Contra Niche

Tattoos In Communist Georgia

2012-01-23T10:02:00.000-08:00

A Mom in Georgia gets arrested for letting her child get a tattoo.

Mom should not have gotten arrested. Now, if mom had not been subjected to public school during her formative years, she may have realized a tattoo wasn't the best way to memorialize one's big brother, but I digress.

Stupid or not, this was mom's call, not the government's.

Repeal Roe v. Wade Overnight

2012-01-20T07:50:00.000-08:00

See, Santorum runs as pro-life, and were he to actually get in office, four years later he'd still be running as pro-life, saying vote for me or some evil Democrat will get in. Paul is pro-life, and says vote for me and I will make the Supreme Court behave (constitutionally and all) and it won't even be a federal issue anymore four years from now. The states had laws against abortion before Roe v. Wade. I cannot stress enough this is real change that means substantially fewer abortions rather than the stupid game of Supreme court nominee picking that never gets us anywhere. The only way Santorum's reference to the Declaration of Independence could be taken seriously is if he were willing to use force against a recalcitrant D.C. and as of yet, he only seems to be willing to kill innocent people in other countries rather than the guilty people he knows.

If this is your issue, Ron Paul is your candidate.

The Russians Are Sane, Our Politicians Are Not

2012-01-13T11:38:00.000-08:00

Apparently, it has become obvious the Russians aren't going to play our theatrical games:

Remember the cold war: evil Empire, 5 year plans, Lada cars, etc? It may very well be back, this time over the simple matter of a few million barrels of crude per day, after Russia was found to be quietly supplying an embargoed Syria with ammunition, in violation of a weapons embargo.

Well, why ever would the Russians do such a thing?
Maybe because they know the case against Syria is largely a state department manufactured scam? The Russians have interest in Syria because their port is there. They also have a connection with the Orthodox Christians living there, and the Orthodox are not experiencing what the State Department says is happening.

What the U.S. is doing is engaging in acts of war and then waiting for someone to get desperate enough to try and fight. I believe that many in D.C. continue to believe that WWII got us out of the great depression, and the pretext that any of these Middle East wars are in any way defensive still seems to be accepted. I do hope the idiots in D.C. understand this for what it is; the embargo is unacceptable and the Russians just quietly chose to ignore it. Otherwise our politicians may get more war than they expected.

Unless our politicians have been angling for a world war all this time...

Santorum Is For Murder

2012-01-13T06:50:00.000-08:00

An Iranian Nuclear Scientist gets murdered, and Santorum suggests this was a righteous kill, and that he'd take part in it. (No Agenda, episode 373)

Sorry, guys, you can't really be pro-life and just let this sort of stuff go. An Iranian nuclear scientist is not an enemy combatant, nor is any nuclear scientist who goes to Iran to work on nuclear stuff. Although we are happily committing acts of war against Iran and a dozen other countries we are not officially at war, nor are they at war with the U.S..

More importantly, nuclear technology is just another technology. Will you to kill electrical engineers in Iran? What about chemists? Are you completely nuts, Santorum? This isn't self-defense, defense of a nation, or anything. Eventually, every nation will have nuclear power and weapons if they want them. Indeed, at some point individuals may be able to make and or acquire nuclear weapons. So, sane long term policy isn't banning; certainly isn't blowing up nuclear scientists. Keep doing that, and you'll have nuclear work being done by people who don't have formal degrees- and if they are brought up by the criminal class, they'll be less likely to be worried if one of their products takes out New York.

But to bring it back up, Santorum- Thou Shalt Not Kill. Yeah, I know it is really thou shalt not murder, but this is murder. The nuclear scientist was just doing his job, working for his country, and it is not clear, despite the propaganda, that he was actually working on weaponry. Nor would this be 'self-defense' if he were. It is simply murder with a flimsy, hysterical excuse, that some day this guy's work might be used to blow up something. They can't even get a warhead here. This excuse bears the same hallmarks of capriciousness and narcissism that exist in the excuses used to abort the unborn. Such a vague and potential threat is really no match to the real dangers posed to Americans everyday by politicians and government workers, yet mysteriously, Santorum doesn't sound like TJIC. Much easier to murder someone you don't know rather than defend against the thieves you know and love.

The Boomer War Against Babies

2012-01-10T06:02:00.000-08:00

Ah, it is the new year and Generational Helots is showing signs of life:

The sort of left of the baby boomers, Progressives, are trying to make the world one big pre-school playground where everything is equal and fair, and everyone is a great artist and really good and playing with sand… literally retarding any progression at all… and then the sort of right wing opposition to them, self-labeled conservatives, who have little awareness of anything cultural or essential that they want to conserve, just want to make sure that everyone doesn’t sin and so they pass laws outlawing sin, imagining that this will make everyone go to some sort of bland Calvinist heaven, a cul de sac in the clouds that backs onto an absolutely divine golf course.

Hilary is quite seriously engaged in making the world on big pre-school. Of course, people have a pesky tendency to go through puberty, which, for all their permissiveness, the baby boomers have never really been able to handle. What used to happen was babies would eventually happen and you'd put away your ego in order to help the little helpless cute thing. But, whether it's contraception or stern warnings against sin, the baby boomers frown on babies, and by extension marriage when women are most fertile, because it really screws up their preschool model.

Besides, they don't want the competition for our attention.

Ilkka On The Liberal View of Communism

2011-12-22T08:56:00.000-08:00

From the Fourth Checkraise: Two of a Mind:

They are too smug and dumb to undersand that communism is no different from believing that if you have to get a group of people through an obstacle course, you should tie their hands together and make them obey the random commands of a blindfolded central planner who, frustrated by your lack of progress, occasionally randomly shoots one of you for being a "saboteur".

The United States of Babylon

2011-12-21T07:11:00.000-08:00

The United States is the largest trespasser in the world, and Occupy Wall Street is the military's incoherent little sister. George Reisman makes a great point about Free Speech and Occupy Wall Street:

The prevailing view of freedom of speech is a major threat to freedom of speech. Not only does it provide justification for actual violations of freedom of speech of the kinds just mentioned, but it also makes freedom of speech appear to be a fundamental enemy of rational communication. Speakers cannot address audiences, professors cannot lecture to students if disrupters are permitted to drown them out and then hide behind the claim that they do so in the name of freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech has been perverted to the freedom to babble. Oh, I suppose you could shout out something meaningful in a crowd, but it would be drowned out. We are permitted the freedoms of squalling children. You might as well be speaking in tongues, and edifying no one.

2011-12-20T11:01:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Gene Callahan, I've just learned the civil war between Sunni and Shia in Iraq is already brewing.

Back when I still thought war was a good idea, I thought the idea of keeping Iraq one country was stupid:

The attempt to create a new "democracy" out of a large nation, one with at least three distinct groups, ignores history. The United States started with 13 small colonies. The 13 had to negotiate with each other until agreements were made. Instead of working from the ground up, we are stuck with a top-down government that is rapidly being disenfranchised by more legitimate leadership at a lower level. Case in point: Kurdistan. The Kurds are far better off than the rest of the country and would like to declare independence from the rest of Iraq, but since the U.S. would prefer not to aggravate Turkey, the Kurdish leadership is proposing a federation with the rest of Iraq.

See, this approach would have achieved a goal, which is why I finally became anti-war:

The true end to any of the pro-war sentiment I had in earlier days came when I realized we weren't achieving any of our ends. I had not thought that I was justifying means via ends, but apparently I was. War, in the absence of any decent objective, looks suspiciously like a lot of trespass and murdering. The means, bereft of any ends are easily evaluated.

We are in a war bubble. The end result of the war in Iraq is further destabilization of the region, which will no doubt be used to justify more war. More war will be used to justify more government. Politicians have access to the cookie jar, but they have no incentive to improve it or leave anything in it. War is the ultimate in bubble economics; the smoke is real and the fascist propaganda against other people should be a mirror- if only people were educated enough to see the reflection. The politicians will just take from the cookie jar, and then shatter it to pieces.

Continuing the Line

2011-12-20T06:28:00.000-08:00

I love waking up and realizing yet another way in which modern society has it all wrong. We should be extremely preferential to our firstborn and encourage our children to be so as well. Well, to be more precise, our boys. Having some conception of 'continuing the line' means a young man will care a lot more about the quality of the character of who he mates with.

Christianity, for all it's charms, doesn't seem capable of handling this situation. If there is no sense of the first-born being important, then the import begins to lie more on the 'getting married' side of things; this merely means it takes slightly longer to engage in an unwise deed, and since most Christian authorities insist on conforming with state laws, married Christian men get to be pushed into state sanctioned slavery for choosing the wrong girl. He also loses any real authority over his children. (Well, technically, it is already lost, but a few ladies allow us to exercise it at their pleasure.)

What egalitarians miss is that the conditions necessary for preferential treatment of the firstborn are also the conditions which provide for the second, third, and more better than any egalitarian plan of action. This is because making sure the firstborn is not a bastard, that he can be properly educated rather than imprisoned and propagandized, that he can eat real food, that his mother has some intelligence, propriety, and decency- all this leads to a situation in which every other child in that family has a better upbringing. So, the life of the third child in a family with firstborn preferential treatment has better treatment than a child raised by some single mother who has had children by different fathers before him.

Indeed, do we not see, that rather than distributing any estate in an egalitarian manner, the state distributes wealth according to it's own interests, and merely takes equality as a pretext?
Who has an estate now? Especially among the baby boomers, it seems likely they will spend every last dollar and run up credit card bills besides. In our modern cases, the youngest children, those allegedly discriminated against in a more hereditary system, are most likely worst off. If there is anything to squabble over, your oldest sons are bigger. If there are broken families, your oldest sons are first out of the house, while your younger ones suffer longer under the psychological damage.

Indeed, I may wake with the joy of thinking something new, something true, but then I realize it is so true that it is making me angry. Because I am the eldest in my family, and most of us who are care about the young ones.

Any Mutual Life Companies Invested In Physical Gold?

2011-12-07T12:46:00.000-08:00

Whole life insurance is looking more attractive, because if you do it just right, you can borrow from yourself to fund the larger expected purchases in life, not to mention leave a little something around for burial expenses and whatnot. It is also, legally, a bit safer than savings accounts, trading accounts, and all the other things recent events with MF Global have shown us are no longer safe. Unfortunately, insurance companies don't look so attractive; aren't they exposed to sovereign debt and all these dirty assets which should have been sold at fire sale auctions in 2008? They've got to invest in something. Usually that something is whatever is considered the safest- an safest seems to be whatever is backed by government. That ship is going down.

Meanwhile, it is becoming more obvious that safest means physical commodities and the ability to defend them. Realistically it is hard for individuals to do such things. We have to buy whatever it is we are going to buy and hope we don't become a target for either the government or thieves. But I can see a company being able to engage in a larger scale buying and warehousing of the sort of commodities that tend to do well as fiat currencies collapse. In this way, the policy holders could feel safe, rather than wonder whether or not the funds will just be seized without notice. They could be seized, but we'd have the advance notice of tanks rolling in the streets.

The dividends provided to policyholders (mutual companies are owned by the policyholders) ought to be of particular interest if things go as I think they may. There may even come a point where no one wants the policies to be denominated in dollars anyway. Why buy thousands of worthless dollars with perfectly good gold?

Does Your Protest Serve The Interests Of The State?

2011-12-07T08:24:00.000-08:00

Bruce Schneier notes that Montreal police have been tagging people with invisible ink.

Okay, so you can tag people with ink. In the U.K. police have been known to make house-calls and just keep prominent protestors at home. In the U.S. police have been taking pictures of the crowds. The arrest records alone mean there are records, and there are very likely records of people who haven't been officially arrested.

So, I can reasonably assume the police and state agencies can defuse any protest within a week, with no headline grabbing confrontations. Just pick them up one by one coming out of the local Starbucks. Charge them with trespassing. They may even be able to hold them for a day or two. Round up the usual suspects as soon as the call to protest goes out on Facebook. We already know the media won't be listening- they are the ones pounding the protestors-as-scum message.

So why do they even let protests happen? There are probably more reasons than this, but I can think of two right now. They want people to think they are still free, and they also want to be made to look intelligent by comparison. I actually think the Republicans benefit most by the latter reason, though I suppose some Democrats could be using this in an attempt to waste more money. They both, however are using the first notion- they want us to think if we vote, protest, etc... if we stay inside the system and use system approved approaches to change, we will somehow change the system.

I'd rather be free and have no voice, than have voice and not be free.

Big Corporate Green=Big Corporate Fraud

2011-12-06T10:19:00.000-08:00

Chevy Volt batteries catch on fire, and apparently, the green thing to do is not tell anyone about it.

Green technology, sustainability, fair trade, social responsibility, recycling- the list grows ever longer; if you see one of these words, it is quite likely the corporation is engaged in fraud. Enron used the green/sustainable vocabulary extensively, though most lefty types conveniently forget that and make them out to be evil corporate Republicans. They may well have been evil corporate Republicans, but anyone can pull this scam on you.

But of course they can pull this scam over and over on the very people they've pretended to educate all these years. Chant enough propaganda at a child and it will be very hard for him to understand intuitively that since recycling obviously costs more (which is why the scheme has to be subsidized through taxes), then it obviously uses more resources and quite likely pollutes more (trucks & chemicals at the very least).

Drug War Folly

2011-12-05T13:29:00.001-08:00

So, if the normal police wouldn't protect your property, wouldn't you either protect it yourself or hire someone to help you protect it?
People who are for the drug war while deploring drug related violence need to check their logic.

Why would you want someone presidential?

2011-12-05T08:21:00.000-08:00

The much vaunted criticism of Ron Paul is that he is not presidential. At this point in my life, I must say all things presidential appear to coincide with being a lying incompetent bastard. I am surprised that politicians still show up wearing a suit and somehow incorporate red, white, and blue in their outfits- because by now folks ought to reflexively flinch and then engage in either a flight or fight action.

I don't think various people will allow Ron Paul to be president. The notary who blew the whistle on the fraud going on with mortgages has been killed. We've got a four year track record of the government covering for and bailing out bankers who should go to jail, and that doesn't even cover the collaborations between government and finance that I believe to be fraud, such as academia as it is now. A conspiracy isn't even necessary; all it takes is one person who knows he is better off with the status quo than real change- especially if he knows he would go to jail.

This idea of wanting someone presidential has far outlived its usefulness. The holders of the office eventually tinge the office with their slime. Perhaps it would have been useful to say we wanted someone presidential way back in the deep past, before television, before it became some sick empty-headed popularity contest, but now I'd rather see the sort of mentally dubious folks the media likes to pretend Ron Paul is than anyone presidential.

Meetings Are Theater For Ugly People

2011-12-02T12:32:00.000-08:00

A corollary to the quote, "Politics is show business for ugly people," which has been attributed to quite a few people. I have no idea who actually said it first.

Meetings, being a most odious subset of politics, deserves it's own quote.

In Some Ways, The Rich Value a Dollar More

2011-12-02T11:31:00.000-08:00

A standard class warfare suggestion is that a dollar is not as valuable to a rich man as a poor man, thus redistribution won't hurt the rich man, or hurt him hardly at all, while the poor man will be helped out of proportion to any loss to the rich man. Unfortunately, this is a lie. To the poor man a dollar is just a dollar, and to the rich man a dollar can just be a dollar too; but to the rich man a dollar can be one of the many molecules that comprise financial security.
Financial security means you can work, and yet call out the higher ups when they do something incompetent because it doesn't matter to you financially if they fire you or not. It opens doors. There are social possibilities open to you- especially in terms of freedom not to conform.

This is why governments instinctively want to take financial security away from people. Make a dollar just a dollar, and everybody must pretend the persons giving out the checks are actually telling the truth. If you feel a moral obligation to the truth, you also have to be resigned to the possibility that you and yours will starve.

Take from the rich and give to the poor and you hurt the poor as well as the rich. The poor stay poor and now the independent voices in society increasingly get crushed, because even those who seem rich are dependent (indeed the upper middle class in this society is seriously compromised in this regard) on perpetuating the fraud that the masters insist upon.

An Odd Thought On Competitive Governance

2011-11-22T12:25:00.000-08:00

On Sunday I wonder if a wealthy eccentric couldn't simply set up a court and start establishing some sort of reputation at good governance. Initially, it would almost have to be charity cases, so he'd have to be rich enough and crazy enough to spend a good bit of money solving other people's problems before he ever saw any sort of return on his investment.

But the genuinely impoverished seem to ask for easily afforded things. How wealthy one would actually have to be is an open question. Perhaps this would be a good use of an L3C, since one could not particularly expect any sort of profit for a good while, but one certainly would want to be ready if someone wanted to contribute or if wealthier people found the reputation of the court to be such that they'd be willing to pay. A segue from granting boons into judging cases (though one would want to keep granting boons too).

Would the parasites infesting the ruins of American government even notice? So outre to the impersonal bureaucrat would this be- could they even see it as a form of governance? Perhaps the harmless wealthy eccentric persona would avail one of a chance to become established before they recognize competition. Really, what this comes down to is being available and listening to people, and being ready to bear the cost of whatever it is you choose to do. The average American bureaucrat would probably not know what to make of it.

Of course you'd have to be willing to waste a fortune, and possibly even your life, in order to try it.

