Jan 18 2025

Some Afternoon Music

     You have to be fairly old to remember a time when James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, and Jackson Browne were unknown even to typical music lovers. Yet there was such a time. Each of them had written a fair number of songs. Taylor in particular had released a very well-regarded first album. But they weren’t yet “household words.”

     But there was this young singer-guitarist from New Hampshire who was beginning to get some attention for the blues and traditional songs he covered on his first two records. In the mid to late Sixties he was looking for fresh material to cover, and somehow the compositions of Taylor, Browne and Mitchell came to his attention.

     The producers at Elektra Records persuaded him that those songs would better suit a more urbane sort of image than the folksy / bluesy one that characterized his earlier recordings. He assented, added two compositions of his own, and, with the aid of some very talented studio musicians, he put together a set of recordings that became his most popular album. That album is one of the highest achievements of its era. I strove to learn to play everything on it.

     Here’s the song I was most frequently asked to play when I had my guitar in my lap. It was written by Joni Mitchell, though I’ve never heard her sing or play it. It’s from Tom Rush’s classic album The Circle Game:

     Tom Rush is in his eighties now, but he still performs. I’d like to see him once more before I die. I wonder if I’ll have the chance.

Jan 18 2025

On Choosing Your Neighbors

     You’ve probably seen this quote before:

     Political tags—such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth—are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort. — Robert A. Heinlein

     Essayist Gene Van Shaar sharpens the spear:

     Would you like to marry a tyrant? Do you want to work for a micro-manager? Do you want to live in a totalitarian country? Do you want to love and lift your family and friends, or do you want to bully them?

     Heinlein and Van Shaar are spot-on. No one wants to associate with others who seek to control him. We distance ourselves from such persons… with one exception: if they share our political priorities in all particulars.

     Controllers will congregate with other controllers. Persons avid for “the authorities” to impose a particular kind and degree of control will find one another, as well. In the current reshuffling of population among “red” and “blue” states and districts, we’re seeing that dynamic in action. But there is another kind of neighborhood that’s far less susceptible to alteration.

     Two days hence, Donald Trump will be re-inaugurated as President of these United States. This is obviously a highly significant event, for reasons I’m sure I need not enumerate. But not everyone is pleased about it. Consider this emission, from one of our neighbors to the North:

     As the “reconfigurer-in-chief” at this particular moment, Donald Trump will be, in philosopher Georg Hegel’s terms, a world-historical figure. If he brings an end to the American democratic republic, he’ll unequivocally rank alongside Washington and Lincoln as among the most significant presidents. But he’s likely to be far bigger than even that. We might not want to concede the fact, but Mr. Trump will probably, in time, take his place in the pantheon of history’s most consequential figures.
     […]
     Indeed, the essential paradox of Mr. Trump’s impact is that he’s constantly generating “certain uncertainty.” We know for sure that he’s going to create disorder – he’s already doing so, and he’s not even President yet – partly because he’s so mercurial. But Mr. Trump has an additional, special power. He has a preternatural ability – almost like a powerful acid – to dissolve the institutional, legal and normative constraints around him, creating the conditions for a constitutive moment. And as those constraints erode, future possibilities multiply exponentially.
     […]
     Donald Trump, many of his advisers, and a large slice of his followers are contemptuous of expertise, especially credentialled expertise; they’re ill-informed about history and oblivious to scientific fact.
     […]
     Mr. Trump’s narcissism means he desperately seeks adulation.
     […]
     Without guardrails, and inflamed by a sense of righteous, inevitable entitlement, Mr. Trump will become increasingly extreme, as his policies don’t work, and his incompetence creates mess. His administration will flood the landscape with disinformation, cooking the statistics on its performance, suppressing federal agencies that might provide unadulterated evidence on worsening trends, and using the power of the federal state to attack scapegoats and critical media. It will order the military to suppress protest, and it will aim to destroy, either directly or through mobilized supporters, anyone in its way.
     […]
     Three years ago I warned in these pages that Mr. Trump’s return to the presidency could fatally weaken U.S. democracy, producing a right-wing dictatorship by 2030. Many thought that was an outlandish claim then, but it’s an almost commonplace observation now.
     I also asked the question: What should Canada do to prepare? We’ve squandered the time since, so we aren’t remotely ready for the shock Mr. Trump’s signatures will soon unleash.
     Our country is now in grave peril. Mr. Trump seems intent on fracturing our federation, by using tariffs and other measures to create an economic crisis severe enough to stimulate secessionist movements, particularly in Alberta, where polling indicates that 30 per cent of the population already thinks the province would be better off as a U.S. state. If a charismatic advocate, well-funded by the friends of the Trump administration, can convince 51 per cent of Albertans to vote in a referendum for secession, does anyone doubt that the U.S. President would demand that the rest of the country let the province leave? And without Alberta, Canada is finished.

     [Emphasis added by FWP.]

     It’s fairly clear from the above that the author:

     Thomas Homer-Dixon (born 1956) is a Canadian political scientist and author who researches threats to global security. He is the founder and Executive Director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia. He is the author of seven books, the most recent being Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril.

     …isn’t a fan of President Trump or the ascendant populist-conservatism he represents. There are probably many Canadians who feel as he does, especially since Trump has promised to impose an import tariff on Canadian goods to compel it to take border control seriously. But the essay strikes many peculiar notes, both in its evaluations and its predictions.

     In the modern, post-monarchical era, it’s common for those who advocate a policy or a sheaf of policies to predict that positive consequences will issue from them. It’s far less common for those advocates to admit to the failure of the policies they’d espoused. More often than not they’ll try to blame negative outcomes on conditions and forces beyond their control. Sometimes they’ll attribute those outcomes to malign actors with a stake in their failure.

     Only in societies ruled by an oligarchic Establishment, jealous of its perquisites and intolerant of opposition, will the ruling class name a neighboring nation as the architect of its ills. Such oligarchies don’t always do so, but I know of no relatively free nation that has followed that path…. until Canada.

     In pondering policy failures, we must be as honest as possible if we want to learn from our mistakes. But politicians are loath to admit to error. It doesn’t happen often. The ones that are candid enough to do so seldom retain power. So there’s an occupational incentive to find ways to shift the onus of failure to other shoulders.

     Canada cannot “choose its neighbor.” Geography won’t permit it. Like or not, it must cope with being adjacent to the larger, more prosperous, and freer United States. Comparisons between the Canadian and American economies inevitably invite questions: We’re so similar in so many ways; why are we so much less prosperous than they?

     This is not the place for such an analysis. What matters here is the political effect of our neighborhood: Freedom and enterprise-minded Canadians look to the south. Persons who chafe under the Canadian Establishment’s authoritarian left-liberalism envy Americans for our intermittent successes in keeping Leviathan at bay. Some migrate, as opportunity-seekers have done for centuries. Others look for ways to “import America,” to whatever extent is possible. They love their country. Given their wish, they’d prefer that it be as free and prosperous as the U.S. But decades of devolution under Liberal governments urge them to look elsewhere for what they seek.

     This is not a new phenomenon. What is new – to Canada, at least – is the advancing tendency among Canadian Establishmentarians to blame the United States for being the United States. Above all, they blame us for being their neighbor.

     Yet neither Canada nor America can do anything about it.

