Hello to Those from the Homeschooling Revolution!

Thank you very much to Isabel (Izzy) Lyman at the Homeschooling Revolution for linking to me! Yes, I suppose I am eclectic. I am a Christian who loves Penn and Teller. I have all their books, have seen them in concert, and watch their profanely-monikered cable show with glee (Here's the link-- I wasn't kidding about the name). Penn and Teller make skepticism fun and interesting, and anything that increases critical thinking is a good thing. I do think they have an illogical hatred of religion, for whatever reason. I don’t understand why atheists of a certain stripe insist upon proselytizing, but I don’t find this one area of irrationality (based upon their own criteria) a reason to disregard the overall entertainment, and yes, educational benefit, the pair offers (But not to children! They are not appropriate for kids).

In the same vein, Cheryl at Konkadoo has a fabulous post on Halloween that precisely expresses how I feel about this contentious holiday. Thanks again to HR for introducing me to her blog. I am very impressed and indeed delighted to see such incredible homeschool talent and energy.

"Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding"
~~Proverbs 3:13

Happy Halloween!

We didn't decorate for Halloween this year, partly because I didn't want even more attractive nuisances scattered about the house to entice the toddling Varmit Marmot into party-colored death (“And here is an electric pumpkin with a pretty, delicate twinkle lite enticingly hidden in nooks just as big as your itty bitty finger. Don’t you want to touch it?”), and partly because I am lazy.

Wendy McElroy is a woman who is not lazy. Hey, my mother always said, when you set out to do something, you ought to do it right.

Thrasymachus on the Post-Christian Soul

"Modern man does not love, but seeks refuge in love; does not hope, but seeks refuge in hope; does not believe, but seeks refuge in a dogma." --Nicolás Gómez Dávila

I think that this outlines a central flaw in the modern soul. Everything good and great exists as a means to a pitiful and self-serving end. We justify our lives by the metric of personal satisfaction.

From Thrasymachus Online

The Scots have a great sense of humo(u)r.

Check out http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/. Under “Languages” at the upper right, click on “Scots.”

Apparently, they are serious.

With all due respect to the Scottish Parliament, it reads like the HUD Pamphlet scandal.

Black Judges

David Bernstein over at The Volokh Conspiracy makes a sound and numerate but politically-incorrect refutation of the supposed dearth of black Bush appointees to the federal judiciary. See, also, Eugene Volokh’s wonderful 1998 Wall Street Journal article “Racial Politics at the Supreme Court.”

Oh Man

Ouch.



From The Stranger via BoingBoing

The Future of America

The Oklahoman has done a two-part series on large Christian homeschooling families.
Large Families Mean Sacrifice
Families Know How to Live Large
Thanks to the Homeschooling Revolution.

Brilliant!

It has never been a better time to be a diabetic. The Glucowatch is now available, and Interactive Healthcare founder Paul Wessel has now released Glucoboy, a blood glucose meter cartridge for the Nintendo GameBoy. Thanks to BoingBoing!

Of course this happened in Texas

DALLAS - A judge welcomed a former fugitive back to her courtroom with balloons, streamers and a cake before sentencing him to life in prison.

"Daddy, you’re a liar!"

Greer says, "The more I told her not to say such things, the more she insisted it was true, saying, ‘That’s what you do.’ The communication gap widened until I realized she was mispronouncing ‘lawyer.’ "

Packing It In

I think to myself sometimes that if Mr. Blessed ever lost his job, we should just pick up and move to New Hampshire. This news would probably devastate my Texas-dwelling parents (and Mr. Blessed, who loves them so). However, I do have a lot of simpatico with the Free Staters who are walking the talk. I, myself, tend to be full of hot air, however. I just recently got down cold precisely where New Hampshire is. All those bothersome tiny little eastern states really mess up my average...

Cargo Cult Law & Medicine

Wonderful post over at Sheridan: Con-Law about false accusations made by both children and adults. Anyone following the "Satanic Panic"/child sex abuse scandals of the late 80's and early 90's will find this to be required reading.

Weekend Tidbits

Federalist No. 84 has some great tips for blog maintenance over at Notes from the (Legal) Underground. He states emphatically that everyone should move to Typepad. Now. And I just got listed in Google this weekend, too...

NFLU also has some good advice to young lawyers.

Frankly, I’m really getting tired of stories like yours. Just think for a minute about what you were doing. You were taking the time to eat lunch. Meanwhile, as you were stuffing your face, other associates remained behind at the firm, using the extra time to get ahead of you in the race for partnership. You're a real nitwit. You’re going to lose out to the grinders and get fat too.

Also, I can tell already that I will never get back to expanding on the Team America post. One rule of blogging seems to be: Post now or never.

VDARE has a good blog post entitled The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Lutheran. You guys post some great stuff, but where is your RSS feed? I still have to *shudder* go to your website to read it!

A Night At the Movies

Mr. Blessed and I saw “Team America” last night and loved it. I guess it really is just a generational thing, since, in our minds, the blasphemy, crudity, and obscenities of the works of Parker and Stone simply don’t interfere with the team’s brilliant comedy. They are probably the greatest, slyest satirists working today.

More later...

