Mar 13 2021

On Rereading Old Favorites

     If you’re a reading junkie – which I am – and find yourself bereft of unread material that strikes your fancy, you’re blessed if you have a pile of old favorites into which to plunge. I have such a pile, and it’s both large and varied. The reference works alone fill eight large bookcases. The fiction…well, perhaps we shouldn’t go there. Suffice it to say that while I can’t always make it from one end of my longline ranch to the other without stepping on a squeaky toy or knocking over a pile of books, I can always lay my hand on an old favorite tome with which to remember first acquaintances and reminisce about “the way it was.”

     This morning my hand landed on Henry Grady Weaver’s The Mainspring of Human Progress. Weaver had been inspired by Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom, but felt he could add to her presentation usefully. MHP was the result, and it’s an impressive book indeed, both for its content and its eloquence.

     But there’s one passage in the book that has remained on my mind ever since I first encountered it. It comes near to the end:

     In the 1860’s, Americans fought to abolish slavery once and for all. At least, that’s usually thought of as the cause of the War Between the States; and it was a just cause, except that the problem of freeing the slaves was already well on the way toward a peaceful solution. But the real issue was the matter of states’ rights versus federal domination. Among other things, this involved the tariff question, which had long been a bone of contention between the industrial states and the agricultural states. The latter had for many years been fighting against high tariffs because they violated the principle of no special privileges for any one.
     The southern states wanted free ports; the federal government insisted on uniform tariffs at all ports – and the election of 1860 meant higher tariffs.
     Northerners fought to preserve the American revolution by preserving the Union. Southerners fought to preserve the revolution by defending the rights of the states.
     During the War Between the States, European troops moved into Mexico – thus proving that the Northerners were right. But the drifting away from the constitutional balance of power which has been going on ever since may yet prove that the Southerners were right. At any rate, the slaves were freed, and the Declaration of Independence was applied to all.

     [Emphasis added by FWP.]

     We have made many errors in our political and Constitutional language, but among the worst, and responsible for immeasurable damage to the concept of federalism, is the term states’ rights. A state – a.k.a. a government, whether large or small – cannot have rights; it is an agent with delegated powers and assigned responsibilities. Only a principal – i.e., an individual or a voluntary assemblage thereof – can have rights.

     The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution puts the matter far more clearly:

     The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

     Therein lies the essence of federalism. The Constitution explicitly delegates certain powers to the federal government and explicitly denies certain others to the state governments. Those not mentioned under either heading are reserved: i.e., to be decided by the residents of the various states, usually by a process similar to that which gave birth to the Constitution itself. When questions of public policy – yes, including slavery – arose on which some of the states differed with Washington, the Constitution, including the Tenth Amendment, should have determined the resolution. The failure to do so was what precipitated the Civil War / War Between The States / Late Unpleasantness.

     Hearken to the great Frederic Bastiat:

     Is there any need to offer proof that this odious perversion of the law is a perpetual source of hatred and discord; that it tends to destroy society itself? If such proof is needed, look at the United States [in 1850]. There is no country in the world where the law is kept more within its proper domain: the protection of every person’s liberty and property. As a consequence of this, there appears to be no country in the world where the social order rests on a firmer foundation. But even in the United States, there are two issues — and only two — that have always endangered the public peace.
     What are these two issues? They are slavery and tariffs. These are the only two issues where, contrary to the general spirit of the republic of the United States, law has assumed the character of a plunderer.
     Slavery is a violation, by law, of liberty. The protective tariff is a violation, by law, of property.
     It is a most remarkable fact that this double legal crime — a sorrowful inheritance from the Old World — should be the only issue which can, and perhaps will, lead to the ruin of the Union. It is indeed impossible to imagine, at the very heart of a society, a more astounding fact than this: The law has come to be an instrument of injustice. And if this fact brings terrible consequences to the United States — where the proper purpose of the law has been perverted only in the instances of slavery and tariffs — what must be the consequences in Europe, where the perversion of the law is a principle; a system?

     Bastiat admired the United States tremendously, as is evident from the passage above. Yet in 1850, even he could see what lay ahead for the Union should the faults in our federalist structure not be addressed and corrected in a principled fashion (which they were not).

     There are a few bloggers who seem determined to refight the Civil War. I count a couple of them as friends. I sympathize with their sense of grievance over the way the South has been treated by historians, especially those who write for a popular audience. But there’s no use in reigniting the conflicts of the mid-19th Century over which side was “more in the right.” As with the blind men and the elephant, both were partly in the right and partly in the wrong. Progress can only be made by focusing on the principles involved, how they applied to the issues of that time, and how to avert the mistakes made then – many of them emotion-driven – that led to America’s greatest ever loss of blood in wartime.

     See what can come of rereading an old favorite?

Mar 12 2021

The Scariest Words in Biden’s Address

“We need everyone to get vaccinated. We need everyone to keep washing their hands, stay socially distanced and keep wearing the mask as recommended by the CDC. Even if we devote every resource we have beating this virus and getting back to normal depends on national unity. And national unity it isn’t just how politicians vote in Washington. What the loudest voices say on cable or online. Unity is what we do together as fellow Americans. Because if we don’t stay vigilant and the conditions change and we may have to reinstate restrictions to get back on track, please, we don’t want to do that again. We’ve made so much progress.”

