Category: Uncategorized

Natural Theology

Rudyard Kipling

Primitive

I ate my fill of a whale that died

And stranded after a month at sea…

There is a pain in my inside.

Why have the Gods afflicted me?

Ow! I am purged till I am a wraith!

Wow! I am sick till I cannot see!

What is the sense of Religion and Faith :

Look how the Gods have afflicted me!

Pagan

How can the skin of rat or mouse hold

Anything more than a harmless flea?…

The burning plague has taken my household.

Why have my Gods afflicted me?

All my kith and kin are deceased,

Though they were as good as good could be,

I will out and batter the family priest,

Because my Gods have afflicted me!

Medi/Eval

My privy and well drain into each other

After the custom of Christendie…

Fevers and fluxes are wasting my mother.

Why has the Lord afflicted me?

The Saints are helpless for all I offer–

So are the clergy I used to fee.

Henceforward I keep my cash in my coffer,

Because the Lord has afflicted me.

Material

I run eight hundred hens to the acre

They die by dozens mysteriously…

I am more than doubtful concerning my Maker,

Why has the Lord afflicted me?

What a return for all my endeavour–

Not to mention the L. S. D!

I am an atheist now and for ever,

Because this God has afflicted me!

Progressive

Money spent on an Army or Fleet

Is homicidal lunacy…

My son has been killed in the Mons retreat,

Why is the Lord afflicting me?

Why are murder, pillage and arson

And rape allowed by the Deity?

I will write to the Times, deriding our parson

Because my God has afflicted me.

Chorus

We had a kettle: we let it leak:

Our not repairing it made it worse.

We haven’t had any tea for a week. . .

The bottom is out of the Universe!

Conclusion

This was none of the good Lord’s pleasure,

For the Spirit He breathed in Man is free;

But what comes after is measure for measure,

And not a God that afflicteth thee.

As was the sowing so the reaping

Is now and evermore shall be.

Thou art delivered to thine own keeping.

Only Thyself hath afflicted thee!

Recommended Reading between now and the 2006 elections

People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil

I’ve actually met some of the people that fit M. Scott Peck’s criteria for a diagnosis of “human evil,” so I’m not as hopeful as he is that they can be healed… Still, perhaps his book could be useful in helping people avoid electing people to office who have the personality disorder he describes.

A very shorthand (and admittedly misleading and hugely inadequate) description of a part of the problem of human evil is that people who are evil attack others instead of facing their own failures. You know, kinda like politicians who insist that solutions to problems (real or imagined) involves simply throwing more money at programs (which means taking more from the taxpayers to do it) that have alrady proven harmful, are themselves a major cause of problems pols want to solve by blaming others for their failures.

Yes, it’s more complex than that. But I’ve become convinced that it’s not just liars, thieves, buffoons, poltroons and mountbanks who run for office. Along with the (supposed but not yet proven) sprinkling of honest and capable politicians—I assume there are at least two, somewhere—I believe one can likely find a relatively high concentration of people with the egocentric personality disorder Peck describes as human evil.

Let’s see if we can’t avoid sending them to our State capitols and to Washington, OK?

James Taranto comments on the obscenity and depravity of the Islamic jihadists

Fundamentalist Muslim mythology has it that terrorist “martyrs” are greeted in heaven by 72 virgins. With Palestinian Arabs increasingly making use of female suicide bombers, we’ve often wondered what they get in heaven. Now we have the answer, thanks to a report in London’s Sunday Telegraph from an Israeli prison:

*** QUOTE ***

One of the inmates, Ayat Allah Kamil, 20, from Kabatya, told me why she had wanted to become a martyr: “Because of my religion. I’m very religious. For the holy war [jihad] there’s no difference between men and women shaid [martyrs].”

According to the Koran, male martyrs are welcomed to Paradise by 72 beautiful virgins. Ayat, as with many of the women she is incarcerated with, believes that a woman martyr “will be the chief of the 72 virgins, the fairest of the fair.”

*** END QUOTE ***

That is to say, the highest aspiration for a fundamentalist Palestinian girl is murder, suicide and prostitution. Has there ever been a more depraved culture?

crossposted at Cathouse Chat

Here’s one such:

“Now that fox hunting is outlawed they poison the foxes as vermin. This is known as humanitarianism.”

