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Too many things I would rather didn’t talk about right now – Islamism, Trump, Easter, etc. – so this week’s Church of Splendor homily concerns a thoroughly practical matter: The Driven way to drive:

Not mentioned in the video: It pays to pre-plan your stops from the map. You’re looking for decent-sized towns or, at a minimum, places where a major road transects the freeway. If you are low on gas and your only choice is El Camino sin Nombre, you’ll only have one or two stations to choose from, the gas will be over-priced and the restroom will be awful. Still worse, those kinds of gas stations can put a huge credit hold on your card, so you may not be able to use it at the next stop – or for the next day or two.

From last September, some very good words for fathers for Easter Sunday. –GSS

What’s the good word? The one that gets the world won. I’m an easy sell on that proposition, even as I want every map to be ontologically consonant.

So: Reflecting on a blog post from the @TheCulDeSacHero, we swing out in a huge arc to encompass all of the universe in one ultimate benediction.

Why? Because if I’m going to traffic in good words, I’m gonna make ’em big ones. This is The Church of Splendor, and we don’t let our atheism, our egoism or our anarchism get in the way of the concerns that have always mattered most in church: Life and death.

How can you tell for sure this is a church? Because there’s a offering plate. I’d be grateful if you would pay me what you think I’m earning from you, more grateful still if you would scare up a donor who can help make this church grow.

Meanwhile, here are some good words about making everything – even death – better:

Men and women might be politically equal, but they are not functionally identical. This matters most where we are most different: Men cannot birth or suckle infants – and women cannot head successful families.

In this week’s Church of Splendor homily, we take up the topic of building well-fathered families – Clan Testudo families:

The marriage contract shown in the video is linked and explained here: “5 reasons every grown-up couple should marry – with an ironclad marriage contract to make their new family last forever.” Discussing that contract – prior to marrying – will tell you everything you need to know about your prospective spouse. And, I should think obviously, no man should marry without having his right to his marriage, his children, his family protected by a marriage contract like this.

Only well-fathered families thrive. There is no way women can supplant men in the family – for the simple reason that it is his family or there is no family. People who marry this way will stay married, and everyone else will founder.

As the ultimate triumph of my private anti-mutiny of the Driven over the Cautious, I can document the Science of Carney – how to predict with precision which way any particular person will make his choices.

If you want to understand how I do this, start with Nine Empathies.

If you want for me to show you how to fix your broken social machine – your company, your work group, your club or church, your marriage – hire me. I know how to fix everything.

For Church this week: “How To Fix Everything: Reading people for fun and profit.”

Thane Eichenerauer, bless his every living breath, put me in mind of this exhortation from April 20, 2012, about the morality of mobs:

As a matter of disclosure, I have not read An Army of Davids. The thesis is completely obvious from the title, and my expectation is that, to justify a $25 purchase price, what is at best a thousand-word essay is inflated by a factor of 100 with repetitive interviews from the echo-chamber. Feel free to correct me if you think I’m wrong about this, but life is too short for weblog posts masquerading as books.

But as we saw yesterday, the putative Army of Davids is actually a pathetic mob of self-panicking Eric Cartmans, dumb-ass bullies telling each other the same one dumb-ass joke, over and over again — just like they do at The Daily Kos and Little Green Footballs, which as Karl Marx reminds us is “no accident.”

That’s sad. This is sadder: Yesterday was Patriot’s Day — Lexington/Concord, Waco, Oklahoma City, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising — the perfect day to talk about the evil of government and how to rid our lives of that evil. So what did Libertarian and Conservative “thought leaders” do instead? They shot spitballs — paper bullets of the brain — at Obama all day.

That’s a waste of their lives, but it’s also a waste of your intellectual capital. The day was lost, and the better points that could have been made were lost. But so much more than that was lost, as we’ll see. I scolded these fools yesterday, and I’m going to explore their errors in fuller detail today. But the important lesson for you, going forward, is to learn how not to squander your own time and character on vile nonsense.

Yesterday, I said this:

1. Saul Alinsky was evil, as are Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, etc. There is no benefit to a self-loving mind in emulating these vile, rhetorically invalid tactics. Breitbart was wrong: Tu quoque is not okay.