We? Who the hell is “We”?

That nebulous 1st person plural that indicates they believe they have the RIGHT to tell the rest of us what we are PERMITTED to do.

Sort of like Bruce Banner, “Please don’t make me angry. You won’t like it if I do.”

Mar 12 2021

Denouncing The Obvious

     A little thought can go a long way. However, on some subjects, thinking is effectively forbidden. Here’s one.

     Let’s say you’re a college professor, and that you teach a first-year class whose enrollees arrived at that class with a fairly wide distribution of high-school grade point averages. At the end of the semester, you find that there’s a strong correlation between an enrollee’s high school GPA and his performance in your class. That is: the higher performers from high school did better in your class than the lower performers. Would that result cause you any degree of consternation?

     I’d find it entirely consistent with what we know about scholastic performance. Good grades are determined in larger measure by innate ability and applied effort than by any other factor or combination thereof. Moreover, the work and study habits exhibited by high performers in high school tend to follow them into college. The phenomenon is consistent with what you would normally expect.

     But should you dare to remark on this where others can hear, you could be in for a lot of trouble. Like Professor Sandra Sellers, who was recently fired by Georgetown University:

     A law professor at Georgetown University has been fired for pointing out that black students got lower grades in her classes. This was not due to racism. Black students get lower grades at selective colleges because they are admitted with lower grades and test scores than their non-black classmates, due to racial preferences in admissions at schools like Georgetown….

     NBC News reported earlier on the brewing controversy at Georgetown, which led to an investigation of Professor Sandra Sellers:

     Some Georgetown University Law students and alumni are calling for the termination of a professor captured on video discussing the performance of Black students.

     “I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks, happens almost every semester,” the professor said in the video.

     The conversation between two law professors at the Washington, D.C., school was filmed and posted to the online database Panopto, where students, who have been attending classes virtually because of the pandemic, can access the recordings. The video is no longer available on the platform.

     Yes, Georgetown has fired Sandra Sellers.

     Mind you, absolutely nothing about what Sellers noted in the cited video would strike a statistician as controversial. Black applicants do benefit from a racial-preference policy in admissions to Georgetown. In other words, the school lowers the requirements for admission for black applicants. They arrive there with a weaker history of academic accomplishment, which correlates strongly with deficits in innate ability and willingness to work. The consequences in substandard performance in Georgetown classes are entirely to be expected.

     “But they’re black!” rises the cry. “We mustn’t say anything about black students that might be construed as disparaging! We’d be taken for racists! Don’t you care about the image of our beloved university?”

     I would argue that those who designed and implement Georgetown’s admissions policies are the ones who don’t care about Georgetown’s image. Deliberately admitting applicants who can’t cut the mustard? What on Earth would justify that?

     Federal money, perhaps. These days quite a large fraction of the revenues of any “institution of higher learning” comes from the federal treasury. I’m not aware of funding contingent on an admissions policy that kowtows to racial political correctness, but that would be the first place I’d look for an explanation.

     At any rate, Sandra Sellers has been made the sacrificial lamb for Georgetown’s racist admissions policies. Add her name to the list of victims of preferential treatment by race. We can only hope she’ll manage to find a home at some more sensible institution. Clearly Georgetown doesn’t deserve her.

Mar 12 2021

Why Actions by Private Companies May be Violations of Constitutional Rights

From the Writer in Black – I’m not going to excerpt, just go to the link.

Mar 12 2021

The Dr. Seuss Debacle

If you had asked me to predict just which writers would be banned, I couldn’t have predicted:

  • Laura Ingalls Wilder – books said to be racist, based on common attitudes at that time towards the Indigenous People of America.
  • Dr. Seuss – cartoon depictions of Asians and other People of Color said to be exaggerated and stereotypical (I guess Amazon doesn’t understand what a cartoon is).
  • Ryan T. Anderson, the author of When Harry Became Sally, a book about the transgender phenomenon.
  • The documentary, Killing Free Speech, Part I, was removed from Amazon
  • Hoaxed, a documentary about media manipulation, was removed from Prime Video (important, as many people, including me, generally won’t watch those videos that aren’t free).

That’s just from Amazon’s part of the Conspiracy Against Books that Trouble Leftists; Simon & Schuster have cancelled Josh Hartley’s book (Why? Because he’s an NLD – Non-Leftist Dissident). And, there are many more – enough to make me concerned about the potential for a powerful media that battles the Leftist Dogma.

Little by Little, the Left is trimming away any traces of pushback against their propaganda. I’ve no doubt that our days freely writing our opinions on blogs are numbered – provided the Left has anything to say about it.

So, what are the alternatives?

