Monday, December 21, 2020
Idaho's patriots beat the machine
Sunday, December 6, 2020
Man up or shut up
Dear M,
One thing I hate is a grown man complaining about "anxiety." I'm well aware it's a condition. It's what we know as the human condition. I'm also aware that, being a problem of the imagination, some people have worse anxiety than others, like some people can plan skyscrapers and others can't imagine doing a good job at MacDonalds. I know life can go sideways at any moment, and that people might not like you, or that you can catch a disease, or look like a fool, or lose lots of money, or a lover, or a job, or the country can go to hell, or hell might be real, or somebody might make an all-black-cast reboot of The Golden Girls. I know that life will go sideways at some point, and that not having it go sideways is temporary, and mostly a matter of luck -- i.e., beyond your control*. Our hopes are the source of our fears. The news is overwhelmingly bad. Car crashes, the main way we get almost anywhere, are the main cause of death and probably mangling. God isn't answering your prayers. Oh well. You're not special. It's you and everybody else.
Thursday, December 3, 2020
Why "liberal" means "left-winger"
Dear T,
Two of my heroes are Mises and Ayn Rand, but for several reasons I could never consider myself a full-blown libertarian. First off is the fact that you can and should legislate morality, and in fact every libertarian without exception does. All government is an extension of moral ideas. He won't prosecute you for stealing a wife, but he'll put you in jail for stealing a loaf; and beyond this he'll do the same thing for murder, and fraud, and kidnapping, and assault -- all of them moral issues, and 100% featured in the book of Deuteronomy.
Friday, November 20, 2020
Thank your hysterical neighbor
Dear M,
Idaho has moved back into "Stage 2" of a coronavirus lockdown. Modified, they say. It could be worse. Other states have mask mandates, stay-at-home orders, holidays are canceled, limitations on informal gatherings, church bans, gym bans, bar bans, closures of all kinds of small businesses -- the population divided into "essential" and "nonessential" workers. Large corporations and pot dispensaries and liquor stores, the big spreaders of diseases both temporal and spiritual, are left open.
Thursday, November 19, 2020
The Exodus (or: Giuliani vs The Machine)
Dear H,
Rudy Giuliani says that Dominion, the software company that ran the elections in our swing states, is actually a front company for Smartmatic. The reason this is important is because Smartmatic is a company based in Venezuela; and beyond this, a company known globally for throwing elections. The Washington Post and other outlets are calling him a liar. But the outlets also called Joe Biden the President, despite the fact that massive lawsuits, in Pennsylvania and Michigan, over unconstitutional measures and voter fraud, could easily throw the election for Donald. They know it and won't say it.
Tuesday, November 3, 2020
Random thoughts on being good
Dear H,
David Hume once wrote that in order for something to be really felt on a moral level, it had to have three aspects. The first is that it had to be beautiful. This aspect has entirely to do with our instincts. A God-thing you're born with. As in, you see a beautiful action and you like it and that seals it, like watching a curvy woman walk, or smelling an apple pie. Thus you see a man push a stroller out of a car's way, at great personal danger, and you just like him for it.
Life advice from the left-wing
And get rid of the police
And get morbidly obese.
Disarm yourself and
Make sure all the felons can vote.
Friday, October 2, 2020
The reactionary Hispanic
Dear T-,
I was raised to think of myself as Hispanic, but in retrospect, I was trained to worship like a white man. My mother was from Honduras but she might as well have come from Mayberry. Back "home," our family history had been difficult. Lots of great people but even more hard times. People had been beaten up, tortured, gunned down, and kidnapped. One of my relatives had been shot in the streets. Another had been forcefully conscripted into the Honduran army. At the time fighting the guerillas was desperate, and the government was stealing random teens right off the streets, like kidnappers. He made it out, but lots of people didn't. To go to the theater or the billiard hall was to risk your whole life, and parents in the know advised their kids to stay away from them.
Thursday, August 20, 2020
Our problem with the presidency
Dear M,
Paul Johnson says, in his biography of Washington, that in 1789, the only monarch with powers as wide as the President's was the czar. All the other ones were hemmed in by regulations. Johnson doesn't go too far into detail about it; but why take his word when we can see it right in front of us? In the last eight years we found the President can put grown men into little girls' locker rooms; that he can pay enemy states hundreds of billions in ransom cash; that he can flood our states with millions of Africans and Middle-Easterners; that he can make or unmake the border at whim; that he can grant citizenship to illegal aliens; that he can pardon scores of drug dealers; that he can veto almost every bill; that he can station troops in any town; that he can put off the payment of payroll taxes; that he can effectively bribe the unemployed with hundreds of dollars a week; that he can bomb people in countries we're not at war with; that he can spy on the next presidential candidate and walk away scot-free; and that, according to Democrats, he can lock the country down and not allow anyone "inessential" to run a business.
