28 March 2003

Jonah Goldberg, intellectual colossus of National Review magazine: “The United States needs to go to war with Iraq because it needs to go to war with someone in the region and Iraq makes the most sense…Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business.”

The neoconservative dream for a new Cold War. Have you betrayed their righteous cause, are you an anti-Semite, or are you just plain nuts? Or maybe all of the above.

This is an article worth printing out and pinning to your wall. Excellent! Thomas Woods writes: “[Edmund] Burke is often referred to as the father of modern conservatism. It hardly requires much imagination to figure out what he would think of the neoconservatives’ imperial program of global democracy. To appreciate Burke’s arguments, though, one would have to shut off Rush Limbaugh and learn about conservative thought by reading actual books…Although followers of the War Party tend to be more familiar with the conservatism of Sean Hannity than that of John C. Calhoun, whom they’ve never read, it is Calhoun whose wisdom is especially valuable here. Calhoun warned that majority rule, which can be justified only on the basis of convention and utility rather than on any strictly moral foundation, can work only in places where there exists a basic commonality of interests among the people. Otherwise, majority rule becomes just another form of tyranny, as interest groups with mutually exclusive goals use their electoral strength to oppress each other.” ~ Thomas Woods

Rush Limbaugh on Thursday was talking to a guy from Army Special Ops who was lamenting the fact that, had Turkey allowed the military to come in from the north as well, Baghdad would be surrounded. Then we could have “cut through them faster and saved lives” because of it. I’m still trying to figure that one out. Likewise, the example of Union General George McClellan’s reticence to engage Robert E. Lee was blamed for “innumerable deaths” and a prolonging of Lincoln’s War, presumably because it allowed the Confederates time to fortify their defenses. To these people, the enemy is just supposed to lie down and give up. Don’t you know who we are? We’re the United States of God-Bless-America! It reminds me of George Will blaming the deaths from the Iraqi embargo on Saddam Hussein. Didn’t he know he was supposed to buy food with his money instead of weapons? Didn’t he know that he was supposed to obey the people who imposed sanctions on him?

A short history lesson from Joseph Sobran.

“The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter says this “is a war we can not win.”

Todd Strandberg, who runs the site RaptureMe.com and is the author of the book Are You Rapture Ready?, informs us that there is no reason the Iraq war should raise his Rapture Index above the level of 174, which indicates “Fasten your seat belts.” To ChristianityToday, this is really important news.

Not the brightest thief in the world.

The world’s first wristwatch phone.

Quick! Get it down from there!

A special thank you to Dr. George Grant for his kind words and for linking to Little Geneva!

I love this guy Matt Colvin. Here he is again with more superb pro-family, anti-libertarian commentary against a certain “ecclesiocentric” pastor who has been very critical of the ”Uniting Church & Home” movement. Colvin writes: “It is perverse and suicidal for ecclesiocentrists to try to minimize the family’s significance in order to magnify the institutional church. For the institutional church will never be healthy unless men take up their covenantal responsibilities and show themselves faithful in their families.” Rich Lusk responded to him with this, which makes me want to pound my head against something: “The church is not so much a collection of families but a new family that transcends the old family.”

To oppose the president’s foolish schemes is to give aid and comfort to the enemy, says D. James Kennedy. Why, that makes me a traitor! I must be anti-American, since being a loyal American today equates to falling in line with whatever Bush wants to do, regardless of the cost.

Senator Robert Byrd: “I look forward to turning away from the incessant news coverage of war, and I look forward to spending a few precious moments outside listening instead to the spring peepers, those little frogs whose singing brings back to me boyhood memories of long ago.” That’s what I say! Turn off the TV and listen to the spring peepers!

