Apr 27 2024

Unspeakable Or Unthinkable Part 2: An Amoral Calculus

     As my Gentle Readers might have expected, I received quite a lot of feedback on the previous piece. I wasn’t surprised by the tone of it. Disappointed, perhaps, but not surprised.

     The mass warfare of World War II, in which many thousands of noncombatants died, should have taught us something. The atomic bombings, in particular, were a critical moral message that nearly no one seems to have absorbed. The blindness men have exhibited toward that lesson is depressing…especially as it’s all too easy to adopt that blindness for oneself in a spirit of “This is the way things are and there’s nothing to be done about it.”

     I studied strategic planning – that’s the peculiar science of how to plan for the possible use of one’s armies and arsenal in a notional war – for more than twenty years. I kept at it until I was certain there was no way for a layman to understand it any more deeply nor more fully. I didn’t do so because I thought it unimportant. Neither did I do so because it was the supreme goal of my life to master that horrifying field. In a world hagridden by States, an increasing number of which possess weapons of mass destruction, understanding the criteria by which they maneuver against one another, whether diplomatically or militarily, is crucial to understanding States themselves: the core of the madness that afflicts suffering Mankind.

     It’s vital to understand one’s enemy. Our enemy is the State. (Kudos to the shade of Albert Jay Nock.) Weapons planning is the essence of the craft of Statesmanship.

     Statesmanship is the institutionalization of evil.

     Give that a moment before continuing on.

***

     The calculus of warfare demands certain things from those who conduct it. There is no morality in it; there are gains and losses, and nothing else. The balance sheet of war often confounds the layman with its callousness. Yet that is inherent in the enterprise, for those who order men to war have only the will to win as their guide.

     The progression of warfare from prehistory to the present has been one of steadily increasing scale and brutality. Time was, men fought with their fists, and perhaps with clubs. Later there came swords and spears, and then the first weapon that acts at a distance: the bow. More time passed; the discovery of explosive combustion and how to manage it brought us the musket and the cannon. Small arms became ever more accurate and capable, and that was far from the terminus of the progression.

     Soon the very first weapon of mass destruction arrived: the machine gun. Cannons grew steadily larger; their projectiles became more deadly, capable of slaughtering men in bunches far away. Over time, warfare, which had once been confined to land surfaces, reached the seas, and then the air.

     Armies grew ever larger, too. Time was, a war would involve only a few hundred or thousand men. The wars of the Twentieth Century compelled millions into combat.

     The German Empire introduced the first true area-of-effect weapon: poison gas. While the Germans eventually decided it wasn’t worth the trouble, the central idea persisted. Fire, more controllable by far than phosgene, became the tactical area-denial method of choice.

     What originated as a tactical device soon became a strategic ploy. Analysts discovered that a sufficiently concentrated bombing campaign could ignite a firestorm capable of devouring a whole city. Their test bed was the city of Dresden. The tactic proved even more devastating than they had expected.

     And then came The Bomb.

***

     Men who wield power over others don’t readily think of those others as their equals. As difficult as that is in peacetime (i.e., “A state of tension falling short of armed conflict” – Keith Laumer) it’s utterly impossible in wartime. Human bodies become tools to be hurled at the enemy. Weapon systems are evaluated on how efficiently they can destroy others’ lives and property. In general, bigger, faster, and cheaper are treated as synonyms for better.

     For a while after the arrival of The Bomb, even power-mongers were sufficiently horrified by its power to focus on how to arrange matters so as not to use it. A unique military leader, Dwight D. Eisenhower, became a notable political leader. He made it his central aim to preserve the peace, using The Bomb as its ultimate guarantor. Yet his intention was never to bomb anyone; rather the reverse.

     But more time passed, and the science of weaponry advanced further. Weapons of mass destruction ramified in ways their original developers could not have envisioned. Tactical nuclear weapons; artillery shells that contain small nukes; even a man-portable launching system for small nukes. Naval surface vessels were equipped with nuclear depth charges; submarines were developed that can launch ICBMs and IRBMs. (At one time there was a proposal for the development of nuclear land and sea mines, though I can’t say with assurance whether that went anywhere.)

     Each of these became a component in the arsenals of the Great Powers. That none of them have been used as yet is a mighty blessing. It’s odds-on that the first time one of them is used, all the others will be dispatched shortly afterward.

***

     Weapons science has advanced relentlessly in the direction governments, not private citizens, find congenial: the direction applicable to warfare between States. Private citizens have no use for weapons of mass destruction, Mike Nesmith’s notions notwithstanding. We prefer weapons we can use to defend ourselves and our loved ones without igniting a firestorm.

     But the men who “govern” the world cannot resist the lure of the really big gun. If it exists – if it’s even theoretically possible – they want one. Or many. Usually as many as they can squeeze funds from their subjects to pay for. The usual reasoning, which has proved resistant to refutation, revolves around “balance of power.”

     Today the Earth is partitioned into States. Antarctica and a handful of barren islands excepted, there’s no land surface not under the jurisdiction of some government. Over time, the dynamic of power has caused States to develop into ever more ruthless and rapacious entities. Warfare, the province of governments, has become a constant fact in the lives of Earth’s billions. No one anywhere can be certain that it will never come to his door.

     Some time ago, I wrote:

     The States of Earth exist in an anarchic relation to one another. Each has its own regional code of law, which might differ markedly from all the others. Despite several thrusts at the matter over the centuries, there is no “super-State” to enforce a uniform code of law over them all. More, they view one another as competitors in many different areas; their populations and institutions are often in sharp economic competition with one another. Thus, they are often at odds. They resolve important disputes among them through negotiation or warfare.

     That is what governments – States – do. They exist to wield power over private persons, and to contest for increases in power with other States. While they sometimes negotiate with one another, the shadow of warfare lies over every negotiation: the final “offer” that can only be answered by its like. Their calculus does not admit of the constraints of absolute morality.

     The rulers of Earth’s States have grown ever less concerned with anything but their own power and prestige. Nothing else can adequately explain the wars of the century behind us. Those rulers’ decisions are encompassed by the wholly amoral, win-or-lose calculus of warfare.

***

     How about a Bible quote? Everyone loves Bible quotes: some to laugh at their naivety, the rest of us to be humbled and exalted by them.

     Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to Samuel unto Ramah, And said unto him, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the nations.
     But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us. And Samuel prayed unto the LORD. And the LORD said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them. According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt even unto this day, wherewith they have forsaken me, and served other gods, so do they also unto thee. Now therefore hearken unto their voice: howbeit yet protest solemnly unto them, and shew them the manner of the king that shall reign over them.
     And Samuel told all the words of the LORD unto the people that asked of him a king. And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.
     And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the LORD will not hear you in that day.

     [1 Samuel 8:4-18]

     Samuel understood. He grasped the logic of power better than his Hebrew brethren – and better, dare I say it, than the great pullulating majority of my countrymen.

