What am I?

"Aristotle said I am a rational animal. I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer."

Brennan Manning

Terrorism?

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451098/antifa-terrorism-designation-not-accurate

Couldn't agree more with Mr. Goldberg. A snippet that sums up his thesis:

"The groundswell behind the label “terrorist” for Antifa is a call to blur that distinction. Although treating American radicals and vigilantes the way we treat foreign members of the Islamic State or al-Qaeda might play well in certain corners of the populist Right these days, serious conservatives should be very skeptical about granting the federal government new police powers, which could be used to other ends in future administrations.

Elevating Antifa to the category of terrorist organization would fuel the worst trends in our politics. It would entice President Trump to indulge his strongman shtick, and it would give Antifa the stature it clearly craves. It would also likely accelerate vigilante violence among the white nationalists. Launching a federal crusade against domestic enemies would only fuel the fallacy that anyone Antifa attacks is a fascist. We should fight crime, whatever guise it takes, on the local level — as the founders intended."

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue

Sorry Uncle Milty

Another area where Friedman and I diverge.  I think  his major philosophical blind spot was the existence of human nature, which allowed him to be a proponent of things like this.  I'm tempted by it myself (and would cash any check they sent my way, just like I take my interest deduction), but think it would be a disaster.

https://medium.com/basic-income/why-milton-friedman-supported-a-guaranteed-income-5-reasons-da6e628f6070

Violence generally begets violence

Interesting article.  What's most disturbing is the third paragraph in the snippet below.  I would contend, dear author, that promoting arson is definitely on the "intolerance" side of the "advocacy/intolerance" divide.  Perhaps an emotional college sophomore could be forgiven for not knowing the difference, but a writer for the New York times should.

In the end, violence will be met with violence until an orderly stasis is reached, or violence will lead to order without resistance - a state we will recognize to be tyranny. 

I would encourage everyone one fomenting for violence to read their history (not burn it) to find out what those swept into power through violence do to those who swept them in. They are ALWAYS the first to go because a mindless mob, fueled only by discontent and hate, is a weapon that can be wielded by anyone seeking to oust the current regime.

Meet the New Boss. Same as The Old Boss.

From the Times:

"That can play out in every aspect of student life, as William Gu, an Asian-American who writes for The Claremont Independent, found out after some of his articles showed up on conservative news sites. He received Facebook messages accusing him of “threatening marginalized communities” and was told at a party that “people are uncomfortable with you being here, please leave.”

Mr. Gu, a sophomore, said each incoming class “is getting progressively more radical.” He recalled a panel discussion during orientation at which a student said, “We should burn down Pomona” because “elite colleges represented white supremacist patriarchy.” Mr. Gu found the idea absurd. “You are going to a $60,000-a-year school and you’re either there because your parents are wealthy or the school has given you a full ride and you are saying it’s a dangerous environment for you,” he said. “There is a strange sense of entitlement.”

It can be hard to separate intense advocacy from intolerance, particularly for students who, Dr. Plaza said, arrive “empowered to feel they should have their say.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/education/edlife/protests-claremont-college-student-demands.html?mc=aud_dev&mcid=fb-nytimes&mccr=AugustMC810mcdt%3D2017-08&subid=AugustMC810&ad-keywords=AudDevGate

North Korea

North Korea may gamble incorrectly and provoke a war. Let's hope not. 

That said, the jumbled thinking (ignorance?) of the author is staggering.  Yes - let's apply the template Reagan used to defeat The Soviet Union in the 80's to fight NK/China in the teens. 

Because just like China, the Soviet Union was a major trading partner of America's. And just as with China, we had tremendous cross-national investment in each other's economies. And just like the Soviet Union, China has set up dozens of satellite nations with the express purpose of wiping out the West and completely dominating the world through the global expansion of communism.  Not...

The author's reference to Chinese "adventurism" in the body of water they border reveals the hubristic foundation of his thinking.  How would an American read an article from a Chinese author that referred to "American adventurism in the Gulf of Mexico"? How about if it was literally called " The South US Sea"?

China is indeed our #1 external existential threat, but they are - ironically - winning the same way we beat the Soviets: economically. 

Pulling back in Asia, while not relinquishing our naval, air, or space superiority, would force China to deal with the reality of their aspirations: Increased tensions with their neighbors and shouldering  the cost of mitigating those tensions in a multi-lateral fashion. 

This is not to mention saving the billions spent by Americans subsidizing South Korea and Japan's economies by serving as the guarantors of their freedom (freeing those nation's to subsidize their economies in the form of lower taxes). If one doesn't see how that affects the price of electronics from Asia, U.S. employment in the manufacturing sector, and the Federal Debt, well...

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/10/how-ronald-reagan-would-have-handled-north-korea-commentary.html

Please....

I know this article is supposed to make my blood boil with self righteous indignation, but...please.  Some clerk at an Indiana Walmart put a sign up in the wrong place.  It was clearly a mistake or prank, not some attempt to suggest kids initiate a massacre. 

What is concerning is the fact many folks are quick to interpret such innocuous things through a lens of offense and puff up with outrage.  The truly chilling thing is the underlying belief that they "know what was really meant" by each trigger.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/08/10/walmart-apologizes-for-own-school-year-like-hero-gun-display-sign.html

Joy

“The pagan set out, with admirable sense, to enjoy himself. By the end of his civilization he had discovered that a man cannot enjoy himself and continue to enjoy anything else.”