  1. Use the links to Kobo. If people really want to read what you’ve put out there, they can buy an e-reader (comparable in price to a pricier Kindle), or, even easier (and cheaper) download the Kobo app. Rakuten is the company selling the Kobo platform/readers, and would probably just LOVE to gain market share at the expense of Amazon. They have some of those books that Amazon is too PC to carry, including When Harry Met Sally. And, yes, the Library Extension, that checks to see if your library carries it, works with Kobo.
  2. Nook, the Barnes & Noble app/reader – available in both forms. I checked, the ‘questionable’ books are available. It also looks like the pricing is better than Kobo.
  3. Smashwords – I’ve used them to put my stories out there, and my experience is good – they actually sent me my money faster than Amazon did.
  4. Don’t forget to install that Library Extension (it’s in the Chrome store, but also works in Brave). It makes checking to see if a book is available for loan, before buying it. It’s probably saved me over $100 this year, alone.

The BIG Tech Media would LOVE us to just succumb to their bullying. Don’t do it – resist. A good first step is to dump the Kindle Unlimited subscription. After all, if you can get a comparable book, either free, or a lower cost, why not? And, for those books that you would have to pay additional money – consider that clipping Amazon’s wings might just be worth it.

Yes, I do know of the many people who are KU only, and depend on that money to feed their family. At some point, you really have to say to them – look, I realize that this wrecks havoc with your normal mode of work and income. But, we can’t just give up because it hurts us financially. How will you look your family in the face and say, “I WOULD have fought the Power, but it was inconvenient”?

Find other sources of cash – bartending, house cleaning, working in a strip club (it’s got more dignity that cooperating with Amazon).

Grow up. Some people may TALK revolution, but when the price hits them, fold like a Millennial. It’s WAR. It’s SUPPOSED to hurt.

Mar 12 2021

“Normal”

     I just found this brilliant little piece at Ace’s place:

     Suppose you have a kid your age who finds that he has the urge to fuck a toaster. In the past, he’d either keep it to himself and learn to live with it, or, if he mentioned it to someone else, they’d tell him he was crazy and pretty much the same thing would happen. Now, he goes online and finds that there’s a whole community dedicated to toaster-fucking. Hell, there’s an entire Reddit about it (I have no idea if there is actually a toaster-fucking Reddit). So he starts talking online to toaster-fuckers world wide, and they tell him that it’s a wonderful hobby, and completely normal, and that anyone who opposes him is oppressing him. This ability to connect can be a wonderful tool for people who are actually facing oppression, but it also magnifies the fringe, and the deviant and the dangerous. Couple this with a media that wants to celebrate anything that is against traditional Western mores and common sense, and pretty soon you have Congressmen introducing bills that toaster-fuckers are a Constitutionally protected class, and anyone who dares say ‘Uh, dude, you shouldn’t do that” is ostracized. And so the kid winds up burning his dick off.

     You see the problem, don’t you? Alfred Kinsey, whatever you may think of him, had the same one. He described various sexual behaviors as “normal” at a time when they were deemed beyond the pale of discussion. It turned out that some of them, at least, were more common than was generally supposed. All the same, tagging them as “normal” was an outrage to the mores of the time.

     It was also inaccurate, at least colloquially. To the average English speaker, “normal” means approximately that “everybody does it.” But the behaviors Kinsey characterized thus were not “normal” in that sense. They were simply a bit more common than the average person might suppose. For example, homosexual conduct, rather than being a rare, one-in-a-thousand phenomenon as was thought when Kinsey’s studies were presented to the public, can be found among perhaps three percent of the population.

     Mischaracterizing a deviant behavior as “normal” can have catastrophic social effects, especially when the young and impressionable take it to mean “harmless.”

     While it is “normal” for researchers to want to know the frequency of various deviant behaviors, whether sexual or otherwise, it is vital that they watch how they represent those deviances, and their findings about them, to the general public. Sadly, the hunger for fame – more often, notoriety – all too often cross-cuts that caution.

  • Homosexuality is not “normal.”
  • Sadomasochism is not “normal.”
  • Transgenderism is not “normal.”
  • Self-mutilation is not “normal.”
  • And need I say anything about toaster-fucking?

     And no, your mileage won’t vary. Regaling people with your fetishes about mackerel, or Mack trucks, or Mac Davis won’t contribute positively to the general discourse. So whatever weirdness you might be into, you should probably keep it to yourself. (You should definitely keep it away from Congress. Don’t give the taxpayer-fuckers any new ideas. Besides, we have enough “protected” groups already.)

Mar 11 2021

This Should Piss A Few Folks Off…

     …which, to my mind, is a good reason to post it:

I’m a Boy / The Who

One little girl was called Jean-Marie
Another little girl was called Felicity
Another little girl was Sally-Joy
The other was me
And I’m a Boy

My name is Bill and I’m a head case
They practice making-up on my face
Yeah I feel lucky if I get trousers to wear
Spend days just taking hairpins from my hair

I’m a boy, I’m a boy
But my ma won’t admit it
I’m a boy, I’m a boy
But if I say I am
I get it

Put your frock on, Jean-Marie
Plait your hair, Felicity
Paint your nails little Sally-Joy
Put this wig on little boy

I’m a boy, I’m a boy
But my ma won’t admit it
I’m a boy, I’m a boy
But if I say I am
I get it

I wanna play cricket on the green
Ride my bike across the street
Cut myself and see my blood
I wanna come home all covered in mud

I’m a boy I’m a boy
But my ma won’t admit it
I’m a boy, I’m a boy, I’m a boy
I’m a boy, I’m a boy, I’m a boy, I’m a boy
I’m a boy, I’m a Boy
I’m, A, Boy!

