Sep 13 2021
Consider these two songs, the first the original by R.E.M.:
Now, the parody, by the immortal Al Yankovic:
Frankly, I prefer the parody. (I must also admit that I do like Spam®. Dad was a Navy man, and the stuff was a staple of his diet in his World War II years.)
Sep 12 2021
At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Franklin was queried as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation. In the notes of Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Convention, a lady asked Dr. Franklin “Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy.” Franklin replied, “A republic . . . if you can keep it.”
Joe Martin has a lengthy post – I’d recommend reading it, in full.
We appear to be nearing that time, when it’s necessary to flip the switch from Nice to Not-Nice.
TPTB are drawing the lines. Not merely in the USA, but worldwide.
Charting a pathway out of our current hysterical response to a relatively mild infection (for most) will take some time. It will take even longer, should we continue to be blocked in ferreting out the reality. Alex Berenson has several small books that attempt to find out the truth from the load of Convenient B$ that is coming from the Left.
I know it’s hard to settle your mind down to reading anything but fluff lately – God knows that I’ve been re-reading old mysteries over the last year. It’s called Escape Literature for a reason. But this is a book that bears reading, and may give you both hope, and a clearer mind for the Re-Building Efforts to come.
Add this report to the stack – those of you who are more philosophic of mind may find it worthwhile.
What the hell, ya’ gotta do something while waiting for the tumbrels to arrive.
All of the above recommended book were from What Would the Founders Think blog.
Sep 12 2021
Good morning, Gentle Readers. A number of you have written to ask why I haven’t posted anything about the twentieth anniversary of the greatest atrocity ever visited upon this nation. The short answer is that the date has left me both heartsick and furious: too heartsick to say anything encouraging, and too furious to say anything meaningful about “where we go from here.” As for the long answer…well, suffice it to say that neither of us has the time or patience for that. So I’ll spare you.
Other commentators have said a great deal about the day today commemorates. Gerard Vanderleun produced a deep remembrance of what he saw that day. Mike Hendrix has rounded up the thoughts of several others and added his own. There’s enough there and elsewhere for your perusal. I have no need to add a great quantity of melancholy or angry verbiage to theirs, especially given how I feel about it all.
However, there’s a word ringing in my head that simply won’t go away. It’s an old “favorite,” one about which I’ve ranted in the past: should. To be more specific, I’m hearing it embedded in a past-tense phrase: what we should have done. As we’re getting quite a lot of that from other commentators, including the ones cited above, I’ll strive to keep my thoughts brief.
First, a snippet from a truly excellent thriller:
“Miss Rains?” It was the General.
“Yes, sir.”
“What did you know for certain after the attacks on 9/11?” he asked.
I hesitated for a moment because I thought I was being tested.
“I knew for certain on 9/11 that we were at war,” I said. “What did you know for certain on 9/11, sir?”
“That we had gotten off easy,” he said and hung up.[Martin McPhillips, Corpse in Armor]
Both Mara Rains, the first-person protagonist of the passage above, and her shadowy interlocutor “the General” are correct. Moreover, their conclusions were easily available to anyone who dared to view the atrocity open-eyed. We were at war. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were just early salvoes, the worst our enemy could do to us at that moment. They were not the end of the conflict, but the beginning of its active phase.
That war began with Muhammad himself. It’s a war between the Christian-Enlightenment West and Islam. It’s now fourteen centuries long and is still going on…and we’re losing.
We’re losing because we’re unwilling to allow that we’re at war. Instead, our “leaders” prattle about “justice” and exhort us not to think badly of Muslims.
But war is not justice. War is not the imposition of a judicial procedure upon an accused wrongdoer. War does not send forth detectives to investigate nor policemen to arrest nor judges and juries to try. War is prosecuted with armies. Its aim is to break the will of the enemy: at first, by closing with and destroying its active forces; thereafter, by doing whatever is necessary to eliminate the will of the enemy nation to resist our will.
We were at war after 9/11…but we did not go to war. Our “leaders” refused to allow that we were at war. They prattled instead about “justice” and “democracy.” In particular, they told us that Islam is “a religion of peace.”
Islam is not a religion of peace. Islam is an ideology of world conquest. It aims at the subjugation of all of Mankind. Stripped of its theological trimmings, it is indistinguishable from Nazism…but wait: didn’t Adolf Hitler want to be seen as a god?
Islam has always been the open enemy of the West, the United States in particular. It will be our enemy for as long as it persists.
We cannot impose “justice” on Islam. We cannot “democratize” or “modernize” it. We certainly can’t improve its attitude toward us through immigration or trade. We can only fight it with wholesale slaughter and destruction, just as we did with Nazism and Japanese imperialism.
Only two commentators took that view, unabashedly and unapologetically, after September 11, 2001. One was Ann Coulter:
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.
The other was this clown. If you don’t recall what he said on that occasion, here’s the meat of it:
I saw and spoke to many people that day. Gripped with shock from the events, many had nothing to offer but tears. Those who could articulate their feelings were nearly unanimous about them:
“Kill them all.”
It was a sentiment I shared with a degree of passion and a wholeness of heart that I’d once reserved for the people and things I loved.
He meant every word of it. He still means it all today. But do have a nice day.
