Oct 21 2023

Assorted

     Did I really just cite weekends as a time to relax? What on Earth was I thinking?

***

1. “It’s Islam.”

     Daniel Greenfield has compiled a record of serial brilliance for his essays, especially when he addresses matters in the Middle East. His most recent offering rips the false facade away from the issues surrounding Islamic violence toward non-Muslims. The Sunday punch:

     Islamic terrorism is not an American problem, a British problem, a French problem, a Russian problem, a Chinese problem or an Israeli problem. It’s an Islamic problem. The only way we will ever triumph against it is to stop treating it as someone else’s problem. If only India gave up Kashmir, Israel gave up more of the West Bank, if America stopped being involved in the Middle East, if France hadn’t banned the hijab and the Netherlands hadn’t allowed cartoons of Mohammed, there would be no Islamic terrorism are the kinds of lies that are killing us.

     We are not responsible for Islamic terrorism. None of us. Only Islam is responsible.

     Islamic violence is over 1,000 years old. It predates most modern countries and it is not caused by anything we do. The only thing we are guilty of is our failure to smash the Jihad.

     I’ve said it before: If Islam were not granted the status of a religion, it would be viewed – by non-Muslims conversant with its teachings, at least – as utterly vile, no better than Nazism and in some ways worse. Denial will merely perpetuate the problem, giving the cancer further time to grow.

***

2. Birds Of A Feather.

     Communism and Islam may not look much alike, but they do share an implacable hatred of freedom and the aim of subjugating the whole world. Dave Blount has the story:

     The Muslim–moonbat alliance may be the greatest threat civilization has ever faced. It has emerged into plain sight following the historic terror atrocities in Israel. Ivy League colleges are one example. Communist Cuba is another:

     Cuban official media spokespersons, Leticia Martinez, head of communications for Miguel Diaz-Canel, and “El Necio” posted statements celebrating a “Free Palestine” and justifying the terrorist attacks over their social media. He retweeted the People’s Forum’s genocidal call for the end of the Israeli State with the slogan: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!.”

     The “From the River” slogan calls for the eradication of Jews from the Jewish homeland.

     In the midst of this barbarism and evil, Castro Regime spokesman “El Necio” cites Che Guevara visit to Gaza as inflection point that turned Palestine into a world cause, and posts photos of the Argentine guerilla with Middle East leaders during a visit there at the start of the Cuban dictatorship.

     The totalitarian ideologies of leftism and Islam differ in the particulars, but the sadistic barbarism that characterizes Hamas and that was personified by Che Guevara provides them with common ground.

     Applause. Perhaps were Communism and Islam the only ideologies remaining on Earth, they’d fight one another for supreme dominance. Until then, know them for villains of a single character. To support one is to support the other, and conversely.

***

3. “You Say Your Welfare State Is Broke?”

     Well, then! Simply exterminate the clientele!

     Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party voted down a bill Wednesday that would have barred the state from euthanizing mentally ill Canadians, reports Blaze news. There is nothing now standing in the way of those who have mental disorders – including the depressed with suicidal ideation – from having the state put them down.

     The new liberal or progressive has little regard for human life.

     Conservative lawmaker Ed Fast put through bill C-314 in the hopes of controlling this, but he couldn’t get it through. His bill would have provided vulnerable citizens with suicide prevention counseling rather than extermination.

     The Canadian Liberal Party is the same party that lauded at least two Nazis within the last few years.

     Horrors of this sort become inevitable when “compassionate care” of any sort is made the province of the State. Besides reducing the workload on the Complaint Dept., this would also allow the transfer of the funds previously earmarked for mental-illness care to the employees of the bureaucracy. The irony of offering “medical assistance in dying” as a “treatment” for persons tormented by an impulse to suicide is only a grace note.

***

4. Can’t Attack The Message? Attack The Messenger!

     Few books have provided as penetrating a depiction of evil and its aims as George Orwell’s 1984. Given the Left’s attempt to make dissent from the “official line” legally punishable, it’s fantastically relevant to our time. For that reason, it must be dismissed, denigrated, destroyed.

