Vox Popoli

This guy does for the infantilisation of Western culture. And he’s basically correct:

Seriously though, there is an increasing dearth of actual intellectual or moral seriousness in much of American Christianity, even in professing Evangelicalism. The churches are following the same trend of infantilisation as is society at large. No longer is this religion God-centred, dedicated to His glory, and seeking to serve Him acceptably. Now it is man-centred, feebly mewling because somebody offended it by disagreeing with it on doctrine. And that right there is another symptom of this childishness in society – this notion that we shouldn’t talk about things that might “offend” or “create a stir”.

A certain man once said this: “Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.”

If you ever hear a pastor babbling on about peace and unity through religion, or worrying about offending the precious sensitivities of others, you can be quite confident that there’s little point in listening to him. Whatever he’s teaching, it isn’t the Bible, which is filled with metaphor after metaphor referring to division, separation, and even winnowing.

While I understand Joseph Farah’s annoyance with Wikipedia, I’m not that concerned about it. Anyone who actually uses the online encyclopedia knows that it’s not reliable when it comes to the discussion of any controversial figure, especially anyone whose views aren’t in accordance with the idiot college lefties who defensively squat on every entry of interest to them.

There’s no shortage of errors in the entry about me, but I think the most egregious may be the recent modification which states I am “supposedly a libertarian“.

Now, consider the facts. I oppose the drug war, support the legalization of all drugs, support legal prostitution, assert the right to absolute self-title, and repeatedly write about the evils of central government and advocate stringent limitations on its power. The only two formal positions of the Libertarian Party with which I take issue are abortion and open immigration, both of which can be very well justified on pure libertarian grounds, (the former), and practical libertarian grounds, (the latter). In my pragmatic preference for universal democracy over limited representative democracy, I’m more genuinely democratic than most despite my skepticism about the societal viability of women’s, children’s and foreigner’s suffrage. I am demonstrably more of a pure libertarian than most of the quasi-Republicans and libertine Democrats who attempt to appropriate the name.

In short, if I’m not actually a libertarian, then who is?

I suppose this bizarre document might explain why he was in such a hurry to move into Blair House:

This is another scandal that just keeps growing. When it first became known that Rezko helped Obama buy his house, Obama himself called the deal “boneheaded”. Now things look much worse, because Rezko‘s lawyer owns the house. His name is William Miceli, and Obama formerly worked for him.

I have no idea if the Assessment Record for Cook County is, in fact, conclusive proof that William Miceli owns the property at 5046 Greenwood. I don’t even know that 5046 Greenwood is Obama’s current address. And I don’t understand how the Obamas could – or would – claim a mortgage deduction on a house they didn’t own.

So, perhaps there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this. But there certainly appears to be no shortage of corruption and scandal surrounding the president-elect. Between the birth certificate, the Blago scandal, Rahm “21 calls” Emmanuel, the Rezko ties and now this house thing, one begins to wonder if the guy will even make it to Inaugural Day without getting arrested.

More evidence that Obama may be legally barred from the presidency:

Jorge Baro was hired by WND to investigate issues related to Obama’s birth amid allegations the Democrat does not meet the Constitution’s requirement that a president be a “natural born citizen.” Baro’s affidavit documents an interview his staff conducted with Beatrice Arakaki, who has lived at 6075 Kalanianaole Highway in Honolulu since before Obama was born….

Arakaki told Baro’s investigators she had no recollection of Obama being born or of the family living next door having a black child born to a white mother.

I tend to doubt this will ever come to anything, since both the White House and the Congress have made it quite clear that they consider both the Constitution and federal law to be entirely optional. What I’ve found most interesting about this situation is that since the federal court system and the Supreme Court have resolutely refused to consider the facts concerning Obama’s ability to be sworn in as a lawful president, there’s nothing to prevent Arnold Schwarzenegger or any other foreigner from running for the office in the future. No amount of public knowledge will matter if there isn’t a single party with court-approved standing to question any candidate’s legitimacy.

If this isn’t a harbinger of apocalypse, it’s hard to know what would be:

Tarvaris Jackson’s strong performance in relief of injured starter Gus Frerotte on Sunday earned the Vikings quarterback NFC offensive player of the week honors on Tuesday.

Only Brad Childress would be more pleased than me to see the Tarvaris Jackson Experiment turn out to be a surprise success. And he has had a pair of really nice games, but then, Detroit and Arizona aren’t quite Baltimore and Tennessee.

And speaking of Tennessee, even though Brian Westbrook and the Tennessee DEF failed to rack up their usual points, Green Bay gave me just one more reason to hate them by failing to show up against one of the league’s worst passing defenses. Two first-place finishes in three years, but not a single playoff win. My only consolation is that the turning down the big Manning/Portis trade wouldn’t have made any difference.

So, the VPFL championship game will feature second-place Alamo City against the fourth-place Redbeards. Dammit.

In order to “save” it:

“I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” Bush told CNN television, saying he had made the decision “to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse.”

