the big check they get back and think they're geniuses at fooling the government.

Just think of how many sides we each have to choose, on how many issues. It's often unclear which side to choose--while we were bombing Serbia a few years back you had conservatives on both sides--some backing the Serbs to the hilt, some backing the Kosovars just as eagerly--when in reality both sides were rotten. Elian Gonzalez was another such case, where you had Conservative talk show hosts declaring that he should go back to his father because of family values--and others declaring that there's no such thing as family values in a communist system so he's better off with distant relatives. Even those of us supposedly on the same side can't see eye to eye on every issue, and the genius of Reagan was his 11th Commandment: "Thou shalt speak no ill of a fellow Republican."

The fractures in society are not that deep, but they seem deep because there are so many divisions, so many sides you have to sort through to figure it out. Glen Beck is currently trying to parse history into a single narrative of a progressing progressive movement, deciding which historical figures are good guys and bad guys accordingly. Lots of those of libertarian bent hate Lincoln (see Crusader above) as a statist, as if every decision of every person through history be so neatly cast as pro- or anti-statist. These escalations from disagreement to detestation are not only counter-productive, they weaken freedom and our republic. I have heard countless conservatives lament that it's impossible to argue with a liberal because they only respond with ad hominem attacks. Very true. But it's also true WITHIN the 'conservative' side of things; libertarians calling movement conservatives 'Republicrats,' Repbublicans replying with the ever-so-witty 'losertarians,' 'Birthers' are nuts, John Birchers are the 'lunatic fringe,' and countless other examples. Since the right takes no trouble to argue reasonably within, why would anyone expect a reasonable argument without?

Biting your tongue instead of coming back with a witty, cutting rejoinder is at least 10x as hard. I reckon it's time to reclaim moderate from those who can't decide which side to support and use it as a model for responses to rivals--moderate responses, reasoned and reasonable arguments, and humor humor humor--but not the cutting sort.

Because once we get to the point of drawing knives, it turns a lot of people off. Wonder why there are so many undecided people in the middle? Because the high dudgeon and intemperate name-calling makes it hard to decide who's right. Even when you have logic, history, science and common sense on your side.

The escalations have gone about as far as they can go without a civil war; it's time to be the voice of reason, the moderate, calm, reassuring, but still firm and fervent voice of reason. And really, if the nasty names we hurl back and forth were true, then what recourse would there be except civil war? If Republicans were really bent on starving the elderly, poisoning the children, murdering gays, enslaving blacks and nuking the entire Muslim world then what other recourse is there but violence. After years of getting riled up I have come to the conclusion that I will not be offended by anything that doesn't warrant violence. If my only honorable recourse is to start shooting, then I'm offended. Otherwise I'm annoyed, irritated, peeved...etc.

No doubt there are some who would welcome the opportunity to start shooting Democrats or Republicans. But I don't think that's even close to a majority feeling on either side and I can't imagine anything less likely to restore our republic to health.

Additions:
I have a feeling that whichever side can make this happen, can become the voice of reason instead of red-meat-man (or woman) is going to go far. Many have asked how Obama managed to get elected--he posed as the voice of reason. He pretended to be above the fray, made people believe he wasn't a hard-core partisan. His sinking poll numbers are due to disillusionment--the brief spasm of hope returned to cynicism. The low numbers for both Dems and Reps right now reflect that cynicism.

But underlying cynicism is almost always thwarted idealism. A true cynic is past redemption, because he's not interested in it, but these are few and far between. Most people who pose as cynics, who trust nobody (so they say) are really just hoping to be proved wrong.

So in order to really make a go of being Mr. Reasonable, one has to somehow be above the fray and at the same time be true to principles. Both Presidents Bush tried hard to do it, but they took the wrong tack--they saw the Presidency as a management job. In addition they made compromises that went too far, but this was only a part of their view of the presidency.

I know precisely how hard it is to do what I'm advocating; even in this comment I've been grinding my teeth to keep from using all the nasty epithets I might be able to use, and if you read back over the years you'll definitely see that I'm no angel in this regard. It just suddenly struck me a few days ago that though I ask in my prayers every day that God will 'help me to be good and kind to everyone,' I had sorta mentally deleted the political side of things. This is the same problem we see all the time on when the leftist media are being nasty to conservatives--anything goes because conservatives simply cannot be enough detested. All of a sudden I don't feel so aggrieved because after all, I think the same way without realizing it.

That doesn't mean that I no longer believe that anything that lessens freedom is evil; it most certainly is. But it doesn't follow that anyone who does anything to lessen freedom is purely and wholly evil. Their intentions may be angelic, if their actions aren't. Most belief systems are a mixture of freedom and slavery, and even the very worst people who ever lived were not altogether evil; many Nazis were kind to their wives and children, and Communists spared far more than they slew.

I think that the root of the debate comes down to free will vs mental slavery, and if you intend to open minds then the last thing to do is start shouting nasty epithets. I reckon those of us on the right ought to start this process by dropping all the nastiness towards each other and agree to disagree calmly and rationally where we simply can't agree, and then present a united and reasonable front on those areas where our accord is in step with most of the nation.

Yeah I know. Wishful thinking. Still and all, it needs to be done if we expect to keep our republic. I'm not looking forward to the anarchy that is always the result of democracy, and I'm REALLY not looking forward to the man-on-a-horse phase, because at that point it's definitely time to start shooting.

Somebody finally said it!!

2010-02-09T12:10:00.000-08:00

Here it is at last: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/getting-it-backwards

I would love to point to my essay about how Obama should emulate FDR only on a much quicker time scale but unfortunately I never posted it. I wrote it months ago and thought it went up here, but I forgot to upload it. Still it languishes in my essays folder.
Fortunately John Yoo over at Weekly Standard finally said the same thing (and in greater detail). It's good stuff and makes me wish I'd posted my essay so I could claim to have said it first with authority--but what matters is that it gets said. Happy happy joy joy! Good on ya, Sir John Yoo!

Avatar IS Titanic

2010-02-08T17:21:00.000-08:00

I shoulda known.

I went to see Avatar in its first week, and was impressed. It's really the only movie I've ever seen where the technical wizardry made up for the lame story.

I had no idea it would be such a phenomenon. While I'm very glad that the pitiful Titanic has at last been knocked off its gravity-defying pedestal, I could wish its vanquisher had a bit more to it.

I'm sure many have seen the comparison between Avatar and Pocahontas, though I can't make the comparison myself as I've never seen Pocahontas. The way I see it, Avatar isn't Pocahontas--it's Titanic.

Titanic's story was hackneyed, unimaginative, stereotyped, did I mention hackneyed? I never did sit through the whole thing in one go--I saw it in pieces, watching until they overlapped. And the best I could say for it was 'I've already seen this movie 500 times!' I'm willing to admit a lot of the CG was stunning and impressive, but it was just tawdry--it seems wrong to me to put a Harlequin romance on top of a great tragedy. The two just don't belong together.

Avatar could be accused of the same thing. The story is something I've already seen many times--not including Pocahontas. It's typical Hollywood boilerplate, and far more fantastic and divorced from reality than the amazing scenery of Pandora. Fortunately, however, the tragedy they depicted wasn't real--it was just as much a fantasy as the rest of the story. This makes for a better movie in my mind at least, but it's still the same combo as Titanic--crap story, amazing technology.

Avatar could've been one of the greatest movies ever. With an original and decent story, not even a great story, just a pretty good one, it would've been the greatest thing to hit the screens well, ever. As it is, I don't regret spending $12 to see it, but once is enough. I don't reckon I'll buy the DVD either cause it just won't be as impressive without the giant screen and 3D etc. I can't say I was disappointed with the movie itself, because it was above my expectation--but it does annoy me that crap stories keep knocking it out of the park. There are plenty of other hackneyed stories they could use instead of using the same 8 or 9 over and over, but Hollywood is too mired in the past--while considering themselves progressive.

