Southern Bread Blog

I am pro-life across the board. I always have been. The thought of ripping a child apart and sucking it out of it’s mother gives me the same feeling as seeing children blown to bits by war. It’s absolutely horrible. It’s a billboard for human depravity.

That’s out of the way now.

My question to pro-lifers is: what’s the end game? What exactly are you wanting to accomplish with the pro-life movement?

Do you want abortion doctors convicted of murder? That would seem like a logical conclusion. But, I don’t see that being pushed.

Do you want it simply made illegal? If so, then on what basis is it an illegal action? Because the basis for it’s illegality determines what type of punishment is going to be tied to it. Again, I don’t see that discussion.

Do you want the women who have abortions to be convicted? If so, convicted of what? Murder? I haven’t seen an answer to that.

Do you want it to be a constitutional amendment? Because if it’s not, then it’s a state issue. And you don’t seem to want that.

Questions like these don’t seem to be generating any answers because the abortion issue has been so thoroughly politicized that it has morphed into something new that’s hard to nail down. The morality questions haven’t changed, but the politics have cause the whole argument to lose it’s framing. In a way, when you strip a question like this down to only it’s moral components, you’re left with an end that has no means.

So what’s the answer? Depoliticizing the argument. Abortion can’t be fought as an “issue” any more. There’s only one way to eliminate abortion, and that’s in the heart of yourself and your children. It’s not laws that will keep my daughter out of the abortion room. It’s me. It’s what I teach her. It’s her moral vision. It will never be a law that will keep any woman out of that room. It will always be what’s inside them that will make the choice. Government doesn’t help. Like with everything else, it just muddies the water with empty rhetoric.

Congress hasn’t declared a war since 1941, but hundreds of thousands of war dead since then prove that laws are meaningless. Making something illegal doesn’t stop it. The thing that stops sin and crime is what’s inside a man’s heart, not what a group of people I’ve never met before write down on some paper.

I’m pro-life to my core, but I also see the futility of modern law. We can’t look to government for any kind of redress or to mete out justice of any kind. They aren’t in the justice business any more. I choose liberty instead. And I’ll fight my battle in the heart, not in the court room.

This is the book that Ron Paul said people should read when he was being being grilled by three state Attorney’s General on Fox News. I knew Bastiat as an economist, but hadn’t known that he did any general work on political economy, so I picked this book for our 2012 reading list. It was a joy to read.

When Bastiat speaks of “the Law”, he is referring not to any one particular law, but to the system of codes, rules and regulations that we are to live by as imposed on us by a government. Government is force. And the rules it forces you to obey, taken as a whole, are “the Law.” This is the subject of the book.

His premise is simple, and he repeats it often: “The law is justice.” It’s not anything else. The appropriate use of law is the protection of life, property and liberty. Because these things preceded the law, the law will always be metaphysically subordinate to them. When the law steps outside of that narrow vision, it creates injustice, in violation of it’s nature. This is his argument in a nutshell. He starts this way:

We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life — physical, intellectual, and moral life.

But life cannot maintain itself alone. The Creator of life has entrusted us with the responsibility of preserving, developing, and perfecting it. In order that we may accomplish this, He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties. And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By the application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them. This process is necessary in order that life may run its appointed course.

Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

..

If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.

–Frederic Bastiat, The Law

He goes on to define property as that which is obtained by labor, and plunder as that which is taken by force from the labor of others. The main thrust being that if an individual can’t, by law, do a certain thing, then government (the will of many individuals) can’t do that thing either. In this context, taxation is “legal plunder”, war is legal murder, etc.

What does he say about the state of post-civil war America?

…look at the United States [in 1850]. There is no country in the world where the law is kept more within its proper domain: the protection of every person’s liberty and property. As a consequence of this, there appears to be no country in the world where the social order rests on a firmer foundation. But even in the United States, there are two issues — and only two — that have always endangered the public peace.

What are these two issues? They are slavery and tariffs. These are the only two issues where, contrary to the general spirit of the republic of the United States, law has assumed the character of a plunderer.

