Jan 15 2024

Mask Droppings

     I’ve written this before: When the two parties are agreed on the problems but differ on the methods, the American system of government can function as intended, though not without the occasional bump in the road. However, when the parties don’t agree on the problems, or assign them radically different priorities, trouble ensues. Sometimes war or a major economic crisis will result.

     But the Democrats and Republicans haven’t agreed on what constitutes a problem for several decades. Indeed, there have been times when the Democrats were more concerned with cementing themselves into permanent power than with anything that could arguably be called the good of the nation. Now is such a time, and the Democrats’ strategists and power-brokers have failed to conceal it. Indeed, it appears that they’ve stopped trying.

     One of the giveaways is when “lesser” Democrat officeholders start criticizing those placed above them. A few links:

     Granted that the illegal alien invasion is one of the hottest current issues, it was once next to sacrilege for state-level executives or legislators of any level to criticize a first-term president from their own party during his re-election campaign. Yet that’s become a frequent sort of news item in recent months. If the Democrats’ top dogs can’t silence nor mollify those outside the Administration, the party is in deep trouble come November. Assuming they can’t steal a second term for Biden, that is.

     But they have no intention of backing away from their open-border policy. There are plenty of giveaways there, too:

     The whole country is screaming under the stress the army of illegals has put upon us. Very few districts have escaped the effects. But what does the Usurper-in-Chief deem the most important of all America’s problems? Ukraine! After keeping Donald Trump off the November ballot, of course.

     At this point, only the willfully blind could fail to see the writing on the wall. The Democrat Party is deliberately intensifying the stresses on the nation. Illegal immigration, breakneck borrowing to expand the federal bureaucracies, a torrent of unjustifiable regulations of everything from cars to washing machines, and unnecessarily entangling the U.S. in foreign wars top the list. Their strategists remember that the last time things got really bad, Republicans lined up behind an openly anti-Constitutional, almost totalitarian Democrat regime.

     It’s almost certainly going to get worse. The illegals will continue to flood into the country. The dollar will continue to lose value. Federal interference in a multitude of properly private choices will continue to advance. And the Usurpers will continue to send American money and materiel to the corrupt Zelenskiy regime in Ukraine.

     Don’t look to politics of any sort for the solution. Even a second term for Donald Trump would be badly hobbled by the surly resistance of the majority of Republican legislators to his initiatives. There’s a reason so much of what Trump accomplished in his first term was so easily undone by the Usurpers.

     There is a solution, but it’s become vanishingly unlikely. And it doesn’t involve voting. You’ll have to decide for yourself what stance you’ll take. For my part, I’m buying more ammo while I can still get it.

Jan 14 2024

Blue States’ Assaults On The Second Amendment Continue

     We already know about New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul, California’s Governor Gavin Newsom, Illinois’ Governor J. B. Pritzker, and New Mexico’s Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and their machinations against the right to keep and bear arms. But now Democrats in the state of Washington have gotten into the act:

     According to Jason Rantz of KTTH Radio, Washington Democrats hope to reclassify ammunition as a “privilege” to take away gun rights.

     State Representatives My-Linh Thai and Liz Berry, both Democrats, introduced House Bill 2238. Using the guise of public safety, they claimed access to ammo is the cause of violence. The bill adds an 11% sales and use tax on top of sales tax and other taxes levied when purchasing ammunition.

     For example, Seattle imposes a per-round tax.

     The bill also claims consumers do not have a “right” to purchase ammo – it’s a “privilege.”

     There’s no end to their cleverness. Ask any of them, and they’ll tell you, “Oh, of course we support the right to keep and bear arms.” Then comes the all-important but. Washington Democrats, if the two named above are representative, simply don’t want your firearms to be usable, except perhaps as clubs. But feel free to keep and bear them.

     Washington is Democrat-dominated. Its governor, Jay Inslee, is a Democrat. So are its two United States Senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, six of its U. S. Congressmen, and a majority of its state-level legislators. So the bill cited here has a pretty good chance of becoming Washington state law – and of contradicting not only the federal Second Amendment but Washington’s state’s own constitution, which explicitly guarantees that the right to keep and bear arms “shall not be impaired.”

     Despite the steadily multiplying reasons why Americans would want to be prepared to defend themselves, their families, and their property, the majority of the coastal and border states are trending in the anti-gun direction. The Supreme Court might strike down some of their incursions on the right to keep and bear arms, but the Democrats who dominate those states will simply pass other, differently worded laws, and enforce them until SCOTUS explicitly strikes them down too. That’s what’s already happened in New York and California.

     There doesn’t seem to be a remedy that will last. The federal courts have no enforcement arm, by design. James Madison called them “the least dangerous branch” for that reason. Had he foreseen today’s state-level attacks on individuals’ rights, perhaps he might have felt differently.

     By the way, it’s not just individuals’ rights as guaranteed by the Second Amendment that are under attack. New York has been passing “hate speech” laws. I don’t know if other states have done anything similar, but I wouldn’t bet against it.

     Fellow Americans of the Evergreen State: I hope your ammo stocks on hand are adequate. The way things are trending in your state, you might soon have to use them to defend yourselves against the myrmidons determined to leave you helpless.

Jan 13 2024

Where The “News” Is

     If you labor in the news media, your principal need is news: i.e., things to talk about in your newspaper / radio program / television program / website. What will matter to you above all, therefore, is where “news” can be found. That, it develops, is a giant part of the maladies of our time.

     You see, if we omit individuals’ triumphs and crimes and the disasters that time and chance inflict upon us, news is actually hard to come by. Moreover, those things hold only fleeting interest for persons not directly involved in them. But the Fourth Estate needs news to continue in business. Where, then, shall its minions look?

     Right! Capitals. Centers of political power. Places where the men we’ve elevated to public office, wisely or not, are known to cluster. They can produce news out of thin air, merely by speaking, or signing obscurely worded documents, or decreeing that armed men shall sally forth. Sometimes, the news is simply that one politico has met with another, or has held a “press conference.” The production of news becomes a collaborative event.

     When Robert A. Heinlein wrote:

     Most neuroses can be traced to the unhealthy habit of wallowing in the troubles of five billion strangers.

     …he had a fuzzy glimpse of an important truth. The strong emotions are every reporter’s targets. Engaging them is his mission; success brings “eyeballs.” But how is he to do this? Can he make his readers love, hate, sorrow, or fear?

     Eliciting fear is the easiest. So the reporter and his collaborators in public office – both of whom passionately want as many “eyeballs” as they can attract – will do their best to make people fearful. A nervous, perpetually anxious populace is a fertile source of readers and viewers for the reporter, and donors and supporters for the politician.

***

     A fairly odd intro for a Fran Porretto piece, eh? Well, I write about what’s uppermost in my thoughts, and sometimes that can be a few degrees off-plumb. But why else would you come here, Gentle Reader? You can get the vanilla stuff quite a lot of other places…if vanilla were the flavor you seek.

     I just had this speculation: If there were no prompt, wide-scale, long-distance media, how would our lives differ from today? Without the existing bombardment of ominous news and opinion from a multitude of sources – including the fulminations and decrees of politicians of every kind – would people be as jumpy and distracted as they are currently?

     Imagine if all the prompt news in your world were about what’s happened recently in your immediate neighborhood, rather than around the globe. Imagine if the self-important types in Washington, Albany, and so forth were unable to communicate with you in near-real-time. What would occupy your thoughts at those moments when you aren’t concerned with making a living, caring for your home, or looking after your family?

