We interrupt this series of “Fraying” essays to address the question that seems to be on a majority of Americans’ minds at this time:
Is Biden Out Of His BLEEP!ing Mind?
Warning! Spoiler Alert! Yes.
But this leads to a larger and ultimately more important subject: foreign policy and what constitutes the “national interest.”
***
Undefined and terminally vague phrases have dominated the foreign-policy debates since the formation of NATO. The Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch have already seen me froth at the mouth over ”national defense” and “national security.” But the title phrase of this piece is at least as portentous, in part because it lends itself to so many interpretations, each of them a slight departure from the others.
When we speak of an individual’s interests, the matter is acceptably clear: the preservation and furtherance of those things and conditions that make his life survivable and pleasant. That would naturally include his health, his honestly acquired property, the well-being of those he loves, and the overall condition of his neighborhood. While we might haggle a bit at the margins of these things – is the maintenance of the current zoning laws included in that list? – we can generally reach an agreement on his interests with a single clarifying question: Which of these things is he morally permitted to defend by force?
Force is the standard. It divides the moral universe into Go and No-Go zones. It also compels cost-benefit analyses: If I pull my guns, will I come to regret it on net balance? Many a citizen has faced that question in real time, when the answers are most pertinent and painful.
But try to apply that standard to “national interest.” Matters become far slipperier. Agreement is hard to achieve. And rather often, the federal government of these United States will plow right on ahead without bothering to acquire such agreement.
This could become a discussion of the morality of third-party decision-making: in particular, who bears the costs for Washington’s decisions. That’s beyond my intentions this morning. When a politician starts waving “the national interest” in support of his demands, you may rest assured that if he gets his way, someone else will be doing the bleeding for his cause.
***
“Combat occurs within an envelope of conditions. A general doesn’t control all those conditions. If he did, he’d never have to fight. Sometimes, those conditions are so stiff that he’s compelled to fight whether he thinks it wise, or not.”
“What conditions can do that to you?”
His mouth quirked. “Yes, what conditions indeed?” Oops. Here we go again. “Weather could do it.”
“How?”
“By cutting off your lines of retreat in the face of an invasion.”
“Good. Another.”
“Economics. Once the economy of your country’s been militarized, it runs at a net loss, so you might be forced to fight from an inferior position because you’re running out of resources.”
“Excellent. One more.”
She thought hard. “Superior generalship on the other side?”
He clucked in disapproval. “Does the opponent ever want you to fight?”
“No, sorry. Let me think.”
He waited. Conditions. Conditions you can’t control. Conditions that…control you.
“Politics. The political leadership won’t accept retreat or surrender until you’ve been so badly mangled that it’s obvious even to an idiot.”
The man Louis Redmond had named the greatest warrior in history began to shudder. It took him some time to quell.
“It’s the general’s worst nightmare,” he whispered. “Kings used to lead their own armies. They used to lead the cavalry’s charge. For a king to send an army to war and remain behind to warm his throne was simply not done. Those that tried it lost their thrones, and some lost their heads–to their own people. It was a useful check on political and military rashness.
“It hasn’t been that way for a long time. Today armies go into the field exclusively at the orders of politicians who remain at home. And politicians are bred to believe that reality is entirely plastic to their wills.”
In our time, politicians are often more avid for combat than the men who’d be doing the fighting. One of the reasons, of course, is the one Malcom Loughlin, grandmaster of all things martial, gives to his student Christine. Another is the payoff to the politicians involved in fomenting warfare.
They would never admit to this, of course. Instead they make vague assertions about the “national interest.” The phrase has been used to defend the indefensible on several occasions. Even “good” wars – i.e., the ones we generally agree are against an evil force that should be put down – contain episodes no decent person could justify. Such events have punctuated all the wars since Christ walked the earth.
From the politician’s perspective, that changes nothing. With tragically rare exceptions, he’s thinking exclusively about his bank balance, his prospects for higher office, and his “image.” But don’t you dare question his assertions about the “national interest!” He’ll call you a poltroon, a stooge, a traitor…in a phrase favored by a friend, “everything but white.” What he won’t do is offer a reasoned argument for why a military intervention to inflict “regime change” upon Whackistan or to protect the “sovereignty” of Upyourassov would conduce to any objective gain for the people of these United States.
***
I rant a lot about the need to use words and language accurately and precisely. It’s in the gravest of the political trenches that the need becomes most acute. These vagaries – “national defense,” “national security,” “national interest” – have been used over and over to insert American forces into places where there was little or no chance that anything good could come of the intervention for Americans. Indeed, some Americans would die. All of us would bleed from the wallet. And other unpleasantries would follow, as foreign politicians, satraps, and tyrants eager to “do business” with President Him or Senator Her strive to induce an American military expedition in their favor.
Granted that decisions to go to war cannot be subjected to a national plebiscite. They will always be made by political bodies. But We the Put-Upon have a duty to ask sharp, clarifying questions about the wherefores of such a decision before the decision becomes irrevocable. Surely Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq have taught us that much.
Yesterday’s rather melancholy piece provoked some contention, but there was less of that than there was of dour, semi-resigned agreement. Quite a number of my correspondents wrote to say “I wish you were wrong, but I fear you aren’t,” albeit not in so many words. Nearly all of them asked me not to mention their names here, which is consistent with the current climate of intimidation and fear.
But of course, no phenomenon as portentous and sweeping as the collapse of the greatest civilization in history can be adequately addressed in one brief essay. It takes at least two. And so here we are, grim of aspect, girded of loin, fully prepared to address the questions that are on the mind of the typical Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch:
“How did this happen?”
“What comes next?”
No, it won’t be any more fun than yesterday.
***
Yesterday, I enumerated four sociopolitical influences:
Socialism,
Atheism,
Moral relativism,
Solipsism,
…and styled them “intellectual pathogens.” And yes, I had a disease analogy in mind at the time. The explication has arrived.
The living human body possesses an immune system that responds to the introduction of inimical bacteria and viruses. It’s not perfect, but half a million years of practice has rendered it pretty good. With only modest conscious support from the host – i.e., eat the right things; get enough rest; exercise now and then; avoid cranky neighbors, door-to-door solicitors, and prime-time television – it manages to keep him reasonably healthy and capable for seven or eight decades. It does this by producing antibodies that will locate the invading microbes, close with them, and destroy them.
A similar set of mechanisms is available to the mind, though few conceive of them in such terms. When faced with a disturbing social or political proposition, a healthy mind responds by activating its reasoning center, which then:
Confronts the proposition’s implications for the alteration of the status quo,
Marshals the available evidence;
Uses logic to deduce what would follow from the acceptance of the proposition;
Measures those consequences against moral-ethical precepts and the existing order of things.
Each step in this amassing of intellectual antibodies must be performed with due respect for the reality principle: What is, is. Objective evidence must be granted its due. The identity and convictions of its discoverer are irrelevant. How we feel about it is irrelevant. Samuel Johnson knocks out Bishop Berkeley in the first round. Full Stop.
The process must also acknowledge human fallibility. Any of us can be wrong. Therefore, no conclusion should be regarded as immune from reconsideration, especially if fresh evidence emerges that calls it into question.
For many years, that process, evoked by education and bolstered by experience, protected Americans from the devastating effects of the pathogens I cited. Only recently in historical terms has it faltered.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root. – Henry David Thoreau
The intellectual pathogens have always had their advocates. Early in the Twentieth Century, those persons, aggrieved by how little progress their pet nostrums had made, communed in several centers of evil – the best known is probably the Institute for Social Research / Frankfurt School — and analyzed the defenses of the free nations of the world. Being good strategists, rather than just continuing in their established course but “doing it harder,” they sought a point of attack that would undermine the philosophical structure of Western thought. The one they found was the concept of objective truth.
Truth is an evaluation: a judgment that some proposition corresponds to objective reality sufficiently for men to rely upon it. The weakening of the concept of truth cuts an opening through which baldly counterfactual propositions can be thrust into serious discourse. Smith might say that proposition X is disprovable, or that it contradicts common observations of the world; Jones counters that X suits him fine, for he has dismissed the disprovers as “partisan” and prefers his own observations to those of Smith. Unless the two agree on standards for relevant evidence, pertinent reasoning, and common verification — in other words, standards for what can be accepted as sufficiently true — their argument over X will never end.
An interest group that has “put its back against the wall” as regards its central interest, and is unwilling to concede the battle regardless of the evidence and logic raised against its claims, will obfuscate, attack the motives of its opponents, and attempt to misdirect their attention with irrelevancies. When all of these have failed, its last-ditch defense is to attack the concept of truth. Once that has been undermined, the group can’t be defeated. It can stay on the ideological battlefield indefinitely, preserving the possibility of victory through attrition or fatigue among its opponents.
