Author: David

Emperor Darth Misha I, the ruler of The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiller, has a great disquisition/deconstruction of those LLM sufferers of PEST (Post Election Stress Trauma). Herewith one very small sample:

[Quoting a “therapist” then commenting]

“More than anything else, people with PEST tremble physically.”

That’s called “withdrawal symptoms”, you bumbling buffoon. Hand them a reefer and a latte and they’ll be right as rain in a second.

There’s much more at the post. Warning, some vulgarity. Well-warranted and wholely appropriate vulgarity, IMO, but may be offensive to some. Let’s all show our compassion for those PESTs by demonstrating the benefits of laughter therapy, shall we?

This time of year can play havoc with teachers’ lesson plans—at least lesson plans of teachers who want their students to continue learning anything of value. And that’s the least of it. Several years ago, when I was in an only slightly curmudgeonly mood, I wrote some offhand verses to the tune of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” titled, “It’s the Sap-Sappiest Season of All”

Yep. The title above is linked to the lyrics with a midi file playing in the background.

There are other Christmas “things” on that particular website, as well, that are less… curmudgeonly. Such as,

A simple lullaby, a short poem (with a midi background rip-off of a Mannheim Steamroller piece—heh—and a nice graphic) and maybe some other things this year, if I get around to it. It all really kind of depends on whether or not I get around to digging out some old compositions and converting them to web-friendly formats or even (don’t expect it) am moved to write something fresh this year.

Such as these things be, they are simple things, but my own.

For the most part.

🙂

Just did a lunchtime check of some blogs and ran across a comment by someone calling themseves “Vandal” responding to a post by someone fed up with the LLMB’s PC approach to eliminating “Christmas” (or anything Christian) from the season.

Vandal commented that the best response to such was “Merry Christmas, you filthy animal.” Others were quick to chastise Vandal for such an “unchristian” attitude. I beg to differ. “Merry Christmas, you filthy animal,” really does touch the very heart of what Christmas is all about. I applaud Vandal’s clear Calvinism and want to remind us all that anyone who ascribes to the total depravity of man can’t be all bad… heh

After all, Christmas is God’s gracious response to our “filthy animal” depravity that He demonstrated in the incarnation and sacrifice of His Son…

So, “Merry Christmas, you filthy animal” is kinda God’s loving response to our total depravity. I like that.

It is just as scripture has said,

“There is no just man, not even one;
there is no one who understands,
no one in search of God.
All have taken the wrong course,
all alike have become worthless;
not one of them acts uprightly, no, not one…” (Romans 3: 10-12)

and

The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6: 23)

So, Christmas is about “Good will [from God] to filthy animals,” if you will. And that’s something we can be very, very grateful for: that God looked upon those who hated Him and chose to reach out to His enemies with love. (Romans 5: 8) “Peace on earth”? Accessible only through Christ. (Romans 5:1).

And that addresses why so many who find the Christmas season depressing or—in LLMB PC conformity, offensive. They do not yet know the Good WIll God has already expressed toward them, nor have they welcomed the Peace He offers through His Son.

Their choice.

So, I wish one and all a Merry Christmas you filthy animals!

A very merry, merry Christmas, indeed.

Folks who avidly study biblical eschatology and prophecies of “the endtimes” generally have pretty definite ideas about what “the mark of the Beast” might be, and all of those ideas I’ve been exposed to orbit around some sort of physical mark imposed upon folks.

Maybe there’s a more important mark: the stain on souls so corrupt that they choose satanic evil so vile as to be unmistakable as their normative “good”.

If that be so, the Netherlands is peopled with folk already wearing the Beast’s mark. Consider the Groningen Protocol, now in effect in the Netherlands, whereby committees of doctors choose whom to kill. As Hugh Hewitt puts it,

“This is either a low point, or a point of no return. The establishment of ‘independent committees’ to dispatch non-consenting humans is nothing but a death penalty committee for innocents.”

Unmistakably sold out to Satan. Surely that must leave a mark…

Well, Frank J. at IMAO is certainly umm… ticked off.

* The Red Cross is claming that conditions for prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are “tantamount to torture”. What! I pay tons of taxes each year, and I want full-fledged torture for my money!

Yeh, well, this is the government that gave us Mineta’s Morons and Ridge’s Retards in the Thousands Standing Around boondoggle. So? You expect a good work ethic among government torturers? C’mon, now! It’s ridiculous to expect anything better than “almost torture” from government workers. The best we can hope for is another four years of tax cuts and dead terrorists.