Sep 11 2021
The Southern schools do this well. Most of the schools have an active JROTC program, and the students take their participation very seriously. School leaders, community members – both present and past serving, the local 1st responders and National Guards , and, most importantly, the students (over the last 5 years, were not even born when the Towers fell), made this an emotionally draining, but very important memorial.
Every year, I find myself crying – for the victims, for our country, and for the speed with which most have managed to forget the lessons of that day.
What were the lessons?
That America was being targeted by Islamic radicals, not for what we had done, but for what we represented.
That the weasels of the Left could barely conceal their impatience to push any knowledge or memory of “this event” far away, and minimized as just a terribly sad but completely understandable expression of justified rage of the oppressed. Good luck with that, Weasels!
I was working, and preparing for our school’s opening (delayed due to some construction issues). We would have started with our first day on Wednesday. That was delayed another week, and in the interim, we lost a 1st grade teacher. Her husband, a helicopter pilot in the service, was several weeks away from retirement. She had moved from VA to take her position, and was forced to quit to return to VA, when her husband’s retirement was rescinded.
My husband and I had 2 children in the military – our son was serving on the Bon Homme Richard, at that time out of port, and our daughter was National Guard, and in college. Danny was smart, and, as soon as he heard of the attack (he worked in an office right near the bridge), he emailed me that he was fine, but would likely be out of contact for at least a few weeks. We trusted that God would keep him safe. He ended up going back and forth over the Pacific, ferrying Marines to Afghanistan, and traveling to spots around the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf.
We didn’t hear from our daughters until late in the day – both were fine. The youngest was with her boyfriend, later her husband, also in the Guard. They spent the next few days with their unit, preparing for what might come. As it happened, her unit wasn’t called up until 2 years later.
I’m watching NBC News. Hoda has an oddly inappropriate carefree smile on her face. She seems detached from the ceremony, and is smiling and laughing as though this was just another day. Savannah Guthrie appears to be more attuned to decorum, with a more serious mien.
Apparently, GW Bush is in Shanksville, PA, the site of the Flight 93 plane’s crash. Kah-mah-la will be joining him. Hope she manages to hold back that jacka$$ laughter for the duration of her appearance.
I remember my mother on December 7. I didn’t understand her feelings about that day, until I experienced 9/11. By that point, she, and my father, had been dead for several years. My kids are old enough to understand, but I doubt that my grandkids have the maturity to realize what a shock it all was – not unlike the shock of Pearl Harbor.
Schools don’t truly teach about these pivotal events. They are so anxious not to appear “Islamophobic”, that they don’t convey the deserved outrage these atrocities deserve. Similarly, students are taught more about Hiroshima, than Pearl Harbor. “Moral equivalence” is the order of the day.
There is no moral equivalence. The people who planned, and perpetrated this are moral midgets, privileged and ethically empty, nasty little thugs. I’m not satisfied by the outcome of the Afghanistan War, nor the lack of accountability that Pakistan has been held to. I’m fine with making wide swathes of “Pock-ee-ston” a parking lot.
Screw ’em.
One newscaster is talking about how kids born after that point don’t even question any security measures – whether TSA checkpoints, no backpack rules, long lines to pass scrutiny in sports venues or other large gatherings, and, now, masking. It is the ‘normal’ they have grown up with. They have learned to accept many restrictions on their freedom for the dubious guarantee of ‘being safe’.
My experience with younger Americans is different. Many of them hear stories from elder family members; many of them have former soldiers, sailors, and Marines in that group. They are often quite thoughtful, although, thanks to the readiness of the Karens and Kyles of their acquaintance, they are reluctant to state their non-PC opinions openly. When they talk in private with me, the truth comes out. They are NOT generally happy with our oppressive government. There is an undercurrent of distrust, disdain, and discontent with America’s ‘leadership’ and other Elites.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this sentiment was the tinder that only needed a flashpoint to ignite.
I may add to this post as the day goes on. If I do, I’ll add it below.
9:42 am – I thought I noticed that lying ba$tard Milley at the Pentagon ceremony. Little weasel should be embarrassed to show his face in public after that FusterCluck in Afghanistan.
Sep 11 2021
It is characteristic of collapsing regimes that as they feel their subjects turning against them, possibly preparing to rise, they strive to tighten their grip to the maximum. This is happening in the United States as we speak:
Policymakers in Washington have proposed requiring banks to report virtually all their customers’ bank account information and activity to the IRS regardless of the customers’ consent.
While community banks do not endorse such broad IRS access to their customers’ account information, consumers need to be aware of the potential effects of this proposal.
Mandating new, broad bank account reporting to the IRS would infringe on the privacy of bank customers, push more people away from a banking relationship and overload the IRS with more personal information about American citizens than it can possibly process or keep safe from a data hack.
Applause to Mike Miles at 90 Miles from Tyranny for the reference.
Remember, just a few years back, when government economists – and if that doesn’t strike you as a contradiction in terms, it damned well should — were openly proposing the complete elimination of cash? You can count on that idea coming back to their table. Cash is the only truly private transactional medium. The doings of people who buy and sell in cash are known only to themselves. Our omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent federal Leviathan doesn’t want us to have any privacy at all. Privacy makes insurrections and revolutions possible.
