Dec 27 2021

Comprehension: A Primer

     First, a few quotes:

     You say: “There are persons who have no money,” and you turn to the law. But the law is not a breast that fills itself with milk. Nor are the lacteal veins of the law supplied with milk from a source outside society. – Frederic Bastiat, The Law

     ‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.’ – Frank Herbert, Dune

[I]f the temperature has risen 10 degrees since dawn today, an extrapolation will show that we will all be burned to a crisp before the end of the month, if this trend continues. Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument. In the real world, everything depends on where we are now, at what rate we are moving, in what direction, and — most important of all — what is the specific nature of the process generating the numbers being extrapolated. Obviously, if the rise in temperature is being caused by the spinning of the Earth taking us into the sunlight, then the continuation of that spinning will take us out of the sunlight again and cause temperatures to fall when night comes. – Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed

     In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. [Mark Twain, Life On The Mississippi]

     I’m sure my Gentle Readers have seen some of those before. They’ve all appeared at Liberty’s Torch in times past. They’re important comments on the essence of the mental achievement we call comprehension. To grasp their essence and internalize their implications is to take and pass Comprehension 101 with flying colors.

     Far too few persons – Left or Right – are willing to undertake the prodigious amounts of serious thought and study required to comprehend socioeconomic and political phenomena. This has given rise to a “Fix it!” peremptory-demand-oriented mentality in political discourse.

     Well, as it happens, I’ve been seriously studying this shit for forty BLEEP!ing years. And while, pace Socrates, I must admit that what I know is trivial compared to what I don’t know, I do know this much:

Demanding that government “solve problems,” regardless of the specifics, is on a par with demanding that a dog have kittens – and a male dog, at that.

     If I have one contribution to make to the body politic, it’s that bit of knowledge.

***

     Today’s tirade was triggered by this piece at Doug Ross’s place:

Here is what confuses me about San Francisco.
We have the most liberal, left-wing government & population in the country.
And we have 8,000 people sleeping in the rain this week.
Can someone please explain this to me?
What do progressives stand for, exactly?
I thought it was about making things more fair.
About standing up for the little guy.
About human rights, equality (equity?), compassion.
San Francisco (to me) looks like the least compassionate city on the planet.
The slums of Mumbai look cleaner than the streets of downtown SF.
This isn’t just the Tenderloin – it’s SOMA, parts of the Mission, Dogpatch…
We have thousands of people wandering around – looking like they are on the brink of death.
This is why ppl use the term Zombie. I’ve been a registered democrat for 18 years.
I grew up in a Progressive family and went to a Progressive school, and have mostly Progressive friends.
Yet what I see in SF – if this what Progressive stands for – I want the opposite.

     I must assume that Michelle Tandler, the author of that Twitter thread, is being honest about her longtime political affiliation. If so, the clash between her politics-to-date and her perception of the condition of San Francisco speaks of a lack of thought and study. She did what Bastiat deplored: she saw a “problem” and expected that the “progressive” city government of San Francisco would “solve” it. But the dog didn’t have the kittens she demanded. Indeed, even if it could have done so, it would have declined.

     I doubt that Miss Tandler is stupid. She may be ignorant. Many on the political Left are ignorant, some willfully so. The Orwellian name given to the politics to which she subscribes might have something to do with it. Far too many people assume without investigation that the name given to a thing honestly and accurately describes its essence. To be maximally gentle about it, in politics that is seldom the case.

     As I said above, the problem exists on both sides of the aisle. Consider national defense. Many a conservative politician orates at intervals about the need to “strengthen our national defense.” Some have been raised to high office for that position alone. But ask yourself plainly: What can Congress do to strengthen America’s national defense? Think about it for a moment.

     As I don’t want to embarrass anyone, the answer to that question is in small font:

Not one BLEEP!ing thing.

     Congress can vote military appropriations in ever-increasing amounts. Indeed, it has done so ever since the U.S. entered World War II. Yet by any objective measure, the ocean of funding the military has received has had at best no positive effect on our national defense. The money’s been spent, but Americans are no safer from the world’s multifarious threats today than we were in 1940. If we extend “national defense” to include our military commitments to our various allies and client states, we’re weaker today than we’ve been since the Spanish-American War. Feel free to look into it yourself. I came by my opinion by spending thirty years in defense engineering. Choose your authorities as you prefer.

     What else could Congress do to strengthen our national defense? I can’t think of a single thing, which would mean: if more money doesn’t do the job, then in this matter of our national defense, Congress is powerless. As for the executive branch, any Army drill sergeant has more power over the readiness and efficacy of our national defense than the President of the United States.

     All that having been said, don’t expect to stop any politician from nattering on about our national defense. They do it because it works to win them the votes of a fraction of the electorate – and as long as it achieves that aim, they’ll keep at it.

     The process is determined by the objective, and the objective by the motive.

***

     Many years ago, a certain Charles Peters, who at that time edited the Washington Monthly, gave the game away:

     The Library of Congress recently studied federal agencies’ compliance with the Sunshine Act of 1976, which was supposed to open government to the public. The study found that of a group of 1,003 government meetings listed in the Federal Register, 627 were either partially or completely closed to the public. One closed meeting was held by the Federal Reserve Board to consider the design of its furniture; it was closed on the grounds that “matters of a sensitive financial nature were being considered by the Board.”

     The military is a master of this kind of subversion. When the navy was ordered to conserve fuel during the energy crisis of the early seventies, it reported that it had reduced its ships sailing time by 20 percent. What it actually did was redefine sailing time to exclude a ship’s journey from the port to the fleet at sea.

     What is this if not make-believe? Laws are passed, orders are given, compliance seems to occur, but nothing changes. Bureaucrats don’t like real change, only the appearance of change. That is why they are so fond of reorganization. Reorganization gives them something to do: redrawing charts, knocking down office walls—but nothing outside the agency, such as poverty or hunger or disease, is affected in the slightest. What does happen is that new jobs are created, almost always with higher grade classifications, which of course means higher salaries for the reorganizers.

     The reason bureaucrats like internal reorganization better than external action is easy to understand. Suppose you work in an antipoverty agency and you do your job so well that poverty is eradicated. Or suppose you work in the Department of Energy and the energy problem disappears. What will happen to you? The bureaucrat can figure that out. If he takes real action, if he’s truly effective, he’ll be out of work—he won’t survive. If, on the other hand, his action is make-believe, poverty will not disappear, the energy problem will not be solved, and his job will be safe—he will survive. Now you understand the fundamental Washington equation:

Make-believe = Survival

     That final paragraph is the key to the matter. The motives of the government employee are not yours nor mine. His central objective is to stay employed, and if possible, to rise in the hierarchy. That motive gives rise to his behavior, which in turn gives rise to the characteristic ineffectiveness of government bureaucracies. As I wrote specifically about the State Department:

     [The] young bureaucrat will profit from deliberate ineffectiveness to the extent that he can get himself viewed as an asset by his superiors and a non-threat by his peers. His superiors want him to produce justifications for the enlargement of their domains. His peers simply ask that he not tread on their provinces.

     To justify enlarging his sub-pyramid of the bureaucracy, a manager must represent his efforts as vital and his resources as inadequate. This can put peers in a bureaucracy into conflict with one another, but the budgetary constraints on the bureaucracy as a whole will often give way even if every sub-bureaucracy within it demands more people and funds simultaneously, provided only that Congress can be made to see the alternatives as unacceptably worse.

     How does one engineer the required perceptions? By a combination of techniques, the most effective being the partial suppression of information, both about the nature of the problems one addresses and one’s labors to solve them.

     Contrary to what intuition might say, a fully informed superior is usually an unhappy man. Even if things are going swimmingly in his organization, if he knows exactly what’s being done at the detail level, he’ll always see things he disapproves — because he once did those jobs himself, and will invariably contrast his subordinates’ methods unfavorably with his own. The temptation to micro-manage is amplified by the possession of those details. His subordinates will know this, of course, and so will suppress any details below the level required for a broad-brush status report. This is an example of Robert Anton Wilson’s “Snafu Principle” in action.

     So the portrait of a bureaucracy’s operations, as it emerges from the nether depths at which specific tasks are addressed, becomes ever vaguer and less detailed as it approaches presentation to “outsiders”: the president, Congress, and the general public. In a sense, the “outsiders” are lucky to get any accurate information at all. If it could get away with it, a bureaucracy’s status report to its external control authorities would say nothing but: “You need us desperately, and we’re working as hard as we can, but we need more people and money. Send them soonest.”

     Compare the above to the citation from Charles Peters.

***

     The Left has made citing “problems” and promising “solutions” the heart of its approach to politicking. Oftentimes, as Thomas Sowell has pointed out more than once, the “problem” was itself created by a Leftist policy. This is observably the case in America’s cities, San Francisco most emphatically included. The process this describes suffices to explain the whole of the disaster we call “social policy” over the century behind us. At this point, the motive behind the process “should” be “obvious:” They do it because it gets them what they want: ever-increasing power and status.

     It would not work if the electorate were more attentive, more determined to comprehend. But comprehension is hard. Among other things, it compels one to ask himself “Have I been hoodwinked that completely for that long?” The answer is seldom pleasant. The high probability of an unpleasant answer is a great part of why general comprehension of the political dynamic is so thin. Most of us would rather plead guilty to murder than admit to having been played for a fool.

     But nothing else will suffice. If Americans don’t face the hard truth about the way we’ve been deceived, the deceptions, animated by the motives behind them and produced by a process consistent with those motives, will continue. Governments are not problem-solving entities. They’re good at exactly one thing, and by their very nature will never be good at anything else.

     Happy New Year.

Dec 26 2021

Saint Stephen

     Today, December 26, is the feast day of Saint Stephen, one of the first (some accounts make him the very first) martyrs to the Christian faith. Here’s what this morning’s missive from the Catholic Company has to say about him:

     St. Stephen (1st. c.) was one of the Church’s first deacons in Jerusalem and an eloquent preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. According to Sacred Scripture he was “a man full of faith, and of the Holy Ghost” and “full of grace and fortitude.” The account of his martyrdom is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. After boldly preaching against the Jewish leaders for their rejection of the promised Messiah, he was accused of blasphemy and stoned to death by an angry mob. The man who would later become St. Paul the Apostle, while he was persecuting the Church before his conversion, was among the mob as an approving witness. St. Stephen’s name comes from the Greek word meaning ‘crown,’ fitting as he was the first Christian to earn the martyr’s crown. St. Stephen’s feast day is celebrated on December 26th.