     About twelve years ago, I wrote:

     Every religion has both a clergy — the “official” celebrants of the sacraments, whatever they are, and keepers of doctrine — and a clerisy — the segment of the lay population that bolsters the religion and its institutions by direct action. The clergy in a given locale is normally a small number of priests or ministers. Clergymen are most visible and approachable before and after an official rite of their church; the rest of the time, they’re much less accessible. The clerisy can and often is considerably more numerous than the clergy. Its members are more visible and active day-to-day among the faithful: organizing and doing works of charity; maintaining the parish’s buildings and other assets; going about the district and keeping other, less involved parishioners “in touch.” The healthiest and most vital parishes and congregations enjoy the attentions of a substantial and energetic clerisy.
     One way to view the clerisy is as the parish’s enforcers. No, they don’t run around with guns, chivvying their neighbors to Sunday services. By their words, deeds, and general prominence in church activity, they keep the less active aware of their religious affiliation and “what it’s supposed to mean” in terms of life here on Earth.
     […]
     If we view a political affiliation through this lens, we can regard the affiliation’s major promulgators of political principles and central policy positions as its clergy, while those activists who serve to “whip ’em up” in the style of a revival preacher, and who act to penalize deviationism or dissent, as its clerisy.

     Among the functions of a clerisy that I neglected to address is the responsibility to “keep ‘em in the fold:” that is, to provide arguments and disincentives to straying from the true faith to some other. The usual form that takes is in denigration of the competition. That can be couched as benevolent disagreement, as fire-and-brimstone condemnation, or some blend of the two. But when a competitor begins to lure congregants away in significant numbers, the clerisy is virtually compelled to get nasty.

     In Canada’s case, the Liberal clergy are its public officials, whether elected or appointed, and its most prominent political leaders. Its clerisy consists of persons such as Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon, the essayist cited above. The professor’s acerbity is a sign that Canada’s clergy are “feeling the pinch,” and have issued orders, sotto voce, to the clerisy to mobilize for battle.

     Yet no matter what Canada’s commentators and talking heads may say in denigration of President Trump, he won’t be going away until January 20, 2029. And however little they like being America’s neighbor, we’re not going away either.

Jan 18 2025

It’s funny because it’s true

From the Babylon Bee of course, which has become less of a satire site and more of a prophecy/soothsayer/prognosticator website. Not that it ever intended to become prophetic, but when the real world approaches insane levels of stupidity and Marxism, eventually even the most satirical take will become reality. There are people who document every Bee headline that ended up coming true.

That’s because good humor, the kind that sticks, always has an element of truth to it. Which is why the late night TV shows have devolved into retarded mouth-breathers grunting and hooting at whatever humorless pabulum that the writers can push out for their soy-soaked marionettes to regurgitate, all while ratings go down faster than the Titanic.

Now as for me, I have no problem with the TikTok ban. We’re talking about Chinese spyware, and it doesn’t just spy on the person who downloads it onto their phone, it spies on the people in that person’s contact list. If you have a friend who uses TikTok, and he has that app on his phone, there’s a good chance that YOUR information is already in the CCP’s hands.

It’s a spy app. Not a social media app. And fuck the CCP sideways.

I’m not too worried about my information, since Barry OBumblefuck the Jug-Eared commie already gave the CCP all my information when he allowed them to hack into the OPS. So I was screwed years ago. And yes, that wording was deliberate.

So to sum it up: Fuck the CCP, fuck TikTok, and good riddance to bad rubbish. It’s not like the CCP won’t have another app up and running in a week anyways. And Americans, having been indoctrinated and dumbed down by the publik skool sistim, will download it by the millions.

*sigh*

Jan 17 2025

Common Scheme: Subtly Introduce Perversions To Naifs and The Unwary

Gentle Readers: In order to revive the best parts of our cultural legacy and protect any of it that still remains, the following summary of behavioral observations must not be shrugged off.

I have written, most recently here, about the mechanism social engineers use — specifically induction — to attract small segments of humanity to one or more behaviors that might never occur to the public on its own. The lures they use are ubiquitous in entertainment, in reports on crime, in electronic gaming, etc. And, more subtly, from authority figures; such as teachers, themselves indoctrinated in totally Leftist infiltrated teaching colleges.

Little did I know how old was my observation until Richard Fernandez wrote this on FB a few hours ago.

Thomas Aquinas had this notion of the “occasions of sin”, circumstances that brought the unwary close to a cave from which a lurking devil might spring out to get him. Occasions of Sin can be external (like people or places) or internal (like habits or passions).

Thomas advocated avoiding occasions of sin, a skill which constituted the virtue of prudence, the habit of anticipated situations that could lead to moral failure. In a world which regarded evil as real, defeating the Enemy was a serious endeavor.

“Poor devil, he never had a chance.”

(Fernandez wrote more on this that I only noticed as I was composing this essay. He might also have written it on Twitter, and it and a wider exploration may turn up shortly in one of his essays for pjmedia. Look for it if you don’t already follow him.) **UPDATED BELOW** because FB linking is unreliable.

Adding to this discovery is the circumstance that I noticed the following line from a story that surfaced this morning. The coincidence of this is what propelled me to force myself to write this.

The harm starts from the moment that a child adopts the belief that they were born in the wrong body.

Life in a war zone made me desist from gender transition—what will it take for others to buck the harmful idea of gender ideology?

Parents with young children have taken notice that their kids were coming home from public institutions with notions that, historically, never occur as frequently as we are witnessing today. And yet their concerns were and are not only ignored by those who run those institutions, but the FBI was sent to the homes of many such parents to stifle their protests.

It all suggests — to the point of brash, self-assured exposure — how deep and high is the rot.

So this is why I warned you all, at the top, not to shrug this off. Don’t do what I did. I now find it shameful I had not taken my own observations more seriously.

What I did was I kept thinking “Who am I to call others to notice what I see going on?” I’ve might have better contributed to the now wider countering efforts sooner. It was common sense that contributed mostly to my awareness, but we’ve been pounded by the same forces into second guessing our senses. Don’t let them get away with that any longer.

Now that the battle to stop such schemes is underway, after so much more damage to decency has transpired, I know I should have tried harder to stop the schemers from continuing their predations.

And so I write this admission and alert today. I pray it strikes a chord in you.

**UPDATE**

Wretchard T. Cat

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People who are arrested for commiting crimes or secretly evincing attitudes they are famous for denouncing are commonly regarded as ‘hypocrites’ (which they may well be) but their obsession with those subjects also suggests they’ve been thinking on those topics a long time.

Thomas Aquinas had this notion of the “occasions of sin”, circumstances that brought the unwary close to a cave from which a lurking devil might spring out to get him. Occasions of Sin can be external (like people or places) or internal (like habits or passions).

Thomas advocated avoiding occasions of sin, a skill which constituted the virtue of prudence, the habit of anticipated situations that could lead to moral failure. In a world which regarded evil as real, defeating the Enemy was a serious endeavor.

But ‘educated’ moderns, indoctrinated to think that evil does not exist and consequently that ‘occasions of sin’ don’t exist either possess neither the lore nor awareness to avoid or escape the terrible something which devours them. They are ripped up without even knowing why.

“Poor devil, he never had a chance.”

Jan 17 2025

“We’ve Seen The Light! You Can Trust Us Now!”

     A quick summary from 90 Miles From Tyranny says it all:

     Among the persistent problems the nation will face during the second Trump Administration is a sort of cognitive inertia: the tendency to go on believing that some information sources are inherently trustworthy, even though they’ve been spewing provably false statements for four years, while some other information sources are inherently dubious, even though they’ve been provably correct throughout those four years. Before November, I would not have believed that public trust in a gang of demonstrated liars and shills could be that sturdy. Yet it appears to be so.