If you haven't seen Avatar, it's still worth the price of admission--if for no other reason than to see what the big t'do is all about. It'll be a fun experience--as long as you don't expect too much.

Teenybopper theory of Economics

2010-02-01T17:38:00.001-08:00

Some economic decisions are rational. Some are irrational. We all know this. Whether it's a sudden wish to buy an ice cream cone, or buying a car on impulse, or trading a cow for magic beans, at times all human beings make completely irrational purchasing choices.

This is an 'everyone knows' thing. It's accepted as part of life, and we're in our current financial mess due in no small part to very many of us being unable to say no to our red hot credit cards. It's hard to resist the impulse of desire when we can pay for something for years instead of right now, even when we know it's not really affordable.

But there's an additional irrational dimension to economic perception. We expect banks, mortgage companies, investment firms and mutual funds to be rational all the time. Why on Earth would we believe that? Many of us have been to college, and know perfectly well that a college professor isn't necessarily a rational being. Some things are so ridiculously foolish, so wildly divorced from reality, that ONLY a college professor can believe them. This is also not news--education, even advanced education, doesn't make people rational. We all know this. Sometimes it just cements their prejudices so firmly that they think their passionate bigotries ARE rational.

A large portion of the current financial mess is directly owing to this blind spot in the perceptions of the public. What's particularly weird about this belief is that it's not held as admirable; many despise the cold-hearted bankers who care only about money, the Scrooges who use logic like a shield against compassion.

The problem is that the financial class is no more rational than anybody else--but unlike the rest of us, they aren't aware of this fact. Going to elite colleges, becoming used to considering themselves smarter than most, living in enclosed wealthy communities--these things insulate them from the reality that they aren't the smartest humans who ever lived, and that their brains are limited just like the dumbest crack-head they step over while climbing out of a limo.

Ebenezer Scrooge is not the best media archetype for the financial class. There's a much more apt: the teenybopper.

Just check out the crowds of girls screaming, crying, and fainting at the sight of Elvis or the Beatles, you've seen the true face of the captains of industry. This doesn't only go for financiers and bankers, either; pick any middle manager on up and likely you're looking at a teenybopper, no matter how sober and businesslike the appearance.

Much has been made of the 'tech-bubble' of the late nineties and the 'real estate bubble' of the middle aughties. These are examples of the 'irrational exuberance' of the stock market, to use Greenspan's construction. The problem however is that the downside is just as irrational as the upside; many of the tech companies that went out of business were flourishing until their stock vanished and they had to close their doors. They weren't worth nothing--except the irrational fear of the herd made them valueless. The same for the mortgage derivatives. Why can the bad 10% of loans in a package make the other 90% lose 3/4 of their value? Once again it's irrational fear.

This extends throughout corporate America. Fear of loss is the primary motivator for any corporation that isn't young and hungry; greed is much lower on the list. This especially permeates middle management, who hire consultants to do the dirty work for them as often as not. Fear of being blamed for a loss is even great than fear of the loss itself, and middle managers will do anything to avoid leadership, because leaders have to be responsible for both success and failure.

But beyond the fear is the faddish devotion to the latest thing, just like teenyboppers. Corporate managers run wildly after any new trend just like sheep, even if their wool has been died and woven into business suits. Trade screaming teen-aged girls for middle-aged men and women wearing colorful ties and scarfs and Elvis for overseas help desk or change control, and you'll see the resemblance.

Most unfortunately of all, we have plenty of teenyboppers in government too, wasting kagillions of dollars on nifty and completely idiotic fads, from Social Security to Medicare to 'the public option.' Never mind that the fad is 150 years out of date and has already proved itself a bust. Never mind that the people giving it a try this time have learned nothing from all the failures who tried it before. When the teenybopper herd sees the Beatles, they charge, and heaven help anyone who tries to stop them.

Personally I think Greenspan should've kept his trap shut, and I was horrified when he called the tail a tail. Of course a correction was coming, but why hasten it's arrival? Just because a bubble has to burst sometime doesn't mean it can't happen on its own, and who wants to be the Grinch? At the same time, predictions of disaster are often self-fulfilling prophecies. Fear turns a downturn into a recession, and continues on downhill from there. Why is the recession still going? Because everyone is afraid to spend, to hire, in short to take risks. The president ought to know that all he has to do to 'fix' the economy is restore confidence--the only thing actually within his power. But he belongs to the teenybopper set, following slavishly Madonna's outer-underwear fad long after it's old fashioned. He can't give up his 'principles' because he is incapable of recognizing that it was merely a fad; there have never been such tenacious faddists as his generation.

The teenyboppers that swarmed after Ricky Nelson were actual Baby Boomers too. Fads and trends have a death grip on that generation to an astonishing degree. Even those not of the elite set that presently are ruining our economy went for craze after craze, having an unhealthy desire to fit into the crowd that I don't see in my own generation or the next. And the regimented, cookie-cutter, goose-stepping non-conformity of the elitist Baby Boomers has no equal.

While exaggerated in the Baby Boom generation, this tendency is universal. There have been screaming crowds from time immemorial, and whether we call them whiz kids or teenyboppers or lynch mobs or pogroms the same dynamic applies. What we need to remember is that NOBODY is immune. Ceding your own decisions to somebody who claims to be perfectly rational and wise is the height of foolishness, because no matter how much education, no matter how much experience, no matter how great the wealth, and no matter how high the IQ, nobody can be rational all the time, and computers don't have all the answers.

The real issue one of trust. We all know that all human beings are irrational a good portion of the time; we all know that hunger, lack of sleep, illness, alcohol, even aspirin can change brain chemistry even in a super genius. So how can any one of us look up starry-eyed at a self-proclaimed 'master of the universe' who pretends to have the ability to leave his humanity aside and choose only the best every time?

Next time you think that somebody has the answers and will save you from yourself, picture a crowd of screaming girls chasing Dobie Gillis through campus. Then ask yourself if you really want one of those girls making your decisions for you. If you really truly do, then go to teenybopper paradise: China. You can worship party bosses to your heart's content, go wild for every fad like the one child policy, and never ever have to make a decision on your own.

Apple Tablet foolish wishes

2010-01-25T15:57:00.001-08:00

We're closing in on Apple's overly anticipated announcement of a tablet, and even though it's too late I'm going to list what I WISH they would do with it.

I don't want a tablet computer. I want a tablet adjunct computer.

I want a smallish (10" is fine) iPod Touch with the ability to transfer data directly to my Mac--both notes or whatever written on it, and as a graphics tablet on steroids. My current graphics tablet is annoying--you write on it with a stylus, but you can only see what you're writing on the screen. I want to be able to do both at once. Draw on the tablet, and have it transfer directly to Photoshop as I go, but more naturally because I'll be able to look down while I draw. I want to be able to drag it around the house and transfer up to my Mac wirelessly too. Draw something, take a pic or video of something, and speed it off to my Mac whenever I want. I don't really care if it works with my Vista machine--but it would probably be best it if had the ability just in case my Mac goes belly up.

I've been thinking about this for a few years. I like the idea of a netbook, but so far they're mostly useless--they don't have any of the power of a laptop, but they're not really designed to be adjuncts to another computer either. They're just super-wimpy laptops.

I love my iPhone, and I use it a hundred times a day; but I could live with a crappy cell phone if I could get a big iPod touch and do what I'm wishing for. I don't really care much about the cell phone usages of the iPhone. I use it for reading, taking notes, reference, etc. All of those things would be better on a larger screen. But making it a secondary, adjuct computer for my main computer would give it a value I can't understate. If I win the Publisher's Clearing house sweepstakes tomorrow (or whenever) I'd be trying to get this thing built the next day. I wish rather than hope Apple has seen the same possibilities--after all, they do tend to come up with the only real innovations in the industry--but I don't really know if anybody else WANTS what I do. I think that they WOULD want it, though, if they knew about it. There are already several part-way versions of this idea coming out slowly--little extra screens and tablet monitors for regular computers etc. I can get a 21" tablet monitor for my Mac for about $1200. But that's not really what I want.

