I have another post at The American Spectator Online today. In this one, I appeal to Icelandic sagas in order to support my bigoted and hate-filled arguments for traditional marriage.

I have another article up at The American Spectator Online today. It’s about the problem of how young people are to understand the thinking of their ancestors, especially on issues like slavery.

And then, this morning, James Lileks pointed me to an article from io9 that perfectly illustrates the problem. This writer talks about the “mysterious” culture of the Incas, which “had no markets.”

The secret of the Inca’s great wealth may have been their unusual tax system. Instead of paying taxes in money, every Incan was required to provide labor to the state. In exchange for this labor, they were given the necessities of life.

Of course, not everybody had to pay labor tax. Nobles and their courts were exempt, as were other prominent members of Incan society….

Only someone who has completely failed to understand history, in the sense about which I write for the Spectator, could fail to recognize the actual nature of Incan civilization. The common people were all slaves.

A few interesting articles that caught my attention today.

From World Magazine: Despite protests, Boy Scouts reaffirm policy on homosexuality.

“The vast majority of the parents of youth we serve value their right to address issues of same-sex orientation within their family, with spiritual advisers and at the appropriate time and in the right setting,” Mazzuca said. “We fully understand that no single policy will accommodate the many diverse views among our membership or society.”

What an outrage. When will this benighted organization understand that a boy’s life is forever blighted if he misses the opportunity to spend a night in a tent with a homosexual?

From National Review: A Letter to Young Voters, by the great Dennis Prager.

But just in case you need an argument to take an older person’s thoughts seriously, ask any adults you respect whether they have more wisdom and insight into life now than they did ten years ago, let alone when they were your age. The answer will always be yes. (And any adult who has not gained wisdom over the course of a lifetime is not worth listening to.)

Which directly leads to my point: Did you ever wonder why people are far more likely to become conservative in their views and values as they get older?

This seems an excellent point to me. How do you answer it if you’re a liberal? Either it’s false that people get more conservative as they get older (which utterly defies all experience) or it’s false that people get wiser as they get older (and try telling that to the Boomers, even the liberal ones).

And finally, a Minnesota-related post, from Mitch Berg at Shot in the Dark: The Beatings Will Continue until Morale Improves. It involves a huge, disruptive light rail project going on in St. Paul right now, which (aside from bankrupting many small businesspeople, most of them East Asian immigrants) is forcing drivers to divert to other streets. What’s the city to do? They’ll turn one of those streets into “bikes only!” That’ll make everything better (it should be noted, by the way, that Mitch is an avid biker).

Joe has too much faith in Wahhabi transit activists. They’re a little like post-modern German artists, the type that glumly intones “Art IS destruction and ugliness” as they unveil their latest, “installation”, a dancing man clad only with a jar holding a gutted cat pickled in urine.

Like the post-moderns, the chaos – to drivers, anyway – is precisely the point. The goal is to make driving, and drivers, miserable. And to them, it’s no matter if you deal with that misery by jumping on the train, or by expressing your anger, fulfilling their prophecy that drivers are base, benighted, spoiled, arrogant and above it all.