     If the propagation speed of information were limited to that of a man on horseback, there would be no news media as we know them, of course. There would also be no politicians or politics as we know (and suffer) them. The operations of contemporary government require the capacity to transmit orders in near-real-time to functionaries who would then implement the wills of legislators and executives near to immediately. Wars would be far rarer, and far smaller: on the order of the wars of the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries, perhaps. Moreover, the great majority of people would never hear about them, much less be drawn into them.

     How exercised could anyone get over what’s happening today, if it were all about who bought the house on the next block, or which neighborhood kid just won a spelling bee, or who was caught sleeping with someone else’s spouse? Any news that might reach us from distant shores would also be distant in time: nothing to get our glands in a lather.

     Granted that it would be harder to make a living in the news media, but really: If we could have that degree of peace, would we care? The majority of those who want to report the news would have to seek other ways of earning a living. So what?

     This is a disturbing thing to contemplate. The price of that much domestic tranquility would be high, for me at least. I’d have to abandon my vocation as a writer of fiction. I’d also have to give up pontificating to a gaggle of faceless readers here on the World Wide Web. But if I could have an existence untroubled by the machinations of politicians or the quarrels of peoples in faraway places, would I care?

     Would you?

Jan 12 2024

For Peace

     This is the twelfth movement of Sir Karl Jenkins’s Mass The Armed Man. It’s titled “Benedictus.” And yes, that’s Stjepan Hauser of “2Cellos” on solo cello.

     If only.

Jan 12 2024

Trending?

     Of course, one can’t be sure, given the tendency of hawkers and partisans of all sorts to claim unsubstantiable things, but it certainly seems possible:

     A quick search on Google Trends shows that the term “tradwife” gained popularity in 2018 but peaked in 2020 as the pandemic accelerated women’s return to the home. Instead of being confined to religious or ultra-wealthy women, the tradwife movement entered mainstream discussions. It offered women the chance to reclaim the ingredients of happiness — faith, family, community, and meaningful work — back from the career-focused model they grew up with.

     Popular online accounts (explored here and here) tend to show women who don the clothes and lifestyle that they perceive women in a previous era embodied: shirtwaist dresses, aprons, a rejection of formal work outside the home, and a heavy emphasis on homemaking and care for children.

     Instead of finding the home stuffy, boring, or trivial, many women found greater purpose and satisfaction than they previously imagined. Initially, the pandemic gave women the ultimate “permission slip” to explore the domestic realm (stay inside to stay alive). Later, popular and aesthetically pleasing tradwife accounts gave women the encouragement they needed to combat the outspoken expectations that all women, even mothers, ought to rejoin the 9-to-5 workforce.

     I like the idea that this is trending, even though it may not envelop a significant fraction of American women. As any regular Gentle Reader will already know, my emphasis is on freedom: the right of each individual to choose for himself. More than the embrace of the traditional wife/mother/homemaker role, it warms me that women are discovering that they’re free to choose their own courses through life. It should be that way for everyone, male or female. But certain choices involve irrevocable consequences. Therefore, it pays Miss Smith to choose carefully and with full prior knowledge of those consequences.

     Miss Smith can choose a life in the working world…but if she takes it seriously, she’s likely to forgo some of the satisfactions of the “tradwife” alternative, such as motherhood and extensive community involvement. Careers are like that; they absorb the greater part of one’s time and energy, leaving only scraps for non-career pursuits. But if Miss Smith opts for the “tradwife” course, she’s likely to forgo the satisfactions that come from commercial achievement. Motherhood is quite as demanding of one’s time and energy as careerism.

     Yes, there are some “middle ways,” and the young Miss Smith should acquaint herself with those as well. But the bottom line remains that every choice forecloses certain possibilities. Some who marry and have children young will regret it, just as will some who throw themselves into the working world. There are no guarantees.

***

     I can’t help remembering a scrofulous proclamation from 2005:

     Half the wealthiest, most-privileged, best-educated females in the country stay home with their babies rather than work in the market economy. When in September The New York Times featured an article exploring a piece of this story, “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,” the blogosphere went ballistic, countering with anecdotes and sarcasm. Slate’s Jack Shafer accused the Times of “weasel-words” and of publishing the same story — essentially, “The Opt-Out Revolution” — every few years, and, recently, every few weeks. (A month after the flap, the Times’ only female columnist, Maureen Dowd, invoked the elite-college article in her contribution to the Times’ running soap, “What’s a Modern Girl to Do?” about how women must forgo feminism even to get laid.) The colleges article provoked such fury that the Times had to post an explanation of the then–student journalist’s methodology on its Web site.

     There’s only one problem: There is important truth in the dropout story. Even though it appeared in The New York Times. …

     The census numbers for all working mothers leveled off around 1990 and have fallen modestly since 1998. In interviews, women with enough money to quit work say they are “choosing” to opt out. Their words conceal a crucial reality: the belief that women are responsible for child-rearing and homemaking was largely untouched by decades of workplace feminism. Add to this the good evidence that the upper-class workplace has become more demanding and then mix in the successful conservative cultural campaign to reinforce traditional gender roles and you’ve got a perfect recipe for feminism’s stall….

     What better sample, I thought, than the brilliantly educated and accomplished brides of the “Sunday Styles,” circa 1996? At marriage, they included a vice president of client communication, a gastroenterologist, a lawyer, an editor, and a marketing executive. In 2003 and 2004, I tracked them down and called them. I interviewed about 80 percent of the 41 women who announced their weddings over three Sundays in 1996. Around 40 years old, college graduates with careers: Who was more likely than they to be reaping feminism’s promise of opportunity? Imagine my shock when I found almost all the brides from the first Sunday at home with their children. Statistical anomaly? Nope. Same result for the next Sunday. And the one after that.

     Ninety percent of the brides I found had had babies. Of the 30 with babies, five were still working full time. Twenty-five, or 85 percent, were not working full time. Of those not working full time, 10 were working part time but often a long way from their prior career paths. And half the married women with children were not working at all.

     And there is more. In 2000, Harvard Business School professor Myra Hart surveyed the women of the classes of 1981, 1986, and 1991 and found that only 38 percent of female Harvard MBAs were working full time. A 2004 survey by the Center for Work-Life Policy of 2,443 women with a graduate degree or very prestigious bachelor’s degree revealed that 43 percent of those women with children had taken a time out, primarily for family reasons. Richard Posner, federal appeals-court judge and occasional University of Chicago adjunct professor, reports that “the [Times] article confirms — what everyone associated with such institutions [elite law schools] has long known: that a vastly higher percentage of female than of male students will drop out of the workforce to take care of their children.”

     How many anecdotes to become data? The 2000 census showed a decline in the percentage of mothers of infants working full time, part time, or seeking employment. Starting at 31 percent in 1976, the percentage had gone up almost every year to 1992, hit a high of 58.7 percent in 1998, and then began to drop — to 55.2 percent in 2000, to 54.6 percent in 2002, to 53.7 percent in 2003. Statistics just released showed further decline to 52.9 percent in 2004. Even the percentage of working mothers with children who were not infants declined between 2000 and 2003, from 62.8 percent to 59.8 percent.