***

     My point “should” be “obvious” by now, but then, I thought that to be the case when I wrote the previous essay:

  • For as long as we tolerate, or are forced to endure, the existence or States, there will be warfare; there are no Organians who can or will restrain them.
  • War and the possibility of war will overshadow every decision of any sort made by any ruler or ruling cadre.
  • The calculus of war is unconcerned with morality as men understand and respect it. It is entirely “practical” – from the point of view of the rulers.
  • Thus, in any situation where the use of a weapon of mass destruction – e.g., an atomic or nuclear weapon – appears to the rulers to be the most practical available course, they will use one.
  • Moreover, they will continue to develop such weapons, for “if he has one, I have to have one too.”

     President Harry Truman gave the order that resulted in the A-Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because the calculus of war, worked out under the circumstances that prevailed at that time, made it the most “practical” way forward. Today, that decision appears to have been the best available. In that regard, Tucker Carlson was wrong. But in this regard – i.e., the position that the killing of innocents is morally wrong and cannot be redeemed by any “practical” consideration – he was correct, even if he failed to address such non-nuclear slaughters as Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Bataan, the Holocaust, et alii.

     And for as long as we demand – or must suffer – States over us, that antinomy will persist.

     May God forgive us.

Apr 26 2024

Cicero Saw Clearly

Everything about this post is short. Something simple should not require a great deal of words.

The enemy outside the gates are far less to be feared.

That is the shortened version of Cicero’s famous observation. I have begun to see it as eventually universally true. Certainly in light of Fran’s latest screeds noting past evils arising from all forms of government.

Our enemy, the Progs, in truth the regressives — the ones aiming to supplant our constitutional republic with an oligarchic Neo-aristocracy — is on the verge of owning the super-power Americans built. The questions I have for Americans:

  • Does a significant number see as clearly as did Marcus Tullius Cicero yet?
  • Do they feel obligated to show gratitude to our forebears by responding as they did?
  • Do they have the courage, or at least the sense not to wait until there is nothing left to lose?

I cannot answer for them. Let me just say that I’ve faith that it is never too late. Not even for an ailing octogenarian like me. I love this country and what is has done to improve life in a very short span of time. I thank God that He had a role in its founding and success.

I hope Fran grants the concise version above a berth in Liberty’s Torch Life Is Short Codex. If for no other reason than our enemy intends to shorten the lives of any red-blooded Americans they can. Certainly the Death Cult knows them to be their greatest obstacle.

Apr 26 2024

Unspeakable Or Unthinkable?

     There are things that must be said. Some of those things are terrible to contemplate. Fortunately, there are a few people, at least, who are willing to say them. I aspire to be numbered among them.

     Just now, the premier speaker of the unspeakable is Tucker Carlson:

     For those who don’t watch videos at all, here’s a transcript of the “controversial” part:

     I love, by the way, that people on my side — I’ll just admit it, on the Right — have spent the last 80 years defending dropping nuclear weapons on civilians. Like, are you joking? That’s just, like, prima facie evil. If you can’t — ‘Well, if we hadn’t done that, then this, that, the other thing, that was actually a great savings’ — like, no. It’s wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people, and if you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil. Like, it’s not a tough one, right? It’s not a hard call for me. So, with that in mind, like, why would you want nuclear weapons? It’s like just a mindless, childish sort of intellectual exercise to justify, like, ‘Oh no, it’s really good because someone else could get’ — how about, no? How about spending all of your effort to prevent this from happening?

     That statement caused shocked expressions and outraged statements throughout the American Right. Here’s one from Erick Erickson:

     Carlson’s moral myopia avoids the obvious. Far more civilians died during conventional bombings than died as a result of atomic bombs. On March 9 and 10, 1944, Tokyo was firebombed. It was called the “Night of Black Snow,” and it killed about 100,000 people – most of them civilians. Like Dresden, people fled to water and were “boiled.” WWII was but 50 years removed from men on horses attacking entrenched combatants, often with swords in hand. Bombs, in WWII, were “dumb.” Gravity took them to the earth and killed people – noncombatants and soldiers alike. War 80 years ago was very messy.
     Carlson and Rogan didn’t moralize over Hamburg, Dresden, or Tokyo. Instead, they bobbed their heads and lamented the use of a particular type of weapon, not the death toll or civilians roasting alive from firebombs.

     Yet while Erickson has a point, Carlson was half correct at least.

     A week ago, in a comment to this piece, I wrote:

     Wars are normally the province of governments. Government can stick a gun in your ribs and tell you “You’ve just enlisted.” Then it can send you out to fight — and God help you if you don’t report.

     That’s been the case since the Peace of Westphalia. “Private” wars were forbidden by sovereigns jealous of their supreme prerogative. While it went largely unnoticed at the time, that was what gave rise to a worldwide armaments industry, whose customers are the only entities equipped to make others pay for their wares and still others use them in combat: sovereign states.

     War and its accessories are big business today: so big that in the shadows cast by the munitions makers there are numerous “arms dealers” who broker such goods to customers even less savory than governments. The federal government of the United States alone spends nearly a trillion dollars annually on “defense,” with a substantial portion of that amount going to weapons design, fabrication, and acquisition. As there are nearly two hundred other nation-states on this sorry ball of rock, I’m confident that the global total is well beyond that.

     Governments buy weapons of war. Governments compel their subjects to pay for those weapons. Governments declare and wage war, often using their unwilling subjects as soldiers to do so. Are you beginning to detect a “red thread” here?

     While the next statement falls short of provability, I feel confident of its accuracy:


As Long As There Are Governments,
There Will Be Wars.

     “The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force,” wrote Robert A. Heinlein, and indeed it is so. Throughout history, except for one tragically brief century in a single continent, unwilling persons – conscripts, civilians, noncombatants, innocent bystanders, what have you – have died in war. It will be so in the wars of the future as well, for weapons – and governments – are becoming more destructive and less discriminating as time passes.

     Tucker Carlson finds the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki morally unacceptable. Yet that is what governments do! The scale of the thing, many thousands killed by a single gigantic explosion, is morally irrelevant. Those bombings were no more and no less moral than the bombings of August 6, 1914:

     A government with evil intentions had sent two million men marching on a mission of conquest. Its liege lord and top military planners were angry at the stubbornness of a minor power, neutral by treaty, that refused those armies free passage through its lands. The conquest-minded state decided on a strategy of intimidation. An aircraft long kept in reserve was sent aloft on a mission of terror, the first since Hume, Smith, and Locke put their stamp on the moral renaissance of the world.

     The aircraft was a Zeppelin, designated the “L-Z” by the commanders of the armies of the German Empire under Kaiser Wilhelm II. Its weapons were gravity bombs, thirteen in number. Its target was the Belgian city of Liege, where the Kaiser’s troops had met unexpected resistance to their Schlieffen Plan thrust against France. Its harvest was nine civilian lives: the first civilians deliberately killed by authorized military action in the Twentieth Century.