     A favorite Heinlein quote comes to mind:

     “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.”

     Was the Grand Master being a trifle too optimistic about humans’ ability to detect deceit and scorn the emissions of the deceitful?

     I once thought I could detect a liar reliably – sufficiently so to avoid being “taken.” After all, I’ve had seven decades of experience, over which span quite a number of people have tried to con me. Seldom had any succeeded. Yet a recent event showed me that I was more trusting than I’d believed. And of course, it cost me.

     If a bright, widely experienced person can remain gullible after so much exposure to deceit and deceivers, what hope is there for the man of average intelligence and experience? The political implications are dreary. They suggest that elections cannot provide a long-term cure for what ails us. But what then?

     Right now, we’re looking at four years of attempted corrections of the previous four years. There’s no way to know what will follow. To have a good chance of establishing the Trumpian / “Make America Great Again” program, much less continuing it after Trump leaves office, the greater part of the public must somehow be inoculated against the efforts of the legacy media to cloud our eyes. The effort must be both energetic, sophisticated, and unflagging. But how can we reach people who trust the old media and disdain the new?

     Just an early-morning thought.

Jan 16 2025

Desiccation In Progress

     [W]e are told that there is no need to fear the concentration of power in government so long as that power is checked by the electoral process. We are urged to believe that so long as we can express our disagreement in words, we have our full rights to disagree. Now both freedom of speech and the electoral process are important to liberty, but alone they are only the desiccated remains of liberty…. Effective disagreement means not doing what one does not want to do as well as saying what he wants to say. – Dr. Clarence Carson

     There’s a subject on which I have a habit of repeating myself. (“What? Only one?”) (“Shut up, you.”) It’s the sharp difference between democracy and freedom. The amount of propaganda the Left has poured on us, to the effect that “as long as you can vote, you’re free,” is simply staggering. The falsity of it could not be clearer… yet it has succeeded to a remarkable degree.

     I first wrote about this deceitful substitution of ballots for individual liberty a long time ago. Yet few have listened. After the atrocities of 2016, the Establishment’s strokes against the trustworthiness of our elections should require no comment. Yet this notion of “the vote as freedom” seems to be an armored against all objection.

     A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. – Lysander Spooner

     If you’re a long-time Gentle Reader, you may recall this 2003 observation, from the old Palace of Reason:

     So long as speech was protected, Americans could claim with some justice that we were in some sense free. If Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision prevails, we will not be able to call ourselves even partly free. We will be a people in chains. Chains forged to protect incumbents from having their records in office publicized in the press as they stand for election. Chains forged to increase the power of the Old Media, granting their journalists and editors the last word on political campaigns. Chains forged by (and for) men to whom “the people” are not only not sovereign, but are a force to be fastened down and made to do as they’re told by those who know better.

     That was about the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, an anti-Constitutional monstrosity that was struck down by the Supreme Court some years later. That Act was one of the political Establishment’s first strokes against freedom of expression. For you see, that had begun to threaten the Elite’s grip on power. Clearly – to them — that meant it had to go.

     Americans have been a little more successful at preserving our freedom of expression than our British cousins. The “authorities” there have been locking up Britons for posts on Facebook and X. Similar things have been happening in the other Anglospheric nations. Here, should you say anything that makes the Elite uncomfortable, the Regime dispatches the FBI to “talk to you.” Intimidation by federal employee, however, is apparently not very effective.

     The latest news from the U.K. suggests that its Establishment has laid a crosshairs over Britons’ electoral franchise, as well:

     Sir Keir Starmer’s government proposes allowing millions of foreign nationals to vote and abolishing measures to prevent voter fraud.
     Ministers are considering plans to overhaul the way elections are held by scrapping voter ID laws and giving five million foreign nationals the right to vote in UK elections.
     They clearly plan to cheat and stay in power in perpetuity.

     Just Google “Keir Starmer AND voter ID” if you doubt this. The Starmer Regime openly plans to dilute British citizens’ votes with the votes of millions of foreigners, including an unknown number of illegal aliens. Do you have any doubt that Britons who dare to object to this will get visits from the Regime’s myrmidons?

     Some years ago, in the run-up to the bicentennial celebration of the ratification of the original Bill of Rights, Philip Morris Corporation released a TV ad promoting that occasion because it guarantees our right “to say what we wish to say, to think what we wish to think” – and nothing else. Even that drew denunciations from the Establishment media. They claimed it was an attempt by that company, which sold tobacco products, to offset the criticism it had weathered due to smoking’s deleterious effect on human health. Whatever the motives involved, the ad campaign itself was innocuous by any imaginable standard. Indeed, by not mentioning at all the other rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, it missed 95% of the significance of the document.

     Once the Elite and their media allies decide on a position, they will brook no opposition. Speak against it? You get denounced, on whatever basis is most convenient. Vote against it? You’ve been duped, brainwashed by “propaganda” and “misinformation.” Compare this to Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse’s conception of “false consciousness:”

     The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and ‘philosophies’ can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the ‘marketplace of ideas’ is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the ‘end of ideology’, the false consciousness has become the general consciousness–from the government down to its last objects.

     And so even what Dr. Carson called “the desiccated remains of liberty” are beaten back, chained down, corrupted and forced to serve those determined to remain at the levers of power. Now we’ll get to observe that process across the pond, in the nation that was once called “the land of liberties.”

     Have a nice day.

Jan 15 2025

It’s Time To Level The Nominations Playing Field

     The brutal, irrelevant, completely graceless interrogations Democrat Senators are inflicting upon various Trump nominees were only to be expected. The Democrats have no honor. They have no convictions they would uphold about courtesy, civility, or decency. Democrat Senators can abuse Republican nominees because the media is on their side. The media will stand behind the Democrats no matter what they say or do.

     But were a nominee to tell a Senator exactly what he thinks of the scoundrel, the media would be unanimous in denouncing the nominee. Fear of such denunciations forces the nominee to restrain himself, even if he’s boiling inside. I don’t envy the men and women who have to run that gauntlet.

     A few years ago, I imagined a different sort of “interview,” one in which Judge Amy Coney Barrett, then a nominee to the Supreme Court, would give Senator Kamala Harris exactly what she deserves:

Sen. Harris: Judge Barrett, what is your opinion of the decision in Roe v. Wade?
Judge Barrett: It was an outrage. Clearly wrongly decided.
Sen. Harris: So you would vote to overturn that decision?
Judge Barrett: Given the opportunity? I certainly would.
Sen. Harris: How can you sit there and advocate the repeal of a woman’s right to choose?
Judge Barrett: Abortion is murder. If there’s a right to life, there can be no right to murder.
Sen. Harris: I’m appalled that you can consider yourself fit for the highest court in America.
Judge Barrett: I’m appalled that you, who openly defend the murder of innocent children, have a seat in the U.S. Senate.
Sen. Harris: How dare you!
Judge Barrett: Why not? You were never going to vote to confirm me, so why shouldn’t I say what I think?

     I think the time has come for such a riposte. The media will never criticize a Democrat, no matter how outrageous his words or deeds. (Remember Teddy Kennedy?) Someone has to do it – and the recognition that no Republican or conservative can “win the media over” should be regarded as liberating.

     Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee for Attorney-General, came close today. I wish she’d really “let it rip.” Alex Padilla deserves to be lambasted publicly for his crude and graceless behavior. Who would ever have a better chance to do it?

     Just a quick thought.

