Sep 23 2021

Authoritarian Theft Part 2

     Concerning my tirade of yesterday, Mike Hendrix adds a report on an incident I should have included:

     After the FBI seized Joseph Ruiz’s life savings during a raid on a safe deposit box business in Beverly Hills, the unemployed chef went to court to retrieve his $57,000. A judge ordered the government to tell Ruiz why it was trying to confiscate the money.

     It came from drug trafficking, an FBI agent responded in court papers.

     Ruiz’s income was too low for him to have that much money, and his side business selling bongs made from liquor bottles suggested he was an unlicensed pot dealer, the agent wrote. The FBI also said a dog had smelled unspecified drugs on Ruiz’s cash.

     The FBI was wrong. When Ruiz produced records showing the source of his money was legitimate, the government dropped its false accusation and returned his money.

     Ruiz is one of roughly 800 people whose money and valuables the FBI seized from safe deposit boxes they rented at the U.S. Private Vaults store in a strip mall on Olympic Boulevard.

     Federal agents had suspected for years that criminals were stashing loot there, and they assert that’s exactly what they found. The government is trying to confiscate $86 million in cash and a stockpile of jewelry, rare coins and precious metals taken from about half of the boxes.

     But six months after the raid, the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles have produced no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the vast majority of box holders whose belongings the government is trying to keep.

     Some lawyers for box holders say the government’s entire operation is a “money grab” to acquire tens of millions of dollars for the Justice Department through forfeiture. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office denied that and said some of the money it recovers will go to crime victims.

     In civil forfeitures, no criminal conviction is required. The government just needs to prove that it’s more likely than not that the money or property it seeks to confiscate was linked to criminal activity.

     In warrants authorizing the search and seizure of all “business equipment” at U.S. Private Vaults, U.S. Magistrate Steven Kim placed strict limits on the government, explicitly barring federal agents from searching the contents of each box for evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

     In the warrant application, submitted by Assistant U.S. Atty. Andrew Brown, a statement by FBI agent Lynne Zellhart assured Kim that agents’ inspection of each box would “extend no further than necessary to determine ownership” so that belongings could be returned once the government took an inventory of the property seized.

     Box holder lawsuits allege that those promises were false and that agents, with no probable cause, intended from the start to rummage through the boxes looking for evidence in the criminal investigation….

     “They pulled a bank heist in broad daylight,” Ruiz said. “They didn’t even apologize.”

     Please read it all. The tidbit that most people aren’t aware of is that the whole “civil asset forfeiture” scheme was planned to work this way. The Fourth and Fifth Amendments protect people, including the accused but not yet convicted, from being expropriated in this fashion. But way back in the Seventies, some bright boy in the DoJ said to his superior, “Wait a minute! We don’t have to treat money and property as innocent until proved guilty! They’re not people so they have no rights!”

     What’s that you say? Inanimate objects can’t commit crimes? A mere bagatelle. If governments can create fictional persons (i.e., corporations), they can easily attribute wrongdoing to money and goods. Didn’t you take Straining at Gnats and Swallowing Elephants in law school?

     And so the scam was born. The accused get the presumption of innocence, but their funds and possessions don’t. Without their savings, they have less chance of defending themselves successfully, so DAs’ conviction rates skyrocket. The government gets more money to spend, so everyone’s happy. Except the folks who lost their money, their peace of mind, and often as not a big part of their lives, of course.

     So the feds can seize everything you own, allege that it was tied to “drugs,” and compel you to prove that you acquired it legally to have even the ghost of a chance of getting a fraction of it back. Of course, the state and municipal governments got in on the caper almost at once. The number of persons who’ve lost their savings this way is far larger than the number who’ve gotten even a piece of them back.

     Perhaps the most outrageous case of this was that of California resident Donald Scott:

     Early on the morning of October 2, 1992, 31 officers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Drug Enforcement Administration, Border Patrol, California National Guard and National Park Service entered the Scott’s 200-acre (0.81 km2) ranch. They planned to arrest Scott for allegedly running a 4,000-plant marijuana plantation. When deputies broke down the door to Scott’s house, Scott’s wife would later tell reporters, she screamed, “Don’t shoot me. Don’t kill me.” That brought Scott staggering out of the bedroom, blurry-eyed from a cataract operation—holding a .38 caliber Colt snub-nosed revolver over his head. When he emerged at the top of the stairs, holding his gun over his head, the officers told him to lower the gun. As he did, they shot him to death. According to the official report, the gun was pointed at the officers when they shot him.

     Later, the lead agent in the case, sheriff’s deputy Gary Spencer, and his partner John Cater posed for photographs smiling arm-in-arm outside Scott’s cabin.

     Despite a subsequent search of Scott’s ranch using helicopters, dogs, searchers on foot, and a high-tech Jet Propulsion Laboratory device for detecting trace amounts of sinsemilla, no marijuana—or any other illegal drug—was found.

     Scott and his wife, the former Frances Plante, had only been married for two months at the time of the incident. His body was cremated and the ashes were given to his widow. The ashes were later destroyed when the ranch home was burned in a wildfire the following year.

     Scott’s widow, along with four of Scott’s children from previous marriages, subsequently filed a $100 million wrongful death suit against the county and federal government. The case lasted eight years, requiring the services of 15 attorneys and some 30 volume binders to hold all the court documents. In January 2000, attorneys for Los Angeles County and the federal government agreed to settle with Scott’s heirs and estate for $5 million, even though the sheriff’s department still maintained its deputies had done nothing wrong.

     Michael D. Bradbury, the District Attorney of Ventura County, conducted an investigation into the raid and the aftermath, issuing a report on the events leading up to and on October 2, 1992. He concluded that asset forfeiture was a motive for the raid.

     The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department issued their own report in response, clearing everyone involved of wrongdoing, while California Attorney General Dan Lungren criticized District Attorney Bradbury. Sheriff Spencer sued D.A. Bradbury for defamation in response to the report. The court ruled in favor of Michael Bradbury and ordered Sheriff Spencer to pay $50,000 in Bradbury’s legal bills.

     An elderly man was murdered because the “authorities” coveted his land. Let that sink in for a moment. Have you started thinking of assets you own that the “authorities” might covet?

     The day will come when, having expropriated you of all you’ve earned, the feds will charge you a hefty “storage and safekeeping fee” for holding it while you labored to prove that you earned it legally. The KGB used to bill the family of an executed man for the bullet that killed him, didn’t it? So there’s a precedent. Perhaps I shouldn’t have put the idea into pixels. You never know who might be watching.

Sep 22 2021

Five Minutes Of Teflon

     My parish is privileged to have a genuinely excellent homilist for its pastor: Monsignor Christopher Heller. (In this he follows in the path of his predecessor, the late Father Charles Papa.) From the Gospel reading for Wednesday, he extracted a wisdom that few lay Catholics, and perhaps not many priests, would have found there. The relevant reading is from Luke:

     Jesus summoned the Twelve and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them to proclaim the Kingdom of God and to heal the sick. He said to them, “Take nothing for the journey, neither walking stick, nor sack, nor food, nor money, and let no one take a second tunic. Whatever house you enter, stay there and leave from there. And as for those who do not welcome you, when you leave that town, shake the dust from your feet in testimony against them.”
     Then they set out and went from village to village proclaiming the good news and curing diseases everywhere. [Luke 9:1-6]

     It sounds like a mere bit of history, doesn’t it? No moral message, no parable about the Kingdom of God, nothing like that. But Father Chris found an important bit of counsel in this verse:

     “And as for those who do not welcome you, when you leave that town, shake the dust from your feet in testimony against them.”