     The date was August 6, 1914.

     That, to your Curmudgeon’s way of thinking, was the most awful day. The day a major Western power, nominally committed to individual rights, the rule of law, and the norms of civilized warfare, threw all of that aside in hope of imposing its will on the government of another land. The day the line between combatants and civilians was erased.

     You who hate war but think Carlson was being excessively moralistic, how much do you really hate it? Enough to give up the insanity of government itself? Or is that too steep a hill for you? Are you going to try to ban nuclear weapons? Perhaps a second Kellogg-Briand Pact?

     Take your time.

***

     One of the true geniuses of the Twentieth Century, the late Herman Kahn, spoke and wrote feelingly on this subject. He started an address to a non-military audience with a quick poll:

  • How many people in this room believe that the number of nuclear weapons can be reduced? Almost everybody believed that they could be.
  • How many think they can be reduced to zero? Almost no one thought so; they recognized that nuclear weapons would continue to exist.
  • How many people think the U.S. should unilaterally reduce its nuclear arsenal? Most felt this was not the best option.
  • How many of you believe that arms reduction should take place through negotiated treaties like SALT or START, or a mutual freeze? Most supported those as the best alternatives.
  • How many believe that the remaining weapons might actually be used? Most feared that as a very real possibility.

     Kahn replied thus:

     “Now that we are agreed that nuclear weapons might be used, we have to think about how to use them: against what targets? Toward which objectives? We have to think about how to use them to maximize the chances of survival and minimize the damage. And we have to think about how to use them to end the war as soon as possible.”

     Kahn stressed that doing that thinking is the only prudent, responsible, and moral course. He was quite correct.

     Nuclear explosives will continue to exist. That djinn cannot be rebottled. And while we tolerate governments, we will endure wars. For nearly eighty years, the nuclear arsenals of the United States and other powers have gone unused. It can be argued that the knowledge of their existence and their destructive power has kept the degree of peace we’ve enjoyed since World War II; I’ve done so myself. But there have been wars over those eight decades – many of them – and not one of them has confined the suffering it caused to willing combatants alone.

***

     There’s no point in demanding that governments agree not to assault civilians and civilian properties. There’s no point in demanding that they refrain from conscription. There’s no point in demanding that they limit their weapons to some agreed-upon threshold of destructive power. They won’t do it. There’s no way to force them to do it.

     This is the world in which we live. It’s hagridden by States, and States are inherently predatory, violent, and heedless of moral considerations. You cannot compel them to limit their predations or their destructions. You cannot have peace while you tolerate them, and a tragic number of people – some of them very smart – sincerely believe that “we must have government.”

     If there’s more to say on this most agonizing of all worldly subjects, I’ll leave it to someone else to say it. I’ve said my piece elsewhere, and further bloviation is not for me.

Apr 25 2024

“We’ve Got To Get Him Before He Gets Us!”

     Sundance at The Last Refuge has the story:

     In the Special Counsel Jack Smith constructed Lawfare case against Donald Trump, what is generally called “the documents case”, involving the raid on Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s attorney, Christopher Kise, did something similar to a speaking indictment with an extensive court motion on January 16, 2024. The 68-page motion is a comprehensive “speaking motion” which outlines a great deal of the fraud and Lawfare manipulation by the special counsel. [SEE DOCUMENT HERE]
     In response to the filing, using the pre-established legal narrative about needing to control “national security” information [SEE HERE], the Jack Smith team (essentially Lawfare operatives like Weissman, Eisen and McCord) redacted large portions of the Trump motion specifically to stop the public record from showing the outline. However, two days ago, April 22nd, Judge Aileen Cannon unsealed and more importantly ‘unredacted’ the motion.

     Please read it all. Then perhaps lie down with a cool damp cloth over your forehead.

     If this doesn’t persuade you that “national security” is the most pernicious term in government-speak, I can’t imagine what would do the job. It’s been used to conceal innumerable crimes against Americans, individually and severally. Today it’s used to bludgeon anyone who dares to oppose the political Establishment and its aims – and thereafter to conceal the real motives of the bludgeoners.

     I can’t say much more about this without making steam pour out of my ears. (Not smoke, steam. Why do you think it’s called “wetware?”) If you have any doubts that the mechanisms of the federal government have been forged into weapons to be wielded against those outside the corridors of power, I hope Sundance’s article will put them to rest.

Apr 24 2024

Can We Be Certain There’ll Be Elections In November?

I don’t feel so sure:

     Biden’s puppeteers could well try this. The polls really look bad for him, and they don’t want to surrender power. Suspending elections on the basis of a “crisis” hasn’t happened here before, but that’s not to say that it can’t happen. There are alternatives to a “climate crisis,” of course:

  • A world war;
  • The assassination of Donald Trump;
  • Elections so corrupt that the Usurpers can declare them invalid;
  • The sudden death of Joseph Biden and his replacement on the ticket by…whom?

     In essence, any sufficiently large “crisis,” whether real or contrived, could serve as the pretext. Whether Americans would accept such a suspension of the Constitution passively is, of course, uncertain. Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t try it; he stood for reelection to a third term, and a fourth…and the electorate, unwilling to “change horses in mid-stream,” went along with it. Whether any lame-duck president could get away with it today is dubious.

     Do my Gentle Readers have any other possibilities to add to the list?

Apr 24 2024

In Case You’ve Spent The Last Five Years In A Coma

     …this is what’s being done to you right now:

     I don’t think he left anything out. Applause to my favorite tall but brilliant, fabulously talented and visually stunning example of a placental mammal.

Apr 24 2024

Repeating The Old Mistakes

     Back in the Sixties, when students on American university campuses first began to exhibit unruly and uncivilized behavior in large numbers, the administrators of those institutions made a fatal mistake: they tried to placate the disruptors. From that moment on, there was no quelling the mobs. Their principal agitators, most of them openly aligned with the Communist Party, had tasted success and were certain they could get whatever they might demand. Whatever event had initiated the disruptions became irrelevant. All that mattered to the agitators was to “keep pushing.”

     Nothing of that sort can last forever, of course. It had to burn out eventually. But many campuses suffered long periods of complete disorder. Hand-wringing administrators, terrified that calling in the police would somehow damage their institutions unacceptably, persisted in trying to “negotiate” with young thugs whose overt demands mattered little. Their whole goal was to “keep the revolution going.”

     It’s always a mistake to try to “negotiate” with such forces. By their actions, they’ve openly dismissed the purpose of a university in favor of their “cause.” Call it what you will: “peace,” “anti-racism,” “social justice,” “the environment,” “equality,” or whatever else. They have set out on a course that cannot be tolerated, lest it completely invalidate the disrupted institution.

     Perhaps some of today’s campus administrators have learned a little from their forebears:

     Protests over the war in Gaza have taken hold at a handful of elite US universities as officials scramble to defuse demonstrations.
     Police moved to break up an encampment at New York University (NYU) on Monday night, making a number of arrests.