Jan 15 2025

A Word And A Defeasible Tactic

     Certain words, as all my Gentle Readers already know, have been anathematized: driven out of the common lexicon by censorious P.C. evangelists. I’ve written about this before. But those actions have evoked reactions in many cases. One of them is the contemporary practice of condemning the individual’s privilege of discerning better from worse, or good from bad, or right from wrong. That is denounced as judgmental.

     Really? We’re not supposed to use our ability to discriminate – whoops! another banned word! – between what’s pleasant and unpleasant, constructive and destructive, ethical and unethical? Yes, really, Gentle Reader! We’ve been commanded to give all that up in the name of tolerance! It’s about “the freedom to be me,” don’t y’know!

     Well, pardon my Urdu, but fuck that shit.

     Turning “judgmental” into a pejorative is part and parcel of the Left’s Newspeak campaign. As Orwell noted, restricting our vocabularies restricts our ability not only to convey a concept or a sentiment, but even to formulate it for ourselves. We think in symbols – words – and without the appropriate words, some thoughts become impossible to express.

     I am judgmental. I know what I believe and what I prefer. No censorious leftist will deprive me of the words I need to express those things. But they’re working hard to browbeat as many Americans as possible out of their most expressive terms. “Judgmental” is only the mildest of their pejoratives.

     Now that denunciations as “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” “Islamophobic,” and so on have lost their force, “judgmental” is on the rise. Confident persons will laugh it aside… but appallingly few of us are confident in the face of an attempt to shame us. We’ve been hectored and battered for so long, and from so many directions, that the common inclination is to “self-censor” to avoid such sallies. That such attempts are themselves “judgmental” rarely occurs to us.

     A quick “blast from the past:”

     [A]llow me to recount an episode from more than a decade ago. It occurred at the home of some friends, who had invited us over for dinner. They’d also invited another couple, about whom I’d been told nothing except that the husband, Abe, was someone “you might enjoy talking to, Fran.”

     Abe was a left-liberal of typical left-liberal opinions and arrogance. We fenced verbally for an hour or more — apparently our mutual friends had told him a little about me and my proclivities — during which:

  • The topics were many and various;
  • Abe repeatedly made factual assertions I could easily disprove, but which he insisted were true, while freely dismissing my factual assertions as “nonsense;”
  • Despite severe temptations to do otherwise, I remained courteous. I was in someone else’s home and felt an obligation to maintain the peace.

     But there came a point where Abe felt he simply had to address what he deemed the inadequacies of President George W. Bush. Now, whatever Dubya’s missteps were — and I’ll allow he made a number of them, some of which were quite serious — he was a man of sterling character. You could believe that he meant what he said. When he proposed a plan of action, you could be confident that he was sincere about it and would prosecute it to the limit of his ability and authority. When Abe lit off in that direction, I could sense that trouble was on the horizon.

     And indeed it was. I managed to hold myself in check throughout most of Abe’s tirade, but when he sneered at Dubya for his Christianity — for “needing the comfort of an imposed structure,” as Abe put it — I snapped.

     “Do you have any idea,” I said in a tone that might have issued from the bowels of the Earth, “what you just said to a devout, practicing Catholic?” I didn’t wait for an answer. I turned on my heel and walked away. We exchanged no further words that evening. Indeed, my wife and I left without wishing him a good night.

     Abe, who was clearly an evangelistic secularist – lots of leftists are like that – saw fit to judge Dubya for his embrace of Christianity. Whatever anyone may think of Dubya as President, his faith was sincere, and was sincerely demonstrated on may occasions. When I riposted at him, he was dumbstruck. I’d counter-judged him, and he was helpless before it.

     There’s a moral in there, Gentle Reader. They who denounce us as “judgmental” cannot face their own fire when it’s turned against them. In a way, it’s a reprise of what’s happened to the Left’s previously preferred pejoratives: when turned against them, they were unable to respond coherently. Some foamed at the mouth; others simply fell silent.

     I think the point has been made: stand your ground. Have a nice day.

Jan 14 2025

Liberals Are Conservative In The Worst Way

I’ve on many occasions observed that the conservative view is naturally fractured by two forces inherent in the aphorism: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

One of these is the desire to leave to our legacy a world at least as well-off as that with which we were blessed.

The other is “don’t rock the boat.”

The former I refer to as principled, emblematic of patriots, the latter as principaled, emblematic of RINOs.

Fran’s post just below this one, Reality Is Unbending, is astoundingly timely, because a liberal admitted to me yesterday that being fairly well-suited, she was inclined not to rock the boat.

To which I immediately pointed out that that makes her a conservative. To which she frowned in that she recognized the at least partial truth.

I then said not to be too saddened. Robert Conquest long ago noted in his first Law of Politics that “everyone is conservative in what they know best.” What one is accustomed to they are at least at ease with. They worry most when others want to rock the boat.

This is especially true when current events prove earlier actions to be wrong. It’s one thing to placate oneself that intentions were good. It’s entirely another to stick to what didn’t work because it’s too hard to admit the errors.

That goes for conservatives as well. But principled types work hard to overcome the principaled ones who, because of their more plutocratic positions and connections, are hard to remove from power.

But for the liberals, being conservative in the don’t rock the boat sense is one where they permit the radicals to remain in charge. As the relatively wealthy in Pacific Palisades — a good portion of whose net worth went up in flames — are now facing, leaving the radical super-rich like Gavin Newsom in charge is not healthy for them or anyone else.

Newsom and his ilk are unbothered by their plight. If that gang lost anything in the last week, they have funds to rebuild. But for the lesser ones, without insurance to rebuild with or without regulatory obstructions, they may only get, from land speculators, pennies on the dollar of the former value of their land.

And then there is the religious aspect of liberalism that Fran rightly noted.

I at least hold hope that their faith in that is far more shaken than that of the Death Cultists. The latter gained by the death toll that is mounting (a small number, but a trend they favor), the diminution of the upper middle class, and the power trip they’re enjoying from seeing their policies of neglect achieving what they hoped for, but to which they will never admit.

It is for certain that if Liberals continue to plod along as before, and continue reelecting Dems to control their legislature and vote counting, Libs are truly being conservative in the worst possible way.

Maybe you can awaken a few by making this point. Remember? Many a conservative is a former liberal who has been mugged.

Jan 14 2025

Reality Is Unbending

     …but human nature can be pretty stiff too:

     It’s not that [California left-liberals] can’t learn. They’re not stupid in the sense that they don’t understand that the people they’re voting for are blithering idiots. It’s that human nature prevents them from accepting the fact that they’ve been wrong so that they can change. They are emotionally invested in the liberal project that they grew up in, and to vote against it now would require introspection and an admission that everything they believed in was baloney. Most of them can’t do that. Most of them won’t do that. And nothing’s going to change.

     You’d think that the wildfires consuming the Palisades would have awakened Los Angeles liberals to the utter failure of liberal politics. Then again, you’d have thought that having their city and much of their state overrun by illegal aliens and homeless bums would have taught them something, too. And what about having to pay the highest state and local taxes of any district in America? No, that didn’t get their attention either. Indeed, much of liberal politics has been devoted to end-running, if not overturning, the famous Proposition 13 that sharply limited California’s ability to impose property taxes on its residents.

     Kurt Schlichter has pinned it: Liberalism is not a political stance but a religion. Apostates must prepare to be shunned by their fellow-believers. That’s a high price to pay for one’s sins. Not many are willing to pay it, especially given the emotional price of admitting that one has been so wrong for so long.

     It’s a sermonette the rest of America should take seriously.