The Pervasive Institutionalization of Places

2011-11-21T12:02:00.000-08:00

Governments have been in charge of prisons and schools for so long that upon the mere mention of such institutions, one should know quite well what I mean. Tyranny of cinder block and mortar, but also bathroom stalls, florescent lighting, and various regulations writ in brick. The congress that regulates the innards of your toilet probably have a truckload of paper and ink wasted just on the doorhandles in such places.

Long ago a lord would build a great hall for people to come to, but it was always and obviously his hall, and as such it was always personal. The impersonal bureaucrat hadn't yet had the time to insulate himself from our injuries resulting from his actions, nor had an architecture based, in part, on such a premise been developed.

And the church was Our Lord's; certainly humans were to gather there, but the focus was not on the humans. This is where, today, we can see the most glaring aspects of an institutional mentality. We've quietly lost that idea. It is ours, or our place to pray. Many modern churches have adopted floor plans more appropriate for a stadium or theater. There are these sad half-circle atrocities all over the place, supposedly fostering a community atmosphere- such things are said by people who confuse the political with the communal.

Even in more traditional church structures, you will inevitably find a bathroom, imitating, for the most part an invasive, metastasized cell. The modern American restroom cannot be made personal. Obviously, there are deep theological problems regarding constructing a bathroom that would convey a sense of the personal in church, but we are not permitted to even begin that discussion. Even a non-taxed, not for profit entity like your local Church simply must conform to the myriad of regulations governing today's public restrooms.

Since so many of us had to deal with schools, we generally don't notice this stuff. Does your meeting place look like a school gym? What of it? This is normal, isn't it?

My normal isn't what took place during my lifetime. I understand that this is the default for many, and I assumed as much myself for a while, but now I understand these things are abnormal, and very likely hurting us. If it looks like a public school, a prison, or a Soviet-style apartment building, it impinges upon our humanity. It has no life.

Real Class Warfare From the Elites

2011-11-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

This is what a class does when it wants to protect itself from anyone below it who might be thinking naughty things- like getting rich and moving to the wealthy neighborhood. They may do it in the name of socialism, helping the poor, or whatever else, but taxes raise a barrier against being able to rise in this country. The already rich can pay them.

So it makes more sense to occupy Connecticut than Wall Street, if you are into the sort of class warfare the lower classes engage in.

Interestingly enough, if what Ann Barnhardt suggests about the futures and options markets is correct, I suspect some of these elites will start to notice the political class costs them more headaches than upstart neighbors. Real change requires real funding, so a weakening of the collaboration between the extremely wealthy and D.C. would be helpful.

Keeping Us in Darkness To Profit From the Light

2011-11-15T12:18:00.000-08:00

Various members of congress have been taking advantage of their inside knowledge.

I believe all insider trading should be legal. The reason is simple- the fastest way to disperse knowledge is to give a high reward to the person who publicizes that knowledge. The market would be doing this naturally.

But there is Congress requiring everyone else to keep us in the dark, while it acts on whatever malevolence it dreams up. Tax, spend, run up debt, help their friends orchestrate Enron, Solyndra, and thousands more- and use their insider knowledge to snatch a little more money from the rest of us to boot. This isn't the same as an insider making a trade on his knowledge; this is conspiracy because the option to trade wouldn't exist if they hadn't conspired to make it happen in the first place. And none of their grand plans actually end up being profitable, either, so we lose twice over, and possible even forever as they declare their tragedies too big to fail and insist on taxing the crap out of our children to pay for their mistakes.

Inordinate Hope and Academic 'Success'

2011-11-15T06:30:00.000-08:00

Joe Carter provided a link to this:

Hope uniquely predicts objective academic achievement above intelligence,
personality, and previous academic achievement

I think this is likely most true because of the false nature of academia. Hope is good. Indeed, some component of my desire to get up and learn something new everyday must be hope. But hope without reason leads to Phds in gender studies. Hope without clarity of thought leads one to sociology. Hope, untempered by prudence, lets us generate ridiculous levels of debt while we perform these objective academic achievements.

Hope, much like ambition shall very likely be the sort of thing academia is rewarding in lieu of actually doing it's job. There are very many people with very little capacity for thought, who are unreasonably hopeful for thinking that they should go to college at all. Meanwhile, a few of us find our hopes dashed when we find university turned into a holding pen, the floor littered with more propaganda than education.

Value versus values

2011-11-14T14:02:00.000-08:00

Value must be subjective in economic transactions, because, values aren't.

Nothing is more frustrating than finding the labor theory of value looking preternaturally hale, despite the fact that a turd is still a turd no matter the time, care, or passion involved. I'm sure the chronically constipated would love someone to show up and pay them handsomely for their labor. That no one does is a clue.

If there were intrinsic value, that is, if in a particular transaction value were not subjective, then the economic actor (the buyer) would never be able to achieve his values. Values, for the clueless, basically come down to life and living. Is what you are buying beneficial for living. Christopher Alexander, the architect, came up with a rather brilliant idea of putting up two photos (buildings, everyday items) and asking, which one has more life. Amazingly, folks overwhelmingly agreed, so he came to think value isn't subjective; he didn't notice the difference between the plural and the singular. Indeed, his test takes one away from making a random decision about one particular thing to evaluating two things. In economic transactions too, we don't operate in a vacuum; price helps us form our decision. Value is subjective, but it gets less so as it approaches the plural- prices helps us understand what others value something at and this effects our decisions to something less subjective than just pulling a random number out of a hat.

So, the value set, the system via which we have life, encourage life, and perhaps even have it more abundantly, requires a freedom in transactions that isn't conducive to some concept of value intrinsic to the thing or the labor used to produce the thing. Such concepts ultimately produce death, for if the aim of your value is something other than life, then you end up getting more death.

Communists Are Industrialists Too

2011-11-09T12:31:00.000-08:00

It seems to me that we continue to suffer from the industrial revolution. No, not the wonderful benefits, but the political nature of things. Wealthy industrialists noticed they could go to whatever political authority that was near them and use nationalist propaganda to secure a pro-industrial agenda, and then turn around and use that to secure legal protections against workers.

The communists subverted the government and the industrialists, but kept the pro-growth policies. They industrialized, even when, and in many cases because it killed people. Ukrainian farmers not getting on board with the new industrial farming plan? Starve them to death! The plan was more important than the people, despite odes to the proletariat.

So we see the same frustrating game here today. OWS or tea party, corporation or government, bureaucrat A or bureaucrat B.

For much of human existence, capital goods existed mainly in the hands of families. Labor and capital were pretty much in the same hands, or at least in the hands of family members, and your local authorities (grandpa, your local priest, mom, etc...) will likely start fussing at you if you don't treat your own kin right. The rise of large scale manufacturing was good for technological advancement, but it is not at all clear that this always has to be this way. Indeed, at the periphery, there is reason to believe that the 'means of production' should be undergoing the same sort of decentralization and miniaturization as cell phones. Gadgetry is gadgetry, but the size of corporations is both political and economic in nature. Regulation represents a cost and if sellers really do try to get anywhere near where marginal cost=marginal revenue, politicians push costs onto corporations and the corporations respond by becoming bigger. Costs for lawyers and regulation represent a cost of being in business, not a cost on each transaction, so people maximize the number of transactions to drop the cost per transaction. Leftist Wal-mart haters have only themselves to blame, but then they've never reconciled themselves to the existence of economic laws anyway.

So, folks notice the system is fraudulent, or at least have some vague sense that SOMETHING IS WRONG, but all their solutions involve keeping the same system. The system is going down now. Ideally, we orderly shut down all processes so that we can have a clean reboot; not, that's a great analogy, because the current system doesn't understand capital. It equates capital with money, so if they destroy a big part of the capital structure, or eat the seed corn, they pretend like it is easily replaced because they can just make more money. Which is precisely the problem; they can make more money, more pieces of paper and more electrons, but they can't grow more food if they've eaten all the seed. Or replace entire factories, steel, etc... First, the supply will shrink, is shrinking, and then people see the flood of money coming; prices go up.

Ah, well, little chance this little tirade matters...

Patriarchy Requires Cooperation

2011-11-07T09:58:00.000-08:00

Laura has a good post up on the inadvisability of just telling Christian men to 'man up'.
It is worth a read, so go over there and read it. Over here, you get to read my take on the dynamics of this thing.

What Christian women are basically saying on this thing is that they want someone who behaves like a potential patriarch. They are unlikely to actually say they want a patriarch because the whole idea of patriarchy has been manipulated a thousand different ways, but biology is a hard one to conquer, and if you are at all open to having children and intelligent to an extent, you want a man who thinks past one generation.

Meanwhile what Christian women do, mostly, makes this impossible. At some point, men realize how unlikely the whole thing is, so they drop it. Women sort of vaguely notice, and then we get the shaming lecture, which is often actually written by some pathetic guy. (I once attended a three day event put on by a priest about improving relationships. There were very obvious moments of 'selling out' to females, who comprised the most of the audience. I assume at least some subsection of the females there actually wanted to improve their relationships rather than just congratulate themselves on caring about their relationships, so I think he did a disservice to them.)

This is akin to exhorting the heirs to the various thrones in Europe to 'just rule', despite the rather obvious fact that the bureaucrats and a good chunk of the badly informed people would draw and quarter them if they put any serious effort into it. Most of Europe would be better off, especially if it were a legitimate return to the smaller government of the past and spelled the end of the massive modern state, but everyone is clear that the monarchs have been ousted, or at least have had their power seriously curtailed- by force when necessary.

A family is a firm, requiring a pattern of life. The corporate/government career world isn't conducive to it. Neither is the propaganda shoveled at us from academia. If you want to live, you have to chose a very different path, one that will make you look different from your friends- even, and sometimes especially your Christian friends.

Non-Smoking Corpses

2011-11-03T08:36:00.000-07:00

Ah, they've finally noticed the drug they were pushing makes people suicidal:

Champix, which is also known as varenicline and sold in the U.S. as Chantix, topped the table, despite only having been on sale for four of the years studied. Ninety per cent of reports of depression or suicidal behaviour, including suicide, related to the drug.
This compared with 7 per cent for another drug, Zyban, and 3 per cent for patches, gums and other nicotine replacement products, the journal PLoS ONE reported.

I took this stuff years ago. Luckily, I had already learned to completely ignore my feelings and keep on living. I guess, technically, it worked. Once the stuff reaches a certain level in your body, the nicotine from the cigarettes can't get to the proper receptors. Unfortunately, it also blocks every shred of human happiness, so I quit taking the drug soon after I quit smoking, despite what it said on the label.

Some one is actually trying to take what they call an 'anti-smoking vaccine' to market. This thing is most likely called a vaccine because if companies can fit the legal definition of vaccine they can have some legal immunity to, oh I don't know, causing massive numbers of suicides! Of course, the actual definition of vaccine doesn't allow such malarkey, so what we probably have here is a more permanent version of hell, one in which those receptors that respond so well to nicotine get capped in some unhappy way.

The Soft Tyranny of Mythical Events

2011-10-28T06:55:00.000-07:00

Once again, while listening to the radio to hear what sort of weather I could expect for today, I hear a lie. I didn't hear exactly where this it supposed to be, but I believe it was more local than national, but anyway, they were saying women get paid something like 62 cents for every dollar men get. Liar, liar, liar! They do most of their lying under the phrase 'comparable work,' and never bother to take into account things like teachers only working nine months out of the year, or the fact that occasionally women give into perfectly sane biological urges and go have babies instead of working.

I don't have the funds to do a study, it is clear to me women actually have an advantage. First, women who look good always have an advantage. Second, the credential mill that higher education has turned into caters to women. Third, the inane questions the average HR department asks applicants- they don't even make sense to men.

So we continue to hear these complete lies, and if things were actually working for both sexes properly no one would even try to do these studies. Families are healthy; corporate/government culture is not. The government's parasitic urge has led it to push us apart, keep us separate so that it can have two incomes to tax. Then they'll have two sick people in some corporate run home too, and there won't be any children to tax, though they've already promised huge chunks of the next generation's income to pay for the fairy tales they like to tell.

Debbie

2011-10-27T07:32:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine, Debbie Vaughan, died recently, and her funeral was on the twentyfifth. It was a quite well attended funeral, for she was a great wife to Cliff, a mother of seven, a grandmother, and part of the People of Praise, which is why I got the chance to know her. I met her in 2003.

Debbie was a reader, and, of course, she immediately asked me about books I liked, and I really like To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis, so I told her about it. Debbie not only read it, she bought extra copies so that she could loan them out. She had at least one reading group and a women's group read it- I don't think many of the women in the Shreveport branch escaped. I know she read Bellwether, and probably Passage as well.

Indeed, even after she died, someone mentioned the book while honoring her. It is still being read because of her.

You may think this isn't such a grand thing, but I was going through a divorce and the book had played a small but revealing role in that relationship. You will find To Say Nothing of the Dog in the science fiction section, but a rather large portion of it takes place in Victorian England and there is a bit of romance; my ex-wife liked Victorian romances. I had read things she had said were particularly good; I knew she would like the book. I recommended the book to her. I even tried reading it aloud to her. She then told me was jealous of the book. I enjoyed it enough to read it multiple times, which meant my attention was on it and not her.

So, Debbie's unreserved joy in sharing this book meant a lot to me. There was a lot more, of course. I have spent quite a few holidays at the Vaughan house, and her efforts to make sure there was something I would actually eat as I changed my diet were heroic, but let me not turn this into the sort of post that requires heroic fortitude on the part of the reader.

Thank you, Debbie.

We should be able to fire politicians

2011-10-21T09:57:00.001-07:00

The Louisiana government has passed a law in which the use of cash is banned in transactions involving used or secondhand goods. The law is broad enough to cover a lot of things, and it is also completely illegal because it violates legal tender laws. The politicians who brought this law into being should immediately be fired. This would represent true 'checks and balances', rather than the farce that exists today. I assuming that a judge will strike this law down, probably after some middle class housewife gets busted for having one too many garage sales, though relying on a judge to have his head screwed on straight doesn't fit my idea of good risk assessment.

We are a nation run by lawyers. They make laws for the express purpose of sustaining their own class. They don't even care if the law is unconstitutional- the mere process of contesting the law generates more work for lawyers. Nothing that adds to the ever growing mass is ever checked or balanced.

This is the sort of legislation that proves simply, and without doubt, that the people in office who approved of this bill are incompetent for their job. There is an outside possibility they may just be evil, but I will be charitable and assume they are just too stupid. Either way, they are not fit for office and should be fired immediately.

Elections, as we have seen countless times before won't work. Indeed, we appear to be getting increasingly less intelligent candidates and are running into politicians passing illegal legislation precisely because they don't comprehend anything, rather than what we used to have when intelligent leftists were running around intentionally trying to subvert everything. Now we get both the left and the right passing ridiculous things with out having a clue, and we still have the odd intelligent leftist, though I think many of them pose as professors and subvert good governance by giving insidious advice to idiot politicians.

2011-10-20T12:35:00.000-07:00

Kinsella on Corporations

The difference between tarring and feathering all corporations everywhere and actually rolling back the insanity that has been happening these past years:

Ownership implies the right to control. It does not imply liability. Liability flows from actions, whether those actions employ means owned by the actor or not. In other words, whether one owns a means employed in an act of aggression is irrelevant. Likewise, having an ownership (control) right does not automatically imply responsibility.

This is what I have been trying to get across with the need for some sort of court. We have to address the actions of various people. Some of those actions rise to the level at which all of the assets of the corporations and the individuals who perpetrated those actions are forfeit. But simply attacking owners creates yet another pretext for the bureaucrat. The revolutionary mindset is wholly owned by the state, for it eternally proclaims itself the mediator through which the oppressors are crushed, and it is the bureaucracy through which assets are redistributed to the victims. What we desperately need, however, is no more bureaucrats! Certainly we must put to an end various corporations, but we must do so because they are fraudulent, and for the larger message, to show that criminal gains made through the state shall no longer stand.

Hamas Says One Israeli Worth A Thousand Palestinians

2011-10-19T10:11:00.001-07:00

Is Hamas stupid? I am glad they returned Gilad Schalit, but they should have never kidnapped him in the first place. These sorts of trades, in which Israel gets one soldier returned (who was kidnapped while in Israel) for one thousand criminals (terrorists- some didn't actually kill anybody, but what is the likelihood any of these people are going to be contributing members of society?). It kinda makes Palestinians look, well, worth less than Israelis, doesn't it?

Especially if you are making the claim that these criminals are actually comparable to soldiers in a war. You trade Schalit for one; get greedy, and you disrespect your own people. People also can tell that the crack-pot Israeli government, for all its flaws, values its own citizens at a higher level than Hamas does. They also might notice Israelis seem to have a better economy. Surely this penetrates the Palestinian mind? I know, I know, they've been raised from birth to blame everything on Israel.

The Egyptians have been raised similarly, but when the Israeli Embassy was attacked, it seemed to be viewed by most with suspicion. When people begin to realize it is their own governments, not the bogeymen they've been taught to hate, that is the problem, such attacks seem like attempts at manipulation- government forces trying deflect attention.

So, it isn't clear that the propaganda will stick. It is clear that Hamas thought Schalit was a thousand times more valuable than one of their own.