(sigh)

I can only hope that Apple has been reading my mind and that there is a larger collective unconscious out there wishing the same thing.

Yep, far fetched.

But wouldn't it be cool.

It's the Freedom stupid!

2009-11-05T13:38:00.000-08:00

Once again we see the problem with the ceaseless and stupid bickering between social and fiscal conservatives. It's not so much that the NY party nominated a far-left liberal to replace a moderate conservative, but the ensuing name-calling and sniping at those who are natural allies.

Natural allies I say and mean.

What is the point of being a social conservative? It's the same as being a fiscal conservative. To preserve freedom.

The fact that social conservatives are really bad at explaining this is no help. Social conservatives want to be left alone as much as fiscal conservatives. There may be a few who are Calvinist enough to wish for a new Puritan state, but they are few. Most have no desire to tell anybody else what to do. They object rather to being told what they can and can't believe. They object to having things they consider lies taught to their children as fact, such as Darwinism and environmentalism. While there may exist some evidence for both of these belief-systems, neither is scientific; they are philosophies so fervently believed that they amount to de-facto religions.

I don't mean to argue about either. I am not a 'scientific creationist,' and I couldn't care less if the Earth is 6,000 years old or 4.5 billion. It doesn't matter to me and my own belief in God. It won't cause me a moment's concern to discover that the both camps are wrong and the Earth is exactly 223,000 years old. I don't care what means God used to create the universe, nor how long it took, because time is a human thing. I believe this based on evidence and experience which seems to me conclusive and convincing. What I object to is being taught, as I was in school, that evolution is evidence that God doesn't exist. It is evidence of no such thing, and my principle objection to Darwinism is the heavy hand of force that its proponents use to push it down my throat. The same goes for environmentalism. If either argument were powerful they wouldn't need to force anybody to believe and damn all questions.

The same goes for many social conservative beliefs. Why against 'gay marriage?' Because why should government be allowed to force churches to marry people in contravention to the beliefs of their particular religion, and don't try to pretend that's an impossibility. There are already lawsuits against churches in several parts of the country, and in Canada there are already pastors in jail for 'hate speech,' which amounted to quoting the Bible.

Fiscal conservatives should share that view, because taking away the freedom of a church or body of believers to determine their beliefs diminishes the freedom of us all. If once the government declares several religious beliefs illegal, how long will it be before they start declaring political beliefs illegal. The left already claims that many conservative beliefs are purest evil; does anybody actually think they mean it when they pretend they care about free speech? They care about free expression, so long as it offends the mainstream; but they have already tried to stop Rush Limbaugh and others from speaking freely and are working on it again this Congress. Once the fairness doctrine comes back, that's the end of talk radio, which is proof positive about what elected Democrats truly think about free speech.

Social conservatives and fiscal conservatives share one important belief that should unite them through thick and thin; that our freedoms, as guaranteed by the Constitution, must be defended and preserved. That's what the 'conserve' in conservative means. Nobody is going to the polls to preserve the Victorian social order, as liberals fondly imagine. Nobody is trying to keep segregation legal or create a new theocratic state. It's possible that there might be a few, but they are irrelevant and powerless, because the vast majority of conservatives wouldn't agree to any of those things.

So enough with the 'godless libertarians' and 'neanderthal bible-thumpers.' Freedom is more important than perfection. The best of all worlds comes when people are free, and freedom requires knowledge, authority and responsibility. Anything that promotes those things is good, anything that undermines those things is evil.

I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again: every conservative argument should be couched in terms of its applicability to freedom. Every law, every policy, EVERYTHING should be explained in terms of how it increases freedom, and everything conservatives oppose should be explained in terms of how it decreases freedom. Ronald Reagan did it all the time.

Social conservatives and fiscal conservatives both believe in freedom. So what exactly are we fighting about? Whether prostitution or drugs should be legal? Is that really a good enough reason to let the socialists drag us to hell?

Are you REALLY sure you want a tyranny?

2009-05-15T14:49:00.000-07:00

As the government plans to rob my generation of the tattered remains of the paltry inheritance left to us, I wonder whether the earlier generations who currently run our nation really truly want this to happen.

The problem with creating a tyranny for your own benefit is that eventually it comes back to bite you. What'll happen, do you suppose, when my generation or the 'millenial' generation holds the wheels of power as the nation reels under the weight of retired persons? When those most perfect of larcenies, Medicare and Social Security are vanished for those presently paying into the systems merely to care for those who saddled us with the burden in the first place.

Are you really and truly sure you want bureaucrats of the next couple generations in charge of deciding whether you deserve the best health care available? Do you think that those of us whose only inheritance is a mountain of debt and stolen freedoms are going to care for the old folks when they can no longer fend for themselves?

I don't speak for myself in this; I'll never be a bureaucrat of any description, and the amount of power I wield is likely to be minimal at most. However many of those in my generation and younger will wonder why exactly we're so lucky as to have a future of endless drudgery stretching out before us for no reason that that such a large chunk of the so-called 'greatest' generation and the baby boomers are a pack of larcenous faux-socialists. One day every government bureaucrat will be Gen-X or Y. And you're bringing in a regime that'll let them decide whether you get the MRI or somebody more deserving does?

Did you really think this through? Are you so sure that the next generations will simply keep slaving away to keep you going when you slaughtered 20% of us via abortion and voted for your own comforts without any thought for those who come next? Democrats love to talk about children being the future and reason good; who else will be their debt slaves when they sit back to live their golden years out? Perhaps the bureaucrats of the future will deny only Democrats advanced medical procedures; presumably they voted to make us slaves so who cares if they die in the hedgerows?

Of course the 'greatest generation' doesn't have anything to worry about. They'll be dead by that time anyway, having won a world war against totalitarianism only to vote in velvet fascism that does what fascists do, but with sweeter rhetoric. Perhaps the next two generations will happily embrace the debt slavery imposed on them by the selfish generations, but I wouldn't count on it. As the 'me' generation has destroyed all reason for self-sacrifice can they really expect that those of us who have real injuries to resent rather than their ludicrous fantasies will behave with the sort of self-restraint and noble self-sacrifice that they never taught to us?

All the fogies out there ought to think this all the way through. The 'greatest generation' can't be blamed for Social Security per se, though they did vote to expand it to its present unsustainable levels. They are responsible for the rest of the 'great society' larcenies and far too many Baby Boomers have done everything they could to destroy our freedoms. Now as we sit on the edge of yet another robbery, perhaps now is the time for Baby Boomers and earlier generations to wonder whether they truly think that the future generations they have treated with such contempt and disregard are the best persons to entrust with their future health care.

Now that only half of Americans pay taxes, those of us who do pay taxes will not only have to shoulder the burden of earlier generations, but we'll have to pay the share of those who don't pay taxes as well, in addition to paying those who are net welfare recipients the 'refunds' they get from the government. Why keep at it, especially if the petite-fascists raise our taxes even further. How much longer before callousness and even vengefulness set in?

It won't be long before the whole canard about Social Security recipients eating cat food is seen as too good for them. It won't be long before the sob stories about those who receive 'refunds' that are really welfare ring hollow. Human beings are not naturally good as the Hellenistic side of the Enlightenment still believes. Locke is not natural; Hobbes is. Locke requires effort and work to achieve, but Hobbes is always there waiting in the wings. Many cultures used to leave the old and infirm to die in the cold; in some the elderly went willingly, refusing to be a burden on their children and grandchildren.

In America some of us have decided that the young are only good for bearing the weight of the old, and as long as the old have the whip hand, it will remain so. The leading edge of Generation X is now past 40, and it won't be long before all of those mid-level bureaucratic jobs are filled entirely by Gen-X and below. In 10 or 15 years there will be many in congress and at every level of the bureaucracy.

Lots of elderly folks live in closed communities where children and younger people are not allowed, safe little havens where they don't have to be afraid of the young. But then the way they vote makes them right to fear the young.