Mar 11 2021

I WAS Going to do Something Useful, But…

…my internet started getting flakey, and I had to re-boot, and I was using a known site (with known loading characteristics) to test it out.

Okay?

Okay, I have to admit it was According to Hoyt, which – STRICTLY because I was scrolling down the page to see if it loaded correctly – led to my coming across THIS VIDEO in the comments.

Don’t watch it if you have a problem with your BP.

Is it POSSIBLE that “educated” people can be so clueless?

Sorry for the link. You will likely also waste some time watching it. But, a better example of just why we have to keep fighting, I simply couldn’t find.

Mar 11 2021

Not Making This Up Dept.

As values-based democracies, NATO allies and partners have been at the forefront of the global women’s rights movement. And as an alliance, NATO plays an important role in advancing equity within foreign policy. When NATO foreign ministers meet later in March, they should take the natural next steps toward adopting a feminist foreign policy (FFP).[1]

With its very own acronym too.

Our living in “values-based democracies” and like that, I’d like to know what values those are precisely. Empirical evidence indicates quite strongly that the U.S. is into electoral fraud, suppression of free speech, unhindered rioting, looting, arson, and murder, judicial abdication and fantasy, contempt for the Constitution, media monopoly, importation of foreign enemies and parasites, industrial destruction, urban destruction, worship of minorities, official hostility toward the majority white population, manufactured hostility to police, delusional social attitudes, hysteria about “climate,” destruction of the family, worship of homosexuality, impoverishment of wage-earning people, economic lunacy, and pointless, ruinous, unconstitutional foreign wars.

And when the Atlantic Council is through providing insight into the values that underpin all this perhaps it can tell us all about the rules-based international order (RBIO). I can’t wait.

Notes
[1] “Why NATO should adopt a feminist foreign policy.” New Atlanticist (?) by Gabriela R. A. Doyle, Madeline Olden, Leah Sheunemann, and Christopher Skaluba, Atlantic Council, 3/9/21.

Mar 11 2021

Tough Day Personally

I just came back from a trip to the Ortho guy – had a knee injection with a gel substance (the needle is HUGE!). Naturally, I was actually hobbling worse when I left, than when I entered. Nonetheless, in another day or two, I will be experiencing the benefits of a more fluid motion in the joint. So, although painful, worth it.

Not so with the increasing pain I’m feeling in my right foot. In addition to some joint stiffness and swelling in the ball of the foot (site of the affected joint), I’m also finding it quite painful to place any weight at all on my right foot, due to painful toes (other than the Pig that went to the Market). On top of just general stiffness and soreness from driving around 10 hours (there and back) for a COVID shot, it makes me just want to sit down, prop my feet up, and do nothing.

Which makes the irritation that I felt when told I had to put on a blue surgical mask – either instead of or in addition to my normal cloth mask – understandable. The thing is, those type of masks attach via elastic bands to the ears – which, as I wear hearing aids, throws off the performance of those aids, and makes them vulnerable to unnoticed loss.

Golly, I really am getting to be a crank.

On the positive side, the sun is shining, the air is clear (not even all that bad for my allergies), and Life is Good.

Mar 11 2021

The Public Service Pitch Du Jour

Hey, remember public service pitches? I do. We don’t see or hear them much any more, possibly because air time has become so expensive, whether on radio or television. At one time they seemed endless.

The one – actually, it was a family of them – that lingers most vividly in my memory is “The family that prays together stays together. / Go to the church of your choice.” If you’re not virulently hostile to religion, it seems a decent sentiment…but wait: “the church of your choice?” What if that’s an Islamic mosque, or a Satanic temple? Ought such choices to be encouraged?

Others of more recent vintage involve exhortations to enlist in the military, because the skills you can acquire will land you a good job afterward. Now, I have no beef with the military – my father was a Navy man, and I worked in military engineering for three decades – but the claim about enhanced employability runs afoul of the ugly statistics about unemployed veterans. That may have changed for the better in recent years, but there are still a great many firms that tend to shy away from hiring veterans. All that talk about post-traumatic stress disorder and how it can strike without warning has made them skittish.

How about the ones that urged young folks not to drop out of school? Back when the schools were actually in the business of educating their inmates students, that might have been a decent suggestion. Today? Well, let’s just say that the “education” provided by the “twelve year sentence” tends to be more in the direction of victimism, racialist propaganda, indiscipline, hatred of America, and exculpations for thuggery: “coursework” I’d rather not have my progeny subjected to.

Still every now and then I stumble over a PSP that really does tell us something in the public interest – which really means “in your interest to take seriously.” Here’s the one I found this morning:

Yes, it’s a “tweet.” But Mr. Kelly is saying something people should hear. The Kung Flu Panic has told America’s 88,000 governments that if they can scare us sufficiently, they can strip us of our rights down to the last iota. And so I exhort my Gentle Readers to pass it around as widely as possible. As a public service, don’t y’know.

Mar 11 2021

Toxic and duplicitous.

What the Fed has been doing ever since Greenspan (the veritable “Patient Zero” of the current global $280T debt disaster) is very clever yet extremely toxic, as well as openly duplicitous.

