An Arnold Truism

I'm not entirely sure it's a secret but I agree: the mind always fails first. At least for me. Damned dirty mind. Em, well, get your mind out of the gutter!

On Being Uncomfortable

Benjamin Franklin, on being asked to publish something with which he didn't agree:

I have perused your piece, and find it to be scurrilous and defamatory. To determine whether I should publish it or not, I went home in the evening, purchased a two penny loaf at the baker’s, and with water from the pump made my supper; I then wrapped myself up in my great coat, and laid down on the floor and slept till morning, when, on another loaf and a mug of water, I made my breakfast. From this regimen I feel no inconvenience whatever. Finding I can live in this manner, I have formed a determination never to prostitute my press to the purposes of corruption, and abuse of this kind, for the sake of gaining a more comfortable subsistence.

Would that I had even half the determination and wisdom. Alas …

Sallow Lincoln Was Shallow

Abraham Lincoln liked pretty women—for which he deserves to burn in hell, I'm certain of it. I learned today that one of our greatest Presidents may have been, in addition to the Great Emancipator, the Great Objectifier.
Mary Owens, a lady mayhap lacking a level of pulchritude befitting what the Great Man expected was objectified thusly:

“… when I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid thinking of my mother; and this, not from withered features, for her skin was too full of fat to permit of its contracting into wrinkles, but from her want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general, and from a kind of notion that ran in my head that nothing could have commenced at the size of infancy and reached her present bulk in less than thirty-five or forty years ; and, in short, I was not at all pleased with her.”

When the Klieg lights of such a man's opinions are trained on such a slow target, it burns! It burns!
As if in punishment, Lincoln moved on to Mary Todd, reputed to be a beauty and learned the eternal lesson: hot chicks are crazy.
Read the rest and gaze upon the visage of the weather-beaten she here.

Baccalaureate

A quote, from LP:

Imagine a large corporate machine mobilized to get you to buy something you don't need at a tremendously inflated cost, complete with advertising, marketing, and branding that says you're not hip if you don't have one, but when you get one you discover it's of poor quality and obsolete in ten months. That's a BA.

Nod.

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius, from Meditations Book II

5.  Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and feeling of affection, and freedom, and justice; and to give thyself relief from all other thoughts. And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last, laying aside all carelessness and passionate aversion from the commands of reason, and all hypocrisy, and self-love, and discontent with the portion which has been given to thee. Thou seest how few the things are, the which if a man lays hold of, he is able to live a life which flows in quiet, and is like the existence of the gods; for the gods on their part will require nothing more from him who observes these things.

Elections

Mencken:

“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

 Harumph.

Seeing as I obviously have no idea what I'm doing re politics, I'm going to stop writing about it.

A Little Something

‘For, when Rome was freed of the fear of Carthage, and her rival in empire was out of her way, the path of virtue was abandoned for that of corruption, not gradually, but in headlong course. The older discipline was discarded to give place to the new. The state passed from vigilance to slumber, from the pursuit of arms to the pursuit of pleasure, from activity to idleness.’

– Velleius Paterculus, early first century AD.

Evolutionary Truth

An interesting book recently published, contains:

Notice something else. The atheist naturally thinks that our belief in God is false. That’s just what atheists do. Nevertheless, most human beings have believed in a god of some sort, or at least in a supernatural realm. But suppose, for argument’s sake, that this widespread belief really is false, and that it merely provides survival benefits for humans, a coping mechanism of sorts. If so, then we would have additional evidence—on the atheist’s own terms—that evolution is more interested in useful beliefs than in true ones. Or, alternatively, if evolution really is concerned with true beliefs, then maybe the widespread belief in God would be a kind of “evolutionary” evidence for his existence.

You’ve got to wonder.

Indeed.

Commerce Clause Ascendancy

Excellent riposte:

If birth means entering the market, Congress is omnipotent, authorized by the commerce clause to regulate “every human activity from cradle to grave.” —Michael Carvin

From an excellent—as usual—Krauthammer article.