     But that’s not possible. It’s been read by too many people. The majority of us “got the message:”

     “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

     Orwell’s O’Brien character felt safe about stating it plainly. And why shouldn’t he? Everyone even marginally capable of independent thought was under continuous, inescapable surveillance. Any of them who dared to deviate from the Party’s dictates was treated to the regimen O’Brien inflicted on Winston Smith. Only the proles, who were kept pacified with “films, football, beer, and above all, gambling,” were allowed any latitude at all:

     In all questions of morals [the proles] were allowed to follow their ancestral code. The sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them. Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was permitted. For that matter, even religious worship would have been permitted if the proles had shown any sign of needing or wanting it. They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: ’Proles and animals are free.’

     Too plain; too open; too terrifying. So the creator of this nightmare must be demonized, that his insights and creations may be forgotten:

     George Orwell was a “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent” man who wrote women out of his story, according to a biographer of his wife.

     Anna Funder said that Orwell was a brilliant writer but a complicated man whose personal life was at odds with the “decency” of his writing.

     She has produced a biography of Eileen O’Shaugnessy, Orwell’s wife – highlighting the contributions O’Shaugnessy made to his work, including helping him to write Animal Farm.

     According to Funder, the darkness that runs through 1984 is a reflection of Orwell’s soul.

     “Decency is such a core Orwellian value. He writes about it. It’s the quality of the ‘proles’ in 1984 that is going to save us. He wanted to be decent, to be seen as decent, by which he meant a man of integrity, the same inside and out,” said Funder.

     “Also, he also used that word to refer to being heterosexual – he was enormously homophobic but deeply attracted to men, and I think not particularly interested in women sexually.

     The agenda here is undisguised.

     Remember also that various agencies, here and in the United Kingdom, have listed 1984 — along with The Lord of the Rings — as works conducive to “right-wing extremism.”

***

     That’s all for today, I think. It’s time for me to get to work . Have a nice day…if you can, after all that.

Oct 20 2023

The Sons Of Martha

     First, a little music:

Well I’m on the Downeaster Alexa
And I’m cruisin’ through Block Island Sound
I have charted a course to the vineyard
But tonight I am Nantucket bound

We took on diesel back in Montauk yesterday
And left this morning from the bell in Gardiner’s Bay
Like all the locals here I’ve had to sell my home
Too proud to leave, I work my fingers to the bone

So I could own my Downeaster Alexa
And I go where the ocean is deep
There are giants out there in the canyons
And a good captain can’t fall asleep

I got bills to pay and children who need clothes
I know there’s fish out there but where, God only knows
They say these waters aren’t what they used to be
But I’ve got people back on land who count on me

So if you see my Downeaster Alexa
And if you work with the rod and the reel
Tell my wife I am trawling Atlantis
And I still have my hands on the wheel

Now I drive my Downeaster Alexa
More and more miles from shore every year
Since they told me I can’t sell no stripers
And there’s no luck in swordfishing here

I was a Bayman like my father was before
Can’t make a living as a Bayman anymore
There ain’t much future for a man who works the sea
But there ain’t no island left for Islanders like me

[Billy Joel]

     Economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote of capitalism as a mechanism of creative destruction. In that phrase he meant to capture the coupled processes of innovation and obsolescence. For in economic terms, it is men who create and destroy; natural processes have nothing to do with either. Moreover, the destruction is a necessary complement to the creation; one could not occur without the other.

     But economic destruction – the elimination by innovation of older ways of making a living – is something that happens to men as well as by them. The makers of horse-drawn carriages were men with families and bills to pay. They could not rejoice at the emergence of the automobile. It meant the disappearance of their means of living, which might have been their fathers’ and grandfathers’ as well. They would be compelled to find new means of earning…and for some, that’s a mountain too high to climb.

     Men who are younger and more flexible, and who learn more readily, often profess indifference to the suffering of those others. “Their time is over,” goes the refrain. But there may come a time when they will find themselves similarly afflicted. Few of us remain nimble and flexible all our days.

     The best time to learn empathy for others is before you need it for yourself.