I distinguish truth, at least rhetorically, from fact. By truth, I mean to address propositions of cause and effect, especially in the social, economic, and political realms. Remember that every statement about cause and effect has preconditions – required context – whose absence or violation nullifies the statement. That makes it possible for an attacker to “change the game” subtly by introducing deviations from the required preconditions without saying openly that he’s doing so. It’s a lot harder to get people to ignore or dismiss the evidence of their senses than it is to get them to entertain a proposition such as “It might not work like that for everyone, everywhere, in every era.”
All the same, to arrive at truth is the objective of sound reasoning. We may not possess many absolute truths, which require no preconditions whatsoever and always operate in exactly the same fashion, but we must do our best to study the evidence, formulate hypotheses, design tests for the cause-and-effect proposition involved, and dispassionately observe and record the results.
***
Some years ago, a deceitful book, I, Rigoberta Menchu, was published to international accolades. It affected many and was widely praised as a real-life narrative of the life of an Indian peasant in Guatemala. Yet, as anthropologist and Guatemalan expert David Stoll discovered after considerable research, it was mostly a fabrication.
The book’s defenders were many among the glitterati. They leaped on Stoll en masse, impugning his personal motives and proclaiming his research fraudulent. Yet they never refuted Stoll’s central assertion: that the majority of the incidents related in the book had not occurred. When challenged to do so, they retreated to a position that should be familiar to contemporary readers: “The facts may have been wrong, but the narrative was right.”
Facts are important barriers to the intellectual pathogens. “It might not work like that for everyone, everywhere, in every era” is best met by “Perhaps not, but it did work like that in every case in recorded history.” The pathogen advocate sometimes replies, “Well, there may be unrecorded instances in which it didn’t,” to which the rebuttal should be “Until you can present verifiable evidence, we’ll stick with what we know.” However, not many people are willing to riposte that way today. It sounds as if you’re challenging the other guy’s honesty…which you are.
The availability of verifiable facts makes reasoning possible. Thus, the pathogen advocates must somehow cast doubt on the facts or render them inadmissible. They strive to do this at every turn.
***
No assault on verifiable facts and reliable, if context-dependent, truths could capture everyone, of course. The strategists of the Left knew this. They selected their targets on the basis of their innocence and susceptibility: American youth. This folded nicely into Antonio Gramsci’s advocacy of a “long march through the institutions.” But not every institution would be attacked simultaneously. The big prizes, the engines of cultural formation, had to come first:
Education,
Journalism,
Art,
Entertainment.
If these could be colonized, they would provide a beachhead from which assaults on the rationality of American youth could be launched. And of course, that has proved to be the case.
Educators and journalists were the first to be corrupted: in part through appeals to their vanity, and in part through the distortion of what they were taught. It didn’t take long before a quite substantial fraction of each occupation had been convinced that “we decide what constitutes important information and real knowledge.” Who was there to contradict them? Other members of their trades? Most were too courteous, or too averse to confrontation. Ad hominem counterblasts would serve to deal with the rest.
The arts and entertainment came next. If the young could be persuaded that there’s something wrong with artistic standards – e.g., that representational art is outdated; that rhyme and meter in poetry are disposable conventions; that music need not conform to structural rules or please the ear – they could be made to listen to critics and reviewers rather than to their own esthetic sensibilities. The coarsening of the art and entertainment worlds paid off spectacularly in the coarsening of young Americans themselves, especially after America’s public schools were integrated. The consequences continue to blossom to this day.
***
The vector sum of the influences mentioned above was a thoroughgoing destruction of the reality principle. The facts of history were “whatevered;” established truths about human nature and society became “your truth / our truth.” The maturing influence of education and cultural familiarization was replaced, incredibly, by the self-esteem movement. It ceased to matter whether little Johnny knew about the principles behind the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Indeed, it ceased to matter whether he could read them. Could he sing or play a scale? Could he appreciate the great painters and sculptors of the Renaissance and what made them great? Of course not. So what? Did he feel good about himself? Nothing else mattered.
In retrospect, we were blind to far too many evil trends. We’re reaping the consequences today:
The misunderstanding of principles;
The rejection of prudence and temperance;
The unwillingness to delay personal gratification;
The belief that human will can override natural laws;
The unwillingness to consider incentives and their effects;
The inability to discriminate between right and wrong, or better and worse;
The elevation of trendy “gurus” over persons of demonstrable wisdom and accomplishments.
It’s not obvious that each of these things opened an avenue for the introduction of the aforementioned pathogens. Yet all of them have contributed. Consider how the dismissal of natural laws makes atheism and moral relativism more plausible. Consider how insistence on the immediate gratification of desires dovetails with the socialist premise. And consider how important confusion about right and wrong, why they matter, and how to tell them apart play into solipsism.
These corruptions have not captured the entire country. However, they are pronounced among young Americans – and tragically, when challenged on any of the above, those misled, miseducated, malformed young folks mainly look to their corrupters for guidance. The assumptions insinuated into them are too deeply rooted to elicit serious contemplation of where the went wrong…even among those who concede that yes, they have gone wrong and things have gotten very, very bad.
***
Many of us who’ve been uninvolved in any of the above must nevertheless accept a dollop of culpability. For example, we in the realms of technology did not think things through. We were frequently too entranced by our own gee-whizzery to think seriously about the consequences of what we were unleashing upon the world. We paid too little attention to how the corrupters would exploit our developments. They used much of what we produced to destroy our children’s ability to think and discriminate.
You thought television was a bad influence? Think about what Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok have done to America’s youth, and shudder.
***
I expect that there will be many cries of dismay over this piece. Some will see reflections of their own misdeeds and defaults, and will recoil from the implications. Others will argue that they had no power to countervail what was being done, even to their own children. And yes, we’re all limited beings, and we all have to earn a living. Well, you can’t please everyone. At any rate, I gave up trying before I turned forty.
Yes, there will be a third essay. It will cover still more consequences of what I’ve been delineating. Some of them might be pleasant, so stay tuned.
This will be a rather sad piece, I fear. Still, hang in there. You never know when a ray of light might come through the clouds.
***
Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson! “You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? “Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, “Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! “You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
Among the Modernist poets, Thomas Stearns Eliot stands supreme. His superb images and allusions were made possible by great perspicacity and a wealth of learning to which few others of the era could aspire. His mastery of hidden rhyme and metric schemes spoke of a singularly sensitive “ear.” Yet much of his work is terribly depressing, daunting to read in quantity, and troublesome to recommend to others for that reason. His magnum opusThe Waste Land is emblematic of his sensibility.
The Waste Land speaks of post-World War I Europe: the devastation and enervation the Great War wrought upon it. Physically, Eliot’s Britain suffered somewhat less than the Continental nations. Yet Britain’s exhaustion was as deep as that of France or Germany, if not deeper. As the center of “advanced” sociopolitical thought for the West, its malaise would have unequaled consequences for our civilization.
Eliot could sense this. Indeed, with the symptoms of civilizational decay all around him, one of his intellect could hardly deny it. Nevertheless, he worked tirelessly to record his perceptions, in poems of exquisite structure and power. But I wonder if he could have withstood the rot that is upon us of today.
***
Among the things a civilization requires for cohesion is a set of near-unanimously agreed norms. They don’t necessarily have to agree with the norms or principles of other times and places, though to be sure, some norms are more stable than others, and bring more practical advantages to the civilization that adopts them.
There are other features common to successful civilizations, of course. But its norms are a necessary feature. The civilization of classical Sparta held to its norms better than the rest of the world around it. Until it was overrun by superior force, it was the stablest state of its time and place – even though its norms would elicit horror if they were imposed upon a contemporary people.
When a sufficient percentage of the populace disaffiliates from the common norms, the civilization is in trouble. It develops insular sub-populations: enclaves and exclaves in which persons from the larger society would be uncomfortable, even endangered. Historically, for the greater part of the nation to reassert and reimpose the norms by force upon such sub-populations has seldom worked. What matters, then, is the allegiance itself: the emotional bonding to the norms by the overwhelming majority.
Though a society’s norms may appear as mere customs to an outside observer, their operational character is that of moral boundaries. Some things are compulsory; some things are forbidden; and some things, though not proscribed by law, are simply “not done.” To conform to the norms is to be “a citizen in good standing.” Violators are punished, whether by legal penalties or social ones.
The norms of pre-World War I Europe were Christian and optimistic. The century before the War had brought unprecedented economic, technological, and social progress to every nation of the Old World. The ninety-nine years from the conclusion of the Battle of Waterloo to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand were the greatest era of peace and civilizational development Mankind had ever witnessed.
Note: I said progress, not “perfection.” There are no perfect eras and no perfect societies, and there never will be. Mankind is fallen. Our propensity for serious errors and outright evil is ineradicable until the Second Coming. Besides, find me two people who agree on what would constitute a “perfect” society. Defining “perfection” in any context is like trying to sculpt steam.