Jan 14 2025

Just Adding My 2 Cents

Comments were closed on this post by the time I’d seen it. Hey, it was my anniversary this weekend! No fancy stuff to celebrate, I was battling a respiratory infection. So, not a Whoop-de-doo celebration. Just rest and recuperation. And a lot less online stuff.

I used to be a quick up-and-out person in the mornings. Shower, dress, eat, get my stuff out to the car, and go. In the winter, add 20-30 minutes to that time, to clear the snow off the car and chip away at the ice, if needed.

Husband was generally great about clearing the drive and walkways.

It was more complicated when the kids were little, but I was still on the road to work with one to 1-1/2 hours. With ONE bathroom.

After retirement, I could afford to slow down, but usually did not.

Until the last year.

Why?

It takes longer today:

  • More meds, which have to be taken with food.
  • Greater need for lengthy breathing treatment, when experiencing respiratory infections, alas, more common since last January.
  • It takes longer to “oil my joints” – add a topical like Voltaren , do some walking around and stretching, and gradually get to the point where I can move with need of a cane.
  • Breathing exercises
  • Vocal exercises – my voice can be rough and scratchy without going through the limbering up exercises. I haven’t lost my voice in MONTHS.
  • Check calendar – for appointments, bills that need to be paid, people to call (with lengthy waiting time), check off the tasks completed.
  • Check text messages, in case any family member is having a crisis that I need to deal with.
  • Check email.
  • Once a week tasks, like changing my hearing aid filters (all parts are TINY, and need a fair amount of manual dexterity, which I no longer have), filling my weekly meds box, and mopping, filing, etc.

Today, at this point, 2 hours after crawling out of bed, I’m still working on the above list. Face it, I’m a rusting and obsolete piece of machinery, whose owner is still trying to keep in operation. I’m not alone. There are a lot of those creaky old citizens.

Consider offering a little assistance, if you can. Not just for seniors, but anyone who struggles with manual tasks, or other activities of daily living.

“Solutions”, like Canada’s MAID – Medical “Assistance” in Dying, are NOT the answer.

Jan 14 2025

Drama And Facts

     A fair number of movies are made about – or “based on” – real-world events. The events themselves must be dramatic to qualify, of course. But filmmakers, ever searching for that “blockbuster hit,” will inevitably depart from the facts of the story in search of increased drama and pathos.

     The C.S.O. and I watched such a movie yesterday evening: Pawn Sacrifice, which was “based on” the meteoric career of chess titan Robert James “Bobby” Fischer. The movie was irresistibly tempting to me, as a chess devotee of many years. Yet it proved disturbing, due to the liberties taken with the personalities of several of the people involved, especially Fischer.

     The movie was apparently personally important to Tobey Maguire, who played Fischer despite the sharp physical divergence between them. (Maguire is 5’8” and slight of build; Fischer was 6’1” and somewhat more robust.) Maguire not only starred in the movie but was one of its principal producers. He’s also reputed to be a “keen chess player.” According to IMDB, he was greatly impressed by Steven Knight’s screenplay for the film.

     Knight’s screenplay exaggerated two of Fischer’s devotions: his insistence upon perfect conditions for play and his absorption into Cold War conspiracy theories and Herbert Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God. While it was clear from a fairly early age that Fischer was somewhat unbalanced, as a young man he wasn’t the unbridled lunatic portrayed in the film. His descent into paranoia and isolation became serious after he won the World Championship from Boris Spassky, who is also treated more harshly than he deserves.

     It could not have gone otherwise. Fischer’s quest for the championship, to be acknowledged as the top chess player in the world, was the one and only thing that mattered to him. Once he had conquered that mountain, where else was there for him to go? Note that he never played another game under FIDE’s auspices. He based his renunciation of the world title, rather than play challenger Anatoly Karpov, on FIDE’s refusal to accede to his demands for match conditions and rules, but probably only superficially. Why would he have agreed to risk his hard-earned reputation as “the greatest?” It was all he had.

     But a movie is entertainment, and as entertainment the movie succeeds. (The C.S.O. loved it.) Probably its greatest failing is that it comes to an abrupt end with the Fischer-Spassky match. If there’s a moral to be drawn from Fischer’s life, it would be that a monomania of any sort is inevitably harmful, both to the monomaniac and the people who care about him. Fischer’s several friendships, especially with other top players from various nations, deserved to be treated with more significance. That would have made more comprehensible the damage that winning the world title did to Fischer.

     Once again, the tradeoff between dramatic impact and fidelity to the facts was resolved in favor of more drama. It happened in Lone Survivor. It happened in Zero Dark Thirty. It happened in 13 Hours. And it will happen again, in the next movie “based on a true story.”

Jan 14 2025

One Week to Go

And, we’re just holding our breath, praying that our Official Enemies don’t decide to launch a war.

Who are the official enemies?

That would be China, North Korea, Iran, along with their lesser allies – those who have not declared themselves publicly, but would be happy to jump onto the train, should they perceive the United States might be on the losing side.

Friends?

We have few. At best, those who are on the fence.

We have our Quislings, those who have been collaborating with our enemies, declared or not. Many of them claim to be Patriotic Americans.

Well, they’re not – not by any definition of patriotic that I would recognize. They are actively hostile to the concept of a citizen-run country. The would like to see a Monarchy of The Elitists, the Academically Credentialed, the Deep State, and the Righteously Outraged, ruling over actual citizens – for their own good, of course.

It’s important not to unleash the more vengeful forces that want to exact retribution on those officious scumbags. Justice, yes. Public hearings, yes. Release of the buried evidence of crimes, yes.

But we can skip the guillotine. We don’t want a Reign of Terror. That would likely lead to a restoration of Leftist Power.

Selective trials, yes. Otherwise, let the victims collect compensation for the abuses of individuals via fines (Office of Civil Rights, repurposed to keep government officials and private institutions from doing this again). Mandate a ban on such individuals who have abused their powers to limit citizens’ civil rights to hold a government position, whether hired, appointed, or elected. Keep companies who hire such individuals from getting access to government money, whether grants, contracts, or loans.

Mostly, unearth the rot, bring it into the light of the public, put it on record, and Let the Sunshine In.

Jan 13 2025

The times they are a changin’

Back when I purchased my very first M1911A1, you couldn’t walk into a gun store without seeing a plethora of parts for that platform. Slide locks, triggers, grip safeties in various configurations, backstraps, more triggers, the list goes on.

However, when I have to purchase a new slide lock for that very same pistol, now over two decades (and thousands of rounds) older, there’s not a single gun store that has one. I have to go online.

This might make me seem an old geezerly grump, but I hate this. I want to buy local. Support local businesses. But it seems I’m one of the few.

A pox on Amazon and the retail apocalypse that it created.

Jan 13 2025

Preventive Measures

     It will not surprise you, Gentle Reader, to learn that quite a lot of people think I’m “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Neither will it surprise you to hear that that doesn’t bother me. I’m a retired engineer. Most non-engineers consider my sort to be problematic company. Their reasons are fairly consistent.

     Engineers understand the difference between intentions and results. It’s one of our defining characteristics.

     To be a successful engineer, one must understand feedback: consequences of the operation of a mechanism that constrain its subsequent behavior. A well-designed mechanism will have such consequences designed into it, with an eye toward assuring the desired results. I’ve written about this before.

     In that previous essay, I wrote:

     Systems composed of people must incorporate the same sort of mechanism. Individuals who under-perform, mis-perform, or mal-perform must incur correction in some fashion. The usual problem is that they simply…don’t. When a system combines fallible people with under-designed components of other kinds, the ramifications can exceed even a good designer’s ability to incorporate the necessary feedback mechanisms.