     The author, Linda Hirshman, wants women in the marketplace rather than “languishing” at home with their children. Here’s her prescription:

     Women who want to have sex and children with men as well as good work in interesting jobs where they may occasionally wield real social power need guidance, and they need it early. Step one is simply to begin talking about flourishing. In so doing, feminism will be returning to its early, judgmental roots. This may anger some, but it should sound the alarm before the next generation winds up in the same situation. Next, feminists will have to start offering young women not choices and not utopian dreams but solutions they can enact on their own. Prying women out of their traditional roles is not going to be easy. It will require rules — rules like those in the widely derided book The Rules, which was never about dating but about behavior modification.

     There are three rules: Prepare yourself to qualify for good work, treat work seriously, and don’t put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry.

     It’s all about priorities, don’t y’know:

     The privileged brides of the Times — and their husbands — seem happy. Why do we care what they do? After all, most people aren’t rich and white and heterosexual, and they couldn’t quit working if they wanted to.

     We care because what they do is bad for them, is certainly bad for society, and is widely imitated, even by people who never get their weddings in the Times. This last is called the “regime effect,” and it means that even if women don’t quit their jobs for their families, they think they should and feel guilty about not doing it. That regime effect created the mystique around The Feminine Mystique, too.

     As for society, elites supply the labor for the decision-making classes — the senators, the newspaper editors, the research scientists, the entrepreneurs, the policy-makers, and the policy wonks. If the ruling class is overwhelmingly male, the rulers will make mistakes that benefit males, whether from ignorance or from indifference. Media surveys reveal that if only one member of a television show’s creative staff is female, the percentage of women on-screen goes up from 36 percent to 42 percent. A world of 84-percent male lawyers and 84-percent female assistants is a different place than one with women in positions of social authority. Think of a big American city with an 86-percent white police force. If role models don’t matter, why care about Sandra Day O’Connor? Even if the falloff from peak numbers is small, the leveling off of women in power is a loss of hope for more change. Will there never again be more than one woman on the Supreme Court?

     Worse, the behavior tarnishes every female with the knowledge that she is almost never going to be a ruler. Princeton President Shirley Tilghman described the elite colleges’ self-image perfectly when she told her freshmen last year that they would be the nation’s leaders, and she clearly did not have trophy wives in mind. Why should society spend resources educating women with only a 50-percent return rate on their stated goals? The American Conservative Union carried a column in 2004 recommending that employers stay away from such women or risk going out of business. Good psychological data show that the more women are treated with respect, the more ambition they have. And vice versa. The opt-out revolution is really a downward spiral.

     Finally, these choices are bad for women individually. A good life for humans includes the classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way, the liberal requirement of having enough autonomy to direct one’s own life, and the utilitarian test of doing more good than harm in the world. Measured against these time-tested standards, the expensively educated upper-class moms will be leading lesser lives.

     There’s no point in psychologizing Linda Hirshman, nor in enumerating the several places where she’s proclaimed her personal opinions as indisputable facts. She has staked out a position – her notion about what the priorities of young American women “should” be – and she wants it enforced. It’s dictatorial, but that’s been the tenor of “feminism” for several decades. What’s the value of freedom? Letting women choose their own courses through life is undermining feminism, and that’s what matters. Simone de Beauvoir said it, Hirshman believes it, and that settles it.

     Now, this is not “news” in any objective sense. My point in citing it — not for the first time — is that it’s not how feminism began. Originally, feminism was about choice: expanding the choices available to women, and thereby increasing their freedom. And any increase in individual freedom, to this septuagenarian freedom weenie, is a good thing.

     But “movements” can be dangerous. They who “lead” movements can be disappointed in their results. That will often cause them to become peremptory, as Hirshman is in the above. Not to be followed wounds their self-esteem. Those who deem themselves “leaders” must have followers, for the sake of their mental health.

***

     So we have the “tradwives” at one pole, and the “rulers” at the other. Neither position will be exactly right for every woman. Individual choice will matter. Some women will choose wrongly by the only standard that matters: their own happiness. Yet denying them freedom of choice would reduce women’s happiness even more.

     See also this article from Stephanie Edelman on the burgeoning of what feminist harridans scorn as “retro-sexism.”

Jan 12 2024

How It’s Done

     Vivek Ramaswamy may not be our next president, but he’s a man to watch:

     You don’t see verbal courage of this order very often. The reason is simplicity itself: the average Republican officeholder / office-seeker fears the media. Even the GOP’s “firebrands,” such as Rand Paul and Mike Lee, would hesitate to “flip the script” on a gaggle of putatively hostile reporters this way. That fear is a great part of why the Left has run roughshod over the Right for the century past.

     Perhaps Ramaswamy feels that as his is a “longshot” presidential campaign, he has little to lose by challenging the press. That would be hard to argue. Even so, most men with political ambitions would be unlikely to be that bold. All by itself, that boldness marks Ramaswamy as someone of value. Let’s hope that Republican strategists will see this and embrace and cultivate him for the post-Trump era.

Jan 12 2024

Busy Weekend

I know that I haven’t been posting as much as I should. My apologies. Tomorrow (or today for those on the East Coast) I’ll be driving my mom to my uncle’s funeral. I’ll be back on Monday.

I’ve been to far too many funerals this year, or last year, however you want to calculate it. Most of them are non-family, but too many of them have been close to me. I’m getting a little tired of losing family members.

Oh, and we’re getting snow and ungodly cold weather in the passes. And mom is freaking out. Hence me driving.

Yes, I’m bringing a bottle of whiskey with me, why do you ask?

Jan 11 2024

Relating to the Narrative Engineering

That our Humble Host mentioned yesterday, I add this report regarding the recruitment woes of the US military.

The mention of “partisan scrutiny of the service” is closer to the mark, but that framing blames the response and not the actual problems that exist. It’s the military equivalent of “Republicans pounce.” Why are white people looking at the Army and deciding not to join when they were doing so at nearly double the rate just five years prior? One only needs to look at the changes within the military over the last several years to figure that out.

Yep, us white folks look around at the “leadership” of the US military who seem to hate us and openly talk about how they prefer someone who isn’t white, and that makes white people decide that they don’t want to join. Who woulda thunk it?

But for the actual warfighters, it’s going to be far, far worse than just raw numbers. You see, there’s a definite self-selection process that occurs when young people enlist, and it’s rather significant. A huge portion of what is combat service and support are made up of minorities. Take a stroll through the Logistics University on Ft. Lee and look at the command photos. Last time I was there was in 2017. There were thirteen units represented there and of those thirteen, nine of them had command teams that were black. Of the various commanders and Sergeants Major that were on the wall, there were maybe three photos of people who were white. In my entire career I can recall having ONE white male supply sergeant. All the rest were minorities, female, or both. That didn’t stop them from being damn good supply sergeants, but it’s indicative of WHO is choosing to go into WHAT field. Oh, the recruiters push and prod people into fields that need numbers, but by and large it’s the recruit who makes the choices of what job to do.

For combat arms however, that ratio is flipped. Artillery, Infantry, Cavalry, Armor, are predominantly white. My old center commander in recruiting was a black guy who had been infantry, and he was the ONLY black guy in his basic training company. The Drill Sergeants called him “Token”. You’ll get more hispanics than blacks in the Infantry, but both of them are far outnumbered by the white recruits.

So when you read this report about how white recruiting numbers are down, what that means is the actual number of trigger-pullers, door-kickers and cannon-cockers will be going down. Hard. Supply, Fuelers, Cooks, Mechanics, they might still make their numbers. But tankers and gun bunnies? They’re going to be hurting.