Yep. The so-called “Liberals” who got fox hunting outlawed did it for the poor dear foxes, all right. “Liberal” sounds more and more like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s slanderous definition of Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time.

More blogging from Pournelle’s trip to England at Chaos Manor: Current View.

Welcome, Carnival Readers! Personal note: CLICK HERE for a personal request for help …for someone else

Bicuits and Sausage Gravy

When I was in college and working three part time jobs to fit my schedule, sometimes my last meal of the day would be at a 24-hour truckers joint that featured an unending plate of biscuits and sausage gravy and a bottomless cuppa coffee. Often, a drive out to a plate of biscuits and gravy would net a table of like-minded college students and together we’d spend the wee hours of the morning gorging on biscuits and gravy, tanking up on coffee and B.S.-ing the night away.

Ah, well.

Biscuits

Mixing bowl and fork to mix; measuring cups, spoons; glass baking dish(es)–I use a couple of Pyrex “pie pans”.

Ingredients:

• 2 C Flour OOPS! This isn’t how I made my biscuits this morning! Don’t know how I did this: it’s 4C Flour!

• 4 ts Baking powder (Check)

• 1 ts Salt

• 2 Tb Olive Oil (Used 4 this a.m.)

• 1 C Milk (for “buttermilk” biscuits–lighter and flakier–add one Tbs vinegar to measuring cup before measuring the milk.)

*sigh* Shoulda proofread the thing before posting… 🙂

Separate: margarine or butter

Preheat oven to 350 Fahrenheit. While the oven is preheating, place your baking dishes in the oven with a tablespoon or so of butter or margarine in each.

Mix dry ingredients in a bowl. Mix wet ingredients—milk and oil (and vinegar if used)— in 2 C measuring cup. Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and mix together quickly.

Turn out onto a floured surface, dust with flour and roll out to about 1/2 inch thickness. Butter the top. Cut with cookie cutter and then stack them so that each final biscuit is two 1/2 inch pieces. Remove baking dishes from the oven and slide each biscuit around in the melted butter/margarine a little as you place it in the backing dish. Bake for about 8-10 minutes, until the tops are nice and golden.

Sausage Gravy

• 1C flour

• 2C milk

• 1Lb ground sausage—whatever your fav. I prefer a “hot” sausage of a brand I can usually find around here, but whatever suits you is the right sausage.

Crumble the sausage and cook until well done. Remove the saisage and leave the grease. Keeping the heat on the pan at a little above medium heat, add the flour a bit at a time to make a good brown roux. Back the heat off. Now, add the milk slowly and bring almost to a boil, and add the sausage back in. Simmer at a very, very low heat until the biscuits are done. If the gravy thickens too much before serving, bring the heat back up and add a lil milk at a time until the right consistency is reached (i.e., one you like).

Serve the sausage gravy over separated biscuit top n bottom halves. Scrambled eggs make a good addition. Scrambled eggs with Rotelâ„¢ or Tabascoâ„¢ make a better addition.

Oh, and coffee. Lots n lots of coffee. 🙂

I’m just glad I wasn’t there…

So I opened the rear hatch on the station wagon to load the groceries. *huh!?!* Spare tire cover’s on the other side of the car, torn up. Look at donut spare. Yup. Glad I wasn’t in the car when it decided to spontaneously KaBOOM!

Totally wasted. I guess it was hot in there, huh?

Funny thing: it had to have really shaken the car, cos the safety cutoff switch for the fuel pump had kicked in. Found that out when I tried to start the thing and… nothing. Noticed I couldn’t hear the fuel pump (usually quite loud on this car), so went back and tripped the switch.

But really: yeh, I’ve been saying bad things about donut tires, but did it have to go all “Katie Kaboom” (Animaniacs) on me?

Sometimes I just want to say, “Idiots! Think it through!” And then I realize the writers are probably products of public schooling…

Is not one else issitated by people who claim special status as “journalists” writing and speaking subliterate prose in a language they have (usually) spoken all their lives? A few small examples I’ve seen/heard recently will suffice to illustrate my frustration.

