Caturday Night Special, Episode 0x2D

I think that one dispenses Korean barbecue...

An infinitely-quotable man

A general of distinction, for whom I once had the honor of working, maintained that there were two transcendent experiences a man might have in a lifetime -- the two great ones known only to the fortunate. First was hearing the idolized girl say "yes"; and the other was watching brave, strong, well-armed men flee in terror from one's presence.

- Jeff Cooper, Africa Ciao!

Caturday Night Special, Episode 0x2C

The possibilities are endless

Putting the child back in "Schild und Schwert"

Little Brother and Little Sister are watching you:

Luton Borough Council's Street Seen scheme encourages its 650 volunteers to report 'environmental concerns'. It is also recruiting 'Junior Street Champions', aged between seven and 11.

Primary schools could also be involved within two years.

Similarly, Islington Council in north London has recruited 1,200 'Islington Eyes' to report crime hotspots, fly-tipping and excess noise from DIY.

Volunteers are given a list of things to do when confronted with fly-tippers, including taking photos 'without being seen'.

Considering that even a modest council-budget could outfit a legion of these snot-nosed lice with equipment that would have made the actual STASI wet their pants in excitement, this should prove to be a profitable venture for the micro-tyrants of the United Kingdom's various townships.

A spokesman for the Local Government Association said: 'Environment volunteers are people who care passionately about their local area and want to protect it from vandals, graffitists and fly-tippers.

'These community-spirited residents are not snoopers.

'They help councils cut crime and make places cleaner, greener and safer.'

Wasn't this the plot-line for Hot Fuzz?

What a sad spectacle this nation has become.

Marriage, the Church, and the State

After further hashing-out some thoughts trapped in my head following a post at Vox Popoli, the subsequent fast-and-furious commentary by the Dread Ilk, and a related story regarding the ongoing failure of marriage in the United Kingdom at Elusive Wapiti (with additional examination at Code-Monkey Ramblings), I stumbled into an insightful op-ed piece at the New York Times, of all places, that had a surprisingly libertarian bent to it. (Broken clocks, nes pa?)

In particular, the op-ed confirms a previously-held opinion of mine: marriage determines the pecking-order of "rights" in the eyes of the State, and if one (or two, or many) want a reservation at the teat of the taxpayer, then one must adhere to the State's prevailing opinion of marriage. And so, fundamentally, marriage becomes a vehicle for convenience and comfortable living in this post-modern dystopia, and thus a mechanism for control.

What brought my attention to the op-ed, however, was a salient point revealed in ensuing discussion regarding the fuster-cluck of modern marriage: the Church refuses to stand up for the rights of its male congregation in the arena of family-law. I'm not suggesting the establishment of an organization of Legal Templars (however interesting the idea sounds), but the movement to reclaim marriage as the sole jurisdiction of the Church must be made in order to strengthen itself at the expense of the State, which has steadily usurped power to dictate restrictions according to its own satisfaction and aims. This alone should underline the danger in attempting to follow in the footsteps of the Social Gospelers in their attempts to unravel our civil-liberties, but if we have learned anything in our history, it is that we constantly demonstrate an ability to promptly forget (or determinedly ignore) our mistakes.

Incidentally, this is the primary reason I've not been to a brick-and-mortar church in years: my last visit to a "Christian" service with my then-girlfriend was so inclusive in scope that it was outright apostasy, and in hindsight, I should have ended the relationship then and there (she was employed by the clergy). Fortunately, it ended for other reasons some time later, and I thank the Almighty that it did.

To believe is one thing, and to not believe is another, but don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining when it comes to my responsibility to enslave myself to the State via a secularly-focused wife under the color of Scripture, because I won't have it.

A half-truth is a whole lie

For the many times I have seen this story posted, not once have I seen a clear distinction made between the Exploring and Boy Scouts, as many that have posted about it have failed to bother themselves with independent research or digging in the New York Times' rubbish-bins. To wit, Learning for Life (the parent organization for Exploring) recently posted a response to the article that addressed the deliberate obfuscation of that distinction:

Last, the article inaccurately describes Explorers as Boy Scouts. Exploring is a program of Learning for Life, a nonprofit organization that provides character and career education programs to participating agencies or groups. Learning for Life is affiliated with the Boy Scouts of America.

Overall, the complete piece was a weak, ineffectual reply to the article, but this is more of a reflection on its leadership, which cannot afford to be principled by nature of its relationship with a broad variety of national education-focused programs. This is not to say that I approve of the aims of the Learning for Life program; to the contrary, I neither approve nor condone the existence of a program so intimately involved with the State, and it is my sincere belief that the Boy Scouts of America would do well to totally disassociate itself from the program and focus its attention on Scouting.

This, of course, is the the point: lingering association with Learning for Life has damaged the reputation of the Boy Scouts of America, and it will continue to do so as long as the BSA continues to espouse its rights as a private organization. This has been the avenue of drift since I was in the Boy Scouts some years ago as a youth, during which traditionally-used buildings on military property at the Defense Language Institute (rest in peace, Uncle Paul) became increasingly unavailable due to the refusal of the BSA to adopt a "more inclusive attitude".