Simultaneous voting to rob the next generation and giving them the power over the healthcare of future retirees seems excessively optimistic. Society is a fragile thing, and as the left in America leans ever closer to statism, recall what happened to
'useless eaters' in another modern, progressive society not so long ago. If we vote in petite-fascism, the real thing might be close behind, and those who've felt the whip may be shortsighted enough to refuse to help those who wielded the whip. Many might protect their own parents but what about those who aborted or alienated their children? Who will protect them from vengeance?

This is a vision I hope is entirely wrong. I really don't want to live in a culture where the elderly are driven off into the cold because they're no longer any 'use.' I can think of countless things they can and do teach and 'use' has changed greatly since a strong back was the measure of a man. But as human life has become ever less sacred through our 'progressive' movements, it's not that hard to imagine. Those who feel pain on behalf of the helpless fetus won't necessarily be so compassionate about what will be caricatured as a selfish, self-absorbed old fogy who has robbed and enslaved the younger generations of Americans.

This is not something I expect to see emerge my side of the fence however. It'll come from the left. Those who lust for power for its own sake don't really care how they wield power as long as they are able to do it. And if keeping hold of that power means tossing a few thousand elderly 'robbers' to the wolves, I'm sure they won't hesitate.

The 'progressive' movement has always been about making life easier for wealthy old men. Feminism provides them plenty of fresh meat, as does the 'gay' movement. Abortion makes it easy for them to avoid responsibility and unwanted children. Unlimited immigration gives them cheap servants; unions keep schools from teaching upstart kids how to threaten their wealth or businesses from growing beyond their control. All the 'free love' crap from the 60s removes the criticism they might otherwise get for chasing 18-year-old girls (or boys). Now they're working on lowering the age of consent so they can get away with robbing children of innocence without any danger. Time after time, 'liberalism' in its modern form has simply been a way for the old to selfishly exploit the passions of the young.

Now they're looking for additional power over the American people, one more chain to make slavery popular under the guise of 'free' healthcare. They should really think it over. Every camel has a last straw, and slave or peasant revolts are never pleasant. Even when they're crushed plenty of rich old men get killed in the process, and one thing that's different about America is that there are nearly as many guns as people here. Leisure world swinger parties are no protection against a mob of outraged former slaves.

Think it through.

How Dungeons & Dragons made me a Conservative

2009-05-06T16:53:00.001-07:00

I’m not a natural conservative. I’ve got all the makings of a liberal just a couple of micrometers beneath the skin. I have to constantly fight those tendencies that make people liberal, and the reason I do comes from something I learned playing that ultimate measure of True Nerdity: Dungeons & Dragons, also know as D&D.

D&D is the grand-daddy of all Fantasy Role-playing Games. There would be no World of Warcraft or EverQuest without it. To create a character in D & D you need 6 attributes. Three of them are physical, and the other three are mental and/or spiritual: Charisma, Intelligence and Wisdom. This is something I learned when I was 11 years old, so needless to say I was not at that time an imbiber of masses of philosophy. I grew used to thinking of a human character as divided into these three parts without ever really analyzing its origin or even discovering how true or false it might be. As I grew older this changed, and instead of so simply dividing things I now would include several additional areas. That is not relevant to the story, however, because the critical change comes from esteeming intelligence and wisdom as two different things. I had many characters with low intelligence and high wisdom, or vice versa; and while at first this seemed silly over time I came to believe that either was possible. I learned this as I struggled against being a nerd on several occasions, trying not to be what I obviously always was.

I didn’t have too many friends who were obvious nerds; those that were always seemed to be heavy on brains and information but low on savvy and personality, and I tended to drift away from them, perhaps fearing contamination as much as any other reason. It wasn’t something I analyzed at the time. As I grew older I noticed that there is often a striking distance between a large accumulation of knowledge and the ability to apply it in any useful way, and that came to be my definition of the difference between intelligence and wisdom. A person may be highly intelligent, well-informed and well-read, a skilled debater, even have excellent interpersonal skills, and still not have a clue about reality. Such people ruin businesses and lose elections and make just plain bad decisions every day.

The reason why they make bad decisions was something that interested me personally, because I’m well-informed and well-read, pretty handy at getting people to see things my way, and have personal skills that are downright amazing (for a nerd that is). It’s one of the benefits of being a nerd; manners are an afterthought but people forgive you. So far it would seem I’ve got everything going for me in the intelligence department. So how is it that I make bad decision just like others of my sort?

The answer is probably obvious to many: arrogance. In politicians it could even be called hubris. It’s easy to be arrogant when you so easily bend the opinions of others to your own, when everyone you know just expects that you’ll know something worthwhile about EVERYTHING. It’s not only easy, it’s natural. It’s inherent to all human beings, but it’s easiest, almost inescapable, for the intellectual.

The problem is that quick wits, reams of information, and a sparkling personality don’t translate into actual wisdom. A dimwit hick with the personality of a goat may accumulate more wisdom in the course of his life than any intellectual, because unlike the intellectual, he’s not immune to learning one important lesson: error.

During the last presidential election lots of people were talking about Bush’s hubris because he wouldn’t admit he was wrong about Iraq. I found it humorous because the very people accusing him are guilty of their own accusation in so many areas. The hubris of the left is its defining characteristic and central belief. The ‘progressive’ believes that regardless of history, regardless of human nature, regardless of evidence, he can make the world into whatever he desires because of his own great and powerful intellect. That whatever came before is always going to be worse than what’ll come next because he’s going to condescend to guide us into the bright future that only his astonishing mind can conceive.

This is a conceit I share. I feel it yapping at my heels constantly, and on some occasions it irks me to the point of anger that all the dolts just won’t LISTEN! This is of course not confined to the left; after all I’m no leftist. We all feel it to a greater or lesser degree. Listen to any talk show you want, read any blog, left or right, and some variation of ‘wake up America’ will be repeated ad nauseum.

There is a difference, and that’s where D&D came into play. When I was a teenager I thought it would be fun to make a character that matched me. I tried very hard to come up with accurate stats based on both the game itself and Dragon Magazine articles. I had the hardest time with Wisdom and Charisma, while Intelligence was easy because it matches IQ. Charisma I just estimated, because it’s hard stuff to pin down, but I decided to put some work in on Wisdom. It was really the first time I tried to understand what wisdom actually is, and the more I learned about it the more I realized that despite a fairly high IQ and Advanced Placement classes and the like, I really didn’t have much wisdom at all—if any. I decided that wisdom is applied understanding. Philosophy is ‘love of wisdom,’ but usually amounts to either a pursuit of wisdom or an arrogation of wisdom. I say wisdom is the understanding of a particular thing, and really knowing its place and use in the world.

Some will notice that this is not unlike the Stoic definition of wisdom, and reason good. Marcus Aurelius wrote: “this thing, what is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its substance and material? And what is its causal nature? And what is it doing in the world? And how long does it subsist?” There are a lot of things in the world. You can take forever to learn about just one. Finally understanding the whole of anything is a pebble of wisdom, and it takes a lot of pebbles to make a mountain.

This offends the arrogance of the intellectual. Having imbibed as much knowledge as necessary, in other words enough to awe the yokels, anything beyond is just waste. This is promoted by our education system, which puffs up the honor society students and Ivy League graduates to insupportable estimations of their own superiority, and instead of learning their own insignificance as reality descends, they turn leftward. Their arrogance is not misplaced; the system is simply against them. They congregate in places where everyone agrees, dismiss all contrary opinion as bunk, and fume that the world doesn’t give them proper respect.

All this I feel in my heart-of-hearts, but instead of accepting that it’s all so very true, I struggle against it. D&D gave me the first pebble: I didn’t have any wisdom. Adam Smith gave me a second pebble: an understanding of my own insignificance. Even kings and presidents can’t order back the tide, order the planets into alignment, or force people to be excellent to each other.

