Let me start by saying that I am not happy about Obama being elected President. Not happy at all. But I’ve managed to turn my unhappiness with the election into the same feeling you get right before you sneeze — you know, that resignation that this is simply out of your control and it will happen regardless of your approval, and all protestations to the contrary will matter nary a wit.

And let’s insert the obligatory “Omaba is bad” stuff: He knows nothing about business.  He has no real-world experience in anything. His ideas are bad. He supports the killing of infants recently born because, you know, saving their lives would be too much of a burden on a woman who has chosen to kill her child. And he wants to take guns away from law abiding citizens.  Check. Check. Check. Yadda yadda.

But here’s the thing: He’s president. I’m not going to act like some pipsqueek liberal holding a sign that says “Bush is not my president.”  Because he is.

And you know why?

Because God wants him there.

Chew on that. Chew on that real good. (Don’t swallow as you might choke, but chew for a little while.)

It doesn’t matter how much you dislike Obama.  It doesn’t matter how good your reasons are for disliking him.

Romans 13:1-2  Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.

There is just no getting around this. Paul lived under a nation that had both just and unjust laws. The sins of the leadership of the United States aren’t any worse than those of the Roman government. And yet Paul didn’t dwell on his government.  He didn’t intermingle the Gospel with warnings about Caesar. Even when Paul was accused of crimes that would have resulted in his execution, he didn’t set out on a campaign of reform against his government.

Now back to the first thing I said: Politics can bring out the worst in anybody. I have heard people say the worst of curses against their new President. And it bugs me. Here’s why:

1 Timothy 2:1-2  I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.

Here Paul tells us what our attitude about our leaders must be. We are to pray for them and even give thanks for them.

Ouch. That’s hard. I think living up to Old Testament standards might even be easier than giving thanks for Obama.

But there it is, nonetheless. And Paul told us why. “That we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.” This is God’s will for us. This is what we should be striving for — not to get ABC, NBC, or CBS to air the right news. But to live a peacable life. And there is a flip side. Ignoring this exhortation means getting the opposite of “peaceable life.”

Yes, it’s nice to be right. Of course Obama is going to be one of the worst presidents this country has ever had. And, no, of course you don’t have to be happy about it. And in four years, you will get to vote against him again. Maybe in four years enough of the people in the country will see what’s right to prevent his re-election.

What do we do in the meantime?

Proverbs 29:2  When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.

Notice the key here: mourn. No rebellion, no railing. Mourning.

I’m thankful I live in a country where I have freedom of speech and can blog about things that interest me, like economics and the insanity of environmentalism. I am thankful I get a “say” in who my governors are. But in the end I know that nothing I do is going to change the fact that it is going to take Christ returning and establishing his own rule in Earth for anything to get better.

So I’ll deal with the fact that Obama is president.

I hope you will, too.

“…I’d prefer to say that the default position is a terrible enervating passivity. Murderous misfit loners are mercifully rare. But this awful corrosive passivity is far more pervasive, and, unlike the psycho killer, is an existential threat to a functioning society.”

Wanted: A culture of self-defense (Michelle Malkin)

Mark Steyn makes a compelling argument that Europe is already lost to Islamofacism, and the Islamofascists didn’t need to bomb a single pizza parlor to do it.

Steyn’s book is all about demographics. His argument is nigh unanswerable: if the folks in your country are reproducing at a rate lower than is necessary to even sustain your population, and you have a cradle-to-grave welfare state that requires you to have workers to tax, you’re going to have to let them come in and they will eventually own the place. This is already happening all over Europe.

Steyn also makes a solid case for something most of us already understand intuitively: our culture is superior to theirs. If you’re intent on holding to the indefensible position that all cultures are morally equal, you won’t like what you read in Steyn’s book.

All-in-all an excellent read. Steyn has a good sense of humor that fills every page. Even though he’s discussing what amounts to a coming New Dark Ages, you’ll find yourself giggling all the way through.

America Alone is easily the best political book of the year.