     Cheeky fellow, wasn’t he? In a way, his fate was a lesson to the rest of us about the virtue of discretion. Saint Francis of Assisi might have had Stephen in mind when he (allegedly) said “At all times preach the Gospels. When necessary, use words.”

     All that having been said, Stephen must have been bold indeed to castigate the leaders of the Judean theocracy for dismissing Jesus as the Messiah. After all, they’d contrived His crucifixion. They weren’t likely to enjoy being reminded that they’d used the Roman occupation forces – roundly hated by the whole of Judea – to execute Him. Nor were they happy about the reports that He’d come back from death, which they unceasingly strove to condemn.

     Which might help to account for this later ode, penned by a certain Robert Hunter:

Saint Stephen with a rose, in and out of the garden he goes,
Country garden in the wind and the rain,
Wherever he goes the people all complain.

Stephen prospered in his time, well he may and he may decline.
Did it matter, does it now?
Stephen would answer if he only knew how.

Wishing well with a golden bell, bucket hanging clear to hell,
Hell halfway twixt now and then,
Stephen fill it up and lower down and lower down again.

     Lady finger, dipped in moonlight,
     Writing “what for?” across the morning sky.
     Sunlight splatters dawn with answers,
     Darkness shrugs and bids the day good-bye.

     Speeding arrow, sharp and narrow,
     What a lot of fleeting matters you have spurned.
     Several seasons with their treasons,
     Wrap the babe in scarlet colors, call it your own.

Did he doubt or did he try? Answers aplenty in the bye and bye,
Talk about your plenty, talk about your ills,
One man gathers what another man spills.

Saint Stephen will remain, all he’s lost he shall regain,
Seashore washed by the suds and foam,
Been here so long, he’s got to calling it home.

     Fortune comes a crawlin’, calliope woman, spinning that curious sense of your own.
     Can you answer? Yes I can. But what would be the answer to the answer man?

High green chilly winds and windy vines in loops around the twining shafts of lavender, they’re crawling to the sun
Wonder who will water all the children of the garden when they sigh about the barren lack of rain and droop so hungry ‘neath the sky…

Underfoot the ground is patched with climbing arms of ivy wrapped around the manzanita, stark and shiny in the breeze
William Tell has stretched his bow till it won’t stretch no furthermore and/or it may require a change that hasn’t come before…

     I hope you’re enjoying your Christmas Octave, Gentle Reader. Don’t let all the shreds of wrapping paper and all those empty boxes spoil your mood. If you’re tired of all the Christmas carols, try a little Grateful Dead. I suggest Anthem of the Sun or Aoxomoxoa. They go great with pancakes!

Dec 25 2021

Merry Christmas!

It’s the traditional greeting on December 25, and for a short period of time before. It became popularized in Victorian times, through stories (including the most famous one, a tale of Christian Redemption) and songs.

We reserve the use of the word ‘Merry’ in modern life, always teaming it with the holiday. No other holiday has that term attached. And, for many of us – myself included – substituting other festive words just doesn’t seem correct.

So, Merry Christmas!

How are we to carry out that exhortation, in these troubled times?

The same way Christians always do:

  • In peace and war
  • In hard times, and in prosperity
  • In personal difficulties, and when life is good and calm
  • Whether single, married, or some other circumstances
  • Whether near family and friends, or far from those who might care about you
  • Whether sick, or healthy, at peace or disturbed in mind, emotion, or soul
  • Whether imprisoned or free

We rejoice in the annual celebration of the Birth of Our Savior.

It isn’t easy, some years. Life circumstances can make it a depressing interlude, surrounded by cheerful people, yet, yourself, depressed and heartsick. If you are caring for an ill person, separated by political or religious differences, or worried about the health – body or soul – of a loved one, this is not much of a time for joy.

And, yet, this is, paradoxically, a time when we need to LOOK for reasons to be celebratory. To focus on what is GOOD about our lives, rather than what is going wrong. We need to take comfort in the small things – a roof over our head, some daily bread, and bodily covering, however unfashionable and old. That, in part, is one point of the story – if the Holy Family could be at peace, even in their reduced circumstances, who are we to complain?

As Fran pointed out in a recent post, there are some signs that the political situation, and the fortunes of Dissidents, may be changing. The Bidens and their supporters have reason for an uneasy repose at night. They seem to be slipping in most people’s estimation. Their policies, and their objectives, have pushed many into questioning them, and their party, as well. The wave of announced retirements in Congress may be a sign of their resignation to reality.

Will they spend us into the ground? With the help of a few stalwart souls – Thank you, Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema – it appears that the mad rush to bankrupt us may be over (at least for now), and we may have some breathing room.

The Dreaded Illness of the Decade appears not to be killing as many as predicted – for many, it’s a nasty, and survivable, infection. The Supreme Court has several challenges to draconian mandates, and MIGHT – only MIGHT – rule on them (hopefully in favor of striking them down).

The real surprise – and reason for hope – is that so many of us DIDN’T collapse into bankruptcy. Most people, when the crisis hit, used any spare cash, including the ‘Covid Money’ to pay down bills, invest in storable food and other needed supplies, and tighten their budgets. Sure, there were those who fecklessly spent that cash, while using Covid as an excuse to skip out on their rent and have a good time. But they were few.

So, altogether, I’m content, for now.

Have a Merry Christmas!

Dec 25 2021

The Big Whys

     Why do you do what you do? Apart from the autonomic stuff such as breathing, and the instinctive stuff such as chasing cute girls, that is.

     As far as I can tell, there are only three categorical reasons for any consciously chosen action:

  1. Desires;
  2. Fears;
  3. Beliefs.

     Virtually everyone understands the first two of those categories. Moreover, when you ask someone why he did or is doing something, if he replies with a desire or a fear, you’ll believe him pretty much automatically. You might differ with him over the desire or the fear, but you’ll understand its motivating power.

     Beliefs are a different matter altogether. Any belief, outside the realm of mathematics, can be disputed. No matter what Smith has to say about his belief in X, Jones can always come up with an alternative theory – and if Jones stands to gain from persuading Smith out of his belief, that’s likely what he’ll do.

     So: What do you believe, Gentle Reader? Do you believe it on the basis of evidence and accumulated confirmations? If so, then how much counter-evidence would be required to cause you to abandon that belief? Or do you believe it because it answers an inner need? If so, then what severity of adverse consequences would cause you to forsake that belief for “practical” purposes?

     Yes, there’s a point to this.

***

     According to Daniel Pipes, there’s been a flood of religious conversions of which we should take note:

     [More] Muslims have come to faith in Jesus Christ over the last thirty years—and specifically over the last seven to ten years—than at any other time in human history,” wrote Joel Rosenberg in 2008, and the pace has intensified since then. Uwe Siemon-Netto confirmed in 2016 that “a global phenomenon is underway: Muslims are converting to various Christian denominations in droves in every part of the world.” Indeed, Christian missionaries have even coined a name and an abbreviation for them: Muslim-background believers, or MBBs.

     Please read it all. Pipes is a careful scholar; when he reports some event or trend, you can bet the rent on it. I’ve cited the article for an overriding reason which Pipes mentions early on in his piece:

     Historically, nearly all conversions involved Christians becoming Muslim, not the reverse. Islam has for 1,400 years been the “Hotel California” of religions (“You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave”), as it prohibits adherents from either declaring themselves atheists or members of another faith, which from the Islamic point of view amount to the same thing. This attitude goes back to the religion’s origins (a Hadith quotes Muhammad, “Whoever changes his religion, kill him”) and the sense that leaving Islam is akin to joining the enemy and, thus, equals betrayal. Additionally, to live as a proper Muslim has a powerful social aspect, participating in the maintenance of communal solidarity.

     Death is a serious consequence for any decision. The prospect, if sufficiently likely, would deter most of us from doing whatever we’d been contemplating. Yet millions of Muslims are moving away from that barbaric, toxic belief system and toward Christianity. They’re taking a risk most of us will never have to face.

     Some such “conversions” are insincere: motivated by something other than a sincere change of faith, as Pipes notes. But others are apparently quite real. Despite the costs and hazards, Muslims are abandoning Islam and accepting Christ. How would our professional militant atheists and God-mockers seek to explain that away?

     Take your time, militant atheists; I’ll wait.

***

     A long, long time ago, back at the old Palace of Reason, I wrote:

     In this world, God coerces no one. He has laid down the laws of Nature; that is all. Those laws may be denied or decried, but they cannot be broken. One aspect of those laws is that, for any given miracle — that is, for any given observed phenomenon that’s so far from the ordinary course of things that one explanation offered for it is the hand of God — there will always be at least one other plausible explanation, such that disbelief will remain possible. I believe that this is a part of the Divine Non-Coercion package, designed to allow men’s minds to be free even on the most fundamental of all subjects.

     Why does God want men’s minds to be so free? A good question. It might be part of the test. It might be part of what it means to be men. And it might be that we’ll all know soon enough. My own theory is that this is how God speaks directly to some men, such as Paul of Tarsus, while leaving others capable of reaching their own conclusions.

     Revelation is always private. Private events, as opposed to public events that may be witnessed by many persons simultaneously, have no evidentiary value for those who have not experienced them. Private events give rise only to private knowledge and private convictions. If a man has had such an experience, it may help him to persuade others, but even here there are stronger factors than the revelation itself: his known character, the degree of his eloquence, and his strength of will in staying true to the substance of the revelation and refraining from adulterating it with opinions of his own.

     To be a Christian agnostic is to say: Revelation is wonderful, if you’ve had one. It’s stunning, thrilling, enlarging beyond any other experience of the mind. But it has no weight as evidence in any argument with others. Your revelation was meant for you alone, or all the rest of us would have had it too.

     The Christian agnostic position is an insistence on personal humility: self-doubt, not doubt of God. How can we doubt what He has said to all of us together, the objectively verifiable laws that govern our universe and dictate how we may use what we find in it? But how can we not politely reserve judgment in the face of a Gnostic’s claim to have personal knowledge of His will? To do otherwise would be to elevate the convictions of a mere human above the actual mechanics of the cosmos, the continuously unfolding panoply of Creation itself.

     And more recently, I wrote:

     “The word ‘conscience’ means ‘knowing with.’ But knowing with whom? As we can’t read one another’s consciences, or transmit into them, it can only be God. Conscience is the channel God uses to help us make our judgment calls—which does not mean that if you and I make a particular one differently, then one of us is ‘wrong.’ You can never know what another person’s conscience has told him…or whether he’s really paid attention to it as he should.”
     “‘Judge not, that ye be not judged,’” Larry said.
     “Exactly,” Ray said. He pointed upward. “Do what you can with yourself, and leave the rest to Him.”