“In the correct biblical theory of marriage it is the wife who is not made full equal in the co-partnership, but is made subordinate, in a limited degree, to the affectionate authority of the husband. Hence, a superficial person may think that women would gain by substituting the infidel, Jacobin theory of marriage for the true one. But this is a huge practical mistake. It will ever be the women who will incur the chief calamities from this instability of the marriage relation. The history of six thousand years has shown the only fortress for the safe defense of the rights, dignity and happiness of woman (who is practically the weaker vessel) is scriptural and life-long monogamy. The sure tendency of all lower forms of union is to corrupt the offspring, to barbarize the male sex, and reduce the ‘weaker vessel’ from the honored place of wife to that of a toy of man’s lust, and then the slave of a superior brute force. Will our shallow, conceited age utterly refuse to learn from history? Where else has woman escaped practical enslavement, except in the lands where she is a scriptural wife? If she enters the marriage relation refusing all subordination and insisting upon full equality then she must take her chance of finding the union a temporary co-partnership terminable at any time by the suit of either party…The American woman who seeks this liberation…has her Jacobin freedom, but she has sunk herself from the wife to the concubine.” ~ R.L. Dabney

Audio of George Grant’s Bible studies!

Relive the days when video games were ugly and fun.

In God We Trust…Canadians aren’t so sure. Politicians there never say “God bless Canada.”

More on this fictitious idea of separating the personal and the political, the religious and the secular, the church and the state. Pagans sincerely want you to believe that it is possible (for you, not for them).

Molech worship is dedication of a child to the state.

A Bottum dweller from the Weekly Wipe explains why the world has nothing to fear from neo-Wilsonians. I just feel so comforted after reading that. And I love the part about how Iraq “milked dry for three generations” would never pay for this war. What about the black gold, Texas tea?

No chemical weapons found yet (not that it ever mattered one way or another).

The proper way to deal with terrorists.

Would you consider changing your name to Freedom King, Jr.?

The ”Reconsidering Lincoln” conference in Richmond was a great success. Read Robert Salyer’s speech and Ron Holland’s speech.

A “conservative is a realist, who believes that there is a structure of reality independent of his own will and desire. He believes that there is a creation which was here before him, which exists now not by just his sufferance, and which will be here after he’s gone. This structure consists not merely of the great physical world but also of many laws, principles, and regulations which control human behavior. Though this reality is independent of the individual, it is not hostile to him. It is in fact amenable by him in many ways, but it cannot be changed radically and arbitrarily. This is the cardinal point. The conservative holds that man in this world cannot make his will his law without any regard to limits and to the fixed nature of things.” ~ Richard Weaver

“A film like Gods and Generals is important to the ‘paleo-Right’ not just as a historical curiosity, but as a work that tells us something about an embodied reality, an intersection of principle – in this case the South’s fight for independence – and events. The ‘paleo’ concern with specific cultures, and most especially one’s own culture, is partly emotional but not just emotional - it isn’t nostalgia. It’s both a feeling and an awareness of how the social world in which we live derives from and represents the underlying natural order; how a given place and time specifically express the nature of man and the laws that govern him. As for David Frum and National Review, on the other hand, the closest they ever come to an understanding of place is their talk about the ‘red’ and ‘blue’ zones of the country.” ~ Daniel McCarthy

RCjr gets all logical on us.

“And I hope, with me, you are a theocrat, because Calvin was; and if you don’t have the courage to call yourself a theocrat, then I hope that you will have the honesty to quit calling yourself a Calvinist.” ~ Dr. Francis Nigel Lee

The Uruk-Hai Anti-Defamation League will be boycotting the premiere of Return of the King, and kidnapping of short movie-goers has been threatened.

There is a small problem at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. You see, they’re required to post signs warning intruders about the dangers in the area, and the problem is that these signs need to last about another 10,000 years. I mean, should the signs be in English? Who knows if English will be spoken on earth then? (The oldest known writing, Sanskrit, is 7,000 years old.) The Wall Street Journal reports that the latest idea is to draw a picture of someone vomiting [or growing a third arm?] while drilling at the site. Another idea is to discourage trespassers by making Yucca Mountain a global feces dump. It need hardly be mentioned that the state of Nevada did not want to be the world’s toilet, but as every young lad with a pencil box is well aware, Honest Abe put an end to that state sovereignty nonsense, and God Bless America.