     However, others are displaying the timidity that afflicted their predecessors:

     New York Rep. Ritchie Torres, a Democrat, criticized Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, saying she has “chosen to surrender control of Columbia to an antisemitic fringe.” Torres also said canceling in-person classes is “an admission of failure” by Shafik.
     “If you cannot ensure the safety of your students, then you have no business serving as President of any university, let alone the alma mater of Alexander Hamilton,” Torres said in a statement. “What Columbia University needs is not an appeaser of antisemitism but a leader who will fight with moral clarity against it.”
     He continued, “That Columbia University has failed its Jewish students so profoundly is an indelible stain on the soul of the institution. If the President of Columbia University cannot lead with moral clarity, then she should step aside for a true leader who can and will.”

     Columbia canceled in-person classes in the name of “safety:” specifically, the safety of its Jewish students, who’ve been assaulted and threatened by the “pro-Palestine” mobs.

     Has Minouche Shafik, an Egyptian-born Muslim, aligned herself with the mobs, or have the civil authorities mislaid their water cannons?

     This much is clear: the “pro-Palestine” mobs, like their predecessors six decades ago, sense the weakness of the college authorities whose campuses they infest. That a university has nothing to do with their “cause” means nothing to them. Their mantra is once again to “keep pushing:” not merely for surrender from the university, but also to strike fear into those who administer other institutions. The more fearful they can render peaceable others, the more likely their tactics will be profitable. It’s been the aim of militant minorities since time immemorial.

     Stay tuned.

Apr 23 2024

I Can’t Say I LIKE This Essay…

…but it’s one that brings up some points I – most of us – need to think about.

How would a war affect our own situation? Like it or not, it’s probably the likeliest outcome of the desperate Dem attempts to keep Trump out of office.

They’ve tried a soft, expensive, distracting war with Ukraine as the proxy. They’ve implied that Russia should be opposed militarily. They have studiously avoided pointing out that China is in MUCH worse shape than Russia, and seems poised to invade Taiwan.

What’s left but a hot war?

My Take-Away from the essay:

Who is in charge at the state, county, and local level is critical. I think most states might want to consider moving away from the Nationalized Guard system, and create or shore up a State Guard system, with similar benefits/pay. They would also benefit from not being required to be called up for active Army service at the whim of the occupant in the White House. Their mission would be to protect their OWN state.

States should earmark some money for EMP protection of vital utilities, protection of equipment (both physical and video), and other protection for their state.

You can probably think of other measures.

Apr 23 2024

Philanthroplagues

     If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intention of doing you good, you should run for your life. – Henry David Thoreau

     Those who would administer wisely must, indeed, be wise, for one of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity. – Andrew Carnegie

     A case could be made that, except for war, nominally charitable activity has inflicted more misery on suffering Mankind than any other isolatable cause. In this era, when so much supposed charity is inflicted by and through governments, the irony reaches an astounding height.

     But of course the bien pensants would shriek in fury at the idea that organized charity is a bad thing. Isabel Paterson told us why:

     The philanthropist, the politician, and the pimp are inevitably found in alliance because they have the same motives, they seek the same ends, to exist for, through, and by others. And the good people cannot be exonerated for supporting them. Neither can it be believed that the good people are wholly unaware of what actually happens. But when the good people do know, as they certainly do, that three million persons (at the least estimate) were starved to death in one year by the methods they approve, why do they still fraternize with the murderers and support their measures? Because they have been told that the lingering death of the three millions might ultimately benefit a greater number. The argument applies equally well to cannibalism.

     Paterson might have been overly cruel in the above. Surely many decent persons sincerely believe that organized charities do “net good” in the world. The United Way and the March of Dimes don’t send forth sadists to flog the underprivileged, do they? As far as I’m aware, no captured assassin has claimed afterward that “I’m with the Red Cross.” But large, organized – shall we say corporate? Oh, why not – charities are what they are: giant targets for predators. Indeed, the only targets larger than the big charitable institutions are governments themselves, and we know what they do.

     Let’s enumerate the effects – intended or otherwise – of organized charities:

  1. They support the idea that we can buy our way out of our personal responsibilities toward our neighbors.
  2. They promote dependency by doing for others what those others should (and usually can) do for themselves.
  3. They take funds out of the hands of genuinely well-meaning individuals and put them into the hands of persons who will employ those funds impersonally, without responsibility or regard for their actual effects.
  4. They create career paths for persons who, in Paterson’s words, seek to live for, through, and by others, thus diverting them from genuinely productive activity.
  5. They attract the insincere and the outright evil, who drool at the possibility of enriching themselves by “doing good.”
  6. Last but not least, they attract regulation, supervision, and ultimately absorption by governments, which are guaranteed to use them for purposes infinitely distant from the intentions of their donors.

     If you doubt any of the above, ponder this: Why are so many illegal aliens flooding into our country? Is it really plausible that any great percentage of them come here for jobs?

     It is not necessary that, to be net harmful, an organized charity must be large. I wrote the piece below in June, 2017. Ponder it, and its implications for your charitable action.

     The charitable impulse can easily be transformed into a fury that sets heads to rolling.

     My parish – St. Louis de Montfort in Sound Beach, NY – maintains, as so many Catholic parishes do, an Outreach pantry, intended to assist the needy with free food and other consumables while (hopefully) they struggle back to a condition of self-sustenance. My fellow parishioners are generous souls; the pantry shelves are virtually always kept full, even though an average of 150 families partake of the bounty each week.

     Sounds good, right? Christian charity in action, just as the Redeemer prescribed. Well, once in a great while things are not so good.

     Four weeks ago, the parish bulletin listed one of the pantry’s needs as “pork & beans.” Actually, the listing was PORK & BEANS, that we parishioners might grasp the intensity of the need. Accordingly, the next time I was near a supermarket I purchased half a dozen 1 lb. cans of pork & beans, a few other items listed as Outreach needs, brought them to the pantry, and thought no more about it.

     The next Sunday, PORK & BEANS appeared once more as the pantry’s principal need. So the next time I went grocery shopping, I purchased a dozen 1 lb. cans of pork & beans, a couple of other items on the bulletin’s Outreach list, brought them to the pantry, and thought no more about it.

     Sunday June the 18th: the Outreach pantry still listed PORK & BEANS as its principal need. I was beginning to grow a bit concerned. So I made a special trip to the supermarket and bought 24 1 lb. cans of pork & beans. (I’m sure you can see the pattern developing.) I brought them to the pantry and told the supervisor that “if I see pork & beans in next Sunday’s bulletin, I’m going to be very cross. Tell whoever’s eating all the pork & beans to eat a vegetable now and then.” She assured me that it would not appear in the June 25th bulletin.

     That assurance was false.