The Usurpers are frightened. They’ve heard the talk; they want to know who’s talking it and how serious he is, and they want to put a stop to it right BLEEP!ing now. Why else would the Justice Department and Homeland Security be forming intimate relationships with the giants of Big Tech? Why else would they be straining to eliminate the privacy of our communication via cell phones? Why else would Biden’s puppeteers have told him to mandate The Jab?
Do you think there’d be anything the Usurpers couldn’t learn about you, once your financial and medical dealings have been laid bare?
Once more, with feeling: There is no time. The collapse is in progress. Whether we rise soon or late will determine how bad the destruction will be.
Take it seriously, Gentle Readers:
I can’t say it loudly enough. Soon I might not be able to say it at all. So take heed.
Sep 11 2021
We are being denied our right to communicate freely. We are being denied our right to a fair election. We are being denied our right to be heard in court. We are being denied our right to be heard in public.
This does not end well. Let us consider the paths forward.
First, we should agree that the Republican party is dead, along with its affiliated “conservative” institutions in the media and think-tanks. . . .
“Where We Go From Here.” By surakblog, 1/7/21.
Sep 10 2021
Postal Workers – whose facilitation of the movement of the fake ballots – through the postmarks that were backdated, enabled a veneer of respectability to cover the shenigans.
Teachers – another group that is largely exempt from forced vaccination.
NGOs are generally under the number of employees (100), and should be exempt from the mandatory shot. Most of their workers are unpaid/part-timers, and won’t force the NGO’s qualification for the mandate.
Sep 10 2021
I’ve long encouraged Americans to present their “leaders” with a healthy spirit of defiance. It’s as American as apple pie – considerably more so than any of the “woke” pro sports leagues. But it’s not enough to be verbally defiant when the Schutzstaffel is at the door, armed and ready to drag you to Hell. You have to be willing to act.
So this article about gubernatorial defiance of the Usurper Regime got me shaking my head:
GOP Governors are already telling their attorneys general to prepare for battle against Joe Biden’s unconstitutional vax mandate.
Joe Biden on Thursday declared war on the unvaccinated and threatened GOP governors when he announced a new federal vaccine mandate.
Federal workers will be forced to take the Covid jab under Biden’s new order.
Additionally, businesses with 100+ employees will be forced to either test workers or prove they are vaccinated.
“Sounds positive so far,” I hear you say? Well, I hope you’re securely seated, because the laugh line is coming up:
GOP Governors across the country are already preparing litigation over Biden’s new mandate.
Oh, litigation! The courts! The toothless branch, which the Usurpers can ignore without any peril to themselves! Are the courts going to dispatch their bailiffs to arrest Biden, Harris, and their cronies? Or maybe issue a strongly worded cease-and-desist order?
The military is now wholly controlled by the Left. The huge federal bureaucracy itself is heavily armed. Through the Federal Reserve system, with no more than a few keystrokes the Usurpers can bankrupt any company that fails to submit. But the courts will fix it. They’ll just cite the Fourth Amendment, and everything will go back to how it was.
Yeah, right.
I know the illusion that we still have a constitutional republic is hard to dispel. All the same: It’s time, folks. We are reaping the fruits of the poisonous, blatantly stolen 2020 elections. We failed to correct them forcibly, as was our right and duty from the moment the cheating became visible. The consequences have arrived. Imagine the sound of a train of empty boxcars coming to a stop.
The country we loved and pledged allegiance to is no more.
There is one chance left, and I can’t put much faith in it.
No, I’m not talking about an armed uprising. While that’s still theoretically possible, it’s become plain that everyone is waiting for someone else to go first. Life is still too comfortable for Americans to plunk their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on the barrelhead of revolution. Hey, you with the mouth: You do it. We’re too busy replying to one another on Facebook.
But there’s another weapon, if we can steel ourselves to its use. It has its own hazards, and will require more resolve than we’ve shown so far. Even though it wouldn’t require us to fire a shot, once again most Americans will sit on their hands and wait for someone else to take the lead.
That weapon is your pantry, assuming you have one and that it’s properly stocked.
We’re all familiar with jests about “the row of cans in the back of the cabinet.” You know, the ones that have been there since Noah first started measuring in cubits and the unicorns asked one another what all the hubbub about a big flood was about. However, owing to the proliferation of “warehouse” stores such as Costco and Sam’s Club, the majority of us have more than just a few cans of “emergency eats.” Most of us could feed our families on what’s already in the pantry for a week, perhaps longer, without going hungry or running out of anything genuinely essential. It might not be the tastiest menu we’ve ever enjoyed, but we’d live.
So what would happen if the American economy just…stopped? Not forever; just for a week or two. No workers showing up in the fields or at the office. No incomes or corporate revenues to tax. No municipal workers cleaning the streets or collecting the garbage. Especially, no trucks carrying food to the stores. Would you suffer greatly?
I wouldn’t, but I know who would: the elites in the cities. They have virtually no disaster reserves. They depend on a continuous flow of goods into their grocery stores just to stay alive. In three days they’d be on their knees, praying for the trucks to return. The cargo cultists of the South Pacific can tell you how that usually works out.