Those who can’t understand that grotesquely obvious truth are what we now call liberals or progressives, which last century they called fascists and socialists. The rhetorical and tactical differences are irrelevant; those who reckon themselves wise enough to reorder all of society according to the dictates of their overwhelming intellects are just as likely to be rotten bounders as any commissar or reichsmarschal. I’ve got another nugget of wisdom to be gleaned from the world of Fantasy, this one from The Lord of the Rings: “…were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit, as you desired…”

The central belief of American conservatism, in contrast, could be summed up by a quote from Santayana: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Not very nice of me to condense Burke and Smith and Chesterfield and all the rest into one statement, is it? I still believe it’s apt, because American conservatives are wild radicals by world historical standards, and that small dose of caution is all that keeps them from the hubristic excesses of the torrid romanticists of the left. I suppose it could be called the difference between arrogance and hubris, because overweening pride is common to both conservatives as liberals--I'm proof positive of that. It's a tiny but crucial difference.

I never had a liberal phase; I was a cautious and skeptical federalist conservative from the age of 15. I don’t buy libertarian pie-in-the-sky promises any quicker than ‘progressive’ ones. All thanks to Dungeons & Dragons.

The real problem with the conservative movement

2009-01-05T09:30:00.000-08:00

Ever since Ronald Reagan left us, many conservatives have been casting about for some new plan for conservatism to come back into its own. There's an excellent reason why that hasn't happened, and it isn't because of tactical mistakes or intra-movement bickering per se. The problem is that the overarching reason that brought the conservative coalition together has been neglected, in some cases even abandoned.

Ronald Reagan brought hope back to many Americans, a point with which everyone can agree. The question is: why? The core principle that united Ronald Reagan with the rest of us is also the core principle of America.

Freedom.

The problem is that liberty is something taken so much for granted in America that it seems almost trite to mention it, and glib appeals to freedom as a defining reason for anything tend to draw cynical smirks rather than enthusiasm.

Despite those disadvantages it is nevertheless the road back to both popularity and power. Freedom may not be much thought of historically speaking, and has been denigrated or denied by most religions, philosophies, mythologies and political movements throughout all time. However we're not talking about convincing Punics not to sacrifice their daughters to Bel in a vain attempt to keep the Romans at bay, but convincing Americans that the freedoms they enjoy are worth preserving.

After all it is the conservative movement. We're not here to conserve traditions, or family values, or fiscal responsibility, or even the Constitution as its written, each for its own sake. Those things are important elements, but the reason for all of them, for the entire American system of government, is to conserve and protect liberty. We have many different organs dedicated to small parts of the whole, but each of those organs ought to explicitly serve the greater reason for their existence. The why behind the how is what we need to bring up, again and again. Our arguments should all be about why a particular tradition protects freedom, how family values promote individual liberty, how fiscal sanity keeps us from bondage, how a federalist diffusion of power and a strong standing army and navy keep us free. Why do we want strict constructionists on the Supreme Court? To protect our freedoms, also known as rights. Why do we oppose gay marriage? We want to protect our religious freedom, which is almost the raison d'être of America.

This is the thread that pulls every piece of the conservative movement together, and yet it barely receives lip service from pundits and politicians alike.

John McCain spoke of freedom movingly on many occasions, but it wasn't and isn't enough. Every one of his attacks on Obama should've been about how the policy in question limits our freedom. They dragged out the dreaded word 'socialism' towards the end of the race. What good did it do? It wasn't coupled with the reason to oppose socialism, which is that socialism, even the petite-fascist version of the Democrats, destroys freedom. Every socialist of every camp, whether National Socialist, Bolshevik, Frankfurt School or First Internationalist, is a tyrant just aching for the chance to tell everybody else what to do. Just look at the supposed environmentalists right now. Have they come up with an alternative that they're trying to sell us so we can save the Earth? Nope. Have they made any attempt to invest in battery technology so that we can make the biggest change imaginable and conserve energy instead of the current use-it-or-lose-it system? No way. Every proposal they've made comes down to forcing other people to do what they say. I don't believe most of them care about the environment much, if at all. The priority is to dictate the behavior of others, even if they cause forests to burn down...as they have.

And to be a little more specific, there are three major components to freedom, and those of us who claim to want to preserve liberty need to use them in the argument as well. Freedom is knowledge, authority and responsibility. One has to know the choice exists and the options, must have the ability and the right to make the choice, and is responsible for the consequences. If any of those components vanishes so does freedom. The easiest part to attack is knowledge; ignorance is intrinsic slavery, and that is the area our opponents have mastered. They've controlled the educational establishment for many decades, and yet we wonder why people become ever more ignorant of American ideals.

It is also important to remember why Reagan believed in freedom; for all that some reckon it an eternal principle of the Universe, the political concept has its roots in something a lot closer to home. A true conservative believes that the people can handle freedom. Reagan believed in the American People, that those who have been brought up to be free can manage their own lives and don't need to be ordered about. The left in American talks a lot about how much they care for 'the people,' but it's the sort of thing you'd hear in the Roman Senate or the pre-revolutionary Versailles. They fear the mob, and see 'the masses' as a herd rather than individuals. They hold the contradictory beliefs that the idiotic mob can be easily led by their great wisdom and education, but is also a terrifying beast that could break free at any moment if some fool puts the idea in their head. It's not for nothing that liberals are labeled elitist these days.

People are not cogs in a machine; they are not a virus out to destroy the earth, nor are they faceless drones that labor mindlessly for their betters. Every individual deserves freedom, the right to goof up beyond redemption or excel beyond present dreams, or labor along in the middle, doing a little good here and a little bad there, as each individual elects. This is the central right of all rights; none of the others matter or even exist if we are unable to choose for ourselves.

No matter what the argument is about, it should include reasons why something strengthens or weakens freedom, and which of the three main elements it attacks or defends. This is not hard, and I'm sure the petite-fascists who call themselves democrats for reasons of camouflage will attempt to steal it as they've stolen other labels and arguments over the years. But consistent use of freedom as a cause for everything we support, built into well-reasoned arguments, can have a powerful effect, and most importantly, it will poke holes in the ignorance that has been so carefully cultivated and maintained by the supposed champions of the little guy. Anything that breaks down that wall of ignorance is worth the effort, and it is also the best way to preserve those things that are worth preserving over not just decades but centuries.

Thanks to the H8ters

2008-11-19T09:45:00.001-08:00

I wrote in my last that it was hard to maintain pity for those who spew venom in hatred in your face. It's true, but with a little effort pity can displace resentment once again.

After additional contemplation I've decided that we Mormons should be grateful for the H8ters who have decided to target us. Very grateful! They've done us an enormous service.

What service? What have they done except increase our standing among those of other faiths? Those who have become sickened by the half-hearted semi-Christian denominations they've belonged to for years will hear about Mormons standing up for 'traditional' beliefs. They'll hear their pastor trying to be as mealy-mouthed as possible, trying to balance on a rickety fence and they'll remember that we Mormons aren't anywhere near the fence.

What's more, they aren't going to be hearing about Mormons gunning down the protestors or even getting into fights with them. I'm very proud of how well behaved my brothers and sisters have been when faced by the hateful cruelty of these protestors 'for' tolerance. They remember that a good number of us turned the other cheek and didn't return evil for evil.

And then they'll get an earful from their pastor about how Mormons aren't really Christians at all—despite the fact that they've seen nothing but Christian behavior from Mormons in this situation.

The fact is we want everybody to be happy, in the truest sense of the word, and nobody can be happy while defying God. It's possible to have fun, to have a sort of surface happiness that never touches the depths where the soul truly lives.

In the end this whole apparent mess will bring more souls to Christ. How can that be a bad thing? Some of the Saints will suffer under this weird form of persecution, but they suffer for Christ, which generally is a blessing, not a curse. Their suffering will be a catalyst to bring the good news to more lost sheep, and that makes even much greater suffering worthwhile.