     Far worse than mere unwelcome could happen to a traveler in those times – and far worse often did. The roads of first-century Judea were plagued by highwaymen, rapists, murderers, and others with no good in mind. (They didn’t yet have realtors or insurance salesmen.) That’s a great part of the reason why journeys of more than an hour or two were more often undertaken in caravans than by solitary walkers.

     But what did the Redeemer tell His apostles? Not to watch out for marauders or thieves. Not to carry a weapon or be always on alert for the approach of threats. To beware harboring resentment for unwelcome! To answer rejection with rejection! To pass on without allowing it to attach a weight to their thoughts…or their souls. Their mission would be strenuous enough without burdening themselves with resentment against those who spurned them and their message.

     How many of us have borne great weights of injury, usually composed of innumerable petty insults, slights, or infringements, for year after year, decade after decade? I’ve struggled with the anger and resentments from such treatment my whole life. So I buttonholed Father Chris after Mass for a brief chat. First, I asked him if it struck him as odd, even paradoxical, that it’s the lesser harms that have the greater grip upon one’s soul? He agreed that it was. So I asked if he had any suggestions for freeing oneself of it.

     His recommendation was classically simple: “Coat your heart with Teflon for five minutes. Ask Jesus to take the obtruding thought away for just five minutes. Tell yourself ‘I’ll think about it tomorrow, if necessary,’ and pass on.”

     “That sounds like prayer,” I said.

     He smiled. “That’s exactly what it is: the ‘take it away’ prayer. Jesus prayed it in the garden at Gethsemane. Why shouldn’t we?”

     I am reminded of something I’ve seen on a coffee mug:

     Not every problem has a neat solution, regardless of the opinions of some. Not every solution is easily applied. But this one is.

     May God bless and keep you all.

Sep 22 2021

Authoritarian Theft: Three Cases

     “Taxation is theft!” rises the cry from thousands of freedom lovers. And it is so, if viewed through the lens of direct comparison. After all, what practical difference is there between the highwayman who points a gun at you and says “Your money or your life,” and the IRS agent who assesses you for some obscene amount he says you “owe,” and tells you to pay or go to prison? It’s just that the latter thief has the majesty of “the law” behind him – and did you get any say in that? I didn’t.

     Have a snippet from Allan Sherman – yes, the musical humorist – in his badly neglected book The Rape of the APE:

     If you break a religious rule, your conscience is supposed to punish you, if you break one of society’s rules, people cluck their tongues or shun you. But government doesn’t deal in intangibles. Break a government rule and it throws you into a reinforced concrete prison with real iron bars. It hires full-time skilled employees, at your expense, to catch you, lock you in, and watch you, plus (if you try to escape) expert marksmen, to shoot you with bullets you paid for….
     The government buys all manner of things—and no expense is spared. Government has an unlimited source of income as long as the citizens have an ounce of strength left to work. Government spending is limited only by the boundaries of human greed. No one has ever found the limits of human greed, but our government is constantly exploring the frontiers, forever pushing them further outward. It is hard to believe that the politicians can actually find ways to spend all the money they appropriate, in the time allotted. Our government may have a secret bank account in Switzerland, in case it has to leave the country in a hurry.
     Most amazing of all is the way a government gets its funds. It’s a new twist on an old obsession: Our money burns a hole in their pocket. When religion needs money, it passes a collection plate and lets you decide how much to give, if anything. When society needs money, a silver-haired matron rings your doorbell, and you are free to say you gave at the office. The geejy bird [government] has a better system; each year it figures out exactly how much the public will stand for—short of actual armed rebellion—and spends it in advance. Then on April 15 it says, “You pay or go to jail.” Belonging to a government is like having your credit card stolen.

     Regarding that “exploring the frontiers,” bit above, it’s not just about the amount government steals, but also about its methods. Have a gander at a few interesting cases from recent news reports.

***

     From Maspeth, in Queens, NY:

     Maspeth High School created fake classes, awarded bogus credits, and fixed grades to push students to graduate — “even if the diploma was not worth the paper on which it was printed,” an explosive investigative report charges.

     Principal Khurshid Abdul-Mutakabbir demanded that teachers pass students no matter how little they learned, says the 32-page report by the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools, Anastasia Coleman.

     “I don’t care if a kid shows up at 7:44 and you dismiss at 7:45 — it’s your job to give that kid credit,” the principal is quoted as telling a teacher.

     Abdul-Mutakabbir told the teacher he would give the lagging student a diploma “not worth the paper on which it was printed” and let him “have fun working at Taco Bell,” the report says.

     The teacher “felt threatened and changed each student’s failing grade to a passing one.”

     Theft through malfeasance! Isn’t the sworn responsibility of the government-run schools to teach our children what they will need to be functioning citizens? Yet by the decree of this “principal,” who really should be making little rocks from big ones, they have abandoned that task – a task for the execution of which they take thousands of dollars per household per year from the district’s residents.

     Do you expect anything to happen to the persons responsible? I don’t.

***

     Next up, the Evil Party is mad about the Senate Parliamentarian:

     The communist Democrats are on the war path after nonpartisan Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough said amnesty for illegals can’t be a part of the Commiecrat’s “budget bill”. Some on the left are calling for Elizabeth MacDonough to be fired too. This is what the communist Democrats are. The funny thing is, Elizabeth MacDonough was appointed by communist Democrats in 2012 when they controlled the Senate. Under the bus Liz.

     Greisa Martinez Rosas, executive director of the progressive United We Dream Action, said groups will decide which candidates to support in upcoming elections based on “not how hard the Democrats tried or how they went down fighting, but whether or not they delivered.”

     Another advocate seemingly suggested that Senate Democrats should fire MacDonough if she doesn’t allow their immigration language. “If at the end of the day they’ve exhausted every option and the parliamentarian is a ‘no,’ she is not an elected official,” said Lorella Praeli, co-president of Community Change Action, a progressive group.

     Theft through lax border control! A green-card holder – i.e., a “resident alien” – is entitled to a host of government-provided benefits that sum to thousands of dollars per year. The illegal aliens for whom the Democrats intend the green-cards are expected to vote Democrat. A neat little racket, eh?

     Elizabeth MacDonough is merely trying to do the job she was appointed to – by a Democrat Party-controlled Senate. Likely her scalp will be the next one removed. At least the ghost of Ruth Bader Ginsburg will have company.

***

     Finally, some more or less direct and undisguised theft:

     The Democrats’ $2.9 trillion tax plan involves a tax credit for local news journalists.

     On September 13, Democrats on the House of Representatives’ Ways and Means Committee — which plays a key role in drafting tax policy — introduced a proposal to raise $2.9 trillion in new federal revenue over the course of ten years. The proposal centers upon drawing more funds from wealthy Americans by raising the corporate tax, the capital gains tax, the estate tax, and the income tax.

     However, the proposal also includes a “Payroll Credit for Compensation of Local News Journalists.” As summarized by Editor and Publisher — a journalism industry publication — the tax credit “will provide local newsrooms the opportunity to receive a five-year tax credit of up to $25,000 per journalist in the first year and up to $15,000 in the subsequent four years.”