Food riots are rare in our nation’s history. Few of us can imagine the chaos that would ensue in the big blue cities.
What would happen to the District of Columbia, I wonder? It’s basically a big slum: a huge zone of blight, petty criminals, and welfare recipients, with a few ornate buildings at its center. Federal employees’ pantries might keep them eating for a few days, but what about the folks around them? And what would those far more numerous folks do when the food has vanished from the stores but the federal bureaudrones still look fat, dumb, and happy?
It’s fortunate for the Usurpers that we’re too comfortable, too accustomed to our daily routines, to adopt such a course. Probably, at any rate.
But not certainly.
Four hundred million privately owned firearms and untold billions of rounds of ammunition. A hundred million armed citizens. Millions of military veterans who remember their oaths. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
An armed uprising against the Usurpers might still be possible, but the odds against it are severe. A passive-noncompliance movement, designed to starve the regime into surrender, is only slightly more plausible. All else is outright fantasy.
The constitutional federated republic called the United States of America has been overthrown from within. The Usurpers will ignore the courts and the Constitutional provisions designed to thwart them. They are confident that no matter what infamy they decree, there will be no armed uprising sufficient to bring them down. After all, they hold all the trumps.
Except for the contents of your pantry.
I leave the rest for my Gentle Readers to work out for themselves.
Sep 09 2021
Many in the Right were surprised and worse when a veritable legion of “conservative” commentators reacted with dismay to the ascension of Donald Trump to the Republican nomination for the presidency. For some of that number, their objections approached rabid, frothing-at-the-mouth fury. Those selfsame commentators followed their dislike of Trump with a peculiar dislike of everything he did as president. That President Trump’s policies were squarely in the conservative mainstream seemed not to matter to them. They were his policies; therefore those soi-disant “conservatives” had to disavow and condemn them.
But the Trump Administration’s policies, especially those the president put in place by executive order, were good for the nation. They promoted prosperity, jobs, the return of various manufacturing industries to American shores, the enlargement of our ability to meet our own fuel needs, the control of our southern border, healthful adjustments in our relations with our allies and with NATO, and other things conservatives had been advocating for some time. For “conservative” commentators to deplore them was beyond puzzling. Yet big names from the Right’s Punditocracy did so repeatedly. Some even collaborated with the Democrats’ attempts to force Trump out of office.
There were other things going on at the same time, including the failure of several venerable conservative outlets, such as The Weekly Standard. Mind you, that publication had been on the downslope for some time, being repetitive, uninformative, and not terribly attractive for any other reason. However, it crashed and burned when its leading lights turned against President Trump. Several of its contributors, plus a few from National Review, gathered under a new heading, The Bulwark. That publication has proved to be about as “conservative” as Nancy Pelosi.
The emissions of the NeverTrump “Right” are about as conservative as the NeverTrump Left. Its members have put their support behind all manner of things conservatives have always found to be abominations. Some of them have even endorsed the “right” to abort all the way up to the moment of birth. Good-hearted Americans of a conservative bent have looked incredulously upon this wholesale defection of “conservative” pundits from venerable conservative positions. Had the philosophical basis of conservatism been refuted somehow? Have we in the Right been wrong all along?
Not to my way of thinking. But then, I’m not paid to orate here. The NeverTrump “Right” makes its living from its op-ed writing. Its commentators needed a paying perch to replace the one that had been yanked out from under them. As the old sailors say, in a storm any port will do.
But a port that appeared welcoming when the winds were at their worst can prove uncomfortable after the storm has passed:
It’s been a tough few days for Bulwark writer-at-large Tim Miller:
Be it my matter-of-fact tweet about generally opposing abortion (we’ll get to that) or my stridency in lambasting the abandonment our friends in Afghanistan, I guess I’ve ruffled some feathers. (“Tim, you used to be so balanced,” they say. I did? Are you sure you have the right Tim?)
This has been a tad disorienting because I thought we had a nice little deal going, whereby my new friends and I could disagree, even passionately, on assorted policy matters—but we stayed friends because we agreed on the biggest things and the biggest threats and our little alliance is too important to our democracy for it to fray.
…
To be perfectly transparent with you, the breakdown in our deal has left me feeling kind of blue.
On the one hand I get it. It’s tough out there in our grand digital battlefield, where disagreement can feel like desertion. Plus when your fellow soldier used to fight for the other side, there is always a flicker of doubt, a mistrust, a fear that they just might unsheathe their katana and slice your backside.
On the other hand, I have to say it is a little weird. I’m a freaking open wound over here, people! I’m getting dumped by old pals, spilling my guts over past mistakes, changing my views on some things, and getting all John-Boehner-teary-eyed for weeks after we slayed the coral dragon together. Yet some of y’all still are apparently concerned I might flip a switch and jump on Team DeSantis or something? Really?!
I hope my Gentle Readers will forgive me for the spate of schadenfreude the above plaint has brought me. I find it hard to feel pity for someone who disavows the majority of his “strongly held convictions” for the sake of a paying post from which to pontificate to the public. Perhaps you feel the same, in which case we can do penance together. Is February 30 next year good for you?