The unprecedented destruction of the Great War shattered Europe’s confidence in its norms, and thus in its future. Socialism, atheism, moral relativism, and solipsism – intellectual pathogens that had been held in check by the principles of the Christian Enlightenment – were freed to wreak destruction upon a generation of disaffected and unmoored young Europeans. Their elders were mostly too tired and disheartened to check them.
***
A civilization’s norms are often best expressed in compact imperatives:
Obey the law.
Be considerate.
Respect life.
Defend the family.
Stay clean.
Avoid excess.
Love your neighbor.
Really, could a torrent of words express those values any better? I think not, though I’m willing to entertain arguments to the contrary.
These ideas, which were once considered so fundamental as to constitute a complete moral-ethical education, were nearly universally accepted and observed in both America and pre-Great War Europe. The “lost generation” that prevailed artistically after the War largely dismissed them as “failed” – without having argued successfully against them. They regarded the War itself as an unimpeachable refutation.
Note that even though several of the premier artists of that era were Americans, the sense of civilizational enervation and decay hardly touched the United States. Americans were willing to consume the products of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck without taking them as panoramic descriptions of the nation as a whole. American society had its problems – the Great Depression would teach us that — but we continued to believe in ourselves. We remained a nearly-unanimous Christian-Enlightenment society. Dissidents were few; deviates did their best to stay hidden. The insular sub-populations among us were not significantly influential.
Initially, World War II appeared to do no greater damage to our norms and our fidelity to them than had World War I. The thinkers and commentators of the first two postwar decades remained optimistic. They foresaw unending social and economic progress, this time with America lighting the way for the rest of the world. But they may have been mistaken about that.
***
He looked unwell, not in the body but in the spirit. His face was slack and his mouth hung partway open. I could hear his breathing when he was still ten yards away. He tramped through the remnants of the spring snow as if he had lost his strength, or his will to use it. “What’s up, Louis?” Even his shrug spoke of a bone-deep weariness. “Nothing. Out for a walk. Are you busy?” I am never busy, as he reckons it. “Not at the moment. Coffee?” “Sure.” We went inside, fetched coffee and sat at my dinette table. It’s about large enough to set a TV dinner on and still have room for the salt and pepper service, but I don’t need more. “Are things not going well?” I said. “No, no real changes. Life goes on.” That it does. “You don’t look your best.” “I know.” He wrapped his hands around his mug and hunched over it, as if he sought words it wouldn’t take too much effort to speak. I’ve never been happy to wait, but I have learned to wait for him. It has never been time wasted. “They’re killing themselves, Malcolm.” “Who is?” He jerked an arm at nothing. “All of them. All the ones you thought I could protect.” The mug quivered in his hand. “How so, Louis?” He told me the story of Celeste and Alex and their baby. When he wound down, he waited for me to tell him he was wrong, in whole or in part. I had nothing to say. He was right.
Of the seven imperatives that lead the previous segment, which would you say are still accepted and observed by the overwhelming majority in today’s America?
I’d have a tough time arguing that any one of them retains its previous force. If they were important to the cohesion of American society, then what ought we to have expected from the weakening of allegiance to them?
The norms of the Christian Enlightenment cannot sustain themselves without allegiants, and their number declines daily. No other norm – that of Cthulhu excepted – has arisen to cement us together. Whence, therefore, should we expect to go, other than to Eliot’s Waste Land?
[With applause and deep gratitude to Anthony Esolen for his highly relevant essay of yesterday.]
Hey, it’s Monday. Never imagine that that doesn’t distress a “retired” guy quite as much as a still-working stiff. Actually, I had more free time when I was working for someone else…and I’m not the only retired engineer who would say so.
***
1. What’s so important about this “freedom” crap?
If you’re a Washington Post editor, it might not be entirely clear to you:
Political freedom is the central concept of the Enlightenment. Yes, the Enlightenment was largely propelled by white European thinkers. So what? Is the Post trying to tell us that persons of other races have no desire to be free? Or do its editors have something more sinister in mind?
Yet this paper, once regarded as a jewel of American journalism, is owned by the founder of Amazon. Go figure.
Charles Thomas Munger (born January 1, 1924) is an American billionaire investor, businessman, former real estate attorney, architectural designer, and philanthropist. He is vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by Warren Buffett; Buffett has described Munger as his closest partner and right-hand man. Munger served as chairman of Wesco Financial Corporation from 1984 through 2011. He is also chairman of the Daily Journal Corporation, based in Los Angeles, California, and a director of Costco Wholesale Corporation.
Clearly, this is a man who knows a little something about money. Here’s additional evidence to that effect:
When a billionaire who’s one of Warren Buffett’s longtime lieutenants speaks on the subject, it’s wise to listen.
An Airbnb user who never intends to leave. Tenants not paying enough rent to keep up buildings. A roommate temporarily renting a room who later decides not to move out.
Under the Legislature’s misleadingly named “Good Cause Eviction” bill, these occupants can all remain in their apartments forever and the property owner has virtually no recourse.
“No Eviction Ever” would be a better name for an absurdly vague, sweeping proposal that would place strict new limits on rent increases and evictions for nearly 1.6 million New York renters.
While some revisions are likely, the business community and real-estate industry nonetheless fear it’ll become law with its devastating core elements intact.
The bill broadly defines nearly anyone who pays another person to occupy real estate in New York as a “tenant” and expressly prevents landlords from removing them except in the narrowest circumstances.
New York City’s insane rent-control and rent-stabilization ordinances have destroyed the confidence of landlords in the Big Apple. Many of them have been frantically striving to get out of that role. The conversion of apartment buildings to condominia is one approach; another is just to sell the BLEEP!ing building, tenants and all, to some ignorant fool who’s unaware of what the city will do to him. A few landlords, driven to despair, have simply abandoned their properties…and have found in the aftermath that the city will pursue them wherever they might flee.
Now we have this – statewide.
Don’t sign up with AirBNB or the Hospitality Exchange. The downside is too steep.
A spokesman for ACT Policing has confirmed that LRADs were deployed during the anti-vaccine protests.
Last weekend in Canberra the Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw complained that the grassroots movement against forced jabs were a “challenge” for law enforcement. Videos from the march show huge crowds rising up against their government’s dictates which is why pro-mandate government officials retaliated.
The police deployed long-range acoustic devices (LRADs), which transmit at high volumes and frequencies. Even if they are referred to as “non-lethal weapons”, Canberra protesters (including women and children) were badly burned by directed microwave energy beams, complaining of blisters on their faces, arms, and torsos. Concentrated microwave radiation can inflict painful burns on the skin from long distances away.
Protesters were also reporting feeling nauseous, and suffering from vertigo and dizziness – outcomes associated with acoustic crowd control weapons.
This is nasty stuff. It can kill, cripple, sterilize, and generally ruin your day. I have personal experience to this effect, having worked on EM weapon systems for many years.
Why are the governments of two important AngloSphere nations so averse to admitting to error? Have their ruling classes gone insane, or is it merely a case of “the worst getting on top” — ?
Beware, America. We’re as afflicted as the Canadians and the Australians, and sooner or later it will bite us. Indeed, it’s already taking some hefty nibbles.
Some argue COVID-19 vaccine mandates are human rights violations. Not really, say experts on actual human rights violations.
In fact, some point to the more fundamental right of everyone to be protected from COVID-19 – particularly as variants continue to disproportionately impact the unvaccinated.
You’ve got to love it. “Experts on actual human rights violations.” “More fundamental right.” “Disproportionate impact.” How did this clown manage not to work in “minorities and the poor will suffer most” — ?
Forcing something into an unwilling person’s body under any other circumstances is an act of rape. No one and no government has a “right” to do that to anyone. Full Stop.
But that phrase “fundamental right” was carefully chosen. It’s one of the entering wedges of the Left in their campaign against human freedom. Have a few other instances:
“We have a fundamental right to be safe from gun violence.”
“We have a fundamental right to affordable housing.”
“We have a fundamental right to non-GMO food.”
“We have a fundamental right to a living wage.”
“We have a fundamental right to health care.”
“Fundamental rights” “Fundamental!” Don’t you dare claim your rights to your life, liberty, and your honestly acquired property are superior to these, you damnable freedom weenie! These are FUNDAMENTAL!
This is the sort of talk that makes me look longingly at the Barrett .50 and the stash of Oreo Double-Stufs®. As one my favorite Heinlein protagonists said, “Some people talk better if they breathe vacuum.”
***
That’s all for today, I think. I have other responsibilities to meet, a novel straining to be born, and a need for a nap. Enjoy your (ulp) Monday.
It’s amazed me the extent to which many Western governments during the “pandemic” adopted the identical hostility to alternate prophylactics, palliatives and treatments and had the identical fixation on so-called vaccination, lockdowns, economic destruction, statistical distortion,[1] and general viciousness. The following is from an article that suggests what the common thread is:
Pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, and Astra-Zeneca were actively lobbying governments to buy their vaccines as early as February 2020, supposedly less than a month after the genetic sequence (or partial sequence) was made available by China.