A Court for Freedom

2011-10-13T08:54:00.000-07:00

As I have mentioned before, I think one of the more sane approaches to dealing with the mess we are in is to have a sort of bankruptcy proceeding for the entire nation. This would be a very messy thing, and I've no doubt on certain particulars in specific cases the court would get things wrong. I am not thinking utopia.

There are two issues at hand- there are wealthy, connected people who have directly broken the law and are getting away with it (indeed, they have every incentive to continue doing so) and there are the various assets currently under the control of various bad actors. The two issues are related, but somewhat separate. I think bad actors should be punished, but it is far more important to me that bad actors cease to have control of assets (and power).

This is one of the reasons I would like to see an old fashioned sort of court. Take a particular case, like Bank of America, or even the Federal Reserve itself; these entities have assets which basically need to be sold off- dispersed among the people. This isn't redistribution of wealth; these entities were not entitled to these assets in the first place, so we need a somewhat fair way of dispersing them.

Another thing we desperately need is for the court to make a decision on an asset, get the asset sold- that is owned by a person, and basically forevermore not make anymore decisions about the item. It is probably impossible to find the original rightful owner for everything, especially in a reasonable amount of time, but is important to get the assets to actual owners (rather than thieves and politicians)- otherwise the court would morph into a coercive modern state and become thieves themselves. Obviously, the judge and other court personnel would have to be paid; it would be best if their financial incentives lined up with the activity of clearing assets out from under their control, rather than them having any financial interest in keeping control of anything.

Perhaps it is advisable to point out that owners do most of essential 'governing' of whatever it is that they own. Landlords are called landlords, for instance, because they used to be able to establish standards of behavior that would occur on their land. It is an extremely boring and normal reality that some people are capable of handling property very well, while others waste everything, so despite the propaganda certain professors like to foist on us as history, such distinctions are not indicative of oppression. What we have now is oppression. We are less free now than our grandparents were, and the constant mantra of progress, the idea that we are freer or that we have more 'voice' or that things are just getting better over time is just part of the scam our oppressors are playing on us.

So, you can see where this is different from the 'revolutionary' ways of dealing with things. Revolutionaries seek to control everything and make a lot of promises they can't keep. I'd make no promises, because I wouldn't expect to have anything at the end of it with which to provide for those promises. Instead, I would expect that a free people, being liberated from the parasites, and once again having clear title to real property, will grow the economy and far more effectively provide for their own concerns than any government ever could.

Paleo Permaculture

2011-10-11T12:03:00.000-07:00

So, I've always sort of assumed there would be some sort of milk production on a farm that had cattle, for instance, in part because I like butter and I've hoped that raw dairy would be good for me. Store bought dairy has never been good for me, and recently I got to try some raw milk kefir. It was great, but after drinking it I noticed my sinuses were suddenly filled up and that I was sniffling. This hasn't happened to me for years and now I think it must be the casein. I can drink whey protein powder and eat butter with no problem.

Anyway, so my idea of a farm changed a little bit after that. Salatin (not really permaculture though) seems to be doing interesting things, but what happens if you give up the milk production, and figure you'll just have to go foraging for eggs if you want them? If there are natural boundaries to the property (like a valley where it is hard to get out most places and where it is easy there are humans- the 'farmers') and various animals can more or less engage in roaming where they see fit. Okay, maybe the pigs need some cajoling to go where the land needs a bit of rooting up or whatever, but I'm thinking, since different animals eat different things, they'll be attracted to different areas, and it's the human job to plant the stuff they are going to want to eat and generally care for the land. Keep the animal healthy, happy, and alive until you need it for food rather than have regular times or seasons of production.

I'm also thinking a lot about herbs and spices- how these are the plant based foods are often prized over other things for their nutritional and medicinal benefits. They often get over looked- in terms of calories they usually have very little to offer, but if you are banking on the fact that the pig, who might get into your tubers, will provide you with plenty of calories via fat, then you are basically looking to plant life for taste, variety, and nutritional benefits.

There would also be periodic need for various human interventions. I think the extent to which, for instance, the Native Americans had an effect on their surrounding has been deeply underrated. Obviously, in a valley like the one I described above, can't use fire like they did out on the plains, but there would be need to keep the system healthy. As simple example would be if the land became successful enough for a population explosion among the animals on the property. More, bodies, more byproducts of bodies. more of a need for human intervention.

The dirty little secret is that the charges of sustainability, or lack there of, only work in the negative. We can tell, for instance, that trucking bees around California to all sorts of almond orchards is crazy. This is why there is massive bee death, though it seem folks want to use dying bees to scare people about cell phones for some reason. The bees die because they are no longer in a healthy habitat, and modern medical bee science can't keep their population numbers up enough to satisfy the almond grower's demand.
So, we can tell this is unsustainable, and we can make vague gestures towards smaller, more diverse systems, but we don't really know what is sustainable. Indeed, it is too easy, if you've grown up with a particular system in your life, to assume that it must be sustainable simply because you've known it for your whole life. Also, it might be more sustainable to do something big, like return the buffalo to the great plains, but we seem to have a preference for the small and the local, despite it being perfectly possible to burn through more resources in the backyard than it takes to make something in China and ship it here.

This is no urge to return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Paleo, or evolutionary thinking, is a tool via which we can head to living better than we do today by uncovering the needs we have not, until recently, realized we had. I'd like a whole city; I like what the distribution of labor brings. I don't like the fraud, of course, but in no small part, if you eat real food, you tend to find yourself less gullible.

Thoughts Triggered Via OWS, Cain, et al

2011-10-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

Consensus equals paralysis.
Herman Cain got where he is today via the color of his skin and is a rat bastard for telling the protesters to blame themselves for failure at life. These people were public schooled and propagandized by your Republican/Democrat matrix. A pox upon both your houses.
For the youth to have a chance at success there must be a functioning civilization.
They are so badly educated that some claim they don't want capitalism; meanwhile it is blindingly obvious they need capital. Unfortunately the baby boomers have burnt through most of it.

I know for a fact our elders have been lying to us. Play by the rules, work hard- you'll get ahead. Yeah right. There are a half-ton of protected identities in this country, and they always get to cut the line. On top of them, there are the rich, who are quite willing to pay to get their kids a place at the trough. The chances of the people outside are the chances of making something nobody saw coming, like Google back before anybody had a clue. Any existing business is turned into a redistribution game.

I was pretty sure things would turn out well anyway, as I kept seeing the above happen to me because I believed the right wing Republican mantras. I could do it. I was smart enough. I could make it on my own, eventually. I don't believe this anymore. We are alll not supposed to go out and create the next Google; most of us are supposed to be building upon and growing already established businesses. Sadly, the lawyers, the human resources departments, the politicians, the unions, etc...- all of these parasites are killing the host, and the host doesn't even have good internal structure, seeing that they can no longer actually pick competent candidates to do the jobs that actually need to be done.

Founding the next great unknown business is an unlikely event, much like getting to be the one who finally breaks through the last century of malarkey surrounding revolution that has, so far, utterly destroyed any chance of true change in this country. Much more likely a son would be about the business of his father- not totally necessary mind you, but a clear indication of civilization. Progress is not a political achievement. Progress is incremental, generational, iterative, and discriminating. It depends on humans being free to make millions of decisions, and then turn around and make them again when they decide they didn't like what happened the first time round.

More For Wall Street Occupiers: End The Fraud

2011-10-05T09:57:00.000-07:00

Someone, thankfully, pointed out there are no official demands because there isn't any formal structure to the protests, so any 'demands' are, at best, opinions. Let us then try to improve our opinions.

Free education, as I alluded to before, is unlikely to be helpful because it is unlikely to be an actual education. I noticed many folks associated with this movement grumbling about their college debt and how they don't know how they are going to get by. Well, we aren't going to get by by allowing the fraud to continue. You haven't been educated; you've been conned.

Fraud is actually illegal in this country. Instead of asking people to fund more fraud perpetrated upon you, ask instead that people prosecute the fraudulent. Academia and government have co-operated in the lie for quite sometime. Shut down the colleges and sell off their assets- we use these funds to make the victims of this fraud whole.

Similar things must be done with those Wall Street companies. We, as in 'we the people' to unravel a rat's nest of shenanigans which will ultimately enslave our future generations if we don't stop it now. We won't manage it if we keep buying into the lies; rather we need to carefully seek out a just way of dealing with the mess. To the uninitiated, justice may appear to be massive redistribution, but it is not, for those institutions that fraudulently gained do not legitimately own what they have. We must be careful to make the distinction. Banks, colleges, and companies that take a lot of government contracts are likely to be engaging in fraud, but a shoe company is likely to be just selling shoes. We want business. We don't want anymore lies.

A Lesson For The Protesting Masses

2011-10-04T14:13:00.000-07:00

The 'occupy Wall Street' crowd appears to be bent on proving ignorance among protesters is not limited to Egyptians, though, to be fair, the media seems to be going out of their way to find stupid and/or let well known leftists co-opt the movement. If a journalist heard a coherent thought among the protestors, it would be studiously ignored, for it doesn't fit the narrative. So, here is a basic little lesson about what has happened to us:

A really, really long time ago, people cared about their children and, when their children grew up and started thinking about having children of their own, folks would sit down and try to figure out how everyone would be able to feed the coming generation. It occured to, oh the vast majority of the entire human race, that the Mommy and Daddy to be would need some sort of capital in order to be able to provide for a famliy. In most cases this would be directly provided in capital goods- indeed land, various animals- the point here is that this stuff, properly taken care of, will produce food and other goods with which the new couple can raise their children.

But we've been lied to in so many different ways, often directly under the guise of education, that we demonize the word dowry and glorify debt. Can anything be sillier? Can you even begin to make a coherent demand in the face of such mis-education?

So far, I've heard demands that many Wall Street types will be happy to accommodate; it'll let them trick yet another generation. We will continue to be in debt to them and/or in prison and forced to work for them via their friends in government. They'll be glad to provide a free 'education'- more of a chance to make sure you come out the other end believing the sort of self-defeating tripe that will keep them in power.

Okay, this was a really basic lesson. Maybe I'll do more later. Maybe not. Nobody is running around giving me any sort of hope that there is reason to waste the time elucidating things. But please, try to think of the difference between a dowry, which allowed a new couple to provide for themselves and their new children, versus debt, which put us all into hock to the previous generation- you know, those baby boomers who have mysteriously managed to stay around and keep all those jobs they promised us we'd get if we only went out and got that expensive education.

Theatrical Congress

2011-09-26T09:32:00.000-07:00

The pretense of the day appears to be Republican politicians holding hearings in order to get to the bottom of Solyndra. I've heard a few clips. Here is my impression- if the Republicans were remotely serious, they could have some of these bureaucrats they are grilling thrown in jail. One of the clips I heard was some guy going on about how the legal counsel his office got was that they could interpret a law in a way that seemed, at least from what the Republican was saying, contrary to what the actual law said. So, if the Republican was serious about stopping these abuses of power, he'd have that bureaucrat thrown into jail right then and there. Imagine trying to get out of a speeding ticket by saying your legal counsel said it was okay to interpret traffic laws differently, or a shoplifter trying to pull something similar. Does it make the remotest bit of difference whether or not you okayed your actions with some lawyer before you commit a crime? Yes, well, I suppose the reality is that we've move from a nation with some sort of rule of law to a nation ruled by lawyers, and everything will be okay as long as you pay your retainer and throw a lot of consulting work their way, but this is likely to upset the unlawyered classes.

These scams are regularly played, though since this green business is highly unscientific, it'll tank a lot more easily than, say, the Republican's pet industries, like oil and weaponry. The Republican lawyers find pre-existing industries to act as host to their parasitical ways; Democrat lawyers seem to think they can create new industries by fiat. The thing is, they are all lawyers, so the Republicans are unlikely to shove these bureaucrats in jail. Browbeating them is okay, but, if you start jailing them, you'd destablize the very system via which you expect to use for your own nefarious plans.

Wanted: A Wine, Pro-Biotic Experiment

2011-09-10T13:27:00.000-07:00

Given that, in nature, one would generally not find the presence of alcohol without also finding various little organisms that produce alcohol, I think it may be likely that the number of live organisms in one's alcoholic beverage of choice would have an effect on overall drinking rates. Thomas Jefferson, if I remember correctly, actually suggested wine as a way to curb alcoholism. Obviously, the distilled alcohols have no organisms in them, and now even wines are probably dead; it is common practice to add a lot of sulfite to wine.Now, the biggest problem, perhaps, is that wines are going to taste different, so whoever participates in a test will know the wines are different, but they need not know why. One could run a short term experiment, consisting of two casks of wines, one largely organism free and one with live cultures- you'd probably want the same participants but two different events- college students would love two free parties. As long as consumption can be properly monitored, researchers ought to be able to note whether or not live cultures have an influence on alcohol intake. I suspect there would be need for further refinement- more elegant, long term research. One could possibly argue that our modern, 'dead' beverages encourage a behavior of over-drinking or binging, and that it would take a while for the re-introduction of live cultures to effect drinking behavior.

Nutrition And the Mind

2011-09-09T07:17:00.000-07:00

I think back, to New Orleans, and inner city poor on multiple psych meds and nary a discussion about nutrition, unless it was to repeat that evil low-fat mantra. These fields are a scam and won't ever be much more than that- unless they start listening:

"Primal mind: nutrition & mental health—improving the way you feel & function & cultivating an ageless mind" by Nora Gedgaudas from Ancestry on Vimeo.

Why I Don't Eat Wheat

2011-08-30T13:33:00.000-07:00

Robb Wolf talks with Dr. William Davis about his new book Wheat Belly.

World Market's Crappy Service

2011-08-30T07:51:00.000-07:00

I was happy the day I found World Market started carrying a brand of coconut milk that had two ingredients; coconut milk and water. It was more expensive, but it is actually worth it. The other brand I was using before had guar gum in it which can cause some discontent.

The brand they stocked had a reduced fat version. It quickly became obvious that whoever stocks the shelf didn't bother to read the labels, because they just threw them all together. Over the past month or so, I've told the same cashier about the problem. Last night I bought the last two. I told her about the situation yet again. I even said something about getting in touch with the supplier. As I was walking out she said something like, "yeah, I've got them on speed dial."

Okay, sometime in the past month, it should have occurred to her to talk to her supervisor about it. Sure, I'm angry enough to go back, find a supervisor and raise hell; I am also angry enough not to go back at all.

They are out of the coconut milk. They have stopped carrying the chocolate bars they used to have that don't have soy lecithin in them. I've also become concerned with the level of sulfites in wine, and though they have a few organic wines, they are mainly interested in selling sweet plonk to middle America- I used to enjoy their wine tastings, but now they are usually pathetic.

I wonder if they have an unsubscribe button on their rewards program. What do I need their rewards program for anyway? The most of them exclude alcohol and the last one I saw also excluded food! Are you paying any attention to what I buy? That doesn't constitute any sort of reward.

Yet another reason why this 'fairness tax' for on-line purchases that many states insist you declare on your income tax is a lie. Shopping on-line actually requires a level of planning ahead. I don't know how many cans of coconut milk I use per month; I like having a store nearby so I can grab some on the way home when I run out. The state doesn't want to face competition, and neither apparently, do the corporations, but they both deserve to be out of business if they can't provide decent products and services.

For The Children: Fixing Modern Dentistry

2011-08-29T15:35:00.000-07:00

Well, if you are one of those people for whom having children looks likely, paying attention to what anthropology has to say about dentistry might keep the future little ones out of one of the biggest trial of my generation:

"Where is Darwin on dentistry? Caries & malocclusion from an evolutionary perspective" by Kevin Boyd, DDS, MS & Michael Mew, DDS from Ancestry on Vimeo.

I'm pretty sure the whole lot is avoidable with proper nutrition, but it'd be great to see some progress along the lines these two speakers are talking about. I still run into situations where dentists clearly don't know what is going on and merely treat without there being any coherent picture.

Stumbling Into a Big War

2011-08-29T13:00:00.001-07:00

So, obviously there are still a lot of people unable to understand Ron Paul. They didn't understand our foreign policy before 9/11 and they sure don't get it now. This is particularly sad, because continued military interference in the Middle East isn't just going to get us in trouble with Muslims- eventually it'll wake China, Russia, or both.

The Chinese have been heavily investing in Africa, as well as elsewhere. The Chinese are committed to growth, growth beyond which seems sane, but the rural impoverished people there have a history of bringing down governments, so the bureaucrats have an incentive. Make these people middle class, who do annoying things, like believe the TV tells them about American foreign policy in the Middle East- the middle class are docile and therefore prefered.

The current fighting in Libya is upsetting already existing contracts between Libya and China. The rabble currently posing as rebel force has already stated NATO powers will be getting the sweet deals. The Chinese have interests all over the place, especially in Africa, but we keep going to war with the people who have the resources they want to buy for their projects. This even rose to the surface during the spat with Pakistan after we violated their sovereignty. The Chinese are the all-weather friends; they bring these countries money and technical expertise. We may bring money, but we bully.

Russia also has interests in the Middle East. It seems the U.S. has settled on a plan to essentially steal various assets of certain countries before we go to war with them. This may become a way to 'keep hope alive' while D.C. keeps burning through the world's assets. In any case, they did it to Libya, and they've just recently done it to Syria. Russia has an interest in Syria and a naval supply base there.
In addition, although America may have completely forgot about Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Russia has not, nor have Muslims. America likes to fashion itself a Christian nation, and when Muslims feel like retaliating, they find the one sort of Christian probability suggests Americans are not; Orthodox. The Russians no doubt notice this.
Since the end of the Soviet era the Russian Orthodox church has been experiencing regrowth. Like all proud people they have aspirations of their own.
The Orthodox world, meanwhile has been upset since Kosovo. In the Middle East they have to deal with Muslim governments, and now Greece is suffering from whatever new edicts are issued from the European banks.