It’s one thing to confront the evidence, re-examine some conviction, conclude that you’ve been wrong, and explain why you now think otherwise. It’s another to reject essentially the whole of your philosophy because you dislike the style of the man who’s become their foremost representative. Worse yet is to do it for money. Detecting the insincerity beneath such an about-face isn’t hard for anyone of normal intelligence and discernment.
But perhaps a retired engineer turned novelist who is not and never will be admitted to the Punditocracy has no place criticizing his “betters.” At least, we can be reasonably sure his “betters” would say so. They would get paid for it.
Have a nice day.
Sep 08 2021
“Go Forth and Multiply” was produced by James Corbett to provide the human race added incentives to rebel against the deadly self-anointed global elite.
He twice misspelled his lead-in to the video. Here is the corrected version. It says quite a bit about what so many have become.
Do you think the world is overpopulated? Are you worried that having a baby would contribute to climate change? Deep down, do you hate humanity? If [n]o, then it’s time to stop swallowing the propaganda of the anti-human death cult and to realize that creation is our ultimate act of rebellion agains[t] the elitists and eugenicists. — Corbett Report
Note: Word Press often misplaces or suppresses the featured video from appearing on the home page. Readers may need to click through to the singular post to see it.
Sep 08 2021
…for lounging about…
…for reading Tolkien…
…for watching videos of cute animals…
…and, as it was memorably phrased by that monumental icon of American culture, the Beaver, “just goofing off.”
I need a respite. So here are a few loose links to stuff you might find interesting:
But do please have a nice day!
Sep 07 2021
Yesterday’s tirade about moderation reaped me an email objection I should have expected. My correspondent assumed that I had a “system” of some sort in mind, rather than a simple respect for the equilibrium principle that governs all things under the veil of time. The writer asked if I were about to advocate “Christian Socialism,” a concept with which I was only vaguely familiar. The reference “sent me to the stacks:”
Christian socialism is a form of religious socialism based on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Many Christian socialists believe capitalism to be idolatrous and rooted in greed, which some Christian denominations consider a mortal sin. Christian socialists identify the cause of inequality to be the greed that they associate with capitalism.
Christian socialism became a major movement in the United Kingdom beginning in the 1960s through the Christian Socialist Movement, since 2013 known as Christians on the Left.
Socialism with a miter and crozier, eh? Thanks, I’ll pass.
There are several terms of condemnation in the above, but the standout, which gives the thing its overall flavor is greed:
greed n: excessive or rapacious desire, especially for wealth or possessions.
The term greed is widely exploited as a pejorative by the busybodies of the Left. If you have more than they think is “right,” they accuse you of “greed.” If you protest being mulcted of your earnings by the Omnipotent State for “redistribution” to others, they deem you “greedy.” And of course, your entirely natural and understandable desire to retain what you’ve earned for purposes of your choosing is irrefutable evidence that you lack “compassion.” Never mind that the compassion-shouters of the world have done far more harm than good, whenever they’ve been allowed their way.
May God save us from such people and their arrogation of His authority.
But let’s get back to my correspondent’s inquiry. By implication, he lumped me in with the Christian Socialists. As I’m moderately wealthy by my own labor and pleased to be so, I found it amusing. A sincere Christian Socialist would be busily dissipating his savings – assuming he had any – in pursuit of that impossible goal of all socialists, “equality.” And while I have no such intention, I also don’t strive to increase my wealth still further.
The censoriousness of the compassion-shouter, who wants to decide your point of moderation for you, is “balanced” by the money-addict for whom no bank balance can ever be high enough. Neither respects the economic principle of diminishing marginal utility:
In economics, the marginal utility of a good or service is the gain from an increase, or loss from a decrease, in the consumption of that good or service. Economists sometimes speak of a law of diminishing marginal utility, meaning that the first unit of consumption of a good or service yields more utility than the second and subsequent units, with a continuing reduction for greater amounts. The marginal decision rule states that a good or service should be consumed at a quantity at which the marginal utility is equal to the marginal cost.
Like most economic theses, the law of diminishing marginal utility cannot be proved. However, it is illustrated by nearly every course of action we undertake. It’s particularly plain in decisions about consumption. It applies with equal validity to individual decisions about virtually any desideratum known to Man.
That that “certain point” is a matter the individual must determine for himself is one that’s lost upon the folks who strive to rescue the word greed from pejorative status. Yes, our desires propel our efforts. (I include our needs among our desires for simplifying purposes.) If we desire nothing, we do nothing; that’s the law of human action. But desire itself obeys the law of diminishing marginal utility. At some point, Smith’s pursuit of more Gorgonzola / single-malt scotch / negotiable bonds / commemorative plates and figurines from the Franklin Mint will make him no happier in the all-important personal sense, and might just obstruct his pursuit of other things he needs.
If Smith is functional – i.e., if he can manage his own affairs satisfactorily without a minder – he’ll know the point of moderation when or before he reaches it. It’s one of the more common tests of personal balance. Yet there are a lot of unhappy people who are unhappy because their pursuit of some item has passed that point without their recognizing it. Indeed, that might be the dominant cause of unhappiness in America today.