As a person who spent his whole professional career in pharmaceutical and vaccine development, I found the whole concept of going from scratch to a ready-to-use vaccine in a few months simply preposterous.
Something did not add up.
I knew of the names with which everyone has become familiar. Bill Gates, Neil Ferguson, Jeremy Farrar, Anthony Fauci, and others had either been lobbying for or pursuing the lockdown strategies for many years. But still, the scope of the actions seemed too large to even be explained by those names alone.
So, the fundamental questions that I have been asking myself have been why and who? The “Why” seems to always come back to issues besides public health. Of course the “Who” had the obvious players such as the WHO, China, CDC, NIH/NIAID, and various governments but there seemed to be more behind it than that. These players have been connected to the “public health” aspect but that seemed to be only scratching the surface.[2]
Spoiler alert: the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are extremely active and successful in recruiting a lot of people around the world in and out of government. And the number of major corporations signing on to the WEF is amazing. Serious money is behind the WEF.
I don’t think Mr. Koops goes far enough in emphasizing the destructive purpose of the WEF and its astonishing totalitarian, revolutionary objectives that we, the mole people, are to end up owning nothing, frolicking among the daisies, and touching our cap to our betters. Build back better with “better” defined by whom? Do those elitist scum think that we’ll all just give up our houses and bank accounts voluntarily because of the sheer brilliance of the Great Reset that has issued from the mind of Klaus the Great? This will happen by democratic means?
Still, it’s a terrific article if for no other reason that he knows vaccines and blows the whistle on the absurdly short development process. The reasonable suspicions of the mole people about a deeply hidden depopulation agenda are another thing entirely but that would require another article addressing the statistical fraud and the concealment of the amazing adverse reactions seen post injection. The times are so absurd that absurd notions need to be addressed as well.
Notes [1] “Died of covid,” “infection survival rate > 95.5% = immense peril,” “adverse reaction < 14 days after injection not vaccine related,” “omicron variant deadly deadly,” “infants need vaccination.” [2] “The Next Step For The World Economic Forum.” By Roger Koops, ZeroHedge, 2/20/22 (emphasis removed).
Forgive me, Gentle Reader. Because of the graphic above, which I found over at 90 Miles From Tyranny, my memory has assaulted me again, and so I find that I must do a terrible thing. How terrible it is, I shall leave for you to decide.
About thirty-five years ago, Long Island’s regional disgrace published an op-ed piece from some socialist flack who argued that socialism is superior to capitalism because it’s “more democratic.” The words democracy and democratic have been used as the cover for a multitude of sins, but that one struck me with particular force. And so I wrote an angry letter to the rag dissecting the fallacies presented in that op-ed. It appeared on the Letters page a few days later.
In the usual case, diatribes such as mine result in nothing much. However, that letter was an exception. A day or two after the letter appeared, I received a call from a very pleasant gentleman named Leslie Ramsammy, who was at that time running for the presidency of Guyana. It proved an illuminating encounter for us both.
Those who hate capitalism will do anything to slander, undermine, and destroy it. This has been demonstrated repeatedly since before World War II. Below, I present a compact review of the major attempts, taken from the late Dr. Murray Rothbard’s book For A New Liberty:
Let us consider the record of recent decades:
1. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the liberal intellectuals came to the conclusion that capitalism was suffering from inevitable “secular stagnation,” a stagnation imposed by the slowing down of population growth, the end of the old Western frontier, and by the supposed fact that no further inventions were possible. All this spelled eternal stagnation, permanent mass unemployment, and therefore the need for socialism, or thoroughgoing State planning, to replace free-market capitalism. This on the threshold of the greatest boom in American history!
2. During the 1950s, despite the great boom in postwar America, the liberal intellectuals kept raising their sights; the cult of “economic growth” now entered the scene. To be sure, capitalism was growing, but it was not growing fast enough. Therefore free-market capitalism must be abandoned, and socialism or government intervention must step in and force-feed the economy, must build investments and compel greater saving in order to maximize the rate of growth, even if we don’t want to grow that fast. Conservative economists such as Colin Clark attacked this liberal program as “growthmanship.”
3. Suddenly, John Kenneth Galbraith entered the liberal scene with his best-selling The Affluent Society in 1958. And just as suddenly, the liberal intellectuals reversed their indictments. The trouble with capitalism, it now appeared, was that it had grown too much; we were no longer stagnant, but too well off, and man had lost his spirituality amidst supermarkets and automobile tail fins. What was necessary, then, was for government to step in, either in massive intervention or as socialism, and tax the consumers heavily in order to reduce their bloated affluence.
4. The cult of excess affluence had its day, to be superseded by a contradictory worry about poverty, stimulated by Michael Harrington’s The Other America in 1962. Suddenly, the problem with America was not excessive affluence, but increasing and grinding poverty—and, once again, the solution was for the government to step in, plan mightily, and tax the wealthy in order to lift up the poor. And so we had the War on Poverty for several years.
5. Stagnation; deficient growth; over-affluence; over-poverty; the intellectual fashions changed like ladies’ hemlines. Then, in 1964, the happily short-lived Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution issued its then-famous manifesto, which brought us and the liberal intellectuals full circle. For two or three frenetic years we were regaled with the idea that America’s problem was not stagnation but the exact reverse: in a few short years all of America’s production facilities would be automated and cybernated, incomes and production would be enormous and superabundant, but everyone would be automated out of a job. Once again, free-market capitalism would lead to permanent mass unemployment, which could only be remedied—you guessed it!—by massive State intervention or by outright socialism. For several years, in the mid- 1960s, we thus suffered from what was justly named the “Automation Hysteria.”1
6. By the late 1960s it was clear to everyone that the automation hysterics had been dead wrong, that automation was proceeding at no faster a pace than old-fashioned “mechanization” and indeed that the 1969 recession was causing a falling off in the rate of increase of productivity. One hears no more about automation dangers nowadays; we are now in the seventh phase of liberal economic flip-flops.
7. Affluence is again excessive, and, in the name of conservation, ecology, and the increasing scarcity of resources, free-market capitalism is growing much too fast. State planning, or socialism, must, of course, step in to abolish all growth and bring about a zero-growth society and economy— in order to avoid negative growth, or retrogression, sometime in the future! We are now back to a super-Galbraithian position, to which has been added scientific jargon about effluents, ecology, and “spaceship earth,” as well as a bitter assault on technology itself as being an evil polluter. Capitalism has brought about technology, growth—including population growth, industry, and pollution—and government is supposed to step in and eradicate these evils…. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter put the whole shoddy performance of liberal intellectuals into a nutshell a generation ago:
Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.
I trust that the matter is adequately elucidated.
***
One more thing before I close for the morning. Bad ideas seldom simply vanish, even after repeated, progressively wearying demonstrations of their horrors. The above was motivated not merely by the graphic at the top, but by how Dr. Ramsammy, an intelligent and highly educated man, accepted the “socialism is better because it’s democratic” premise almost reflexively.
If anyone still fails to understand why the words democracy and democratic have begun to make me violently ill – emphasis on the violent part – see me after class. I’ll pick out a new switch just for you.
In the early morning – obscenely early by most Americans’ standards – is when the ideas that spur deeper contemplation usually occur to me. Perhaps that’s because the more recently awakened is one’s mind, the more likely it is to perceive without distraction. The world certainly provides a wealth of distractions, but at 4:00 AM most of them are still abed and asleep. At any rate, I’m less likely to focus on them.
This morning I have a striking parallelism in mind. It concerns the way in which certain things – in one case certain words and ideas; in the other certain human actions – have been driven from acceptability to virtual criminality. The links between them are disapproval and our dislike of being disapproved.
***
After the conclusion of World War II, agencies that had been at work among American liberals began to attack the prevailing notions about the races. Let there be no ambiguity about this: the great majority of American Caucasians were uneasy when around Negroes, thought little of their capabilities, and wanted to live apart from them. Moreover, typical American Caucasians were unabashed about saying so. For example, until the Brooklyn Dodgers signed the greatly talented Jackie Robinson in 1947, the professional sports leagues made no allowance for them. But sentiment toward treating the members of all races according to their merits was growing.
During roughly the same period, there arose a tumult, originally concentrated at certain colleges, over “free speech.” I don’t have all the details, but from what I’ve read the University of California at Berkeley was where matters came to a head. The student-led movement claimed that students’ freedom of expression was abridged by university rules that strictly forbade political activities. The University eventually capitulated to the movement’s demands, but matters didn’t rest there.
