More separation, please

Regarding yesterday's judicial overturn of California's Proposition 8, a facebook friend asks, "Why do religious people refuse to accept the SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE?"

If the separation of church and state is the issue, then let's well and truly separate them.  Let religion keep marriage, which it's had far longer than any state has existed, and let the state keep its laws off our sacraments and come up with its own relationship-defining contracts.

Even Jefferson's wall of separation was formulated in terms of a restriction on the actions of the state.  Nowadays, the restrictions seem to work only in the other direction.  Let religion so much as peek over Jefferson's wall and say something about the state's stuff, and we have screaming, shouting, demonstrations and lawsuits.  Meanwhile, the state is free to come and go as it wishes, plundering and regulating whatever it touches.

A note on Rush's 2112

Priests of the temples of Syrinx got you down? Dude, the bureaucrats in the government offices of Syrinx are far more likely to repress you. But priests don't complain when you kick them, so I guess they're safer to kick than almighty bureaucrats.

"Leaders"

Why don't these "world leader" morons and their lackeys meet in some remote hunting lodge in Nunavut? Look - I've already googled it for them! If they don't like being around fellow citizens, this would be perfect. Up there they could even look out their windows and pass the time agonizing over receding Arctic ice, or whatever it is they do for fun.

The Pournelle Axes

In his Ph.D. dissertation these many years ago, Jerry Pournelle examined the traditional left-right political spectrum, found it wanting and even dangerous, and devised a two-dimensional grid, the Pournelle Axes, to replace it. To my surprise, I find that I'm about a 2.5/2.5, right next to what he calls the American counter-culture!

If you aren't reading his daybook, you should. I keep it in my browser's bookmarks and check it out every evening.

The General Theory of NPR

I had the local NPR station on the radio Sunday afternoon as I worked in the kitchen. As I half-listened to one liberal interviewing another, I formulated a General Theory of NPR: NPR's default position is that every human problem can and should be solved by the federal government. I noted that for some future blog post and then within moments, at 4:04 in the mp3 file, I heard confirmation of it, as one liberal asked the other about making websites more accessible to the handicapped, "I'm confused on this point. Now, I know the government has a fairly wide berth in mandating physical improvements in public space, that have pretty much become standard not just in government buildings but in all public places. Is the internet deemed, for the purposes of government mandate, a public space that the government can say to a retailer or some other website that you're simply not in compliance and you'd best start to comply?"

The General Theory is a corollary of Althouse's Maxim: "A love of autocracy often lurks beneath the liberal veneer." Indeed.

Where's a map when you need one?

I'd like to see the trail of laws, amendments and court decisions that led to this from this:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

How far we've come

Vide.

What could you do with half a million bucks?

recovery.gov says they've stolen 16 billion dollars to create (or save) 30 thousand jobs. If you dare to do the math, that's about half a million dollars per job. So that's what the government can do with $500,000. I think I could do a hell of a lot better than that, all by my little own lonesome.

UPDATE: see subsidiarity, a word from which King Obama's czars, sultans and potentates recoil in horror.

Liberty once lost, or, The Prophetic Mr Adams #1

John Adams to his wife Abigail, July 7, 1775:

Your Description of the Distresses of the worthy Inhabitants of Boston, and the other Sea Port Towns, is enough to melt an Heart of stone. Our Consolation must be this, my dear, that Cities may be rebuilt, and a People reduced to Poverty, may acquire fresh Property: But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever. When the People once surrender their share in the Legislature, and their Right of defending the Limitations upon the Government, and of resisting every Encroachment upon them, they can never regain it.

Get your laws off our sacraments

Just something I stumbled across in my archives from 2003:

I don't think government should claim any authority over marriage, which is not only a sacrament but an integral part of the natural law, which precedes and supercedes any claims of government. The government has no more right to define the nature of marriage than it has to define the nature of, say, the Eucharist.

Give the government that power [to regulate marriage], and soon enough it will attempt to define the nature of the Eucharist; it will define our prayers and worship as child abuse, our Scriptures as hate speech, our acts of charity as crimes against humanity, and so on.

A government program I can get behind

Government-run healthcare, summarized

"Nothing costs less than a dead patient." - Stephen Green. Something to remember when the government starts paying the bills.

I'm back

I haven't blogged in a while - it's that darned Facebook. I may as well try to put something up here every day. Perhaps I'll get back into the habit of writing, and maybe my sentences will lengthen, too. This bit at Instapundit was sweet:

Terrorists left in their own filth: War crime.

Patients left in their own filth: Progressive healthcare!

Some of that for us, please

I see that our esteemed House of Representatives in Washington has passed a bill that "[e]xpresses support for all Iranian citizens who embrace the values of freedom, human rights, civil liberties, and rule of law." Now if only we could get one of those passed in support of American citizens who do the same.

A picture of Mr Obama's foreign policy

Wrecking the economy?

With what Obama and the Democrats have done and are planning to do, it almost seems they're deliberately wrecking business and industry, as though they want everything to be supported by the government so when the nation returns to its senses, we'll find it impossible to scale back government without causing the whole structure to collapse.

And do you get the impression they're not concerned about upcoming elections? With the White House takeover of the census and huge "stimulating" payoffs scheduled to go out just before next year's elections, it's as though they intend to rig what elections they can and buy the ones they can't.

Or maybe I'm just a new member of the tinfoil hat brigade.

A note on tax hikes

"Rich" people are looking for ways to avoid slavery, as any sensible person would. I don't understand the notion of raising taxes on the rich. Personally, I've never received a family-sustaining regular paycheck from a poor person. If the President has his way, fewer families will receive them from rich people.

Change comes to America!

Well that was worth it. Barry, Nancy and friends wrecked the economy, but at least we all get an extra 40 quarters a week; or, to fully capture the excitement, one hundred dimes - every week!

Minitrue

The rulers of Airstip One knew better than to leave the scrubbing of history to amateurs - they employed an entire professional bureaucracy to ensure that all past cross-references matched the new history. I wonder whether Uncle O included funds for his own Minitrue among the job-creation provisions of the recent "stimulus" bill.

The biggest heist in history

Here's the official website for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. It sounds as though they're actually proud of stealing my money and wasting it on vast ruinous mountains of crap.

A lot of the so-called "stimulus package" goes towards funding federal programs, none of which ever have their budgets cut. This means that future budgets will allocate even more stolen money to continue funding the projects at their inflated "stimulus" levels. The effects of that are seen here, courtesy of the Congressional Budget Office.

This whole thing is yet another obscenity produced by the shameless bastards who claim to be our government.