Wednesday, August 5, 2020
To save America, defund the schools
Friday, July 17, 2020
In these troubled times
Tuesday, June 16, 2020
For the love of God, stand up for yourselves!
Monday, June 8, 2020
What do they really want?
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Apologies to President Obama
Monday, May 18, 2020
Portrait of a people-pleaser
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
The Great Shame
When I was a small boy I was told about a coming judgment. Mom said that God was the judge, but what stuck with me more forcefully was the idea of how He would do it. There would be a great TV in the sky with all our deeds on view -- all of them, large and small -- and everyone would see what kind of life we lived.
Friday, April 10, 2020
Can a leftist write great history?
Tuesday, March 24, 2020
Notes on the pandemic

Thursday, March 19, 2020
Black Elk Speaks: a review
Black Elk Speaks is supposed to be a spiritual classic for American Indians. Not just for his tribe, but for all of them. It's so far advanced in this direction that now, almost a hundred years after its first publication, it's beginning to get its own schools of theology, and a horde of uninspiring idiots argue about its more obscure passages. But this is how it goes. Inspiration leads to confusion leads to policy. The Spirit gives life, and the letter kills it.
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
Black Republicans
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Candace Owens, Queen of Blexit |
Monday, March 9, 2020
Some Athenian euphemisms
My position on r------d people* is exactly the same position on everyone else: the good ones I keep, and the worst ones I hate. I've had more than one r------d enemy, in fact, and some of them are so brutal, so treacherous, and so incapable that I find no use for them; and I think the best use for them is the exercise we'd get running them out of town. There are autistic people I've enjoyed, day after day, and been happy to see, and others who threatened my friends. Some of them are sweet and others are rapists. Some of them are silly and other ones are spoil-sports. But J, some say, they can't help it! Can the rest of us? Are we really so different from them? Are any of these categories I mentioned things we don't experience ourselves? So what if we can think things through -- many of us still make bad decisions, rotten statements, and horrible messes, especially when acting in groups**. We give the handicapped a pass because most of us could do better. But I doubt in many cases we could. A personality is something set in stone. A sourpuss, a loser, a cheater and an idiot will be what he'll be, and many times was born that way. God has given us our trajectory -- in most cases, our job is to act it out, not to change it***.
Tuesday, February 4, 2020
A commie worth reading

Friday, January 31, 2020
Midsommar: an analysis
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Tuesday, January 28, 2020
So you want to be a manly man?
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Smiling on the front lines |
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
Sober yourself up (Rambler No. 2)
Man's mind is never satisfied with the things immediately in front of it; and, in fact, it's always breaking away from the present to lose itself in plans for the future. The only time in our power is now -- but we throw it away planning for things which, in all likelihood, we'll probably never get to experience.
Monday, January 13, 2020
The rise and fall of Mark Driscoll
Up until Mark Driscoll I had never considered getting a full-time job. I was a playboy and a loser at heart, had never read a serious book, and had lived in a kind of perpetual childhood. Then I heard him speak. A stocky, round-faced working-class type, he caught me off guard because he was funny. A pastor who was actually funny. Unheard of, in those days, and in fact most days, as Christianity and humor are in an eternal fight to the death (neither sex nor laughter are mentioned in Heaven).
Friday, January 10, 2020
On the death of Cato
This week we've been waiting for World War 3 to start. At least that's what everyone's been telling us. It started about a year ago, actually. A little event nobody even noticed that turned into more events and got us to here. And if you want, you could say it started a lifetime ago. Donald Trump put the squeeze on Iran last year because they put the squeeze on President Obama. They put the squeeze on President Obama because the Ayatollah took over in 1979. He took over because Mohammed's followers couldn't agree about who takes over for Mohammed. And Mohammed only took over because nobody could decide who really spoke best for Moses. So you could say this was four-thousand years or so in the making.
Monday, January 6, 2020
In defense of Hollywood
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Ricky Gervais, hero |
Friday, January 3, 2020
In defense of Pope Slappy
I'll confess up-front, for the sake of dramatic effect, that I think Pope Francis is a slimeball. Nearly everything he does in the news makes me sick. We caught him washing Syrians' feet. He told us to let them all in -- an act which even the Dalai Lama, out of respect for Western Civilization, is against. The next he says we can't judge perverts, while likening Donald Trump to the baby-killer King Herod. He hates the death penalty, and even life imprisonment for murderers.