Slavery is a violation, by law, of liberty. The protective tariff is a violation, by law, of property.

It is a most remarkable fact that this double legal crime — a sorrowful inheritance from the Old World — should be the only issue which can, and perhaps will, lead to the ruin of the Union. It is indeed impossible to imagine, at the very heart of a society, a more astounding fact than this: The law has come to be an instrument of injustice. And if this fact brings terrible consequences to the United States — where the proper purpose of the law has been perverted only in the instances of slavery and tariffs — what must be the consequences in Europe, where the perversion of the law is a principle; a system?

–Frederic Bastiat, The Law

Ron Paul was right. This is a truly great book. There are a million quotes I could paste in here. Too many. It will, at the very least, give you a better understanding of Ron Paul’s own philosophy of government.

Here’s my drill when it comes to eating out Mexican. I order cheese dip and then eat 5 chips loaded down with salsa and cheese dip. This is roughly 5 carbs, as chips are almost always 1 carb each. After I eat those 5 chips I stop and wait for my food. Allowing myself 5 chips really satisfies that chip craving, but gives me a hard limit so I know where to stop.

As far as main dishes, I always order steak or chicken fajitas and just toss out the tortillas that come with it. Dump all your guac, salsa, lettuce and sour cream on top of the fajitas and just eat it like a taco salad. It’s awesome. The black bean soup is also a good alternative if you don’t like fajitas. And, of course, there’s taco salad. Just be sure and ask them to put it on a plate instead of in a tortilla bowl.

If you eat like this, you’ll come out around 15 carbs. Hope that helps.

The first fiction book of our 2012 book reading list is 1984, and I used the opportunity of a long road trip to listen to the audiobook. I’ve never read it before, and I have to say that it was simultaneously one of the best and one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read. I finished it about 4 hours ago, yet I still feel the emotional tremors from it’s ending. Yes, it’s one of those books that grabs you by the emotions and shakes you to the bone.

Overall, I guess you could say that 1984 felt like two different books. The first half felt like simply a parabel of future society. But, the second half takes you deep into the evil that absolute power can produce in the mind of man. Whereas Ayn Rand’s Anthem was similar in it’s vision of where government would go in the future if it remained un-checked, 1984 was a much darker book. Anthem only gives you vague impressions of the people behind the curtain of government. 1984, in contrast, introduces you to them in their fullness.

Throughout the first two-thirds of the book, I kept running into phrases and whole sections that sounded like they perfectly described what we see in our own government today. It was, at times, uncanny. Here’s some that stood out to me about war:

“…in a physical sense war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at…”

–George Orwell, 1984

“The primary aim of modern warfare .. is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.”

–George Orwell, 1984

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed.”

–George Orwell, 1984

“War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war.”

–George Orwell, 1984

“It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.”

–George Orwell, 1984

“…In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat… But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police.”

–George Orwell, 1984

“The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair… The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist.”

–George Orwell, 1984

To say that this book is highly recommended is an understatement. It is a must read. But, make sure you carve out some time, because once you start reading it, you probably won’t put it down until you’re finished.

Good video on the history of intervention by the U.S. The full story, as do most, goes back to World War I.

By all means, let’s not elect the guy that has such a solid worldview that he can warn us 10 years in the future about coming threats. Let’s just elect another Ken doll plastic politician. That’s a good idea.

I’ve been fighting this annoying battle for a while now. My main computer at work has a small (40 gig) SSD drive as the C: partition, and a large (2 Terabyte) spinning drive as the D: partition. No matter what I set the disc burning staging drive to be in Windows, it insists on using the C: drive to stage the files. This, obviously, will not work because I’m usually always below 4 gigs free space on C:. Well, I fixed it today by doing the following:

1. Create a file on D: called “burn”.
2. Open up a command prompt and CD to “%USERPROFILE%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindows”.
3. Delete the “Burn” folder found there: “RMDIR /S Burn”
4. Issue this command: “MKLINK /D Burn D:burn”

This re-creates the Burn folder as a symbolic link over to the real folder on your secondary drive. Problem solved.