It's been something of a worry over the last few years that the growth of the Church has slowed somewhat. That slowing may now be over with as people who might never have opened the door for our missionaries suddenly change their minds. Blessings in disguised are never really disguised, we just won't see them in the proper light.

So a hearty thanks to those pitiable souls who languish under the slavery of closed minds. May a chink of light blink through, because no matter how much you hate Him, God still loves you and wants you back. He really does know what He's about, and His plans tend to work.

Is anyone surprised at the GLBT reaction?

2008-11-14T10:18:00.000-08:00

A lot of Mormons are wondering why the protests against our Temples by the 'gay marriage' advocates aren't being reported. I can tell you why: it's not news. It's news to nobody that the gay movement is bigoted, hateful and intolerant of all opposition to their dogmas. We are not now to learn that they will treat anyone who disagrees with all the venom they can muster. Remember Dr. Laura. There's a reason to be gay, and it's not a lifestyle choice and it's got nothing to do with genetics. To become a GLBT activist is to declare your hatred of the society that raised you and to do anything and everything in your power to destroy it.

This may have its roots in the fact that more than 80% of gays/lesbians were molested or raped as children or adolescents. Society didn't protect them as it should've, and what's more a lot of the people who committed such crimes often continue to maintain a facade of respectability that reasonably angers those who have peeked behind the mask. Add to that the constant barrage of negative descriptions of bourgeois society (aka 'America') in many media and colleges and you've got a recipe that spits out cruel-minded bigots who despise their mother culture and constantly struggle to weaken it.

Gay is such an apt word for this movement. Gaiety is the least and most shallow of all forms of happiness; it is skin deep at best. Gaiety lasts as long as the fun lasts, and vanishes swiftly like the wispy stuff it is. Whoever decided it was the perfect word for homosexuals got it exactly right. We see this every time they're thwarted; the smiles vanish and out come the fangs.

I feel a great deal of pity for those who have chosen (or have been tricked into) this half-life. But it grows ever harder to act on that pity. The constant attempts to force the majority to conform to the views of their tiny minority arouse disgust rather than compassion. As they try to wreak vengeance on we Mormons for daring to disagree with them they demonstrate with perfect clarity what will happen if they ever get the whip hand; they'll wear out the leather. They long to be rulers over the rest of us, and dictate to all of us what we're allowed to believe. What's more, if they ever got what they claim to desire they'd be no happier, because it would change nothing. They would be just as miserable, and the fabulous smiles would still be a veneer over the self-hate underneath.

History has plenty of examples of a minority attempting to tyrannize a majority. Sometimes it works out for them for a while, but eventually they lose power and often their lives long with it. In this case, they will never be able to win, because we Americans simply will not allow a tiny minority to force us all to change religions. If they ever get their way because some self-deluded petty tyrant of a judge declares for them (again), they'll soon discover that things could get much worse. Bigotry is only admired by bigots, and those who might've ignored the gay community forever will suddenly become ardent foes when faced with the loss of their religious rights.

And that is really what the GLBT movement is about: destroying religion. America is a very religious country, and lots of hypocrites use the mask of religion to do vile and evil things, and much of the GLBT community has first-hand experience in this area. But the unreasonable and bigoted attitude they take from their experiences does no good for anyone. If one priest is a pedophiliac, it does not mean all are. Even if a majority of priests were pedophiliacs, the rest still wouldn't be, and there's nothing like a majority. To condemn religion and religious belief en masse because of the actions of a few is purest bigotry and intolerance, and is the hallmark of the GLBT movement. Their demand for the rest of us to tolerate them has already been met; there are GLBT persons in every section of society and they hasn't been a single pogrom against them. No concentration camps, no ghettos, no sumptuary laws. Obviously tolerance is not enough, so now they're demanding that we embrace their religious beliefs and do as we're bid like good little children. This reaction is the reaction of any would-be tyrant when the proles don't do as they're told.

It may be news to the GLBT movement, and the 'News' media, and liberals in general that there are no proles in America. There are no common masses, in fact, no masses at all. Free people tend to do what they think is right, and resent mightily when a pack of wealthy elitists try to force them to change their beliefs. The fact that these particular wealthy elitists also have (for the most part) a range of pitiable personal histories is what's gotten them this far. But pity dries up quick when it's repaid with increased bigotry and vitriol. Attempting to persecute Mormons for refusing to change religions may be a bridge too far for the GLBT movement. Even Evangelicals who've been persecuting us as best they could for decades are now coming to our defense. That's what happens when a common enemy rears its head, and with their unsubtle prejudice and narrow-minded intolerance these pitiable souls are making themselves the enemies of everyone who believes in freedom of conscience. What a pity.

Unmasked at last?

2008-11-11T12:51:00.000-08:00

o how long before the latest Democratic party mask comes off?

They've been wearing masks all through history, from pretending they cared about 'the common man' when they were really only trying to protect slavery, to pretending to care about 'American traditions' when they were really only trying to keep black folks 'in their place.' Now they pretend to care about minorities while doing everything they can to reduce their numbers via abortions, they pretend to be the party of progress while trying to drag us all back to the middle ages, and they pretend to be the party of the little guys while lining their own pockets with money from the big guys.

Obama presented the most fake and apparently convincing mask of all: he pretended to be a fiscally conservative 'Blue Dog' Democrat, slightly to the right in a center-right country. He's got an awful lot of people fooled, despite the evidence of his skimpy resume.

So when does the mask come off?

It already has with his choice of Chief-of-Staff. He's going to go as far left as possible, and there's really nobody to stop him but a weak minority in the Senate and a 4/1/4 Supreme Court. I believe the Democrats think they're finally going to get back their antebellum powers at last.

Rush Limbaugh at this very moment is saying almost exactly that. We lost, they fooled enough people, and they're going to do just about anything they feel like doing. He admits to being fooled by the American people; he didn't think the sort of vile venom the left has heaped on Pres. Bush would be rewarded.

Of course it hasn't been; Obama is simply the most brazen liar ever to run for President, though like Clinton he's only an effective liar because the Press carries so much water for him. Without that cover he'd never have gotten past the first round of primaries.

There's one thing that Obama and the Democrats and even Rush are forgetting about. And that is the core of Democratic beliefs. Democrats have two mutually contradictory beliefs that are at the center of everything else. First: the People are a bunch of useless idiotic drones who need government help to drool properly. Second: the People are racist violent bigots who are terrifyingly likely to take up arms at the slightest provocation.

It's true that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will totally ignore phone calls to their offices telling them not to try and nationalize medicine or the car industries or whatever else they try to take over. But they will listen when tens of thousands of angry calls start pouring in, when even peaceful protests in numbers show up in Washington. They'll try to bring back the good old days, raising taxes, absorbing State responsibilities, ordering dumb rubes about like the fools they are, and quite frankly the people won't take it. A good chunk of Democrats in House and Senate are conservative Democrats—which means they weren't elected by a pack of socialists. The news media declared it ridiculous to call Obama/Biden Marxist (though everybody with half a brain knows perfectly well they're not Marxists, they're Fascists). But it makes people believe they're really mainstream, not representative of the 3% who make up the true leftist cadre in America. The Big Lie still works, and we have proof of it right before our eyes.

The comfort is this fact. Not only do Democrats (and the harder left, the harder they believe) think that Americans are a gun-crazy mob, nothing in the world terrifies them more. They are truly afraid of the American public, as they've demonstrated all their lives by living behind bars and gates and keeping the People at arms length except when they have to sully themselves by campaigning to win the support of the mob.

The reason for this has its roots in a belief that goes back to the Enlightenment: that people are naturally good. Democrats in general, but leftist Democrats in particular, hate the bourgeois nation that is the United States, and desperately want to have an actual proletariat to boss around instead of all these uppity middle class types, you know, like in Europe. They dream of their new Intellectual Feudalism where they'll get to be grand seigneurs, deserved of course because they're the smartest and best. A true aristocracy such as Plato would've envisioned if he'd had the wit.