     Revelation and conscience are two sides of one coin. All of us have that coin buried within us. But there’s no telling how or when God will prompt any individual to pull it out of his mental purse and contemplate either side of it.

***

     The Muslim-to-Christian conversions Pipes mentions that strike me most powerfully are the ones triggered by dreams. We have been told, repeatedly and often in an elevated tone of voice, that dreams are not to be taken seriously – that they reflect internal processes of random association and cleansing, rather than a conveyance of information from some external source. But those are the opinions of men with their own, often unexpressed, desires. They are both unprovable and undisprovable.

     The MBBs, as Pipes labels them, take their dreams quite seriously.

     A really long time ago, a similar vision moved a group of shepherds, persons of little wealth or status, to leave their flocks and go to a stable in a small Judean town:

     And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
     And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
     And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
     And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.
     And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.
     But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.
     And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.

     [Luke 2:8-20]

     Those shepherds could have turned to one another and said, “Hallucination, right? Yeah, gotta be.” Or however that might be phrased in First Century Aramaic. They did not. In finding exactly what the angels had proclaimed, they believed, and spread the news, glorifying and praising God.

     Why? Judea in the First Century was a curious sort of place: a province of the Roman Empire that was also a quasi-theocracy. The Sanhedrin took it ill if anyone were to depart publicly from official doctrine. They often had such persons stoned to death. So those shepherds were taking a considerable risk…just as are those MBBs of today…just as Mary of Nazareth did when she said to the angel Gabriel, “Let it be done to me according to thy word.”

     Big whys, eh? There are none bigger.

     Have a Merry Christmas. Rejoice, for He is among us!

Dec 23 2021

For Real Americans Everywhere: Lest We Forget

     Just a quick reminder, before I go offline for the Christmas weekend:

     Government kills.

     All governments, at all levels.

     All elements of government, whatever their nominal function.

     Killing is the only thing they’re good at.

     The events of January 6? Capitol police officers killed three protestors. All three were unarmed. None of the three were violent. They died anyway. No protestor killed anyone.

     Read about the assault on Randy Weaver and his family. Read about the assault on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. Read about LaVoy Finicum. Read about what was done to John Singer, because he wanted to homeschool his own children.

     Read this heartbreaking story. When I read it, I had an immediate urge to lock, load, go to the Anne Arundel County facility where those two dogs are being held, and liberate them by force. Yes, at my age; nothing upsets me more than the mistreatment of a domesticated animal. I’m not sure why I haven’t done so already. I may yet.

     This is what governments do. They kill. They know no other method. Every edict of every government is backed up by the threat of deadly force.

     Apparently despite the many attributions, George Washington never said this, so I will:

Government,
Like fire and fear,
Is a dangerous servant,
And a terrible master.

     Now we have Usurpers in control of the federal government. They’re determined to reduce us to serfdom. Their every move since January 20, 2021 has been to impoverish and subjugate us. Simultaneously, they’ve allowed the worst among us to run riot, looting, vandalizing, and killing without let or hindrance.

     Do you really think they won’t resort to deadly force to compel us to accept their “mandates” and take their poisons? Do you really think, after the wholesale purges of our Army, that they won’t ignore the Posse Comitatus Act and send tanks rumbling down the streets of un-subjugated cities and towns? They’re just working out the numbers. They know that resistance is building, and they don’t want to face an un-pacified populace come November 2022.

     Henry Bowman knew what to do. The hour is approaching when we must decide whether we’ll follow his example, or submit to the Omnipotent State. They’re coming for our guns. They’ve made no secret of it. After they have them, we’ll be helpless.

     “Take your choice – there is no other – and your time is running out.” – Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

     But do have a very Merry Christmas.

Dec 23 2021

Some Early Christmas Presents To Indie Colleagues

     Here we are: December 23, only two days from the Feast of the Nativity, Christianity’s second-biggest holy day. But many Americans’ thoughts remain on entirely secular matters, especially the purchasing and wrapping of presents for others. As one of my parish priests put it, this is the time of year we go running around frantically, spending money we don’t have, on things we don’t want, for people we can’t stand. And sadly, it is so for too many people.

     Well, here at the Fortress we don’t do that. We give presents when the spirit moves us. It doesn’t have to be any particular date. And we have found that liberating ourselves from the gift-giving rhythms that agitate the rest of the country to an exhausted bankruptcy – or should that be a bankrupt exhaustion? – has done a great deal to improve our experience of the Christmas season.

     That having been said, I’m going to give some presents now. Recommendations of the fiction of several of my indie colleagues. Indies must support other indies; there’s no one else to do the job. So here we go.

***

     First and foremost, I’ve just encountered a remarkable novel by a writer I’d known nothing about: Armond Boudreaux’s The Way Out. This is a book you’ll press onto everyone you know who has any ability to think, and here’s why:

     A medical miracle is reshaping the world. The artificial womb ensures the perfect health and flawless development of every unborn child. Natural pregnancy is now unnecessary risk—and quickly criminalized as a danger to both mother and fetus.

     As a reporter, Jessica Brantley makes new enemies on a daily basis covering both sides of the controversial new law. Now her search for the truth behind this world-changing technology will lead to an unimaginable discovery—the existence of children with terrifying telepathic powers.

     This truth is no secret to former U.S. Marine Valerie Hara. Her illegally born eleven-year-old son can’t help but hear the thoughts of everyone around him. When government agents storm her home to take her child away, she’ll stop at nothing to protect her family.

     Soon, these two fearless women will be branded as terrorists, hunted by the military, demonized by the media—and drawn into a desperate fight for the freedom of the human race.

     This is near-future science fiction of the very best kind. Like my Futanari Saga, it addresses a looming “what if?” that could destabilize everything we know about our societies and ourselves…forerunners of which are already highly-charged issues that threaten to provoke mass bloodshed. If you read only one novel in 2022, make it this one.

***

     Second on the carousel is a similarly affecting novel by a writer who, until a few months ago, was unknown to me: Philip S. Power. Power is remarkably prolific. Of course that means that not everything he writes will rise to the highest standard. However, he has one of the most potent imaginations I’ve encountered in a lifetime with the printed word. The first book of his “Infected” series, Proxy, strikes with the force of a tornado:

     Brian Yi knew what it meant when he showed up with super-powers one day.
     He was Infected.
     Doomed to be hated and reviled for simply existing.
     A monster.
     But Brian is special, a rare Infected person willing to fight for those that can’t, not uncontrolled or insane. In fact, thanks to his power of taking the place of those about to die and the bizarre overriding sense of self-sacrifice he suddenly develops, he doesn’t really get a choice in the matter.
     Now he has to either fight for the IPB – a government organization designed to contain the Infected threat – or end up lobotomized, living the rest of his days in a psych ward.
     In the end though, he knows there’s only one real option: save all he can.
     Even if it kills him.
     Because the world is about to change, and the only thing standing between the lives of millions and certain death, is one man with the unlikely power to take a victim’s place when there is no other hope left.

     The combination of power, helplessness, and selflessness Power gives to his ultra-tragic hero is beyond anything else I’ve read — ever. Treat yourself.

***

     Boudreaux and Power write in a straight, unadorned narrative style – my preferred style. But there’s a place in the world for the stylist, too, as long as he doesn’t permit his arabesques to detract from the story he tells. With that, we come to Ripley Harper.

     Harper’s “Dark Dragon Chronicles” are in some ways conventional urban fantasy. However, she gives them a series of new twists throughout her four books to date – and each volume is gorgeously written…but not overwritten. They feature a single protagonist, Jess, whose circumstances are both unfortunate and fraught with possibility:

     The problem is this: either I’m losing my mind, or I’m a psychopath with superpowers. But I’m pretty sure I’m not a psychopath, and even suspecting that I might have superpowers probably means I’m crazy. Which I know for a fact I’m not. Which means I must have superpowers. Which is crazy.

     [From Ordinary Girl]

     Here’s Jess’s first brush against her own powers:

     The moment I saw the smoke, I screamed out a warning, but the music was so loud nobody heard me. And then the whole thing went up like a light—whoosh!—and within minutes the place had descended into chaos: smoke and flames and screams and the kind of hysteria you only get when a barn full of drunk people suddenly realize they’re about to be burned alive.
     I was the only one who remained calm and not, I hasten to add, because I’m usually cool in a crisis. No, the reason I remained so calm was simply because I wasn’t afraid.
     I thought the fire was beautiful.
     I was hypnotized by its power. Thrilled by it. Elated. The feeling that came over me is difficult to describe. It was a bit like being in a dream, although not really, because even though my limbs felt weak and heavy, I knew I was awake. There was a deep sense of unreality to everything that happened but at the same time my brain was totally clear and my senses strangely heightened. Colors seemed brighter, smells sharper, and I could feel the energy of the fire pulsing in the air all around me. Time seemed to stretch and then stood still completely so that everything seemed weirdly precise: I could see every face in the most minute detail, clearly make out each individual voice.
     For a while I watched the chaos around me with a delicious sense of detachment. Everyone was screaming and scrambling to get to the exit, but I sat completely still on the same rusty old fold-up chair I’d been on all evening.
     The moment was pleasing to me.

     [Ibid.]

     Highly recommended.

***

     Finally for today, we have Kfir Luzzatto’s “Tessa” novels. Luzzatto is also exceptionally prolific, though not quite to Philip Power’s level. His “Tessa” novels are standouts of the “psi powers” subcategory of near-future science fiction. Like Boudreaux and Power, his writing is straight narrative. What makes the “Tessa” books appealing is the variety and intensity of the scrapes his protagonist, a very powerful telepath, gets into: initially as a government agent; subsequently as a fugitive from the same government, an agency of which seeks to hunt down and exterminate all individuals with psi powers of any kind.

     These won’t appeal to everyone. Tessa is in some ways too powerful for her role, but Luzzatto employs her abilities in unexpected ways. He also contrives an interesting supporting cast for her, some with powers of their own – and agendas of their own that aren’t necessarily consistent with Tessa’s objectives. Give the first novel a try. Like most indie fiction, it’s inexpensive and worth more than its price.

***

     That’s all for today, Gentle Reader. Enjoy your Thursday – perhaps with the blessing of some fresh fiction reading; I could recommend a unique romance that might be to your taste – and I’ll see you tomorrow. Until then, be well.

Dec 23 2021

Sitrep.

The following is an outstanding comment by Sushi on the Moon of Alabama website on whether the present United States government is capable of perceiving certain stark new realities, identifying and assessing options for dealing with them, or prioritizing possible responses. (Those stark new realities are discussed in the article upon which he comments.)