Advertising – the art of getting the audience to desire something enough to go out and buy it – is responsible for part of this. Happiness isn’t about acquisition per se; it’s about having what you want and not having what you don’t want. (Ask any man whose wife has exhausted their home’s closet space.) But there’s an additional dimension to be considered: the widespread promotion of goals that are inherently unachievable for all but a very few. Goals of wealth. Goals of beauty. Goals of strength or endurance. Some of these goals have nothing whatsoever to do with human happiness…unless it’s the happiness some perverse souls derive from dictating the behavior of others.
I’ll close with a tale from the great Raymond Smullyan, as closely as I can remember the essence of it:
Once upon a time there was a man who hated above all other things being envied. He felt the envy of his less-well-off neighbors for his prosperity, so he dissipated his savings, resigned from his profession, and took a bottom-tier job to keep him in necessities. Others envied him for the love of his wife and his sons, so he divorced and separated himself from his family. Still others envied him for the clothes he wore and how good he looked in them, so he wore nothing but a burlap sack. Finally, in a last despairing attempt to avert all envy, he gave up even his subsistence job and went about the land begging for his meals. At last, he said he said to himself, no one can envy me now.
Then he happened upon a friend from his earlier life, with whom he had been out of touch. The friend looked at his beaming smile and said, “My God, how radiantly happy you look! How I envy you!”
</rimshot>
But do have a nice day.
Sep 06 2021
I am frequently impressed by Misanthropic Humanitarian’s selection of Quotes for the Day. Today is such an occasion:
Those three quotes underscore one of the deadliest conceptual tragedies of recent times: the shift in emphasis from achievement to acquisition. I’m about to start sounding like a cranky old man, here – as I am a cranky old man, I consider that an earned privilege – so bear with me.
I was raised to believe the sentiments in those quotes, and I do. I was also raised to understand the concept of “enough:” i.e., moderation. One of my reasons for writing fiction is to illustrate those things in stories. I did so most recently in In Vino:
Ray held up his glass. “There are eight more bottles of this delicious stuff in a case on the floor behind me. Do you intend to leave them here, Matt?”
The vintner nodded. “With my compliments.”
“Thank you. But I’d guess that you don’t expect Father Monti and me to break into them after the rest of you have gone home. Am I right about that?”
Lundin chuckled. “You are, Father.”
“And we won’t,” Ray said. “Because we understand ‘enough.’ It’s part of our ethic as priests not to abuse the good things of life. It’s also part of what we try to teach our flocks: Take enough, and be well and happy.”
He panned the table.
They seem to get it. Will they get the next part?
“A great part of what’s wrong in modern society comes from the refusal to allow that ‘enough is enough.’ The acquisition of wealth and property becomes a matter of ego, a way to measure yourself against others. Or you might consume without stopping to distract yourself from an inner emptiness that food, alcohol, drugs, and expensive toys can never fill. But these are not temptations that can be fought directly. They can only be beaten by cultivating an old virtue.”
He sat back and waited.
“Which old virtue, Father?” Rachel murmured.
“It’s called temperance,” Ray said. “The disciplining of one’s own habits and desires, acquired through the conscious practice of ‘enough.’ It’s one of the four cardinal virtues.”
Temperance is a tough virtue to internalize, especially today. It can take many years. It’s made harder by the flood of consumption-oriented messages. Most such messages carry the implicit subtext that you deserve this, and if you can’t get it, someone is cheating you.
Nearly all contemporary advertising embeds such a subtext. It’s riddled American society with the worst of the capital sins, and let it be writ large:
For some of us, whether by virtue of ability or inheritance, acquire more than others. Those others look at wealth with envy-germinated hatred. They seek to pull it down, since in their heart of hearts they know that they could never achieve so much. And all too frequently, they succeed at the one thing of which envy is capable: destruction.
Sometimes the destruction includes the envious one:
“I nursed him through two divorces, a cocaine rehab, and a pregnant receptionist. God’s creature, right? God’s special creature. I’ve warned him, Kevin. I’ve warned him every step of the way. Watching him bounce around like a fucking game. Like a wind-up toy. Like pounds of self-serving greed on wheels. The next thousand years is right around the corner. Eddie Barzoon…take a good look because he’s the poster child for the next millennium.
“These people, it’s no mystery where they come from. You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire. You build egos the size of cathedrals. Fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse. Grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green gold-plated fantasies until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own god. Where can you go from there? As we’re scrambling from one deal to the next, who’s got his eye on the planet? As the air thickens, the water sours, even bees honey takes on the metallic taste of radioactivity…and it just keeps coming, faster and faster. There’s no chance to think, to prepare; it’s buy futures, sell futures…when there is no future.
“We got a runaway train, boy. We got a billion Eddie Barzoons all jogging into the future. Every one of them is getting ready to fistfuck God’s ex-planet, lick their fingers clean, as they reach out toward their pristine, cybernetic keyboards to tote up their fucking billable hours. And then it hits home. You got to pay your own way, Eddie. It’s a little late in the game to buy out now. Your belly’s too full, your dick is sore, your eyes are bloodshot, and you’re screaming for someone to help. But guess what, there’s no one there! You’re all alone, Eddie, ‘CAUSE YOU’RE GOD’S SPECIAL LITTLE CREATURE!” — “John Milton,” played by Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate, describing the milieu that gave rise to his doomed partner Eddie Barzoon.
