For every class of decision a modern government makes, from diplomacy to economics to issuing fishing licenses, there exists a caste of scholars in the social sciences, carefully selected for their race, gender, intelligence and/or political reliability, who use the methods of science - which, as you know, split the atom and put a man on the moon, and is absolutely infallible - to divine the correct public policy. None of these professors is in any way, shape or form responsible for the success or failure of these policies - generally the later. I swear I am not making this up.

Mencius Moldbug

This is a very succinct explanation of where ideas in politics are derived. The elites come up with an idea, based, of course, on Science! And then we go through an elaborate process by which we pretend to choose the people who will make decisions for us on these policies. Because We the People are merely given the options from which to choose. Both for representatives and for policy. And we are told which we should choose. This predictably leads to tragedy.

Which brings us to another excerpt from Moldbug's essay:

Here are some random facts about the present California which, I feel, are violations of order. The major cities are full of racist paramilitary gangs. Large sections of them are unsafe at night. Other sections are unsafe by day. Millions of people are in California illegally. California has no secure list of people who are authorized to reside there, nor does it know the addresses and occupations of its residents, nor does it have their biometric identities. If an unlocked bicycle is left on the street, it will be stolen. Many Californians are idle and not independently wealthy. Many schools approach the zoological. Graffiti is everywhere, as is garbage. Etc, etc. (You'll note that by the global standards of 2009, California is actually quite orderly).

To the residents of the New California, after a few years of Dictatorship, any of these phenomena would be as shocking as the sight of a live rhinoceros walking down the street. More to the point, they would be about as shocking as the exact same phenomena would be to the residents of California in 1909.

I'm sure the word 'dictatorship' set off alarm bells in everyone's head. Why is that? Most people are aware of the failings and excesses of dictators. Nevermind that most of the 20th century examples were popularly elected and required popular approval to maintain power. Yet the failings of democracy are largely overlooked. Go read Moldbug's essay to hear some of those failings.

I found this on Right Wing Video, courtesy of Conservative Grapevine.

Let me give you an alternative view: if a man walks up to another man and calls him a f*ggot or a n*gger of a motherf*cker, etc., etc., to his face, there is nothing whatsoever morally wrong with punching him in the mouth as a response. In other words, "Did he deserve a beating? Yes, he did." There are people who deserve beating. Fighting isn't always wrong. Violence actually solves a lot of things.

John Hawkins

From something about one celebrity hitting another celebrity.

I don't much care about celebrities, but I agree that some people just need a good beating. Turn 'em polite right quick, I think.

Well, rather than getting couches for my living room, I got a desk and book shelves for my library upstairs. All pretty cherry wood with carved detailing. Right now I'm going for that Victorian England library. The kind that would belong to some explorer that's filled with random souvenirs from his travels (souvenirs yet to come). Here is the start of it.



I still need to add some pictures and paintings on the walls, and add the various accent pieces to it. I've got some old maps from fantasy video games. I want to frame those and put them up, since they have that old world feel to them.

I also want a bunch of steampunk accent pieces. I'm trying to walk a pretty fine line between traditional and fantasy.

The only other major thing I want to do up here is add a comfy chair and a little table so I can actually read in my library.

Oh, and redo the lights. My list of things I want to do to my house seems to only get longer as I actually get things done.

I found this at the Other McCain today. It comes originally from Shannon at Chicago Boyz.

The left doesn't actually have a developed system of thought regarding the economy. They can't actually explain why the real world political process will systematically make better decisions than the free-market. Instead, they simply point to any reversals in the real economy, regardless of cause, and then assert that in their imaginations, leftist politicians could have done better.

It's hard to argue against people's imaginations. You end up with a discussion much like two D&D geeks arguing over whether a dwarf with a +10 axe could take an elf with a vorpal sword.

I agree with McCain and Shannon. The dwarf wins.

Plodding right along on my Tau force, I have completed my first stealthsuit. This is an older XV15 model that Games Workshop has discontinued. I got it from my friend's brother-in-law, along with a bunch of other Tau models. This particular model is a Shas'vre, equipped with a bonding knife and markerlight.