This problem isn’t going away, because we have “leadership” who whole-heartedly believes in racial discrimination when it comes to promotions or schools, and white Soldiers are at the bottom of the list. In fact, unless there’s a wholesale removal of flag officers, the problem is only going to get worse, as the current crop of generals and admirals select their replacements using DIE as their criteria. Yes, I know everyone calls it DEI, but any organization that uses DEI is going to DIE. So why not put the letters in their correct formation? Anyways, the current crop of perfumed princes are so removed from reality that they keep making the problem worse, and until they’re summarily fired and replaced with actual warriors? Nothing will get better.

So yeah, fire them. All of them. That’s how this entire problem started anyways, with Barry Obumblefuck firing the competent generals and replacing them with racist, woke garbage. It’s how we got traitorous shitbags like Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin. And don’t think that anyone else in their staff isn’t just as woke, traitorous and shitty. I guarantee you that anyone on Lloyd Austin’s staff is just as racist as he is, or they wouldn’t be there in the first place. We need to get rid of huge swaths of the flag officers, pull up some Colonels who don’t have their heads up their asses and restart the military. Otherwise, you’ll just watch things go from worse to even more worse.

Jan 11 2024

Benevolent Monsters

     Some benevolent-sounding people harbor actual intentions that verge on Satanic. Every now and then one makes the news. Maura Dowling provides one today:

     The Key Club of Rome member Dennis Meadows hopes the “necessary” depopulation of the planet, down to one billion—an 87.5% reduction from today’s population—can “occur in a civil way.”

     He and his fellow radicals have decided it’s necessary. The Key Club now works with the World Economic Forum (WEF).

     “I hope that it [depopulation] can occur in a civil way. I mean civil in a special way – a peaceful way, doesn’t mean that everybody’s happy. But it means that conflict isn’t solved through violence, through force, but rather in other ways.

     “And so that’s what I hope for …the planet can support something like a billion people, maybe two billion [we currently have 7.8 billion people in the world], depending on how much liberty and how much material consumption you want to have.”

     Doesn’t that sound just as gentle and soft as a caress with silk? Aside from the open desire to exterminate nearly ninety percent of Mankind, that is? Which Meadows hopes can be done “peacefully.”

     But note the wording throughout. The depopulation is “necessary;” therefore, any means required would be licit. And to “hope” always implies the possible failure of those hopes…in which case Meadows would discard “peaceful” methods in favor of whatever would bring the numbers down. Regretfully, of course. But it’s “necessary,” Comrade Citizen. You’re getting into the Annihilation Chamber whether you like it or not. Nice having known you.

     (What makes it “necessary?” Such questions are a clear sign of disloyalty, Citizen! Sit down and shut up.)

     I’ve written about this sort of monster before. Of course Eric Pianka, Pentti Linkola, and their fellow-travelers are less “hopeful” than Dennis Meadows, but the commonality of their aims is plain: mass death. Out of “necessity.”

     I have a little list – thank you, Sir William Schwenck Gilbert – that’s part of my planning for a fiction project:

  • Sterilants in the water supply;
  • Genetic engineering / Cloning;
  • AI “sexbots” and “companions;”
  • The homosexual and transgender movements;
  • Abortion on demand, including post-natal abortion.

     Consider its contents. Each item has made an appearance in our world. When taken together, what do they point to?

     When you’ve sickened sufficiently of that list, consider this one:

  • Hostility toward fossil fuels;
  • Hostility to fission and fusion power;
  • Opposition to new housing construction;
  • Attempts to reduce agriculture worldwide;
  • Destruction of existing educational institutions;
  • Demands for the elimination of hard knowledge and merit-based practices.

     What does the aggregate say to you? Could the picture be any clearer? The “elites,” worldwide, hate us and want us gone. But “peacefully,” of course. And hopefully with no need to deal with a few billion corpses. But one way or another, they intend for it to happen. It’s “necessary.”

     Have a nice day.

Jan 10 2024

Personal Update

I’ve been struggling for many weeks with a respiratory infection. Yesterday, when I went to my new doctor, he immediately ordered me to the emergency room.

I’ve been increasingly fatigued, congested and, as of this weekend, breathless. The ER checked me out, prescribed antibiotics and a medication to reduce coughing (I’d been spending most of my nights getting in and out of bed, due to inability to stop coughing). I am to continue my asthma meds.

I was home last, not coughing so much, which did help me get some sleep. I’m a little less tired.

today, I’m mostly going to rest, try to catch up on household tasks as I can, and heal.

if the new meds work, I should be feeling much better by the weekend.

Jan 10 2024

Good Riddance!

Oh, please, please, please! Release the Epstein files!

Now!

Just GO!

https://x.com/bcele899/status/1736162032943276138?s=20

And, Billy Job?

Don’t forget to take your wife and grifting child with you.

Jan 10 2024

Look Sharp: Narrative Engineering In Progress!

     Beware the narrative engineers in government and the media, the ones who craft fear and suspicion from quite ordinary things. Have an example:

     In December of 2021, the Pentagon furthered the ‘white rage’ narrative, warning that ‘extremism’ within the ranks was on the rise, which would require ‘detailed new rules’ to prohibit service members from engaging in ‘certain activities.’

     The new policy lays out in detail the banned activities, which range from advocating terrorism or supporting the overthrow of the government to fundraising or rallying on behalf of an extremist group or “liking” or reposting extremist views on social media. The rules also specify that commanders must determine two things in order for someone to be held accountable: that the action was an extremist activity, as defined in the rules, and that the service member “actively participated” in that prohibited activity.
     Previous policies banned extremist activities but didn’t go into such great detail, and also did not specify the two step process to determine someone accountable. -AP

     Extremism among men equipped and paid to kill people and break things! OMG!! That’s got to be bad, doesn’t it?

     Well, maybe not. Pull the emphasized portion apart. It cites four “scary” things:

  • Advocating terrorism;
  • Supporting the overthrow of the government;
  • Fundraising or rallying on behalf of an extremist group;
  • “Liking” or reposting extremist views on social media.

     Three of those four things are largely subjective. Two make use of a wholly undefined term: “extremist.” These days, advocating a return to strict Constitutional fidelity is frequently condemned as “extremist.” I know people who’ve been stripped of their right to keep and bear arms for arguing that the Second Amendment means what it says. (Enjoy the irony.)

     But my attention is on the fourth item on the list. Just what does it take to get some emission on Facebook or X/Twitter classified as “extremist?” A handful of shrieking complainers has managed it in times not so distant. Indeed, statements from United states Senators have been labeled “extremist” because they upset some Leftist whiner. And thereafter, is everyone who agrees with the sentiment an “extremist?” A threat to others, or to our “institutions,” or – may God help us – to “our democracy?”

     I’ve written about this practice before:

     That sort of deliberate mixing of immiscible statistics is an important tactic in the Narrative Engineers’ toolkit. Thomas Sowell highlighted it in The Vision of the Anointed:

     One of the common methods of getting alarming statistics is to list a whole string of adverse things, with the strong stuff up front to grab attention and the weak stuff at the end to supply the numbers. A hypothetical model of this kind of reasoning might run as follows: Did you know that 13 million American wives have suffered murder, torture, demoralization, or discomfort at the hands of left-handed husbands? It may be as rare among left-handers as among right-handers for a husband to murder or torture his wife, but if the marriages of southpaws are not pure, unbroken bliss, then their wives must have been at least momentarily discomforted by the usual marital misunderstandings. The number may be even larger than 13 million. Yet one could demonize a whole category of men with statistics showing definitional catastrophes. While this particular example is hypothetical, the pattern is all too real. Whether it is sexual harassment, child abuse, or innumerable other social ills, activists are able to generate alarming statistics by the simple process of listing attention getting horrors at the beginning of a string of phenomena and listing last those marginal things which in fact supply the bulk of their statistics. A Louis Harris poll, for example, showed that 37 percent of married women are “emotionally abused” and 4 million “physically abused.” Both of these include some very serious things–but they also include among “emotional abuse” a husband’s stomping out of the room and among “physical abuse” his grabbing his wife. Yet such statistics provide a backdrop against which people like New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen can speak of wives’ “risk of being beaten bloody” by their husbands. Studies of truly serious violence find numbers less than one-tenth of those being thrown around in the media, in politics, and among radical feminists in academia.