On a more personal note, and speaking for more than a few Eagle Scouts other than myself, involvement in the program has done infinitely more good by us than any of the public-schooling, forced volunteerism or feel-good "Rock The Vote" schema implemented by public do-gooders, even in their most fevered delusions. Indeed, much of this obligatory social-engineering has back-fired due to our Scouting experience, and many of us have become self-professed (and actively agitating) libertarians with a penchant for good-natured mayhem because of it.

It's not a perfect program, but I've yet to see better.

Caturday Night Special, Episode 0x2B

Iä! Iä! Hyperbolic Wharrgarbl!

All elder-being knock-knock jokes aside, I think this modern-geometry class caused more weird dreams than anything else I've had the dubious pleasure of bending my mind around; post-Apocalyptic non-Euclidean dreamscapes are just a tad over (but not incident with) the line.

Regular posting (and sleep-schedules) will resume starting today.

Better ladder than never

Honestly, I can't make this stuff up:

ACADEMICS at Oxford University have banned step-ladders from its world famous Bodleian library – because of health and safety fears.

The ban means students are unable to reach books on the top shelves but dons refuse to bring them lower because it would remove them from their “original historic location”.

"Besides," the health and safety officer said, "it's common knowledge that those books contain ideas not listed in the Party-approved literature lists, and we certainly wouldn't want that sort of rubbish floating about within easy reach... It causes sluggishly-progressing schizophrenia, and if that's not a health and safety issue, then I'm the Queen-Mum."

Apropos: England Prevails

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? ... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If... if... We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

— Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

England Prevails

It's true, from the Magna Carta to the Home Office, from John of Salisbury to Jacqui Smith, and despite numerous warnings to the contrary, you've come a long way, baby:

Nikolai Bukharin claimed one of the Bolshevik Revolution's principal tasks was "to alter people's actual psychology". Britain is not Bolshevik, but a campaign to alter people's psychology and create a new Homo britannicus is under way without even a fig leaf of disguise.

The Government is pushing ahead with legislation that will criminalise politically incorrect jokes, with a maximum punishment of up to seven years' prison. The House of Lords tried to insert a free-speech amendment, but Justice Secretary Jack Straw knocked it out. It was Straw who previously called for a redefinition of Englishness and suggested the "global baggage of empire" was linked to soccer violence by "racist and xenophobic white males". He claimed the English "propensity for violence" was used to subjugate Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and that the English as a race were "potentially very aggressive".

Only aggressively stupid, Frau Straw, as they have allowed the totalitarian state to advance this far into their lives. Short of total collapse, it's here to stay, unless (however unlikely) the natives undergo a cultural revival laced with some of that dreaded latent "aggressiveness".

Perhaps, as is the case with many sub-sentient animals, if England threatens the young:

In September 2006, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Codie Stott, asked a teacher if she could sit with another group to do a science project as all the girls with her spoke only Urdu. The teacher's first response, according to Stott, was to scream at her: "It's racist, you're going to get done by the police!" Upset and terrified, the schoolgirl went outside to calm down. The teacher called the police and a few days later, presumably after officialdom had thought the matter over, she was arrested and taken to a police station, where she was fingerprinted and photographed.

Hmm. I suppose this was not a sufficient affront to one's sanity to garner such a response. Never fear, England will do better next time, so long as the people willingly and knowingly entrust their children to its indoctrination-camps.

What if the people, particularly those clinging to the mysticism of the Days of Ignorance, are made to bow to the idol and kiss the ring of the State?

A bishop was warned by the police for not having done enough to "celebrate diversity", the enforcing of which is now apparently a police function. A Christian home for retired clergy and religious workers lost a grant because it would not reveal to official snoopers how many of the residents were homosexual. That they had never been asked was taken as evidence of homophobia.

Unless rolling over and urinating on oneself is a mysterious new strategy in combating the rampant and arbitrary abuse of power, this lands soundly in the camp of "failure". Of course, to have accepted the shekels of the State to begin with was to doom themselves from the start.

I am not yet so callous that I did not feel a small pang of pity for England-That-Was, or the erstwhile-unwilling Scotland and ever-rebellious Ireland, but there is no one to blame for this except themselves, and they deserve everything that is coming to them as a result of their folly, however horrific it may be. What they say is true: none of us is as stupid as all of us.

Perhaps, if the fires burn brightly enough at night from across the Atlantic, some will remember the last days of the United Kingdom and guard against those same mistakes, if just for a little while.

Caturday Night Special, Episode 0x2A

Naiveté, intractability, and the aftermath

One must spend money to make money, nes pa?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama proposed on Thursday nearly doubling funds to enforce U.S. tax laws next year, with an aim of more than quadrupling funding for tax compliance to $2.1 billion within five years.

The budget plan seeks $12.1 billion for the Internal Revenue Service, responsible for collecting and enforcing individual and corporate tax laws, for fiscal 2010, which begins October 1. That amounts to a roughly 5.2 percent increase over the IRS budget for 2009, which was $11.5 billion.

The budget proposal, which must be approved by Congress, includes a $890 million request to boost tax enforcement, including in the international arena, an increase of $400 million from 2009.