     The Democrats already operate the larger “news” organs as a wholly-owned subsidiary. Now they want to purchase whatever local news organs remain. I have no doubt that the “journalistic community” will find this an appealing and entirely defensible prospect. It’s about “defending democracy,” you see. The press is “democracy’s indispensable guardian,” don’t y’know. People have “a right to know,” after all.

     “The people’s right to know” — The people’s right to know what? — Robert A. Heinlein

***

     So: three cases of creative theft by government. Government, according to an old document, was instituted to protect your property, among other things:

     Amendment IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

     Amendment V: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

     Decide for yourselves: Is theft somehow legitimized by having government do it?

Sep 22 2021

Rest In Peace

     A great man died yesterday: Dr, Angelo M. Codevilla, who was walking home from church when he was hit by a drunk driver. He was taken to a hospital, where he died of his injuries.

     Herewith, a brief summary of Codevilla’s resume:

     Angelo M. Codevilla (born May 25, 1943) is professor emeritus of international relations at what is now the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. He served as a U.S. Navy officer, a foreign service officer, and professional staff member of the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate. Codevilla’s books and articles range from French and Italian politics to the thoughts of Machiavelli and Montesquieu to arms control, war, the technology of ballistic missile defenses, and a broad range of international topics. Articles by Codevilla have appeared in Commentary, Foreign Affairs, National Review, and the The New Republic. His op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He has also been published in Political Science Reviewer, Intercollegiate Review, Politica.

     Codevilla was in the forefront of the wave of critics attacking the American political establishment. He was among the first to capture the essence of “America’s ruling class” and its distance from the “country class” over which it presumed to reign. The following, from a 2010 essay, neatly encapsulates his conclusions:

     Our ruling class’s agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a “machine,” that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels’ wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges — civic as well as economic — to the party’s clients, directly or indirectly. This, incidentally, is close to Aristotle’s view of democracy. Hence our ruling class’s standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government — meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc. Hence more power for the ruling class has been our ruling class’s solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes, global cooling and global warming. A priori, one might wonder whether enriching and empowering individuals of a certain kind can make Americans kinder and gentler, much less control the weather. But there can be no doubt that such power and money makes Americans ever more dependent on those who wield it. Let us now look at what this means in our time.

     We needed this thinker, who was all too soon taken from us. Over the years to come, we will be forcibly reminded of the value of his insights. Rest in peace, Dr. Codevilla.

Sep 21 2021

Something To Tell The Minimum-Wage Cranks

     The following is a table of minimum wage levels, set by Congress, alongside another figure whose meaning I’ll withhold for now:

YEAR Federal Minimum
Wage Per Hour		 ???
1964 $1.25 $0.90
1970 $1.00 $1.50
1980 $3.10 $14.05
1990 $3.80 $3.80
2000 $5.15 $4.15
2010 $7.25 $27.70
2020 $7.25 $23.90

     Did you know the federally-set minimum wage is still only $7.25 per hour? (Some of the states have different laws for wages paid by companies that operate in those states.) The folks screaming for $15.00 want a huge increase. The “economists” advocating a $26.00 minimum wage don’t even belong on this planet. But it’s that “mystery” third column that really tells a tale.

     The “mystery” third column is the value in that year’s dollars of the silver content in five United States quarters minted in 1964 or before. Each such quarter contains approximately 0.181 Troy ounces of silver.

     Note that in 1964 –you were wondering why I started with that year, weren’t you? – the minimum hourly wage was five quarters. So that year, the legal tender value of those quarters slightly exceeded their silver value. But run your thumb down the column and watch what happened to the relationship.

     The price of silver in dollars has shot up not because silver is becoming more scarce, but because the Federal Reserve Bank keeps creating more dollars – dollars that have no backing by any physical commodity. That, not the increase in the prices of commodities, is inflation. When the dollar was statutorily defined as the value of a particular weight of gold or silver, and any holder of dollars could bring them to a Federal Reserve System bank and demand that they be redeemed in gold or silver, there was no issue of a minimum wage. Wages increased much more slowly then than now, it’s true, but the prices of food, clothing, shelter, fuel, and virtually every other commodity of importance slowly but steadily declined. That was because of steady improvements in American productivity, which made the effective standard of living of the American worker rise over time, even if his hourly wage in dollars didn’t increase.

     Ask yourself:


Do We Need A Minimum Wage?
Or Do We Need Sound Money?

Sep 21 2021

Hard Times For Superherodom

     “What do you mean?” I hear you say. Well, you know how tough it can be when a trade gets overpopulated. Think of America’s legal profession. Today there are more than one million lawyers in these United States. More than a lawyer for every three hundred Americans. There simply isn’t enough legal work to go around any longer. Quite a few lawyers are straining to make ends meet. Some of them have started suing one another, even though there’s no money in it, just to keep their skills sharp.

     That’s also the case with superheroes. Everybody and his halfwit uncle Herman is creating superheroes. We’re being deluged by steely-eyed, cleft-chinned crusaders and stunningly beautiful but romantically unavailable paragons of justice in Spandex.® There aren’t enough high-powered villains to keep them all occupied. Also, the most popular superpowers – super strength, super speed, and the ability to fly – are way oversubscribed, though that should be treated as a separate problem.

     We need a solution. The carnivals can’t absorb any more strongmen. FedEx and UPS have stopped hiring the speedsters, though the suit just filed by the Postal Service might have something to do with that. The flight lanes are getting dangerous; not all airliners have radar good enough to avoid colliding with a superhero who’s just cruising around to pass the time. (Their costumes are hell on jet engines.) Unoccupied superheroes have been seen gathered on street corners and perched on tenement stoops, swapping tales of their derring-do between sips from bottles in brown paper bags. Given the glut, it won’t be much longer before our welfare offices are overrun with brawny adventurers and shapely crimefighters in capes and tights. But where is a remedy to be found?

     It’s bad out there, Gentle Reader. I’ve prattled about the militarization of police forces in the past, but back then I had no idea how the expansion of their capabilities would impact the agendas of America’s superheroes. What’s worse, there’s no export market for them, even at companies that pay substandard wages, offer poor benefits, and provide no paid sick leave. Just one more consequence of automation, I suppose.

     Moreover, it’s vital that this problem be solved by the private sector. You know how reliably government screws things up. Washington would probably create a Superhero Relief agency within the Department of Labor – and that’s if Congress should refuse to create a whole new Cabinet department. Pretty soon there’d be subsidies paid for not fighting crime, espionage, and alien invasions. Think of the impact on the morale of our men at arms! Haven’t they got it bad enough already?

     I suppose the government-run schools could hire involuntarily idle superheroes to serve as hall monitors and crossing guards, but their instincts for truth, justice, and the American Way would be a problem. They might start disciplining “educators” who propagandize in the classroom instead of teaching their assigned subject. That would surely get the teachers’ unions in a lather, and they’ve already caused trouble enough.

     But one way or another, there’s no time to lose! America’s superheroes need our help. The nation’s best minds must tackle this problem seriously and give it their best efforts. Spare no expense! I mean, you wouldn’t want to see gaggles of unemployed superheroes congregating around your nearby convenience store, hoping to get picked up by a contractor for some “day labor,” would you? Think of the children! (And the neighborhood real-estate values.)