Obsessing about troops who won’t agree to questionable, marginally-effective gene therapy and weeding out Crimethink in the ranks of the military suggest that it is not. I doubt we can summon up enough strategic common sense to fill a Starbucks coffee cup. If any surgeon handled a gall bladder removal like the senior officers of the U.S. military handled the Afghanistan departure s/he could contemplate a future career as a part-time Zamboni driver but that Afghan train wreck came and went with not one general’s head on a pole. Five buck sergeants could have gotten the job done competently. With one day’s notice.

Comment by Sushi:

Russia has issued an ultimatum. Essentially a re-run of the Cuban Missile crisis but with a reversal of the adversary positions.

A few caveats – the US was unaware Russia had viable nuclear missile systems present in Cuba. The US administration believed these missile systems were en-route. They were acting to prevent their arrival and installation.

The world perched on the brink of nuclear conflict. Not only did the USSR have the capacity for a pre-emptive strike but, in an associated incident, a USSR submarine Captain believed he was under attack by US ASW vessels and was about to defend. His defensive response had the potential to unleash the maelstrom both major powers sought to avoid.

The question to be asked and answered is “Does the present Biden administration have the capacity to understand its present position?”

The answer to this question must take cognizance of the fact elements of the US government waged war on a newly elected president and did all in their power to deny him the opportunity to govern.

Elements of the US government, aided by techno-capitalists, misled the US public and created conditions conducive to putting a befuddled octogenarian in the White House.

The same US government has undermined scientific endeavour and the medical profession while combating a pandemic. The same US government demonstrates an incapacity for fiscal reality. The same US government insists on prosecuting persons such as Julian Assange, and others, who revealed US indiscriminate killing of civilians, facts only recently being published in the NYT. The same US government is undertaking a series of show trials of persons who committed misdemeanour trespass on January 6th, an event which gives evidence of government malfeasance and/or entrapment.

We will ignore for the moment the entirety of woke-ism, a political philosophy which suggests persons of one skin colour can kill, cause millions in property damage, attack state institutions, and run riot, but be applauded for it, but if you defend against such behaviour and your skin colour is different you will face capital charges.

Does anyone honestly believe the government outlined above has the intellectual competency to understand they may be looking down the barrels of a hypersonic nuclear shotgun?[1]

For background I strongly recommend Gilbert Doctorow’s piece[2] about what Russia is laying on the table. It is taking a position identical to the one the U.S. itself took during the Cuban Missile Crisis, namely that nuclear missiles installed by a hostile power just a stone’s throw from our borders were simply intolerable. Oblivious as ever, NATO the U.S. thinks the Russians should tolerate on their borders what we would not on ours.

Russia has now made it crystal clear that they will not tolerate idiocy, or worse, in or impacting affecting their legitimate sphere of influence. As Vladimir Putin observed at the Munich Security Conference in February 2007:

“It turns out that NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders, and we continue to strictly fulfill the treaty obligations and do not react to these actions at all. I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”[3]

Those are reasonable questions. For which our Klown Kar Establishment has no answers.

Notes
[1] “U.S. Navy Acknowledges Russian Weapon Superiority.” By b, Moon of Alabama, 12/23/21.
[2] “A Surprise Russian Ultimatum: New Draft Treaties To Roll Back NATO.” By Gilbert Doctorow, Antiwar.com, 12/20/21.
[3] Id. (Emphasis added).

Dec 22 2021

Fear Alone Provides Insufficient Test Subjects

What Felix Rex implies is that the forced vax campaigns provided billionaires’ scientists billions of non-consenting human guinea pigs upon which to test potential life-extending technology. They must’ve anticipated that fear alone wouldn’t turn all of humanity into Howard Hughes type germaphobes, hence the gradual forced campaigns were already planned for when fear no longer worked.

Well the Gates’ and Bezos’ of the world can’t take their wealth with them, so why not pay to put into power men who will ruthlessly put to good use all the world’s subclass (that means not their class)?

Megalomania applied on a global scale.

What could go wrong?

Dec 22 2021

Tribalism Ascendant

     I’ve written about tribalism on several occasions, mainly at Liberty’s Torch V1.0. Because of associations that link tribe with race, it’s a subject that induces considerable trepidation in persons who dislike being called nasty names. Yet it’s a real phenomenon, it has deleterious effects on a society, and when allowed any latitude it can bring about actual civil warfare.

     Here are the key snippets of that earlier essay:

     A tribe is a group with certain social and political characteristics:

  1. It possesses a set of criteria for determining who is (and who is not) a member;
  2. It demonstrates a substantial degree of cohesion over time;
  3. It prefers members to non-members in significant ways;
  4. It enforces a code of conduct upon members, whether formally or informally;
  5. It regards interaction and interpenetration with outsiders as occasions of elevated danger and opportunity.

…

     Even after nation-states have formalized their legal systems and all that goes with them, whatever tribes they have subsumed will still exhibit tribal characteristics, at least for a while. In particular, members of a subsumed tribe will continue to prefer one another to the members of other subsumed tribes. In historical studies, this is often called sectionalism, but the geographical connotations of that word should not be allowed to lead us astray. After subsumption by a nation-state, the members of a tribe will often undergo some degree of internal dispersion. Yet they will continue to maintain tribal preferences as they disperse, until interpenetration and the slow process of binding to their new locales have had time to weaken them. Consider the resistance of various religious groups to exogamy as an illustration.

     Should political incentives arise that reinforce tribal distinctions and preferences, havoc will ensue. A nation-state cannot endure under conditions of internal inter-tribal strife; as Abraham Lincoln put it, a house divided cannot stand. There must ultimately be either a convulsive reduction of the tribes to political passivity, for example by warfare, or a parting of the ways that dissolves the nation-state into two or more separate units, as happened after the British relinquished the rule of India.

     Let that passage sink in for a few moments before continuing on.

***

     Consider the following three news stories:

     The killers in the above stories are all Negroes. In each case, the media’s determination to perpetuate the “American blacks are oppressed” narrative is operating to spare the killers the appropriate attention and judicial treatment. Were white perpetrators to commit acts even remotely similar to the ones chronicled in those stories, their treatment would be radically different…especially if their victims were black.

     I shan’t light off on another Cui bono rant about such journalistic malfeasance. But what does it say about the media’s collective fear of the American Negro tribe? Would any other demographic in the United States receive equal forbearance from the fourth estate? Would any racial, ethnic, religious, or political cohort be treated with such kid gloves?

     The American Negro tribe has established itself as one to be feared. For nearly two years, its members have rioted, vandalized, looted, and committed crimes of violence without let or hindrance. Urban police forces have stood aside and let them do so. Cities with appreciable black population fractions that have not suffered such chaos are few. When a black American has met his demise at the hands of a white American, the media have treated the event as a modern-day lynching.

     These are the fruits of tribalism ascendant. While I can’t predict its course, I’m certain that other demographic cohorts are viewing the black tribe’s seeming immunity to correction and asking themselves, “How can we get in on this?” Success does attract emulators, after all.

***

     In another essay, I wrote:

     When a society makes special provisions for a particular class of persons, such that those persons have a good expectation of not suffering for illegal or antisocial behavior, it has committed the worst imaginable injustice against the persons in that class who honor their society’s laws and norms: it has equalized the legal, social, and moral positions of good citizens and thugs. Thus, if ninety percent of such a class is law-abiding and decorous while ten percent is violent, dishonest, or disruptive, the latter category will come to overshadow the former in the perceptions of persons outside the class — not because ten percent is a majority, but because that anti-social subgroup is identified with the class’s special set of privileges.

     That shift in perception has taken place among Americans, whether or not they’re willing to say so. Whatever the actual proportions may be, a majority of American whites have come to view American blacks as dangerous to them. They are not wrong, though to say so where others can hear, as for example John Derbyshire has done, is to take a huge chance with one’s social and economic position. Nor does it lessen one’s vulnerability to have irrefutable evidence for one’s contentions.

***

     I could go on, but I’d mainly be repeating things I’ve written on previous occasions. In closing, I’d like to present a snippet from a great book, a book that every American should read upon attaining his majority: the late Clarence Carson’s The American Tradition. This comes at the conclusion of his chapter “Of the Civilizing of Groups:”

     [M]uch of the practical empowering of groups has not been accomplished by either constitutional amendment or legislative act. Instead, in many instances law enforcement officers have looked the other way while unions employed coercion and violence. Politicians have practiced a policy of divide and conquer on the American people. The Democratic Party has been most adept at this, though the Republicans have often attempted to compete. They [the Democrats] have forged a party out of numerous minority groups, making promises and presumably providing favors for them. Many of these groups have become vested interests, legally and extra-legally.
     Since the above was written, the disorders have intensified and spread. Most recently, they have been extended to colleges, courtrooms, and in the streets surrounding political conventions. The pattern is repeating itself. The birds are coming home to roost. If the restraints are removed from group behavior by the grant of special privilege, if groups are empowered by law, if direct action is advanced because the end is “good,” if the means for civilizing of groups are abandoned, compulsion and authoritarianism must be used to preserve order….
     When groups become accustomed to having others submit to threats and pressure, they will become less and less willing to brook resistance. But there comes a time when social order requires resistance to the anarchy of contending groups. The road of resistance, however, leads to despotism in one form or another.

     Professor Carson wrote that in 1964. Where he says “groups,” I say “tribes,” but the import is unchanged. Draw the moral.

Dec 21 2021

Shoals of life dead ahead!

But without question, Mr. Powell deserves much derision for waiting until inflation reached a multi-decade high before starting to taper asset purchases, let alone begin to raise interest rates off the current level of 0%.[1]

There’s much more in this article which taxes my non-existent financial acumen. At some point I suppose I should, like, resort to looking at an actual textbook rather than grazing the likes of ZeroHedge for the odd tidbits of insight. BTAIM, Mr. Pento ends with a somber assessment of the Fed’s options: allow the economy to implode to fix inflation or again borrow and print trillions of dollars that will increase inflation already at a 40-year high, thus collapsing the economy anyway.

Hold me back.

Recently, Sen. Manchin was one man in the Senate who made like Horatio at the bridge on the particular issue of spending. So far that’s one guy out of 330M. A bit of a deficit of such types you might say. Well, add MTG, Tucker, Bronx Tina, Katie Hopkins, and a few I’m blanking on just now. But, mostly, Karens, grifters, race baiters, snowflakes, and milquetoast, neutered-at-birth conservatives stretch to the horizon and so far not much of a ground swell for sanity.