***

     Not long before I retired, a colleague about my own age named Phil lamented that he could no longer make a living with what he already knew. As software engineers go, he was a rather narrow specialist; his expertise was mostly in applying the powers of Microsoft Office’s various tools, particularly Microsoft Access. But the supply of persons with those skills exceeded the demand for them: i.e., the work to be done with them. Phil found himself compelled to broaden his skill set, which he found difficult.

     If it can happen in software, it can happen to anyone. For all I know, had I been stubborn about continuing to ply my particular trade – real-time software – it might have happened to me by now. I haven’t tried to stay in touch with the field.

     It will happen. Indeed, it must, for that is the path to a better future for billions of people. But we must not be callous about it. Indifference to the suffering of others isn’t numbered among the capital sins, but it’s no less deadly for that.

***

     A particular Gospel passage is much on my mind just now:

     Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard his word. But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me.
     And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.

     [Luke 10:38-42]

     It sounds a bit cruel, doesn’t it? But Christ did not rebuke Martha for her request; He merely declined to take “that good part” from her sister Mary. And in reflecting upon that passage I found myself wondering: Would He have rebuked Martha had she chosen to join her sister at His feet?

     I think that He would not have done so, for Martha would merely have “chosen that good part,” as her sister had done. Yes, it would have meant that He and whoever else was present would go hungry a little longer, but what shall it profit a man to gain a dinner but lose his soul? And no, I’m not being facetious.

     Christ did not disparage the work of Martha. As the passage indicates, He sympathized with her in her labors. But His own work, and the infinite benefit it could bring those who chose to listen, was more important.

***

     I have a great fondness for poetry of the sort created by “traditional” poets: i.e., those who respect the medium’s requirements for rhyme and meter. One of my favorites is Rudyard Kipling, whose offerings seem always to be on-target. Yesterday, in commenting on this piece, the worthy Steven Furlong reminded me of one of Kipling’s best. Have a snatch:

Raise ye the stone or cleave the wood to make a path more fair or flat;
Lo, it is black already with blood some Son of Martha spilled for that!
Not as a ladder from earth to Heaven, not as a witness to any creed,
But simple service simply given to his own kind in their common need.

And the Sons of Mary smile and are blessèd – they know the angels are on their side.
They know in them is the Grace confessèd, and for them are the Mercies multiplied.
They sit at the Feet – they hear the Word – they see how truly the Promise runs.
They have cast their burden upon the Lord, and – the Lord He lays it on Martha’s Sons!

     Yes, it’s wry, and perhaps even a little bitter…but in the end it’s about all of us, isn’t it? We all spend the greater portion of our days in labor – often brutal, thankless labor. By doing so, we hope to earn not just our daily bread, but also an interval of peace in which we might make sense of things. The evening’s rest; the weekend’s release; the hoped-for interval before life ends in which we’ll have time to complete the longest thoughts and the labors animated by love alone.

     And here we return to the tragedy of the first segment: not all of us get those respites. These days, they seem the province of a dwindling few.

     Do not disparage nor dismiss any of the Sons of Martha. You may know their lot, and their sorrows, in your turn.

Oct 19 2023

The Sovietization of the USSA continues

Maybe if Hunter Biden had posted memes instead of snorting rails of coke off a Russian hooker’s ass, the DOJ would have been interested in him. HA! I kid, we all know the DOJ is just the Democrat Party’s new Gestapo.

The humorless hacks at the misnamed Biden Department of Justice (DOJ) just sentenced a man to seven months of prison for sharing memes about voting. Oh, in case you’re wondering, Joe and Hunter Biden are still not in jail and there will be no consequences for the intelligence experts and Big Tech censors who enforced the election-influencing lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was a fake.