Sep 20 2021

No Man Is So Blind As Is He Who Refuses To See

     I’m in a kind of “comedown” mood this morning. No, I didn’t get wasted yesterday; it’s a purely psychological phenomenon. You see, yesterday was “Talk Like A Pirate Day,” one of my favorite days of the year. Drives the C.S.O. nuts, but she knows it’s only one day a year. Happily, the many telemarketers desperate to sell me an extended warranty on my cars or security services for my home don’t know that. I’m sure yesterday has winnowed my phone number out of many of their Rolodexes. (Rolodices?)

     Add to that that there are still people unacquainted with the concept of zero. Some of them posture as economists and public policy analysts:

     Leftists are arguing that a $15 minimum wage is far too low; instead, many are calling for a $26 minimum wage.

     As originally noted by Foundation for Economic Education correspondent Brad Polumbo, online debate about the policy started with an August article from the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research. Economist Dean Baker argued in the piece that the minimum wage ought to keep pace with overall economic productivity.

     Having the minimum wage track productivity growth is not a crazy idea. The national minimum wage did in fact keep pace with productivity growth for the first 30 years after a national minimum wage first came into existence in 1938…

Think of what the country would look like if the lowest paying jobs, think of dishwashers or custodians, paid $26 an hour. That would mean someone who worked a 2000 hour year would have an annual income of $52,000. This income would put a single mother with two kids at well over twice the poverty level.

And, this is just for starting wages. Presumably workers would see their pay increase above the minimum as they stayed at their job for a number of years and ideally were promoted to better paying positions. If we assume that after 10 or 15 years their pay had risen by 20 percent, then these workers at the bottom of the pay ladder would be getting more than $60,000 a year.

     Baker acknowledges that the policy would cause mass unemployment if implemented in the present economic order; however, he recommended fundamentally restructuring the economy such that wealthy Americans earn less income.

     Glory be to God! There is no limit to the rapacity of the Left. My original reaction was YGBFKM. (Expand it yourself. Yes, the fourth word is profane.) But then I found myself recalling another hard-left “analyst,” a certain Teresa Ghilarducci:

     Democrats in the U.S. House have been conducting hearings on proposals to confiscate workers’ personal retirement accounts — including 401(k)s and IRAs — and convert them to accounts managed by the Social Security Administration.

     Triggered by the financial crisis the past two months, the hearings reportedly were meant to stem losses incurred by many workers and retirees whose 401(k) and IRA balances have been shrinking rapidly.

     The testimony of Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economic policy analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York, in hearings Oct. 7 drew the most attention and criticism. Testifying for the House Committee on Education and Labor, Ghilarducci proposed that the government eliminate tax breaks for 401(k) and similar retirement accounts, such as IRAs, and confiscate workers’ retirement plan accounts and convert them to universal Guaranteed Retirement Accounts (GRAs) managed by the Social Security Administration….

     The current retirement system, Ghilarducci said, “exacerbates income and wealth inequalities” because tax breaks for voluntary retirement accounts are “skewed to the wealthy because it is easier for them to save, and because they receive bigger tax breaks when they do.”…

     All workers would have 5 percent of their annual pay deducted from their paychecks and deposited to the GRA. They would still be paying Social Security and Medicare taxes, as would the employers. The GRA contribution would be shared equally by the worker and the employee. Employers no longer would be able to write off their contributions. Any capital gains would be taxable year-on-year.

     I have no doubt that Miss Ghilarducci and Mr. Baker would cross-endorse one another’s policies. It’s powerful evidence for the contention that they hate people. Really! What would the consequences be for blue collar workers and retail sector workers, whose jobs are already threatened by the advance of automation, expert systems, and applied artificial intelligence? What prospects for retirement would they have?

     But as the late Konrad Adenauer once said, the good Lord put limits on Man’s wisdom but none on his stupidity. The Left has a single aim, expressible in two and only two words: Control everything. Control who may and may not work, who may and may not spend or save and how much, who may and may not travel and to where and for how long, and so forth. That such control invariably reduces the whole of society to poverty doesn’t seem faze them. “This time,” they say, “we’ll do it right.”

     It’s not just here. Hearken to what’s just been put in process in our neighbor to the North:

     Surprised? Why? Canada has moved faster Leftward than has the U.S. Not that our Left hasn’t voiced similar proposals and “let’s edge up to it” notions here. Were you aware that various “policy analysts” have proposed the complete elimination of cash? It only started with the elimination of the higher denomination bills. Quite recently, “Republican” economist Ken Rogoff suggested that we eliminate the rest of our physical currency and go “pure digital.” Think about it.

     The COVID-19-propelled refusal of many retailers to accept cash and the drive for “contactless payment” in all circumstances should have given any thinking American pause. Thinking Americans are our target audience here at Liberty’s Torch. I hope the citations above, added to the cash-aversion that flowed from the pandemic, are sufficient to make my point. My arm is already weary from flogging this horse.

Sep 20 2021

Rationing Liquor – Who Will That Affect

From the list of brands affected, it looks like women and the men that are trying to impress them, Black people, and Rednecks with taste (the Rye).

Frankly, any man who spends as much as Dom Perignon costs (it can run over $200 a bottle!), is either trying to score with a woman who is WAY out of his league, or an idiot – or both.

Guys, you’re in the catbird seat right now. About 1/3 of the competition is unemployed. Another 1/3 is either married or otherwise unavailable, gay/bi/whatever, or still living with Mom.

If you don’t have women throwing themselves at you 24/7, get your ass to a gym and pare down that lockdown spare tire, invest in some decent clothing, and lay off the herb. Even minimal effort should leave you with more choices than you can shake your man-stick at.

Don’t waste your money on overpriced booze.

Sep 20 2021

The Dr. Stalin Icarus-Frankenstein approach.

Changes to key parts of the mRNA code in SARS-CoV-2 vaccines may be causal in changing the innate immune response via toll-like receptors. Toll-like receptors are important components in defence against infection and downstream effects may also include inhibition of CD8 T cell response. CD8 is a vital part of the immune system’s ability to eradicate infection and cancer. Those changes may be reflected in recent reactivated Varicella Zoster infections [chicken pox] although specific mechanisms are unclear at the moment. Anecdotal reports of significant uptick in cancer presenting to medical consultants may be consistent with aberrant toll-like receptor and dendritic cell changes leading to an inhibition of the anti-cancer CD8 effector response. Further data are required but the prospect of an altered CD8 response to infection and cancer is very concerning and should prompt urgent investigation.[1]

As the familiar quip goes, “What could go wrong?” The ancestors whisper from long ago.

Notes.
[1] “Stabilising the Code.” By Dr. Mike Williams, UKColumn, 9/12/21 (emphasis added).

Sep 19 2021

Premises

     It has been said – I know this for an incontrovertible fact, as I’m the one who said it – that an argument founded on a false premise, no matter how perfectly and seamlessly logical, is worthless. This applies to arguments about any and every subject under the Sun. If your premises are wrong, your argument is trash.

     There’s more than one way for one’s premises to be wrong. They could be incomplete: lacking in some tenet required for the issue at hand. This is often the case in arguments about theological subjects.

     I have a great admiration for mathematician-philosopher Raymond Smullyan. He’s written at length about many philosophical subjects, and his cogitations are frequently illuminating, always entertaining at the very least. But the greatest of logicians – and Smullyan is surely among them – will go wrong if his premises are false or incomplete. I think this is the case in the arguments about the existence and nature of God that Smullyan puts forth in his book Who Knows: A Study of Religious Consciousness.

