A moment of cute

Slow down! I've got little legs!

How to fight a skeleton army

Finally, someone is taking on a question I've been pondering since I was six-years old.

Medikit

I came across the blurb about the medikit on Modern Mechanix and, having a great love for kits, hunted down more info on it; including some very nice images from ebay.

It's not perfect, but with some updating, modifications and additions I think that we could come up with something that Dr McCoy would be proud of.

Get-home bag

A machete?  Really?

The Art of Manliness looks at "get-home bags" and while some of the suggestions are good, the author piles on so much heavy duty equipment (stout boots, tarps, toothbrush, machete) that it ends up as impractical for something that's intended to be close at hand for an office worker and operate for 24 hours after a natural disaster so he can get home safe.

I particularly take issue with his including a pistol.  Now, don't get me wrong, I believe in carry conceal and all that.  However, I've lived through enough natural disasters and even a couple of terrorist attacks to suspect that God has it in for me, but I've never been through one yet where my top-ten survival priorities in the first 24 hours involved packing iron.  My general rule of thumb is that if you need a gun after a disaster, then you needed one before, so you'd have one anyway.  In other words, if I need a gun after an earthquake, it's because I'm in Kandahar and not Seattle. QED.

I don't have an office survival kit now because my office is at home, but when I had to work for clients on site my get-home bag consisted of the gear I always carry on my person plus a small satchel that fit in the back of a drawer containing an energy bar, three water pouches, a pocket first aid kit, a space blanket, a torch, a face mask (I live near a volcano) and some matches.  That was enough to get me back to my car where my 72-hour bag is, home if I have to hoof it or a relief station if I can't. The basic idea is to include the essentials while keeping the kit small enough that I won't feel tempted to not take it along or stuff it away somewhere so I need an emergency kit to get to my emergency kit.

Get a life!

Me?  I'd change my name and go with it.

The modern dictionary

The BBC looks at obscure words and the importance of keeping them alive.

I quite agree and here are a few that get too little usage today:  Chastity, duty, honour, courage, reverence, patriotism, liberty, freedom...

Another duckling rescue

It's not easy being a duckling

Commanding the depths

Victor Davis Hanson looks at the Left's claims to hold moral authority and concludes that their only real moral compass is power.

The truth about penguins

What Sir David Attenbrough is hiding from us.

New blog

I'm starting a new blog today with a very familiar name.  Feel free to cop a shufti.

Murder by ethics

Morally irrelevant?

Reader Ironmistress asked for my thoughts about this pronouncement by a pair of bioethicists, who say that infanticide is "no worse" than abortion because infants are "morally irrelevant".

First off, any time an "ethicist" opens his mouth I know that what ever follows will boil down to either, "Do what thou wilt shall be the only law" or "That which is not forbidden is compulsory".  The idea that you can turn ethics into a science is farcical.  You can become just as much an expert, and probably more so, by running a pub or sweeping floors.  An "ethicist" is an academic mountebank at best and a charlatan at worst.

In this case, what has happened is the logical extension when you remove the idea that human life is sacred.  I don't mean that metaphorically, I mean literally sacred.  It's why in a proper morality killing is only sanctioned in extermis, such as in accordance to the rules of war or as ordinate punishment under the law for treason or other foul crimes.  It's why we don't deal with tramps by organising hunts.  It's why five men will die trying to save one.  It's why slavery is so vile.

It's even the main reason why we don't practice cannibalism or necrophilia.  Such practices are more than profane or disgusting, they are sacrilegious.  From a Judeo-Christian point of view, it is to defile the image of God.

Now, I don't want to get into the whole abortion debate.  I tend not to touch on it because it's the sort of topic that generates far more heat than light and I prefer productive discussions to ones that end with a pair of armed camps glaring at one another.  The logic of the Catholic Church, which I subscribe to (the logic, that is), is that only a human fetus can develop into a human being that will possess an immortal soul.  We do not know where along the line from fertilised ovum to infant that this happens, but it does and it is therefore logical to err on the side of caution.  Hence the prohibitions that Catholic doctrine demand.

With the "ethicists," on the other hand, they have rejected the sanctity of human life and have determined that when it is permissible to kill someone is based largely upon what is most convenient and what the killer can get away with at the time.  Their definition that they give of personhood is as tenuous as it is ungrammatical:

Their definition of a person was "an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her."

This sort of personhood is about as protective as a G-string. Any third-rate sophist could twist this to justify disposing of anyone at any time. For that matter, what gives the ethicists any authority to establish this as a definition or to declare it set in stone?  Once the practice is accepted, the definition can change to fit whomever is next for being declared an unperson. It is, to coin a phrase, a licence to kill.

If we accept their argument even in the tiniest degree, we are staring into the abyss.  Why stop with infants?  Why not the very ill?  The deformed?  The old?  The homeless? Class enemies? The politically incorrect? Or anyone else the Party decides is undesirable?  Why not?  Once you've swallowed the camel of infanticide, why strain at the gnat of genocide?  And the truly appalling thing is that our world has slid so far that the infanticide isn't enough to show the true evil of this idea.  I have to bring up genocide.