Memes. A man is now in jail for posting memes on Twitter. I want you to think about that. Hillary Clinton committed more felonies than I can count with her private email server that held above-top-secret information, but she’s out there cackling and calling for Republicans to be “deprogrammed” but the DOJ went after a guy posting memes. The Biden Crime Family has laundered millions of dollars internationally (make sure there’s 10% for the big guy!) and the DOJ can’t be interested, but they’ll jail a guy for posting memes. The DOJ allowed Bob Menendez to get away with bribery, fraud and banging underage hookers in the Dominican Republic for years, but gosh that meme-ster is going to get his due! Hey, we have NO CLUE who was on Epstein’s client list despite the FBI having that information for years, but they got a guy who posted memes! The DOJ is hunting YOU down for disagreeing with the Marxist cabal running this country, but actual terrorists get millions upon millions of dollars.

Burn. It. All. Down.

Burn it down. The US Government no longer has any real function other than attacking law-abiding citizens and patriots. The DOJ is investigating Catholics as “domestic terrorists” but they couldn’t tell you who Antifa was if their life depended on it. The border is wide open, and BPS is CUTTING FENCE WIRE and then FIST-BUMPING THE ILLEGAL ALIENS AS THEY ENTER. There is no valid reason for the US Government to exist any more. They refuse to protect this country. They go after meme-posting people while allowing the worst crime to not only go unpunished, but they protect the vile criminals. All while shipping YOUR MONEY overseas to various shitholes around the world so that it can get funneled back into a politician’s pocket. The apparatchiks running this country actually hate this country, and I see no real reason for them to continue to receive our support.

Burn it all down. You cannot reform a system this corrupt, much like you cannot save a limb that is gangrenous. You can only remove it to save the rest of the body.

Oct 19 2023

Beauty And The Engineer

     No, the title is not a joke. Please indulge me for this morning. I have a need to rant about things that are a bit off the beaten path. I won’t be able to get to trivia such as world wars and the banality of evil until it’s off my chest.

***

     No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. — Samuel Johnson

     Then either I’m a blockhead, or the celebrated Dr. Johnson was a soulless boor. (Pipe down, you in the peanut gallery shouting “Why not and?”)

***

     The tropisms of Man are few. Abraham Maslow identified most of them accurately. While they do fall into a priority scheme, the strength of the “later” ones is easy to underestimate. This is often the case for those who haven’t yet met the “earlier” ones adequately.

     I had a bit of difficulty phrasing the above sentiments. The primacy of survival doesn’t render it absolutely more important than self-actualization; it’s merely the one that must be addressed first. Dead men don’t have the time or energy to work on improving themselves.

     Among the glories of the United States of America is that its attainments in the material realm have made it possible for men to seek attainments in the non-material realm: knowledge, wisdom, and beauty. These things are at the top of the Maslovian hierarchy. When our society is functioning properly, each man chooses a path by which to travel from the lower levels of the pyramid to the top. While not everyone “goes the distance,” those who do can create further glories by which others may be gratified, comforted, or inspired. Among the ironies of our time – yes, yes, and many other times and places as well – is that there is a gaggle of persons, who often call themselves “reformers” or “idealists,” who seek to destroy the base of the pyramid in the name of “equality.”

     The height of a civilization is measured at its pinnacle, not at its base. We don’t judge the classical civilizations by their middens, but by their greatest achievements. Should Mankind perish, whoever comes after us will do similarly.

***

     “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain. – John Adams

     We’ve become a race of engineers. What we never seem to understand is that after it’s time to railroad, there’s time to build a beautiful railroad. – John Varley

     It’s easy, and graceless, to disparage “engineers,” by which I mean those who create, build, and maintain the physical comforts of our society. People in the arts do so frequently, seldom pausing to reflect on the criticality of those comforts to the very possibility of their pursuits. But it’s equally easy and graceless for “engineers” to disparage the arts. Why strive for an ever higher, ever more secure standard of living if there’s nothing else to achieve?

     Yes, yes, there are persons, and many at that, who don’t “do” beauty. They too have their place, as with Sandburg’s nail. But they can appreciate beauty when they come upon it. They who create beauty labor as much for those unable to do so as for their peers. And the most perceptive of their tribe will frequently come upon a thing of beauty which at first might be taken for a mere contrivance or convenience, a grubby little artifact made to complete some chore. And they will celebrate it as a thing proper to their pursuit quite as much as the works of their own minds and hands.