     This morning at 9:30 AM EDT, I brought 48 1 lb. cans of pork & beans to the Outreach pantry. The expressions that greeted me ranged from poker-faced to stunned. I dropped the case – approximately 70 lb, gross – on the sorting table, fixed the Outreach supervisor with my best gimlet eye, and said, “Where’s all the pork & beans going?”

     The supervisor said, “There was a big barbecue.”

     It took me about a nanosecond to go from relative calm to incipient stroke.

     “The food donated to this pantry is supposed to be for the local needy,” I said. I put more effort into controlling my demeanor than I’ve ever put into anything except concealing my glee at having just been dealt a straight flush. It proved insufficient. “It is not supposed to be used to supply institutional functions!”

     The supervisor smiled sheepishly and shrugged. “Well, you know.”

     I departed swiftly, before I could burst a blood vessel.

     That supervisor doesn’t know what kind of agony she’s in for. I intend to spread the news of this all over the parish – with her name attached.

     Fellow Christians, are you sure your charitable donations are actually doing charity? Really sure? If you were to discover otherwise, how would you react?

     Beware the charitably inclined Christian who discovers that he’s been duped. Few creatures are more dangerous. St. Louis de Montfort is about to experience a demonstration.

     And finally, a reprise from the old Palace of Reason:

The Circle Of Care

     I came of age in the Sixties, a time when America was gradually being turned upside down. And that having been said, I’ll spare you any soliloquy about the Sixties. It’s the upside-down part that matters.

     I don’t recall exactly when I learned about the duty of charity toward the less fortunate, but it was probably in my Catholic grammar school. The nuns were quite insistent about the obligation to help one’s fellow man, when he was in genuine need. Every classroom had a “poor box,” filled by contributions from the students. Its contents were periodically totaled and used for some charitable undertaking — and I don’t mean buying a color television for a family that didn’t yet have one, or dragging a “homeless” man into a government-run shelter; I mean providing food or clothing for a struggling family that hadn’t quite managed to make ends meet that month. Blauvelt parish, a blue-collar sector of Rockland County, New York, always had a few such.

     A lot of things come to mind about that poor box and its uses, but none so strongly as this: no one ever suggested that the money be sent far away, to people none of us knew personally. It was to be employed right there, in Blauvelt parish, among the people we knew. This was so obvious, so fundamental to the concept of charity, that the contrary idea was never considered.

     “Charity” derives from the Latin word “caritas,” the concern for others that springs from personal connection. A related word of Greek derivation is “sympathy,” the ability to “feel with” another person. These are not relations one can truly have with faceless and nameless strangers at a distance.

     True charity requires proximity, for at least two reasons. First, the necessary personal connection, the sense that one is helping one’s own, fails at any great remove. Second, human fallibility and weakness guarantee that, just as some will fail to prosper on their own, others will fail to employ charity properly; indeed, to receive money from others sometimes makes one’s troubles worse. When this occurs, the giver must give no further, for other measures — criticism, instruction, discipline — are clearly indicated. With any separation between the benefactor and his beneficiary, it becomes impossible to know whether help helps in fact, or only in theory and intention.

     Compare this ancient, common-sense approach to charity, preserved and perpetuated by all the great religious institutions of Man, to the modern concept. Today, our media would have us believe that charity is about voting for tax-funded, government-administered programs to redistribute our income to others we don’t know. Some of the supposed beneficiaries are in far places where America and Americans are routinely vilified for their prosperity and derided for their generosity. Whatever rules modern charity observes are determined and enforced by salaried bureaucrats who pay no costs for any mistake. Volunteers and private institutions that attempt to take a role are tolerated, but distrusted. The apostles of modern charity would prefer that all of it be under the watchful eye of government monitors, to insure that no misleading messages about the importance of sobriety, continence, or self-reliance are packaged with the gifts.

     Obviously, there’s been some change to the concept. I’d like to leave aside the political implications of this change for a moment and concentrate on the inversion of the circle of care.
If proximity was regarded as the most important of the requirements of the old concept, it is considered no better than optional under the new one, and quite possibly a detriment. If personal concern, for both the bodies and the souls of others of one’s direct acquaintance, was the fuel for the charity of old, the motive power of the new charity is rules: rules that direct the bureaucrat to shower largesse without regard for its actual effects, and rules that punish the citizen brutally if he attempts to avoid “contributing.”

     The new concept of charity first rose over the old one in the late Sixties, when the American welfare state began its explosive growth. In the years since then, we’ve seen many other things explode as well: crime, vice, filth in the streets, and social pathologies such as fatherlessness and illegitimacy whose effects have eclipsed even the darkest predictions.

     Meanwhile, law-abiding, self-supporting Americans of the cities, they who are mulcted for the funds that support the new charity, have been drawing in upon themselves, isolating themselves as best they can from the madness that surges around them. Their circles of care have contracted to hold only themselves and their immediate families.

     Count Leo Tolstoy once spent a night wandering the streets of St. Petersburg, giving to the poor whom he encountered until his pockets were empty and his energy was spent. At the end of his sojourn, those to whom he’d given were a little better off for a short time, but he knew and admitted that he’d made no lasting difference in their lives, that as soon as they’d exhausted the night’s benison, the darkness would return. He concluded that one should act with love toward those whom God has placed in his path, rather than to ride forth and scatter his substance widely and without regard for efficacy.

     Who are the needy whom God has placed in our path? Are they not our family members, neighbors and friends? Is it not these whom our circle of care should encompass?

Apr 22 2024

Surveillance Need Not Be Governmental

     A student at Exeter in the U.K. found out the hard way:

     A philosophy student overheard through the wall of his room saying ‘veganism is wrong’ and ‘gender fluidity is stupid’ was threatened with expulsion by his university, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
     Robert Ivinson said he was disciplined after a student next door in halls of residence at Exeter University heard the comments then complained he had been offensive and ‘transphobic’.
     Mr Ivinson, who expressed the views in a phone call to a friend, was hauled before university officials and put on a ‘behavioural contract’ for the rest of his studies.
     He was warned he could be expelled if the university thought he had done anything else wrong, and told by letter he had been found guilty of harassment.
     […]
     At the time of the complaint, Mr Ivinson – who had just started his first year of a philosophy degree – was alone with the door closed.
     Mr Ivinson, who is 6ft 5in with a deep intonation, said his voice often carried without him realising.
     When an officer from the university’s estate patrol banged on his door to tell him his female neighbour had complained, the mature student was shaken.
     ‘It was like the Stasi had come to my door,’ he said. ‘He stuck his foot in my door and said you’ve been saying some very offensive things.’

     If it is now licit for a neighbor to listen through your wall, and if what he hears you say is now actionable, despite it being an expression of personal opinion…well, the Stasi of the days of East Germany under Communism would be proud. Ivinson’s characterization is quite accurate.