     Rather than proceed at once to the place where Smullyan and I part company, allow me a few words of preface. Smullyan’s thought is valuable, first in that he’s willing to entertain ultimate questions: Is there a God? Is there a devil? Is there a hell? Why does “natural religion” differ from codified religion, in every instance? Second, he approaches them as a logician, moreover a logician of great power and refinement who knows good reasoning from bad. There is much to be learned from Who Knows. However, one of the things the reader should learn is how vital it is not to be confined by premises drawn from, and solely relevant to, the temporal realm.

     Consider the following snippet:

     …suppose there really is a God who influences some people to believe in Him by some means we do not understand. Then I would hardly regard the belief of those so influenced as a superstition—even though they had no objective evidence for the belief.

     For me, the highlighted word goes to the central problem of Smullyan’s approach: He disdains to consider private experiences as evidence. But why should private experiences be dismissed as “not evidence?” Granted that they cannot be used as objective evidence. Granted that one who seeks to persuade others cannot rely on them. But to those who have had them – yes, I’m one such – they are real. And they can be remarkably persuasive.

     Later on, we have this:

     On the negative side, I certainly regard the fact that God does not communicate with us in a generally recognizable fashion, plus the sufferings and evils of the world, as very strong evidence against a God—certainly an all-powerful and all-good one, as many define God to be.

     Smullyan has just dismissed the conscience, “the still small voice” inside each of us that counsels him away from evil, as a channel of communication that God might employ. Why? Because he can’t hear what my conscience says to me? That’s hardly a substantial objection.

     Now comes the capper, upon encountering which I concluded that Smullyan had gone badly wrong and could no longer find his way:

     Thus, on the one hand, the remarkable design of the world suggests a planner, but the imperfection of the world virtually rules out a perfect planner.

     But what is perfection? To say that something is perfect is to say that it is finished: that is, that no further changes remain to be made to it. As another great and underappreciated philosopher has said, perfection is finality. The perfect thing is a thing whose creation is complete.

     Contrast this with the notion, which Smullyan must hold at some level, that perfection involves the absence of want, or pain, or evil. Such a world cannot exist under the veil of Time. Time, married to any set of physical laws, must inevitably produce both conditions we would find desirable and conditions we would find undesirable…some of them outright lethal. Our reality is such: one in which time, physical laws, and their working-out will sometimes benefit us and sometimes harm us. Add to this the nature of human consciousness, in which each of us makes his choices alone. As we are not a race of angels – unfallen angels, at that – human desire is guaranteed to produce strife and evil, for not all accept the moral laws built into our temporal nature.

***

     In a way, Smullyan has reprised the problem of free will. If God is omniscient, how can we have free will? After all, He knows what we’ll do in every nexus of decision we face. That implies a predetermination of the choices of every creature, Man included. Free will, under those assumptions, must be an illusion.

     But Smullyan has omitted the premise that makes all of theism acceptable. I wrote about it in Shadow of a Sword:

     “I never really got that part,” Christine said.
     Ray nodded. “Understandably so. It seems paradoxical. I don’t really think we’re expected to ‘get’ it. Just accept it on the evidence.”
     The room had grown dim. It had gotten quite late, but neither Ray nor Christine was in any hurry to conclude their chat.
     “What makes it hard for most people,” Ray said, “is that we tend to think of God as just a very powerful temporal entity, like some sort of super-magician. But He’s not. He created time. He looks down on it from above, the way you or I would read a map. He knows the path we follow because He knows all the paths we might follow, and what might flow from every one of them.” He sat back and reflected for a moment. “So our time-dependent language about ‘choosing’ and ‘knowing’ gets us into trouble when we try to apply it to God.”

     If God stands outside time, all else, including free will, maladies, disasters, and human evil, becomes possible without disturbing in the least the conception of a benevolent, loving God and free will for every member of Mankind. Indeed, no conception of a benevolent God would be consistent without that premise.

***

     It is a classical error, the sort that traps the logician inescapably, to apply temporal reasoning and constraints to God. There is absolutely no justification for it…yet philosophers have made the very same mistake for many centuries. Thereby hangs a tale of legions of intelligent and well-meaning men who fancied themselves qualified to reason about God – His existence, His characteristics, and His Plan – and have found themselves caught in thickets of logical impossibility to which their limited viewpoints, especially their inadequate premises, doomed them from the very start.

     I could go on, but I’ll spare you. The watchword, as it so often is, is humility: to accept that however powerful our minds, our knowledge is both conditional and incomplete. With humility, we can learn; without it, we are bound by our own preconceptions. In no domain is humility more important than in our approach to that which our eyes cannot see: God the Creator, who stands above us all, and whose Plan no human conception can encompass.

     Food for thought.

Sep 18 2021

Fences

     Why does anyone, anywhere and at any time, erect a fence?

     I have one around my backyard. It’s to keep my dogs in: that is, to lessen my fear that my dogs will run away, possibly to their deaths.

     When the patricians of other places erect fences, it’s usually to keep other people out: that is, to lessen their fear that other people will invade their privacy, possibly with ill intent.

     The village of Bedford, in Westchester County, New York, is laced with stone walls that demarcate the properties of wealthy individuals. For many years, those walls were almost all no more than three feet high: not serious obstacles to ingress, merely attractive property boundaries. In recent years, some residents have built higher walls than that: four to six feet. That caused some displeasure among older Bedfordites, who saw the walls as more decorative than functional. Among other things, the equestrians of the village could jump the older, low walls, which contributed to a sense of community among the “horsey set.” Walls that were high enough to present a substantial barrier were seen as a rebuff of that community. That did not deter the residents who erected the higher, jump-proof walls; they were more concerned with privacy and security than community.

     Fences and walls are intended to separate one area from another. In the usual case, they express either a preference for privacy or a fear of what lies outside them.

     What do these fences express?

     The rationale given for them is specious. Virtually no harm came to the Capitol, and none to any Congressman, because of the January 6 protest against the blatantly stolen elections. No one expects that the demonstrators who will congregate there today have anything in mind other than voicing their displeasure with the Usurper Regime. But the officials who “work” in that building are fearful all the same. They’re aware of the high – and still growing – national dissatisfaction with them, whether Democrat or Republican.

     Their fears may run well above the actual hazard to them, but that’s nothing new.

     “When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.” Thomas Jefferson said it, and it is so. But what is the true “correlation of fears” today in these United States? Who currently holds the preponderance? Which way is it trending? Can anyone answer with confidence?

     I can’t. Yet it is plain that there’s fear in both camps. We the People have been subjected to a year and a half campaign to instill fear in us: fear of a virus. It was a pathetic thing to see, for the virus is no more dangerous than ordinary influenza. Americans are slowly but inexorably coming to realize that they’ve been hoodwinked: first by the Trump-averse legions of the Deep State; more recently by the Usurpers who stole the 2020 elections and are frantically maneuvering to cement themselves immovably into power. They — we — are shedding our inculcated fear of this phantasm.

     But another fear is rising: the Usurpers’ and the Deep State’s fear of what we might be moved to do. For a man who discovers that he’s been had will feel anger: some at himself, for having fallen for the con; more at those who hornswoggled him. If he can exact retribution from his defrauders, he will. Our defrauders know their position is shaky. They’re seeing the early-to-intermediate signs of a popular rising, and they know they’re unprepared to meet it.

     So they’ve erected a fence around their place of business.