Specifically, the Fed now prints over $120B per month (to buy $80B in unwanted Treasury bonds and another $40B in unwanted, toxic MBS [mortgage-backed securities] paper) with no apparent inflationary effect (despite the fact that inflation is defined by money supply) beyond its 2% “allowance.”

Such extreme money creation openly dilutes the USD to inflate away US debt with increasingly diluted dollars, now a desperate as well as deliberate Fed policy.[1]

It beggars the imagination that there IS NO imagination in the deep ranks of our Care Guardians. Those suckers are whistling past the graveyard and that’s ALL they’re doing. Whereas, Pilgrims, it’s Dutch Uncle time. Time for some relentless realist to announce to the country that the current political-economic-social “strategy” most closely resembles what you’d find in your freezer after a one-week power outage.

The duplicity of these financial gods is amply laid out in the article in the Notes below. The graphic therein showing how inflation is just defined away to get to the politically convenient result is beyond illuminating. If we still calculated the Consumer Price Index the way we did in the 1980s, inflation would be around 9% per that graph. But, “officially” it’s around 2% because of the way that the method of calculating the CPI has been fraudulently “revised.”

As Mr. Piepenburg shows, the inflation-adjusted return on a U.S. 10-Year Treasury would be/is very negative if we were to use the more (?) honest 1980s measure of inflation. This has the effect of making said Treasury instrument highly unattractive and making gold highly attractive. Who in his right mind would want to help the U.S. government finance its spending addiction on these terms? You see another reason here for the Fed’s lies. Somebody still buys those bonds — the Fed apparently — but for how long exactly? Powell must have Bernie Madoff on speed dial to help keep this shift show going.

Solzhenitsyn warned us to live not by lies but that is exactly how we live as a so-called nation.

Notes
[1] “The Fed’s Most Convenient Lie: A CPI Charade.” By Matthew Piepenburg, ZeroHedge, 3/10/21 (emphasis added).

Mar 10 2021

“…You Peon?”

“Who are you calling a public servant…

Mar 10 2021

I Thought I Was Beyond Being Stunned

     I was wrong:

     Milo Yiannopoulos, the gay man whose conservative messaging and willingness to speak the truth sparked riots on university campuses may well trigger more outrage now that he describes himself as “Ex-Gay” and “sodomy free,” and is leading a daily consecration to St. Joseph online.

     Two years ago, when Church Militant’s Michael Voris famously challenged Yiannopoulos to live a chaste life, Yiannopoulos was not defensive. Instead, he acquiesced, and humbly admitted his human weakness.

     “I know everything you’re saying, and I’m just not there yet. And I don’t know if I’ll get there,” Yiannopoulos told Voris at the time.

     It seems that he has now arrived “there.”

     Please read it all. The interview with Milo is as brave and candid a thing as I’ve ever encountered. I find myself in awe of the degree of personal honesty – to say nothing of the humility – it took for Milo, one of the most famous homosexuals in the world, to do what he has done and permit it to become public knowledge.

     I was never one to condemn homosexuals. All of us face challenges in this life. It’s what this life is for! No man is allowed to slide into Heaven without facing trials he can barely overcome. So rather than condemn them, I prayed for them – and I prayed that God would be generous toward them, for a sexual addiction can be as difficult to defeat as any narcotic.

     Frankly, I’ve never been sure that the Church is correct in condemning homosexual behavior. I know some of the reasons for that condemnation, but it always struck me as theologically shaky. What I do know is that male homosexual sodomy involves damage to the practitioner, both physical and emotional.

     But Milo’s change of heart – and soul – seems completely detached from that:

     LifeSite: Last summer you posted on Parler pictures of members of the CHANGED movement, with the caption, “Look at these beautiful souls, rid of their demons and cured of their sinful urges. Can’t you tell they’ve been saved? I can.” Are you now able to add your picture to theirs, with that same caption?

     Milo: No, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever be brave enough to declare it a thing of the past. I treat it like an addiction. You never stop being an alcoholic. As for the CHANGED movement, I guess because they’re Californian they don’t see how funny their website is, or maybe they’re dirty non-doms who think God loves you more the gayer you act, but I was slightly making fun of them with that caption. (Walker Percy was right: Modern man has two choices — Rome or California.)

     And later on in the interview:

     Milo: As you might expect, my professional priorities are shifting somewhat, given my new spiritual preoccupations. Over the next decade, I would like to help rehabilitate what the media calls “conversion therapy.” It does work, albeit not for everybody. As for my other aspirations and plans, well, no change: I’ve always considered abortion to be the pre-eminent moral horror of human history. I’ll keep saying so — even more loudly than before.

     When this article gets into serious circulation – apparently, it hasn’t yet, owing to hostility from Google and other Big Tech panjandra – it’s going to cause one hell of a noise. And I couldn’t be happier about that – or for Milo Yiannopoulos.