And therein lies hope. All three of these beliefs are false. There is and has never been a proletariat anywhere in the world. The American People are not a simmering lynch mob waiting for some tiny provocation. And human beings are not naturally good.

Russia spent 70 years rebuilding their country on a pack of lies, and will probably never recover. China ignored reality for 40-odd years before they finally turned fascist, but their nifty 'third way' between socialism and capitalism is turning them into capitalists, because capitalism could just be called 'reality' and done with it. Fascism is far more powerful than ordinary socialism because it's less focused on perfection, and it may take a long time to win China out of their Communism-in-name-only version of Fascism, but you can only buck reality so long. Cuba and North Korea are doddering along still pretending to believe in Communism but if it worked they'd be paradises by now instead of slave camps.

America is not going to bend over for Fascism, and that's really what the Democrats preach today: "everything for the State, and nothing without the State." It's one area where I agree with Pat Buchanan, of very few; a backlash is imminent. Not because of what has happened, but because of what's about to happen. It may well prove violent, though I hope it won't, nor do I think there will be any need for violence. Liberals like to consider themselves the brave vanguard of society, but they in truth are about as cowardly as your average corporation. They despise they People, true; but they fear us more.

Of course there's one thing that will let them win, which is despair. That is what turned Russia and China and Cambodia and others into slave-nations; people gave up and turned tail. That's what we need to fear, not the fascists who think they've taken over America.

And maybe finally we'll be able to quit pretending that the Democrats care about America and want what's best for her. I'll believe it the moment I see it, but except for a few hours after 9/11 I've never seen any evidence that any prominent Democrat cares in the least about America as America, except of course those in disgrace like Lieberman. They are not patriots for America as she is, but only for what she might be. And since she'll never be what they want, which is perfect, she'll never have their love. But for the nonce we'll keep pretending they support the troops while they do everything they can to get them killed, and love America while they try to ruin her, and care about the poor while they kill them off via abortion.

Right up until the mask finally comes off.

Audacity of Despair

2008-10-20T11:44:00.001-07:00

How does one go about becoming an infant? I often wonder who all these despairing people are that can't do anything for themselves and wait around for somebody to come along and give them hope. How do you join this freemasonry of despair? Do they have secret handshakes and code words? Do they sit around in encounter groups telling each other why there's no possibility of any good ever coming unless some man-on-a-horse comes along and makes it all better? How do you become a hopeless helpless infant?

Naturally I have no idea because I have no desire to be one. I'd much rather be a responsible adult, even though it's far more painful and difficult. I don't want to be ignorant because ignorance isn't bliss. I don't want to be a slave, even a fairly comfortable slave of a kindly mistress (see Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of). What's more, I'm willing to hold myself responsible for my own deeds for good an ill.

I just lost about $5k from my 401(k). The people managing my account are evil vile greedy slimes, right? I should go shoot them today! Well except...I'm perfectly aware that the primary motivating factor of corporate America, and even more so in that segment of it that revolves around Wall Street, is not greed. It is cowardice. Making more money is very well, but what they're really all about is not losing any money.

This is the same cowardice that afflicts the upper classes in almost any existential conflict. They've got the most to lose so they're less willing to risk. Call it the natural conservatism of the wealthy, which is in no way connected with the philosophical conservatism of libertarians or federalists or movement Republicans. The innate natural conservatism of corporations is inherently logical and self-consistent; but it often turns upon itself because fear so easily leads to panic.

Corporatism is like Athenian Democracy; braggadocio in victory and terror in defeat. The crowd stampedes from flush to broke for no reason whatsoever. What would cure the present market? Nothing more than a bit of courage. Same goes for the housing industry. Whoever has the courage to start buying up properties, buying stocks, and lending money, will make the most profit in the long run, because everybody else is waiting for somebody to follow. And they will.

Human beings are not herd animals, however we resemble them in many ways, and this is one. The middle of the crowd is always the safest place to be.

Once upon a time I was at a dance in Tennessee where there was exactly one African-American girl in attendance. I overheard two other girls talking about how sad it was that nobody would dance with her, so I went right over and asked her to dance. After that several other guys danced with her--she never sat down the rest of the evening. She saved the last dance for me and we had a great time. I didn't do it out of pity, it never occurred to me that I was doing anything noble. I was just irritated. But even though my motive wasn't necessarily perfect and pure it was enough. All it takes is for somebody to take a step, and then others of good will come right along.

It might seem that I'm making an argument for the man-on-the-horse after all. Far from it. I didn't force anybody else to do anything. I didn't take charge or order anyone about. I just showed the way.

I'd love to do so now in the market, but the pitiful amount of money I can throw at it wouldn't make any difference. However what I can do, I will do; I'm leaving my 401(k) alone. It'll grow or shrink with the market. About 3% of my 401(k) is invested in the company I work for; it stays too. I'll rise or fall with America herself; if we really do have a financial meltdown America may never recover. You never know what might happen next. I'm betting on America. I refuse despair, I refuse to be an infant; I do what I do out of my own conviction and and faith. It's not much; I have so little socked away in my 401(k) that it would raise only sneers if I mentioned the amount.

Nevertheless, that is the difference between a free man and a wannabe slave. I am responsible for what I have, however large or small, and I risk it or hide it under the mattress according to my own will. It doesn't take great courage to bet on America, and it didn't take great courage to break the ice at the dance long ago. It only took a very little.

That's all it'll take to save the markets, both Wall Street and Real Estate and all the dependent industries jeopardized by them. A modicum of courage.

This is the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. We'd better start acting like it.

A vote for Obama is a vote for the press

2008-10-16T16:23:00.001-07:00

So you love reporters? Think they're the wisest and best of all humankind? When you see a news reader on TV you listen to every word they say, and follow your orders without question...right?

That must be the attitude of a lot of people, since Obama has nothing going for him...except the press.

Without the news media he would be nowhere. Nobody with such a thin resume, no executive experience, and almost no legislative experience would have a prayer of being president under normal circumstances. But unfortunately for us all, the very man running against him is the reason why the press has gained such power.

Thank you McCain-Feingold!

The worse news is that either the press has decided to betray America again, (see Vietnam Conflict/Tet Offensive) or they really are as stupid as they appear to be. Any reporter should see though the ridiculously transparent lies of Obama. He can't give a tax break to 95% of Americans, because only 60% of Americans pay taxes. Yes, including payroll taxes. This is not news, it's been known for well over two decades, and the number of net taxpayers is closing in on half of all Americans. 50% of Americans pay 2% of the taxes, and the upper 5% of Americans pay 35% of taxes. Which of course isn't their fair share according to Obama and the rest of the New Fascist Front. This is one of many whoppers, and anybody who listens to the man for 5 minutes will hear several. Surely nobody in the press is stupid enough to believe this crap. But if they aren't then they're willingly trying to trick you into voting for a fraud.

And apparently a lot of people are falling for it.

I can't help but wonder if they know they're following in Mussolini's footsteps--if they mean to be. The American version of socialism is right out of the Italian Fascist playbook, and surely they must realize it. Can they really be so ignorant of history and politics? It's hard for those of us on the 'right' to believe that the 'left' has well and truly bad intentions; we tend to think of them as goofy fools who don't know better. 'Independents' are certainly goofy and certainly fools; they're the primary targets of this laughably bad big lie and they're too dumb to know it. But what about the rest? Are they really trying to build a nifty third reich in America? Or do they want 'change' so much they don't care where we go, as long as we don't stay where we are.

I tend to beleive the latter, because it fits all too well. They hate the status quo because it doesn't give them the respect they deserve, so ANYTHING must be better. But the reporters better beware. Lots of reporters died in the concentration camps and the GULAG. But then I suppose they like being told what to think. So much for an independent press. They're actually doing everything in their power, openly and without disguise, to get themselves killed en masse.

And when you scoff at the idea of Obama attempting to butcher people in a new version of the GULAG remember WHY socialists of every stripe have killed so many people.