     The prevalence of such deceitful practices argues for a default attitude of distrust. No longer can an American afford to confront any governmental or media emission in a trusting fashion. In particular, the media are not interested in informing us, except as that would conduce to increased circulation. What does, quite reliably, increase circulation, is scare talk – and if nothing truly scary has happened lately, those eagle-eyed blokes in the newsroom will slap something together out of whatever’s lying around the cutting room.

     Samuel Johnson warned us three centuries ago about the “general degradation of human testimony.” He was principally concerned with “falsehoods of convenience.” Today, the falsehoods that matter most are uttered by persons determined upon power. Just now, with a presidential election season about to swing into high gear, remaining alert to such nefarious practices is more important than ever. Tag those who practice them as not to be trusted, and pass on.

Jan 09 2024

Plausible Villains

     “No villain comes in black, screaming obscenities. All evil has children, homes, regard for self, fear of enemies.” – Greg Bear, Anvil of Stars

     A writer straining to produce drama faces several challenges. One that perpetually bedevils me is the construction of a villain in whom the reader can believe.

     There have been writers that write tales without villains. Isaac Asimov is a prominent example. But Asimov’s stories generally pit Man against Nature, rather than Man against Man. He was a master of such counterpositions. I prefer to write about human failings, including human evil.

     So from time to time, I find myself moved to write about an atrocity or an obscenity brought about by human action – deliberate human action. At such times I must ponder the question, “What would move a man to do such a thing? What kind of person would it take?”

     I’m in that mode this morning.

***

     Some of the most important villains in the history of fiction never “step onto the stage.” Their motivations remain behind a shroud. The best example I know of is Tolkien’s Sauron. Sauron’s desire to create worldwide misery and darkness is the key to the entire Lord of the Rings adventure. Without it, and him, there would be no story to tell. Yet Tolkien keeps him entirely offstage; why?

     Tolkien has gone to his reward, so it’s impossible to ask him. However, I think I have an inkling. Sauron is so extreme a “character,” being so wholly committed to evil, that Tolkien could not find a way to make him plausible. Satan would fail as a fictional character for the same reason. The quote from Anvil of Stars at the head of this piece points in that direction.

     For good or for ill, villains in fiction written for human readers must have human dimensions. They must have “children, homes, regard for self, fear of enemies.” And in the best cases, they’ll have some residuum of human goodness about them.

***

     I’ve been held back from starting my next novel by a villain problem. The degree of villainy I have in mind for the book is quite extreme. Yet it’s already at large in our world. The core of it is the complete commodification of life – human life included.

     Let’s be candid: we already commodify life to some extent. We must. We eat plants and animal flesh. That requires that we treat certain life forms as commodities for our consumption. So a degree of commodification is forced on us by our physical needs.

     (Yes: there are self-hating lunatics who hold that Mankind has a moral duty to go extinct for that reason. I don’t know any such persons, but I’d bet heavily that none of them have completely renounced eating.)

     However, despite our need to consume animal flesh, we strive not to be cruel about it. Animals killed for meat are seldom treated cruelly, even in the largest of meat packing and processing plants. The total commodification of life would dismiss that set of considerations. All that would matter would be production. Moreover, human lives would not escape such treatment.

     Slavery was a form of that evil. We renounced it – the United States was only the second nation ever to do so – but it lasted for a shamefully long time. Some slaveholders never accepted that what they’d done was wrong.

***

     Leave all that to the side. I need a villain who’s willing to embrace that evil in a new form. The slaves of yesteryear were persons born of Man. They owed nothing of their origins or natures to technology. But technology has advanced to a point where it has become plausible that humans can be made to order through genetic engineering and cloning. As Larry Sokoloff noted in Innocents, such humans would be pure commodities:

     “The people who did this,” he said, “did it to turn out a sex slave. Probably by request and to specification, and I’d bet my house that if they haven’t done it before, they’re trying to do it again right now. For that I’m going to send them all to hell. But think about it. Let’s say they were to clone me—produce a baby version of me. That baby would have no parents or other relatives. The people who produced him would have no reason to care for him, or about him, and only they would know he existed. He would be a product for sale. Why would anyone make that product? Why would anyone want that product? Apart from pure altruism?”

     Among human evils, I can think of no degree lower nor more despicable. A man capable of embracing that practice would be more deeply and thoroughly evil than any figure known to history. And it’s my job to envision such a villain and make him plausible to my readers. Hayao Nakahara, the villain of Innocents and Experiences, is only a pale forerunner.

***

     No political blather from me today. The problem delineated above must receive the whole of my attention. The novel to come – working title Ex Nihilo — may be my last. At least, I can’t imagine delving more deeply into evil and the need for heroes than that. And the first step is conceiving of a plausible human being who would embrace the deliberate creation of human lives to be treated as commodities for sale.

     Has a novelist ever solicited your prayers before this, Gentle Reader?

Jan 08 2024

Quarter Pound Opinions

     Yes, I’m still recovering. (I’m told this whatever-it-is can hang on for many weeks. Something to look forward to! 😒) As my energies are low and the news has been both repetitive and monochromatic, a short while ago I decided to page through my archives in search of something worthy that I could repost. Rather than an essay of mine, I’ve selected a piece by another writer: Greg Beatty, who once graced the old Palace of Reason with several short tales and the essay that follows.

     “Quarter Pound Opinions” first appeared at the Palace in 2003. I was powerfully struck by it when Greg first submitted it, and I continue to be impressed by its penetration and implications. Greg, wherever you are today, I hope you’re well and happy, and specifically happy to see this piece republished for the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch in this Year of Our Lord 2024.

     In 1901 Mark Twain wrote an essay called “Corn-Pone Opinions.” It wasn’t published in his lifetime. It’s been published since, in various collections, but I didn’t run into it until I was flipping through the 2000 volume of the best American essays of the past century edited by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan. “Corn-Pone Opinions” opened the book.

     I can see why the editors chose it. Twain starts with a folksy tone and a marvelous description of a now-distant memory of spectacle. With an openness most would find shocking today, Twain reminisces about the sight of a slave he used to know, some fifty years before, whose knack for impressions kept local boys laughing. The slave mimicked the style and gestures of local preachers, and, when he sensed his master might be listening, the sound of a saw working its way through a board.

     However much Twain clearly relished this memory of a slave who would fool his master with saw sounds, he also loved what the man had to say. In a recognizable move, Twain took the man’s homespun wisdom, and built upon it, a witty brick at a time, until he had moved so far away from the rhetorical harlequin figure he had evoked to begin that he was now talking about the entire human race, and it all seemed just as hypnotically right and charming. Twain repeats one line in particular from this unnamed genius: “You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions is.”