Anyway, it’s off to the races one way or t’other. Well into Ayn Rand’s “can’t avoid the consequences of reality” territory. And God bless the Fed for its stellar contribution to the coming disaster. Two percent annual inflation was the least of their brilliant innovations aimed at the middle class. Just a tiny bit of theft each year. Hope you don’t mind.

Notes
[1] “The Great Reconciliation Of Asset Prices In 2022.” By Michael Pento, ZeroHedge, 12/21/21 (emphasis removed).

Dec 20 2021

Shibboleths And Scare Talk

     Political talk is mostly hot air, of course. Among other influences, politicians almost unanimously regard their own voices as the sweetest sound in the universe. They’ll fill whatever space is provided to them with as much blather as they can get away with – and it won’t necessarily mean anything in particular.

     So in attempting to decode what a politician has said, the first task is to remove the deadweight verbiage so we can clearly see the important bits…if any. It’s vital to be ruthless about this. Many political statements are 100% deadweight: semantically null. One of my favorite passages in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation involves an incident of that sort:

     “As you see, gentlemen, something like ninety percent of the treaty boiled right out of the analysis as being meaningless, and what we end up with can be described in the following interesting manner:
     “Obligations of Anacreon to the Empire: None!
     “Powers of the Empire over Anacreon: None!”
     Again the five followed the reasoning anxiously, checking carefully back to the treaty, and when they were finished, Pirenne said in a worried fashion, “That seems to be correct.”
     “You admit, then, that the treaty is nothing but a declaration of total independence on the part of Anacreon and a recognition of that status by the Empire?”
     “It seems so.”
     “And do you suppose that Anacreon doesn’t realize that, and is not anxious to emphasize the position of independence – so that it would naturally tend to resent any appearance of threats from the Empire? Particularly when it is evident that the Empire is powerless to fulfill any such threats, or it would never have allowed independence.”
     “But then,” interposed Sutt, “how would Mayor Hardin account for Lord Dorwin’s assurances of Empire support? They seemed –” He shrugged. “Well, they seemed satisfactory.”
     Hardin threw himself back in the chair. “You know, that’s the most interesting part of the whole business. I’ll admit I had thought his Lordship a most consummate donkey when I first met him – but it turned out that he was actually an accomplished diplomat and a most clever man. I took the liberty of recording all his statements.”
     There was a flurry, and Pirenne opened his mouth in horror.
     “What of it?” demanded Hardin. “I realize it was a gross breach of hospitality and a thing no so-called gentleman would do. Also, that if his lordship had caught on, things might have been unpleasant; but he didn’t, and I have the record, and that’s that. I took that record, had it copied out and sent that to Holk for analysis, also.”
     Lundin Crast said, “And where is the analysis?”
     “That,” replied Hardin, “is the interesting thing. The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Holk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications – in short, all the goo and dribble – he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out.”
     “Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn’t say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed. There are the assurances you had from your precious Empire.”

     This is the pinnacle of the art of political speech: saying absolutely nothing yet persuading your interlocutor that you sincerely intend to fulfill his wildest dreams. There are no more accomplished practitioners than the members of our political class. Yet even they are occasionally compelled to speak plainly, or called to account for insufficiently guarded statements. Their fear of being caught out is one of the chief reasons for the emergence and evolution of the political shibboleth.

***

     Originally, shibboleth was used by the ancient Hebrews as password. It was a clever choice, for the proper pronunciation of the word was all but impossible for anyone not brought up in the Hebrews’ language of the time. Thus, they need not worry that their password might be discovered.

     Today, a shibboleth is a word or phrase favored by a political party or interest group. He who uses it correctly indicates his allegiance with that party or group. There are plenty of them, most notably on the Left. I’m sure you have your own list.

     Some of the Left’s most frequently used shibboleths today are terms intended to induce fear. “Climate change,” “reproductive rights,” “voting rights,” “threat to democracy,” and others are getting very thick on the rhetorical ground. Scare talk is one of the Left’s favorite devices, though it’s seldom the case that the thing of which we’re supposed to be scared has any objective basis. Indeed, often the thing being promoted as scary is really cover for another, less palatable element of the Left’s agenda.

     This article provides a snapshot of Leftist scare talk in a currently relevant context:

     Some liberal media commentators predicted Sunday that West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s vote against President Biden’s Build Back Better plan could very well spell the end of democracy….

     MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan tweeted out “What’s worse – that Manchin is killing the Biden legislative agenda, and perhaps the future of American democracy too, or that he wasted most of this year dragging this whole thing out to do it *and* wasted half of the time that Dems control Congress and the White House.”

     In a largely mocked tweet, The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin wrote “If Manchin is no on both BBB and voting, Biden is done. Democracy is hanging by a thread. Hard to think of anyone more destructive.”

     In an appearance on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” journalist Carl Bernstein also implied that Manchin’s vote could drastically affect American democracy in his refusal to eliminate the filibuster rule in the Senate.

     “And this also goes into the question of voting rights because unless there’s something that can be done about the filibuster rule in the Senate which Manchin again has indicated he will not change, there is not going to be an effective legislative means of doing what needs to be done to guarantee American democracy through the right to vote for all Americans without being suppressed as we’re seeing now,” Bernstein said.

     [All emphases added by FWP.]

     Boy, that “democracy” stuff must really be important – and really threatened, too. Look at all those high-profile blatherers jumping on Manchin’s back for his refusal to vote the way they want! Never mind that not one of them could say exactly what he means by his castigation. Democracy is endangered! Mobilize the troops! Man the barricades! Break out the emergency supplies of Oreo Double-Stufs®!

     This is the sort of thing that’s turning Americans off to politics in steadily increasing numbers. I’d bet the mortgage money that if non-voters were surveyed for their reasons for not going to the polls, a great many – perhaps even a majority – would cite political rhetoric and its essential emptiness as a contributing factor. If “they” won’t say exactly what they mean, how can you hold “them” to their commitments?

     Yes, yes, yes: to a politician, actual commitment to a principle or a course of action is a horror that belongs in the depths of Hell. But you already knew that.

***

     A constructive project for the coming New Year would be the development of software like what Salvor Hardin referred to in the snippet from Foundation in the first segment. If such software existed, and if it were widely available, common private-citizen Americans could use it to seine the statements of politicians and their hangers-on for actual content. I think we’d find very little, after the shibboleths, circumlocutions, and qualifications had been eliminated. And that just might militate toward a rather complete reassessment of politicians in general — all politicians, Left, Right, Up, Down, Strange, or Charmed.

     If memory serves, it was the late Walter Williams who said, as regards regularly removing incumbent officeholders, that “Every toilet needs a flushing now and then.” This is indisputable. As a contemporary meme puts it, politicians and diapers both need to be changed frequently…and for the same reason. While H. L. Mencken’s observation retains its sour force:

     At each election we vote in a new set of politicians, insanely assuming that they are better than the set turned out. And at each election we are, as they say in Motherland, done in.

     …perhaps, with frequently enough repeated flushings, we’d have a chance to install a set that aren’t unanimously and completely full of shit.

Dec 19 2021

Christmas, Children, and Christ

     If you have young children (I don’t), or were once a young child yourself (I wasn’t), you’re probably familiar with children’s Christmas frenzy. It’s all about the presents. (Well, maybe a little about the decorations.) The religious aspects of the holiday are virtually impossible to communicate to them. The origin of the gift-giving tradition is of no interest to them. Worse, many parents contribute to the malady by asking the kids “What would you like for Christmas?”

     In this respect, the whole season has gone off the rails. But then, it was to be expected once mass media turned the holiday into little more than an opportunity for marketing.

     I’m not trying to be a Grinch here. But I would like to see American Christians “Put Christ back in Christmas,” as the once-ubiquitous bumper stickers said. And while we’re paused here, there’s another facet of our current disease: cars with pro-Christian bumper stickers, rosaries hanging from the rear-view mirror, or statuettes of Jesus on the dashboard, get vandalized with appalling frequency…sometimes while bystanders watch as if paralyzed. Yes, it happens here on heavily Catholic Long Island.

     There are serious difficulties involved in giving kids a religious education or a Christian upbringing. The juvenile mind is short-range, largely unconcerned with anything beyond immediate gratification, and uninterested in hearing a long explanation for anything. Today, considering that most kids are perfectly safe from deprivation of the necessities of life and largely safe from other threats to their existence, suffering is an abstraction to most of them. You’re going to explain the mission of Jesus of Nazareth to your six-year-old? The ultimate reason why the Son of God took on human flesh? Good luck.

     It’s worse if Junior’s parents are “lapsed” Christians, or are insincere about their faith. Cosmetic faith is the very worst sort, for reasons I’ll explore some other time. It’s particularly pernicious for the children exposed to it. Imagine the lesson they derive from it, and shudder.

***

     One of the motifs in The Discovery Phase, my latest novel, is about an outsider’s first “up close and personal” recognition of sincere faith in someone very close to her. Co-protagonist Sylvie is in love with co-protagonist Loren, and Loren wants to marry her – in a church wedding. At Our Lady of the Pines Roman Catholic Church, of course; this is an Onteora County romance. Sylvie, therefore, must convert. But early on, though she knows that Loren is Catholic, it takes a while for her to grasp her spouse-to-be’s sincerity…and the implications of her youthful indiscretions:

     They were seated before filled mugs when Sylvie spoke again. Her eyes were fixed on her mug.
     “I… might not be able to convert.”
     He said nothing.
     “Father Ray is making an appointment for me to talk to his bishop.”
     Loren’s alarms all rang at once.
     There’s only one reason she could need to see him.
     “When did it happen?” he murmured.
     She did not look at him. “High school.”
     “Your party-girl phase.”
     “Yeah.”
     He fixed silence upon himself and sipped his coffee.
     Her hand crept toward his and took it.
     “Loren, I’m afraid.”
     He nodded. “Bishop Sawicki has a reputation. He might not absolve you.”
     “Not that,” she replied. “I’m afraid of losing you.”
     “Oh.”
     “Will I?”
     He took a moment to choose his words.
     “Well, if he doesn’t let you off, I won’t be able to marry you in the Church.”
     She clutched his hand with surprising strength.
     “But would I lose you?”
     It shocked the breath out of him.
     “Does that,” he said slowly, “matter more to you than your fate in the next life?”
     “I don’t know!” she wailed. “I only know that I mustn’t lose you. I was barely alive before you. Being with you, loving you, has made me whole, and I don’t know whether I can hold on to that without you!”
     Her eyes had filled with tears. He drew a long, shaky breath and let it out slowly.
     “Syl,” he said, “I love you with all my heart. You won’t lose me. I don’t think you could, because I don’t think I can do without you any more. But we’d have to go on as we are today… and I’d be in the worst kind of fear for you, every instant of our lives, from here to the grave.”
     He squeezed her hand gently. “Let’s not borrow trouble from a future that might not arrive. The bishop might absolve you, if you can convince him that you’re truly sorry for what you did. But convincing him won’t be easy. He won’t let it be.”
     “You’ve met him?”
     He nodded. “Three years ago, just after Bishop Wilton retired. He made the rounds of the diocese, introducing himself to all the parishes.”
     “Father Ray called him a hard-liner.”
     “I think that was his way of saying the bishop doesn’t compromise on things that really matter,” he said. “Like life. The Polish clergy are all that way.”
     “You know a lot of them?”
     “A couple. I had a Polish chaplain in Afghanistan.”
     She spent an interval in silence. He forced himself to respect it.
     I have to believe in her. That she is truly sorry for what she did. That the bishop will see that… and that the penance he’ll impose won’t be beyond her strength of will.
     I have to believe in me, too. That I can love her and live with her no matter what the bishop says. That I can stand by her despite my fears. And that God will forgive her.
     “Do you know anyone else,” she said, “who’s gone to him over… something like this?”
     He shook his head. “That’s confessional stuff. As private as private gets.”
     She grinned faintly. “Like attorney-client privilege, huh?”
     “Yeah,” he said. “About like that.”
     “So we don’t have a track record for the bishop, then,” she said.
     It forced a laugh out of him. “No, the touts can’t handicap him on the basis of his past races. All they can do is follow the money as it comes in.” He was seized by impulse. “Would you do something for me, Syl?”
     “Sure, what?”
     He rose. “Come with me.”
     She followed him up the stairs to the bedroom. He knelt beside the bed they shared, looked up at her, and smiled.
     “Join me?”
     She lowered herself carefully to her knees beside him. He made the Sign of the Cross, folded his hands, and bowed his head. She did likewise.
     “Lord of all,” he murmured, “you have said that you want mercy and not sacrifice. You sent your Son to be a ransom for the souls of all men. If my love is truly repentant, I beseech you: let your mercy embrace her, so that she can join your flock… and me, in matrimony before you, till death do us part. I ask it humbly, through Christ Our Lord, amen.”
     “Amen,” she echoed. She looked up at him. “Do you think he heard us?”
     He smiled. “He notes each sparrow that falls, remember?”
     She wrapped her arms around him and buried her face against his chest. They stayed that way for a long time.

     I debated with myself for quite a while before writing that scene. Most romance writers don’t go anywhere near religion; they regard it as toxic to the dreamy hearts-and-flowers mood they want to set and sustain. Well, damn it all, I do — and I want my readers to know it means something more than Mass at Christmas and Easter.

     Hypocrisy can be deadly. It reaches a catastrophic level when you’re trying to convey something of maximum importance to your kids. If they know from your observed behavior that you’re not sincere, they’ll give your preachments the same sort of token, cosmetic acceptance as you give your faith. The consequences are for you to imagine.

***

     How to rescue Christmas from the merchandisers and the other secularizers? I can’t prescribe a sure-shot method. But don’t imagine you can delegate it to a “Sunday school.” It must begin in the home, with the parents – and note the BLEEP!ing plural. Mother and father must both take part; they must both be sincere believers; and they must both follow through. Christianity isn’t about faith alone, but about doing as He commanded us:

     And, behold, one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?
     And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.
     He saith unto him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

     [Matthew 19:16-19]

     But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
     Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

     [Matthew 22:34-40]

     Remember that Second Great Commandment, and see to it that your kids appreciate it as fully as you do. Especially the critical word neighbor: “one who is near.” True charity must be, as far as possible, personal and difficult to misuse. Never give cash. Forget donations to the United Way; get involved with your parish charity pantry. Got any clothes you no longer wear – that aren’t terminally stained or “holey?”

***

     That’s enough of a rant for the Fourth and last Sunday of Advent. Enjoy the Christmas season; He wouldn’t have it otherwise, even knowing the fate that was in store for Him. But do remember to mention Him over the turkey and cranberry sauce. Perhaps little Johnny and Jane will have a few questions for you afterward.

     May God bless and keep you all.

Dec 19 2021

Your starting point for understanding disinformation.

Glenn Greenwald’s excellent take:

All that said, there is a core truth — an unintentional one — that lies at the crux of this elite war on “disinformation.” It is absolutely true that U.S. political discourse is drowning in deliberate disinformation campaigns and lies. It is also true that this disinformation epidemic is a serious menace, a toxic plague on our democracy and society. That part they have right.

Where they have gone wrong — very, very wrong — is how they have identified the most harmful sources of this disinformation. It does not emanate primarily from Trump boomers on Facebook or dark web QAnon groups or mischievous and transgressive teenagers on 4Chan. Ordinary citizens are obviously as capable as anyone of believing and spreading false assertions. But the far more damaging, destructive, organized and coordinated disinformation campaigns come from major corporate media outlets themselves and their security-state partners — particularly the corporate outlets that most vocally and flamboyantly claim to be so profoundly concerned about disinformation that they want to censor the internet in the name of stopping it. They are the ones who spent the last five years flooding the country with demented CIA-constructed conspiracies about a Kremlin takeover of the U.S. using clandestine sexual blackmail over the president and hallucinating Russian agents hiding under every bed; so many fabrications were disseminated under the rubric of that fairy tale that it is genuinely hard to choose the worst.

“Greenwald Exposes The Real Disinformation Agents.” By Glenn Greenwald, ZeroHedge, 12/17/21.

Dec 18 2021

Bits Of Fun

     Christmas is a week away. What point is there in writing about politics and current events at a time this joyous? Shut ‘em out with me, at least for today, and see if we can amuse one another.

     (Amuse, not abuse! Get your mind out of the gutter.)

***

     I saw this at AoSHQ and have been straining to decode it ever since:

     I’m reminded of technical manuals I’ve seen that were:

  1. Originally written in English;
  2. Then translated – usually by a program – into Japanese?
  3. Then retranslated into English by another program.

     This is not a formula for legibility. However, the above graphic suggests something even stranger: after the third step above, some Japanese-speaking person pulled out a Roget’s Thesaurus and tried to “sex up” the translation with a few “synonyms.”

     Truly, words fail me…though perhaps not quite as badly as they failed the “synonymizer” above.

***

     How many of the following do you remember – not from reading or having been told about them, but from personal experience?

     Yes, I remember them all – and all the “We’re all going to die!!” hype that accompanied them. But then, I also remember getting up in the wee hours to watch “Modern Farmer” on my family’s 13 inch black and white TV. And don’t ask about how far I had to walk to school, uphill in three feet of snow!

***

     We pause here for a few words of sound advice – normally not to be expected coming from an entertainment celebrity:

     I think I’ll print that out and paste it to the wall behind my monitor…after I get a working printer, that is.

***

     Now, it’s Double-Take Time!

     In case you don’t recognize her – for which you can be forgiven, as she’s still quite young and not yet, ah, over-exposed – the young lady on the right is Chloe Grace Moretz, the co-star of the delightful movie Kick-Ass and a key Supporting Cast member of Denzel Washington’s movie The Equalizer. I do hope she learns not to be so, ah, forthcoming in the future…and to keep better company, of course. (For the…person on the left, there’s no hope at all.)

***

     Finally, a movie-related question. Yesterday evening, the CSO and I watched Night Hunter, a mystery / procedural on Amazon Prime that was apparently released in 2019. I’d never heard of it before yesterday, but the CSO thought it deserved a look, principally because Oscar winner Ben Kingsley is in it. It proved to be so-so: a not particularly memorable time-killer.

     However, in the process of locating the movie among Amazon Prime’s offerings, I stumbled across this “gem:”

     In the Eighteenth Century, Rayne is the half-human half-vampire Dhampir and the lead attraction in a carnival’s freak-show in Romania. When she escapes, she meets a fortuneteller that tells that her mother was raped by the king of the vampires Kagan and she decides to destroy her father. In her journey for revenge, she meets Vladimir and Sebastian, the leaders of the fortress of vampire hunters Brimstone, and she joins their society. She seeks for powerful talismans to defeat Kagan, while the skilled warriors Vladimir and Sebastian train her to face the forces of Kagan and her human side falls in love with Sebastian.

     I remember renting that movie from Blockbuster – say, remember Blockbuster? — and having the checkout clerk warn us that “this movie is really bad.”

     If you haven’t seen it, Ben Kingsley is in it.

     This sent me and the CSO into a new hunt: really bad movies starring first-echelon stars. Eventually we turned it around: we asked What first-echelon stars have appeared in really bad movies? Which, in the sweet rushing fullness of time, became What first-echelon stars haven’t appeared in at least one really bad movie?

     Give us your citations in the comments.

***

     That’s all for the moment, Gentle Readers. The CSO is about to leave for yoga and I’m heading back to fiction…assuming Joy the Newf will permit:

     Lately, she hasn’t – and at 130 pounds and still growing, Joy has some influence. Enjoy your last pre-Christmas Saturday.

Dec 18 2021

We Started as a Bunch of Snowflakes

Not the Soy-Boy kind, but the fragile, white stuff, that falls individually onto the ground.

Many of those flakes quickly disappear, melting away when a little heat is applied.

Others stick around. Eventually, should other flakes land near them, they clump together, and become more likely to survive. Gradually, they form a sturdy snowpack.

That’s it for many of the formerly fragile. Once they find their “peeps”, they hunker down and survive as long as their climate is stable. Nothing wrong with that, it’s the basic nature of snow.

But, sometimes, a disturbance to the snowpack occurs. Something, a nudge from a moving particle, a loud sound that causes vibrations, the increasing weight of the pack making their location less stable – any of those could start some movement.

It generally starts slowly, and affects only the nearby part of the snowpack. That small part might slide away for a distance, then stop. That does happen.

Sometimes, the vibration is too small or subtle to initiate movement; the inertia of the massive pack is too large.

But, when the pack starts moving, and no friction or resistance is great enough to stop its velocity, it gets REALLY exciting (for those not in the pathway). The force of the moving snow dislodges other parts of the pack, and it all starts escalating. The bigger the runaway snow group gets, the more noise it generates, which loosens other nearby snow, and leads to that snow joining the movement.

As the moving snow achieves a greater mass, other snow joins it, eventually combining to form the avalanche, which sweeps all in its path away, and buries a lot of stationary objects in many feet of snow.

Such is our Resistance to the Left. We’re gaining momentum. How do I know?

Let’s Go, Brandon has become a popular catchphrase.

These stickers adorn many gas pumps.