     If we look at private organizations such as the profit-seeking company, the most obvious feedback mechanism is “the bottom line.” If the company is making money, that will encourage its current behavior; the inverse is true as well. The ultimate feedback for a company that isn’t making money, but which persists in its losing behavior, is to go bankrupt and out of business. From the eagle’s-eye view, that’s the greater part of what’s required to get productive conduct out of a private firm.

     But the feedback mechanism provided by “the bottom line” is absent from governments and their agencies. The constraints upon them are much weaker, mostly involving elections – and note that the overwhelming majority of government workers are not elected. Thus the agents of the State are far more likely to run wild than a private company attentive to the feedback of profit and loss.

     The history of governments throughout the world testifies to their appalling lack of effective feedback. Ours are not exceptions. Yet a provision was built into American governments and governance to provide such feedback. It’s been there since the very start… but we’ve seldom invoked it.

     The feedback mechanism the Founders intended to keep American governments on a proper course is the people in arms.

     Very rarely, that mechanism has been activated for its intended purpose. The Battle of Athens, Tennessee is the most recent case I know of. (This short video nicely dramatizes the event.) Even nominally failed uprisings such as Shay’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion served a purpose, for they reminded those in office that the citizenry retains the power to inflict harsh consequences on elected arrogance.

     The people in arms have also arisen to enforce the law when “official” law enforcement has failed to do so. That’s usually called “vigilantism,” and is widely condemned by people who have an excessive regard for officialdom. I happen to disagree with them. I had my most popular fictional character demonstrate why:

     It was an ordinary July evening in Onteora: hot, damp, the air too still, the black gnats too numerous. Most of the city’s residents had retreated behind closed doors and powered up their air conditioners, then turned their television sets up high to mask the compressor noise. On an unlit street in the abandoned part of the city, Joseph Follett and Lafayette Buskey were enjoying a special pleasure, raping a teenage girl who had wandered onto their turf.
     They had cut away her jeans and panties, stuffed the scraps of the panties into her mouth, and bound them there with a double winding of packing tape. Buskey knelt on her arms and held a knife to her throat while Follett violated her at his leisure. They had changed places once already. Perhaps they would do so again before the fun was over. Neither had bothered to conceal or disguise his face.
     They had been at it perhaps ten minutes when a quiet patter of footsteps from the far end of the street alerted the merrymakers that they were not alone. Both looked up to see the onrush of a short, slight figure, bearing down upon them.
     Buskey had turned toward the sound but had not yet risen when Louis braked and planted. His right foot lashed out in a powerful placekicker’s arc and caught Buskey squarely beneath the jaw. The snap of Buskey’s spine resounded the length of the street. He flipped backwards and lay on the sidewalk, twitching spasmodically.
     Follett pulled away from the girl and drew his own knife. Louis turned to face him.
     “Keep back, motherfucker.”
     Louis made no reply. He advanced.
     Follett dropped into a knife-fighter’s crouch. He kept both hands well out in front of him, daring Louis to come within slashing distance. Louis halted and watched him, apparently relaxed.
     “So this is your idea of a high old time, eh, asshole?” Louis’s voice was soft. The darkness concealed his face. “Wait till some defenseless girl wanders by, take her down, rape her a few times, then gut her like a deer? Not much to take home from it, though. Not like a Grand Avenue mugging or a good B and E.”
     The young tough snarled. “What do you know about B and E?”
     Louis’s eyebrows rose. “Isn’t that how you make your living?” He gestured at Follett’s crotch. “I mean, that thing dangling from your fly isn’t big enough for you to make it as a gigolo.”
     Upon being reminded that his dick was still hanging out of his jeans, Follett looked down at his crotch.
     Louis whirled and kicked again. His toe caught the elbow of Follett’s knife arm. The elbow cracked and bent the wrong way, and the knife flew from the hand that held it. The young thug spun and dropped to the pavement with a piercing shriek, clawing at the rough asphalt.
     Louis stepped forward to stand over his victim. Stray rays from the headlights of a car on a connecting street revealed his expression. It was that perfection of rage that resembles perfect calm.
     “Well, so much for the muggings and B and Es. Think you can make a living as a rapist? I mean, you’re going to need a new helper and all. Maybe two or three. Big nut to carry.”
     He straddled Follett’s body and lowered himself to a squat, all but sitting on the thug’s belly.
     “Who the fuck are you, man? You got no business here!” Follett’s voice was an agonized hiss.
     Louis pursed his lips. “Business? No. I was just out for a walk, and it went on a little longer and farther than I intended. I don’t get into the city much. It’s not my favorite place. But here I am, and here you are, and thereby hangs a tale.”
     He sighed. “I knew you were going to kill that girl when you were done with her. If I hadn’t been sure of that, maybe I would have handled it another way. Or maybe not. Not that it matters now. May God have mercy on your worthless soul.”
     Follett’s pain had not displaced all his fear and hatred. He surged in a last attempt to throw his assailant off him as he scrabbled for his knife.
     Louis’s right hand arrowed at Follett’s face. The heel of that hand crashed into the bridge of Follett’s nose, driving the bone into his forebrain with the impact of a well-thrown spear. The rapist’s body spasmed once and was still.

     And in a subsequent tale:

     “Louis could be in a great deal of trouble.”
     “With you?”
     “Ah, no. With the civil authorities.”
     She sneered. “You mean the police? The hell with them. Where were they when the shit hit the fan?”
     “Christine!”
     “Knock it off, Father. Louis got used to it. You can, too.” She rose and paced the room for a few seconds. “You’re not going to tell them, are you?”
     The baldness of the question stopped Schliemann’s mental processes dead. The idea hadn’t occurred to him until she asked about it.
     I have a duty, don’t I?
     To whom? The so-called justice authorities of this extremely corrupt county, who’ve done nothing for your parishioners but tax half of them out of their houses and harass the rest for parking on the streets around the church?
     But murder!
     Louis Redmond is not a murderer. If he killed two men, it was because it was right and necessary. You know it, Schliemann.
     Still, he took the law into his own hands.
     The law is always in someone’s hands. Why not Louis Redmond’s? Whose hands are more trustworthy than those?
     There are procedures…
     What procedure would have intervened to save their lives if Louis hadn’t acted as he did? What procedure would have intervened to save this lovely young woman from being forced back into the hell she risked her life to escape?
     I can’t just keep silent over this!
     Yes, you can. You must.

     That is the proper application of negative feedback.

     Intelligent men other than myself differ with me on this. I doubt that any of them have applied engineering principles to the matter. Here’s one:

     And even then, some of these fake priests find themselves facing their deserved end regardless of laws that I am sure we all agree with, and are designed to not allow vigilantism. Luckily, the people that had initially been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of the pedophile priest, were later found to be completely innocent of the crime on appeal. [Emphasis added by FWP.]

     Don’t be so sure, buddy. “When the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation”) Vigilantism is the necessary and inevitable corrective for “law enforcement” gone wrong. If it doesn’t kick in under the appropriate conditions, the tyrants rule unopposed, ably assisted by the predators – and all too often, “tyrants” and “predators” are impossible to distinguish.

     I could go on about this, but I’ve bored you enough for the nonce. Remember this, always: Institutions are intended to serve people, not the other way around. Governments and “law enforcement” are not exceptions. The feedback mechanism intended to ensure that condition is guaranteed to us by the Second Amendment to the Constitution. The American Revolution demonstrated its importance. That some milquetoasts “deplore violence” or condemn private action in defense of civilized order as “vigilantism” does not set aside the laws of Nature.