Thanks to the politically correct, Gods and Generals has only made $15 million so far, and The Last Full Measure may never be filmed.

“The devil protects his own, and how he loves war.”

“A recent Gallup poll shows that church-going Americans are more likely to support war against Saddam Hussein than are Americans as a whole…by an almost 2-to-1 margin.” A Pew Forum study shows that 7% of white Protestant clergy and 38% of black clergy have spoken out against the war. Catholics are very much opposed, and Baptists are very much in favor. This survey shows that only 21% of the clergy have come out for or against the war. Those who insist that churches should only be concerned with “spiritual” matters should look no further for the reason why most people increasingly find the church irrelevant to the challenges of daily life.

Speaking of which, Michael Horton comments on this tendency among Christians to turn every military action into a holy war (with “prayer missiles”). Yet his imaginary separation of the “heavenly” and the “earthly” is the very sort of gnosticism that continually plagues us. The question is whether something is right or wrong. And while Horton believes that God no longer covenants with nations (a dubious assertion – the Great Commission tells us to make disciples of the nations, not families), he has no trouble in praying that opposing nations become “confused, disoriented, and distrustful of each other.”

“But the United States is unique because we are an [anti-agrarian] empire of ideals. For two hundred years we have been set apart by our faith [religion unspecified] in the ideals of democracy [you mean oligarchy], of free men and free markets [you mean central management], and of the extraordinary possibilities that lie within seemingly ordinary men and women [you mean your tax base].” ~ Ronald Reagan, with helpful clarification by me

Rush Limbaugh, who, with typical understatement on March 24, called the Iraqi regime a “sub-human species,” saith: “The Constitution limits the role of government. The Constitution enumerates the freedoms of the people and enforces those freedoms against government, making sure government cannot encroach.” Very true, but I’m not sure what that document from antiquity has to do with anything.

“You might have noticed that there has been no talk about an exit strategy [a blatant violation of the so-called Powell Doctrine]. That’s because there isn’t one. The Bush administration plans to stay in Iraq to set up an occupational government and run the country for an indeterminate period of time. We, of course, will get stuck with the bill, and it will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Some of the politicians’ corporate cronies are already being promised lucrative contracts…Gee, I hope the Israelis don’t get jealous. They’ve been on the American dole so long that the cumulative total is about $100 billion.” ~ Charley Reese

I saw a clip today of Bush saying he’s not concerned about nation-building, he’s concerned about justice. How wonderful. These guys gave every support to Hussein when he was fighting Iran, then turned on him when he threatened our 51st state (Israel). They encouraged the Shi’ites and Kurds to rebel against Hussein, then left them high and dry after the 1991 war. On top of all that, our embargo has killed millions of Iraqis. Our leaders even supported Bin Laden when he was fighting the “right” people. Now 75% of Americans have been convinced that we are riding to the rescue of these poor folks, who have nothing to do with Bin Laden or 9/11 (Sunnis are secular, and the Taliban are religious fundamentalists). Too many are willing to believe whatever the little people in the TV set tell them is true. They are about to find out what it’s like to stir up a hornet’s nest, and this will make the ongoing political turmoil of Afghanistan look like nothing. The thing about Iraq is that it’s an artificial patchwork of rival tribes that was thrown together by the British less than a hundred years ago. They installed Iraq’s first king, Feisal, who fought alongside Lawrence of Arabia. The British took a cut of the oil proceeds then, and the Americans will do the same very soon. We’re just concerned about justice, you see.

Chronicles magazine responds to “the lies of David Frum.” Mr. Fleming reminds us elsewhere that “every conservative with an education is one less reader for National Review.”

A French-owned cleaners in Modesto, CA, goes up in flames, and the fire chief won’t call it arson.