Every saint has a past;
Every sinner has a future.
(Catholic maxim)

Mar 10 2021

Rejoining One Another

     A passage in Bookworm’s piece for today resonated powerfully with me:

     One of the things that has helped me be a nicer person is discovering that, if you ask the right questions, everyone has something interesting to tell. For that reason, I always start conversations with people — clerks, gardeners, guard gates, whomever. Saying “Hello, how are you?” as if you mean it (which I do) always gets a smile. Then, if there’s time, commenting on something that you know matters to the other person — her artistic nail polish, his looking forward to the coming weekend, her manifest efficiency, his beautifully deep voice — often sparks a conversation. My favorite thing is when I can hear the conversation continuing with other people in line after I’ve moved on.

     I very strongly believe that part of America’s falling apart is that we no longer see or speak to each other. Once upon a time, daily commercial transactions bound Americans together. At the grocery store, the butcher’s, the hardware store, etc., we’d see the same clerks and run into the same friends and neighbors. Those small interactions, repeated over and over, create a strong sense of community. I know that’s true because, for all its political leftism, that’s what life was like raising kids in Marin County. I lived in the functional equivalent of a small town, recognizing people wherever I went. Few were friends but all were friendly.

     Stunningly appropriate to these hyper-digitized times. Actual human contact is a biological and psychological necessity, one that’s become ever harder to satisfy. Indeed, there are well-documented cases of neuropathy, some involving actual Central Nervous System atrophy, that were traced to the victim having gone too long without human contact. (“If you are not stroked, your spinal cord will shrivel up.” — Dr. Eric Berne) The proliferation of ways to communicate that don’t require proximity has put many millions of us in danger of such a malady.

***

     I know he’s terribly out of fashion, but I find the wisdom of Dale Carnegie to exceed that of all the self-help flacksters of our time put together. In his most famous book, How To Win Friends And Influence People, he made many powerful points about the gains to be had from routine human contacts. Here’s my favorite of the bunch:

     I was waiting in line to register a letter in the post office at Thirty- Third Street and Eighth Avenue in New York. I noticed that the clerk appeared to be bored with the job — weighing envelopes, handing out stamps, making change, issuing receipts — the same monotonous grind year after year. So I said to myself: “I am going to try to make that clerk like me. Obviously, to make him like me, I must say something nice, not about myself, but about him. So I asked myself, ‘What is there about him that I can honestly admire?’ ” That is sometimes a hard question to answer, especially with strangers; but, in this case, it happened to be easy. I instantly saw something I admired no end.

     So while he was weighing my envelope, I remarked with enthusiasm: “I certainly wish I had your head of hair.”

     He looked up, half-startled, his face beaming with smiles. “Well, it isn’t as good as it used to be,” he said modestly. I assured him that although it might have lost some of its pristine glory, nevertheless it was still magnificent. He was immensely pleased. We carried on a pleasant little conversation and the last thing he said to me was: “Many people have admired my hair.”

     A heartwarming vignette, isn’t it? But Carnegie has something more to tell us about that episode:

     I told this story once in public and a man asked me afterwards: “‘What did you want to get out of him?”

     What was I trying to get out of him!!! What was I trying to get out of him!!!

     If we are so contemptibly selfish that we can’t radiate a little happiness and pass on a bit of honest appreciation without trying to get something out of the other person in return – if our souls are no bigger than sour crab apples, we shall meet with the failure we so richly deserve. Oh yes, I did want something out of that chap. I wanted something priceless. And I got it. I got the feeling that I had done something for him without his being able to do anything whatever in return for me. That is a feeling that flows and sings in your memory long after the incident is past.

     Carnegie’s unnamed interlocutor in the above is representative of far too many people today.

***

     I’ve been writing quite a lot about the trust deficit in America today. I tend to repeat myself when I do, because the central point is so simple and so clear. But there is something more to be said about it, even so:

Trust at a distance is harder to achieve or maintain than trust in proximity.

     Those with whom you maintain proximate contact are more easily trusted – and more easily made to trust you, you sneaky little conniver – than faceless persons at a great remove. I can’t prove it, but it’s held true throughout my 69 years. Yet here we are, attempting in our various ways to operate within a social structure that demands high levels of trust, while ever more eschewing proximate interactions with others. Is this terminally fatuous or has my watch stopped?

     The Kung Flu BS has contributed to our social malady. In a sense, something akin to normal life was made possible by our ever-evolving methods of Internet communication and interaction. America could hardly have survived the lockdowns et alii without our digital marketplaces. Yet it cannot be denied that the combination has accelerated our movement away from human contact. The same is true for that most Orwellianly-named of all phenomena, the “social media.”

     No, I’m not advocating that we should all trash our computers and our digital phones. I’m suggesting that we get out of the house and do some in-person stuff — without masks.

     The climate of fear created by the Chinese Lung Rot and the attendant propaganda will make this difficult, but if we want our society to regain its former vitality, there is no alternative.

***

     With the advice and assistance of Co-Conspirator Linda Fox, I’ve been getting into GMRS (General Mobile Radio Services) radio. This portion of the electromagnetic spectrum was originally intended for certain business and quasi-business uses, but is equally adaptable to non-commercial communications. Over the next few days I’ll complete a base-station setup with a reach of about 15 miles…after which I intend to provide inexpensive handheld GMRS units to my nearest neighbors.

     (Yeah, yeah, call ‘em “walkie-talkies” if you like. They’re a lot more flexible, and usually longer-range, than the radios that originally bore that nickname. But they’re not hard to use.)