If I were a homosexual, for example, I would be denouncing our ethical comrades very loudly indeed.  At the moment, the sexually deviant are riding high because they are very popular with the political class.  But, as the Jews can tell you, that can change very quickly and when that happens, you don't want to be living in a world where being inconvenient is a capital offence.

One columnist recently pointed out that with this as the moral standard, you could make a nice living breeding babies in quantity to be lobotomised and sold as slaves.  Why not?  They're "morally irrelevant", after all and once their frontal lobes are detached, they're sure to remain so.

How to deal with these ethicists?  I've been reading postings that say that they've been receiving death threats and that there have been plots to murder them.  These have, of course, been quite rightly denounced as wrong. I can't think of a blunter word to describe such things.  However, what I would say to the ethicists is this:  Using your own logic, there cannot be anyone less "morally relevant" than a man who advocates such an abomination of an idea.  If anyone deserves to be the recipient of the reward for such irrelevance, it is such vermin.

Perhaps, we should tell them, it is time to revive the old practice of outlawry and declare them beyond the protection of the law and fit for any man to do with them as they will.  Think of it as the ethical version of what happens when you live by the sword.

Or perhaps we should, as always in a free society, acknowledge their right to say such vile things, but then use our right to refute them and call them what they are: Evil.

Avengers, assemble... My desk!

It's a shame that I meet most of my editors and clients in phone and Skype conferences because I would really like to be sitting behind this desk when visitors come calling.

There's even a Nick Fury needle gun in easy reach if the meeting gets a bit dodgy.

The question answered

I've often wondered what would happen if I fell into a pool of lava–and once it wasn't just an academic question, but that's another story.

Anyway, here is the answer that was previously known only to Gollum and Darth Vader.

Wall Street on Trial

Zaphod Beeblebrox, call your service

Extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake

Popular Science posts a map of the Universe that confirms what I've always suspected:  It revolves around me.

And I didn't have to go to the Frogstar to confirm it.

Strange times

What an enlightened age we live in.  Tell people that you had the privilege of looking at the finger bone of a saint they think you're a superstitious holdover from the Dark Ages.  Tell them that you bid a small fortune for a lock of one of the guys who created Superman and no one bats an eyelash.

I'm missing something here.

Potholing

I've noticed a lot of stories recently about local governments being unable to find the money to fix potholes despite having bags of cash, apparently, for bike lanes, assistant deputy under secretaries of green outreach diversity communications, and general busybodydom.  It's very easy to point to massive national debts, insane "green" initiatives, and the parasitic welfare state and say that something has gone seriously wrong, but I have come to the conclusion that the lowly pothole is a much more significant indicator of how deep the rot has gone in our political classes.

We didn't get into the mess we're in because the government spent too much on fixing roads.  And it isn't even that money was spent in geneal, though that is the end result of the problem.  The real, fundamental issue of the day is pointed out by the prevalence of potholes.  There are very few things that a government must do to justify its existence.  On the local level, this can be summed up in a simple phrase: Your government exists to do mundane things like filling potholes.  

The political class has forgotten this. They have come to the conclusion that their function is to Save the Plantet^TM, usher in the secular millennium, treat the polity like children, inspect every plate of food for badness, every utterance for offence, and every thought for heresy.  They build huge, whirling monuments to themselves across the countryside and call it "alternative energy".  They "outreach", promote "diversity", "multiculturalism", "cohesion", "community" and a brand of "tolerance" of the sort that only a Commissar would appreciate.

What they don't do is fix potholes.

It is, in other words, a class that has completely inverted the priorities of the social contract that allows the state to govern the people.  Fixing roads, keeping the peace, settling disputes, defending the realm, maintaining parks; these sort of things are treated by everyone from local councils to national governments as if they were luxuries while fripperies like foreign aid, entitlements, "green" rat holes and gruesome social engineering programmes are shoved to the front of the queue with bushel baskets ready to receive the largesse of the State.

I often wonder what can be done to change this.  An electoral upheaval?  Reclaiming the institutions we've lost since that vile surrender of our culture that began in 1968?  Revolution?  No. What I recommend as a starting point is something much simpler: The pothole initiative.

The idea is very simple.  The people must become like a four-year old who wants Daddy's attention and starts prodding him in the shoulder with his finger and keeps on doing so because he knows that he's going to live longer than the Old Man, who must eventually give in or die of old age.  Instead of getting into constant, ridiculous arguments about budgets, taxes and so on, go for the most fundamental approach.  At every opportunity, through every venue, via every medium, constantly and continually remind the political class of why they are allowed to exist.  No matter what new "crisis" they bring up, no matter what new crusade they raise the banner for, no matter what makes their eyes sparkle as they hear history's bugle calling them to battle, point to the real and metaphorical potholes in the High Street and say "fix it, then we'll talk and not before".

No matter what they say in reply, no matter what excuse, if they reach for the public purse while a core duty remains neglected, while a pothole remains unfilled, demand that they "fix it" before anything else is considered.

It's not the solution to this mess, I'll grant you, but it's a start.

A gentle reminder

Now pay attention, 007...

A credit card that opens up to reveal a lock pick set.

This is one of those things that I have no need for, but I want desperately.