“To each of my Nephews, William Augustine Washington, George Lewis, George Steptoe Washington, Bushrod Washington, and Samuel Washington, I give one of my swords or Cutteaux of which I may be possessed; and they are to choose in the order they are named. These swords are accompanied with an injunction not to unsheath them for the purpose of shedding blood, except it be for self defense, or in the defense of their Country and its rights; and in the latter case, to keep them unsheathed, and prefer falling with them in their hands, to the relenquishment thereof.” ~ from the last will and testament of George Washington

The prosperity gospel makes it to Britain. The poor and blacks are most in danger of being snared.

Baptists are realizing that evangelism can never match raising covenant children. Now, if they will just learn how to do the latter, everything will be fine.

The Iron Chef: Lembas Battle.

It’s easy to despise the French. They have had to live with the consequences of their Revolution and their atheistic heroes, such as Rousseau and Voltaire. They have inherited the wind from the slaughtering of Calvinists during the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre long ago. My French Huguenot ancestors fled to Charleston when the Edict of Nantes was revoked by Louis XIV, and it is safe to say that there has been no more than a small Reformed presence in the country ever since. Still, let’s be honest, the dark underbelly of France is no darker than that of the New USA. This (overwhelmingly successful) effort to demonize the French for not falling in line behind Fearless Leader George while we portray ourselves as the righteous liberators of mankind frankly disgusts me. Everyone gets a big laugh out of calling the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” but the fact is that, per capita, France lost almost as many men during its few months of war with Germany as the U.S. did in four years. Sorry, I don’t get the joke. Just this morning I received an email from those cubicle warriors at The Federalist listing about a hundred French products we should immediately boycott, including Bic razors and Michelin tires. I have news for you, America. You would still be British subjects if not for those so-called cowardly French. When Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, he was surrounded by more French than American troops. Vive la France!

“[Neoconservatives] are always in favor of bombing, embargoing, and boycotting anyone they disagree with. The fact that the US bombing of Yugoslavia killed as many people as Serbs and Albanians were killed in the preceding year of ethnic strife in Kosovo means nothing to them. The fact that as many as half a million Iraqi children have died as a direct result of the embargo on Iraq that they support is all the fault of Saddam Hussein. The fact that French farmers, businessmen, and workers, whose political views we know nothing of, will be hurt by any boycott of French products will not trouble the ‘consciences’ of people who have never been to a farm, run a business, or done a day of honest work in their lives. I love my country, knowing all the limitations and frailties of the American people, and I respect and admire the French, who have been a far greater nation than we shall ever be, that is, if greatness means anything loftier than money and bombs.” ~ Thomas Fleming

“The irony of this stupidity [that the Middle East can be transformed by force into a democratic region] is that it is only the Arab dictators who support the United States; if true democracy came to the Arab countries, there is no doubt that the people would elect governments extremely hostile to the United States and Israel. You’d have to be so retarded you couldn’t button your own shirt to devise a policy more stupid than this one.” ~ Charley Reese

Jay Bookman elaborates on the Grand Neoconservative Plan, ten years in the making, to turn the United State into Planetary Policeman.

It’s the Oil (and the Power, and Israel), Stupid. If it was ever in doubt, the money trail begins to take shape.

I don’t quite understand this strange requirement to stop criticizing the president and his bad decisions during wartime. “My country, right or wrong” is incompatible with the just war doctrine.

One of 14 original copies of the Bill of Rights, stolen from North Carolina by a carpetbagger during Lincoln’s War, has been returned. Though the paper is worth at least $30 million, these ten amendments, especially the last one, have been dead for a long time.

Al Gore, the inventor of the Internet and the man responsible for the tax added to every phone bill which has filled education camps with unused computers, joins the board of Apple Computer. Steve Jobs must want his company to go bankrupt.

The loathsome David Frum, author of the absurd phrase “axis of evil,” condemns paleoconservatives as “unpatriotic” Americans. There are many silly things about this article, not the least of which is that only a few of the people he calls paleoconservative would label themselves as such. The common theme here is that one becomes an unpatriotic American by opposing the schemes of the revolutionary Right, whether it be the “civil rights” movement or the imperialism of today. It takes guts for a Canadian like Frum to lecture those of us whose families have lived here for over 300 years on what being a loyal American entails.