     “Why?” I hear you ask? Simply because it will give me an opportunity to put some sinews on the bonds of our local community. I’ll call upon each of my neighbors and tell them something along these lines:

     “I’m going to have a base station powered up and listening to channel X all the time. As I’m home just about all the time, if you have an emergency and need help, you can get my attention this way. If I can’t help you personally, there’s a repeater network through which I’ll contact others. Just keep this unit charged and where you can find it should you need it.”

     You might not be in a position to do this. Still, think about alternatives that would have a comparable effect. For example, most of us have cell phones now. A telephone-tree for alerting one’s neighbors to problems or opportunities shouldn’t be hard to set up, at least if it’s kept to a couple of dozen contacts. The point isn’t that you “need” such a thing, but that by putting it together you can build community.

     It will increase your frequency of contact with those nearest to you. It will get your neighbors thinking of your block as a neighborhood, rather than just a zip code where they eat, sleep, and do their laundry between visits to “the office.” You might even make a few friends as they warm to the idea and rope in others you haven’t yet met.

     And you’ll keep your spinal cord from shriveling up.

***

     Allow me to close with a favorite old quote, from Metaphysical-Era poet John Donne:

     No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

     Now go and catch a falling star. (Or get with child a mandrake root; your choice.)

Mar 10 2021

You Think You’re On Top Of The Lunacies…

     …and then something like this scrolls by:

     Black Lives Matter protesters badgered young cheerleaders while they entered the Kentucky International Convention Center in downtown Louisville for a cheer competition on Saturday.

     One of the protester leaders Carmen M. Jones, who said Sunday that she stands by her comments, yelled at the girls for their “white privilege” and told one of the women with the cheerleaders that she better “make sure your kids aren’t somebody my kids are gonna have to beat up.”

     “The reason why you get to be here in these pretty little gorgeous outfits and your gorgeous hair and your gorgeous bows is because of your white privilege,” Jones said over a megaphone to the girls.

     “Breonna [Taylor] is dead,” she told the girls and their parents. “Black mothers are burying their babies while white mothers send their daughters to cheer competitions.”

     First, a mild response – oh, trust me, it’s the mildest I can compose! – to this Carmen Jones creature: No, sweetie, sorry: The reason those girls are cheerleaders and your offspring are street vermin is because the cheerleaders are pretty, feminine, graceful, and disciplined, whereas your crotch-droppings are butt-ugly, graceless, lazy, foul-mouthed and ill-mannered. And frankly, Breonna Taylor was a felon who kept company with a felon, resisted arrest with a firearm, and got deservedly shot dead for it. If she’s your current plaster saint, I expect the shrine to her is in Hell. (Mild response ends.)

     If there’s anyone out there who has even a single positive word to say about this…demonstration, I suggest he keep his hands where I can see them. I’m not in a good mood.

     This is merely one minor outcropping of the whole “white privilege” canard. Whites are America’s real victim-class, and anyone familiar with the facts can’t honestly deny it. We struggle on with little or no protest out of pride and self-respect. (Also because by and large, we’re aware of those facts and have no alternative to coping with them.) But with infamies such as this, the BLM scum turn more American whites into racists – not my sort of individualist-minded “statistical racist,” but the 200-proof article who’s beginning to see a racial cleansing as desirable – each and every day.

     Don’t expect the BLM scum to draw the moral. Not only are they too stupid and vicious to do so, their grift is making big bucks. Those are tough obstacles to overcome, short of the clarifying effect of live fire. Kyle Rittenhouse could tell you.

Mar 10 2021

What Comes Of The Loss Of Trust

     “A thousand truths do not mark a man as a truth-teller, but a single lie marks him as a damned liar….Lying to other people is your business, but I tell you this: once a man gets a reputation as a liar, he might as well be struck dumb, for people do not listen to the wind.” — Robert A. Heinlein

     I’ve ranted before about this critical aspect of the degradation of American society. And of course, long time Gentle Readers will already be familiar with this quote, one of my all-time favorites:

     There is no need in human life so great as that men should trust one another and should trust their government, should believe in promises, and should keep promises in order that future promises may be believed in and in order that confident cooperation may be possible. Good faith — personal, national, and international — is the first prerequisite of decent living, of the steady going on of industry, of governmental financial strength, and of international peace. — Benjamin M. Anderson

     The vacuum created by the loss of trust is immediately filled by the darkest, all-encompassing suspicion of everything. The untrustworthy person or agency is no longer awarded any credibility. Everything he / it says or does is immediately suspected of being duplicitous and evilly self-serving. This is the state we find ourselves in today as regards the actions of government agencies:

     In 2019, a 38-foot baleen whale washed up near the Florida everglades, but now researchers suspect the individual may belong to a brand new species—Rice’s whale (Balaenoptera ricei)—that calls the Gulf of Mexico home, reports Zachary T. Sampson for the Tampa Bay Times.

     A study detailing the discovery of Rice’s whale, published last month in the journal Marine Mammal Science, suggests there may be fewer than 100 of the new species left in the wild, instantly adding the species to the list of critically endangered species, according to a statement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration….