The Simple Explanation

My back hurts. twitter.com/fwoodbridge/st…
— Fred Woodbridge (@fwoodbridge) February 18, 2012

2012 — Fight

A thought for the year?

After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to
know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly
understood, is the business, the real highest, honestest business of every son of man. —Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown’s Schooldays

Scrappy New Year.

Quote Of The Day

“… for never can a fair or just policy be expected of the citizen who does not, like his fellows, bring to the decision the interests and apprehensions of a father.” —Pericles

Patriarchy for the win?

Law, Regulation, and Morality. Oh my!

From a razor sharp essay, Mark Steyn:

When people get used to complying with micro-regulation, it’s but a small step to confusing regulatory compliance with the right thing to do — and then arguing that, in the absence of regulatory guidelines, there is no “right thing to do.”

Another:

“When we say ‘we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstances,’ we make cowardice the default position.”

Chesterton On Political Speeches

“Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.” G.K. Chesterton, ‘On the Cryptic and the Elliptic’

Point, Counterpoint

Richard Dawkins: "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." [1]

C.S. Lewis: "If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning." [2]

Resources:

1. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden, p. 55.
2. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.

[Thanks, Truthbomb!]

Plato’s Leaders

“Therefore we must elect as ruler and guardian of the city him who as boy and youth and man has been tested and has come out without strain, and render him honours in life and after death, giving him the highest rewards of public burial and other memorials. The others we must reject.” —Plato

What I find interesting is that in Plato’s opinion, we must actively reject the ‘others,’ and not, say, simply ignore them. I wonder if that’s got any deeper meaning?

H. G. Wells On Humanity

Sink me, I’ve taken to Twitter and abandoned ye olde blog. Sorry about that, but I know no one reads this darn thing anyway.

Tough Questions Answered’s Bill Pratt wrote about H. G. Wells’ conversion from naïve humanist to shell-shocked realist. In his book, A Short History of the World from 1937, Wells wrote:

Can we doubt that presently our race will more than realize our boldest imaginations, that it will achieve unity and peace, and that our children will live in a world made more splendid and lovely than any palace or garden that we know, going on from strength to strength in an ever-widening circle of achievement? What man has done, the little triumphs of his present state…form but the prelude to the things that man has yet to do.

To be followed by this after World War II, from A World at the End of Its Tether:

The cold-blooded massacres of the defenseless, the return of deliberate and organized torture, mental torment, and fear to a world from which such things had seemed well nigh banished—has come near to breaking my spirit altogether…“Homo Sapiens,” as he has been pleased to call himself, is played out.

Pratt’s point is one that should—but doesn’t and never will—resonate with too many: Mankind cannot pull itself out of the quicksand, we need a supernatural hand up. Our very natures are immensely flawed and as such, you cannot save yourself.

Live with it or die with it.

Fight

Quote for the week:

“When no one else wants to fight, I fight myself.”

This is a deep thought. Tell me what you think it means.

My Country ‘Tis Of Thee

If you don’t know this by reading my rants, I am an unabashed patriot. I love the United States because I know what it is to live elsewhere. Not just any elsewhere, but Africa ferchrissakes!

In other words, I subscribe to the catch-phrase “My country, right or wrong,” but as one of my few favorite Englishmen John Derbyshire (“Daarbysher”) writes,

most people forget the second half, which goes: “If right, to keep her right; if wrong, to put her right.”

I didn’t know this, but now that I do, I’m re-upping my subscription!

Something I Read Today

In Classical Education and the Home School by Douglas Wilson et al:

“The education of children for God is the most important business done on earth. It is the one business for which the earth exists. To it all politics, all war, all literature, all money-making, ought to be subordinated; and ever parent ought to feel, every hour of the day, that, next to making his own calling and election sure, this is the end for which he is kept alive by God—this is his task on earth.” — R.L. Dabney, On Secular Education

Well. It seems I’ve got work to do.