2. No matter how much you revile or ridicule your opponent, this will not make you a better person. Two wrongs don’t make a (more…)

Marxists have taken over education? You bet they have – starting over 100 years ago. In this Sunday’s Church of Splendor homily: How a family organized like the Clan Testudo can shield itself from the Marxist domination of education:

Links cited in the video:

The works of Richard Mitchell.

“Propositions Three and Seven” by Richard Mitchell.

How you came to be enslaved – and how you can free yourself.

Propositions Three and Seven from The Graves of Academe by Richard Mitchell:

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is, as we all know, king. And across the way, in the country of the witless, the half-wit is king. And why not? It’s only natural, and considering the circumstances, not really a bad system. We do the best we can.

But it is a system with some unhappy consequences. The one-eyed man knows that he could never be king in the land of the two-eyed, and the half-wit knows that he would be small potatoes indeed in a land where most people had all or most of their wits about them. These rulers, therefore, will be inordinately selective about their social programs, which will be designed not only to protect against the rise of the witful and the sighted, but, just as important, to ensure a never-failing supply (more…)

Sunday at Church I talked about deploying my notion of the subdominant motivation in my recasting of the DISC system of personality assessment to understand how particular people will express and pursue their dominant motivation. I went through this for all of the DISC motivations to some extent, but I was paying particular attention to the Incandescents because I was talking about politics. There were all kinds of side issues I didn’t hit – although, if you watch the video, I give you just in passing the DISC of Cheech and Chong’s Sister Mary Elephant. But one that seem fun to me is in that neighborhood: The DISC of clowns.

You call them comics or comedians. I distinguish them from humorists, who are not quite so frenzied in their Incandescent need. All true clowns will be Incandescent first, and, accordingly, it should be possible to distinguish them by their subdominant characteristic: Incandescent/driven clowns will have an agenda they are trying to effect, Incandescent/sociable clowns will seek to make people feel warm and fuzzy and Incandescent/cautious clowns will seem to strive to whip their audiences into more-compliant behavior.

Consider the types of clowns brought to us by Shakespeare: Id: Feste. Is: Falstaff. Ic: Malvolio. The first and last are from Twelfth Night. Sir Toby plays the Falstaff clown in that play, albeit with his own Id agenda. Malvolio is foiled by another Ic clown, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and the two together form the basis for every succeeding Ic clown duo, modeled and perfected in the modern era by Laurel and Hardy. The Oliver Hardy/Malvolio Ic clown thinks he’s wise but doesn’t know he is actually stupid. The Stan Laurel/Aguecheek Ic clown knows he’s stupid but doesn’t know he is inadvertently wise. These forms show up again and again in cinematic and television comedy, from Charlie Chaplin to Lucille Ball to Sheldon Cooper.

Three examples from stand-up comedy: Id: Lenny Bruce. Is: Jay Leno. Ic: David Letterman. Audiences love the Is comic, (more…)

I know how to make Donald Trump untouchable – which is the only way we’ll be rid of him:

An introduction to the empathy of DISC.

Why Trump is the Prom King.

Why the Prom King turns into a Cautious tyrant.

What do you plan to tell your children when your hired thug turns on you – or on them?

Pictured at the right is a tweet I saw yesterday from Jeffrey Tucker, a big-shoe libertarian. Why, he wonders, is human liberty being Trumped by an obvious thug? He names six reasons, none of which are wrong, but he omits the reason that matters most:

The future belongs to the people who show up for it – and libertarians preferred not to.

The universe of your experience emerges from the inside out. Accordingly, when you are confronted with an unhappy outcome, it is wise to ask yourself these three questions:

1. What did I do wrong?

2. What should I have done instead?

3. What can I do differently, going forward, to attain my values?

Democracy is mob-rule made dainty. A republic is mob-rule by proxy. Where people live near each other, there is no alternative to mob-rule, just better and worse compromises with the problem posed when two or more people ‘elect’ to turn on an individual who looks to them like an enemy – or like prey. The Hoplite solution was the best-ever compromise with brutality, and every society we would call civil was modeled on that Hoplite ideal: Each father is a worthy – and well-armed – adversary to each one of his neighbors, and all of those fathers, banded together, are more powerful than any would-be king.