Stealthsuits are equipped with stealth field generators that distort their image and make them more difficult to see (and thus shoot at). I wanted some way to mark that the models are cloaked, rather than just painting them like the rest of my infantry. One way that I had seen was to dry brush the model the same way you dry brush the base, so that it blends in with the terrain that your army is mounted on. Some of the better ones had the stealthsuits phasing in and out, with half the model painted normally, and the other half cloaked.

However, I wasn't really sold on the idea, and I didn't want something that was only half stealthed. So I decided to give my stealth units a camouflage scheme. I painted the model the army's blue, rather than the standard white of my infantry, then painted a mottled pattern over top. It came out a lot better than I thought it would.

This past weekend I found a mirror for my foyer. It's an interesting looking piece. Still going with the oriental flavor, this actually reminds me of some of the decoration I saw when I was in Thailand. Particularly the gold leaves on the red background.


And now that I have the mirror up, I can hang up one of the pictures I got at the art show. I needed the table and mirror as a reference to see where the painting should go.


I have three things left to do to my foyer. I need something to go on the table. I'm thinking either a Thai dragon or a Chinese lion. I also need a shoe rack to go along that low wall you can see in the bottom of the picture. I have a bunch of shoes lining the base of the wall, but I'd like an actual place to put them. I haven't really been looking yet, but the only ones I've seen so far are those metal or plastic wire frames. Suitable for the closet, but not for the front entrance. The last thing I want to do is replace the light with something more oriental looking. The shoe rack should be the only thing that poses any difficulty.

The other week I decided to liven up my front walk a bit by adding some flowers. It was pretty bare before, especially the strip of mulch between the garage and the sidewalk. So I went to Lowe's and picked out some flowers at random. Just whatever looked pretty. I got a couple long windowsill pots to put them in. I potted them instead of planting them since I wasn't sure what the home owner's association would say about it. So far, nothing.


This is the front walk with the new flowers. The poinsettia there by the door was a gift from the neighbors this Christmas. And the little American flag is from the Tea Party.


The first set of flowers. Three of them are the same kind, just different colors. The bright red ones there on the center right have since stopped blooming. The others look like they'll keep going for a while.


All but the red ones here have stopped blooming. The plants are still green, but no more flowers. The tags on the flowers for these first two pots say they need a lot of sun, and here between the buildings they probably only get 3 hours of sunlight a day. We'll see if the start blooming again once the dead buds fall off.


This last pot has flowers that like the shade. The two in the middle need a lot of water. They start wilting if I don't water them for a couple days. The pink one has stopped blooming, but the plant is still a bright green.

And no, I don't know what any of these flowers are. I didn't save the tags, and I forgot to look. Also, my neighbors decided to copy me after I put my flowers out. But she outdid me, putting more pots out and taller flowers. If any of mine die, I'll have to get something bigger to match.

...Consider the possibility that man is to God as a dog is to a man, and a dog is to man as a flea is to a dog; i.e., the man, the dog, and the flea, who are merely tagging along for the ride, have neither the faintest idea as to why their masters do what they do nor the means to ever understand why.

The question then becomes: Is God indifferent to us, as the dog is to the flea, or does he allow us to suffer for reasons we do not understand? When someone takes his dog to the veterinarian, the dog has no idea why his master allows pain to be inflicted on him. In the same way, perhaps, God doesn't always give us what we want, but he knows what we need.

Robert Ringer

Hat Tip: Right Wing News via Conservative Grapevine

Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn't recede willingly before the wheels of progress.

Andrew McCarthy

There's been much talk recently about the Somali pirates. It is heartening to hear that the pirates got what they deserved. But I am completely baffled that a handful of pirates in a lifeboat with one hostage managed to hold off three American warships for four days.

And not only that, but the hostage actually escaped, giving the Navy a window of opportunity to sink their little dinghy. Do destroyers not have cannons these days?!

What is it that has paralyzed our society in the face of danger? It's not just pirates off the coast of Africa. It's gangs in the inner city and drug lords in Mexico. Why do we tolerate crime and destruction and anarchy?