• they are one in [sic] the same vs. they are one and the same

• tow the line vs. toe the line

• in mass when the writer means en masse

• begs the question does NOT mean “asks for the question” (arrrgghhh!) it refers to the logical fallacy of petitio principii.

• chomp at the bit vs. champ at the bit

• confusing enervate (rob of energy) with innervate (infuse with energy, stimulate)

• using “the exception proves the rule” as an argument that where a rule fails it validates the rule (silly). “Prove” in this context means “test”.

• [spoken] forte pronounced as “for-tay”. The “e” is silent in “forte” when used to mean “strength” as in “Logical argument is his forte.” I’ll let native English speakers say “for-tay” when they’re talking about “loudness” in a musical phrase, if they wish, because there it’s from Italian, not French, as above.

• hale and farewell vs. hail and farewell (“hale” means “healthy” for those who insist it’s the correct word in the phrase. “Hail” means “Hello.” So there. Military folks do NOT write this wrongly more than one time…)

• “if I was”—has no one even heard of subjunctive construction? “If I were” please.

• upmost vs. utmost

• “wet” when “whet” is meant

• confusing affect (usually a verb meaning to influence; when a noun, overt signs of an emotional state) and effect (usually a noun meaning a result; when a verb, cause to happen NOT influence).

• than (comparison) vs then (when)

• there (place), their (possessive pronoun), they’re (contraction meaning “they are”)

• it’s and your’s used as possessives, when its and yours are correct (“your’s” is nonsense).

• Heck, there are tons of misused apostrophes—a punctuation mark frequently misused in creating plurals, for heaven’s sake. *sigh*

• to, too, two: these should be obvious

• your vs you’re—oh, heavens. *sigh* “Your” is a possessive pronoun. “You’re” is the equivalent of “you are.”

• “All woks of life”—nah. Too easy.

• write to choose—really? (Writer meant “right to choose”.)

• copywrite used when copyright is meant.

• A biggie: imply vs. infer. A speaker may imply. A hearer may infer. They are two very different processes. Most errors of argument seem to occur when a hearer infers (or pretends to) something not said and then erromeously (or disingenuously) implies (or outright states) that what they inferred is what was said… BTW, that’s also known as a non causa pro causa fallacy of argument. A common use is in straw man arguments: arguing against something not proposed or said.

Well, these are a start: irritating, one and all. (Not, as I have seen and heard, “One in all.”)

Note: yes, I make mistakes. I claim no special training in writing; I have no editors; I am not a professional wordsmith. The examples noted above all come from websites of people who do claim special status as wordsmiths/journalists or from news broadcasts or newspapers where the writer or speaker made more than one such error—or continually repeated the same error—in the same article/newsreading. Irritating to see/hear supposed wordsmiths, especially in “Smartland,” screw up English. And it’s one of the reasons I generally avoid Mass Media Podpeople’s mangling of the “news”—such as it is.

I’ll accept no excuses, lame or otherwise appealing: Lileks Screedblog for yesterday is a MUST READ. There will be a test (you just won’t see it coming… 🙂

A sample, please? OK. But understand, you need the context, and you’ll simply have to read the whole thing to get that.

“Why PBS threatens their intellect.” Whoa! You nailed me there; I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve switched the channel ‘cause I cain’t tell what that dang Miss Marple’s saying. (And why’s she a miss, huh? She wunna dem lesbeens?) It’s possible that one could oppose public funding of PBS because it could survive on its own by appealing to the rich yeasty demographic slice that likes it; it’s possible one could argue that the very idea of state-funded TV is more like, oh, the Soviet Union, the Nazis and Pol Pot’s regime, but I wouldn’t do that. It’s possible that one might wonder if PBS would be beloved by Mr. Schram if it pumped out the O’Reilly Factor 24/7, with occasional station breaks for Marine Band concerts. In that case, one suspects that state-funded TV with mandatory citizen contributions would be a sign of creeping fascism. And one might also note that cable TV has offerings that delight the PBS-inclined viewer, 24/7, and rather than fight for dimes and pennies for PBS, Congress might well use its regulatory power to break up the tier system that keeps people from subscribing only to the smarter channels on cable. These things are possible.