G.K. Chesterton

And Yet Someone Saw the Whole

“In the famous story of the blind men and the elephant, so often quoted in the interests of religious agnosticism, the real point of the story is constantly overlooked. The story is told from the point of view of the king and his courtiers, who are not blind but can see that the blind men are unable to grasp the full reality of the elephant and are only able to get hold of part of the truth. The story is constantly told in order to neutralize the affirmation of the great religions, to suggest that they learn humility and recognize that none of them can have more than one aspect of the truth. But, of course, the real point of the story is exactly the opposite. If the king were also blind there would be no story. The story is told by the king, and it is the immensely arrogant claim of one who sees the full truth which all the world’s religions are only groping after. It embodies the claim to know the full reality which relativizes all the claims of the religions and philosophies.”

-Lesslie Newbigin

You Know

You know my heart
Have mercy on me

You know my heart
Its need to be free

You know my heart
For You truly see

You know my heart
Its desire to be

You know my heart
Have mercy on me

Redemption

From the hands it came down 
From the side it came down 
From the feet it came down 
And ran to the ground 
Between heaven and hell 
A teardrop fell In the deep crimson dew 
The tree of life grew

And the blood gave life 
To the branches of the tree 
And the blood was the price 
That set the captives free 
And the numbers that came 
Through the fire and the flood Clung to the tree 
And were redeemed by the blood

From the tree streamed a light 
That started the fight 'Round the tree grew a vine 
On whose fruit I could dine 
My old friend Lucifer came 
Fought to keep me in chains 
But I saw through the tricks 
Of six-sixty-six

And the blood gave life 
To the branches of the tree 
And the blood was the price 
That set the captives free 
And the numbers that came 
Through the fire and the flood Clung to the tree 
And were redeemed by the blood

From his hands it came down 
From his side it came down 
From his feet it came down 
And ran to the ground 
And a small inner voice Said "You do have a choice." 
The vine engrafted me 
And I clung to the tree

-Johnny Cash

Rome and America

A loooong article, but informative wrt Rome's decline.  The author misses a clear opportunity to draw parallels between Roman "mos maiorum" and American Judeo-Christian values, but the tie seems obvious to me.

America's current crisis isn't one of politics or economics, but culture.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/like-rome-america-could-be-ripe-for-tyranny/

Poem by David Solway

A lot happens in that dark place,
the annex to the glittering edifice
where the clients sit
passing the time of day
ordering drinks and trying their luck.
The important work gets done
in that pokey, smoke-filled vault
at the back of the casino
where the real players
chomp on cigars, trade off-color jokes,
shuffle cards, raise the ante,
recount their manifold exploits
in the politics of the underworld,
listening to a blaring radio
while casting an attentive eye on the rigged slots
rolling their fruit on the TV monitors.
Of course, fortunate dupes of the turbulent underlords,
we’re not aware of what goes on
in the room at the back of our innocence,
dingy and apsidal,
home to the clergy of unshaven misfits
where the progress of the game is determined,
where the deck we’re issued is already marked
and where the music and the poetry come from.
There is no reason to complain,
no reason to cleanse the chamber
and expose the racket.
If we only continue playing,
no way we can lose.

- David Solway

Pride

Pride has good and bad connotations, but this is the best positive definition I've heard of it:

“Pride is faith in the idea that God had when God made us.”

- Karen Blixen

Reagan on Healthcare

Good article which challenges some of the mythology of both the Right and Left wrt to Reagan, and sketches out aspects of an approach to health care reform that doesn't fit neatly within the talking points of either party.

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/07/learning-from-reagan-on-healthcare

Life

The point is not that all such situations end this positively, but that we should always err on the side of life and hope.

https://aleteia.org/2017/02/19/little-boy-born-without-a-brain-can-now-speak-count-and-attend-school/

Legalization

I'm ambivalent about legalization: parents need to raise their kids to not choose drugs. But the demographic analysis of policing in the accompanying bill will lead to more crime.  It's been demonstrated that pouncing on smaller crimes like vandalism and littering discourages bigger crimes - it's called community policing.  But if you have an ethnic gang dominating a neighborhood, well...tough luck for that community. If the police are going to be hit with claims of profiling, they will just make fewer arrests of the 'wrong kind', or possibly begin arbitrarily stopping the 'right' colored people to make sure their numbers balance out. These perverse incentives will lead to upwardly mobile flight from the city center and turn Portland 2020 into NYC 1970.

http://herb.co/2017/07/11/oregon-decriminalize-drugs/

X-Rays are there even if I cant see them

The True, the Good, and the Beautiful are objective realities but my comprehension of them are subject to the limits of my senses, perception, and intellect.

Crunchy Conservatism

Reposting something from Rod Dreher that helped crystallize several strains of thought for me about 10 years ago.

A Crunchy Con Manifesto
By Rod Dreher

We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.

Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.

Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

Culture is more important than politics and economics.

A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.

Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.Beauty is more important than efficiency.

The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.“

Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives.

(Super)naturally

"... only Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little way away from her, and then turn round, and look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible. You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current. To treat her as God, or as Everything, is to lose the whole pith and pleasure of her. Come out, look back, and then you will see ... this astonishing cataract of bears, babies, and bananas: this immoderate deluge of atoms, orchids, oranges, cancers, canaries, fleas, gases, tornadoes and toads. How could you ever have thought that this was the ultimate reality? How could you ever have thought that it was merely a stage-set for the moral drama of men and women? She is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt. Meet her and know her. If we are immortal, and if she is doomed (as the scientists tell us) to run down and die, we shall miss this half-shy and half-flamboyant creature, this ogress, this hoyden, this incorrigible fairy, this dumb witch. But the theologians tell us that she, like ourselves, is to be redeemed. The ‘vanity’ to which she was subjected was her disease, not her essence. She will be cured in character: not tamed (Heaven forbid) nor sterilised. We shall still be able to recognise our old enemy, friend, playfellow and foster-mother, so perfected as to be not less, but more, herself. And that will be a merry meeting."

-CS Lewis