Authority and responsibility

Politically I’m mostly conservative. The Republican party is to me what I am to it – a tool to be used. I have no interest in electing Republicans for the sake of electing Republicans. To the extent that having Republicans in office advances the things I care about, I’m for them. Last time around having Republicans in Congress didn’t do much good. Having them now might slow down the pace at which bad things happen.

Unless the Republicans are going to effectively filibuster to block bad legislation or nominations, they might as well not have the power to filibuster. If Senator Specter wants to go back to the Democrats, let him go. The Democrats have all the authority; let them take the responsibility that goes with it, and let them be held accountable for the result.

If the result is good, they’ll get to keep the authority. If not, maybe the Republicans will retake the House next year. Divided government likely will be better for conservatives than one-party rule by Democrats, or by Republicans.

Unoriginal thesis

“[T]oday’s complex, interconnected, globalized world requires policy makers willing to toss out old assumptions … and embrace creative new approaches.” — The Era of Adapting Quickly

One-party rule

a bad idea

“Use of the reconciliation process would allow Democrats, who hold 58 seats in the Senate, to pass the measures without a single GOP vote.” — Dems to use reconciliation for healthcare.

Piracy

Not just for Somalia

The Live piracy map shows, for example,

“19.02.2009: 0630 UTC: Posn: 05:50.5N – 099:06.03E, Malacca Straits.

12 pirates in a boat boarded a tug and a barge underway. They stole ship’s navigational, radio, personal belongings and kidnapped the master and the chief officer before leaving the vessel. The 2nd officer is navigating the vessels to a nearest port.”

See Piracy – More than Somalia

Elementary

A nice little theorem. More here.

The fixer

Are the Democrats fixing things? Or putting in the fix, Chicago style?

Youthful indiscretion

You know how it goes. I was young and impressionable. I started hanging out with some older boys, and then I joined their club. It was widely respected at the time, and seemed innocent enough, except for a strong emphasis on God and Country.

But one thing leads to another. When I was older, I was recruited into a different organization, this one overtly militant. I swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same. I took the obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion, and promised to well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office. I held up my right hand and said “So help me God.”

My oath wasn’t conditional, or limited in time. But I didn’t expect thirty years later the organization would come to be suspected as a threat to national security. Neither did I expect we’d have a Department of Homeland Security, but that isn’t Janet Napolitano’s fault.

I wonder if the government will ask me for the names of other organization members known to me. If they’re no more efficient now than they were then, they will probably have to ask, because they will have lost everyone’s records.

We were in our twenties – just kids, really. But I have no one to blame but myself. I knew what those bayonets were for. Will we be tracked, rounded up, blacklisted?

I hope they don’t shave my head and send me to Georgia again.

Heaven and Hell

Last things, but not ends

“…the truth seems to me to be that happiness or misery beyond death, simply in themselves, are not even religious subjects at all. A man who believes in them will of course be prudent to seek the one and avoid the other. But that seems to have no more to do with religion than looking after one’s health or saving money for one’s old age. The only difference here is that the stakes are so very much higher. And this means that, granted a real and steady conviction, the hopes and anxieties aroused are overwhelming. But they are not on that account the more religious. They are hopes for oneself, anxieties for oneself. God is not in the centre. He is still important only for the sake of something else.” — Reflections on the Psalms, by C.S. Lewis

Bullying

Middle school boys are bullying weaker boys, calling them “gay” or “fag”, sometimes hounding them to the point of murder and suicide. They don’t really think their victim is homosexual, just weak or effeminate. Judith Warner at the New York Times rightly condemns this, blames the parents, and misunderstands the problem.

“This generation of parents tends to talk a good game about gender, at least in public. Practicing what we preach, in anxious times in particular, is another thing… We should do something to get this insanity under control.” — Dude, You’ve Got Problems

Show and tell

They talk a good game in public? They say what Ms. Warner expects good people to say, that both boys and girls can do anything girls want to. They preach one wrong, and practice a different wrong. The bullying and name-calling she rightly condemns is the result of years of ‘enlightened’ social and educational policy. I wonder what change she would recommend. Workshops on gender diversity? Inclusive readers in Kindergarten? After-school sitcoms about capable domineering women married to incompetent wimps?

Nobody shows these boys how be men. They’re told in one way and shown in another that men are effeminate, or they’re jerks; that good boys act like girls. They know that’s wrong, but they don’t know what’s right instead. These are the children of mankind, just like Scrooge’s Ignorance and Want.

Carthago delenda est

Chesterton’s writing is dense, and tightly linked to the rest of Chesterton’s writing. Unless it’s one of his aphorisms, taking an excerpt is difficult. Have I preserved the sense? Read The Everlasting Man and see.

“…the consuls of Rome and the prophets of Israel … were at one in what they hated. It is very easy in both cases to represent that hatred as something merely hateful. It is easy enough to make a merely harsh and inhuman figure either of Elijah raving above the slaughter of Carmel or Cato thundering against the amnesty of Africa. These men had their limitations and their local passions; but this criticism of them is unimaginative and therefore unreal. It leaves out something, something immense and intermediate, facing east and west and calling up this passion in its eastern and western enemies…

“The civilisation that centered in Tyre and Sidon was above all things practical. … [They] believed, in the appropriate modern phrase, in people who delivered the goods. In their dealings with their god Moloch, they themselves were always careful to deliver the goods. It was an interesting transaction, upon which we shall have to touch more than once in the rest of the narrative; it is enough to say here that it involved … a certain attitude towards children. This was what called up against it in simultaneous fury the servant of one God in Palestine and the guardians of all the household gods in Rome.”