     Twain then built an extended argument about how true this is. He argued that the average man “cannot afford views that interfere with his bread and butter” and that if “he would prosper, he must train with the majority.” His argument is, again, classic Twain. The insights he delivers about groupthink and economic determinism are doubly attractive to American readers through their fusion with a frontier anti-establishment attitude, a leavening of wit and an occasional spice of misogyny, and, always, just enough distance so that the average man can replicate this very groupthink experience by saying, “Yes, that’s so true. I know so many people like that.” And never see himself in it at all.

     And I’m no different. As I read it, I said, “Yes, so true,” thinking of the fads I’d seen in my lifetime, substituting leg warmers for hoop skirts, and actresses for princess as fad starters. And then I stopped. It’s been a full century. Is this image still accurate?

     Immediately, the answer came to me. No, it isn’t. Things have changed. For one thing, the domestic economy has changed. Corn pone is no longer the homey dish that Twain eulogizes. In fact, it has become rather exotic, a regional dish enjoyed at bed and breakfasts before antique runs through a series of small towns and back to the suburbs to relax.

     What then is our corn pone? Just as immediately, the answer came to me. The Quarter Pounder. The Quarter Pounder is just as mundane to the citizen of 2002 as corn pone was for the citizen of 1901, but what a difference is summed up in this statement! Corn pone, a cheap form of corn bread made without eggs or milk, is a food of the poor. Like grits or hush puppies, it is a food invented by the working rural poor, but is now traditional. Born of necessity, corn pone is a way to get the maximum amount of food from a minimum of ingredients and financial outlay. And, like Twain, people fond of corn pone remember it with specificity. Their mommas made it one way, their grandmommas another, cousin Stacy never did get it right, and if they ever found a woman who could make real pone here in the city, they’d be happy.

     But until they do find that woman, these modern, urbanized workers eat at McDonald’s, our contemporary provider of cheap food for the worker. And where they once could recognize if their momma had been distracted by the burned edges, or if their little sisters were learning how to cook by the uneven texture of the pone, they relax instead at knowing that their Quarter Pounders will be, within statistical deviation dependent on worker distraction and slippage in training practices, exactly the same. Variations will be minor, will mean nothing, and will be immediately forgotten.

     But take the analogy further. Twain was concerned about conformity in a small and local way; Twain was concerned with corn pone conformity. For all that he made points about our larger society, Twain’s analysis was grounded in his original image. In Twain’s analysis, people, especially Americans with their divided allegiances to God, democracy, and the dollar, were likely to accept the opinions of those around them. Just as the corn in their pone was grown in nearby fields, ground by a miller they knew, bagged by another of the string of entertaining slaves Twain wrote about, and then baked by those who loved them, the opinions Twain was concerned about were handed to his fellows by the members of their church, their families, their townsmen. Just as the seasonings that made individual batches of pone distinctive indicated the geographical and economic limits on the cooks, the shared opinions upon which Twain heaps such scorn were often circulating over and over because there was simply nothing else available. And the speed with which fashions swept through his society was fed by the same taste for spectacle that made Twain cling to those memories of a capering slave for fifty years until they found a place in his writing. We accept Twain as one of our greats because he is one of us. Twain is a corn pone philosopher.

     And except in quaint, residual pockets, none of that is true today. In fact, you could say I celebrate the same things that concern Twain because I am concerned with Quarter Pound opinions, not corn pone opinions. I am concerned with conformity on a global scale, with the way Quarter Pounder culture is driving corn pone from our plates.

—

     What was the first line that Twain’s dark genius preached? “You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions is.” Well, where a man gets his Quarter Pounder isn’t the issue. He can get it from the spotless McDonald’s with the cheerful Pakistani manager I visited in Greensboro North Carolina. He can get it from the incredibly filthy McDonald’s in Charlottesville Virginia. This McDonald’s was staffed by Black, white, and Hispanic women who could barely understand one another’s words, but who slouched behind the cash register with exactly the same lack of hope. In short, he could get his Quarter Pounder from any of the more than 28,000 McDonald’s in more than 120 countries, and it wouldn’t matter. Maybe it mattered whar a man got his corn pone, but it doesn’t matter where he gets his Quarter Pounder.

     In place of local meal and downhome opinions, what does today’s hungry man receive with his food? Trends. Trends that are planned, merchandised, and promoted with cyclic regularity. These trends do not sweep through our towns like fads. Instead, they provide the basic fabric for them. Each year, we can judge when the summer movies come out by the annual emergence of the latest plastic toys at McDonald’s. However, unlike popular songs, McDonald’s promotions are not so striking that we date our lives by them in memory. We remember the year that Vanilla Ice came out, or the year that Brittany versus Christina was the big debate but we don’t remember which year we got the Monopoly game pieces or Atlantis submersibles. These promotions, like the McDonald’s wrappers, are disposable. Like the playground equipment outside so many McD’s, they offer safe stimulation, providing just enough managed excitement to race our psychic engines and get us through the day. Not enough to hurt or change us.

     Twain never says so directly, but his scorn for the trends that swept through his society gave the impression that he found them stupid, and that he felt himself distant from them. Not me. I don’t find my fellow citizens stupid, and I know I’m all tangled up with them. But I find them produced, processed, and managed like the McDonald’s workstaff. McDonald’s is infinitely flexible. It can absorb changes in education level, age, or ethnicity of its employees without blinking. McDonald’s don’t fundamentally care if the beef used in quarter pound of hamburger came from disease free local cows, from cows that were grazed on what until recently was irreplaceable rain forest land (as was the case in Costa Rica), or if it was raised in Iowa. Beef is beef. Employees are employees.

     Twain’s essay has a logical flaw. He assumes that exposing conformity matters. That if his readers recognized that they were circulating opinions that they hadn’t produced themselves, they would spontaneously break free, powered by a self-pride that would- somehow!- allow them to overcome their economic positioning. This message can be found in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” and in new family sitcoms every fall. Every seventeen year old who figures out how the world “really works” believes that he can get the rest of society to throw off the corn pone chains of public opinion which had been thrust upon them through accident of birth or a biased media. And then we’ll all be free! Hurray!

     However, a funny thing has been happening in recent years. As Americans across the political spectrum start their magazines, newsletters, television and radio talk shows, listservs and websites, they haven’t gotten any freer. In fact, at the same time that access to a free market of ideas has flourished, and that choices have multiplied, certain other things have also happened. To name one, Americans have gotten fatter. They’ve gotten fatter when information about what constitutes a healthy diet is more readily available than ever. And an ever growing percentage of the American diet is made up of processed foods- processed, packaged, measured, and in all ways regularized for ease of consumption.

     Recall, if you will, Twain’s corollaries of his slave performer’s corn pone text. He said that the average man “cannot afford views that interfere with his bread and butter.” In the world of the Quarter Pound opinion, it is become clear that a man, a woman, or a transgendered individual can hold any opinion he, she or s/he wishes, so long as that individual does not interfere with the flow of beef and bread. Oh, s/he can choose. Choose a Whopper, over a Quarter Pounder. Choose a Vegie Burger over a Quarter Pounder. Be daring, and choose a (vegetarian) Boca Burger over a Quarter Pounder! In 1901, a man had to “train with the majority” in order to prosper. In 2002, one can choose from a nearly infinite menu of meals/opinions. You don’t have to think like the majority, so long as you shop like the majority. Eat like the majority. Grow fat and apathetic like the majority.