Frum might want to acquaint himself with Edmund Burke to learn what conservatism truly means. A good way to begin is by reading Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. (I’m quite certain that none of the kids running National Review magazine has ever heard of it.) Paul Cella also wonders if conservatives these days even remember Burke. This is an excellent article. “A potential threat, no matter how monstrous, does not justify preemptive action; the threat must be imminent.”

Images like this are sickening to me. A country that sends women into the hell of war deserves what it gets. Oh, but I forgot. We don’t really fight anymore; we just drop bombs from a mile high.

Armstrong Williams, who it seems to me has always been a couple of tacos short of an extra value meal, declares that war will stimulate the economy. Well good, let’s have more of them then. The myth that war benefits the economy. The 19th century French economist Frederic Bastiat used the example of a broken window. A boy throws a rock through it, and the owner is distraught. Then someone says to cheer up. Fixing the window will mean business for the glazier. With the money the glazier earns he can buy a new suit. The economy will be helped! Of course, this theory fails to take into account how the money would otherwise have been spent. Government can be a big customer, and some will get very rich, as Yankee bankers discovered during Lincoln’s War. Manufacturing shoots up during wartime, and this creates the illusion that we are prospering. But at the tail end, we will find that no new wealth has been created. We have robbed Peter to pay Paul. As Ludwig von Mises said, “War only destroys; it cannot create. War, carnage, destruction and devastation we have in common with the predatory beast of the jungle.”

Growth in real wages has been essentially flat for 50 years, and wartime is no exception. We are told that we must increase productivity to increase wages, but it would be a great service if economists would take a look at the difference between creating wealth in agrarian and technological societies. Whether we’re talking about farming the earth or forging the steel to build jet engines, wealth always begins with harnessing natural resources. While there may always be a place for the professional thinking and talking classes, these people produce nothing of value on their own, and having too many of them spells disaster for the economy. There are now more employees in government than in manufacturing. The bubble has burst on what used to be called the Information Age and the New Digital Economy, as if the economy could possibly benefit in the long-term from packaging and repackaging information. Capitalism, that carefully-managed destroyer of culture, has failed us.

In the race against the inflation caused by our capitalist system, it becomes increasingly necessary to export jobs or import cheap labor. The flood of immigration since 1965 that has perhaps permanently changed the regional and national identities of our country has been encouraged every step of the way by big business. (It is also what Murray Rothbard called “swamping by the central state of an existing population for political ends.”) A slim minority are getting rich now at the expense of the average working man. (I understand that the economy is not a zero-sum game, but I refer here to the cultural cost for future generations.) In an agrarian economy, on the other hand (which, again, does not mean every man should be a farmer), families are more entrepreneurial and therefore more independent. Because they are more independent, they are less susceptible to periodic disruptions that cause massive layoffs. How do you fire a farmer? With property available to average families rather than huge agribusiness conglomerates, no centralized government will find it easy to control the people. Strife will be minimized because the gulf between rich and poor will shrink (naturally, not through collectivism). Of course, this is all very easy to say and not very easy to do. Cheap immigrant labor has made working the land too unprofitable. My point is that food prices are low because of this, but there is a hidden and painful cost that must be reconciled. We can start down this path by weighing the benefits to the local economy in every decision we make. Keep your wealth close to home. Do business with those in your church. Join with your neighbors and make yourselves as sufficient as possible, devising alternative methods of sustenance. At the very least, support your local food co-op. Should disaster strike, God forbid, you’ll be prepared.

“We should be trying to make exchanges that are mutually profitable (1 Cor. 10:24), not seeking to make the most profit possible for ourselves at the expense of the other party. Business must be regulated by the golden rule.” ~ Howard King

Did the Lord say that machines oughta take the place of living? And what’s a substitute for bread and beans? I ain’t seen it. Do engines get rewarded for their steam? ~ Johnny Cash, The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer

For ’tis the sport to have the engineer Hoisted with his own petard. ~ William Shakespeare

Could Africa be the center of Christianity in the next century?