If Russia could ameliorate the problem in other Orthodox lands, well, that meshes pretty well with the Russian conception of themselves as a great people, doesn't it?

And, everyone is noticing how quickly the dollar is being devalued. They don't want to use it as a reserve currency- but apparently no one is ready to go back to gold quite yet. Various Russian and Chinese have openly made statements about the profligacy of the U.S. government, but there is barely a mention of it in our press.

So, I guess the point of this is, if you are one of those idiots on the internet who made me angry today, please don't be surprised when we end up in a really big war. The bull in the china shop, in all likelihood, will get shot by the china shop owner. If the china shop owner doesn't do it, well, there are other shops on the block, and none of them want the bull either.

The Reckless, the Prudent, And the Daydreamer

2011-08-25T11:17:00.000-07:00

I enjoy listening to private property anarchists talking about private law societies, and how people would contract out to companies for stuff the government does now, and how there would be competition between the companies even within the same geographical area. I like the theories, and in many ways, if I had charge of any sort of area, I'd be pushing society in that direction hard, but I have some suspicions. I think the appropriate strategic approach to take is aim for something that actually existed historically, like Germany before the rise of the nation-state, while keeping one's options open.

Prudence involves some planning ahead, but there's a lot more iteration involved; you try something, figure out what was good or bad and try something different the next time. If we over value planning, well things might never get done, even if the person isn't reckless and is willing to forgo his earthly pleasures for the plan. In some ways, the reckless are easier to deal with than the daydreamer; the daydreamer can appear prudent for far longer and we can waste an awful lot of resources, depending on how persuasive the daydreamer is.

Debt and childlessness provides fuel for illusion, especially since the childless are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) making the argument that what ever it is they are doing is a lot more important than human life. Some are particularly well versed in philosophical nonsense and shall use the abstraction to argue against the concrete. I have very little patience with this any more, for we only have the concrete, in this life, against which to judge our struggles. How do know you've done a good job in your garden? Stop showing me a barren field while telling me stories. As much as I enjoy N.T. Wright, he is wrong about telling stories.

It is the nature of capital accumulation that we eventually arrive at some end. One buys a factory to produce shoes, for instance. The daydreamer either misspends or simply accumulates, never to produce anything. Test, re-test, modify your ideas, try again. Real money, actual human beings, property- keeps us sane and looking at cultivating what we've got rather than wasting it while imagining the Eschaton.

An Interlude on Knowing

2011-08-24T07:49:00.000-07:00

JP quoted Rumsfeld at Confused of Calcutta. Rumsfeld doesn't usually deserve comment, but in this case he's a good example of someone allegedly conservative operating under the conceit of knowledge.
He gives three classes:

Known knowns
Known unknowns
Unknown unknowns

The last class devastates the first, so much so it practically destroys Rumsfeld's whole point, if I remember it correctly. I think he was talking about war at the time, and it didn't turn out too well in no small part because some of the nice little known knowns Rumsfeld thought he knew turned out to be an illusion. If you know there are unknown unknowns, you ought to take the next logical step and develop epistemological humility.

The socialists keep proving the point to us over and over; they think they (or some smart expert) can run the economy better than, well, nobody running it- or more precisely, everyone and their demonstrated, though sometimes perplexing, preferences. It seems possible to know, but alas it is not.

So, Rumsfeld appears know this, and can apply it to various leftist plans, but assumes, in the prosecution of his silly plans, that he has placed all his little unknown unknowns in his third category, away from his known knowns, and never shall the two meet. Well, if the Republicans won't develop epistemological humility on their own, they may develop some sort of humility if enough Americans would just stop voting.

Spending Time in A Hypothetical City

2011-08-23T10:39:00.000-07:00

For the average person moving to our shiny new city (or really old but under proper management), the most probable initial living arrangement would be to rent. One would be presented with all manner of renting possible, and I suspect we'd see a fair number of arrangements that would basically provide a hotel type environment. We don't know whether or not the newcomer has the capacity to plan ahead, but the proprietor of any sort of establishment of this sort certainly does; he would have been replaced long ago if he did not. So, there are various needs the customer needs; he needs proper nutrition, decent sleep, and a very powerful wake up call. The newcomer may not be able to plan ahead (though he may) but he may very well be the sort of person who can show up and do good work somewhere, so it stands to reason he'd be able to get the 'planning ahead' part of things as a service for the right price.

There are little things that corporations never quite get because the people who have to deal with the problem never quite 'own' the situation. Will any modern hotel get right of florescent lights, and red-shift the lighting spectrum at night to encourage good sleep? Will one corporations undertake to stop the other corporations from fattening up the unthinking masses with processed foods? When you really own the establishment, all those extra lbs on your customers actually begin to mean something; in a corporation the employee might think vaguely about the insurance handling it. I'm not saying Aunt Eugenia's boarding house is ever going to be absolutely perfect, but Eugenia's stake in her client's well-being and good behavior is a lot higher. She might even enact strict rules about, say, unmarried visitors of the opposite sex. These sorts of rules can seem unpleasant, but are often the sort of rules that help even the least reflective in our society begin to consider the future, and perhaps improving themselves enough to escape Aunt Eugenia.

But we must assume the newcomer has a bit more sense than that, because we want to explore a bit more of the city. We would also see property owners extremely well disposed to the business of buying and selling. Cities basically exist for buying and selling, despite what the art and society crowd may tell you. Cities usually sit where two or more main trade routes meet. Kill the market, and you'll kill the city. Indeed, much of what is considered urban, or inner-city unpleasantness does not represent an illness of a city, but an illness of a people alienated from the market. Anyway, our newcomer may well move into running some sort of business.

Eventually, he may want to buy in; actually own property in the city. Here, ideally, the only barrier to entry is the price of whatever property he buys. The deed is both title and stock in the city corporation and there are voting rights attached, but he is unlikely to ever vote personally- most of the votes are cast by proxy. Now, it is vitally important that the political class doesn't get to sneak in here by acting in proxy for actual owners; no, this is an all-owner gig, for we are trying to reward people who are planning ahead, not people who can con other people, so those that dominate the board quite rightly ought to be very old, semi-retireed landowners who have proven they know a thing or two about bequeathing some solid assets to their grandchildren.

There are a few catches to this story. Landowners could collude to keep others out, or take advantage of businessmen who certainly own a lot of things but don't necessarily own land. Big landowners could take advantage of small ones, etc... This is why a king, mayor, judge, or CEO (whatever his title is is much less material than his incentives) needs to exist. Landowners will have disputes, and while the corporate body may be able to determine what grand and wonderful things they shall do together (and how they will pay for it), determining justice is a different matter entirely. Despite having practically no voice, vote, or any of the annoyingly political gunk currently available to us now, in this city, the people are wanted. A person in this executive position must take a long view, and preferable derive income from the sorts of sources which encourage the long view; it is my view that homesteading the title system, and seeing his own rights to such income as contingent upon the property rights of others would help.

Liminary & Somewhat Pro-Corporate Remarks with a Digression of an Aristocratic Nature

2011-08-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

The property owners of London are sitting ducks to anyone wanting to steal from them, whether they be thugs or politicians. A long time ago, when only property owners were voters, the government was at least a bit more responsive to a property owner's needs.

We unfortunately, don't usually get to go out an find unowned land and homestead it. Rather, someone holds title to the land, so we've got to buy the title from someone. Now, usually the title system and the actual homesteading of the land overlap, but sometimes not. So, the tricky (but important) thing to do is have someone homestead the titles. A corporation could do this very well. Property owners would have voting stock, there could be a board, and a CEO. I suspect in practice it would actually look a lot like an aristocracy or a monarchy. Indeed, one could argue the task could be accomplished quite well via a sole proprietorship, though I do think any royal activities are far better limited to judging cases between owners rather than coming up with exciting plans for how anything should be deployed for the future. Kings, or CEOs for that matter, are often tempted to increase revenue or growth at the expense of the stability (and/or rights) of the individual property owner.

With careful supervision, such a corporation would be a stable way to run a city. The stock-holders would want to carefully improve the city, since this would in turn increase the value of their holdings, but they wouldn't engage in, for instance, imminent domain seizures or ridiculous levels of debt- both jeopardize their personal holdings.

Just in case I confused anyone with by mentioning aristocracy, let me do it again:
A private property anarchist- a. believes in private property, and b. believes in the division of labor( and a lot more, but this is all I need for the following). So far, at least, I have not read about or heard a private property anarchist suggest that he didn't believe in division of labor, and I assume he would be because private property anarchists seem to be the sort of rare people who study Austrian Economics.

If you believe in the division of labor, you might, upon reflection, realize that some people may be better at administering land than others, and that the aristocrats of old may actually have been, for the most part, the sort of people who were good at the old-fashioned, family-centric form of capitalism that occurred the whole word round long before anyone came up with the word. It is by no means clear that everyone is equally capable, for instance, of keeping a house. I know I am not very good at it, and there are people so bad at it in my town that they spend most of their time (even in this heat) sitting outside. So, it stands to reason that over time only those good at administering property would own property, and they'd lease to those with less capacity for the task. Landlords are still, mysteriously, called landlords...

Preliminary Anti-Corporate Remarks

2011-08-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

Corporations aren't good for much, as is becoming apparent. The structural defect of the father (the government) is also found in its sons (corporations). The employee doesn't own corporate assets and has no incentive to preserve them- instead they have incentive to take a lot of risk on so they can get a big bonus at the end of the year. If there is a deal you know will go south in five years, but it will get you a bonus for four of those five years, why not do it- especially if you have nice, helpful regulatory bodies to sign off on the legality of it?

The government employee/official may be playing for better position, more power, perhaps in some cases more salary, but the incentive is no different- spend everything and mortgage all the assets to make the next election.

Whether it's finance or farming, the corporate/government structural flaw causes the very problems they pretend to prevent. A local farmer would likely lose his livelihood if his product harmed anyone, yet we regularly see e. coli and other out breaks from various corporations- who follow all the government regulations! There is no downside for any single employee as long as he has followed the regulations.

While watching London burn, however, it occurred a corporation of property owners could run a city far better than any current democratic government. I will expand on this later.

The Library Myth

2011-08-11T11:00:00.000-07:00

Vox Day links to a good takedown of the Hypatia myth, to which I'd like to add the library myth.

By the time the so-called Christian mobs come to burn down your library, rest assured our precious store of knowledge will be in no way affected. The shelves have become filled with all manner of questionable things in a heroic quest to increase circulation. There is also the perennial attempt to be non-discriminatory, though this approach appears to require many years of ALA brainwashing to be believed. It seems quite obvious to me that one would want to grant all access to a decent asset rather than drag the asset around in the mud and pretend that it now will provide great service to the disadvantaged.

In truth, they will be post-Christian mobs who'll break down the door so they can steal the dvds of the 56th version of Saw, before they set fire to badly written erotica, paranormal romance novels, low-fat vegan cookbooks, completely inaccurate political garbage (from both the right and the left), books on magic (both the pagan and Christian branded variety), and whatever other bit of ghastliness that can be found on the New York Times bestseller list.

From Vanity Fair to Fire

2011-08-10T10:37:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Vanity Fair while London burns, apparently. I get the impression William Makepeace Thackeray disapproved of certain aspects of high society- which are not aspects of that society at all actually. We've got vanity in spades, we've got a sense of entitlement, class warfare, etc... Everything bad they had, we've got, but with hoodies and thuggish manners.

But, somehow, in that less egalitarian society, vanity was harnessed to serve a larger goal; continuing the line, building up capital, improving the family. The wealthier families tended to have larger families, and put a great amount of forethought (and capital) into the future of their families.

Forethought seems in short supply now. Neither the politicians nor the welfare class seem to know where stuff comes from. They appear unable to realize that people stop making stuff once it's clear some idiot is going to come along and steal it. They also appear incapable of thinking about reproduction; it is as if children are a random happenstance.

Snake Oil And The Art Of Medical Competition

2011-08-01T15:01:00.000-07:00

We need medical competition in this country. A new procedure, cure, technique, etc...- just doesn't come out of the same old system. This isn't any grand new insight- we know Detroit is the zombie car industry, held aloft by big government. For most of my life Japan was the big innovator and now we see Korea coming up fast.

The slow to innovate say the new stuff is quackery or that it is snake oil, and it may be, but the reason why snake oil and quackery should be legal is that eventually the medical equivalent to the model-T will show up and wipe out that medical buggy whip industry. The old medical industry cozies up to government and attempts to limit competition in the name of health, but they are far more interested in their pills being the only legal way to provide yourself with relief.

Speaking of snake oil, I wonder which sort of snakes are the oilest? Where does one procure a snake oil press? I can envision a short career of ironic honesty. Of course, they'd send the government in to shut me down when it turned out snake oil was good for something.

Potemkin Congress

2011-08-01T14:38:00.000-07:00

Well, look at that, a little drama being played out so that Republicans can pretend that they fought the good fight and pushed the president and avoided the big scary sounding default. I think they should default, but this is about raising the debt ceiling and raising the debt ceiling does nothing but make a future default bigger and more likely.

I seriously wish I had enough funds to run a campaign to get everyone not to vote. This debt ceiling madness, like the bailouts, is another example in the long list of examples where Democrats and Republicans happily join together to destroy the future of America for the sake of their own measly political careers.

Know Thy Massacre

2011-07-29T07:10:00.001-07:00

Anders Breivik is not a terrorist. Terrorists use violence and the threat of violence to influence the behavior of other people. The looming fear of terrorist attacks make people afraid, and encourages stupid government officials to become increasingly tyrannical in the name of protecting the people. The effectiveness of a terrorist action relies upon a people's response to it- sadly, America has yet to figure this out.

Breivik did something quite different; he used violence to murder a significant chunk of Norway's future elite. There is no continuing threat from Breivik- he seemed to be working alone, and if he does have accomplices, one has every reason to assume their primary targets will continue to be the elite. Indeed, at first glance one would suspect that Breivik's action will lead people to abandon political position similar to his own.

But a few more glances, and a bit of thought, leads one to wonder, has Norway's elite been weakened? The post-communist revolutionary mindset (even among Christians, sadly) puts a very heavy weight on 'conversion.' No one seems to notice how unlikely it is for the proletariat to be remotely Marxist, or for that matter, for a person raised up in one of the more mainstream religions to convert to another. If you want to add to your number, to spread your way of life, have babies- the stats just don't support forgoing children for the sake of spreading any sort of message.

So, Breivik's brutality may ultimately lead to what he wants. The left loves contraception, abortion, childless women with professional careers, and Breivik has just taken a significant number of a generation out of the gene pool. One can reasonably extrapolate this across a few generations to a point where there simply won't be enough elites for them to control the country any more. Meanwhile, the conditions on the street, which formed Breivik's mindset are still in existence, and the more fecund lower classes tend to be instinctively reactionary.

It would be well to know your enemy, especially, as it happens, if you are an elite. Breivik's actions are evil, but not crazy or irrational; he figured out a means that may very well lead to the ends he wants. It may also be worth noting there were likely a lot of other wants he had before wedding himself to an imaginary abstraction of a future Norway. Much more mundane wants, like marriage, career, children, etc... The kind of wants largely destroyed by leftist policy. The kind of wants, which, if they are met within a society, secure a man's support and loyalty to that society. The ultimate failure of the left is their complete disrespect for the psyche of man.

Production As Activism

2011-07-21T14:59:00.000-07:00

The other day I started thinking, hey why not DISSIDENT vodka? Since DISSIDENT vodka is illegal, there will be a lot of room on the label and there could be nice little political messages there instead of those admonitions that pregnant women who get their drink on never read.
How about something like:
This vodka is illegal! How can you say you live in a free country?

Okay, maybe the health and safety propaganda would keep a lot of the drones from having the eureka moment, but you know what seems to work pretty good? Raw dairy. Yep, it's gateway contraband, and the average republican begins to slouch towards libertarianism. I don't know if raw dairy does quite the same thing to democrats- they seem to be able to violate stupid laws while simultaneously advocating other stupid laws. They do seem to respond well to branding though, being early adopter of organic, free trade, local, etc- pity about level of falsehood in all of these trendy labels.

If, however, your product is illegal, then labeling it as such wouldn't be falsehood. Further, if there was a sensible way of establishing some standards, perhaps a reputation, possibly by fingerprinting the label and using a anonymous website where you can build a reputation without giving away your identity, then you could distribute the message of freedom with all sorts of stuff.

Of course, cigarettes, what with tobacco being dirt cheap and all, spring to mind as a pretty lucrative possibility. A more politically current possibility would be 100watt incandescent light bulbs. I suspect, sans the appropriate regulators snooping around your facilities, baby toys would be highly illegal. The possibilities are endless. If only we could teach our activists capitalism/production as a strategy for change rather than all that revolution nonsense...