In both cases, the critical wedge was disapproval. American Caucasians generally were shamed out of prejudging Negroes according to their racial category. To suggest that Negroes were somehow less able than Caucasians became effectively unspeakable; to utter such a conviction would get you tossed out of “polite society.” Similarly, the student activists shamed university administrators out of their staunch prohibitions against on-campus political action. They became embarrassed at the suggestion that collegians should have fewer rights than adults in the society beyond, simply because of their ages and educational status. The suggestion that “those kids” were “too immature” to be permitted political postures and activities became as unspeakable as any talk about differences between white and black.
The politicization of university campuses and the movement toward “desegregation” both blossomed from those sources. In both cases, what had previously been common was de facto shamed out of existence.
***
In the late Fifties, other sentiments were changing as well. Owing to the rise of certain entertainers, notably including Lenny Bruce, words and phrases previously deemed publicly unspeakable – mainly vulgarisms about sex and biological waste products – were entering our common lexicon. What had previously been an offense that would get one bodily ejected from a social gathering slowly crept into ordinary verbal behavior. A 1971 Supreme Court decision, Cohen v. California, actually ratified the use of the word fuck in public, such that it would henceforth be under First Amendment protection and immune to action by law enforcement. People became unembarrassed, in the main, about such language.
Concurrently, the broad-spectrum “coming out of the closet” of the whole range of sexual and parasexual behavior had begun. According to some commentators, the animating developments were highly reliable contraception – in particular, the birth-control pill – and the ongoing secularization of American society. What had previously been considered enormously shameful – adultery; premarital sex; homosexuality; polyamory; multiple-partner sexual encounters – gained a foothold and slowly overcame the prior inhibitions and statues against it.
In these cases, personal inhibition was the primary barrier against those forms of self-indulgence. “Decent people don’t talk or behave that way,” was the sentiment…and persons who held themselves to be decent would have no truck with those who did. As regards sexual conduct, was also a degree of fear of being “found out,” especially about adultery and homosexuality. Adultery could get a husband judicially stripped of all his possessions, his right to see his children, and in some states his right to marry. Homosexuality could get the practitioner lynched.
The process here was a gradual decloaking of the previously forbidden speech and actions by disparaging inhibition about them. “We’re all adults here.” “Come on, you’ve been around.” “What are you, some kind of prude?” All in the name of “tolerance.”
***
There are many similar cases of disapproval and tolerance as political wedges, but an all-encompassing treatment of these things would require a multi-volume history of American life and society since World War II. Let those mentioned above stand for the rest.
The critical development is one I have not yet mentioned: the transition of these behaviors and movements from suppressed to accepted through assertive to aggressive. What for hundreds of years had been in statu quo, once it was released from the general level of inhibition, swiftly turned on us who had released it.
Today, the mere suggestion of speech and behavior codes for the young is considered obscene. High-school students routinely get away with speaking to their teachers and administrators in the vilest imaginable terms. Punishment for such disrespect is rare, even when it verges on violence. The schools themselves have been completely politicized, such that only one political viewpoint is acceptable in any one of them. To express the contrary view can get one assaulted, even mortally.
Similarly, few dare to state openly what had previously been the common conviction: that there are differences between the races, at least statistically, and that people have a perfect right to live and do business “among our own.” We went from a normal state of affairs, no different here from what prevailed – and still prevails – in other lands, to a condition of enforced mixing of the races, especially in our schools and our businesses. The consequences have been dire. They certainly haven’t been confined to the playing fields.
Our common speech has been vulgarized. To refrain from the use of words previously considered “unspeakable” now gets one labeled a bluenose: “Do you think you’re the second coming of William F. Buckley?” Please don’t think this is an exaggeration. I get hit with this sort of disparagement every fucking day.
And need I really detail the explosion of public sexual license: the celebrations of abortion, the “pride” parades, the public fornications, the in-your-face assertion – and demand not merely for tolerance but for actual approval — of one’s sexual orientation or “identity,” however bizarre?
***
The point here is not that I deplore these developments. I do deplore them, and I’ve said so on other occasions. The point is rather that what kept some of them “in the closet” – i.e., vulgar language and sexual license – was widespread and longstanding disapproval, which induced inhibition and privacy. The others – i.e., a preference for one’s own race and disapproval of politics among the immature – have been forced “into the closet” by the incitement of disapproval, especially through the major media, such that widespread prior convictions and preferences became “unspeakable” and in some instances criminal. Once the bottle had been uncorked, what emanated from it could no longer be restrained to any degree. It became ever more aggressive, until today it threatens to unmake ordinary interactions among persons of divergent views.
The Victorians could have told us what lay ahead. However they might speak or behave in private, when the doors were locked and the children were asleep, they always behaved properly in public. They impressed the importance of those public norms onto their children; not to do so was to be regarded as an unfit parent. Those who would not so conduct themselves were relegated to the slums and the lower orders, for no one else would have them.
Disapproval and inhibition might have limited some of the Victorians’ excesses, though it would be difficult to conclude that definitively. What it did do was more important: it stabilized the social order. It rendered public society – the streets, the commerce, and the open institutions of that time and place — safe. This, in an era when virtually everyone of adult years went about armed at all times.
Do you work in a “service” trade? That is: rather than making or enhancing physical goods, do you merely provide a convenient service to others, sparing those others the chore of doing whatever it is for themselves? No need to be shy about it. Many Americans are in that category.
The “service economy” is largely a provider of luxuries. A luxury, colloquially speaking, is something you could forgo without impacting your ability to survive. You might not want to do without it – you might regard yourself as poorer for having lost it – but you’d get by even so.
There’s a gray area between luxuries and necessities, of course. For example, many of us couldn’t keep our homes warm during the winter without the services provided by heating technicians. We don’t know how to service our furnaces. The knowledge of how they work and what they require to keep working has become a specialty of sorts. It isn’t secret, mind you, just not widely studied or acquired.
Some services are pure luxuries. The folks at the fast-food joint who make hamburgers for you. The guys who deliver stuff from nearby stores right to your door. The gentleman who fills out your 1040A for you. You could do all that yourself, couldn’t you? Except for those who are physically or intellectually handicapped or wearing ankle monitors, of course.
When times get tough, people cut back on their purchases of luxuries. Sometimes whole industries collapse for that reason. People who labor in those industries can have it very tough indeed, especially if they don’t have a second bow for their fiddles.
Might you be one such?
***
Things sometimes “move” – in people’s minds, at least – from the luxury to the necessity category. Consider Internet search engines, for example. Twenty-five years ago the phrase was understood by a handful of computer scientists. Today, if you were to need a phone number that you don’t currently have, how would you go about getting it? Phone companies no longer publish phone books, and people mostly don’t memorize phone numbers these days. Lack of access to a good search engine would be a major impediment.
Now consider the Internet itself. The ‘Net makes so many kinds of commerce and communication effortless today that society itself would totter if we were deprived of it. I sell my novels over the ‘Net, with the help of Amazon. The C.S.O. does 80% of her work via the ‘Net. And may God help us if we were ever to run out of reading matter; we’d have to get into the car and drive to a bookstore. Are there any bookstores remaining? For that matter, will the car still start?
Rich societies begin to lose the distinction between luxuries and necessities. It’s one of the unintended consequences of the division of labor, which is a great part of what makes a society rich in the first place. There is no escape:
“Our clan had heavy-lift capacity at one point, didn’t it?”
She nodded. “Yeah, but we sold the plane when Adam’s dad set up shop here. Charisse said she was happy to get rid of it. It made more sense to hire it out, so we wouldn’t have to maintain a plane and train pilots.”
She glanced at the entrance to Morelon House. The old mansion looked as sturdy as ever. It presented an appearance of immutable strength to all who saw it. Yet it had begun to seem to her that the clan had undermined that strength in several ways, with several decisions. None of them had been fatal; indeed, when each was made, it had appeared to be the obvious choice. Yet in combination, they had rendered Clan Morelon massively dependent upon the wills and skills of a multitude of outsiders…persons who might not be as available or dependable as one would hope. —That’s the downside of the division of labor, Al.
Yeah. I can see that, Grandpere. But how could we have avoided it?
—By resisting all the temptations to specialize and to make use of specialists. By purchasing absolute self-sufficiency at the price of economic advantage. Which, incidentally, no clan or society known to history has ever managed to do.
The incentives are too strong, aren’t they?
—Judge for yourself, dear. Put yourself in Charisse’s place at the point when Jack Grenier moved into the area and started offering his services around. Would you have done as she did, knowing only what she did at the time?
Probably. If there’s a lesson in this—
—If there is, Al, no one has ever drawn it. The division of labor is the one and only path toward general prosperity. It can go to an incredible depth. A frightening depth. And it is utterly reliant upon the character and good will of the specialists. Let one critical specialty be corrupted by political forces, or conceive of a grudge against some other group, or even decide that it can rape its customers without fear of reprisal, and the destruction spreads faster than anyone can act to check it.