“The Senate is poised to sanction the creation of a racially exclusive government by and for Native Hawaiians who satisfy a blood test. The new race-based sovereign that would be summoned into being by the so-called Akaka Bill would operate outside the U.S. Constitution and the nation’s most cherished civil rights statutes. Indeed, the champions of the proposed legislation boast that the new Native Hawaiian entity could secede from the Union like the Confederacy, but without the necessity of shelling Fort Sumter.”

I am no expert on Hawaii, but I did live there for ten years.

This “new government” stuff is just stupid. For one thing, the vast majority of the Hawaiian people voted for Hawaii to become a state! It’s true that there were some abuses by large corporations in the past, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was an overwhelming consensus among Hawaiians that becoming a state of the Union would be a good thing. Further, there are hardly any “pure” Hawaiians left! Most people who qualify as Hawaiian for race-based government handouts couldn’t beat an Elvis impersonater in a “how Hawaiian are you” contest.

There is a common myth amongst Hawaiian victimists and race-pimps that missionaries “gave Hawaiians the Bible and stole the land.” If this were true, it would still have been a good deal for the Hawaiians. But the reality is that while the missionaries gave Hawaiians an alphabet, they couldn’t teach them how to make decent candy (yuck). and instead of “stealing land”, they brought Hawaiians a new way of life — maybe what Akaka wants is a return to a more pure Hawaiian culture, like ritual human sacrifices under a military dictatorship, instead of the current system of one vote for every person. (Actually, in Hawaii, they can’t even get that right.)

Don’t get me wrong, Hawaii is a beautiful place. Kauai is the most beautiful environment I have ever lived in. But the current climate of racist, entitlement-driven politics makes me glad I don’t live there right now.

I just watched a segment on Fox News about a father who refused to let his son work on the family farm. The son really likes farming, and wants to farm, just like his dad. But the father has forbidden his son from pursuing the same career and has required him to go to college, making him find other work.

This is stupid. There is nothing wrong with farming as a career. We all rely on farmers and someone has to farm! Why not let it be someone who likes farming? By what objective measure is getting a college degree and going for a non-agrarian career better than farming?

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Making education god.

But now, in a time when Republicans own the government, it is not so good to be a Republican. Indeed, for me, the victorious feeling I had when Bush beat Gore (and he did, so get over it!) and when the Republicans gained complete control of Congress two years later, has turned bitter and cynical. The party I was so gleeful to see gain power after so many years as a minority has squandered their moral authority in less time than it took Clinton to get caught in an “inappropriate” relationship with an intern.

Now the inappropriate relationship is that of the Republicans and big government.

I don’t care about deficit spending. If we need to spend more money on defense and homeland security, do it. The government should never be running a surplus, because that inherently means that the government is stealing from the taxpayer.

But I do care about waste and ever-ballooning government programs. Spending billions of dollars to find out if Mars was ever wet is a waste of taxpayer money. Billions of dollars being flushed down the toilet of the NEA is a waste of taxpayer money. Billions of dollars being sent to third-world countries is a waste of taxpayer money when that money does nothing but enable poor economic policy. And spending even more Federal tax dollars on education is a total and complete waste, when all of the research shows that the more money we spend on schools, the worse they perform — to say nothing of the inherent problem of making everyone drink at the trough of government welfare education.

It is sad to have to say why I am a Republican. I am a Republican because I am loathe to be a Democrat. I am a Republican, because if I voted for Democrats, I would be voting for even more wasteful spending, and side-orders of bad security policy and legalized infanticide on top of higher taxes. And I am a Republican because I am not extreme enough to be a Libertarian and I have to be somewhat pragmatic in the voting booth.

Oh, I know that there are still a lot of Republican representatives who are not big-spending, government bloating, vote-buying, NEA-appeasing weasels. And I hope that they knock some sense into the Republican leadership and get things under control. But until they do, I will be a Republican by default.

The recent unearthing of an interview with Schwarzenegger in 1977 has created a lot of buzz about whether or not it is relevant to his campaign for governor in California. [Article] But what interests me more are the methods by which this information is dismissed by his supporters.

The most common answer? “He was young.”