The Muslim Brotherhood vs the Professionally Naïve

2011-07-14T08:00:00.000-07:00

Michael Totten is in Egypt and he has interviewed Esam El-Erian, a member of the executive bureau of the Muslim Brotherhood. He's worth listening to, despite spouting the typical propaganda on the greatness of democracy and the evils of Israel. In addition to pointing out that Qaddafi is 'our man' he comes up with this:

Look, sir. China, Iran, and France are the three players in Africa. America is now out. And the Arab world may be lost to America if it doesn’t revise its strategy. It may be lost. All the Arab world. This American attempt to stop the revolution in Syria and Libya and Yemen is going to fail.

This is absolutely true. As, I have mentioned before, Osama bin Laden's dreams are closer than ever to being fulfilled, while America influence in the area has dwindled. Our military violence, ever widening in scope apparently (six countries- Somalia being the most recent one I've heard about), is a clear sign we are losing control. So, while the media pretends democracy/revolutionary equals friend, the military negotiates with the U.S., and our state department tries to engineer a 'revolutionary government' which would be harmless to its interests among the cognitively challenged on social networking sites.

The title, incidentally, comes from the interview as well:

Esam El-Erian: You are very naïve people.

MJT: I’m not naïve. I do this for a living.

Perhaps professional naïvete equals myopia? Much like the recent debates on raising the debt ceiling, once you take the long view, it become ridiculously obvious that we just have to stop. No more war; no more debt. The journalist, the government official- they seem to thrive off the inertia, though Totten is certainly better than most journalists covering the Middle East.

Stock Pot=Retirement Home for Old Layers

2011-07-08T10:59:00.000-07:00

I'll be on watch for big fuzzy pink sweater wearing folk from now on!

Flag, Patriot, Folly

2011-07-05T07:42:00.000-07:00

The time of year being what it is, I've heard again that Star Spangled Banner recently.
Through it all, that flag was still there, but what does that mean now?
The enemy can come and kill the rightful authority and take the castle, but leave the flag.
And when the warriors return to the castle, since they have been democratized and public schooled, they have allegiance to the flag and none to persons, they see nothing wrong, even as they see oppression and evil perpetrated against themselves.

Meanwhile, our poor backward ancestors would notice the king was not on his throne, or that the promises made had been broken. The warriors would hear word that their lord had fallen, and gather elsewhere. They would know their land had been stolen, that their families were in danger. It is as if we have adopted a more sophisticated grammar, only to find it dims our ability to perceive meaning, when compared to antiquated speech.

What has brought such great blindness to us? It is as if the patriot must now mimic the flag. He may complain, go to tea parties, and speak with great clarity on the wrongness of many things, but he must be a patriot. He must be still there, visible on the ramparts, while the enemy holds court in the main hall- and the local police become extremely aggressive in order to get a bit more revenue from us on our 'independence' day.

Could The Internet Kill Democracy?

2011-06-25T10:45:00.000-07:00

Supposedly, Iceland is incorporating various suggestions certain Icelanders, who use social media, suggest into their new constitution. A brief perusal of one's Facebook chatter or Twitter feed should be enough for one to immediately see one doesn't want the average social media user making decisions at such a scale. It turns out politicians don't want them to either; rather this is a way to hijack language, under the cover of which, they can maximize their power. A great example of using democratic language in an attempt to seize power is the U.N.s recent proclamation that access to the internet should be a human right. Sounds great to the great unwashed, but it ignores the property rights of those who actually own the infrastructure and sets up a convenient excuse via which the U.N. can claim the right to interfere. So, somewhere down the road we get broken infrastructure and an international body regulating whatever access we do have.

If the internet is going to provide us with any great new insights to governance, I suggest it won't be democratic. It must be remembered that we attempt various means of governance to improve governance. We know not everyone can make these grand sweeping decisions governments like to make; indeed, I am quite unsure that there is any good call for most of these decisions being made at such a level. Most folks lives, and their whole decision making process takes place in a sub-150 group.

But, for the purposes of this post, let's suppose decisions that touch the lives of several million Americans actually need to be made. The Republic was an attempt at an improvement over the Imperial Parliament (anti-monarchical propaganda was tacked on after). Attempts to 'democratize' the republic appear to directly damage good governance. Indeed, one could assume the entire purpose of progressive innovations is to destroy, but I digress.

Should grand, sweeping decisions need to be made, then we'd be far better off finding the person or persons actually capable of making them. A person, most likely, because we all know a committee of even the smartest people can be profoundly dumb, but we'd not necessarily need the same person for all decisions. We want the best decision, not a particular mode of making decisions, so all else being equal, why can't the internet help us get to the best decisions rather than prop up a failed egalitarianism?

Now, most folks are apparently ill equipped to evaluate arguments at all, nor do I have a clue how those in power now could be induced to cede power to people who would be sensible enough not to use it (or, if we continue to suppose for the purposes of this post, use it properly), so the more realistic theory is that we continue along until they've completely self-destructed. Still, I think the influence of the internet does not trend towards democracy, at least not as progressively defined.

People have found, for instance, that prediction markets seem to have some decent purpose. The participant in a prediction market bets on what he thinks he will happen, so he has some incentive to get it right. A voter, however, votes for whatever idiosyncratic mysteries he has in his mind. He has no incentive to get it right. So there are limited arenas in which the many might provide a clear signal, but the incentives must be lines up right, and they are most certainly not lined up properly under the current system.

The buzz around crowd-sourcing decisions has, at least to my ears, fizzled out. So, in the absence of any new clever schemes, couldn't we just look for a good employee? Someone who has the intelligence, a framework of ideas (freedom being prominent among them), and perhaps that sort of eccentricity which keeps him involved with family, church, and hobbies rather than trying to impose his will on everyone.
Sadly, folks are already planning those abominable election campaigns...

The Travelling Seed

2011-06-06T10:14:00.000-07:00

Yoani Sanchez talks about her sister's emigration:

And more than twenty years ago she reached the same conclusion as the majority of my compatriots: How can one set down roots in a country where so few can bear fruit?

For a lot of men, America is already like Cuba in this regard.

Contemporary American Christian Music Explained

2011-05-26T14:14:00.000-07:00

Recently, when I had to listen to some Christian Music, my thoughts turned to Don Colacho's aphorism #71:

Para las circunstancias conmovedoras sólo sirven lugares comunes. Una canción imbécil expresa mejor un gran dolor que un noble verso.
La inteligencia es actividad de seres impasibles.

One of life's great mysteries solved by a Columbian reactionary. Oh, the beauty of the internet.

Perhaps Christian artists aren't less skilled either, they may be very talented; just too emotional about God to be able to write anything coherent.

Abortion And Atheist Morality

2011-05-25T11:50:00.000-07:00

Vox Day notes the New Atheists seem to be the same old blood thirsty progressives:

And it is amusing that PZ thinks that murdering unborn children is "the right side of history"; I have absolutely no doubt that the atheists of the future will be denying that pro-abortion equalitarians were motivated by their atheism in much the same way that atheists today deny that rabidly murderous Communists were motivated by their atheism.

I think there's a rather logical way in which an atheist would find life more important. In order to get to the point where one can have science, falsifiability, and whatnot, one needs an observer. Now, if you are alive you are an observer. If you are dead, or not living, you aren't an observer- at least that's what the tenets of atheism imply. So, we need observers, and since atheists explicitly states there is no God, humans appear to be the best observers on the block, barring any extraterrestrial super-intelligent observers. Now, humans might be the most intellectually gifted observers that atheists are aware of, but we've all got to admit humans make mistakes. The only real solution for the reality of such flawed observers is to have many observers- in other words, protect and promote life.

Instead, there seems to be a tendency to suggest one can take non-existence around for a spin and see how one likes it, or that one can benefit from non-existence, or that folks in general could benefit from more people being non-existent.

The Gullible Christain Soldier

2011-05-18T11:05:00.000-07:00

Teófilo has been drinking the red, white, and blue kool aid and thinks Pakistan needs a 'Come to Allah' moment.

Pakistan needs to “come to Allah.” Pakistan’s leaders need to recognize that they have reached a watershed in their relations with the US and that a clear path is ahead of them: they are either with us or with the terrorists.

Pakistan is in the same place it has always been. It inhabits a particular part of the globe, and, even now, they are still technically our ally. I think they've known we'd turn on them for a while, and this is why they are scrambling for some sort of diplomatic leverage. It doesn't matter how nice they try to be with us; there are factions in the U.S. who find continuous war beneficial and the Pakistanis have wisely guessed that they would be next.

Neither Jews, nor Christians, nor Muslims believe that coming to God involves obeisance to an idol. The right seems to understand so many lies told domestically, but for some mysterious reason the liars who dabble in foreign policy get a free pass. They are the same lies- Our country uses similar justifications for invading Pakistan as they do for killing a Marine in his own home.

When Will the Church Take Action Against Goldman Sachs?

2011-05-16T09:58:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the Catholic Church in Naples has decided to deny any unrepentant Mafia access to the sacraments. One awaits, with near non-existent hope, for similar injunctions against members of the Italian government.

Naturally, here in the U.S., the Catholic Church in Maryland/Viriginia could do us well by banning the sacraments in Washington D.C.

I do think we Christians lost something dear in the late 300s. The legalization of Christianity seems to have led, in so many times and places, to a compromised Christianity. The mafia aren't exemplars of good behavior, but compared to what goes under the aegis of the institutions the Church appears to be okay with- well, it ain't the Godfather bombing Libya. In some cases the local mafia could have a better case to rule a certain area- stemming from property rights and invested interests- rather than the politicians who don't own anything and seem perfectly happy selling us down the river via debt.

A Less Far-Fetched Story: Osama in Pakistan

2011-05-13T12:46:00.000-07:00

Well, ever since Obama came out and said he green lighted the killing of Osama, the story keeps changing. Now I'm seeing stories about how Osama lived in this compound without internet or TV service, but had one huge video collection of pornography. I don't know how this plays for people who actually watch TV, but doesn't this contradict the 'mother-lode' of intelligence story?

Something about the way the story keeps changing has me thinking this-

As far as I can tell, the original purpose for this Navy Seal team was extraction, not assassination. I'm talking about the reasons they decided to put together the program years ago. Obviously, they are getting called assassins now, but the media are rather notorious for refusing to do very much homework. So, I think the Seal team went in to extract.

The various stories surrounding Osama's stay at this compound seem heavily spun and internally contradictory, but it does seem like they are just editing what really happened. They eventually had to admit he wasn't armed. They say he had no internet or T.V. There are various other little pieces in the background of these stories which suggest the compound was a prison.

So, my best guess is that Pakistan had Osama confined in this compound and somebody decided to send in a Seal team to take him. The Pakistanis guarding Osama may have actually been the ones who killed him, but in any case, we've got a downed helicopter and various unknown people dead at the scene- most likely the guards meant to keep Osama under house arrest put up a fight.

If the Pakistani's did kill Osama, then the burial at sea suddenly makes sense. Lose the body, lose the evidence of who killed him. Then it is just a matter of deciding what makes the most political sense to say.

The weak spot in this theory is Pakistan. They don't necessarily know what exactly happened in the compound, but if they had guards keeping Osama in, they'd know the official U.S. story isn't true. This doesn't mean they feel it in their best interest to make this known. Even in the version sanitized for our consumption, we heard this whole idea about how Pakistan must have known Osama was there and that they are, perhaps, not really our friends. I believe it would be more accurate to say that the U.S. is not really Pakistan's friend. The strategic aims of each party diverges- indeed, the strategic aims of the U.S. are now basically untenable for all but the most corrupt. The U.S. has been a friend to and turned on Saddam Hussein, Gaddifi, and Osama bin Laden, and I suspect the Pakistanis are walking a fine line- trying not to cause discord, but preparing as they see their relationship with the U.S. unraveling.

As with most things these days, I hardly know if this is worth blogging about, it being conjecture and all. We know they aren't telling us the truth. We don't need to know what happened in order to know they aren't telling us the truth. In many cases, it's just freaking obviously wrong, like everything Bernanke does, or the food pyramid, or Obama's straight faced promise to get speculators for the high oil prices when he's not only responsible for the policies and wars causing it, but he promised higher prices during his campaign!

How To Become Anti-War

2011-05-05T15:33:00.000-07:00

The true end to any of the pro-war sentiment I had in earlier days came when I realized we weren't achieving any of our ends. I had not thought that I was justifying means via ends, but apparently I was. War, in the absence of any decent objective, looks suspiciously like a lot of trespass and murdering. The means, bereft of any ends are easily evaluated.

In the chaos of thought within the mind, I am sure many other things were important for me to change on this issue. Perhaps the idea that any good governance would protect private property, especially from overreaching bureaucrats, had some effect. Perhaps the thought of how sad I am that many soldiers go away to fight, and come back to find their wife has left them and the much vaunted nation for which they served is letting her steal him blind and take the kids had something to do with it. However thought works, it isn't the linear sort of process a narrative implies.

Self-defense and defense of others still rattle around in my brain as good aims to have, but it seems to me a person on his own property has a better claim to self-defense than men who fly halfway across the world to fight. Of course, there are also the SWAT teams here in the U.S.A., who are happy to do home invasion here, for the average sleeping American. Somehow, the nature of personal self-defense doesn't channel well through the offices of the state.

Wanted: More Humans, Fewer Widgetarians

2011-05-04T13:24:00.000-07:00

Modern revolutionary thought depends on industrialization. Marx was rather occupied with who controlled the means of production, but he didn't think along the lines of homeschooling; no, it's much more likely he'd jump for joy over one of these massive California school districts.

So we've got industrialized schools, industrialized churches, and then we've got industry. It seems to me nobody ever revolts and seizes control of the local cobbler, but if you've got a shoe factory around, someone out there thinks they ought to take it 'for the proles' or 'for the children' depending on what propaganda plays in your town. Meanwhile the shoes tend to wear out much faster...

Folks seem to get enamored with the efficiency of the industrial model, so it pops up in odd places. The evangelical impulse, when not properly kept in check, can lead dangerous things, not just really bad music. Life lived in common ought to be human, not widgetarian.

I like the term widgetarian because it reminds me of vegetarian, and thus intimates some of the problems we've got. Widgetized food is a massive problem, and still too few realize how necessary it is to get back to real food and real food production in order to heal. Too many people are trying to build the shining city on the hill with no thought at all of the hinterlands necessary to supply it.

Spheres: Personal & Political

2011-05-02T09:37:00.000-07:00

I was watching some video from Reason this morning, a presentation by two school choice activists pointing out how much progress has been made. These types of presentations are the same sort that got me interested in politics in the first place; they give you the great idea that you can make some sort of difference, and you can, until your opponents figure out how to thwart you. We win, for real, when the entire question of education is removed from the political sphere. We win when almost all questions are removed from the political sphere, because most questions are personal, and therefore are properly addressed in our personal spheres, even if they are somehow public.

We saw what the personal can do, even when it is public, when Kate and Will went and got married. Politicians are especially attuned to this sort of thing, and it is no wonder they grumbled; despite all their public relations bills and their actual power, they can't muster half that crowd. I have hopes that perhaps some of the many young women who tuned in might have heard about a god who actually wants people to have children. I also hope that, maybe, upon seeing a wedding to a real prince, they might think twice about slumming with thugs and getting tattoos. At the very least, I do hope Kate's dress is replicated early and often- thank you ever so much for wearing sleeves.

But there I go proving my point. There is no guarantee of policy, there is no policy, it's personal. The effects are highly personal, certainly of lasting importance to the participants, but also of some uncertain level of importance to anyone paying attention. We can't, despite all our 'glorious' wars everywhere across the globe, even pretend to manufacture the sort of patriotism enjoyed by those who feel some sort of allegiance to the royal family.

Back in the land where everything is political, including the personal, the president has released something related to a birth certificate, and has authorized the murder of someone who may or may not be Osama bin Laden. Obama is on the campaign trail, and he's framing the debate. While the strategic superiority of Osama's strategy should be obvious for all to see, Obama has just employed a bit of theater in order to pretend he is the winner in the war on terror. Odious, is it not, that in order to do this they murdered somebody and threw him in the sea? Why didn't they do the whole show trial thing?

I shouldn't be surprised. Our toilets are legislated in this pathetic country. The birth certificate, to the protestant minded folk who like to think they can read the document and hold all parties to whatever they think it says, is like red meat to a guard dog; while ya'll are tearing that one apart they'll be in the house, stealing us blind.

Well, I feel like I digressed, seeing as I have embarked on a discussion of current events, but perhaps I did not digress, for they are examples of cheap political theater involving a false person. If these false people, these politicians, were removed from decisions making, if all decisions were personal, we'd be better off. Our real fight isn't to get the bureaucrats to do what we want, but to remove them, where ever possible, from the spheres of decision making that are rightfully ours.

Please Exit The Handbasket

2011-04-18T13:37:00.000-07:00

If you find yourself in a handbasket, I highly recommend leaving the handbasket at once. I'm not saying your particular handbasket is actually going to hell, but if your handbasket is of the size capable of carrying you, your children, or the entire world, why take the chance? Indeed, if you know of any ridiculously large handbaskets, burn them at once (after having made sure no one is in them, of course), and only use larger varieties of baskets that have no handle and therefore tend to be headed in less nefarious directions. The laundry basket, for instance, tends to be headed in the direction of the laundry, and is subsequently considered to be relatively safe, except for the occasional bleaching accident, or those times when everything comes out pink- mortifying, but not eternally so.