Judge for yourself.
***
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has arrogated to himself a set of “emergency powers” that include, de facto, the absolute control of the nation’s banks. He plans to use that power to strangle the Freedom Convoy that has expressed the massing dislike of his mandates and decrees. That would seem to put the truckers, and whatever institutions have backed their play, in a tight spot.
It does, really. There’s no point to trivializing it. But it might just cause a showdown between one set of seeming necessities – digital access to one’s savings – and another, far more material set – the ability to move goods from point to point. The truckers could cut Trudeau’s legs out from under him simply by going on a sit-down strike. If he thought the Honkening was an annoying disparagement of his rule, what will he think of the paralysis of Canadian commerce in toto? What will he say to the captains of industry who come knocking at his door, demanding relief?
If the truckers can hold out for two weeks, they could bring down the Trudeau government. Whether they can, I cannot say. But I’d love to see the proposition tested in reality…and not just among our cousins to the north. It might remind us of the relative importance of things – and about what we’d really, truly rather not do without:
Any Convention would be infiltrated by the Left, subverted by special interests, and make it very difficult to get out of this mess. What we need to do is to:
Shrink the bureaucracy – agencies, departments, and entitlements. Start with unnecessary agencies, such as the Consumer Affairs cr@p, Eliminate the Education Dept., HUD, HHS, and Energy.
Make a deal with the states – we’ll reduce the amount your citizens have to send to Washington, if you will take over providing the services – Welfare, Social Security, and other entitlements. National educational mandates dropped, in return for reduction in money sent in the form of block grants. EPA out of your face, with encouragement to work with other states, mostly regional (the prairie states can set up a regional structure, the Great Lakes already have a Compact that has them working in concert, New England states can do the same). And, for example the Coastal states can arrange to have their representatives meet to set up cooperative agreements on fishing, flood control, a regional Coast Guard intercept of smuggled goods. States along the Mississippi could work together, as well.
Some services would remain, such as national defense. That would have a SMALL core of regular military, augmented with state and regional National Guards (I’m anticipating that the smaller states will work together). National Weather Service, which would provide the monitoring with the assistance of local reporters (as the ARES, manned by amateur radio operators, does). Each state would provide a portion of the cost, depending on the number of residents, legal or not. All states would pay the same per-capita amount.
States would be free to allow cross-state purchasing of insurance. That would do a lot to reduce the cost.
Smaller states could purchase services from larger ones, rather than set up the structures themselves. One example is the IOWA testing service. I took the IOWA tests when I was young. They were a fair assessment of what basic skills the students learned each year. The tests have been validated over many years, unlike many of the newer state tests.
We won’t win by making a Big Push to solve this, for once and for all. It’s necessary to work incrementally, chipping away at the Encrusted Left’s Damage. This mess is not like a party your kids held while you were gone, that can be repaired with a whirlwind effort. It’s more like termite damage. It’s going to require a lot of money, work, and time to fix it.
Many of you are likely familiar with the Heckler’s Veto. The gist is that a single heckler can shut down a speaker unilaterally. Perhaps he is so loud, so obnoxious, that nearby authorities are willing to silence the speaker just to rid themselves of the heckler. Or perhaps the cost of removing the heckler is prohibitive. This was an argument that was used in the past when Milo Yiannopoulos used to attend various college campuses, and the security requirements demanded by the universities grew enormous – ostensibly because of the various threats and counter-protests. But universities were all too happy to discover an excuse to rid themselves of a political opponent.
I saw this video and immediately thought of the Heckler’s Veto, how one person (possibly even a plant) can provide the excuse to overthrow a movement. Specifically, let’s talk about Justin Trudeau’s response to Melissa Lantsman.
We are seeing a new variant or expansion of the Heckler’s Veto.
Here’s how it works. If a group of people are doing something the regime or media doesn’t like, if a single Swastika, Confederate flag, or other such device is discovered, the movement is declared to be contaminated. Anything the movement in question wants to talk about is immediately dismissed as racist, Nazi-esque, or otherwise.
If anyone disputes the racist status of the movement, a picture of the Swastika (or other device) bearer is provided as evidence. This provides the justification for shutting down the speaker(s). Like Justin Trudeau here, someone will rebut an argument with “but here is a picture of a Nazi attending your event.”
Now it may be that for the Canadian truckers, some legitimate skinhead types did show up. Or perhaps they were plants – knowing hecklers giving the regime and the media the excuse they needed. Perhaps a combination of both. Who knows? The question then becomes, is the presence of one individual skinhead/plant/whatever, or a very small percentage of such individuals, justification for then shutting down the entire group, and shouting down any supporters as Nazis?
If that is the standard, then all it takes is a single kook, plant, weirdo, or otherwise to show up, and your movement has been hit by Godwin’s Veto, the modern expansion of the Heckler’s Veto. You are done. Whatever you had to say, forget it. It is contaminated now. One Nazi Heckler and anything an entire group of people has to say is immediately dismissed, and if you have the temerity to question the dismissal, as Melissa Lantsman did, then you are smeared with the implication that you, also, are a Nazi.
We have evidence, now, that even the leader of a First World country will use Godwin’s Veto to shut down the speaker(s). This is behavior that has a long tradition from far Leftists, but I cannot recall such a blatant use of Godwin’s Veto by a major world leader directed at an opposition member so dramatically.
Note that it doesn’t have to be conspiracy. Some folks might think this is some kind of centralized affair. I doubt it. There are almost always a few nuts at a protest, and so the regime and sympathetic media can usually count on a nut or two showing up of his own volition. And if there aren’t any, a few nuts on the other side would – and with minimal (if any) prodding from their compatriots – gladly provide the regime/media with a Godwin’s Veto. They don’t need to be ordered to do it by a room full of cartoon villains behind a haze of cigar smoke. That’s the insidious nature of Leftist cultural domination: a conspiracy is unnecessary. Supporters will do it on their own.
Since our contemporary standard appears to be one, or perhaps a few, that’s all it takes. Shut up, racists. There was a Swastika in your crowd. Your dislike of mandates/masks/whatever is thus Nazi-esque. Your views are contaminated. We are permitted to shut you down now. We may confiscate your financial assets. We may compel others to remove you. We may silence you.
All it takes is one Godwin’s Veto.
The demand and incentives for a Godwin’s Veto are intense. Any movement that does not have the blessing of the regime and/or the media is likely to see an attempt to use the Godwin’s Veto. It’s not just about calling an opponent a Nazi, it’s about casting him as one by using an impossible standard to meet: that no kooks, weirdos, or plants will ever be at even one of your events.
We tend to trust labels. (At least, we did back when we were a high-trust society, but perhaps I shouldn’t assume that it remains the case.) If the package says “Chocolate-chip cookies,” we proceed on the assumption that the package contains chocolate-chip cookies. If we discover afterward that it contains something else, our readiness to trust labels henceforward is shaken…especially if it really contained C4 with a compact electric detonator triggered by the convenience flap.
So also with political labels.
There are a lot of folks out there who style themselves “liberals.” These past few decades, the word has taken on a meaning at odds with its origin: “one who favors personal freedom.” But for those of us who remember liberalism when it defended freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and so forth, the label is a cruel reminder of how successful the Left has been at twisting our language out from under us. Indeed, it might have been the Left’s most potent stroke.
It’s the same on the Right. Many who call themselves conservatives hold to notions that don’t…quite…jibe with the original meaning of the word: “one who favors the perpetuation of established ways and institutions.” Many a contemporary “conservative” actually favors rather sweeping changes to established ways and institutions…which puts backs up among those who continue to favor the original meaning.
It’s no longer wise to trust labels that have gone through such contortions. This is especially urgent for those who are used to pulling the voting lever for “everyone with an R after his name.” You could be voting against your true convictions.
I’ve said this before, but it needs to be said again: What we used to call “conservatism” had two different parts to it.
One, an ideological part, one that favored freedom, religion, business, and such,
and two, a merely factional part, dedicated to preserving the Right To Rule of the Ruling Class, the right of the “Higher Orders” to rule over the “Lower Orders.”
“Conservatism” united those who wanted to retain traditions with those who wanted to retain traditional ruling structures.
They sort of go together.
But they don’t have to.
And when one group — the part that seeks primarily to preserve the Right to Rule of America’s legacy, nepot Elite — stops acting as partners with the ideologically minded, freedom-seeking part, and in fact seeks to subjugate them — then we’ve got problems.
That’s a rather precise description of our current political milieu.
***
Polarization advances with the age of the population. In other words, as a population ages, its social, commercial, and political divisions widen and harden, until it becomes nearly impossible for the opposed sides to communicate without epithets. This is in the nature of aging itself, which attaches us ever more firmly to what we know and find familiar, and thus to regard as ever more threatening anything that would disturb those arrangements and practices.