Brilliant; I suppose that we should start referring to the agents as "revenuers" for time-period parity.

However, according to the President of the Dallas Federal Reserve, this is all irritatingly pointless:

No combination of tax hikes and spending cuts, though, will change the total burden borne by current and future generations. For the existing unfunded liabilities to be covered in the end, someone must pay $99.2 trillion more or receive $99.2 trillion less than they have been currently promised. This is a cold, hard fact. The decision we must make is whether to shoulder a substantial portion of that burden today or compel future generations to bear its full weight.

Now that you are all thoroughly depressed, let me come back to monetary policy and the Fed.

It is only natural to cast about for a solution—any solution—to avoid the fiscal pain we know is necessary because we succumbed to complacency and put off dealing with this looming fiscal disaster. Throughout history, many nations, when confronted by sizable debts they were unable or unwilling to repay, have seized upon an apparently painless solution to this dilemma: monetization. Just have the monetary authority run cash off the printing presses until the debt is repaid, the story goes, then promise to be responsible from that point on and hope your sins will be forgiven by God and Milton Friedman and everyone else.

And the Obama administration is worried about recouping $21 billion a year from corporate-tax loop-holes?

Mogambo Guru is right: we're freakin' doomed.

Or, why I will never emigrate Down Under

The Aussies are wonderful folk, but there are just too many venomous, foul-tempered creatures native to the area that make it inhospitable for human habitation. Also, they have critters like this:

Scores of eastern tarantulas, which are known as “bird-eating spiders” and can grow larger than the palm of a man’s hand, have begun crawling out from gardens and venturing into public spaces in Bowen, a coastal town about 700 miles northwest of Brisbane...

While not deadly like other Australian spiders, the eastern tarantulas are venomous and can grow up to 6cm (2.4in) long with a leg span of 16cm (6.3in). Despite their common name, they do not eat birds, but can kill a dog with one bite, and make a human very sick.

They are also known as whistling or barking spiders for the hissing noise they emit when they are disturbed or aggravated at close range.

And now they're collecting en masse in the town square, cat-calling, making lewd faces at the ladies and causing the milk to sour?

No, no thank you. I don't like surprises, and spiders et al have a uncanny ability for surprise at the most awkward of times, and it just so happens that my least favorite kind of surprises are "potentially-lethal, maybe-hiding-in-your-shoe, maybe-hiding-in-the-laundry-or-perhaps-under-the-couch surprises". Combine that with a penchant for inexplicably congregating downtown, and that's a deal-breaker.

Caturday Night Special, Episode 0x29

Black and white, red and yellow all over

The Volokh Conspiracy comments on a conspicuous absence of coverage devoted to the Nordyke v. King ruling:

So I thought that the Ninth Circuit's holding that the Second Amendment binds state and local governments (via the Fourteenth Amendment) was a pretty big deal. It was the first federal court of appeals decision to so hold. If followed, it would invalidate the Chicago handgun ban, plus perhaps some other broad state and local gun restrictions, such as New York City's ban on all gun ownership by 18-to-20-year-olds. And it might well trigger Supreme Court consideration of the issue, since there's now a split between the Second and Ninth Circuits on the issue.

But here's the odd thing: I couldn't find any articles about this in the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune, or the Washington Post. (I searched for second amendment or bear arms or nordyke or gun show.) There was early coverage on CNN and in the San Francisco Chronicle, but nothing else in any newspapers in the NEWS;MAJPAP file on LEXIS. Am I missing some stories that just didn't happen to use the keywords I searched for? Or is the court decision just not worth even a brief mention?

And yet, the newspapers remain confounded regarding their failure to attract new readership; truly, there is no saving that which does not wish to save itself.

Endeavoring to persevere

Are you gonna pull those pistol-bans or whistle Dixie?

BELLEVUE, WA and REDWOOD CITY, CA – The Second Amendment Foundation, The Calguns Foundation and four California residents today filed a lawsuit challenging a California state law and regulatory scheme that arbitrarily bans handguns based on a roster of “certified” handguns approved by the State. This case parallels a similar case filed in Washington, DC, Hanson v. District of Columbia.

California uses this list despite a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court last summer that protects handguns that ordinary people traditionally use for self-defense, and a recent ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that the Second Amendment applies to state and local governments. The California scheme will eventually ban the purchase of almost all new handguns.

Attorney Alan Gura, representing the plaintiffs in this case, noted that California “tells Ivan Peña that his rights have an expiration date based on payment of a government fee. Americans are not limited to a government list of approved books, or approved religions,” he said. “A handgun protected by the Second Amendment does not need to appear on any government-approved list and cannot be banned because a manufacturer does not pay a special annual fee.”

Let me be brief in my analysis: the California Department of Justice can die in a fire for their "approved list", and I hope they choke on the ashes of their paperwork, cursing their mouth-breathing socialist overlords.

I am truly weary of this state being the laughing-stock of the nation.

By what power does the federal government operate? By the power of the sovereigns who chartered it. Arbitrary power exists nowhere in a free republic.

- Thomas Jefferson