     I don’t expect the demonstrators to attempt to breach that fence. But that won’t matter quite as much as their numbers and the palpability of their anger. The men inside that fence had better pay close attention. The confidence of their early two or three months has been eroding. Whether elected, appointed, or civil service, they know they are not perfectly secure in their seats.

     Ours is a time of grave portents. The events of the next few days, as public anger toward the Usurper Regime and its many unConstitutional and unAmerican actions swells, will speak loudly. Keep an ear cocked. There may yet be a shot heard ‘round the world.

Sep 18 2021

Is That A Clarion Call I Hear?

     Well, maybe:

     People are waking up to the monumental con that’s been played on us:

     Those are basic facts – from the government horse’s mouth, at that. But don’t you dare try to dispute the importance of the “vaccine,” because the Left’s media minions will shortly know all about you:

     The lady in that opening video just might have a lot of brethren who are ready to act. I hope and pray it’s so, because we’re at the brink of a real lockdown.

     Have a nice day.

Sep 17 2021

You Have Been Told

     You have been told that you, Mr. Unvaccinated American, are by your stubbornness endangering your own life and the lives of others, including the already vaccinated. You have been told that your conduct is unpatriotic, in violation of the “social contract.” You have been told that this is a crisis, the moral equivalent of war. You have been told that by refusing the vaccine, you are failing your duty as an American.

     Never mind that the enemy is too small to be seen with the naked eye. Never mind that the vaccinated are contracting the virus at twice the rate of the unvaccinated. Never mind that the vaccines have a higher death rate than the virus. And never mind that you’ve already had and recovered from the disease and are feeling fit as a fiddle. You are a “science denier” for spurning The Jab.

     But soft! What have we here?

     House Democrats rejected a plan this week that would have required immigrants to the United States to take one of three available Chinese coronavirus vaccines despite mandates on American citizens from President Joe Biden’s administration.

     Last week, Biden ordered that the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) develop a rule requiring all private companies with 100 or more employees to mandate the vaccine or be subjected to weekly coronavirus tests.

     Biden also ordered the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to require vaccines for all health care workers who work at facilities receiving federal Medicare or Medicaid funding.

     As Breitbart News reported, Biden has seemingly not imposed any such vaccine requirements on border crossers, illegal aliens, legal immigrants, or Afghan refugees who are arriving in the U.S.

     During a hearing for the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) proposed an amendment that would require the vaccine for foreign nationals in the U.S. who are seeking to adjust their immigration status to remain in the U.S.

     Every Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee opposed the vaccine mandate for immigrants while every Republican supported the measure.

     How shall we make sense of this? Are immigrants not capable of contracting or spreading the dreaded Kung Flu? Do they have some sort of superior immunity by virtue of not being American-born? Or is it a mere technicality of their immigrant status that the Usurpers cannot impose on them the mandates they seek to enforce upon the rest of us?

     You know the answer, Gentle Reader. Just as you know why sitting officials disdain to mask as ordered by their patron saint Anthony Fauci. Just as you know why Congress has exempted itself from all such rules. Just as you know why no Usurper spokesdroid has even attempted to answer questions such as the ones above.

     You are being broken to harness. The Jab is a test of your subjugation, nothing more. Take this highly experimental, unproven, arguably dangerous vaccine or be denounced as a hater and a traitor! By imperial ukase, you have been told to surrender your rights over your own body. All this in the name of combatting a disease that only kills two sufferers in a thousand, just like the flu.

     Fifty years ago, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson wrote about the “Bavarian Fire Drill:”

     “That’s what we call a Bavarian Fire Drill,” Simon explained to Joe. (It was another time; he was driving another Volkswagen. In fact, it was the night of April 23 and they were going to meet Tobias Knight at the UN building.) “It was one official named Winifred who’d been transferred from the Justice Department to a key State Department desk where every bit of evidence passed for evaluation. But the same principles apply everywhere. For instance—we’re half an hour early for the meeting anyhow—I’ll give you an illustration right now.” They were approaching the corner of Forty-third Street and Third Avenue and Simon had observed that the streetlight was changing to red. As he stopped the car, he opened the door and said to Joe, “Follow me.”

     Puzzled, Joe got out as Simon ran to the car behind them, beat on the hood with his hand and shouted “Bavarian Fire Drill! Out!” He made vigorous but ambiguous motions with his hands and ran to the car next back. Joe saw the first subject look dubiously at his companion and then open the door and get out, obediently trailing behind Simon’s urgent and somber figure.

     “Bavarian Fire Drill! Out!” Simon was already shouting at the third car back.

     As Joe trotted along, occasionally adding his own voice to persuade the more dubious drivers, every car gradually emptied and people formed a neat line heading back toward Lexington Avenue. Simon then ducked between two cars and began jogging toward the front of the -line at Third Avenue again, shouting to everybody, “Complete circle! Stay in line!” Obediently, everyone followed in a great circle back to their own cars, reentering from the side opposite to that from which they had left. Simon and Joe climbed back into the VW, the light changed, and they sped ahead.

     “You see?” Simon asked. “Use words they’ve been conditioned to since childhood—’fire drill,’ ‘stay in line,’ like that—and never look back to see if they’re obeying. They’ll follow. Well, that’s the way the Illuminati guaranteed that the Final Solution wouldn’t be interrupted. Winifred, one guy who had been around long enough to have an impressive title, and his scrawl ‘Evaluation: dubious’ on the bottom of each memo . . . and six million died. Hilarious, isn’t it?”

     No other novel of my acquaintance embeds such a serious, nay critical message in so entertainingly farcical a story.

     But you have been told! Why do you continue to resist the New Sacrament? Why do you spurn the well-meant decrees of your social and political superiors? Have you no sense? Have you no shame?

     No, you have not been told to bare your upper left arm so a government functionary can adorn you with a numerical tattoo. Not yet.

     How could I put it more imperatively?


You are being made into sheep.
Sheep are shorn or slaughtered.
Your time for choosing is now.

     You have been told. Now you shall be asked:

     Are you a sheep…or a man?

Sep 17 2021

Oh My!

     I found this over at 90 Miles From Tyranny:

     The curbs in Augusta, Georgia must be really high. Do you suppose the city council should be chided for tolerating such a hazard to the public?

Sep 16 2021

Under Way As We Speak…

     …is a brand new F&SF convention, specifically oriented toward writers and readers in the Right:

     BasedCon survived a July deplatforming attempt. Currently underway in beautiful Norton Shores, Michigan, BasedCon has sold out and turned a profit in its debut outing. Celebrate this gathering for based authors and fans of science fiction and fantasy by topping off your library at a huge sale of based science fiction and fantasy books. Every one of well over a hundred books in the sale is $0.99 or free right now. The offerings include works by John C. Wright, Fenton Wood, Jon del Arroz, Tom Kratman, Mark Wandrey, Larry Correia, Francis Porretto, Mike Massa, David Weber, C.J. Carella, Brian Niemeier, Alexander Hellene, Jon Mollison, Hans G. Schantz, and many, many more. This is a killer deal, and you’re supporting authors who don’t hate you. Go check out the sale now!

     A couple of those writers are fairly decent. I’m sure you’re already familiar with Tom Kratman and John Ringo. Among the others, I particularly like Jon Mollison and Hans G. Schantz. It’s worth checking out a few of the others. But this guy? I don’t know about him. Sounds to me like a real hack. Probably just trying to pay off his bar bill.

     All the same, please give the sale a look. Books for less than a dollar! Some of them free! How can you go wrong?