IQ and the Poverty of (Our) Nation

In 2000, mathematician John Allen Paulos wrote a snarky column entitled "Who Wants to Be a Science-Savvy President?” playing on the format of the popular TV show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” In this thought-experiment, he posed some science and math questions to then-candidates Bradley, Bush, Gore, and McCain, and speculated on their respective scores:

How would the four major candidates do were they to take the above quiz sight unseen?

My guess — and it’s certainly nothing more than that — is that Gore and McCain would get 11 or 12 questions right, Bradley nine or 10, and Bush seven or eight.

What, if anything, would this test would tell us?

My opinion: All other things being equal, greater scientific literacy (which includes being realistic about what one doesn’t know and being open to the scientific advice of others) makes for a better candidate and a better president.

The combination of ignorance and power is a frightening one. (emphasis mine)

Mr. Paulos didn’t address the IQs of the candidates directly, even though he did imply that certain candidates were “ignorant.” Steve Sailer, on the other hand, has gone straight to the heart of the matter this election, and comes out with a titillating theory: Bush may have a higher IQ than Kerry.

How is that for frightening? As he has written several times already, “Are these two the best our nation of nearly 300,000,000 can put forward?”

SimWar

Anyone who has ever played a Sim game has thought to himself, "I bet the real-world applications of this kind of thing are staggaring." It just takes a faster processor and more data points and Uncle Sam to make it happen.

On Mob Rule

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
-George Orwell


Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-C. S. Lewis


Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.
-H. L. Mencken


Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
-Hermann Goering


A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
-Thomas Jefferson

"Reality, said Philip K. Dick, is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

John Derbyshire has written a wonderful piece at NRO on the 10th anniversary of the publication of The Bell Curve.

Tick, Tick, Tick...

My mother gave us a picture frame when our daughter was born, one that has a space in it for a photo from every month of the baby’s first year. The oval monthly pictures circle around a larger space for the child’s first birthday shot. We have this frame on our entertainment center, where we can look up at it and marvel at how she has changed. Sometimes, when I am feeding the Biscuit, I look up at the frame and imagine that it is a clock, ticking down the months. The first six months flew by, and I was happy to see the frame fill up. All parents worry about SIDS, and each month we put a picture in the frame was another month we could put between us and the dread disease.

After the sixth month mark, I began to see time running out. In my mind this past year, I have had several goals to meet before the frame strikes twelve. It will be twelve months on Sunday, and I am not as close to my goals as I would like to be.

In my heart of hearts, I always thought this SAHM thing was a part-time job. I could do the home-making quickly and easily and still find paying work, from home of course. (No matter what, we won’t be putting the critter in daycare.) This year has taught me that being a housewife takes more hard work and time than I had ever imagined. I have had a difficult time finding more time to do paying work.

So far, I haven’t been doing too badly. Certainly it would be arrogant and ungrateful of me to complain, because we would be hurting if we didn’t have my modest income. But I am now having to admit I want more. More work. More income-generating work. We could cut back expenses even more, but I simply don’t want to. Our food budget, for example, is moderate for a family of two-and-a-half, but compared to so many other frugal families, we are Dionysian in our Epicureanism.

The fact that I am admitting I want more paying work isn’t an epiphany, and doesn’t necessarily contradict anything else I have written on this blog. Lots of women who want to stay home are also looking for income opportunities, so long as they don’t come at the expense of their primary job, which is to keep Kirche and Kinder.

I was thinking about this in the shower this morning. Housewives have always been working women. The belief that SAHMs don’t do anything is silly and illogical. It crumbles under the most cursory of inquiries. Women who are in the home simply exempt themselves from taxable income. When thinking about this, what strikes me most is the question that I haven’t been able to answer, even though I am an ex-lefty:

Why do so many leftists, many of whom hate Corporate America, insist that women join the ranks of cubicle drudges and wage slaves? If I were interested in Culture Jamming (in the sense of a resistance movement to the hegemony of popular culture), it would seem to me that one of my first goals would be to remove as many cogs from Mega-Corp as possible. It would be especially beneficial to remove the more intelligent, better-educated ones. So, then, why does this threaten those who would otherwise rant about Big Business, capitalism, etc.?

In my cynicism, I think professional feminists realize that if women were to have a genuine choice, they would choose not to work, at least not when their children were little. Any fly on the wall on a baby-oriented message board can tell you how bad women feel putting their young children in day care. Most of these women feel they have no choice. I think these professional feminists have a vested interest in keeping women working so that the families’ inflated wages can be taxed at a higher level, and these very feminists feed on the trough of public programs. More two-income families mean more taxes, which mean more bureaucracy, more government bloat, and more grants funding untenable organizations which cannot compete without subsidies.

*****
So, the year has passed. My baby is a toddler now. I feel like the time I had, a time out of time, is the most blessed of my life. I know that the coming years are going to be just as precious. And if anyone needs a graphic designer, let me know.

Random Links

I have actually been pretty productive for the past week, but have managed to temper this with a lot of, erm, research. Yes, research, that’s it.

Places I have visited recently have included a gallery of farewell missives from failed dot coms, a preview of 2005’s Spring Colors (yummy! Plus a swatch palette!), and a bleak day-in-the-life diary from a criminal defense attorney. And my family wonders why I never practiced...