Why does it matter that a Hoplite is a father? Because, despite the lies we like to tell ourselves, women can’t fight proficiently – and, of course, children can’t fight at all. Childless men have nothing they will risk death to defend, and, accordingly, in the by-now too-much-underfathered West, there are no Hoplites left to fight to the death, if necessary, for human liberty.

What is missing from Tucker’s list is this: Libertarians don’t reproduce. Even if they do accidentally spawn a child, if they hew to Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard, they exterminate their own young. There are no vast armies of outraged libertarian Hoplites because there are almost no libertarian fathers.

It’s that simple. Amidst the mob-rule for (more…)

Attn: @YaronBrook, #AynRand Inst: Who will change the culture? The people who don’t kill their children.

This is me writing almost seven months ago:

The longer the Ayn Rand Institute evades the Planned Parenthood abortion scandals, the more pellucidly obvious it becomes that they have nothing to say, that Ayn Rand’s argument for abortion is hideously anegoistic because it is anti-reality and that by championing abortion for the past fifty years, the Ayn Rand Institute is complicit in an unconscionable evil.

But they can’t say that, because that would be the truth.

And they can’t actually uphold Ayn Rand’s childish utilitarian argument for abortion because then they would have to acknowledge that they’ve known all along that abortion is self-destructive.

Yesterday’s Church of Splendor homily eviscerates Yaron Brook’s vain hope to change the culture with the help of the tens of thousands of children slaughtered at the Ayn Rand Institute’s behest:

Two of my posts from last week are cited in the video:

I can ask the Ayn Rand Institute’s Yaron Brook anything? How many of my abortion questions can he evade?

Anti-#abortion theater: Getting right everything @YaronBrook and the #AynRand Institute get wrong.

And if you’re a high-C with a passion for pain, take the time to ingest Yaron Brook’s please-don’t-ask-me-anything broadcast.

Do let me know if I’m wrong about his continued evasion of my questions.

The question was: “If Trump is such a thug, then what about Rubio and Cruz?” My response:

I suspect Rubio is a repressed or closeted homosexual – like Obama. Cruz is a robotic phony. Neither would be a threat to my existence as President, since neither would get anything done.

The only safe government is no government. The next safest alternative is paralyzed government. Trump is everything that’s wrong with Obama without Obama’s Ic cowardice. Trump is a thug.

Crying “Havoc!” is the worst possible survival strategy for everyone this side of the grave. This is not TV sports or an entertainment spectacle. There were 160 million political murders in the last century committed by thugs like Trump, many of them popularly elected. This is dog that, once let slip, will not be called back to the kennel.

I am dismayed and saddened by the short-sightedness of my countrymen.

As I noted yesterday, Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute is today putting on his cowardly lion costume, publicly pretending to answer any question, even though he has been evading the Planned Parenthood organ-mining scandal for seven solid months. I don’t know that the Mouch-of-the-microsecond will take up abortion even today, but I know whatever answer he gives will be inadequate.

Not so me. I have been much-benefitted by these awful atrocities, to the extent that I think I am by now completely unassailable on the topic. Here are three ways to apprehend my efforts:

1. In (brutal) fiction: Finding visibility, absolution and closure at the choo-choo train at the mall on New Year’s Eve..

2. In (many) essays: My arguments against intrauterine infanticide.

3. In (copious) video, in the form of these four video homilies from The Church of Splendor:

Terminating #Abortion: The #PlannedParenthood atrocities show that we are all ghouls now.

How to win everything – by driving everyone else crazy.

The Captain’s Commitment: Honoring our enduring obligations.

The Victims of the Sanction: @YaronBrook and the #AynRand Institute must respond on #abortion.

I think this debate is entirely mine: There is no way to reconcile a pro-liberty philosophy with hostility to marriage and family, with sexual libertinism or with abortion. Freedom emerges from strong families – and only from strong families. Any argument that undermines self-responsible fatherhood necessarily impedes and eventually eviscerates all human liberty, where arguing in behalf of Hoplite fatherhood exalts and buttresses the freedom of every individual human being.