There are sections of the city not two miles from my house I would not venture through except in a group, and wouldn't enter at night even with an armed party. Is this normal?

Civilization is the restriction of human behavior. When we remove those restrictions, when we no longer restrain ourselves, no longer enforce restrictions on those who will not restrain themselves, civilization falls. A society that tolerates murder, ignores theft, and encourages sloth cannot be called civilized. Such brings decay. An inner city ghetto in America is better off, I think, than Somalia, but the lawlessness is the same. I wouldn't go into either.

We've let men like this take over whole neighborhoods. When really they ought to stuck on a pike in the village square. (Pirates should be hung from the yardarm. There are traditions for these things, after all.)

Hat Tip: Mark Steyn, via Conservative Grapevine

The topic we were discussing in men's Bible study the other day was moral law. One of the sticking points was whether moral law comes from an outside source, or whether it is made up by society. Obviously, Christians believe that moral law comes from an outside source; God. Whereas evolutionists and many other scholars believe that moral law is made up by society.

Where Calvinball comes in is with an analogy that was used to describe moral law. In almost all games, the rules are made up by an outside source. The players don't make up the rules as they go. Nor do they even agree on the rules before the game starts. The rules exist from beforehand, whether in basketball or Monopoly, and the players are expected to follow them. This is our outside source. The rules of play are created by some external entity and anyone who wants to play the game follows those rules.

In Calvinball, however, the players make up rules as they go. Rules are invented and disbanded at whim. This is the evolutionary theory, where people make up rules to progress themselves, and eventually eliminate them when they are no longer useful.

Both approaches to games are possible. You and your buddies can make up your own rules and have a great time. Or you can play an existing game and have a great time. But in real life, the question is whether moral law is absolute or relative. For it to be absolute, it must come from an outside source. And by outside, I mean outside of humanity. Any objective standard is external to the thing being measured.

With relative moral law, we can invent and modify right and wrong however it suits us. But in a dispute, whose right and wrong do we use? Whoever has the bigger stick. If right and wrong are social constructs, then whoever has the power to enforce the standard gets to set the standard. But if the standard changes, it's not really standard.

Which is shiny and all, but it doesn't really tell us which of these theories is correct. Either we're all playing basketball, even if we don't know the rules and are inclined to cheat, or we are playing Calvinball, and only use rules we like.

Maybe I should go read some more Calvin & Hobbes and see what other theology I can discover.

Hot chicks. With lightsabers. Need I say more?

Hat Tip: House of Eratosthenes

We traded beauty for ugliness, truth for lies, liberty for comfort, love for indifference, responsibility for frivolity, duty for entertainment, history for sound bites, and children for pleasure. We had gold, but we tossed it aside and replaced it with cleverly designed dross. We turned men into women and women into men and marveled at our new creative power. We stopped looking up to Heaven and began to keep our gaze firmly fixed on the ground. We abandoned the old God for a host of hip, cool and slick new ones.

The Return of Scipio

Everything that is wrong with society.

Hat Tip: House of Eratosthenes

I'm tired of being told how bad America is by left-wing millionaires like Michael Moore, George Soros, and Hollywood entertainers who live in luxury because of the opportunities America offers. In thirty years, if they got their way, the United States will have the religious freedom and women's rights of Saudi Arabia, the economy of Zimbabwe, the freedom of the press of China, the crime and violence of Mexico, the tolerance for gay people of Iran, and the freedom of speech of Venezuela. Won't multiculturalism be beautiful?

Robert A. Hall

Dead on. The flip side to that view is that in much less than thirty years, there will be a backlash against this kind of liberal idiocy, and the country will move back to the right. This kind of cycle has been going on for a while now; since the Renaissance for our own culture. But what I can't help but notice is that the cycle itself moves ever more leftward. So I don't expect the coming conservative swing to take as far to the right as Reagan, and the next swing left will take us past the Obama administration. My question is: when do we stop cycling far enough back to the right to be unable to fix things?

Hat Tip: Conservative Grapevine

Heh: "pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility"

Hat Tip: Cassy Fiano