There’s nothing to be done about it, other than this: it is important for each of us to know:
What he really values;
What he definitely detests;
The wherefores in each case.
Each of us is responsible for entering the voting booth knowing what he’s about. If you pull a party-line lever rather than vote discriminatingly, be aware of what you’re endorsing. Party leaderships, strategists, and tacticians have a goal quite different from what you might imagine: they exist to elect persons of their party, and nothing else. Were they to serve any other purpose, they’d soon lose their positions. Electoral success fills the party’s coffers; nothing else does.
This has an implication: the party’s purported policy positions are secondary to its electoral fortunes. The kingmakers will depart from those stands should they become electorally inconvenient, and they’ll do it without a qualm. So while it’s worthwhile to know the party platform, it’s equally important to watch for developments that might jar its luminaries loose from it – and to keep a weather eye on their conduct, especially as re-election time nears.
Labels have been important, but they lack the reinforcing quality of electoral outcomes. Indeed, as politics has professionalized, labels and platforms have taken a backseat to purely practical considerations: the retention of power. This is visible both in the large and in the small. Consider the behavior of party “mavericks” when legislation important to retaining the allegiance of a major constituency is on the table. At such times a “maverick” will seldom vote against his caucus. Those who do – the Manchins; the Sinemas; the Gabbards – are people to watch.
Carlson has nailed a key, if largely unnoticed, development: the rise of the Passive-Aggressive Tyrant. Justin Trudeau qualifies. Though a figurehead rather than an actual president, Joe Biden qualifies. Are there others in the First World? Emmanuel Macron, perhaps? I await the evaluations from European readers of Liberty’s Torch.
The PAT hopes not to be recognized for what he is, i.e., a totalitarian with good manners. He wouldn’t impress a “traditional” tyrant. That sort screams, gesticulates, and pronounces all sorts of dooms upon his enemies…who, of course, are everywhere. People in high places! (Their names would astound you.) People in low places! (Hiding their activities beneath a cloak of poverty…)
Ahem. Excuse me, Gentle Reader. I had a “moment” there, but it has passed. Anyway, the PAT is now an established figure in the Lowerarchy of contemporary politics. The great tyrants of yore might not fear losing their places to him, but he’s certainly something for us to beware. He has his reasons, you see. He tyrannizes us out of a sense of responsibility. He’s very sorry, but he has to take away your rights. It’s “for the good of the nation,” you see. And by skillful exploitation of his media alliances and his general politesse, he manages to seduce a fair number of otherwise sensible people into going along with him…just enough to give him the illusion of “the consent of the governed.”
Tyranny executed with Canadian courtesy is no better than the sort exercised by a screamer in a funny uniform.
Carlson notes that the very same sort of tyranny is already at work in these United States. We don’t equal Canada’s national Politeness Quotient. We swear a lot more, and besides, a lot of us carry guns. But deliberate abridgements of our rights have been taking place under a “public good” rationale since early in 2020. The people conducting those abridgements do so with sorrowful faces. They strive to assure us of the “necessity,” always with the sotto voce proviso that when the “emergency” ends, so will the abridgements.
But they’re lying. Most of us know it now. Some of us knew it from the start.
This is the trajectory of government. Every government, without exception, eventually degenerates into a tyranny. Whether through incompetence or crisis, a strongman will rise. He’s usually waiting in the wings for his chance.
Don’t imagine that a political party will save you:
“Even the iron hand of a national dictator is preferable to a paralytic stroke.” – Alf Landon, governor of Kansas and 1936 candidate for President, in a letter to newly elected president Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933
“If this nation ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now.” – David Reed, United States Senator of Pennsylvania, on the floor of the Senate, 1933
Both the above men were Republicans.
The Passive-Aggressive Tyrant is nevertheless a tyrant. Anarcho-tyranny is tyranny withal.
But the CDC and the FDA won’t give a straight answer to that question [the under reporting factor in the VAERS data] and many others she [Jessica Rose, data analyst] has posed.
“It’s like tumbleweeds blowing by for months, and probably going on a year now,” she said.
Rose emphasizes that she uses raw data rather than “interpretative” data.
“When you’re talking about injecting 1 billion people with an experimental product with … a clear correlation with adverse event arisal, and somebody provides you with strong evidence of causation using certain criteria – for example the Bradford Hill criteria – then it’s time to start listening,” she said.
“This isn’t the time … to defend a narrative which clearly states that there’s no possible way these vaccines can cause injury.”
* * * *
. . . Historically, she pointed out, the maximum number of people allowed to die from a vaccine is 50.
* * * *
The CDC and the regulatory agencies, she said, haven’t analyzed the data using tried and true methods.
“They just say these words, ‘There’s no way these products are causing.’ They even laugh about it. They smirk. Which also really makes me mad, because there are 22,000 people dead in temporal proximity to having taken these products. . . .”
* * * *
“They’re not going to be able to keep hiding the adverse event data,” she said.[1]
CDC Director Walensky downplayed the significance of the VAERS data but as Dr. Rose relentlessly points out, “The CDC and the FDA own VAERS.”
A fascinating article. Kind of a rubber-meets-the-road elaboration from someone well qualified to run the numbers.
When nimrods like this talk about “reimagining” what humans have come up with over the millennia I look forward to what they have in store for us. I has to be good and they certainly don’t have a hidden agenda.
Yes, let’s have things decided by 500 leftist twits.
If you’ve never seen the acronym “RHIP,” it stands for “Rank Hath Its Privileges.” Today we inaugurate a new version of that old maxim, Class Hath its Privileges. For it isn’t just “rank,” interpreted narrowly as elevation within a hierarchy, that decides who can do what to whom, without penalty even if with malice aforethought. It helps just as much to be:
Lawyers for the Clinton campaign paid a technology company to “infiltrate” servers belonging to Trump Tower, and later the White House, in order to establish an “inference” and “narrative” to bring to government agencies linking Donald Trump to Russia, a filing from Special Counsel John Durham found.
Durham filed a motion on Feb. 11 focused on potential conflicts of interest related to the representation of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who has been charged with making a false statement to a federal agent. Sussmann has pleaded not guilty.
The indictment against Sussmann, says he told then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in September 2016, less than two months before the 2016 presidential election, that he was not doing work “for any client” when he requested and held a meeting in which he presented “purported data and ‘white papers’ that allegedly demonstrated a covert communications channel” between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which has ties to the Kremlin.
But Durham’s filing on Feb. 11, in a section titled “Factual Background,” reveals that Sussmann “had assembled and conveyed the allegations to the FBI on behalf of at least two specific clients, including a technology executive (Tech Executive 1) at a U.S.-based internet company (Internet Company 1) and the Clinton campaign.”
Durham’s filing said Sussmann’s “billing records reflect” that he “repeatedly billed the Clinton Campaign for his work on the Russian Bank-1 allegations.”
Is this news? It was already known during the Trump Administration. Yet nothing was done then. Who wants to bet that anything will happen to Hillary and her confreres now? Anything legal and above board, that is.
A colorful but sadly untrue tale about the Roman Emperor Caligula is that he installed his favorite horse in the Senate. According to some sources, he wanted to do so, but was assassinated before he could act on the impulse. Perhaps that was the inspiration for this Biden appointment:
A recent, high-level hire at the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy is a drag queen, LGBTQ+ activist who has “lectured” on kink at college campuses and participated in interviews about fetish roleplay. In one interview, Sam Brinton – now a top Biden official – even discusses having sex with animals.
Brinton – who has written in opposition to “gay conversion therapy” – was recently tapped to serve as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy for the Department of Energy. He also goes by “Sister Ray Dee O’Active” – his drag queen alter ego.
In his own website’s bio, Brinton reveals:
Sam has worn his stilettos to Congress to advise legislators about nuclear policy and to the White House where he advised President Obama and Michelle Obama on LGBT issues. He shows young men and women everywhere he goes that they can be who they are and gives them courage. Once, while he was walking around Disney World in 6 inch stilettos with his boyfriend, a young gay boy saw Sam with his boyfriend and started crying. He told his mother, ‘”t’s true, Mom. WE can be our own princess here.”
Brinton is an active member of the Washington, D.C. chapter of a drag queen society known as the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” which lists him as the principal contact on its 2016 and 2018 tax forms. During the group’s “Lavender Mass 2021,” Brinton can be seen referring to Anthony Fauci, who was declared a “saint,” as “Daddy Fauci.”
Could any Republican president have gotten away with such an appointment? What have the mainstream media said about it? Anyone? Bueller?
You see, members of the Ruling Class don’t have to answer questions whose answers would embarrass them. Instead, they can just disparage the asker. Justin Trudeau has made it plain that he considers himself every bit as much an R.C. member in good standing as our own Dodderin’ Joe. He’s just got fewer peons to lord it over, is all.
There are precedents, of course. Trudeau wouldn’t have sounded quite so haughty otherwise.