BTW, Frank J. also reminds us that the leading cause of death among Islamic jihadists is American military. A Good Thing. It really is too much to hope for decent torture of terrorists… unless maybe the feds could outsource the torture to Islamic women? Gotta be a lot of rage built up there…

This demonstration of the survival benefits of those little features of Western Civilization: Why our soldiers in Iraq are invincible.

The images load rather slowly, but it’s a worthwhile wait to view all eight images, in order to get the whole story.

(h.t. : John of Argghhh!)

The lesson of this lil story: Our guys are invincible because they brush their teeth and play poker (see slide #2 for the poker lesson). Two benefits of Western Civ: good dental hygiene and poker. Each standing our guys in good stead in Iraq.

🙂

Needed to add this comment, again from Pournelle:

“Jane Jacobs points out that a Dark Age isn’t when you have forgotten how to do things. It is when you have forgotten that you ever could. French peasants in 650 AD were entirely unaware that Roman farmers could get yields of 10 bushels harvest for 1 bushel planted: they thought it a gift of God if they could get 3 bushels from each bushel planted, and generally didn’t get more than 2. And American educators have apparently forgotten that there was a time when 96% of the people who finished 4th grade could read; we now have 100% attendance at schools and a literacy rate somewhat lower than Iraq’s. But all will be well and No Child Will Be Left Behind, so long as we can juggle the tests and get increasing test scores. The purpose of the education system is no longer to educate but to produce people with certain credentials. Hurrah for the educational reforms of the past three decades.”

And so it goes. Another axe in the hands of the barbarians vigorously hacking away at the roots of Western Civilization…

The MMPA, the LLMB and their partners in crime must thank god for government schools (they do that only while looking in the mirror, you know, since that is where they see their god… ).

Well, as you may have discerned by now, “The Essay” concerning the conspiracy to murder Western Civilization, etc., is going to be even longer in coming… Nevertheless, I’ll probably be posting snippets concerning the signs of that “conspiracy” from time to time. Here is one such snippet, from Jerry E. Pournelle:

“In every college classroom in the nation nothing is taught that is inconsistent with the view that within every oppressed human lurks a burning desire for freedom. In my view in every human heart beats a desire, sometimes burning sometimes not to rob his neighbor and possess his wife: it was once known as the doctrine of original sin.

Chesterton once said that anyone who didn’t believe in original sin could not possibly be reading the newspapers.”

While this may be a slight exaggeration (I suspect there may be as many as two classrooms in a Bible College somewhere in a hick “red state” that still teach about original sin and man’s depravity), it is close enough to the mark. And it is symptomatic of one of the axes weilded at the roots of Western Civilization by the barbarians in academia, in the ranks of the Mass Media Podpeoples’ Army and the Loony Left Moonbat Brigade. That, of course, is the current preconceptual bias against the concept of right and wrong. The concept that there is anything that is clearly always, immutably right and thus there are behaviors that are always clearly immutably wrong is the only “always wrong” concept to the barbarians in academia, in the ranks of the Mass Media Podpeoples’ Army and the Loony Left Moonbat Brigade. To them right and wrong are opinions, and that is the only correct opinion about right and wrong.

Try to have a civilization where “every man [does] what is right in his own eyes”. Go ahead. Try it.

Meanwhile, I need to clean this keyboard… (tired of re-typing every blasted “d”).

Carol Platt Liebau has an interesting article and a blogpost (actually, a series of posts) on the “values vs. issues” argument about the outcome of the last national election. One of the key arguments is over the effect of loosely-defined “values” vs. the national security issue. She asks whether nationalk security might actually be seen as a moral value.

Consider:

“…It is not without purpose that the ruler carries the sword; he is God’s servant, to inflict his wrath upon the wrongdoer…” Romans 13: 4

And Romans 13 is not the only passage that makes clear that civil government has a primary role: creating fear in outlaws by means of the sword.

Did the campaigns in Afganistan and Iraq improve our national security by means of punishing outlaws and creating fear of wrongdoing in other outlaws?

Ask Qadaffi.

But this is not solely applicable to so-called national security issues. We have outlaws a-plenty here at home, as well. The political class as a whole is talking about extending amnesty to one whole class of outlaws: illegal aliens (while disingenuously calling them illegal immigrants).