What a crock. He was nearly 30 years old when he gave the interview! He was certainly older than that when he finally started controlling himself. This gets me wondering — how old is adult? We are supposed to accept that something someone said publicly when they were three decades old is off-limits and shouldn’t be looked at to examine their character? You can say “it’s the economy, stupid” all you want, but the fact remains that at SOME point it must matter what people say and how they act.

Obviously our culture has pushed adolescence well into the twenties. Instead of expecting young men to become reasoned, responsible individuals in their teens, as was once the custom, degrading behavior is now excusable all the way into graduate school, where drinking and partying is the “social interaction” that is supposedly so necessary to human development. Now it looks like adolescence needs to be pushed into the early thirties in order to not be embarrassed by the disgusting, misogynistic opining of a body builder who wasn’t “liv[ing] [his] life to be a politician.” How about common decency? Not so common I suppose. But hey, can people change? Of course.

Yes, people can change. And they shouldn’t be judged by things they did in the past if they have really, honestly changed. But you would think that someone who has matured past animalistic activities would have something deeper to say than “I haven’t lived my life to be a politician.” What about living your life to be a father? His response really bothers me. I wouldn’t want to be so harsh about this, but this dismissive attitude is repugnant.

California Republicans are just happy that someone with an R after their name might actually win in October — either that or they just can’t get past how “cool” it would be to have the Terminator or the Kindergarten Cop in Sacramento. But unmitigated party loyalty is not an excuse for saying “he was young, it was 25 years ago” when something bad comes to the surface about their anointed candidate. Make arguments about the economy and about running as “the people’s governor.” That’s fine. But saying that a 29 year old man is just “young” is ridiculous.

So how old do you have to be to be expected to act responsibly?

“I would have taken the option to transfer, but I didn’t have it,” Jackson said. “This law ended up costing me money out of my own pocket.”

Boo hoo. Imagine that — having to foot the bill for your own child’s benefit. We homeschoolers do this every day. Americans have come a long way… No longer the independent minded people we once were, most of us take for granted that the costs of education will be paid for by everyone else. Jackson is not happy that his son’s school is underachieving but can’t understand why he should be responsible for the costs of his child’s education. And yet, homeschoolers choose to pay for their child’s eduction “100% out of pocket,” and still pay the property taxes and federal taxes that fund government schools that fail.

I am a Utopian Reject because there exists not a single idealized vision of human society that suits me (that is, idealized by modern ideologues), or of more importance, I do not suit any purveyor of utopia, whether liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, fascist or libertarian, spiritual or religious.

Being a Utopian Reject does not have anything to do with mindlessly protesting against establishment, abstaining from the electoral process (if you happen to live in a country with one), making your mind a god, or avoiding a bar of soap and a shower. Hippies may very well be societal rejects, but they are stupid and lack rudimentary reasoning skills — this is not what is meant by being a Utopian Reject. Multi-platinum musicians who never overcame teenage angst and feel guilty about being paid so much to be so worthless are not Utopian Rejects just because they feign intelligence in political or social matters, no matter what rhetoric they choose to parrot.

Purveyors of utopia from all political, social, and religious persuasions cannot overvalue the ignorance of the masses. No architect of utopia could hope to work with an independently wise and knowledgeable population and expect to make any progress. It is therefore the case that utopians almost invariably identify the same “problems” and the same “goals”– and only sometimes manage to concoct unique “solutions.”

I am a Utopian Reject because the utopian constructs of society designed to processes citizens like so much bologna into neat little packages largely failed on me. This is a mixed blessing, to be sure.

There are Utopian Rejects all over, in any political party or any religion. Most of them haven’t quantified their rejection from utopia. The more cognizant one becomes of their rejection, the more difficulty they have fitting into the round holes their square personalities have been hammered into.

Utopian Rejects don’t necessarily all agree on any particular set of values or truths, but all would agree that there really is no such thing as utopia.

I do not pretend to represent all Utopian Rejects, only myself. I believe in absolute truth, I believe there is right and wrong, and that most “gray areas” exist out of laziness in reasoning rather than some imagined equality of values. I do not for one minute think my mind is my god and I do not make a man or philosophy my final authority.