Sep 16 2021

The Mind-Bogglings Continue

     I have learned an important lesson:

Never imagine that it can’t get worse.

     As a corollary, never imagine that it can’t get more absurd. There’s no limit apparent to the clownishness of American politicians. They’re beginning to make their colleagues in Italy and France look like sober-minded statesmen. Consider this bit of nonsense, for example.

     Democrats want to include 8 million green cards in their monstrous $3.5 trillion package. They need [Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth] MacDonough’s approval. Here is where it gets a little complicated.

     Senate Democrats need MacDonough’s approval to pull off what is referred to as the “reconciliation process,” a procedure that was added to the Senate’s rules in the early 1970s. The roughly 45-year-old process allows some types of budget bills to pass through the upper chamber with just a simple majority. It allows the bypassing of filibusters by opponents.

     Ultimately, MacDonough, whose job it is to protect the rights of both parties, will decided what is and is not acceptable with regard to the procedures.

     Democrat senators are obviously gung-ho about handing over 8 million green cards to illegal immigrants who have crossed our southern border, as it almost guarantees 8 million new Democrat voters.

     Green cards for illegal aliens proposed as a budget measure, eh? Yes, it’s absurd, but absurdities go with Leftist policy proposals just as reliably as violin solos and thunderous grand-piano chords go with horror movies.

     As I noted in a comment to that piece:

     Among the things that come to mind in this connection, my uppermost is that the major media could play a pivotal role in this, by their decision about whether to cover the story. Many people who routinely support the Democrats would turn against them were they to learn about this…but Americans who rely on the major media are at the mercy of their editorial staffs, which are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Democrat Party.

     While I can’t prove it with hard evidence, I’m of the opinion that a great part of the political division in these United States arises from Americans’ decisions about which media outlets to trust, and on which issues. The Left’s dominance of the editorial boards of the mainstream media remains an important asset for the reason I cited above. Information those outlets omit is information those who depend upon those outlets will not receive.

     Which brings me to our top story this morning:

     A Detroit News station’s Facebook query about COVID-19 got an unexpected response when users swamped their comment section with stories that directly contradicted their desired narrative.

     “After the vaccines were available to everyone, did you lose an unvaccinated loved one to COVID-19?” WXYZ-TV inquired in the Sept. 10 post. “If you’re willing to share your family’s story, please DM us your contact information. We may reach out for a story we’re working on.”

     After WXYZ-TV posted its appeal for stories about unvaccinated loved ones dying of COVID, something remarkable happened.

     Thousands of Facebook users shared stories describing alarming vaccine side effects, or posted about fully vaxed loved ones dying of the coronavirus. The viral post appears to have become a popular forum for victims of the vaccines to share their stories.

     Please read it all, especially if you or your loved ones are undecided about The Jab. This is part of the accumulating evidence that the “vaccines” – which don’t really immunize against COVID-19, it seems – are at least as dangerous as the virus itself. This has special relevance to the young and healthy, who are in effectively zero danger from the Chinese Lung Rot. But such stories have received no welcome from the organs of the major media.

     The Usurper Regime is demonstrably frantic to get the “vaccines” into as many Americans as possible: preferably all of us. Its absurd claims that the vaccinated are endangered by the unvaccinated is the best possible evidence that their focus is on imposing the “vaccines” on us, not on somehow ending the pandemic. The unConstitutional attempt to mandate their imposition on the employees of all but smallest companies is proof of the Usurpers’ desperation. Be aware that the Usurpers are now talking openly about abridging another Constitutional right – the right to travel freely, recognized and defended by the Supreme Court long ago – to put additional pressure on We the Unvaxxed to bare arms.

     If you’ve been wondering why, you’re not alone. But rather than pursue that line of thought just now, have another bit of news that could upset a few apple carts:

     House Democrats this week are moving forward with their long-awaited plan to raise taxes to help pay for their next big spending package. With more than 40 separate tax increases, collectively worth $2 trillion, it would be the largest package of tax increases in decades — and a test of Democrats’ willingness to raise rates.

     Lawmakers want the money to fund plans to greatly boost government benefits, from expanding access to pre-K programs to beefing up Medicare — though Democrats remain at odds over the plan’s total size, with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia balking at designs to spend $3.5 trillion.

     Forty new taxes? Even if what’s new is just an increase in the rate, this is not news the American public, already reeling from sharp increases in the cost of living due to Usurper Regime policies, would hear gladly. But will they hear it? Will the major media include those taxes and tax increases in their coverage – and if they do, will the mention of them be prominent or at the bottom of page A37, just beneath the obituaries?

     It’s never been more important to the future of the Republic that we broaden our selections of information outlets. Don’t hew exclusively to the ones that leave your preconceptions and preferences unchallenged. There’s more going on than you’re being told. Some of it is what you really need to know.

Sep 15 2021

From The “No, Really?” Dept.

     There are days I marvel at the obdurate ignorance of self-nominated “scientists.” As I was one, once, I think I can say this with authority: if it isn’t in his wheelhouse, the typical scientist will dismiss it as irrelevant at best, absurd at worst.

     Mankind has developed a great variety of approaches to the acquisition of useful knowledge. Some of those approaches are religious in nature. That is: they proceed from a theology: a creed that incorporates a Supreme Being, a supernatural realm, and a connection between our temporal reality and that higher one. Now, any honest theist will allow that the theology he subscribes to is unverifiable (i.e., unprovable). However, if it is sound, his theology will also be unfalsifiable: incapable of being disproved. A falsifiable system of belief will be subjected to tests of its propositions that human minds can perform. That directly contradicts the nature of a theology.

     More than three thousand years have passed since Moses presented the Decalogue, a.k.a. the Ten Commandments, to the wandering Hebrews. Billions of people have made those commandments the central moral-ethical tenets of their lives. While their lives have not been “perfect” in any sense, those who were faithful to the dictates of the Decalogue (or the Noachide Commandments which preceded them) succeeded in forming coherent, enduring societies capable of progress. While it cannot be proved that adherence to the Decalogue is a necessary condition for forming such a society, history records no examples of successful societies that have lacked them.

     An inquiring mind would note that pattern and say, “Hmm! There might be something to this.”

     In the Christian formulation, the Decalogue is seen as a set of requirements derived from even higher and more imperative principles:

     But the Pharisees hearing that he had silenced the Sadducees, came together: And one of them, a doctor of the law, asking him, tempting him: Master, which is the greatest commandment in the law?
     Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets. [Matthew 22:34-40]

     Earlier in His ministry, the Redeemer put it like this:

     All things therefore whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do you also to them. For this is the law and the prophets. [Matthew 7:12]

     Most of us know this Golden Rule in its more concise version: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” C. S. Lewis has called it the Law of General Benevolence: to wish all others well, for we would surely prefer that all others wish us well, and so the Golden Rule applies.

     Not too difficult, eh what? Certainly within the intellectual reach of the “scientific mind.” Yet the habit of prominent contemporary scientists has been to dismiss religious precepts. While there are surely scientists who appreciate those precepts, they are out-shouted by cretins such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and their fellow-travelers. It’s arrogant, self-glorifying atheists such as these who get the media attention.

     A citation from Dawkins should give you the flavor:

     A few months earlier, in front of an audience of graduate students from around the world, Dawkins took on a famous geneticist and a renowned neurosurgeon on the question of whether God was real. The geneticist and the neurosurgeon advanced their best theistic arguments: Human consciousness is too remarkable to have evolved; our moral sense defies the selfish imperatives of nature; the laws of science themselves display an order divine; the existence of God can never be disproved by purely empirical means.