The momentum is building. And, WE helped. From a comment on Ace of Spades, screenshotted below.

BE a part of the avalanche!

Dec 17 2021

The Secret to Successful Lying

It’s not to make up a story that is completely disconnected from reality. That kind of Fantasy Web-Spinning works only with credulous children, and starry-eyed Leftists.

No, to be a Good Lie, you have to start with a kernel of truth – but not the WHOLE truth.

The video below is a really good example of that form of misdirection-turned-blatant-lie that is so popular in some circles.

Kamala is often underrated. She has mastered one form of public presence – the Verbose Flood of Crap, Carefully Shielded by Sporadic Insertion of Partial Truth. That’s a real skill, and it’s aided by the fact that those operating in Non-Logical Thinking Mode will let the flood of words wash over them, allowing the mellow tones to hit their amygdala head-on, and guide them to an emotional decision that – YES! – this is Truth!

Don’t let your personal dislike for Kamala to allow you to NOT see her appeal. She has some potential to be a very effective figurehead for those that are pulling the strings. The Non-Thinkers – those who have been rendered incapable of logical thinking process by their shoddy excuse for an education – will respond favorably. They won’t be able to point to any actual argument that she made, they will just retain the hazy, warm FEELING that she gave them.

Point by point, here are my objections to what she said, in response to a question about inflation:

  • She starts with an admission that would seem to disfavor the Biden administration. She acknowledges that “Prices have gone up”. That “families and individuals are dealing with the realities that bread costs more, that gas costs more”. So, this is intended to disarm those who would say that the administration is clueless – how can you say that! She admitted to it!
  • Note that she immediately swivels to talk, not of inflation, but “the cost of living” and “limited resources”, and turns the focus to the stress this causes to consumers. Bear that in mind; it’s important.
  • After that, she begins the Big Shift. That shift is to talking about the supply chain. The supply chain isn’t the real problem (it doesn’t help with shelf shortages and rising prices, but it’s relatively minor, as its cause was the sudden release on the economic brakes that accompanied the “Return to Normal”). Notice that she talks about “working with labor unions and municipalities” to open up the ports. Those are two of the Dem party’s strongest allies, who will likely back up her version of the problems. Yet, those allies CAUSED a certain amount of the problem.
  • She then mentions 3 cities – Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Savannah, and – Surprise, Surprise, Surprise! Those cities just HAPPEN to be part of the BBB – Build Back Better bill – also, misleadingly known as the ‘Infrastructure Bill’. WHAT a coincidence!
  • Her next misleading claim is that BBB is “designed to make it less expensive for working people to live”. Well, kinda, sorta true. But, BBB is not cost-free. Kamala flatly states that BBB will “not cost anything – we’re paying for it”. Well, honey, that’s not strictly true. SOMEONE will pay for it. This isn’t one of those bills that uses Magic Beans to pay for things. The money has to come from someone – individuals or businesses. So, for those people who are paying for this boondoggle, life is NOT going to become ‘less expensive’ but MORE expensive. For those who already don’t pay for very much in their lives, yeah, it’s gonna be “Mo’ money, mo’ money!” No cost to THEM. But a HUGE cost, both now, and in the future, for most of those who are actually WORKING – and, for those who have, after a lifetime of working, want to begin using their investments to live on.
  • Note that she NEVER addresses the effect of government spending on inflation. You might think she’d never heard of it. You will NOT be hearing the term inflation in the near future. It will all be talk about Investment in America, Cost of Living, and Wonderful Advantages to Working Americans. That those Working Americans who actually PAY taxes – whose net relationship with the government is that of one who is in debt to the Treasury, rather than someone who is ‘given’ money in the end – will somehow benefit. They won’t. It’s going to cost them, bigly.
  • This approach to the economic crisis will KILL those who are retired. No amount of COLA will offset the devastation that will be caused by inflation on those living on fixed incomes. Only government retirees will generally get COLA additions. Those who retired privately will suffer, particularly if they haven’t access to a retirement account, that might rise in value.

But, overall, Kamala delivered this answer in a low-key and calm manner. She’s clearly learned from the Obama example. Keep the anger out of your voice, keep talking about how much you care, and slip in the lies between those aspects of your message. Do it with a smile. When Obama did that, he was well-received. When he stepped out of that mode, people listened more to what he said, rather than the mushy feels.

Kamala is a work-in-progress. She is NOT ‘ready for the job’, so has been sent out of the country, where she will be shown on the news in carefully curated news bites. It’s the seasoning that, normally, candidates get in their travels around the country, during campaign season. Both Covid, and her own decision to quit before coming in last, kept her from that process.

She has the added advantage of being reasonably good-looking. Your taste in woman may differ, but she generally makes a good appearance, dressing conservatively, but clearly displaying that she is a female, wearing her hair long and loose, and having a voice that, while not all that great, is not harsh or screechy. So, yeah, men will tend to respond to her appeal.

I just saw this video, and thought it was a good explanation of what is REALLY going on with BBB.

Dec 17 2021

Preparing For Armageddon

     A funny way to open a column in the second half of Advent, eh? But it’s what’s on my mind. The eighteen entries in my “Future Columns” folder can wait another day.

     Here is the stimulus for today’s exercise in futility:

     Please take the twelve minutes and watch it. It’s one of Tucker Carlson’s best and most important intros. It got me thinking about what’s to come: not economically; that’s already written in the stars, but in sociopolitical terms.

***

     Why do I say that the economic consequences are already foreseeably guaranteed? Because I know some economics. Even more important, I know people. Ludwig von Mises knew people, too. His knowledge resulted in his most fundamental proposition: the Axiom of Action:

     Praxeology rests on the fundamental axiom that individual human beings act, that is, on the primordial fact that individuals engage in conscious actions toward chosen goals. This concept of action contrasts to purely reflexive, or knee-jerk, behavior, which is not directed toward goals. The praxeological method spins out by verbal deduction the logical implications of that primordial fact. In short, praxeological economics is the structure of logical implications of the fact that individuals act. This structure is built on the fundamental axiom of action, and has a few subsidiary axioms, such as that individuals vary and that human beings regard leisure as a valuable good. Any skeptic about deducing from such a simple base an entire system of economics, I refer to Mises’s Human Action. Furthermore, since praxeology begins with a true axiom, A, all the propositions that can be deduced from this axiom must also be true. For if A implies B, and A is true, then B must also be true.

     There are a few assumptions built into the Axiom of Action, but all of them are self-evident:

  • Human action is, in the main, conscious, and therefore volitional.
  • Humans pursue what they want, and attempt to avert what they don’t want.
  • Such goals, whether positive or negative, are synthetic: that is, they take into account, as far as possible, the aggregate of incentives and disincentives associated with the goal before choosing whether or not to pursue it.
  • A positive goal to which excessive costs or penalties are immovably attached will be set aside. Likewise, a negative goal (i.e., an undesirable outcome that a human would like to avert), if it is less costly or painful than accepting and enduring it, will be accepted and (hopefully) endured.
  • For many reasons, our decisions about these things are not always accurate.

     Just now, government policy is to inflate the dollar and to discourage work. The inflation of the dollar inherently renders it less valuable, and therefore a less desirable thing to pursue through any kind of effort. Work is being discouraged in a number of ways: munificent unemployment and “stimulus” payments; mask and vaccination mandates for employed persons; the tide of illegal aliens flooding into the nation over the southern border. In combination, work-age / work-eligible persons are steadily dropping out of the labor force, resulting in a massive slowdown of American economic enterprise. It could not be any other way.

     This will continue until the destructive policies of the Usurper Administration are halted and reversed. Even should that occur in the immediate future, the effects will not be instantaneous. So we’re in for a period of stagnating productivity – a reduction in the quantity of goods and services available for purchase – as our dollars deteriorate in proportion to the inflation of the currency.

     As we mathematical types like to say, quod erat demonstrandum.

***

     Now, humans normally intend, quite consciously, the foreseeable consequences of their decisions and actions. This, too, flows from the Axiom of Action. As the consequences of government policy I outlined above are easily foreseeable, we must accept that the Usurpers who designed and enacted those policies meant exactly what I have predicted…especially as some of those consequences are already visible. Beyond that, we have seen that the Usurpers have no intention of reversing any of their existing policies, which implies that they consider the consequences of those policies preferable to the consequences of reversing them.

     Read the previous paragraph over slowly. Ponder what it means about the desires of those who command the Usurper Administration. Ponder also what it implies about the Usurpers’ political expectations.

     Chances are that if you weren’t a hard-driven enemy of the Usurper Regime before this, you are one now. But have a caution: there are consequences for the possession of knowledge the Regime does not want you to have. For those who elect to share such knowledge, the consequences could become dire.

     Tucker Carlson’s video above got me thinking about (surprise, surprise) a passage from 1984:

     Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:
     ’Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction.’…
     One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.

     A regime which cannot allow people to know certain things will act to prevent the knowledge from being disseminated. A regime which cannot allow people to say or hear certain things will act against those who say them loudly enough to be heard.

     Pray for Tucker Carlson.

***

     The central question I’ve been pondering is one that Ayn Rand introduced in Atlas Shrugged:

     “You should have expected me, James. This is the great, formal, nose-counting event, where the victims come in order to show how safe it is to destroy them, and the destroyers form pacts of eternal friendship, which lasts for three months. I don’t know exactly which group I belong to, but I had to come and be counted, didn’t I?”
     “What in hell do you think you’re saying?” Taggart cried furiously, seeing the tension on the faces around them.
     “Be careful, James. If you try to pretend that you don’t understand me, I’m going to make it much clearer.”
     “If you think it’s proper to utter such—”
     “I think it’s funny. There was a time when men were afraid that somebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to their fellows. Nowadays, they’re afraid that somebody will name what everybody knows. Have you practical people ever thought that that’s all it would take to blast your whole, big, complex structure, with all your laws and guns—just somebody naming the exact nature of what you’re doing?”

     I don’t know if we’re in such a situation today: i.e., one in which merely stating what you know (and is plain to anyone with a functioning brain) is enough to blast the evils of the Usurper Regime to Hell. It would surely be nice, but I doubt that any individual voice would suffice. The Usurpers have weapons with which to quench adverse sentiments: deplatforming, lawfare, slander, vandalism, and others. Those weapons are already “in the field,” and are garnering more victims daily. If you’re considered a large enough threat to them, they will train their guns on you…if they can target you to advantage.

     This points in what might be the only low-risk direction for reversing the evil tide: millions of individual voices, armed with irrefutable evidence and pitiless reasoning, raised in de facto unison against the Usurpers. If they cannot profitably target us individually – if each of us is a single mosquito in a horde of millions – what then? Repeal the First Amendment? It’s been tried. I doubt the Usurpers could withstand the backblast they would experience then.