Martha Stewart was sent to prison NOT for illegal insider trading but for asserting to investigators and the public that she did not engage insider trading. They say she lied, and so they sent her to prison for “lying” to them about something they did not even charge her with. Meanwhile, large numbers of U.S. Senators engage in insider trading on a regular basis and are given a bye.

Jerry Pournelle has famously said (well, if it’s not yet a famous saying, it ought to be),

“We don’t have a rule of law, we have so many laws that if all were enforced impartially we would every one of us be ruined by fines, or in jail, or both. And we know this.”

And this is one major reason why respect for lawful behavior is so low. When you can follow a speeding highway patrolman to his coffee break, you know that not even the law enforcement officers take traffic laws seriously–unless they want to write a ticket. And I doubt that there are many citizens who have not–probably unintentionally!–broken tax laws simply because the laws on what the government takes from our pockets to put in others’ pockets are so arcane as to need a voodoo magister to keep them straight.

With laws designed to make outlaws of everyone and civil government determinbed to NOT make horrible examples of violent outlaws who rape and steal and murder, is it any wonder respect for thr rule of law is a laughable concept today?

A civil government determined to NOT horribly punish (“pour encourager les autres” [heh]) violent criminals and equally determined to have a big stick wherewith to beat citizens into submission, just in case they ever want to (as if that were a remote possibility–ask Martha) is an immoral government.

The primary justification for civil government is to get the outlaws–those who would steal and kill and destroy–off the backs of common citizens. And there’s not much else that is justifiable in our national government functions either biblically or constitutionally.

Yep. Security is a moral values issue.

Just a lil addendum to yesterday’s “thanksgiving”…

Here’s the rub: in a civilized society, civil government is tasked with hounding thieves with “the sword” so that they at least fear being caught out.

The response of the company that shows no shame at having stolen from me (delivered less than what they sold me) seems to indicate they see their behavior as simply business as usual. When that kind of attitude holds sway, thieves run free.

And vigilance committees come into being, because civil government isn’t aprehending such thieves and meting out punishment severe enough to not only discourage them but at least make other potential thieves like them hesitate to show such brazen behavior.

But we can be glad that the choice between civilization and barbarity is becoming plainer. For example, politicians on evbery side of nearly every aisle in this country are calling for “amnesty” for a major class of outlaws, a class that poses a serious threat to the safety and security of citizens of this country: the huge class of illegal aliens. Most Americans (the polls show roughly 3/4) agree that illegal aliens, those who are in the country without valid visas or work permits or legal attempts to gain citizenship, ought to at the very least be expelled.

But our masters in the political realm see it otherwise. And in pushing for amnesty for outlaws, they make clear one line in the war to save (or kill) civilization: honest government. As Jerry Pournelle put it,

“A country that has an elite leadership that defies the vast majority of the citizens is neither a republic nor a democracy.”

OK, back on track, now. Every instance of barbarians at the gate (like the shamefully dishonest merchant I mentioned yesterday and above) or in seats of power (like the politicians who want to give a “bye” to outlaws), there are others who advance the cause of civilization just by holding themselves to a higher standard.

Looked around for another motherboard to suit my needs (because even IF the scoundrels attempt to send me the merchandise I paid for, there’s no telling how long and how much effort it might take to force an ethical response from them). Found one for about the same total cost (delivered) as the one that was NOT delivered… with a case and power supply and other lil goodies thrown in. And—surprise!—it was from a retailer I’d dealt with before and had simply kind of lost track of over the years. No manual. (The other had no manual either, but a manual was easily downloaded.) Problem. It’s an “orphaned” board—the company is still around, but no longer produces motherboards and has removed all documentation for mobos from their website. No search engine produced anything usable.

Hmmm… not good. Nevertheless, I had had good experiences shopping with this small company several years ago, and the same people owned and were running it. Submitted my order, then emailed the company’s owner for help locating a manual or tech sheet. And on a Saturday evening—Thanksgiving Holiday weekend, no less—Steve Weigle at The Village Geek emailed me back with help.

http://www.villagegeek.net

Decent folks, one and all, who have a personal stake in helping their customers.

So, yes, I have seen more and more evidence of creeps, cretins and crooks peopling the landscape of our society, but there does seem to be a remnant of decent folk.

Nice.

(Yes, there are more than a few other decent, honest business folk doing business on the web, but none of the ones I know seemed to have exactly what I needed—except for the ONE left at The Village Geek, a great place to do business. 🙂