     And relax. It won’t be unpleasant. In fact, it’ll be fun. You’ll never have to choose between conforming like Twain’s good neighbors or laughing at subversive wit like Twain with his slave. No matter what you choose, there will be a performer to entice you into the checkout line with greater wit and originality than Twain’s old friend. Like a retro feel? McD’s offers Ronald McDonald, the classic clown. More fond of cutting edge humor and ethnic backlash? Try the “Yo quiero Taco Bell” dog. Masculine culture and radio drama scripting? The Budweiser lizards. And in each case, the dancing bear/ talking dog / capering clown of the franchise will be as charming as the spectacle-loving Twain could wish, but, rather like the slave Twain converted into a rhetorical prophet of individual freedom, will serve to make us at ease in our servitude.

     In 1901, Twain, that grand and witty prophet of clear thought, ended his essay by reviewing a recent controversy that not one person in a hundred could now identify, the argument over free silver. Twain suggested that not one person in ten on either side had rational backing for his position, and suggested that we all “do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.”

     In 2003, I’d like to close by weeping for Twain’s lost innocence. I grant that not one person in ten has rational support for his or her position in the free silver argument, but I’m afraid that far more terrifying is the realization that we can be perfectly reasonable, and, like Twain’s shackled Socrates, not be able to use our reason to gain freedom. What’s worse, Twain’s cherished slave knew where his master was, when to pretend to be working to keep punishment at bay, where his shackles ended and his flesh began, and where he could run if he wanted to risk it all for freedom. I don’t. I don’t really know where my Quarter Pounder comes from. I don’t know where the processing of the Quarter Pounder ends and I begin. I don’t know if boycotting McDonald’s will free my mind (though admittedly, it might shrink my ass), or simply serve to nudge McDonald’s into a better market position. I don’t know if publishing this will be taken as evidence that the press is freer than ever, or if my despair will convince others that there are no options, and that conformity is the best option available.

     I do know one thing. What corn pone was in 1901, the Quarter Pounder is in 2003.

Jan 07 2024

Why would Biden talk to anyone?

He isn’t in charge of his own bowel movements, much less anything that’s happening on the world stage.

Let’s think about this for a minute. Joe Biden, who is supposed to be the commander in chief, didn’t know for four days that his own defense secretary, a member of his cabinet, was in the hospital. Now, considering what’s going on in the world right now—the Israel-Hamas war, the Houthi attacks on container ships in the Red Sea, and many other things—how is it possible that Biden isn’t talking to his defense secretary daily? Sure, he has time to give speeches about how Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, but he didn’t even know his defense secretary was incapacitated for days?

Joe Biden can barely read from a teleprompter these days, and even when he CAN read from the teleprompter he can’t even enunciate the words that are being fed to him. Joe Biden is a drooling Chinese hand puppet, a senile dementia patient being led around by Obama’s staffers and told where to go and what to do. OF COURSE nobody told Biden about Lloyd “I fuck the troops over for lunch” Austin. Biden isn’t making any decisions, he’s being told what to do, just like Lloyd “I’m a political whore” Austin. They’re BOTH tools.

And I still want to know what the surgery was. I’m betting on lipo.

Jan 07 2024

Desecrating A ‘Sacred Space?’

     Happy Feast of the Epiphany / Theophany / “Little Christmas,” Gentle Reader. It’s a big day for Christians worldwide, on which we commemorate the visit of the Magi to the newborn Christ Child. I’ve written at length about it, if you’d like a detailed rumination over it. However, for this morning I have something else in mind: an obscenity of a contemporary sort that needs to be squashed hard and at once:

     [T]he President of the Navajo Nation, Buu Nygren, has filed a formal objection with NASA and the U.S. Department of Transportation over what he calls an act of desecration. “It is crucial to emphasize that the moon holds a sacred position in many Indigenous cultures, including ours,” Nygren wrote in a letter dated Dec. 21. “The act of depositing human remains and other materials, which could be perceived as discards in any other location, on the moon is tantamount to desecration of this sacred space.” Nygren has asked NASA to delay the mission until the Navajo Nation’s objections are addressed.

     “Sacred position!” “Sacred space!” “Indigenous cultures!” Indigenous to what or where? Not to the Moon, which remains – as far as I know – unoccupied. This “President of the Navajo Nation” hasn’t been there; I’d have heard about it. But he condemns the ULA’s Peregrine mission as “desecration.” And to be fair, the Amerind nations and other “indigenous cultures” have been granted a wholly unwarranted degree of deference in the past, so there was a fair chance he’d get it this time around as well.

     Apparently, in responding to this…person’s demand, NASA has tried to “square the circle:”

     Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration at the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, acknowledged that these commercial missions could lead to further controversies.

     “With these new opportunities and new ways of doing business, we recognize that some non-NASA commercial payloads can be a cause for concern to some communities,” Kearns said. “And those communities may not understand that these missions are commercial and they’re not US government missions, like the ones that we’re talking about.”

     Kearns is saying that Nygren has complained to the wrong department – that he should have addressed the Astrobiotic / Celestis / Elysium Space firms that are the commercial forces behind the Peregrine launch. That invites Nygren to infer that if the launch were purely a NASA affair, NASA would have addressed and prevented the “desecration.” And who knows? Perhaps NASA has become so lily-livered that it would bend over backwards to avoid “offending” an “indigenous culture.” Given how little NASA has achieved since the decommissioning of the Space Shuttles, it isn’t hard to believe.

     Amerinds have been playing the victim card for decades. This is not a departure for them. But it should be dismissed with open disdain, rather than being treated with respect as so many victimist initiatives have been.

     “You say the Moon is ‘sacred’ to your ‘culture,’ Mr. Nygren? Pray tell, where on the Moon is your most important shrine? What’s that? No Amerind has ever been there? Only white Christian men? Well, in that case give us a buzz when the first Amerind expedition plants its flag on the lunar surface. Then we’ll talk about how ‘sacred’ it is to you and yours. Not before.”

     What I would give for a NASA spokesman to deliver such an edict — and to slap down the ‘Native American’ BS in the same breath. It’s high time.

Jan 06 2024

SecDef hospitalized for days?

Apparently from a complication after a “minor elective surgery”.

I’d like to know what the surgery was. Was he trying to get a spine implanted? Or a set of balls to cover his lack thereof? Or maybe he was getting some liposuction. Who knows? Nobody’s talking, which means that whatever we might think, it’s probably worse.

Although if I may posit a theory as to why they kept it a secret, it could be because the people up top know that if the rank and file knew that Lloyd “I’m a political piece of crap” Austin was ill, the rank and file would be cheering for his condition to worsen. Believe me when I say that I cannot wait to piss on Lloyd Austin’s grave, and I’m going to be somewhere in the middle of a miles-long line in order to do it.. My only sorrow is that he’ll die a natural death rather than the hanging that he deserves, along with Mark Milley and a whole host of the Perfumed Princes of the Puzzle Palace.

Anywho, if there’s any people out there shocked that this administration is less than transparent, those people need help, and possibly medications. It’s like being shocked that water is wet, or that fire will burn you.

It’s the Feast of the Epiphany today. Three Kings Day. In a lot of the world, the celebration of Christmas is rather minor, and Three Kings Day is the big celebration. I can recall one country that instead of putting up stockings for Christmas, the kids would put a box of hay under their bed for the king’s camels. It’s also the start of Mardi Gras here in the states. So to that end, I made a King Cake, the wife is making the Queen’s Soup, and we’re having a bonfire tonight where we burn the greens left over from Christmas, The trees/wreaths/etcetera that people had in their houses. A few people will be attending. Should be a good time. If not, well, we still have king cake.