     I wonder about the unnamed female eavesdropper. What “disapproved” opinions might she hold? Do you think anyone will haul her up by the short hairs for expressing them? Possibly not, if they’re in conformance with The Narrative. It’s just as dominant across the Atlantic as here.

     That’s Britain today, folks. No better than the U.S. and in some ways a good deal worse. Scratch it off your list of possible escapes.

Apr 22 2024

Disorientation Or Disoccidentation?

     The United States of America rose to world dominance for reasons that the bien pensants of academia would like to obscure and efface. Rather simply, it was the ideal of individual freedom, which unleashed the creative and productive energies of men as never before, coupled to Christianity and its ethic, which restrained men’s predatory impulses better than any previously known moral system. (Cue the carping voices from the back benches whining about slavery and protesting that “it was never perfect.” Then cue the ushers with the shillelaghs and the rolls of extra-wide duct tape.) With those two conceptions in the lead, there was nothing that could stop us.

     With those two conceptions being tossed on the trash heap today, there’s nothing that can save us.

***

     There’s a writer in Blogdom whom I know only by his Internet moniker “Baron Bodissey.” He borrowed that moniker from science-fiction novelist Jack Vance, who employs Unspiek, Baron Bodissey, as an important but never directly portrayed background figure. The good Baron is filled with valuable insights on things both historical and contemporary. And as one might expect from a thinker who gets it right when others persist in wandering in the intellectual desert, the Baron has a lot of detractors.

     I don’t know whether our contemporary Baron has any great number of detractors. I would guess that he has some; it’s the pattern of intellectual history that men disposed to see clearly, think logically, and speak plainly are widely disliked. As Heinlein has told us, “Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.” The habit can seriously impede one’s social life.

     It seems that the Baron and I share both an advanced age and a sense of fatigue:

     We’ll be coming up on the twentieth anniversary of Gates of Vienna later this year, and the process of preparing for an anniversary post has induced a sort of reverie in me as I contemplate the events of the past two decades.
     Things have changed a lot, both externally and internally. I often feel like I’m too old to be doing this sort of thing. I’m over seventy now, and should be relaxing somewhere pleasant, enjoying the time that remains to me before I shuffle off this mortal coil.
     And I sometimes feel like I’m close to burning out — I’ve just seen too way much information, most of it horrible. I wish I could return to the naïve, idealistic state of mind that I had when I started this job, but, alas, that’s not an option. Once you walk through the door of greater awareness, there’s no turning back. And, worst of all, I don’t think I’ve reached the limit of ghastly understanding. It seems likely that the worst is yet to come.

     [Emphasis added by FWP.]

     A bit later today, I’m going to add the emphasized sentence to the header of this site. It expresses my own sentiments perfectly.

***

     Ponder the following from journalist / columnist Emerald Robinson:

     That, Gentle Reader, is the epitome of the Zoroastrian ideal: to speak truth and shoot the arrow straight. It’s enough to fill with shame anyone who’s sat with folded hands and watched our degradation without even emitting a whimper. But who, of the millions who’ve refrained from even raising a voice in protest against the destruction of all that’s valuable in our society, feels that shame today? Have we not, in the main, simply closed our eyes to it – or run from it?

     Early in The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis observes that men of an earlier era responded to ideas rather more definitely than do we:

     At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning.

     Let that sink in for a moment. Then ponder this: given the incredible weight of evidence to the effect that:

  • Men are free by natural right;
  • The Christian ethic is superior to all other models for interpersonal relations;

     …do you, Gentle Reader, regard either of those propositions as dubious? If so, why? And if not: what aspects of your life have you altered in recognition of those truths?

     No, I’m not here to make anyone feel guilty. That’s just a side effect. I’m really here to talk about economics.

***

     There are more voices than just the Baron’s and mine raised about this stuff. You’d think, given the eloquence and force the best of us possess, we should have made some progress in combatting the tide. But it is not so, and one of the greatest of us has told us why:

     If it were just terrorists bombing buildings and public transit, it would be easier; even the feeblest Eurowimp jurisdiction is obliged to act when the street is piled with corpses. But there’s an old technique well understood by the smarter bullies. If you want to break a man, don’t attack him head on, don’t brutalize him; pain and torture can awaken a stubborn resistance in all but the weakest. But just make him slightly uncomfortable, disrupt his life at the margin, and he’ll look for the easiest path to re-normalization. There are fellows rampaging through the streets because of some cartoons? Why, surely the most painless solution would be if we all agreed not to publish such cartoons. [From Mark Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It ]

     That embeds the core study of economics: how we respond to incentives and disincentives. We tend, as individuals, to look for ways to get what we want – or to avert what we don’t want – at acceptable price. Moreover, if we see the same good available at two different prices, we gravitate toward the lower one. All other things being equal, of course.

     We have a latent capacity for thinking in aggregates – groups; tribes; societies; nations – that we occasionally invoke for “public” purposes. Douglas Hofstadter called it “superrationality.” Martin Gardner renamed it “renormalized rationality,” which I find more attractive. However, that capacity isn’t nearly as strong as our tendency to ask “What’s in it for me, and at what price?”

     Today, that individualization of our responses to events utterly dominates our behavior. Rather than confront the fomenters of evil and chaos, we avert or escape them. We move away, implicitly ceding the streets, and the field, to them. We seldom oppose them even with words. Mark Steyn told us so in connection with the rapidly metastasizing cancer of Islam, but it applies far more broadly than that.

***

     I choose my neologisms carefully. The one in the title of this piece is no exception. If you, Gentle Reader, feel disoriented because of the chaos spreading among us, it may be because we are being disoccidented. We are being transformed, with or without our consent, into men our ancestors might not have recognized and would not have approved.

     Not all of us, of course. Many, especially in locales distant from the big cities and the coasts, retain the spirit of independence, self-reliance, and self-restraint that was common among earlier American men. A regime of individual freedom and Christian ethics selects for such men. Women recognize their quality and seek them as mates. The rest fall by the wayside: they don’t prosper or procreate sufficiently to have a large impact upon the future.

     I’ve written about this subject before, of course. This essay, and this one, and this other one were especially pointed. Yet they’ve had little impact. I seldom hear about them from our readers or anyone else.

     I fear what is to come. Along with the Baron, I don’t expect I’ll live to see the final blackout. I rather hope I won’t.

***

     Apologies for depressing you, Gentle Reader. The Baron’s piece struck a chord with me, and I had to write it out of my head. But there you have it: the plaint of a weary old man who sees what he loves being brought to ruin, while others who love it just as much – or claim to, anyway – stand by and watch. And all of it in conformance with the laws of economics, at that.

     Have a nice day.

Apr 21 2024

And So It Begins

Actually, this sabotage of public utilities and essential services has been in process for some time. But, this is providing a fresh reason to Kick the Bastards OUT!

And, I’m NOT assuming that this was caused by illegals. I’m at least 1/2 way sure that this is domestic terrorism (not the “We just want to have a ‘thing’ to blame all our problems on White People”, but sleeper agents or their home-grown sympathizers.

