Why Christians should be libertarians

"Make it your goal to live a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands, just as we instructed you before."

- 1 Thessalonians 4:11

Note the "minding your own business" part.

The Breastplate of Righteousness

"In donning the breastplate of righteousness, the covert deviant assumes a protective shield of superpropriety. His armor has a particularly shiny quality, a refulgence, which tends to blind the audience to certain of the practices. To others in his everyday world, he is not only normal but righteous – an exemplar of good behavior and right thinking. However much the covert participant may be reacting to guilt in erecting his defensive barrier, he is also engaging in a performance that is part and parcel of his being. Goffman remarks that “there is often no reason for claiming that the facts discrepant with the fostered impression are any more the real reality than is the fostered reality they embarass.” The secret offender may well believe he is more righteous than the next man – hence his shock and outrage, his disbelieving indignation, when he is discovered and discredited."

- Laud Humphreys

Is air-to-air combat obsolete?

The last time a US pilot shot down an armed enemy aircraft was 1999.  A US pilot shot down an Iranian drone in 2009, but since it was not a fighter, I don't count that one. In the past 30 years, there have been fewer than 100 air-to-air kills worldwide. 

If stealth is the most important thing, why not use biplanes like the Antonov An-2? If minimizing losses is the most important thing, why not use cheaper, expendable drones?

The odds of the US going to war with a country with a decent air force are next to nil. And even if it did, the US has thousands of more aircraft than either Russia or China. The US has about 2,500 and China and Russia have about 1,000 each.

A lot of those Russian and Chinese fighters are probably junk. The reason Yugoslav fighters failed to shoot down any NATO planes in the 90s was because their equipment malfunctioned.

The whole reason fighters were invented was to protect ground troops and civilians from enemy air attack. If there's a better or cheaper way to do that, that's what should be done.

I strongly suspect the real reasons the F-35 exists are defense pork and the Air Force's desire for a new toy.

If the Air Force was in charge of delivering pizzas, they would demand Ferraris.

All US males between 17 and 45 are part of the militia

10 U.S. Code § 311 - Militia: composition and classes

(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.

(b) The classes of the militia are—

(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and

(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.

Is a monolingual or oligolingual world inevitable?

Of the 6000 or so languages in the world today, only about 4% of them are widely spoken. The rest are in danger of extinction. One estimate states that by 2050, 90% of the world's languages will be extinct. 
If that's the case, are we heading to a world where only one or a few languages are dominant? I think so.

The many different measuring systems have mostly been replaced by the metric system. The many different numeric systems have almost completely been replaced by Hindu-Arabic numerals. The many different calendars have largely been replaced by a common one.

The above trend leads me to suspect that the coming language wars will be like Highlander:

If English is Connor Macleod, who is the Kurgan? I say Mandarin.

Or maybe it is English that will lose its head. Whichever language maintains economic and cultural dominance will win.

Another possibility is that the dominant languages will splinter the way Latin and other did.

The UN Sucks

Here's one reason why:

"The United States contributes 22 percent of the funding of the UN. This is more than double of the second biggest contributor, Japan, and five times as much as the individual contributions of France, the UK, and China. It is also more than the total contributions of around 170 nations combined.

What do we get out of it? Well, in 2016, we will get a Human Rights Council composed composed of China, Russia, the Maldives, Cuba, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia."

The Proud Kennedy Tradition

....of crashing into bodies of water

Teddy Kennedy crashed a car into the Atlantic.

JFK Jr crashed a plane into the Atlantic

Patrick Kennedy crashed his car into a fountain.

I leave out JFK and Joe Kennedy's accidents because they occurred in war time.