The above is one of the most brilliant pieces of dialogue ever inserted into a movie – and to make it sting really badly, scriptwriters Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy had it come from the mouth of Satan himself. They could not have chosen better.
I’ll resist the temptation to beat this into the magma layer. Let it close with a handful of bullet points:
Have a nice Labor Day.
Sep 06 2021
I was reading some stories about the aggressive moves of China in the world – their attempts to impose cultural hegemony in the West, their moves to take over the waterways near them, how they use their market share like a club to get concessions from Western firms – and I realized that I needed to see a map that compared China and the West.
The USA is roughly at a similar latitude to China; the areas at high elevations aren’t that much different, if you include Alaska. So where is the push for expansion of their areas of influence coming from?
Arable land. China’s farmland is not all that extensive. Only the coastal areas are low enough to provide sufficient level land for large agricultural operations. And, those coastal areas are heavy with manufacturing and shipping.
Russia is in a similar pickle as far as elevation, but it’s complicated by high latitudes that make for a shorter growing season. The plains of Russia are better suited for cattle or other animal husbandry than grains.
And, both Russia and China suffer from lack of access to large quantities of fresh, unpolluted lake water. In the USA, we have the Great Lakes – approximately 1/5 of the WORLD’S fresh water supply. Never underestimate the power of these natural resources in influencing the politics of the world. In the Western part of the USA, the regular release of water from the Rockies makes the region habitable (at least until CA prioritized the non-producing population over the farmers for water access).
That access to water makes the USA a powerhouse in agricultural exports. Literally, we feed the world. Well, at least we did until the Democrats decided to favor the big agribusinesses over smaller operations. One major plus for the next president would be to elect someone with knowledge of farm policy, and a bias in favor of independent farmers vs. the multinational corporations.
Come to think of it, the last president with some knowledge of agriculture was Carter, and, like Hoover, he was sabotaged by Wall Street interests. You don’t think those high interest rates, which hit the agriculture community so hard, were an accident? Financial interests and Deep State combined to tip the scales (Yes, Carter was ineffectual and wrong about so many things. However, it is quite interesting that his strongest supporters – the farmers and associated businesses – just HAPPENED to be hardest hit by inflation).
But, we have some advantages today. We have more access to information today (despite labeling all who tell the unvarnished truth as “Fake News”). There is a reason they are clamping down so hard at present – they truly fear the consequences of our own Samizdata left to expose them. The recent push to silence us is all the more reason to stand up and shout – they are on the ropes. They fear loss of power, and the resulting public exposure of their actions – and, their vulnerability to criminal prosecution and loss of ill-gotten gains.
Sep 05 2021
It’s not complicated.
They fully recognize that the entire basis for their self-image of themselves – that they were rational, fair, and not partisan – is a lie. They twist into pretzels, trying to justify applying different standards to similar actions. Every time that they think they’ve escaped a logic trap, OOOPS, Biden does it again.
Despite a determination to ignore facts (like that dog who looks away from the evidence of his misdeeds, and feigns blindness), they know. They know Biden – now openly failing to handle even simple cognitive tasks – was ALWAYS an idiot and a liar. They know he was morally slippery and prone to say whatever came to mind. But, they tamped down that knowledge, eager to put forth SOME alternative to Trump that had a thin veneer of acceptability to the average voter.
And, a thin veneer it was – old, cracked, and cheap.
It helped that most of them were determinedly in a bubble – seldom interacting with anyone other than like-minded friends, engaging online only with other Trump-Haters, shunning contact with those who might try to break their soapy bubble, and engaging only with media that completely agreed with them, and would shelter them from reality.
It worked – well, sort of. Enough so that when evidence of election fraud surfaced, they could wrap their “Biden WON!” rationale over the muffled cries of their dissenting citizens. Enough that they could play pretend about a few protesters constituting the Advancing Troops of an Insurrection! They got more worked up than Lincoln and the federal government did about the first days of the Civil War.
So they had their Fake Inauguration, with 25,000 National Guard troops surrounding the empty streets, and the press held at a distance. They returned from their shelters, and prepared to bring back Monkey Business As Usual. And, they expected the furious masses to fall in line.
When they didn’t, they increased the penalties:
In the months following, they have covered for Biden, limiting press access, bringing the old guy out only for heavily staged appearances, and using remote speeches to compensate. Even those sheltered opportunities were beyond his diminished capabilities.
And, deep down, the non-crazed Left knows it’s fake. They know this is a sham.
So, they are emerging from their homes, to meet in wine bars, and reassure each other that this is the New Normal. They are cheering on the tawdry performances of their Show Business Elite (have you noticed how much of TV and cable is dedicated to Special Shows, designed to prop up a sagging Broadway, the latest releases of Hollywood, and the Fabulous Folks of the Famous Gays (yes, I could have continued the alliteration, but I’m not cruel), including their TOTALLY normal Fake Families. Oh, and the new TV season! Gotta puff that up, fer sure. All Fluffy Fluff.
Even the death of 13 US military, and the wounding of many more (and Afghanis, as well) didn’t stop their determination to ignore those “terrible events, really, but unavoidable”. The advisors that surround Biden were so happy to get him on his feet and looking normal at the ceremony that brought the coffins into the US, that they ignored the Biden’s action in repeatedly checking his watch. Pity that the proles have cameras on their cell phones – and, really ODD that the so-called professional press didn’t seem to catch that sign of inattention and lack of empathy.