It's not because they think mass murder is cool and want to get on the board with Lenin and Hitler and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and the rest. All of them killed millions for the same reason: frustration. What happens when our Savior Obama can't do almost anything that he wants to do? When his fake promises don't lead us into utopia but just screw everything up? It can't be HIS fault! It's never EVER the 'good guys' fault. Therefore it must be a nasty evil scheme by the enemies of all mankind. It doesn't matter whether they call this enemy the counter-revolutionaries or bourgeoisie or democrats (as in China) or plutocrats or Jews. They've got to find a reason for their failures that doesn't include any error on their part. And then the killing starts.

The best news is that George Washington set us up our very own backup Timocracy in the Military. Judges may have lost their honor but our officers and especially our sergeants have not. Obama won't be able to vent his frustration because he doesn't have a secret police force to round up his enemies. I'm sure the petite-fascists at Daily Kos and Democratic Underground would jump at the chance to lock up conservatives everywhere, but they're poorly armed and have no courage of any description. So even if the fascists win this election this is not Germany in 1932.

Of course in 4 years it might well be. Thank Heaven and the Founders for the 2nd Amendment.

How Dungeons & Dragons made me a Conservative

2008-10-03T13:33:00.003-07:00

How Dungeons & Dragons made me a Conservative

I’m not a natural conservative. I’ve got all the makings of a liberal just a couple of micrometers beneath the skin. I have to constantly fight those tendencies that make people liberal, and the reason I do comes from something I learned playing that ultimate measure of True Nerdity: Dungeons & Dragons, also know as D&D.

D&D is the grand-daddy of all Fantasy Role-playing Games. There would be no World of Warcraft or EverQuest without it. To create a character in D & D you need 6 attributes. Three of them are physical, and the other three are mental and/or spiritual: Charisma, Intelligence and Wisdom. This is something I learned when I was 11 years old, so needless to say I was not at that time an imbiber of masses of philosophy. I grew used to thinking of a human character as divided into these three parts without ever really analyzing its origin or even discovering how true or false it might be. As I grew older this changed, and instead of so simply dividing things I now would include several additional areas. That is not relevant to the story, however, because the critical change comes from esteeming intelligence and wisdom two different things. I had many characters with low intelligence and high wisdom, or vice versa; and while at first this seemed silly over time I came to believe that either was possible. I learned this as I struggled against being a nerd on several occasions, trying not to be what I obviously always was.

I didn’t have too many friends who were obvious nerds; those that were always seemed to be heavy on brains and information but low on savvy and personality, and I tended to drift away from them, perhaps fearing contamination as much as any other reason. It wasn’t something I analyzed at the time. As I grew older I noticed that there is often a striking distance between a large accumulation of knowledge and the ability to apply it in any useful way, and that came to be my definition of the difference between intelligence and wisdom. A person may be highly intelligent, well-informed and –read, a skilled debater, have excellent interpersonal skills, and still not have a clue about reality. Such people ruin businesses and lose elections and make just plain bad decisions every day.

The reason why they make bad decisions was something that interested me personally, because I’m well-informed and –read, pretty handy at getting people to see things my way, and have personal skills that are downright amazing (for a nerd anyway). It’s one of the benefits of being a nerd; manners are an afterthought but people forgive you. So far it would seem I’ve got everything going for me in the intelligence department. So how is it that I make bad decision just like others of my sort?

The answer is probably obvious to many: arrogance. In politicians it could even be called hubris. It’s easy to be arrogant when you so easily bend the opinions of others to your own, when everyone you know just expects that you’ll know something worthwhile about EVERYTHING. It’s not only easy, it’s natural. It’s inherent to all human beings, but it’s easiest, almost inescapable, for the intellectual.

The problem is that quick wits, reams of information, and a sparkling personality don’t translate into actual wisdom. A dimwit hick with the personality of a goat may accumulate more wisdom in the course of his life than any intellectual, because unlike the intellectual, he’s not immune to learning one important lesson: error.

During the last presidential election lots of people were talking about Bush’s hubris because he wouldn’t admit he was wrong about Iraq. I found it humorous because the very people accusing him are guilty of their own accusation in many areas. The hubris of the left is its defining characteristic and central belief. The ‘progressive’ believes that regardless of history, regardless of human nature, regardless of evidence, he can make the world into whatever he desires because of his own great and powerful intellect. That whatever came before is always going to be worse than what’ll come next because he’s going to condescend to guide us into the bright future that only his astonishing mind can conceive.

This is a conceit I share. I feel it yapping at my heels constantly, and on some occasions it irks me to the point of anger that all the dolts just won’t LISTEN! This is of course not confined to the left; after all I’m no leftist. We all feel it to a greater or lesser degree. Listen to any talk show you want, read any blog, left or right, and some variation of ‘wake up America’ will be repeated ad nauseum.

There is a difference, and that’s where D&D came into play. When I was a teenager I thought it would be fun to make a character that matched me. I tried very hard to come up with accurate stats based on both the game itself and Dragon Magazine articles. I had the hardest time with Wisdom and Charisma, while Intelligence was easy because it matches IQ. Charisma I just estimated, because it’s hard stuff to pin down, but I decided to put some work in on Wisdom. It was really the first time I tried to understand what wisdom actually is, and the more I learned about it the more I realized that despite a fairly high IQ and Advanced Placement classes and the like, I really didn’t have much at all—if any. I decided that wisdom is applied understanding. Philosophy is ‘love of wisdom,’ but usually amounts to either a pursuit of wisdom or an arrogation of wisdom. I say wisdom is the understanding of a particular thing, and really knowing its place and use in the world.

Some will notice that this is not unlike the Stoic definition of wisdom, and reason good. Marcus Aurelius wrote: “this thing, what is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its substance and material? And what is its causal nature? And what is it doing in the world? And how long does it subsist?” There are a lot of things in the world. You can take forever to learn about just one. Finally understanding the whole of anything is a pebble of wisdom, and it takes a lot of pebbles to make a mountain.

This offends the arrogance of the intellectual. Having imbibed as much knowledge as necessary, in other words enough to awe the yokels, anything beyond is just waste. This is promoted by our education system, which puffs up the honor society students and Ivy League graduates to insupportable estimations of their own superiority, and instead of learning their own insignificance as reality descends, they turn leftward. Their arrogance is not misplaced; the system is simply against them. They congregate in places where everyone agrees, dismiss all contrary opinion as bunk, and fume that the world doesn’t give them the proper respect.

All this I feel in my heart-of-hearts, but instead of accepting that it’s all so very true, I struggle against it. D&D gave me the first pebble: I didn’t have any wisdom. Adam Smith gave me a second pebble: an understanding of my own insignificance. Even kings and presidents can’t order back the tide, order the planets into alignment, or force people to be excellent to each other.

Those who can’t understand that grotesquely obvious truth are what we now call liberals or progressives, which last century they called fascists and socialists. The rhetorical and tactical differences are irrelevant; those who reckon themselves wise enough to reorder all of society according to the dictates of their overwhelming intellects are just as likely to be rotten bounders as any commissar or reichsmarschal. I’ve got another nugget of wisdom to be gleaned from the world of Fantasy, this one from The Lord of the Rings: “…were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit, as you desired…”

The central belief of American conservatism, in contrast, could be summed up by another quote from Santayana: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Not very nice of me to condense Burke and Smith and Chesterfield and all the rest into one statement, is it? I still believe it’s apt, because American conservatives are wild radicals by world historical standards, and that small dose of caution is all that keeps them from the hubristic excesses of the torrid romanticists of the left. I suppose it could be called the difference between arrogance and hubris, because overweening pride is common to both conservatives as liberals--I'm proof positive of that. It's a tiny but crucial difference.

I never had a liberal phase; I was a cautious and skeptical federalist conservative from the age of 15. I don’t buy libertarian pie-in-the-sky promises any quicker than ‘progressive’ ones. All thanks to Dungeons & Dragons.