Freida Miller, the Ohio midwife, will remain in jail unless she rats on who gave her Pitocin. I find this whole story to be ludicrous. As Charles Dickens once said, “The law is an ass.” You had better believe that medical corporations are spurring the prosecutors.

Belhaven College in Mississippi, which was named among “America’s Best Colleges for 2002″ by U.S. News and World Report, is eagerly seeking homeschoolers.

In case Saddam Hussein happens to be driving through Pennsylvania, a billboard over I-95 urges him to go into exile.

Praise Human Freedom from whom all blessings flow. Praise Peace all creatures here below. Praise Free Markets above ye heavenly host. Praise Rational Choice and Man the most. Amen. ~ David Rockett, in a fit of satire after reading a leading Catholic libertarian’s statement that “the blessings of civilization have come from one source, and one source only: human freedom, with its inseparable twin, peace.”

“A man should not say, ‘I will sell my wares as dear as I can or please,’ but ‘I will sell my wares as is right and proper.’ For thy selling should not be a work that is within thy own power or will, without all law and limit, as though thou wert a God, beholden to no one. But because thy selling is a work that thou performest to thy neighbor, it should be restrained within such law and conscience that thou mayest practice it without harme or injury to him.” ~ Martin Luther, anti-capitalist, anti-libertarian

Yankee abolitionists have condemned domestic slavery for a long time, but far worse in the mind of the agrarian is wage-slavery, which is how the wealth of Northern cities was built. Under wage-slavery, the capitalist norm, an employer frees himself of all responsibility for his employees. Money alone (less and less of it) has replaced what used to be understood as the employer’s moral duty to not ignore the total well-being of the employee, to not encourage vice by various means, and to serve as a virtuous role model. This reduction of wages to merely what the market will bear is why apprenticeship has died and students are rather herded like cattle through impersonal and utilitarian universities (which should more accurately be called pluriversities). Now the person is less important than Progress, but the irony is that the unions, taxation, and onerous regulations that inevitably result from such a system kill the very productivity and progress that the Utopians desire.

“My problem with Capitalism is that it creates too few capitalists.” ~ G.K. Chesterton

Matt Colvin again with more profound thoughts about cutting off fellowship with baptists.

The “quintessential postmodern union” is about to take place. On May 28, a Dutch woman will marry herself.

The number of unmarried couples living together grew 72% between 1990 and 2000.

Liberal Democrats now realize that they can be elected president without winning a single Southern state.

Another myth of victimization, this time concerning the Irish.

Let us carry the gospel to foreign lands, not M-16s.

Only the Southern Baptists, led by Richard Land, who now wears a Viking helmet in the pulpit, officially support this war.

We can’t allow pagans to be offended by hot cross buns. Plus signs have already been stricken from math books because they look so much like you-know-what.

Feeling the good vibes in the omnireligious prayer room aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. ”I make sure the Wiccans have as much time as the most fundamentalist Christians,” says the tolerant head chaplain, whose god is unspecified. “Kill that flesh off! Kill that flesh off!” the congregants chant, as they prepare to take up arms and kill that flesh off.

A man who lives nearby heroically refuses to budge from his land, and it could be the first time Florida will exercise “eminent domain” on homesteaded property.

John C. Calhoun never talked about an (oxymoronic) “international community” the way G.W. does, or even a monolithic American society: “…the human race is not comprehended in a single society or community. The limited reason and faculties of man, the great diversity of language, customs, pursuits, situation and complexion, and the difficulty of intercourse, with various other causes, have, by their operation, formed a great many separate communities, acting independently of each other.” The “diversity” of common parlance is nothing more than bland uniformity. If we were truly interested in celebrating diversity, we would celebrate particularity. But this would mean doing the unthinkable: authorizing freedom of association. Do you know how many laws would have to be changed? What would become of our elaborate quota systems?

Yep, that sure does look like Peter Jackson.