That’s almost as logically coherent as the insistence that temperatures dropping on a global scope is evidence of global warming. I find myself beginning to be astonished, when suddenly I recall that most people truly are idiots. Not one in a hundred individuals, be they godless or religious, collectivist or free market capitalist, ever stops to think about the obvious contradictions they demonstrate every day in their assumptions, beliefs, actions, and statements.

Is there anyone who is seriously surprised by this?

Barack Obama’s newly selected education secretary may need to visit a grammarian before he takes on the American education system. During his introductory remarks in Chicago today, Arne Duncan, the outgoing Chicago public schools chief, mixed up his personal pronouns.

One quite looks forward to Mr. Duncan doing for the rest of America’s public schools what he has done for the excellent public schools of Chicago. It’s been 53 years since Rudolf Fleisch explained Why Johnny Can’t Read. At this rate, in another fifty years, Christian parents are going to be defending their decision to send their children to the local intellectual meat grinder by bragging that their tenth-grader knows his alphabet.

Well, most of it, anyhow.

I was delighted by this review of Summa Elvetica at Amazon. It’s not often that an author is provided with proof that his book has found a reader who truly groks it to an extent very nearly approaching fullness:

Comtemporary fantasy is so indebted to Lewis and Tolkien that its explicitly Christian origins should be openly, albeit perhaps grudgingly, accepted by all–the acolytes of Eddison and Peake are obviously on the wane. Looking over the comments I am pleased for they seem sincere and I concur with the essence of most all of them. Honestly, this Casuistry is hardly a pot-boiler. But with such a title did you really expect it to be?

I would like to humbly bring just one point to light: Expressed in the author’s note is the following: “This novel did not proceed according to plan.” We are told that the philosophical stances of the various and sundry medieval scholastics would be embodied within the tropes of conventional high fantasy “races” and that this dream-ship floundered for lack of a viable narrative structure! Can an author win kudos for mere ambition? How many of you out there can honestly claim: “Aw man, he stole MY idea!” The fact that the creative team at Marcher Lord felt confident they could in turn sell it, failed concept or not, to the masses shows an equal amount of chutzpah…

Complaints about a boring story-line, though true to a point, after all a tale made up of different character’s stories are the essence of medieval literature, are ultimately I think irrelevant as strange as that sounds for what this novel presents is a novel ambient feel: A hot and sour soup for your mind. And just like the eventual Borderlands series, the real point is the continual feeling–this is so cool–that you get from mixing the Catholic church with High Fantasy and all that each entails…. I would argue that this Casuistry is a mandatory read. For cracking minds wide open if nothing else.

The reviewer quite clearly understands that SE is a failure, but is generous enough to view it as a noble failure and doesn’t think less of the book for that. He recognizes how the book has no intention of abiding by the conventional fantasy tropes, or even the conventional genre structure. Most importantly, he grasps that SE is fundamentally a book of ideas and impressions, not action.

Summa Elvetica could have been a better book. It really should have been a better book and I wish it had been a brilliant book. That it isn’t is testimony to my deficiencies, more of focus and execution than capability and conception. And yet, I’m happier with it than I am with any of my other books. From a creative perspective, I find it more personally satisfying to aim high and fail than to aim low and succeed.

I was talking to a friend who is a member of one of the Minnesota country clubs to which many Jews belong, and he told me that the losses in the massive Ponzi scheme are somewhere around $1 billion in Minnesota alone. Apparently the word is that Madoff has been worse for the Jews than Osama bin Laden. Compounding the problem is that Madoff’s “investors” are not only out their capital, they’re also on the hook for the 3x leveraging loan on that capital that many of them took out. And since many won’t be able to repay it, the lending banks are liable for yet another red ink bath.

The thing is, I very much doubt this will be the last fraud to be uncovered as the inflationary tide recedes. Or the largest.

In my WND column today, I addressed the observation that religious belief is to some extent inversely correlated with societal wealth. The correlation isn’t perfect; the evangelical churches in very wealthy Naples, Florida were surprisingly large and well-attended and it is, after all, a religion-defined group that is the most wealthy in the world. But across broad populations, it’s clear that people turn to religion in times of strife and contraction and away from it in times of peace and wealth.

The intellectually unsophisticated and logically incompetent, will naturally assume that this proves some sort of causal relationship between religion and these unpleasantries. But this is backwards. In much the same way that credit expansion in the boom causes the bust, religious revival in the bust helps bring about renewed growth. And as the receding tide exposes financial frauds like Fannie Mae and Ponzi Madoff, it also exposes intellectual frauds like the secular progressive narrative and the neoconnery of global democracy. Spengler, as usual, does an excellent job of showing how the global depression gives the lie to the democratic myth:

The diplomatic strategy of the industrial nations now resembles a James Clavell potboiler, in which an earthquake interrupts a hopelessly immured plot. Moderate Islam was the El Dorado of the diplomatic consensus. It might have been the case that Pakistan could be tethered to Western interests, or that Iran could be engaged peacefully, or that Turkey would incubate a moderate form of Islam. I considered all of this delusional, but the truth is that we shall never know. The financial crisis will sort them out first.

One key principle to keep in mind when considering these matters is that it is as foolish to apply the generic concept of religion to specific societal applications as it is to substitute the generic concept of science for specific applications of physics, economics, or biology.