I don’t care whether it’s caused by aliens or citizens. They need to leave – permanently, AFTER their hopefully very long sentence. And, no leniency for “well-meaning kids”. If you’re old enough to commit a crime against your own country, you need to leave for good.

My tolerance for “protests” and “activism” that includes crimes is NIL. Try ’em, confine ’em, and make ’em leave.

Apr 21 2024

This is a Book Everyone Needs to Read

It’s The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion.

I know, I know. She IS just as ‘Progressive’ and kneejerk as it comes. She’s associated with every cause, activist, and anti-Trump mania as is possible.

But she is a terrific writer. Long before I knew who she was, I read an excerpt of her work in Cosmopolitan during its Helen Gurley Brown years (Hey, I was 20-something. I went along with the crowd). Many years later, I read Play It As It Lays, and remembered that excerpt. It was still as impossible to put down as before.

Her essays on growing up in California, long before the mid-60s invasion of people, are mesmerizing.

So, finally, I noticed some reference to it, and decided to check it out of the e-library.

The book takes the reader through a dreadful year – her husband dies suddenly, then, less than a week after their daughter is taken to the hospital with pneumonia and sepsis. Her daughter’s recovery is complicated and lengthy; when she is out of the hospital, on a trip to LA, she suffers a collapse and spends much of the next two years recovering from a brain hematoma. She eventually dies of acute pancreatitis at 39 years old.

Didion, in her usual detailed style, mines her experiences, memories, and poetry to create an amazing book. The universality of the grief journey, and the sometimes foolish responses we make to overwhelming personal chaos, make this a book well worth reading.

Now, is Didion a deep thinker? A timeless writer?

Hell, no!

What she managed to do, through her fiction and non-fiction, is to capture a slice of American life at a particular time, better than anyone else. At least for the experiences of upper middle class women of the educated class. BTW, she was NOT a feminist, and as an adult, voted for Barry Goldwater. Later, she took on the political colorations and convictions of her literary associates.

She was a woman of many contradictions – career woman who worked alongside her spouse, politically Left, married for 40 years to the same man (a Catholic), mother, gadfly, and lifelong writer.

For an example of refusal to go along with the crowd, here is an essay from the NY Times on feminism. No paywall, it’s archived – just scroll down.

Apr 21 2024

“They Won’t Talk To Me!”

     The news is pretty static just now, and I haven’t done a piece about fiction lately, so have a fresh one.

     There are a lot of approaches to the conception of a story. What matters is the emotional impact of the product, and oftentimes that’s more a function of the writer’s imagination and sensibility than his craft. Please don’t misunderstand me: craft does matter. It’s a sine qua non. But the best collection of skills in the world can’t redeem an insipid story that contains nothing to move the reader.

     Yes – and I have said it before – you must have craft as well. There’s nothing sadder than a genuinely moving story that’s told in an inept fashion that ruins the reader’s experience. While there are innumerable stories among us, few take the time to write them down…and fewer still have the chops required to do them justice.

     But I see I’ve already veered from my main point. Apologies; I’ve only had two cups of coffee.

***

     Affecting stories usually express something that matters greatly to the writer. Yet the writer seldom says to himself explicitly that “I want to tell a story about [insert writer’s passion here].” When I’ve tried that, it’s fallen flat. Other writers of my acquaintance have told me similar stories.

     I have in mind an acquaintance from some years back who was a huge gun nut of the military variety. His enthusiasm for the weapons of war exceeded his sense for what makes a story worth telling. He turned out a novel approximately 200,000 words long that was loaded to the eyelashes with what I call “gun porn”…and as you might expect, it was unreadable. I edited it for him – a mutual friend had asked me to take it off her hands – excising most of the gun porn, refining the character conceptions, and bringing the emotional aspects of their experiences forward. When I finished, it was down to 160,000 words and fairly readable for a military / international intrigue thriller. Sadly, the work came to naught. It did not sell, for the genre was already oversupplied. However, it was a useful lesson to me.

     And that lesson has come around again on the carousel.

***

     No matter what your occupation, it’s essential to play to your strengths. You can spend a whole career straining to shore up your weaknesses. It’s not wasted effort, but to the extent that it takes effort away from what you do best, it can shortchange whoever is paying for your work. It doesn’t matter whether you labor for a wage or for the irregular bit of revenue from your readers.

     I wasn’t sure what my strengths were, if any, until I’d turned out a couple of dozen short stories. After a while, I concluded that I’m better at characterization and the associated skill of dialogue than at the other aspects of fictioneering. So when the time came to try a novel, I started with character conceptions. I figured that appealing characters could lead a reader along quite as well as an intricate plot.

     It developed that once I’d conceived of my Marquee Characters and had given them their essential passions and drives, they knew what story to tell. They told it to me in no uncertain terms. All I had to do was type it out. At the end, I discovered something I badly needed to know:

Theme is expressed through characterization.

     Whatever your passion, your characters, if you’ve thought them out adequately, will embody it. They’ll talk about it in their exchanges with one another. They’ll actuate it through their decisions and actions. You, the writer, won’t need to keep saying to yourself “must express [insert passion here].”

     That insight had great importance for me. It sustained me through nineteen novels and a great many shorter pieces. But these past few months I managed to forget it, God alone knows how.

***

     I’ve been unable to make substantial progress on the book I imagined would be my magnum opus, at least for my personal value of magnum. I kept trying to insert my Marquee characters into contrived series of events that would allow me to explore my chosen theme. As a result, they wouldn’t tell me the story I sought to tell the reader. And why should they? I was trying to coerce them, and they were busy with their escape plans.

     I’d mislaid the insight above and foolishly concentrated on plotting. It was a fatal error, for me at least; your mileage may vary. For me, a plot conceived separately from character conceptions goes nowhere.

     So I went back to the beginning to try again. On this second attempt I’ve striven to focus on what moves my characters rather than the complex, multithreaded plot I’d had in mind. It’s coming slowly – it’s hard to set aside one’s previous work, even when it’s clearly a wrong turning – but it’s beginning to take shape at long last.

     Don’t let yourself stray from what you do best.

***

     The above isn’t an attempt to prescribe a method that every writer must follow. It’s my method; it works for me; that’s all. For example, writers of military and espionage fiction would probably be better served by concentrating on plot construction and then contriving characters that would fit those decisions and actions. But the overarching principle – know what you’re best at and play to it – has wide application.

     But how is one to discover what he’s best at? Must one experiment with a slew of approaches? Should one’s readers have a say in it? Does it take a long period of trial, flecked by failures, disappointments, and periods of agonizing self-doubt?

     Well, maybe. And maybe not. When you’ve figured it out for yourself, write and let me know!