The Medicalization Of Maleness

2011-04-07T14:34:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while I think, what's going on here generationally? Sure, it's modern life, and the average male child can hardly get through kindergarten without a diagnosis. Then there's puberty, and the pro-estrogen crowd are sure to medicate, if they haven't already created little zombies with ritalin. Needless to say there are addictions too, so if you don't end up with something physically wrong with you due to all the interventions, some jerk will still attempt to convict you of something or other.

It's hardly surprising when they actually begin to act crazy, either. Puberty isn't a good time to be messing with hormones, and that's just what most of the food and medications people stick boys on does. Then there's feminism, and churches. Churches, for the most part, are blatantly incoherent on feminism, primarily because even clergy are swayed by the law of supply and demand. Women seem to make up the greater part of the church going public, so pastors shall avoid treading on any feminist toes.

But men drop out. They go invisible when the society isn't working for them. Some of us isolate, some of us actually get sick, some of us try to find some other place where we'll be better off. Now imagine the generation. At first you think, hey it's only few guys. Then you think about the other guys, the guys you don't see anymore but you hear about every now and then. Then you remember the guy or two who've died. Suddenly you are looking at a great big gaping hole in the generation, and it's scary. You can only feel all comfortable and safe by carefully looking only in one direction- only at a few good examples of "successful" men, men who have been labelled so for various reasons, not all of which necessarily reflect reality- look at what's not there, but should be, and you'll get a sense of vertigo.

The Osmotic Class

2011-03-25T11:43:00.001-07:00

David D'Amato, in "Meritocracy" in the Middle East, got me thinking, probably because I've been thinking about concepts like nobility:

The class composition of the state has always been based on what is popularly called “the Noble Lie,” an idea famously illuminated in Plato’s masterwork of political philosophy, The Republic. Plato held that the good or ideal society, the one that would provoke the proper virtues, had to be based on an “ingenious falsehood” that would protect the purity of the ruling class and keep everyone content in their place in society.

After setting out the three classes to be established by the lie, Plato explained that there would be a few from each level of stratification who could experience social mobility, either upward or downward. Still, he warned against the possibility of members of the lowest class — born with “copper or iron” in their souls — ascending to power; “there is an oracle,” he wrote, “which declares that the city shall then perish when it is guarded by iron or copper.”

We’re taught the same today, that society would crumble around us if not for the watchful stewardship of the state and its elites. Nothing frightens the Middle East’s ruling class, those relying on the Noble Lie, more than the class awareness implicit in recent popular movements; it is necessary for them to undermine the idea that a society can be exploitative of the laboring class, can allow a small elite conquest through coercion, while nonetheless allowing a level of “social mobility.”

D'Amato is undoubtedly right about Middle Eastern, and, indeed planet wide meritocracy. It doesn't actually exist anymore- it can't due to the massive bubble in education. Apparently, the Middle East followed the West's example and seduced it's children into Higher Education, the end point of which was supposed to be some sort of office job and a solid shot at the upper middle class. Meritocracy sells to the international Facebook and Twitter crowd; people just smart enough to think they could make it, but too ignorant to realized all the socialism that they 'benefited' from in the past is precisely why they can't get jobs now.

Lisa Goldman in her article, In Post-Revolutionary Cairo Patriotism Is Newly Fashionable, puts it bluntly:

The majority of Egypt’s population is under 30, and they cannot get ahead, even when they play by the rules – by attending university, graduating at the top of their class and serving a mandatory year in the army. Then they try to enter the job market, and there is either no work, or the work available does not pay a living wage. Hence the humiliation and discontent.

Also, Vox Day, informs us the Tunisian unemployment rate among those college graduates is 45 percent, three times higher than the national rate. That's why so many of them who participated in the recent revolt a) spoke English, and b) had the time to participate.

World governments created an illusion, and an artificial class- the falsely educated. The mirage is disappearing, and they are angry, but they are not likely to be people who would climb any kind of social ladder. The evidence is all around us here in America, where tattoo parlors are springing up everywhere; people at a certain social level reinforce their own class behaviors. Indeed, slumming, as well as young middle class men and women outright adopting low class behavior, has become the new direction of social mobility.

Men and women who want to improve themselves are rare. Those who actually try to navigate from a lower class to a higher one are rarer still, and often the largest source of resistance comes from one's own class. Money doesn't define class; behavior does, and it's your own class that will get offended when you start acting differently from them.

The ruling elite are primarily bureaucrats; in a free society there would be a natural elite, probably looking more like many small kingdoms. In the administration of property, (and people, for some will delegate) division of labor and specialization works. Thus a family with good skills for dealing with land will accumulate a lot of it, and have others willing to live and work there. Nobility emerges naturally if, for instance, you actually have to plan on getting your family on a solid enough footing to be able to take care of you when you get old, instead of using your government to steal from everyone. Obviously, those in power often do steal regardless of whether they come from nobility or not, but we know the bureaucrats of our age always steal.

The Growing Darkness And The Pointlessness of Dream Interpretation

2011-03-21T14:34:00.000-07:00

I had a dream in which I was driving an old white sedan through a desert. There was a strange darkness behind, and I began suspecting I wasn't making very much headway. The darkness began to swirl, revealing itself to be a vast tornado of sorts, and my car was being pulled backward regardless of what I did.

The dream ended rather abruptly. I was either out of the car watching it being pulled back at one point, or my mind has been well trained by movies to just provide such scenes for my benefit, regardless of where I might supposedly be in the dream.

I woke up, quite unhappy about staring at such vast darkness. I've gotten chills down my spine looking at pictures of outer space since childhood, so some thing blotting out the entire horizon in a dream will undoubtedly jolt me awake. Obviously, the world and it's leaders seem crazy to me, and there are plenty enough reasons for me to dream such a dream.

Oddly, though, after I woke and had that moment of relief, I thought of how the Church Fathers don't encourage folks to put much stock in dreams. I thought further about God as darkness- I believe this was St. Gregory of Nyssa, who was explaining the great mysterious awe one gets when really getting close to God. Anyway, I don't want to go into explaining that too much, because what I've already wrote gets you to my point; if I were to try and explain my dream I could just as well assume the great darkness was God, and that He was pulling me to Him even as I was headed in the opposite direction, and flooring it.

Pointless to attempt interpretation, but I suspect it is high time I found something better to sleep on.

Charlie Sheen As Therapy

2011-03-11T11:34:00.000-08:00

Feeling down? Embarrassed?

Charlie Sheen's Winning Recipes from Charlie Sheen

Charlie Sheen playing crazy Charlie Sheen, probably to be released from that despicable, but extremely popular two and a half pile of horse manure show. Very likely a rational decision to act crazy so he could be fired and likely make millions of dollars rather than just quit and have to pay whatever he'd have to pay to get out of the contract.

In any case, he does this without a trace of embarrassment. Whether he's crazy or not, he certainly doesn't suffer from anxiety. I believe merely thinking of Charlie's example here is far more effective than any pharmaceutical drug on the market today. If I take the drug, I'd still be embarrassed about what I did or said, and I'd become dependent on whatever the substance was, as it slowly changed the receptors in my brain. But Charlie is the drug free alternative that just makes all the anxiety drain away.

Another Government Agency Fueling Violence

2011-03-04T08:27:00.000-08:00

This time it is the ATF. Peter has the details.

The ATF is notorious for this kind of behavior. They make up scenarios so that they appear to be needed. They've been pointing to increasing violence in Mexico and along the Mexican border as evidence that they are needed, and that they need more funding. Turns out they've been sending the guns down there. Remember a while back we had a media buzz about the legit American gun industry being at fault? It's a big sham folks.

The ATF needs to be disbanded. The federal government has no legitimate reason to be involve with alcohol, tobacco, or firearms production. On top of the already onerous problem of having to pay for a bureaucracy and regulation that shouldn't exist, now we have to deal with the violence and death caused by this very agency attempting to create conditions under which they could get a higher budget from congress.

So, I encourage you to go read Peter's post about it, and pass on the information as he suggests so that the ATF cannot hide from this mistake. I don't think enough people remember or understand that the attack on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas was a similar attempt at grandstanding for a higher budget, which ended in the deaths of many people. David Koresh often left his compound and a law enforcement agency interested in just enforcing law could have easily arrested him on the street somewhere without incident. Instead the ATF orchestrated a military style raid, which was not only unconstitutional and unnecessary, but incompetent, resulting in a stand-off and a multi-agency fiasco. It wasn't the beliefs or the actions of the people inside the compound that ultimately led to their death, but the egos of the various authorities outside. Any of the dozen other agencies ought to have arrested the ATF crew and backed away from the compound, but if I remember correctly one or more of these officious buffoons had been shot, so it became an 'us against them' issue for the government men. I do wish, occasionally, they'd remember they were civilians too, once, and we do have a right to self defense.

It seems John Dodson remembered, and I'm glad he is speaking up. Of course, the flash-point for all this new found honesty is another federal agent, a border patrol agent, getting killed with one of the guns the ATF brought to the party, so maybe it's still 'us against them' regardless...

From A Strategic Standpoint, Osama Bin Laden Is Winning

2011-02-21T12:34:00.000-08:00

With the Arabist's post, Egypt Supports Wisconsin serving to further disappoint me as to the knowledge level and the nature of the protesters, and the spread of these riots throughout the Muslim world, I'd like to point out what should be an obvious point you probably won't hear in mainstream media.

Strategically, Osama Bin Laden is winning. Even if he's dead he's still winning.

Iraq and Afghanistan cost us money and bogged us down. I wonder if Osama realized the Fed would keep interest rates low? No matter, really- he thought that the military engagements would break our hold on the Middle East, and he was right. I wonder if he knew the Fed would cause worldwide price hikes in foodstuffs due to the ridiculous amount of money they created? No matter, Osama figured the U.S. would overreact and weaken it's hold on the Middle East. It looks like Osama was right, doesn't it?

Some dude in a cave out-thought the best and brightest from the Harvard/Yale elitist class that runs Washington D.C. He may yet still be fooling them, though sometimes I think they are using him to fool us. Sustained terrorist attacks on U.S. soil just haven't materialized. They came up with 9/11 in order to lure us into war in the Middle East- now they try to engage us there. They don't have resources to come here and attack civilians, not in the way our government overlords like to say they would. On the one hand, we can assume many of our strategic experts are merely fighting the last war, not realizing Osama got what he wanted, so why would he bother doing another 9/11 style attack? On the other hand, some of our lunatics in office have enough of a sense of self-preservation so that they'd prefer to tell you all their efforts to lock down security and beef up their own defenses is about protecting you. This Homeland Security junk is really about protecting the governing elites, probably from us. In any case, if Osama bin Laden had the ability to sustain regular attacks on the United States, don't you think he'd turn rather quickly to attacking the politicians who were responsible for the Middle Eastern Policy he doesn't like?

Denial Is A Revolution In Egypt

2011-02-14T13:13:00.000-08:00

I am rather ambivalent towards the news out of Egypt. It seems Mubarak won't be allowed to create a dynasty, but the wider party, the people who've been in charge all these years, are still in charge. I believe the very concept of revolution works for these people; the bureaucrats have found the perfect way to stay in power all the time while making it look like things are changing politically. They don't even need to be particularly violent anymore.

What people seem to be missing is that you need government to remove freedoms, not grant them. If you have a banana you have a banana, the only real purpose of organized government is to take it away from you in a legal way, rather than just stealing it and at least being honest. Revolution suggests the opposite, that you don't have anything until some force overcomes the oppressor and gives you your freedom, your health care, your education, and your banana.

I'll grant that we at least need courts, but they were originally intended to provide restitution and stop the thieves. Indeed, a dynasty with an interest in keeping Egypt a healthy and wealthy realm to pass on to children could possibly figure this stuff out, but then the average bureaucrat would get thrown into jail. If you are going to have a parasite, you are better off picking the parasite capable of long term thinking.

So, I suspect the Egyptian elites will find protesters who think similarly to them. They'll grab some young communists and/or socialists, or maybe just a few average befuddled twenty somethings and put a bright shiny face on the same old game. Or shoot people, if things get out of hand. Will things get out of hand? I don't know. Do folks in Egypt think they've won? Are they tired of supply disruptions? Will they gratefully trade food, electricity, and connectivity for their momentum while deluding themselves that their lives will change much as things stand now?

There is that other R word, restoration, which I think would help folks understand where they are. Has what was stolen from you been returned? Has your government stopped pledging your child's future income in order to pay off the debt incurred via their wasteful programs? Can you raise real food, transact business, or other wise use your resources as you see fit, without someone interfering? A restoration is long overdue, but the language of revolution precludes it; instead we just instantly re-politicize everything, often with those same bureaucrats running the show. May it cease to be so.

A Saintly Law Breaker

2011-02-14T08:10:00.000-08:00

TheLegend of St. Valentine suggests that there were once priests who would marry people without requiring them to get state permission first. That would be nice now, given that state marriage does demonstrable harm via the divorce industry, provides very little in the way of benefits, and is now a vehicle through which people are trying to redefine marriage, even to the point, in Britain, of using state law to allow 'church' marriages of homosexuals.

What's next? Forcing unhappy clergy to perform such shenanigans at the point of a gun?
I don't deny I am tempted by schadenfreude at the thought. Surely there must be some point where the average bishop begins to realize the frightful disadvantages perpetrated upon the heterosexual men who actually want to get married! Can't they see that state marriage today is no marriage at all? The state, all too often, aids the transgressor and violates the victim. Why subject anyone to that?

It seems to me, on one hand, they build up new rules like the pharisees for us to jump through, while on the other they seek to be a secular as possible in order to avoid trouble. Don't go out dressed as a priest- you might get beaten up! Meanwhile, make sure your fellow christian is doubly and triply exposed to every legal and financial danger possible, not to mention the dangers to our souls.

True of Any Government Policy

2011-02-08T14:40:00.000-08:00

American birth rates are well below replacement rates when immigrant births aren't counted, and the federal government explicitly claims a right to children that supercedes the parental claim in many areas, including health and education. One can reasonably argue about whether or not these events can truly be said to have been caused by the specific government policy, but to base an argument on the events not having happened takes a special combination of ignorance and unfounded arrogance.

From Vox Day, on El Presidente's illogical statements on seat belt laws.

Prayer v.s. the Progressive spirit

2011-02-05T12:40:00.000-08:00

It seems to me, from my rather scatter-shot readings of historical Christianity, that early Christian prayer mainly had to do with Watchfulness, Holiness and getting all the crazy thoughts in our heads under control. It's tough enough for monks to do, let alone all the rest of us, but one can become suspicious that it is one of those necessary things, that we've generally left off of it and picked various easier (and novel, even though for most of us many of these practices have become century long traditions in themselves) practices.

There are many practices in the West, practices which seem to ignite imagination, engage emotion, and generate ever more thought. These are thought about the Lord, and about holy things, to be sure, but those very thoughts can be the most dangerous when they are wrong.

As a child of the West, I notice, in my own mind, the veil that can be cast by even the most innocuous of thoughts; it's as if the thoughts demand acceptance or rejection, which in turn could put me into conflict with the Lord's will. The whole sequence is a big lie; I am not my thoughts- the obviously wrong ones I can reject, the ones that are neutral or even seem good I can de-focus from. Nothing need keep me from the Lord. Unfortunately, this appears to take a lot of work.

So, what I worry about is that we've moved from a tradition of doing the hard work, to escapism. We dream the big dreams and have the great visions, but have nary a tool with which to build anything.

A Potential Seastead: Monastic Life?

2011-01-28T12:30:00.000-08:00

I saw a post at Byzantine, Texas about Russia's floating churches, and I immediately thought that this would be the sort of seasteading operation that Patri wouldn't think of, being religion averse and all.
There are likely a few places that could benefit from a floating church, and the next logical step could be floating monasteries. Due to the discipline of monastic life, it is far more likely that monks could handle the first iterations of seasteading, whereas families may not. I'm not sure how one would convince monks that it would be a good idea, but their asceticism would certainly increase the chances of initial success.

Asking For Foreign Help: A Few Long Shots

2011-01-28T08:38:00.000-08:00

This morning, on the radio, I heard a journalist say that one of the rioters in Egypt had told her to tell Obama that they want Mubarak out. I find this approach to be of questionable use; is the protester thinking Obama is for the average Egyptian's freedom, or is this Egyptian, aware of America's meddling in world affairs, issuing a warning? Is the rioter saying, "Hey, Obama, back off and let us take Mubarak down!," or is he saying, "Hey Obama, you awesome freedom fighter you, come help us take Mubarak down!
In either case, the appeal to Obama is extremely unlikely to achieve anything, but I suppose it doesn't hurt trying, so here goes:

Hu Jintao, I want Obama out.

Dimitri Medvedev, I'll give you Alaska if you can keep Sarah Palin and all her kin out of the lower 48 and away from T.V. cameras.

Your Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth, we here in America were very wrong. We thought we knew what we wanted when we said, "No taxation without representation." No, now we have representation and more taxation than we know what to do with. So, could you take us back, but not subject us to Parliament? We want all decisions made solely by you, preferably during a nice relaxing tea. Representation is a vile pretense, and the monarchy never taxed the people anywhere near the order of magnitude that legislative bodies do.