     It’s strikingly appropriate that this should be on my mind today, when extraordinary malfeasance among “public officials” has led to billions of dollars in property destruction and the deaths of dozens of Californians. If the remedy is not applied harshly and with vigor, Californians can only expect the situation to get worse.

Jan 12 2025

Dry Well

     Apologies, Gentle Reader. There’s simply nothing I’m moved to write about today. Add a very short night’s sleep and a persistent backache, and I’m without sufficient motivation to bloviate. Perhaps you’d enjoy one or more of the many short stories on the site, if you haven’t read them all yet. For my part, I’ll bid you a good evening, with hope to be back in form tomorrow.

Jan 11 2025

Death Cult Rationales

     If you spend enough time researching a horror, it transforms into something else… something more like a living thing than an evil deed or practice. It acquires a personality of its own. In your times spent delving into it, you can hear it whispering to you. Now and then, I’ve felt a temptation to whisper back.

     It’s not a good feeling, Gentle Reader.

     Among the notions Pascal and I have included in our surveys of today’s death cults is the specific practice called euthanasia: the legal ending of one person’s life by another. The proponents of euthanasia can be quite passionate about it. One or two of them have made careers out of their advocacy.

     The original rationale advanced for legalizing euthanasia was intolerable and incurable suffering. Why, the proponents asked, should anyone whose “quality of life” is so low be required to continue to live, if only to suffer unendingly? And if it’s his right to live no more, shouldn’t others – medical professionals – be allowed to help him to quietus painlessly?

     That was the entering wedge. Things have gone well beyond that argument since the famous 1939 manslaughter trial of Louis Greenfield. As euthanasia has been legalized in various nations and several states, the developments that have followed have illuminated an aspect of contemporary society that would make any decent person oscillate between rage and terror.

     Death is increasingly being treated as medical care:

     Amid ongoing efforts to expand euthanasia in Canada under the name of “medical aid in dying” (MAID), one Ottawa man says he has been offered euthanasia “multiple times” as he struggles with lifelong disabilities and chronic pain from a disease called cerebellar ataxia.
     Roger Foley, 49, shared some of his story in a recent video interview with Amanda Achtman of the Dying to Meet You project, which was created to “humanize our conversation on suffering, death, meaning, and hope.” The project seeks to “[restore] our cultural health when it comes to our experiences of death and dying” through speaking engagements and video campaigns.

     Roger Foley wants to live. Yes, his life is difficult, but despite occasional temptations he doesn’t want it ended. But Canadian medical services have urged “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD) several times:

     “One time, [a nurse] asked me, ‘Do you have any thoughts of self-harm?’ I’m honest with him and tell him I do think about ending my life because of what I’m going through, being prevented from the resources that I need to live safely back at home.”
     “From out of nowhere, he just pulls out, ‘Well, if you don’t get self-directed funding, you can always apply for an assisted.’”
     Foley said the offers from doctors to help end his life have “completely traumatized me.”
     “Now it’s this overlying option where in my situation, when I say I’m suicidal, I’m met with, ‘Well, the hospital has a program to help you with that if you want to end your life.’”

     Read the above carefully, Gentle Reader. Remember Canada’s version of socialized medicine: all medical care is paid for by the government, and the government decides what it’s willing to pay for. Roger Foley has applied several times for “self-directed funding” that would permit him in-home assistance to continue living. It’s always been declined.

     This is terrible enough, but recent developments have made it look even worse:

     Canadian doctors, having accepted the country’s assisted-suicide regime, are now considering whether to harvest organs from euthanasia patients before they have died, The Federalist reported Wednesday.
     The doctors reason thus: Organs are normally removed from a donor as soon as possible after death to ensure they are in the best possible condition for transplant. If organs were removed from a live person, they would be in even better condition. And if that patient is about to die voluntarily anyway, what’s the harm in killing him by taking his organs?
     “The best use of my organs, if I’m going to receive a medically assisted death, might be to not first kill me and then retrieve my organs, but to have my mode of death — as we medically consider death now — to be to retrieve my organs,” said Rob Sibbald, an ethicist at Ontario’s London Health Sciences Centre.
     Sibbald made those remarks at a conference in 2018, just two years after Canada’s assisted-suicide law, known as medical assistance in dying (MAiD), was passed. According to The Federalist’s Logan Washburn, the event was sponsored by three organizations who are so intent on increasing organ donations that they were, apparently, willing to entertain the notion of euthanizing a patient by removing his organs.

     What seamless logic! What economy! “He’s gonna die anyway, so let’s salvage what we can use from him without letting it decay! We can keep other people alive and keep costs down at the same time!”

     But there are a few Canadians with darker thoughts on the subject:

     “MAiD is a huge money-making business — now they’re saving money on future healthcare,” Heather Hancock, a disabled Canadian who said she was pressured to let doctors kill her, told Washburn. “They’re literally denying us healthcare treatment and offering us MAiD instead.”
     Angelina Ireland, whom Washburn described as “executive director of the Delta Hospice Society, an end-of-life care facility that the Canadian government shut down and then took over for not terminating its patients,” told him, “You can get big, big money on the world market” for human organs. “We have opened ourselves to some horrific stuff.”

     Yes, Roger Foley is one of them:

     Canada is the top country for organ donations via euthanasia. Still, its national health system had an organ shortage in December 2022, with more than 3,700 patients awaiting a transplant. Health officials could be trying to close gaps like these by killing patients to harvest their organs, anti-euthanasia advocates told The Federalist.
     Disabled whistleblower Roger Foley, who says he has been pressured to accept euthanasia four times, told The Federalist Sibbald’s speech appears to suggest doctors might harvest organs from live patients.
     “His statement is like, ‘We’ll just do it anyway, we’ll let the physicians do it. And after they start doing it, if there’s ever a complaint, then it will go to the courts, and then the courts can decide if this is right or wrong,’” Foley said. “It could be they’re already doing euthanasia by organ harvesting, we just don’t know about it.”
     He called MAID a “sliding practice” due to “ableism and disdain for persons with disabilities and the vulnerable.”

     If there are any advocates for the legalization of euthanasia reading this piece, make no sudden moves and keep your hands where I can see them.

Jan 11 2025

“Essential Services”

     The fires currently destroying Los Angeles have resurrected the old subject of “essential services.” Most Americans regard police protection, firefighting, and road maintenance as essential: the justification for the existence of state and local governments. Yet throughout this nation they’re the services most neglected by those governments. At the federal level, “essential services” would consist of national defense, border control, and perhaps freedom of travel. Yet the federal government neglects those things in favor of other, largely extra-Constitutional activities.

     But should anyone suggest an overall reduction in a government budget, how do the politicians and bureaucrats respond? Why, by attacking the “essential services,” of course! In 1975, when New York City was teetering on the brink of municipal default, and the federal government resisted suggestions that it should “bail out” the spendthrift city government, that government responded thus:

     When informed that cuts in jobs and in pay were inevitable, the municipal unions ran amok. It is only fair to say that Mayor Beame’s cuts in the summer of 1975, under the supervision of the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), were deliberately inflammatory. They were calculated for the purpose of “proving” that the city needed state and federal aid. Beame dismissed nearly 5000 policemen and more than 2000 firemen (closing twenty-six firehouses) and fired nearly 3000 of the city’s 10,000 sanitation workers. The unions understood that this was an act of political blackmail. In June 1975 the firemen’s and policemen’s unions published a four page leaflet which they distributed to tourists. Titled “Welcome to Fear City,” with a lurid skeleton’s head on the cover, the pamphlet advised visitors to New York to stay indoors after 6 P.M., avoid public transportation, and, “until things change, stay away from New York if you possibly can.” In July the sanitation workers went on strike. They threatened to turn “Fear City” into “Stink City” and shouted from picket lines, “Wait till the rats come!”