Jan 06 2024

Dismissal Through Diagnosis

     The old rhetorical gambit called argumentum ad hominem is most often deployed by advocates for a shaky proposition. If Smith has a better case for his position, such that the preponderance of the evidence and the logic it supports appear to have won the day, his adversary Jones will be powerfully tempted to “attack the messenger.” Jones’s hope is that delegitimizing Smith personally will undermine Smith’s arguments, leaving Jones alone on the field. It’s an old technique, well known to those who study argumentative and rhetorical methods. Nor is it always fallacious.

     Many years ago, I wrote about two prongs of this method as used by the Left. At the time, those essays seemed sufficient. Today, no longer. The Left has “branched out” to other rationales for dismissing or silencing the Right. John Hinderaker cites one below:

     Josep Borrell, the EU’s high representative for foreign policy, warns that migration fears could send political shockwaves across Europe.

     Borrell, 76, a Spanish Socialist and former foreign minister, was referring to the fact that illegal immigration has hit its highest level since Europe’s last migration crisis in 2016, which drove a political backlash including contributing to Brexit. It comes at a time when Europe is braced for terror attacks linked to Hamas and a resurgent Islamist threat in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war.

     He suggested that “fear in the face of the unknown and uncertainty generates a hormone that calls for a security response’, he said, theorising that populism has an irrational biological basis. “We will enter a survival mode based on fear and that may promote the ascent, or strengthening, of the extreme right,” he said.

     Conservatism as mental illness, a favorite trope of the left. But why is it “irrational” to oppose mass illegal immigration, or to want to prevent terror attacks?

     Why indeed? That answer, of course, is that those fears are perfectly rational. Europeans don’t want to be victimized by savages, nor do they want their nations to be “transformed” by the savages’ “culture.” But the Left, which has orchestrated the mass invasion of Europe by savages from Africa and the Middle East, doesn’t want to hear it. More, the media barons of Europe, who are as wholly owned by the European left as American media moguls are by the American Left, want their readers to feel ashamed of fearing the invaders.

     The old tropes of “racism,” “xenophobia,” and “Islamophobia” have been overused. They’ve lost their punch as ordinary people have noticed that those invading and abusing them are overwhelmingly black, Muslims, and violent. No sane, emotionally healthy man will view a declaration such as this as “something we just have to get used to.” So the argumentum must be “tuned.” The new melody is “irrational fear.”

     If Jones can convince Smith that he’s being “irrational,” Smith might back off. If Jones can convince the audience listening to their exchange that Smith is “overreacting,” he might manage to carry the day. It certainly sounds less harsh than “Smith is either stupid or evil,” especially since the statistics are all on Smith’s side.

     No one wants to be thought “irrational,” or – God forbid – “hysterical.” It takes a fair degree of self-confidence to withstand those attacks. A lot of people lack that asset, and thus can be cowed by the “irrational” label. But the willingness to stand one’s ground, confident that the facts are exactly as he perceives them, is a winning posture:

     If you’re secure in your possession of the facts, take confidence from them. Stand firm on them. It took me decades before I could do so in the face of massed disapproval from others. Here are the results.

     Be not afraid…of rhetorical gambits that attack your rationality, that is. Feel free to fear and resent invaders who threaten your safety and that of your loved ones. That’s perfectly rational.

Jan 05 2024

Muh Democracy

If I have to listen to another Democrat hue and cry about “our democracy”, I’m going to puke.

Political Correctness image number 0

There’s a reason we’re not a democracy. We are a Republic, although at this point I would say we’re post republic and post-constitution based on how the government acts. Democracy is mob rule. Our founding fathers knew this. They weren’t dumb or ignorant, unlike your average college student these days. They had studied history, and knew that every single democracy in history had failed.

So they didn’t give us a democracy. They gave us a republic, if we could keep it. Based on what I see coming out of D.C., I think we failed. But that just makes us a corrupt oligarchy, not a democracy.\

In any case, when you hear a Democrat wailing about “our democracy”, you can rest assured that actual democracy is the last thing that they want. Kind of like how they have to save democracy by imprisoning their political enemies. You know, like the USSR did. So democratic!

Jan 04 2024

Closing The Escapes, Defiling the Heroes

     The Totalitarian Prime Directive is simple: Permit no escape. After all, the evidence is copious that oppressed and subjugated people will flee if they can. Therefore, the totalitarian must block all escape routes, station men with guns at each of them, and shoot those who attempt to breach them as an example to others. Stories of such events at the borders of Communist countries are many. Survivors of those regimes often tell stories of aborted escapes. If the regime can keep its subjects despite their enormous desire to escape, its power will be secure against anything but invasion and conquest by a stronger power.

     In our era, escape has come to mean something more than physical removal from oppressive circumstances. It often refers to a mental refuge from such conditions. Large industries have grown highly profitable by supplying people with such escapes. Fantasy and science fiction, superhero comics, movies made from such tales, video games and conventions for fans are all examples thereof. They provide a dollop of relief to those who need it…and a fanciful kind of hope, as well.

     Today’s mental oppressors march under the flag of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” This has been called “woke” doctrine. Like “physical” totalitarians, they seek to close off all escape, such that there’s nowhere for anyone to turn for a respite from their demands. But the task is difficult, for it involves combatting market forces whose heft is measured in tens of billions of dollars. So rather than destroy those mental refuges, the dictators of “woke” have striven to pollute them.

     I wrote about this some time ago, in connection with the “woke” assault on video gaming. But it’s also present in fantasy and science fiction, in comic books, and in the movies:

     As you may have heard from our own Lincoln Brown or our friends at Twitchy and Hot Air, a new Star Wars movie is in the works, featuring everyone’s “favorite” Mary Sue, Rey ‘Skywalker’ Palpatine (poor Daisy Ridley, having to play such a hated character).

     And of course, its new director, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, is a perfect example of DEI: a Pakistani woman who proudly wants to “make men uncomfortable” and somehow forgot several of the most pivotal characters in the Star Wars saga were female (Leia, her mother Padme Amidala, Ahsoka Tano, just to name a few).

     As Lincoln said, Disney isn’t trying anymore, just reanimating the corpse of a beloved IP they killed. Not even for the money (every movie they’ve been putting out in the past few years seems to be getting more and more woke, and they flopped harder than FIFA players), but seemingly out of sadism.

     It’s not pure sadism. It’s an attempt to pollute the refuge the quintessentially escapist “Star Wars” movies offer to their fans. If the dictators of “woke” can render such hiding-places for our minds as unappetizing as the increasingly oppressive reality around us, they will be better enabled to impose their creed on us. We won’t have a redoubt from which to resist them.

     The counter-agent to such invasions is the loss of revenue. Disney has already suffered greatly for its prior sins…but apparently not enough to force its masters to correct their course. Whether Disney will break before “Star Wars’s” fans, we must wait to see.

     I could go on, for the examples of this sort of infiltration of heroic and escapist entertainment are many. But the point will stand as it is.

     Fortunately, my chosen perch – independently-produced and published fiction – cannot be subverted this way. Indie writers and artists still make escapism and heroism available in quantity to anyone who seeks them. There’s also a steadily increasing community of indie moviemakers, who purvey their offerings largely through the Web. Whatever other sins may lie at Amazon’s doorstep, we have those outlets for relief. Pray that the dictators of “woke” don’t find an effective weapon against them.

Load more