Why, shore, I aint worried none bout claim jumpers.  Taint nuthin’ I cain’t resolve on account o my six shooter.    But why in everlovin’ tarnation would SpaceX proclamate where they figger on homesteadin‘ just so a passel of lowdown skunk varmints can sashay in o’ front of them?

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.

***

No evidence of alien species because most advanced species correctly intuit that information is pollution, and cease communicating in patterns.  Their language approaches static, their architecture approaches nature.

-twitter user @ctrlcreep

***

Any sufficiently advanced activity is indistinguishable from ritual. (more…)

Today is Betsey’s dying day.

Atlas started small.  He grew.

His first burdens seemed heavy enough.   He bore the burden of working out his own salvation in fear and trembling before God.  He bore the burden of growing up.  He discovered the grace of Christ.  He bore up.

He took on more burdens before he was ready.  Mission, job, marriage.  He staggered a bit.  Infused with grace, he bore up.  He took on more.  His shoulders got broader and broader.  Family children hometeaching community neighbors friends truth beauty land heritage generations.  His shoulders are broader and broader.  His back is bigger and bigger.

Now it is only the weight of the whole world on his shoulders that keeps him down.

(more…)

I was thinking of John Mansfield, and Brandon Flowers, and JM’s wife this morning.

There are two beauties, one being more beautiful than the other; there shall be another more beautiful than they; I am the Lord thy God, I am more beautiful than they all.

For some reason, the Orthodox converts in America I run across make me think that orthodoxy is Jehovah’s Witnesses for smart people.

Same mental traits.

If you pursued perfect glory when you found it you would be exalted.
If you pursued perfect integrity when you found it you would be exalted.

And so on with the perfection of peace or love or wisdom or every other good.

True fulness cannot be contained.

I’m no fan of Romney. Among his other failings, he hasn’t been very astute politically.

But credit where credit is due, this Romney-Cotton proposal to raise the minimum wage while verifying legal employment is smart politics, to the extent that there can be smart politics among the ruins.

I read a Nevil Shute book awhile back, the one where everyone dies from radiation, On the Beach.  I thought it was cheap and fearmongering.

Recently someone prompted me to take a second look at his stuff.  He writes extremely competently.  This is middle-brow done right.

There are great books and there are books that are great–for you.  No one would say that a factory-made garment has the quality of a tailored one, but sometimes you find something off the rack that still fits you like it had been adjusted down to the sixteenth of an inch.    Pastoral is the latter  kind of book.  It fit me just right.

I have one of those stormy marriages. We have patches of rough weather and patches of placid seas. But just now for no good reason we have been having one of those intensely romantic interludes, as if beyond the calmer waters were the Western Isles of the Blessed. And then I read Pastoral. It is a romance, basically. And the man and the woman are me and my wife. They have the same spirits that we do. I felt like I was reading about us in another time.

That’s it, that’s the point I wanted to make. Oh, uh, its a book about a RAF WWII bomber pilot flying out of a rural air base. I can add some actual insight, but that is secondary to what really moved me deeply about the book. Here it is: for the thoughtful reader, the book has some very interesting reflections about the collapse of social courtship customs. Not consciously. But its there. You see how much benefited everyone is by a goverment policy that has the side effect of bringing young men and young women together, and the benefit they get from having older people taking a hand in the younger folks’ proceedings.

I don’t always link to Scott Alexander, but when I do its because he’s built up a head of steam rant about education in this country, so called.  (Scroll way the heck down to “III” or else where you see the ALL CAPS).

He’s especially right about all the idiotic homework, and the vast waste of time, and how we start kids on it way earlier than need be.

At the palatial G estate, we don’t let our children learn to read until they are at least 5 which is nothing special, but makes us like freaks among our peers.  Yet our children read more than their children because our children like it.

My trash reading lately has been older scifi.  You can get a LOT of it real cheap.

Sometime in the 50s or 60s the stories all started being about psi powers.

I just noticed that the psi powers are mostly a way to  justify a group feeling the saintliness of being a victim while also being superior to everyone else.  It’s deeply offputting once you realize it.

I was daydreaming about better laws.  Laws that treated families like real organizations and that tried to encourage family independence and identity.

All adults pay 10% of their income to their married parents (and something also to the place where they grew up?).  Along with a bare minimum means-tested subsistence scheme for the truly destitute elderly, this is what Social Security should have been.

Home purchase a tax deduction up to $100k.

Productive assets deductible and/or amortizable for families.

Parental aid to children in paying for maternity expenses or new home purchase also deductible.

Deductions or subsidies for energy independence and emergency preparedness.  Home solar plus batteries or neighbhorhood mini-nuclear reactors.  Every neighborhood should have its own CNC mill for turning out parts.  Subsidies for gardens and food storage and trees and animals.

A French-American tries to explain some things to the Credential-American community.

Since we care so much about ideas, I would note that the United States Constitution begins with the proclamation that American citizens are a people, and that, among other things, their government’s job is to promote the general welfare of that people. Not of “ideas” but of citizens—that is to say, actual living and breathing human beings, who (or so it is to be hoped) are grateful for the legacy of their ancestors and want to pass it on to their children, and their children’s children.

Either modernity has hit the dwarves extremely hard or their biology is unlikely.   From Bruce Charlton.