     More recently, when the Obama Administration was faced with a partial government shutdown owing to Congress’s inability to pass a budget bill, it responded by idling the National Park Service and closing access to such landmarks as Mount Rushmore and the Washington Monument. Ironically, this political tactic of attacking what citizens value most to get additional funding for things we value least has long been known as the “Washington Monument Defense:”

     As tax receipts slip and budgets come under the knife in statehouses, city halls and private institutions, the region is witnessing the flowering of a kind of brinkmanship in which officials seek to protect their budgets by threatening to cut where the pain will be worst.
     The object of this exercise is not usually to perform the dire amputations that are threatened, budget experts say, but to arouse support for an agency’s strongest suit, usually the area in which it comes in contact with the public, and to deflect budget-cutting attention from more vulnerable, back-office operations with no public constituency.

     Hopefully, the post-mortems about the L.A. fires will include heavy public discussions of what the municipal government regards as “essential:”

     The City of Los Angeles cut funding for its fire department and allocated thousands of dollars to various progressive programs, including a “Midnight Stroll Transgender Cafe” and a Gay Men’s Chorus.
     Fires swept through Southern California on Wednesday, destroying hundreds of homes in Los Angeles County, and high winds only fueled the destruction. The Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, was slammed for slashing the Los Angeles Fire Department’s (LAFD) budget by $17.6 million for fiscal year 2024 to 2025, Fox 11 reported, citing LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia.

     There are a lot of red faces already.

     Of course, threatening to choke off “essential services” to extort budget increases from a resistant legislature is an old topic. Even so, it comes back with a dreary frequency. Now and then, we get an unambiguous glimpse of the motivations behind the tactic. For instance, consider that federal “emergency management” workers deliberately obstructed private aid to the hurricane-ravaged districts in western North Carolina. They closed off access to that region by private aid workers, and seized privately donated relief supplies. What possible reason, other than maintaining federal control over the stricken residents of the region, could have been behind such a posture?

     That highlights the cleavage between what suffering Americans regard as “essential services” and the rather different position of the governments entrusted with providing them. “The needs of the State must come first, comrade. So sit down and shut up!”

     But – and you knew this was coming, Gentle Reader; don’t you dare deny it – what this tells us is who really does the good deeds, and who really provides the good things. It’s not government at any level. It’s your fellow Americans.

     If it’s truly the case that governments are an impediment to the provision of “essential services,” what does that say about government itself – government as a concept that requires justification in theory and defense in practice? How essential does government look to you?

Jan 10 2025

Music From The Dark Side

     The Police were a highly unusual band. Their songs, the majority of which were written by bassist / vocalist Gordon Sumner (a.k.a. Sting), ranged from moody to black as night. Yet despite that dark and often cutting edge, they were immensely popular during the Seventies and early Eighties. They seemed to have tapped into an undercurrent of British society that eluded the lighter music prevalent in those years.

     The Police’s final record, its 1983 release Synchronicity, was a culmination of the dark, sometimes apocalyptic themes in their songs. The following track, the standout of the record, strikes me as unsurpassable of its kind. The listener is taken to a scene that depicts several kinds of stress and degradation – a typical middle-class British family – in a land that’s barely holding on to its forebears’ bequests of peace and progress.

Another suburban family morning
Grandmother screaming at the wall
We have to shout above the din of our Rice Crispies
We can’t hear anything at all
Mother chants her litany of boredom and frustration
But we know all her suicides are fake
Daddy only stares into the distance
There’s only so much more that he can take

Many miles away
Something crawls from the slime
At the bottom of a dark Scottish lake

Another industrial ugly morning
The factory belches filth into the sky
He walks unhindered through the picket lines today
He doesn’t think to wonder why
The secretaries pout and preen like cheap tarts in a red light street
But all he ever thinks to do is watch
And every single meeting with his so-called superior
Is a humiliating kick in the crotch

Many miles away
Something crawls to the surface
Of a dark Scottish loch

Another working day has ended
Only the rush hour hell to face
Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes
Contestants in a suicidal race
Daddy grips the wheel and stares alone into the distance
He knows that something somewhere has to break
He sees the family home now looming in the headlights
The pain upstairs that makes his eyeballs ache

Many miles away
There’s a shadow on the door
Of a cottage on the shore
Of a dark Scottish lake
Many miles away… many miles away…

Jan 10 2025

Crisis And Opportunity

     For more than a century, the Democrats have used crises – real or imaginary, organic or contrived – to expand American governments and intrude upon the freedom of American citizens. The outline of that strategy has been clear for many decades, but it wasn’t until Rahm Emanuel stated it clearly and openly that most of us had any idea what they were doing. Our Gentle Readers have all seen the quote several times, so I shan’t bother to post it again. The important things about it are that:

  • He meant it sincerely;
  • He was expressing a strategy held widely among his co-partisans.

     But there’s more here than meets the eye. For what does it mean to use a crisis to do “things you couldn’t do before” — ?

     When the Democrats exploit a crisis, they usually do so by emphasizing “the need to act.” Usually, the emphasis is on human suffering. They urge immediate government action, ostensibly to alleviate that suffering. On those occasions when state or federal action does ease that suffering – never mind at what cost nor to whom – they get plaudits for it. Perhaps a government agency is expanded and granted additional funding. Perhaps a new agency is born, with all the dynamics attendant thereto. The powers government seized become permanent.

     Note that no attention goes to any prior actions or developments that produced the crisis – especially if it descended from prior decisions or actions of a government.

     We’re seeing some of this now as regards the wildfires decimating Los Angeles. There are several causative factors behind those fires and the weak responses to them. All of them involve a state or municipal government. But attempts by figures in the Right to have those factors discussed and treated are shouted down as “politicizing the issue.”

     Historically, the Left’s control of the media has been the deciding factor. But today there are alternatives to what the late William E. Simon called “the media megaphone.” Unfortunately, those alternatives are treated like illegitimate cousins to the “legacy media,” which continue to shape public discussion of public controversies. This is an important front in the war for America as it was originally conceived.

     Not long ago, Ann Coulter observed that “conservatives read books; liberals don’t.” It was true and remains true. But similarly, conservatives pay far more attention to the alternative media than do liberals. That’s been put down to people’s tendency to gravitate to what they already agree with: “confirmation of our prejudices.” It’s an aspect of political polarization.

     Yet a crisis such as the Los Angeles wildfires offers us an opportunity to pierce the polarizing veil that causes the Left to ignore or dismiss the Right’s arguments. The destruction and loss are widespread and are easily traced to state and municipal policies. Note how furious CNN’s other talking heads are with Scott Jennings for zeroing in on those policies, especially the emphasis on “DEI” as supreme above all other considerations. The opening is real and vital.

     Arguments over the geneses of the blazes should, if possible, be channeled away from the old media, where left-wing orthodoxy prevents serious discussion of left-wing policy perversities, and toward the alternative media, where discussion of the relevant factors has been serious for some time. To whatever extent we can do so, we can use the opportunity arising from this crisis to open minds and redirect emotions that would previously have fueled the expansion of government.

     Is it possible? Or has our public discourse ideologically rigidified too far to permit it, even for a shot at saving lives and treasure?

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