***

     I recently acquired something beautiful. Here it is:

     Why yes! It is a gun. A Ruger American Ranch rifle, to be precise. Bolt-action, removable magazine, chambered for the .223 Remington or 5.56 NATO cartridge. And yes, it could be used to kill. As I purchased it used, it’s possible that its previous owner did kill something with it, though I doubt it. The .223 round isn’t the best for taking down significant game, and bolt-action rifles aren’t suitable for self-defense. None of that diminishes its beauty.

     This rifle expresses beauty in material terms quite as well as any Rodin sculpture. It’s a simple mechanism, in the best sense of the word simple. It has every feature it needs to perform its design function: i.e., to propel a bullet downrange accurately. It has no features that don’t conduce to that end.

     If I were never to fire that rifle – never to put it to any use whatsoever – it would still be beautiful. It epitomizes elegance in design and fabrication. It is as good, and as appealing, a thing as can be made for its purpose. And that is one of the reasons I bought it.

     I labored for many years as an engineer. Those labors equipped me with both the means and the insight required to appreciate and celebrate beauty. Now that I’m retired from my material trade, I can put what I earned in those years to creating beauties of my own. Whatever monetary profit I might make from doing so is essentially irrelevant.

***

     “This love, you say, comes only once while the hross lives?”
     “But it takes his whole life. When he is young he has to look for his mate; and then he has to court her; then he begets young; then he rears them; then he remembers all this, and boils it inside him and makes it into poems and wisdom.”
     “But the pleasure he must be content only to remember?”
     “That is like saying, ‘My food I must be content only to eat.’ ”
     “I do not understand.”
     “A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.”

     [C. S. Lewis, Out Of The Silent Planet]

     The pinnacle position of the Maslovian hierarchy embodies a certain ambiguity. What does it mean to “self-actualize?” Different persons answer the question differently. A friend of mine, a brilliant engineer with an incredible range of skills, does so by building model train layouts – and yes, they are beautiful. (They’d better be; otherwise his wife wouldn’t allow him most of their house for the purpose.) Another friend, a retired priest, has plunged deeply into the intellectual / scholastic part of Scriptural exegesis. He hopes to elicit even more significance, even more beauty, from the writings of the Judean and early Christian eras.

     Those men are highly “self-actualized”…in the more usual terms, highly fulfilled. Their lives’ work, much of it mundane and some of it even unpleasant, has brought them to a point in space, time, and circumstance where they can give themselves over to the full-time pursuit of beauty. They get no material reward for their efforts. That the media through which they pursue it are wholly different is irrelevant.

     My chosen medium is storytelling. I have a modest readership. Ironically, the bulk of my readers live in other nations. I write for them, yes, but principally for myself: to satisfy my desire to make something meaningful and beautiful. For me, that is “self-actualization.”

     Even though that’s clear to me at the moment, there are times when I lament the relatively small number of readers I’ve attracted. But that’s no better a measure of “self-actualization” than the precision of a statement of the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight. I wrote this piece in large measure as a reminder to myself. Apologies for inflicting it on you, Gentle Reader.

     But I digress. (Yes, I do it a lot.) In any man’s life there comes a peak: a point of highest achievement. He cannot know when it will come. Indeed, he cannot know whether it has come. Mine may be behind me already. Sometimes I ponder that possibility, with a wistfulness you may imagine. But I continue in the hope it might yet lie ahead.

***

     Back to Dr. Johnson’s idiocy: If you are engaged in doing something because of a paramount desire for material gain, you’re likely to slough other considerations. In particular, you’re likely to embrace the “not good, but Tuesday” ethos of production above all other things. They who labor to earn know that pressure.

     But if you are under no such pressure, you have been given a great gift: the gift of time. It’s yours to use as you please. My engineer and clerical friends above have chosen their media, as I have chosen mine.

     So I strive to write beauty. I do the best I can with it. I want every sentence to be perfect: i.e., to express perfectly exactly what I have in mind as I craft it. That’s why it’s taken me nearly thirty years to complete a mere nineteen novels. No, they’re not perfect. They contain numerous imperfections. But that’s life as a mortal, fallible man under the veil of time.