Oh, well, I’m sure they all just HAPPENED to be looking the other way at those times.
And, now, it’s up to us – the Normals – to persist in pointing out that The King Has No Clothes!
Sep 05 2021
…back in the dark days before the Internet, there was a brilliantly scripted, star-studded movie, titled Network. It was scripted by Paddy Chayevsky and directed by Sidney Lumet. If you haven’t seen it, repent of your sins and beg, borrow, or buy the DVD. (If you don’t have a DVD player, buy one of those, too.) Because it is massively relevant to our time.
Newscaster Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) has a break of sorts, says a few angry, outrageous things on the air…and becomes a major audience draw as a result:
I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, God damn it! My life has VALUE!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’ I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
Upon noting the overwhelmingly positive popular response, network executive Diana Christensen (played by Faye Dunaway) spearheads Beale’s transformation into a network asset as “The Mad Prophet of the Airwaves:”
Did you see the news this morning? Did you see the Times? We got press coverage on this you couldn’t buy for a million dollars. Frank, that dumb show jumped five rating points in one night. Tonight’s show is gonna be at least fifteen. We’ve just increased our audience by twenty or thirty million people in one night! And you’re not going to get something like this in your lap for the rest of your days and you can’t just piss it away. Howard Beale went up there last night and said what every American feels, that he’s tired of all the bullshit! He’s articulating the popular rage! I want that show, Frank. I can turn that show into the biggest smash on television.
And for a while, Beale pulls ‘em in like nothing else on TV. But after he denounces a pending merger deal that would further enlarge an already giant corporation, resulting in tens of thousands of letters of protest to the Department of Commerce, the CEO of that corporation, Arthur Jensen (played by the sadly underappreciated Ned Beatty) calls Beale in for a little chat:
You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it! Is that clear? You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immanent, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU… WILL… ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that… perfect world… in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.
Many young Americans who have no idea what we in the Right are ranting about with our denunciations of the “globalists” and our “America First” slogan desperately need to see that brilliant, well-ahead-of-its-time movie. They need the sense of it: the steely determination of men in gray suits who command huge concentrations of wealth and commerce to supervene the nation-state in pursuit of ever greater profits, nations and cultures be damned. Those men think of themselves as the Twenty-First Century’s evolutionary replacements for governments, borders, and statesmen.
I trust the message is clear. Have a nice day.
Sep 04 2021
As the Disco era of the Seventies faded, new powers arose to make their mark in popular music. The guitar faded as a dominant instrument, supplanted – though only for a while – by the synthesizer. Some Eighties bands were as fleeting as the life of a mayfly. Others, such as the Pointer Sisters, showed some staying power. But the era, like the ones before it, had its hits. Some of them were as joyous and memorable as anything before or since.
Wang Chung didn’t last. You might say they “shot their wad” rather quickly. But some of their tunes are among the best the Eighties have to offer. This is my favorite.
Sep 04 2021
Why do I write that?
It’s time for Americans to agree on at least ONE thing – that if an individual hold a fixed idea that is wildly at odds with actual reality, that is what, in a sane world, would be called crazy.
Such a crazy idea is the declaration that a person can FEEL like the opposite sex, and be reinforced in that delusion by medical, legal, and psychological providers. That people claiming to be a part of something called the Reality-Based Community see no contradiction in that assertion. And, that taxpayers are somehow responsible for paying for and facilitating those medical/surgical changes for the delusional wretch.
In other words, seriously WACK.
Sep 04 2021
I happened to find a link to Open Secrets, a site that tracks political donations by individual, party, political organization, and state. That last interested me, as I was wondering about the connection between money and voting patterns.
As you can see below, the outcomes in GA and MI appear to be as unlikely as has been suggested by those asserting Voter Fraud. GA’s donations to the GOP far exceeded the take by the Dems, and MI was essentially a dead heat. So, a huge victory by the Dems seems to be not backed up by verifiable data.
Similarly, the take for NC and AZ don’t match the REPORTED votes. Again, NC is essentially tied, and AZ is considerably in favor of the GOP.
WI numbers are similar to NC and MI – with so little difference between them, it doesn’t back up those lopsided numbers in the mail-in votes (those that were counted).
Iowa is the interesting one here – it’s political contributions are, like WI, NC, and MI, so close to tied that you might THINK they should have a similar outcome. But, no. They clearly preferred Trump.
So, why was IA so different in the final results?
I think it has to do with the fact that, in only ONE county, Johnson (south of Cedar Rapids), did the lopsidedly pro-Biden voting show up. In most other counties, the voting results were within normal ranges. But, in that county, the lopsidedness was striking.
A-ha! I may have found the reason for the disparity – a LOT of colleges nearby.
Given the propensity of the Dems to use the Young and Gullible to do their scutwork for them, I suspect this was a long-planned operation. It takes time to embed the poll workers, train them to cheat, and otherwise deliver the Fake Vote.
Why didn’t the Iowa Steal work? I blame the essential good-heartedness of Iowans. They exemplify Midwestern Nice and Honest.