Is there anyone else I could petition? Could I get the ruling party of Singapore to come clean up Washington D.C.? It would be wonderful to see the bureaucrats forced to do honest labor. Well, perhaps we should disperse the inhabitants of D.C. across the land and put everything in D.C. on the auction block. We are bankrupt, and if the political sort could no longer gather in one place, perhaps they would do less evil.

(Sorry Alaska, I guess we should ask you first, kinda like the U.S.A. did, except they rigged the vote a little, didn't they? Maybe some of you could keep Palin home? I used to find the fact she bothered the Left so much mildly interest, but now she is just contributing to the overall stupidity of the debate, so I wish she'd go away.)

TJIC

2011-01-26T12:16:00.000-08:00

Blogger TJIC has been sorely mistreated. Apparently, his local gestapo has ordered him to give up his guns, and now his blog is off-line. For this post:

1 down, 534 to go
from dispatches from TJICistan by tjic

http://gatewaypundit.rightnetwork.com/20…

U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was shot in the head outside a grocery store in Tucson while holding a public event, Arizona Public Media reported Saturday.

The 40-year-old Democrat, who was re-elected to her third term in November, was hosting a “Congress on Your Corner” event at a Safeway in northwest Tucson when a gunman ran up and started shooting, according to Peter Michaels, news director of Arizona Public Media.

At least nine other people, including members of her staff, were hurt. Giffords was transported to University Medical Center in Tucson. Her condition was not immediately known.

Giffords was talking to a couple when the suspect ran up firing indiscriminately and then ran off, Michaels said.

It is absolutely, absolutely unacceptable to shoot “indiscriminately”.

Target only politicians and their staff, and leave regular citizens alone.

Please!

UPDATE: You might be interested to read a long explanation of my thoughts on human rights, legitimate government, and when revolution is justified.

This, ladies and gentlemen, falls under the category of free speech. The officials who have decided to interfere in TJIC's life are operating without legitimacy, period. The 534 plus practically all of Washington D.C. are too. They don't just break the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, they break the Declaration of Independence; they violate any and every document upon which this nation is founded and upon which they could conceivably derive their power.

Can one possibly do anything other than laugh when one sees the words 'to protect and serve?' emblazoned on the latest addition to the local police fleet? They certainly aren't protecting us. They must mean themselves, though, apparently they aren't particularly good at protecting themselves either. Maybe it's because they spend their time doing stupid things like attacking TJIC rather than rounding up dangerous criminals.
Here's a link to the pathetic news coverage. If we had proper news coverage in this country the government would never had been able to foist that 'firearms license' baloney on the country. How does having to obtain a license fit in with the right to keep and bear arms? It doesn't fit and this is a good lesson as to why. They can just yank it from you whenever they feel like it.

Team: The New Age God

2011-01-23T11:01:00.000-08:00

Perhaps one of the most ham-fisted forms of word magic is that stupid saying:

There is no I in TEAM

Despite the spelling there are a lot of I in any team; indeed there are as many I as there are individuals in a team, assuming your definition is similar to this-

a group of people collaborating to achieve a goal

Folks trying to achieve a goal, the same goal, quickly learn about division of labor. Each person has a certain skill set, certain innate attributes, certain weaknesses. In order to achieve the goal, we need to specialize; otherwise we might as well just stumble around toward the goal by ourselves. Unless you've drunk enough feminist kool-aid to make you blind, you'll notice this eventually, should you ever try to manage a house single-handedly- housework is important enough to dedicate a person to it! Unfortunately, if the woman isn't doing housework, she's likely not going to value it enough to actually respect her husband doing it while she goes off to the 'fulfilling' career, but I digress. The point is, starting from the family and working out, we desperately need division of labor to happen if we want anything but the most simplistic of goals to be achieved.

The folks trying to manipulate you via spelling are trying to sell you a New Age god, though, because their TEAM is something you believe in, and something they may sacrifice you to. They have TEAM building exercises and TEAM work, which are ritualistic in nature and all too often take the place of working toward actual goals and thereby building up one another. Often, when what you thought was a team becomes a TEAM, the very reason for it's existence, the original goal, is excised, and some intangible goal- carefully selected to be impossible to prove whether or not TEAM is now achieving it- is substituted in it's place. Meanwhile, we are all instructed not to notice all those I(ndividual)s being burned up to keep the TEAM 'alive.'

It's very similar to a pagan idol. Idols were made by human hands and even the pagans knew they had no life in them; it was the people praying, sacrificing, giving attention to the idols that people thought made idols strong. I suppose, once they were strong, the idols were supposed to be able to help folk, like parasites are sometimes said to prolong life. Look behind the curtain, and I suspect you'll see a bureaucrat in shaman's clothing, or a bureaucrat in bureaucrat's clothing repeating the 'there is no I in TEAM' mantra today.

Belief, Belief, Perfection, Belief...

2011-01-21T12:07:00.000-08:00

Anthony Sacramone, a Lutheran apparently, does a film review of Black Swan.

His perfection part:

Perfection is in the eye of the beholder, and so in order to achieve it one must always subordinate the self to some other authority, which, in this realm, is always, always fallible. It is a self-defeating exercise, because even if you think you’ve achieved it, give it a minute, and the criteria by which that perfection is judged will shift, and you’ll find yourself having to place catch-up. To be perfect is, by definition, to fail. And the ultimate failure is death.

His belief part:

The price of admission to perfection is faith alone, because the cost of that admission was paid 2,000 years ago. And faith is never a work. Only believe.

Thank you Walt Disney! Just believe, oh, wait! No one can see you believe, so you can't even check in and ask anyone if you are doing it right. Could this possibly be the source of more problems today in this wacky 'I'm OK, you're OK' world than trying to manage a 'perfect' performance? In the end, performing the black swan in this world means being able to perform it for the whole season, and even subsequent seasons- for however long a good ballet dancer's career may be.
So let's just take this questionable movie and use it to prove a point about salvation. Let's further remove from a person his evidence, the physical nature of his 'performance' as a Christian- the things he can see, hear, and compare to an ideal- and suggest he 'only believe.'

This has already been done, and we see the effect of it all around us. Society is secular, over-medicalized, and hearing the devil's lullaby- that there really isn't anything more to life than whatever it is he has before your eyes. If you don't do, you don't experience. If you don't experience, you don't perceive. If you don't perceive, it's rather hard to believe, especially after you find out about Santa Claus.

Yeah, laugh lightly and think this is just some Catholic take, but I know of Baptists who go and get baptized again, for precisely this reason- belief is hard for even the believers to judge. They come to feel they believe now, but they really didn't then, or they just got baptized because their friends did; any number of reasons that boil down to a feeling about the quality of belief at the first (second or third) one versus the latest one.

The Vacation Question

2011-01-14T08:10:00.000-08:00

Celia Green asks, "How the hell can I go on holiday?":

I was always having to find alternative ways of replying to questions without breaking the social taboo. So when Lady McCreery asked about holidays, I might, if a direct and natural reply had been possible, have said, ‘How the hell do you think I can go on a holiday at all, when I have been thrown out without a usable qualification, I have no tolerable way of earning money or of drawing income support (as I would not be supposed to be qualified for any job that I could accept) and my college will give me no support in any plan to get a qualification or to get appointed to do anything that I really could do, whether supposedly “qualified” or not?

The vacation question is one that also makes me stumble. I know plenty of people for whom it's natural to have one at least once a year, but just can't justify it given my budget. And I too, have begun to notice that there are people paid who are allegedly supposed to help one find decent employment, and yet upon close inspection we find academia is not interested in the pursuit of knowledge, and HR departments are not looking for people with actual skills.

So, naturally, the response was to insist something was wrong with me. A diagnosis rather than recognition of my circumstances. They do it for everything now; they'll put you on prozac if you feel down after your dog dies, and insist you need therapy if you express any sort of angst while living with cancer. Now, something was wrong with me, but it was closely connected to bad food, bad influences, and trying to live with a cognitive disconnect. I kept trying to agree, to be positive, to accept a positive view, and yet the evidence that it all was, for the most part, a fraud, was all around me. If I had cultivated an appropriate level of cynicism, I might have managed to be in a far better position.

The Atomic Church

2011-01-13T14:20:00.000-08:00

I usually sit in nearly the same place every time I go to church. I'm single, so I go alone, and when I'm in the midst of a lot of people my body temperature seems to rise, so I like to sit on an end. Apparently, I'm not alone, for I noticed that there was one single person in practically every pew, sitting on the end, just like I wanted to.

It seems to me we could be accused of somnambulism. We pray for new vocations at the end of almost every Mass- when exactly will we start praying for new families? That's a vocation. Indeed, I heard the direction to 'go sell all you have, and give to the poor' again recently, and it struck me- this is exactly what parents do for their children, through time, with added levels of pain and responsibility!

Just the simple idea of Catholics having the right to marry in the Church without reference to a state that increasingly disregards the very definition of marriage- even something as simple as this appears not to occur to anyone. We could do without exposure to the divorce industry.

There is a solid and time-tested tradition of married priests in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, not to mention bishops who have enough authority in their own diocese to respond to local conditions, but unfortunately, we seem stuck in a dream, while we fragment. Often folk blame individualism, but they don't give individuals anything to hold on to. There are still plenty of families in church, and I'm sure some who were there alone were simply there without their families for one reason or another. But I noticed all those individuals lined up in a row, and I was one of them, and I knew it was significant.

A Comment On Race/IQ That Grew Too Long

2011-01-13T09:56:00.000-08:00

Obsidian asked a few questions about the race/IQ thing, and I figured it would be fun to answer even though I don't think I fit the 'HBD true believer' category, but it appears I hit the word count limit or something, so I post it here. You'll have to saunter on over to his blog for the questions- if I put them here it would be a very long post.

1. End Affirmative Action and the entire educational system. We need free markets, not just so those with high I.Q.s can get the sort of education they need, but so that the less intelligent can get skills too. The education system is a scam, turning out a whole lot of us who can’t do much more than push paper around. They put a bright red rope around ‘education’ and claim it’s the only game in town; it’s not, and we’d start getting better options if we made these institutions stand on their own. Let the institutions stand or fall based on profit; either they are selling something we need, or they are not.
You are right about women being the big beneficiaries , and from a social standpoint, this is terrible. Higher education happens right about the time women are most fertile, so when biologically they should be reproducing, we tell them the best thing they could be doing is getting a degree? I think we’ve only seen the very tip of the iceberg in terms of social problems caused by this sort of myopia.

2. The Ivy League is chockfull of mediocre kids because rich people can always pay to get their kids in, and the rich aren’t particularly smarter than anyone else. There is a biological component to intelligence, so it is certainly worth trying to find an intelligent mate. You are right that the kids may not turn out to be smarter than the parents, but that why you have a lot of kids- and realize they don’t have to be smarter than Daddy to be smarter than average.
Yes, there are a whole lot of Dumb White People! I think difference in IQ between individuals ultimately means more than differences like race, creed, whatever. There are people I just can’t communicate with.

3. Under the current regime, school equals prison. If children were free (okay, parents would probably have the larger say here) to choose what they wanted to learn, maybe school would start to be about education, but right now public school is just daily incarceration. End the wars, end the schools, let people figure out what is important to them. It is amazing how children learn and behave when they actually want to.
4. We’ve got to end the dole period, but you’ve basically got this one right, especially under current conditions. For women, having children is a lot of work. Since society currently values education/career more, they go that route because it’s easier. Even among the less intelligent, it seems women will prefer a Walmart job, the pill, and an irresponsible lifestyle rather than the obligations that come with marriage and children.
5. Yes, there are a lot of drawbacks to being on the left side of the bell curve. When people get into discussions about it, it seems they assume some sort of hierarchy, with the really intelligent being on top, but it isn’t clear the intelligent do end up on top. There are some positive correlations statistically, but one can also end up dumpster diving for food and living in delusion.
6. I think police should basically leave people alone. I think their ability to stop people for suspected drunk driving gives them too much leeway; I certain don’t want them stopping anyone based on skin color. The police have always been a clean-up crew, the people you call after everything that has gone down went down. It’s we, the people, who should be well armed, educated about how to use those arms, and capable of dealing with criminals. Anything else is essentially “pre-crime” and therefore a violation of a person’s rights.
What is not seen, and not usually discussed, are the freedoms and the options that would be available if we weren’t wasting so many resources doing what is being done now. In some sense they can’t be discussed, because we don’t know exactly what they would be, but I bet the money I wasted going to college (not to mention a few million others) could have been put to better use!

Near Universal Myopia: Not Seeing Individuals

2011-01-12T08:23:00.000-08:00

The Elusive Wapiti suggests certain folk are being myopicabout the race/I.Q. issue. Here is what keeps bothering me about what I hear, sometimes from the alt-right, but also far too often with the egalitarians.

An I.Q. of 100 is supposed to be the median score. Races are subsets of the set that sets the original median score, so they are going to trend toward that median. Large gaps between the groups can't exist, so we just get this rank order- a very consistent order.

Where are the large gaps? Between individuals. Skin color has nothing on the difference between 130 and 100 IQ. The most annoying part of commentary on the race/IQ issue is that people seem incapable of seeing that these gaps occur not only between people of different races, but within the races as well! Map IQs of black people and you'll get a bell curve too. Outliers are in every race.

So what does the race/IQ list tell us? STOP CENTRAL PLANNING! It is one more piece of evidence telling us the government gets practically everything wrong. As far as I can tell, this is what most of the right and/or libertarian types want. I haven't heard anyone suggest we should implement the race/IQ list as some sort of standard.

Success is not massively IQ dependent. IQ helps, but what helps even more is distribution of labor. Our very inequality, the differences the educational system tries to eradicate, are the keys to success. We could have spent our time developing different skill sets based on our abilities and preferences; instead the educational system seems to be churning out people who can be little more than paper pushers. This is not just a problem for the high IQ white person who doesn't get the job; it's a society wide problem since the loss of performance from misplacing two people (and in America it's likely millions since HR departments are about not getting sued instead of finding the right candidate) leads to less wealth creation than we would have had if they had found a better distribution of labor.

Just think about the cost of credentialism alone. H.R. departments slap on ridiculous educational requirements for a particular job, and everyone, including the people egalitarians are trying to help, have to go get a degree or certification, whatever. A huge, upfront cost. The rich and the subsidized can handle it; the poor intelligent who don't get a level playing field in the name of equality cannot.

Finally, perhaps a simpler example I've probably mentioned before. Libraries try to be egalitarian, so they buy 'black' literature, slasher movies, rap cds, etc...
The young, poor, intelligent blacks who depend on libraries don't want this junk. They want biology, architecture, ballet, decent literature- they want to learn, but they find they've been short-changed. Libraries, schools, universities- all these places have limited funds and, if they are properly ordered, would naturally be places for people with high IQs. Equal access makes sense; changing these institutions into day-care centers for uneducated adults does not.

Ambition Doesn't Lead To Competency

2011-01-08T09:16:00.000-08:00

I suppose it is one of those unfortunate side effects of egalitarianism; since we aren't allowed to distinguish between people based on actual skill, we substitute drive. Somebody really wants the job, so they go get whatever credentials they need, act really perky in the interview, get the job...

... and are incompetent.

Practice does not make perfect, especially if what you've been practicing isn't exactly what you've been practicing for. Nor will the massive education bubble in this country give scarecrows brains. In many cases, ambition may indicate a good reason for someone not to get the job- as our lovely politicians prove over and over. We'd likely be better off appointing folk who find micromanaging people distasteful.

Here is our condition- everybody wants to be captain of the ship, but nobody wants to stop it from sinking. I'm surprised at how many captains can come and go, and how far down the ship can go, but one of these days, there just won't be any ship anymore.

Hah, as I wrote that I had an image of yet one more fool hip deep in water, astride the very top mast of an ancient hulk, proclaiming whatever load of tripe that came out of the last meeting he had with his like minded bureaucrats. Troubling how many different institutions one can apply such an image to.

Just to get down to the remedy- one does not need drive to be competent, and if society is permitted to operate freely, people could figure out how to find and hire competent people without relying on such a false signal. HR departments rely on people applying and on credentialism because companies don't want to get sued. Under current conditions it apparently costs less to fumble through several incompetents in a position than expose oneself to a lawsuit.

Division of labor is cooperative venture which would make us all better off.

A Translator's Note

2011-01-05T09:18:00.000-08:00

A little note at the bottom of one of Yoani Sánchez's blog post:

Alumbrón is a “made up” Cuban word which comes from “alumbrar” or illuminate. Rather than note when the lights go off, and call it a “black-out”, no electricity is assumed to be the normal state and electricity the exception, so when the lights come on the illumination, or alumbrón becomes the exceptional event that is named and remarked on.

Anarchy Breeds Tradition

2010-12-29T07:58:00.000-08:00

More often than not, the figure of the powerful authoritarian is a figure of tradition. Progressives hate the patriarchy, while traditionalists would embrace it, but in no small way, both fall under the spell; the right man shall save the day- until, of course, he does not. Progressives have their disappointment in Obama, but traditionalists seldom find fault with their figures of authority. This is due, perhaps in large part, to the fact that top down action is only good for novelty, for change- in other words, it is precisely the powerful who have the power to do progressive stuff!

Patricius provides us with a wonderful example: the liturgical innovations of Pius XII and the 'traditionalist' groups who think they are somehow being traditional by following the liturgical books of 1962.