***
The pictures of Ruling Class members defying their own mandates have become legion. There’s no reason to recount them all. Nor need I recap the many instances of Congressional insider trading, a practice forbidden to us of the Great Unwashed. And of course Ruling Class members are exempt from other requirements of the law, such as the minimum-wage laws, the Social Security Act, ObamaCare, and other yokes fastened upon our shoulders. But really, why should such godlike beings be bothered to conform to the rules the rest of us must obey? Didn’t they ascend to the Ruling Class for that very reason?
A class is defined by its legal and social privileges. The aristocrats of medieval times were not distinguished by their lineages or their deeds, but by the things they were allowed to do, without penalty, that commoners were not. There is reason to believe that the majority of medieval aristocrats were fairly responsible stewards of their lands and of public order within them. That does not justify the creation of a class of men who could wield high, middle, and low justice over others, but who would normally escape all consequences for deeds for which a commoner would be severely punished.
The members of the Twenty-First Century’s Ruling Class aren’t there by right of inheritance…well, not most of them…but they assert the same privileges as those medieval nobles. There isn’t a microgram of humility or shame to be found among them. Nor is there any privilege, great or small, that they won’t award themselves or one another.
The Climate Intelligence Foundation (CLINTEL) has cataloged significant errors in the UN IPCC AR6 [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report] Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) and distributed this error listing and analysis to the IPCC Chair and other world leaders to inform them of these errors.
The identified errors result in the SPM failing to meet standards of objective scientific integrity and therefore [it] misleads world leaders regarding appropriate climate policy by erroneously pointing to a “climate crisis” that does not exist in reality. The seriously flawed SPM is “inappropriately being used to justify drastic social, economic and human changes through severe mitigation, while prudent adaptation” would be much more appropriate.
That’s what yesterday meant to most people. Not football. A social gathering with plenty of nosherai. Here at the Fortress, yesterday had another, far more significant meaning, which I shall refrain from disclosing, out of regard for the feelings of my Significant Other.
Yes, this is the introduction to yet another “assorted” column.
***
As we no longer follow football, the C.S.O. and I watched two movies yesterday. One was very serious, the other was rather tongue-in-cheek. Both are to be recommended.
The first movie was Eye in the Sky, a 2015 military-technological thriller starring Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman. It concerns an attempt to eliminate an Islamic terrorist cell that’s complicated by the presence of an innocent: a young girl. I shan’t spoil the movie for you with more details. Suffice it to say that it’s a stunner, and that Mirren and Rickman give their usual superb performances. See it!
The second movie was Jolt, starring Kate Beckinsale, Bobby Cannavale, and Stanley Tucci. Beckinsale’s Lindy has a problem: owing to “too much cortisol,” when irritated beyond a certain threshold she tends to “snap” in a homicidal fashion. As the cortisol also makes her stronger and faster than most other human beings of either sex, this poses a certain problem for her in social interactions. She controls her impulses with a shock vest designed for her by her psychiatrist, played by Stanley Tucci…but matters go somewhat awry when she’s told that her brand-new lover has just been murdered. This one is available through Amazon Prime. It’s both high-body-count for the action junkies and delightfully funny for…well, anyone who can endure a little profanity. Highly recommended.
***
I would like to give a bit of advice to other indie novelists, and so I shall:
Don’t disparage persons who differ with you.
It would cost you in readership and revenue.
This is not about having “a right to your own opinion.” It’s about effectiveness in promoting your works and the ideas they contain. You will do those things more effectively if you refrain from castigating, slandering, or condemning others who have their own opinions.
If this point seems a bit too abstruse for you, perhaps you’d be better advised to write children’s books. After all, children don’t usually choose the books they’re given to read. They virtually never pay for them.
***
I have become violently sick of the words democratic and democracy. They have a semi-honorable history, having been integral to the political ascendancy of Andrew Jackson, but over the years they’ve been shriven of both objective meaning and innocent application. Consider the rantings about “an attack on our democracy” we’ve heard recently, and reflect.
“Democracy,” stripped of all its rosy connotations, means majority rule, unlimited by anyone’s notions about rights or freedom. A lynch mob is “democratic,” locally at least. The United States is emphatically not a “democracy,” even if we use a quasi-democratic process – elections – to choose some of our public officials. It is a constitutional federated republic, in which individuals’ rights are recognized and protected, and regional variations in law and policy are permitted.
The Satanic Temple recently opened an after-school “Satan Club” in a Moline, Illinois, middle school, as part of its nationwide campaign to push back against the Christian Good News Clubs offered to schoolchildren after regular-hour classes….
Lucien Greaves, the Satanic Temple spokesperson, told Fox News about the clubs, “I’m hoping that with our presence, people can see that good people can have different perspectives, sometimes on the same mythology, but not mean any harm.”
Greaves also said, “We’re not including items of religious opinion … We’re not teaching children about Satanism. They’re just going to know that this is taught by Satanists.”
The Satanic Temple is not hiding the fact that it created the clubs to take on the Christian club called the Good News Club — which has become its No. 1 nemesis.
Said Greaves, “The after-school Satan Clubs were conceived of in order to give an alternative to [the] religious indoctrination [of] after-school programs.”
The Satanists’ aim could hardly be clearer. “Oh, we don’t intend to preach Satanism to your little darlings. On the other hand, if they should ask about it…😁”
We’re living through a real-world re-enactment of Stephen King’s horror novel The Stand, though the disease in that one was far more virulent than the Kung Flu.
A 500gb SSD drive that failed after barely five years! You know…a drive that just a few years before I installed it was unimaginably expensive, and a couple of generations before that, was simply unimaginable!
“Solid-state drives” are a marvel, to be sure. They have near-instantaneous response times. They’re virtually ideal for read-only or read-mostly items such as program images. But they do have some downsides, and they are more expensive than conventional rotating magnetic media: i.e., disks.
Quite recently I purchased a 2 Terabyte SSD for a new computer. It cost about $250, which by today’s standards rates it as “expensive.” But I’ll bet CBD paid much more for the 500 Gigabyte SSD that just failed him, five years back. That’s how fast technology has been moving lately.
About forty-two years ago, I purchased a microcomputer. It had a Zilog Z80 eight-bit CPU, two eight inch floppy disks, and 64 kilobytes of RAM. It ran the CP/M 2.2 disk-operating system. It required a separate ASCII terminal, interfaced to it by RS-232 asynchronous communications, to operate. I had to program it in assembly language. It cost me nearly $4000. And to my eyes, it was the marvel of the age.
You young folks don’t know how lucky you are.
***
Concerning the Canadian “Freedom Convoy,” what more is there to say? The Tyrant of Ottawa has sent everything but the Boy Scouts to attack the truckers and force them to disperse. Justin Trudeau, arguably the second-worst chief executive in the First World – hey, America’s still Number One, baby – simply will not allow anyone to defy him. Unfortunately, it appears he’ll get his way.
But an American Freedom Convoy is forming as we speak. I wonder what sort of reactions that one will get, considering how our domestic tyrants are steadily backing away from all their authoritarian decrees? And have you noticed that the vaccine makers themselves are backing away from their unqualified claims that their product is perfectly safe for toddlers?
Word gets around. The lie might travel faster, but the truth will get around. In time, people will know what they need to know – and those who’ve tried to keep them from knowing it will pay. We’ve seen that with race, we’ve seen it with sexual perversions, and now we’ll see it with government-imposed “lockdowns,” “mandates,” and “vaccines.”
***
Today, Valentine’s Day, is actually the feast day of a Catholic saint by that name. Saint Valentine was a Third Century priest in Rome at the time of Emperor Claudius II. The Emperor, as emperors sometimes do, issued an insane decree forbidding Roman citizens to marry. He thought it would help to promote enlistment in the Roman Army. Valentine went right on conducting marriages for Roman Christians. This made the Emperor very unhappy.
Claudius ordered Valentine’s arrest, but it didn’t work out quite as he had imagined. While in prison, Valentine restored sight to his jailer’s blind daughter, causing the jailer and his entire extended household, forty-six people in total, to immediately convert to Christianity. The news made Claudius order Valentine’s execution. Saint Valentine left a farewell note for the jailer’s daughter, whom he had befriended, and signed it “From Your Valentine.” He was beheaded on February 14th, giving us Valentine’s Day.
Behead someone you love today!
***
That’s all for the moment, Gentle Readers. I intend to spend the rest of the day away from this monstrosity and all other things digital. See you tomorrow, I hope. (Have some chocolate and think of me.)
Addendum to my last post and to the great relief of the Weather Channel:
An 1871 dataset of sea temperatures across the Great Barrier Reef in Australia has been compared to recent measurements logged at the same reef areas. No differences in temperature were found by Dr. Bill Johnson, leading him to conclude: “Alarming claims that the East Australian Current has warmed due to global warming are therefore without foundation.”