     Dawkins rejected all these claims, but the last one – that science could never disprove God – provoked him to sarcasm. “There’s an infinite number of things that we can’t disprove,” he said. “You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it’s wrong to say therefore we don’t need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don’t need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There’s an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there’s not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it.”

     Mind you, no one has demanded that Dawkins, or anyone else, present a conclusive disproof of the existence of God. Rather than confront that unpleasant little fact, Dawkins resorts to ridicule and, later in the same article, defamation:

     Dawkins looks forward to the day when the first US politician is honest about being an atheist. “Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists,” he says. “Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist. It just doesn’t add up. Either they’re stupid, or they’re lying. And have they got a motive for lying? Of course they’ve got a motive! Everybody knows that an atheist can’t get elected.”

     Could it be any clearer that Dawkins’s entire argument is circular? That its function in his consciousness is to reinforce his conviction of his personal intellectual superiority? Yet this is the premier anti-theist of the day.

***

     If you’re wondering why this subject is at top of my stack today, it’s this article at that selfsame Wired magazine:

     Science and religion have often been at odds. But if we remove the theology—views about the nature of God, the creation of the universe, and the like—from the day-to-day practice of religious faith, the animosity in the debate evaporates. What we’re left with is a series of rituals, customs, and sentiments that are themselves the results of experiments of sorts. Over thousands of years, these experiments, carried out in the messy thick of life as opposed to sterile labs, have led to the design of what we might call spiritual technologies—tools and processes meant to sooth, move, convince, or otherwise tweak the mind. And studying these technologies has revealed that certain parts of religious practices, even when removed from a spiritual context, are able to influence people’s minds in the measurable ways psychologists often seek.

     (Applause to Misanthropic Humanitarian for the reference.)

     It’s worth reading in its entirety, though my reaction was a rather amused “No, really? What an incredible surprise!”

     You don’t have to seek far into the past to find great minds – among the greatest that have ever existed – that were deeply religious: devout Christians, devout Jews, devout Buddhists, Taoists, Confucians, and so forth. If the Dawkinsites, as well as being numb to the practical benefits of a wholesome religion, are willing to dismiss Sir Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Antoine Lavoisier, and Albert Einstein as unintelligent, I’d say nothing more need be said about them.

     The bottom line “should” be “obvious:” Beware of anyone who purports to judge the intelligence or honesty of others on the grounds of a difference in unverifiable, unfalsifiable beliefs. Such persons habitually set themselves above others. They need to believe themselves morally and intellectually superior to others. It’s a conclusive symptom of an inherently inadequate identity, the sort that could crumble upon being confronted with a single indisputable fact adverse to their creed. It’s no coincidence that the preponderance of militant atheists of the Dawkins stripe are on the political Left…which says a lot about both the militant atheists of the world and the political Left, doesn’t it?

Sep 15 2021

What Belief Can Teach Science

I found this on Wired. Perhaps not surprisingly, those Tech Nerds are flabbergasted at the idea that religions’ practices have practical application for modern people.

As a Catholic, I come from a long heritage of scientists with strong religious convictions – Pascal, Descartes, Copernicus, Lemaitre, Mendel, Mercalli, Lavoisier, Doppler, to just name a few. Check out this list, and this one, and this book by a Jesuit brother that worked in the Vatican astronomy facilities.

When I taught, I found that students were often surprised that I regularly went to church. Particularly for those students coming from “Bible-based churches”, that viewpoint was contrary to the teaching of their pastors, many of whom were actively hostile to science, and certain that the disdain was returned. They had been informed that, generally, scientists were atheists.

I plan to get the book in the near future, once my life settles down. It’s available at my local library in Cleveland, so that might be an option, too.

Sep 14 2021

They Want to ‘Pretty Over’ the Wounds

The memorials – flowing water, ‘pretty speeches’ (well, if you don’t consider the politicized speech of the former president slamming the NLD (Non-Leftist Dissidents) as Domestic Terrorists), and and fervent undercurrent of “Let’s Forget”.

That’s the Democratic Legacy of 9/11. It was Terribly Inconvenient of the Taliban not to cooperate in a quick and “victorious” end to the Official War on Terror, and make those inconvenient videos, pictures, and memes clearly showing that, no, the Democrats were the cause of Yet Another World-Class Failure (YAW-CF).

I keep hearing about ‘Closure’. Closure is what happens when a wound heals – but, it generally leaves a visible scar. Scars aren’t pretty – but, they are an inevitable part of life. I’ve collected scars from accidents, surgeries, and all of the other nicks and dings of living a full life. I’ve also seen my share of lumps, lines, and creaky joints – the result of a life fully lived.

The thing is, we aren’t meant to wander through live as an observer. We are meant to participate, and, in the process, pick up some evidence – visible and invisible – that we LIVED. And, hopefully, learned from that experience.

We are disrespecting the memory of all those who died through a cowardly, vile act, should we relegate what 9/11 meant to this country to vapid speeches papering over what is still a raw wound.

We SHOULD be able to straightforwardly express our outrage – not merely at the Losers who aimed the planes at a civilian population, but also at the MANY politicians and their Elite Controllers who tried to bury the inconvenient truths of 9/11. Jayna Davis did an amazing job investigating the Oklahoma City bombing, and made some inconvenient discoveries that have light to shed on the events that preceded 9/11, including the FBI culture that, even then, was willing to sweep connections to the Elite under the rug. I recommend buying a copy of her book before it gets disappeared.

Buy provisions, plan a garden, prep for a long winter, and hunker down for now. DON’T go to DC to protest – TPTB are orchestrating yet another demonstration of why a Police State is SO needed. Don’t give them the fodder. Instead, give to the support of those STILL imprisoned from 1/6 – here is one such site.

Here is one for the lawyers trying to get accountability for Ashli Babbitt (they are representing the surviving family members). If you have knowledge of any reputable donation site, please put it in the comments.

On a lighter note, the Deplorables of Twitter (DoT) savage one of The Meathead’s more ignorant rants. It’s important not to descend into despair.

Sep 14 2021

Only progressives.

The hero of the article is a young academic super-star lefty named Kathryn Paige Harden who, the New Yorker says, is almost single-handedly fighting a two-front war: “on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on her right those who insist that they’re everything.” No one — and I mean no one — thinks genes are “everything,” but that is the pose lefties strike. They believe only committed progressives can truly understand the policy implications of genetics.[1]

I think every progressive, i.e., disingenuous leftist who’s 100% indifferent to the preservation of liberty, who wants to advance any “progressive” idea needs to run it by a committee composed of Bronx Tina, Ron Paul, Lara Logan, Philip Giraldi, Ann Coulter, Cynthia McKinney, any Army E-7 drill sergeant whose last name begins with a “K,” Randy Weaver, and Aaron Babbitt. This would be the 21st-c. equivalent of flapping the scientists of Laputa with inflated bladders in Swift’s masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels.

As it is, absolute flapdoodle goes right to the moral certainty glands of the nation’s decisionmakers and shills propgandists journalists like crack cocaine lights up the brain receptors of 48-year-old, overweight, tattooed, lesbian feminists.

Witness the results.

Notes
[1] “Taking the Fun Out of Being ‘Progressive.’” By Jared Taylor, The Unz Review, 9/8/21.

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