     “Even something as large as a whale can be out there and be really different from all the whales, and we don’t even know it,” [NOAA geneticist Patricia] Rosel tells the Tampa Bay Times. “It really brings to light the urgent need of conserving and protecting these animals in the gulf, and making sure we don’t lose another marine mammal species like we already have.”

     A “new species” in the Gulf of Mexico! How timely. Just as the Usurper Regime found itself in need of a new rationale for forbidding off-shore oil exploration in the most promising region in the world!

     Buck Throckmorton comments thus:

     Good ol’ NOAA is at it again. They’ve been busted manipulating historical temperature records to provide fraudulent climate change charts. I’m sure we can trust them on discovering a new “sub species” of giant whales in US coastal waters.

     One of the gimmicks the Fish & Wildlife Service has used to prohibit development in the Hill Country of central Texas is to classify the harvestmen (daddy long-legs) in virtually every cave as a new species. They’re the exact same arachnid, just separated by thousands of years of isolation in separate caves. I fully expect NOAA to try to suspend all oil and gas activity in the Gulf to save this newly discovered “critically endangered species.”

     Once burned, twice shy – and the NOAA has definitely been caught “adjusting” atmospheric temperature readings and falsifying historical temperature records. Given that the Usurpers are visibly determined to wipe out the fossil fuel industries, and that they’re likely to reward any agency that assists them in that effort, how far would you trust them, Gentle Reader?

     Perhaps an organized, well armed campaign to slaughter every “Rice’s whale” in the Gulf of Mexico at once, before the NOAA and EPA bureaucrats can add this “brand new species” to its list of the “critically endangered,” would clue the Usurpers in about how far we trust the “most popular presidential candidate in history.”

Mar 10 2021

Between a rock and a hard place.

Or between Scylla and Charybdis is you want some pre-Oprah imagery.

So, the whole economy is a gigantic credit bubble completely dependent on artificially low interest rates, and the whole thing would be destroyed if the Fed had to raise interest rates to fight inflation, which means they won’t raise interest rates to fight inflation, which means inflation is going to win and it is going to destroy the savings of Americans.[1]

~ Peter Schiff.

No big deal, of course. Americans can just stick in their ear while the magnificent people play at running the country. The Magnificent Ones are on the threshold of that point after which there is no PR campaign and no raft of BS they can float down the river to your shoreline to remove the stink. Simply stated, they have proved that the cared about everything else except the welfare of the nation and its people. They turned our gigantic, magnificent engine of prosperity into a casino.

PS — A+ if you can pronounce Scylla and Charybdis. El linko for the back story.

Notes
[1] “Peter Schiff: The Fed Between A Rock And A Hard Place.” By Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge, 3/9/21.

SIL-uh and kuh-RIB-dis.

Mar 09 2021

What More Will It Take?

     Retired Lieutenant General Russel Honoré has proposed a permanent military guard force for the District of Columbia:

     A task force charged with making recommendations to boost congressional security after a deadly Jan. 6 pro-Trump mob assault on Capitol Hill has proposed establishing a permanent military presence ready to go at a moment’s notice in Washington, D.C.

     The security review, led by retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who ran military relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina, recommended establishing a permanent National Guard quick reaction force, or QRF, for all of D.C.

     “Deadly mob assault” my bleeding ass.

     The Usurper Regime’s fear of Us the People is thick enough to cut with a knife. Can this really be the presidential ticket that claims to have received 81 million votes?

     If I may cite one of my Co-Conspirators, these are not the actions of a victorious government. Indeed, every move the Usurpers have made has shrieked their fear of us. They’re moving swiftly to spin a protective cocoon around themselves. Were they confident that they have the consent of the governed, would any of this have happened?

     The so-called “riot” of January 6 featured exactly no weapons and only trivial damage to the Capitol building. Indeed, the DC police literally escorted protestors into that building and stood around for photos. Yes, a few people died – but none because of aggressive action by any protestor. If that constitutes an “insurrection” that justifies garrisoning the nation’s capital and assembling a military unit explicitly assigned to its “protection” — i.e., keeping the Usurpers safe from the aroma of us riff-raff – I can’t imagine how the Usurpers would respond to a seriously angry protest march. Nukes, perhaps?

     Please also see Linda’s piece on the emerging “crazy-ass dictatorship.” Yet few Americans have been moved to do more than complain to their like-minded friends and neighbors. If patriots don’t come up with a counterstroke soon, everything we once honored about these United States will be gone – possibly forever.

Mar 09 2021

Why HR1 HAS to be enacted NOW

Because, before Harris can depose Biden, she has to be able to ram her VP replacement into the job.

As it takes a simple majority of BOTH the House and the Senate, the Leftists MUST win the NEXT election. Which, given the way they have pi$$ed off the Normals, and the determination that they will have to monitor the next election carefully, will not be possible unless they can replace real votes with fake mail-ins.

If you have a Democrat or a RINO in Congress who is up for re-election in 2024, make sure that they know they will NOT be returned unless this bill is gutted in the reconciliation process. Make it hurt. Pressure local DA’s to investigate any potential crimes – financial, ethical, moral. Dog them relentlessly, and make sure they know it will get worse.

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