Buried deep in Nassim Taleb's notebook there is this:

Time for some revision of historical reputations. Historians keep piling on the Byzantine for the alleged pettiness of their disputes. I hold that if the Byzantines argued, it was because it was a truly collegiate system & each bishop was entitled to voice his opinion. The system was (& still is) bottom up. The main Patriarchs now have more clout than in the past, but they cannot do anything without consulting each other. If the Westerners seemed more focused & less “Byzantine”, it was because their system was top-down & the Pope was the big boss.

Now, to the extent that the Eastern Orthodox have a more traditional liturgy, they have it because it was bottom up. In such a situation, how does one decide whether or not the Christians one province over from you are actually in communion with you? Well, what do they do? Especially when there are differences in languages, where you can't necessarily tell what they are professing to believe, the emphasis is placed on what is done, and not as much on what is believed.

Belief! If modern science is right, I suppose belief must be crammed somewhere in the brain, though it was once thought we kept our important stuff in our hearts. In any case, your belief is not something I can readily examine; sure, I can ask you, but I can't really take it out of your head and get the flavor of it. I can see what you do. And if I make sure I'm not coercing you (and no one else is either), then what you do becomes a clear signal.

Thus anarchy breeds tradition. Out of a multitude of decisions a remarkably strong tradition arises. This is a pattern, or a language of life. We work out through what gives life, what doesn't, and what obviously kills. How many times does a president, congress, or various foreign entities have to make stupid decisions that cause death on a massive scale before we realize it's better to have the chaos through which our trillions of little decisions can be expressed (oh, how necessary this is in health care!).

Perhaps the impulse of the conservative towards authoritarianism his fatal weakness; in his rush to defend tradition he puts in place structures which can only destroy it. This is not, by the way, anti-papal; the dichotomy between what Catholic 'traditionalists' say they want and their unwillingness to note when popes deviate from tradition is just too good of an example to pass up.

No Rebellion from the Right

2010-12-02T12:01:00.000-08:00

As I was listening to Rush Limbaugh call Julian Assange (of Wikileaks) a sissy, I realized people who identify with conservatism really don't have an archetype for rebellion. I'm not particularly fond of Assange but if anyone is ever going to openly defy the United States government- well they just might have to do a little hiding here and there to avoid incarceration, and it just might be a good thing to do too.

But conservatives don't play this game particularly well, and Limbaugh's words, like all those displays of patriotism at the Tea Party rallies, display flawed thinking. These people, after all, would much prefer to be working, building, producing- when it comes time to do a little creative destruction, these folks are out of their element. The original tea partiers were, well, original. They got an idea and implemented it, dressed as indians, yes, but not Guy Fawkes masks or some homage similar to the one the Tea Partiers are making to them. They ran a serious risk of imprisonment, death, etc- and Assange is under serious risk while conservatives refuse to put themselves out there.

Given what happened to Tom Delay, conservatives should assume they are likely to be burnt anyway at any time and actually start taking real risks. Sadly, despite the left's scare stories to the contrary, conservatives are too used to playing by the rules to do anything surprising.

Sustainable For Man Versus Sustainable For Parasites

2010-11-05T12:36:00.001-07:00

Certain words in the political sphere tend to stress me out. Sustainability is one. To me, for something to be sustainable, it should be able to exist without a huge socialist state. Since I've become more concerned about food quality, I've grudgingly used this word from time to time in relation to agriculture, but it's increasingly clear people don't mean what I mean. From my perspective, we need to get rid of excessive regulation, which would allow small farmers to sell me grass fed meat, eggs, raw dairy- whatever the farmer and I agree to. The rules surrounding the slaughter of animals are the biggest obstacle facing small farmers; the subsidies of wheat, corn, and soy keep the American agricultural industry churning out pain in small bite-sized packets.

I started thinking about the divergence between what I think sustainability is and what others think after listening to Rebecca Thistlethwaite being interviewed on Nature's Harmony Farmcast about the loss of her farm. For the most part, I was pretty sympathetic to her, but when she starts fussing about consumer choices, especially what she calls 'petty' or 'personal' health questions- well she reminded me of the disparity. Well, they all did, because practically everybody harped on how consumers have to move heaven and earth to buy their products, but apparently somebody wants to keep using soy feed! We start leaving the territory of people freely buying and selling and get into a bit of do-what-I-say-because-I-know-better-than-you.
Still though, these folks are basically trying to do good things. It's sad they don't notice what their comrades in the sustainability movement have been up to:

Admittedly, it seems a little over the top, but I don't think it is. With just a little reading I found this:

E) Moving towards environmentally sound pricing

4.24. Without the stimulus of prices and market signals that make clear to producers and consumers the environmental costs of the consumption of energy, materials and natural resources and the generation of wastes, significant changes in consumption and production patterns seem unlikely to occur in the near future.

4.25. Some progress has begun in the use of appropriate economic instruments to influence consumer behaviour. These instruments include environmental charges and taxes, deposit/refund systems, etc. This process should be encouraged in the light of country-specific conditions.

I that from the U.N. Apparently, they've got agenda 21 online.

What I quoted above is a straighforward commitment on the behalf of the U.N. to recommitsocialism's fatal conceit. Socialism just doesn't work, and they went ahead and proved it. No central planner can give us better information than a free market price, period. It doesn't matter if you are looking at growing an economy or conserving resources. There is no incentive like a profit to conserve a resource or recycle, so if the government is subsidizing it or making competing products more expensive, you can bet they are hiding wasted resources (and sources of pollution-many of these green initiatives aren't earth friendly at all).

So, the socialist has changed his tune. No longer does he claim to be able to do better, rather he claims any system more successful than his is unsustainable, and therefore a threat to humanity. This global managerial class doesn't care about small farms, quality food. They care about keeping and expanding their parasitical lifestyle. They are literally saying prices are important signals; let's change them so everybody gets erroneous information! I know they imply they somehow know the appropriate information, but the old socialists already killed untold numbers of people proving this approach is wrong. These new socialists are embracing the fatality; this is zombie socialism fully realized, where an unhealthy society is the goal- makes it easier for the parasites to feed.

Losing One's PC Religion

2010-11-04T08:08:00.000-07:00

Obsidian lost his WordPress blog, and in the process he learned something:

Which is more a pressing concern for our body politic - racism, or feminism? For me, the answer couldn't be clearer. After all, it wasn't hooded Klansmen, or HBDers, or Tea Partiers, or the Rotorary Club armed to the teeth with The Bell Curve, who stormed the Wordpress gates. It was those who consider themselves "progressive" and who all have vaginas, who did it. And they also just so happen to be Black.

There are the lies that they teach you.
There are the consistent examples, day after day, that prove otherwise, often in pretty brutal ways.
Then there is metanoia.
One of the reasons I've slacked off a bit on this blog is that I've noticed the randomness surrounding this event, whether it is truly theological in nature, or is indicative of the destruction of one these state sanctified lies. The discussion seems peripheral to the conversion, so to speak. People develop narratives about why they change their mind about this or that, but if you understand the weakness of stories, the near psychotic insistence the ego has to minimize the appearance of chaos in our lives, well you get an a pretty strong impression that the path is certainly not linear.

Or, I could do the hbd thing, and congratulate Obsidian for being an outlier, but it seems too pat, doesn't it, especially since there are plenty of really smart people still bowing to our democratic idols.

The Eugenics Plan Marches On

2010-10-21T07:52:00.000-07:00

I was operating under the assumption, back when Ruth Bader Ginsburg admitted abortion was about controlling unwanted populations, that she and other people in the progressive movement actually cared about intelligence. She might even think so too, but I think this was always largely a lie; the eugenicists and their descendants are wealthy, but they aren't interested in giving up their positions for someone smarter. No, there is another reason why they promote education.

This is Hans Rosling on Child Mortality. Listen very hard and see if he mentions abortion:

If the lack of any mention of abortion changes the happy picture he presents at all, then the absolute joy that he has that everyone's having fewer babies ought to make his presentation seem downright sinister. The eugenicists are winning! They don't care about intelligence, they care about reducing the population, getting the masses off their golf courses. So, hand out preferential treatment on a race/gender basis and be patient! They are perfectly happy sharing their universities, and can judiciously ignore situations where it's obvious some who get the preferred treatment can't actually do the work because it was never about education; it's about lowering the birthrate of those they don't want around. And it's a bit of a joke that you'd take women at their most fertile, shove them into a university and tell them 'education' is so important, and then chalk their lack of children up to them actually learning something. Couldn't possibly be the much more simple explanation of fewer and less fertile years in which to have children after college.

No, amazingly, progressives are right on track. Oh, I think I mentioned this before, but if you are having trouble following this, the eugenicists were the progressives; when eugenics became unpopular they dropped it and just became progressive. Now they've happily jumped on environmentalism as the next 'scientific' excuse as to why massive amounts of humans need to die- or at least not breed for long enough, but they likely will attempt massacre if we don't go along with them. Dig up that no pressure commercial from 10:10 if you don't believe me.

County Politicians And The Foreclosure Crisis

2010-10-20T08:44:00.000-07:00

A county sheriff refuses to do foreclosures unless the banks prove everything's legit. It's a good first start. I don't know how much imagination county officials have, but they'd better start seeing where their interests lie. You can keep propping up corporate interests, or you can get the bright idea that the people and the property in your own backyard are the people and the property you need healthy and whole during these tough times. Bank of America isn't going to feed you, but there are folks in town that might.
If you let property title in your town get mired down under all this fraud, your town's real estate market will be frozen shut for years. It's fraud perpetrated against county jurisdictions. People should go to jail over this, but if the perpetrators aren't in your jurisdiction, well, the property is, and county officials have the say over who has claim. Put some staff in your court house to identify every single property effected by this- it isn't just the stuff in foreclosure. If you are brave enough, you may be able to transfer assets from the 'to-big-to-fail' banks that the majority in this country did not want to be bailed out, to, well, your constituency. Possession being 9/10ths of the law and all that.

Meanwhile, the media will tell you not to pay attention to all the robo-signing, fake documents, MERS, and focus instead on those mean, scruffy evil people who defaulted on their loans. They may be defaulters, but they aren't engaged in wholesale fraud. Moral hazard is a problem, but the defaulter will likely never have a chance at a sub-prime loan again, but the banks keep getting leave to commit the same crimes again and again. But then again, I'm writing this for politicians, who even if they are local, are usually unscrupulous bastards, so why am I trying to explain the moral situation? Here's your personal incentive:

Keep your local economy healthy, stick it to the banks, and have a sky-rocketing political career!

Okay, so it might not be possible to go as far as I suggest. Still, you ought to play like that's your end game, because this dying financial sector is going to keep trying to suck the life blood out of this country. The modern corporation, unfortunately, fights to stay alive, even long after it becomes harmful to its constituent parts, let alone society as a whole. Somebody has to kill the vampire; if you've got a half-way decent chance to, please take it!

Expanding On Christianity & Intellectual Property

2010-10-14T09:40:00.001-07:00

A bit of googling my own blog shows me I already made the Christian Case Against Intellectual Property:

Can be summed up by pointing out that if we could make an exact copy of our food in order to feed the poor without losing anything, we would have a moral obligation to do so.

Just really think about that for a minute. A real steak, perfectly done, and infinitely copyable, with no loss to you at all if you let everyone in the entire world copy it. You, me, and anybody in the world able to eat. Now the benefit to the poor if this imaginary steak were real is strikingly clear, and Christians everywhere would be aghast at the idea that anyone would try to exert ownership over the copies of this steak quite regardless of whether or not anyone had a coherent argument for such a scheme. Charity is a virtue, after all.

Now, back to the world of ideas. Say you have a good one, and while the benefits are less tangible and immediate than a porterhouse, your idea, nonetheless does provide the holder of said idea many benefits. It may even be a specific sort of idea, one which helps the holder of the idea to get more steak whenever the idea is implemented. In any case, the idea is infinitely copyable and therefore the rule of charity applies just as well as in the case of the steak. You may be able to extract some sort of rent out of people by restricting access, but shame on you anyway.

Now the tricky little part in this equation is that there are all sorts of bad ideas out there too. Emotionally, it can be a bit hard to apply the logic and view some guy downloading the latest schlock from Hollywood with a charitable heart, but ultimately the existence of so many bad ideas provides an even stronger argument for the free flow of ideas. People need higher quality ideas with which to combat low quality ideas. The sad lack of decent ideas on TV, for instance, allows people like Rachel Maddow to have careers. Since bad ideas often have some sort of human desire behind them, many humans prioritize consuming bad ideas (slasher movies for instance) and give little to no priority to good ideas. If we push the cost of ideas to zero, we maximize the chance that the impoverished, inordinate human will find and entertain more good ideas.

While hunger is a much more immediate and acute problem, the noetic wasteland, which one must assume exists empirically because of such things as reality TV shows, is no less a poverty, and no less a danger to human life. Since copying an idea provides a benefit to another without causing an injury to holder of the original, charity should prevail for Christians. I would also hope that Christians would realize intellectual property is not property, but a state enforced travesty, since scarcity is one of the prerequisites for a thing to become property.

The Pointlessness of the Constitution

2010-10-08T08:48:00.000-07:00

Radley Balko takes in a recent court ruling and begins to get a glimmer of the truth:

But if that set of powers includes everything you do (see Wickard and Raich), and everything you don’t do (what Obamacare proponents are advocating here), what’s the point in having a Constitution at all?

The rest is here.

There is a giant cross-section of conservatives and libertarians who argue that everything would be just peachy if we just obeyed the Constitution. The problem is, the Constitution has been here all along; it is obviously part of the problem, not the solution. Officials use it to justify their behavior and to bother others. They never apply it to themselves. There is a clear weakness to the document, one which might be ameliorated a bit if states started nullifying vast numbers of federal laws, and were willing to use force to protect their citizens, but it is patently obvious the existence of the document does nothing to protect us.

Indeed, it seems we, the people, are expected to hold to it, while they, the political class, do whatever it is that they want. It is high time to say they've broken that contract. The leviathan overlooking the Potomac is more of a tyrant than King George III ever was. We must stop pretending anything that they do is legitimate.

Continuing Dubiousness of Social Contract

2010-10-07T07:54:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that anarchists are not the only folks who can lay claim to not requiring anyone to believe or uphold that mysterious concept known as social contract. Monarchs are individuals and as such, require a much simpler and psychologically healthy contract- one with themselves. This is how we lived for much of human history- even in tribal situations, governance arose via personal interaction and negotiation. Certain traditions become institutionalized, so I'm not suggesting that abuse didn't happen, or that various misconceptions weren't promulgated- but any so-called modern state is incomprehensibly gigantic compared to their monarchical predecessors.

In contrast, a 'social contract' removes the person one would normally contract with and replaces it with an abstraction of everybody. It's also an abstraction of contract- nobody has ever actually written down what's supposed to be in this contract, and what it tends to replace isn't just a contract, but the fullness of relationships developed in freedom over a lifetime. The political class needs the patina of authority, so they steal it- they take away parental rights, they tell farmers, butchers, and hairstylists what to do, and just generally transgress- for wherever there is a relationship, no matter how arbitrary, they need to subvert the natural subsidiary levels of authority. Such parasitical insertion of state between people is also the way they thieve; any transfer of goods must be pilfered.

Since there is no clear signatory to the social contract, the destructive can imagine those injured by their behavior aren't, in fact, 'everybody.' The unfortunate calculus of the 'common good' makes it's appearance here- the obvious fact that some will suffer due to this or that policy decision is suggested to be less relevant because the common, another abstraction, are more important than that Lazarus fellow outside your gate.

Nah, instead we'll bail out financial companies, again. We are discovering these companies don't actually have the right to foreclose, that they have put up fraudulent documents into courts in order to foreclose. I am hoping that the state governments, which stand to receive some tax income and whose politicians could enjoy some popularity for sticking up for the little guy, can overcome the pressure from the federal government- which will almost certainly be to change the laws so that these companies can continue to do what they want to. As it stands so far, the myopia of social contract seems to suggest we must endure massive lawbreaking on the part of corporations (as well as government bureaucrats for that matter) for the good of America. You'd think they all have mistranslated bibles, and devoutly believe the irresponsible shall inherit the earth.

Why Freedom Works For Traffic

2010-10-06T13:01:00.000-07:00

Freedom Works, Even For Traffic

2010-10-06T12:38:00.000-07:00

The Inhuman "Science"

2010-09-21T13:01:00.000-07:00

I find the psychologist's abuse of the Chilean miners quite upsetting. I suppose it is the immediate level of dependency those poor miners have on those in control. Here in what was formerly known as the United States of America, the tyranny is a bit more diffuse, and one can usually get a few basic needs met without having to pretend our credentialed lunatics have any sense- unless you are a child having to deal with public school.

These miners are underground, where it is dark and dirty. For psychologists to deprive these people of anything- remember, they already have to limit their diet in order to get out- is just cruelty. (I say anything because, frankly, psychologists should not have the authority to deprive them of anything, while the people actually in charge of their welfare and rescue might choose to deprive them of things that would lessen the chance of their rescue- nobody is sending them donuts, for example.)

The psychologists pull this sort of stunt on people who can't defend themselves, and then they get to go home, to have their wine, cigarettes, television, and whatever else. If they had ever learned to be human, the finest food would taste like ash to them at the mere thought of bullying those miners.