     I’ve been a bit downcast about the nation’s chance to recover from Usurper malevolence. Perhaps it’s possible after all. But even if we should go down in flames, let’s make our voices heard. As valuable as Tucker Carlson is, he’s one man on a heavily attacked and defamed network. From the perch he commands, he can stimulate and inspire us…but he can be targeted, and the trends suggest that he will be, one way or another. The work the Usurpers cannot practically counter lies with us.

     Food for thought.

Dec 16 2021

Conquest’s Second Law In The Saddle

     You remember Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics, don’t you?


Any organization not explicitly right-wing
Will sooner or later become left-wing.

     This is the consequence of a powerful dynamic: the dynamic of power-seeking. It’s a fairly simple progression, yet there are persons who fail – or refuse – to understand it:

  1. Any organization more formal than a sewing circle will have a hierarchy and rules for advancing in it.
  2. Hierarchies inherently award power to persons who rise in them.
  3. Left-wing persons love power above all other things.
  4. Therefore, they seek opportunities to amass power.
  5. Therefore, they target organizations with hierarchies – essentially, all organizations.
  6. As they rise in such a hierarchy, they bring in the like-minded beneath them.
  7. Those like-minded leftists assist their benefactor in rising higher.
  8. In aggregate, they operate to sabotage anyone of conservative or libertarian inclinations.
  9. Eventually, the hierarchy is dominated by leftists and hostile to non-leftists.
  10. The organization turns from its original purpose to left-wing political purposes.

     (Compare this with Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy, which expresses a similar dynamic.)

     Conquest’s Second Law can be seen in operation in organizations of every kind. People avid for power have a natural edge over others, as they can be counted on to pursue their highest priority above all other things. Thus, in every organization with a hierarchy, either its members are vigilant against political incursions – a right-wing attribute – or with sufficient time they will be colonized and corrupted.

     The case of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) is exceedingly instructive. At this point, the organization is explicitly a left-wing political body. Its interest in the well-being of a member writer is dependent upon whether that writer is loyal to – and can be relied upon to advance – the Left’s agenda. A number of incidents in recent years have highlighted its deterioration.

     A more recent case of left-wing colonization has been in the national news:

     The Salvation Army asked for more than donations this year.
The Christian charitable organization asked all white donors to reflect on their racism this year.

     Wow.

     After a major uproar the Salvation Army backtracked over Thanksgiving weekend and released a statement refuting the claims of their racial demands.

     The Salvation Army then removed its absurd “Let’s Talk About Racism” guide following the intense backlash over a text last week that told white donors to “sincerely apologize” for their racism while hinting that Christianity is institutionally racist.

     For many years, the Salvation Army has been one of the largest and most effective Christian charities in the world. Recent events make it clear that the Army’s success at garnering donations and doing real, effective good with them made it a target for the Left. This isn’t an outlying point on the graph; other Christian charitable organizations, from giants such as Catholic Charities all the way down to charity pantries run by neighborhood parishes, have also been targeted. Power-seekers are like that.

     There isn’t much more to be said about this phenomenon, except this:


Avoid involvement in hierarchical organizations.
If possible, avoid hierarchy in your organizations.
The Left never relents. Be vigilant.

     And be careful about to whom you give your charitable donations.

Dec 16 2021

URGENT: Mike Hendrix of Cold Fury in Critical Condition

     I just received this from Big Country Expat:

     Mikes in the Critical Care/ICU. I’m waiting to find out -where- exactly.

     I just got word that my brother-from-another-mother Mike Hendrix, late of the famed rockabilly band The Belmont Playboys and more recently of the Blog “Cold Fury” has gotten seriously hemmed up medically speaking. Last Thursday after a slightly prolonged absence from his blog, I reached out to him to find out WTF was going on and I heard back that he’d come down with a nasty case of food poisoning.

     Since then, apparently something faaar MOR serious happened.

     His brother (actual) Jeff called me tonight as I left one of my more ‘colorful messages’ on his phone (in possession currently by his sainted lil ole Lady Mom) who apparently when she recovered from my diatribe, had Jeff call me to fill me in on what’s up.

     Essentially Mike’s seriously fucked up.

     Food Poisoning turned out to be a MAD infection. His diabeetus didn’t help the issue, so they had to lop off his foot, then his leg, as the infection was/is spreading. They’re fixin’ to make it even MOR stumpy as the infection still isn’t under control. He’s in critical/ICU level condition, but NOT COVID related thank the Gods.

     So, My brother-from-another-mother, henceforth now known as “Peg-Leg Mikey” is gonna have some serious medical bills and life altering needs. So hence Ye Olde GoFundMe Fundraiser.

     I’m starting the ball rolling with the remainder of my ‘raising Christmas’ fund, and ask you please to help in any way, shape or form. Mike is damned fine people and has entertained people from all walks of life, either musically or through his magnificent acerbic writing and wit.

     As they say, step up and help a brother out.

     Spread the Word gang. Mike needs us and has never asked for anything.

     The Go-Fund-Me is here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-mike-of-cold-fury-and-the-belmont-playboys

     You may be unaware that Mike is also the fellow who set up Liberty’s Torch V2.0 for me. If you can help him out, now’s the time.

All my best,
Fran

Dec 15 2021

Assorted

     These grab-bag pieces have always helped me to de-escalate in the past. Let’s see whether this one follows the pattern.

***

     A few days ago, the New York Times published a piece about rising French politician Eric Zemmour that was hysterical even by that paper’s standards. John Hinderaker at Power Line provides a useful condensation:

     Zemmour, the polarizing far-right polemicist…candidate of the traditional far right… Zemmour, a French far-right candidate …the traditional far right…“reduce the cost of adherence” to the far right…this quest to stake out a position on the extreme right may also backfire…gradually spread far-right ideas across society, especially through Fox-style news networks…have now embraced his more extremist ideas…designed to popularize his extreme ideas…“The cool is a way to defuse and neutralize otherwise extremely violent” ideas…Mr. Zemmour risked “being overwhelmed” by the extremism of his own supporters…

     The article strains all credulity by twisting the facts of the rally in an attempt to characterize it as violent. “Anti-racist protestors” from SOS Racisme attacked Zemmour and the rallygoers, and were beaten back…but the Times tells us that the rallygoers were the violent ones:

     At one point during the rally, antiracism activists were attacked in the sort of brawl rarely seen at French political events. … dozens of his supporters attacked antiracism activists. The violent brawl could stain his image … Midway through his speech, dozens of sturdy militants threw punches at several activists from SOS Racisme, an antiracism organization…

     This is the state to which America’s “paper of record” has fallen. No one detectably right-of-center – a “center” which has been sliding steadily leftward, thanks to the efforts of the mainstream media – is permitted to escape the Times’s condemnation.

     The Times is not alone. The international press is terrified of Zemmour:

     It would be nice if we could confidently say to ourselves, pace Jules Feiffer’s “Little Murders, “If the media are that frightened by a populist conservative with little chance to win, why should we fear them?” But they remain powerful shapers of opinion.

     I intend to follow this.

***

     I and other commentators have warned you about the “equality” myth. It’s pernicious to a degree most people – even most in the Right – don’t appreciate. But there’s worse: there’s “equity” and its implications:

     Vice President Kamala Harris called for an intentional restructuring of the country’s economic systems on Tuesday, suggesting existing systems were inherently racist.

     Harris appeared at a forum hosted by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to discuss proactive ways to increase access to financial systems and capital for racial minorities.

     The vice president shifted the conversation to a more radical approach, pointing out fundamental racial flaws with the existing financial system.

     “Some of these designs were just designed not to benefit the people that we’re talking about,” she said, before pausing. “Or the better way to say this, it was designed to benefit other people,” she added with a laugh.

     Harris said the existing financial system was structured to serve people who already had access to information and capital.

     Blather about “equity” and “equitable” results is always a front for a drive to bestow absolute power on the State. For it is the State that would be given the authority to seek out “inequities” and to remedy them through “redistribution.” The masters of the State would hold the power of life and death, de facto, over everyone else in the realm. And yes: they would exempt themselves from the redistributions they would impose on the rest of us. Can’t be Selfless Servants of the People if they can’t have all the Wagyu beef, caviar, Dom Perignon, dachas, and lackeys they can consume, now can they?

     Say, what’s Kamala Harris’s net worth, anyway?

***

     I’m not sure how disturbed anyone should be by this report:

     Children born during the pandemic score markedly lower on standard measures of verbal, motor, and overall cognitive ability, US researchers have found.

     In a longitudinal study of 672 children from Rhode Island that has run since 2011, those born after the pandemic began showed results on the Mullen scales of early learning that corresponded to an average IQ score of 78, a drop of 22 points from the average of previous cohorts.

     The study, which was funded by the US National Institutes of Health is awaiting peer review before publication in JAMA Pediatrics. But a preprint copy is available online.

     The researchers have largely ruled out a direct effect of the virus, as mothers or children with a history of testing positive for covid-19 were excluded from the analysis. Instead, the authors say, reduced interaction with parents and less outdoor exercise are likely culprits, along with effects that occurred during pregnancy.

     Other research has hinted at behavioural effects in children born during the pandemic, including a recent study from Italy.

     We’re raising a generation of morons! Scary – if you take it at face value. But psychometric testing of the very young is fraught with difficulties. Also, inasmuch as the tests mentioned in this article include motor skills and other characteristics unrelated to intelligence as it’s generally understood, that 78 figure could be rather misleading.

     Classical studies of intellectual development indicate that general intelligence – the ability to reason from evidence and to manipulate abstractions – develops over time. The IQ scores of testees who submit to testing at intervals indicate that in the usual case – i.e., in the absence of events that would plausibly impair intelligence – the testee’s score will increase throughout his youth and partway into his twenties.

     More ominous to me is the observed reduction in motor skills and perception of external conditions. That could well be due to a reduction in the variety and fluidity of pandemic babies’ environments. When things change widely and rapidly, the infant is more likely to take notice and attempt to grasp what’s around him. Up to a point, of course; too rapid a rate of change can cause the infant to “shut down” and “retreat into his own world.”

     So there is a reason for concern, but less reason to anticipate the onset of “The Marching Morons” or Idiocracy.

***

     That’s all for today, Gentle Reader. I’m feeling an urge to set to work on the sequel to The Warm Lands, for which I’ve been harangued threatened offered gold, jewels, palaces, and a harem of beautiful women importuned ceaselessly since the novel came out. Wish me luck.

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