Apr 21 2024

Quote Of The Day

     “Modern science — in the name of progress — has gone from trying to understand reality to denying it altogether. Scientific progressivism is a religion. Don’t be fooled by the fact that its priests wear lab coats.” – Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee

     And indeed, it is so.

Apr 20 2024

Reading a New Book

Well, not NEW – but both the author, and the story, are new to me.

The book is The Tears of Autumn. It’s a spy novel, but that could be anything. What it is, is a book that, but for the names of current politicians, could be written today. It’s about the careless use politicians put their ‘intelligence agencies’ to, the misguided understanding of the public to the interplay of government and spook, and the tendency of too many politicians to put the information gathered to use. Rather than just sit and wait (in my view, often the best response).

The spy agency is American, the setting of the story is 1963, and I’m afraid that it’s one of those books that, should it take me longer to read, may keep me from going to bed at a decent hour. An all-nighter, to be exact.

Apr 20 2024

Oh, Come On!

     It’s all getting to be a bit much:

     A memo by the F.B.I. warning of possible threats posed by “radical-traditionalist” Catholics violated professional standards but showed “no evidence of malicious intent,” according to an internal Justice Department inquiry made public on Thursday.
     The assessment by the Justice Department’s watchdog found that agents in the F.B.I.’s office in Richmond, Va., improperly conflated the religious beliefs of activists with the likelihood they would engage in domestic terrorism, making it appear as if they were being targeted for the faith.
     But after a 120-day review of the incident ordered by Congress, Michael E. Horowitz, the department’s inspector general — drawing from the F.B.I. report and interviews conducted by his own investigators — found no evidence that “anyone ordered or directed” anyone to investigate Catholics because of their religion.

     That’s from the New York Times. Be aware that:

  • The FBI specifically noted a preference for the Tridentine (i.e., Latin) Mass and a low opinion of the Second Ecumenical Council (a.k.a. “Vatican II”);
  • The other “signs of extremism” the FBI enumerated were all straightforward Catholic teachings:
    • The way to heaven is through Jesus Christ alone;
    • Abortion is morally wrong;
    • LGBTQ practices are also morally wrong.
  • The targeting of Catholics was explicit, founded on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s listing of “Catholic hate groups.”

     The “Richmond memo” that details the FBI’s reasons for “infiltrating” Catholic congregations is here. Suit yourself that I’m not exaggerating.

     Just this past Wednesday, former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin wrote feelingly on the subject:

     “This is what being stabbed in the back feels like,” I thought to myself on that winter day when I first laid eyes on the FBI’s anti-Catholic “Richmond memo.”
     My reaction was predictable. I am Catholic, and I thought it was appalling, plain and simple.
     Of all the groups our top federal law enforcement agency would write an 11-page document targeting, they picked us. With all of the crime going on in the country, especially in the last few years, the FBI decided we Catholics were the problem.
     “Radical-traditionalist,” I thought, trying to make sense of the term the FBI used more than 40 times throughout the memo. It was certainly not a term I had ever heard before in the counterterrorism space.
     Who is a “radical-traditionalist Catholic?” (Let’s call them “RTC” for short.)
     I’m friends with people who love the Latin Mass. I attended a traditional school where I learned Latin from fifth grade through high school.
     Are they RTCs? Am I?

     It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the praetorians of the Usurper Regime dislike persons who hold to traditional moral and ethical standards. (Frankly, it was rather a surprise that the “Richmond memo” didn’t also catechize us for being against unrestrained rioting and looting.) Those standards are diametrically opposed to the rash of lunacy that’s recently swept over these United States. As Seraphin points out, it’s not just Catholics that hold to those norms; Christians generally subscribe to them, as do most observant Jews and most religiously indifferent Americans.

     But the Justice Department claims that it has “investigated” the FBI and found that the FBI had “no malicious intent” in categorizing Catholics as potential domestic terrorists. Well, that should settle that, then. It seems to have satisfied the Times.

     Words fail me.

Apr 20 2024

Assimilation In Reverse?

     Paul Joseph Watson brings you news the “media” won’t touch:

     A hearing held earlier this week in New York by the Council’s immigration and hospital committees saw black migrants who have arrived in the city airing their grievances about public services they have been provided, including food and accommodation, with one woman even complaining that New Yorkers won’t learn Congolese languages.
     The hearing drew over a thousand immigrants, mostly from countries in Africa, and many illegally in the country, with some claiming that they had been promised money, green cards or work visas if they attended.

     I don’t think the “melting pot” is supposed to work that way. The immigrant is supposed to assimilate to America’s language, laws, and customs. But black African illegal immigrants…you figure it out.

Apr 20 2024

A Unique FBI Investigation

     Have you ever heard of the FBI launching a criminal investigation into the actions of a slain woman after her death?

     I was astonished when I learned the details of the 62 pages of records Judicial Watch extracted from the Justice Department showing that the FBI opened a criminal investigation of Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt after her killing and listed four “potential violations of federal law,” including felony rioting and civil disorder.
     It is beyond belief that the Biden FBI gave Babbitt’s killer a free pass while engaging in a malicious months-long “criminal” investigation of Babbitt herself.
     The records were produced in our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Justice Department and FBI for records related to the death of Ashli Babbitt (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:21-cv-02462)).
     These records may also be responsive to a recent FOIA suit for the family for FBI files and potentially related to the $30 million wrongful death lawsuit we brought on behalf of the Babbitt family.
     The unarmed Babbitt was shot and killed as she climbed into a broken interior window in the United States Capitol. The identity of the shooter was kept secret by Congress, the Justice Department, and DC police for eight months until former U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd went public to try to defend his killing of Babbitt.

     The point of this “investigation,” which seems more like a post-hoc justification of Babbitt’s killing, “should” be “obvious.” Equally obvious is that the FBI is no longer concerned with justice, only the defense of its prerogatives and those of its Establishment backers.

     Michael Byrd, the (black) Capitol policeman who killed Babbitt, has never been indicted for his actions. Indeed, he’s been praised, even lionized. But the wrongful death suit just might do something to correct that. It certainly stung the late Orenthal James Simpson.

     Note also that government wants the suit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, transferred to Washington D.C. Do you wonder why, Gentle Reader? I do. 🤔

Apr 20 2024

Sure, Go Ahead And Elect Blacks

     But don’t act surprised by what you get:

     BALTIMORE (TND) — Baltimore City Mayor Brandon Scott shared his disappointment Tuesday that too much public money has gone to arts organizations that “just happen to be White-ran.”
     The comment came during the announcement of a $3.6 million “Diversity in Arts” grant funded by COVID-19 relief dollars. Capital grant recipients include the The National Great Blacks In Wax Museum on North Avenue and the Reginald F. Lewis Museum.

     For too long, public dollars have simply just gone to the big names and the big players in town,” Mayor Scott said. “And dare I say, I know my staff is going to hate this, the big names and big players in town that just happen to be White-ran organizations in Baltimore.”

     How do you suppose this would go over if the races were reversed?

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