In which I am properly chastened by words from one who is wiser than I…

Would I campaign against changes to California law restricting the right of cities to take property and hand it to private developers? Tooth and nail, war to the knife; but I still do not understand why this is a Federal matter.

“Incorporation of the Bill of Rights” is the justification given. It is clear that the Civil War Ammendments did not intend to incorporate the Bill of Rights into rights to be enforced against the states by the federal courts; they specifically empower Congress to enforce them by appropriate legislation. But Congress doesn’t always act. So when Congress doesn’t act why may the courts do it for them absent an Act of Congress?

And the answer, “Because it is so important, and this needs to be fought by any means necessary” is not a conservative answer. Where in the Constitution does it become a Federal matter? I am prepared to be enlightened on that because I would not at all mind seeing the Feds protecting private property rights (although I doubt they will). So what is the Constitutional issue here? What gives Federal Courts — not Congress, but the Courts — jurisdiction in this case at all? The Incorporation Doctrine has been responsible for a great deal of mischief and in my day Conservatives hated the whole idea. Wouldn’t we be better off if that incorporation were overturned, ended, rescinded, rather than being used by courts to thwart the will of the legislature of Connecticut? If you want protection for private property enforceable by US Marshals, pass an Act of Congress; don’t hand more power to the Courts. They’ll misuse it every time.

Jerry Pournelle nails it pretty well. I have railed often enough about courts creating law ex nihilo and the encroachment of Federal power, often through “incorporation” of Federal Constitutional restrictions and empowerments into State and local government (following after some very bad law issuing out of the so-called “Civil War Amendments”). Why then my outrage at the Supreme Communists of the United States for (irrationally, given their intrusion in other areas) upholding State and local powers in Kelo et al. v. City of New London?

Well, I guess I feel we’re in a Catch-22 situation: as a matter of fact (irrespective of Constitutional justification) the Feds, including the SCOTUS, can and do intrude into State law situations on a daily basis—whenever they wish.

• a puddle on an Iowa farm can be declared “navigable waters” and so a farmer can be jailed by feds for filling it in

• Federal courts can order local schools to do all manner of things abhorrant to the local residents, expensive things that do more harm than good (if any)

• people nationwide can be forced to flush twice (wasting water and still often not getting the “job” done) because some Feeb thinks it important to “save” water with low-flush toilets that don’t work

The list can go on as long as one wants to keep typing. The feebs already exercise, via phony expansion of the commerce clause, the “general welfare” clause and “incorporation of rights” rules far more power than the Founders and framers, in their wisdom, thought healthy for government to exercise.

But when it comes to protecting the bedrock of a democratic republic, provate property owned by citizens, the feebs refuse to meddle as they are happy to do in everything else.

Yes, I agree with Pournelle that this sort of land grabbing is best handled at the State and local level. And I’m pretty sure that such land grab attempts would go fly about as well as a lead balloon in my small town. Still… we live in the world we have. And the world we have is one where our Federal Gummint is far, far too intrusive and unresponsive to Constitutional restraints; where judges legislate from the bench (and legislatures and executives let them, instead of removing them for exceeding their authority); where local and state governments emulate the excessive power of the Federal Gummint.

What, short of Revolution, is the remedy?

Pournelle seems to suggest that more involvement in local politics is an answer—and I’d certainly agree it’s a good place to start. But what to do about the problem of both too much interference by the feebs in what often seems like most local issues and their inconsistent insistence on keeping their hands off in others?

Update (And I, like Randy Barnett said of his book, Restoring the Lost Constitution, would have led with this, had I seen it sooner :-): Justice Thomas, in his dissent on Kelo, said,

“Something has gone seriously awry with this Court’s interpretation of the Constitution.”

Oh? You think? *sigh*

I’ve been largely dissatisfied with Sandra O’Connor’s unpredictable performance in that Conspiracy of Dunces I now call the Supreme Communists of the United States but…

“The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.”

Was a high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property,
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing —
That side was made for you and me!

As I went walking, I saw a sign there;

On the sign it said NO TRESPASSING,

But on the other side it didn’t say nothing–

That side was made for you and me!