Happy Easter!

I discuss the enslavement of perhaps 1,000,000 white/Christians by the barbary pirates and the man who finally brought that trade to an end.

"And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild."  -GK Chesterton

Seems like just yesterday Conan O'Brien et al were telling us about what a lovely place Haiti was, on account of Trump said it wasn't.  As the corpses are roasting in the streets, join me on a stroll down memory lane.

"I am terrified of Africa.  I don't want to be from this place."  -Keith Richburg

"I'm leaving Africa now, so I don't care anymore about the turmoil in Rwanda and have no interest in this latest tragic development."  -Keith Richburg

“It has been said critically that there is a  tendency in many armies to spend the peace time studying how to fight the last war.”  January-February 1929, The Military Engineer, “Some Notes on the World War” by J. L. Schley (Lieutenant Colonel, Corps of Engineers), pg. 55, col. 1L

I read the State of the Union address and will give my thoughts.

““Did you ever in all your life see the head of a human being which so closely resembled that of a cod fish?”

“He is not responsible for his head or his face. But why do you say he is a fraud? The newspapers call him a reformer, and give him credit for great efficiency.”

“I deny your conclusions,” he replied. “A man of fifty is responsible for his face! Yes, I know he is courting the newspapers: that proves him a humbug and presumptively a fraud.”

A few months later the official in question was found guilty by a court-martial of peculation and fraud in the management of his bureau and dishonorably expelled from the service.”  -Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, quoted by Lucius Crittenden, Recollections of President Lincoln and His Administration

“Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In a utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite. Most of us agree that it is ethically permissible to divert a runaway trolley that threatens to kill five people onto a side track where it would kill only one. But suppose it were a hundred million lives one could save by diverting the trolley, or a billion, or—projecting into the indefinite future—infinitely many. How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good?"  -Stephen Pinker

According to my rough calculation, 50 million people were killed by their non-government countrymen in the 20'th century.  According to RJ Rummel, about 250 unarmed people were intentionally killed by governments over the same span.  5:1

"The failure of technological determinism as a theory of the history of violence should not be that surprising. Human behavior is goal-directed, not stimulus-driven, and what matters most to the incidence of violence is whether one person wants another one dead."  -Stephen Pinker

We dance round in a ring and suppose,

But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

-Robert Frost. "The Secret Sits" (1942)

@psychiconfire makes a good point on Twitter.

Sometimes it is impossible to do good without appearing mean.

What does doing evil feel like?  Sometimes, *exactly like* doing good.

A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation says we will pass 300% debt:GDP ratio in 2044, 500% in 2058, and 1000% in 2078.  It's probably later than you think.  This present system of vote-buying will end, one way or another.

Certain jobs can only be done properly by people who don’t care too much if they are fired.