     Just a few early-morning thoughts. For a little more along similar lines, please read this essay by writer John C. Wright. On the other hand, if you’ve already had as much as you can stand…have a nice day!

Oct 18 2023

Who Is Really Speaking?

     Yesterday was a rollercoaster ride: far too much to do and too little time to do it. You don’t need to hear the details. One consequence was that I “missed” my afternoon Rosary interval. Being on the go with mundane things can do that to me. Worse, I didn’t even realize it until the day was spent.

     There are people who scoff at prayer. Remarkably, many of them are believers of a sort. (What sort, I’ll leave to you.) Their arguments boil down to a small group of contentions:

  • God knows everything, right? So He already knows what you’re going to ask Him for.
  • Prayer can’t change God, so whether you get what you request is unaffected by your prayers.
  • If you’re “in” with God, your prayers are unnecessary; if you’re “on the outs” with Him, they’re pointless.

     The above characterize prayer as an attempt to change reality. That completely misunderstands prayer and what it’s for.

***

     A brief, brilliant exchange from the 1993 movie Shadowlands, about the relationship between C. S. Lewis and his wife Joy, says more about the true nature of prayer than most theologians manage in the whole of their lives:

     Harry: Christopher can scoff, Jack, but I know how hard you’ve been praying; and now God is answering your prayers.
     C. S. Lewis: That’s not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God, it changes me.

     We who pray don’t do so in the hope of “changing God.” We do so in the hope that it will change us: our awareness, our priorities, and the yawning void within each of us that we are unable to fill by our own actions. That void can only be filled by God. It is God, no one and nothing else, that gives human life meaning.

     Ponder that for a moment.

***

     Consider the prerequisites for sincere prayer:

  • Acknowledgement of God;
  • Acceptance of His will;
  • Exterior silence.

     Even ritual prayers, written by others, require those conditions to be worthwhile – and here, we come up against the perversities of language, imposed upon us by our consciousness of the passage of time. “Worthwhile” makes prayer sound like an investment, something incurred in the hope of a return. And to be candid, petitionary prayer of the direct and immediate sort – i.e., prayer for the relief of a temporal need such as poverty or ill health – does have a bit of that cast. Even so, the coda of all prayer is Thy will be done, just as Christ said:

     After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen. [Matthew 6:9-13]

     It’s not a negotiation. It’s an acknowledgement of His supremacy over all things, including one’s own circumstances. But if His will must trump ours, as the scoffer says, what’s the point?

     The point is the attainment and maintenance of those three prerequisite conditions. With those conditions in place, we can hope to hear His voice, and learn of His will for ourselves.

     Slam that point:


We don’t pray to change God.
We certainly don’t pray to hear our own voices.
We pray in the hope that we’ll hear Him.

***

     To hear, one must be silent. — Ursula Le Guin

     Quoth Robert Cardinal Sarah:

     First of all, it may be helpful to recall what asceticism is. This word is not praised to the skies by our consumer society–far from it!…Asceticism is a means that helps us to remove from our life anything that weighs it down, in other words, whatever hampers our spiritual life and, therefore, is an obstacle to prayer. Yes, it is indeed in prayer that God communicates his Life to us and manifests his presence in our soul…And prayer is essentially silence.

     There is more wisdom in the above than I could express in a million words of my own. Silence is the great need of our time. There’s so much noise, so many voices clamoring for attention, and so many pleas and demands from so many sources, that the bombardment can prevent us from hearing our own thoughts. I wrote about it in a fit near to despair:

     “The worst” is the noise. The perpetual din. The endless screaming, wailing, moaning, hectoring, begging, and cursing. The ceaseless demands from politicians. The carping from the unsatisfied. The orations of the world-savers. The unending gimme gimme gimme of those who want something they can’t get for themselves and will never realize that no amount of free stuff will make them happy. And of course, the “media” of all varieties, every one of which insists that we must all stay right-up-to-the-minute on What’s Happening Now. Yes, including the bloody Internet.

     The great need of our time is silence. We’re starved for it. The din is making us crazy. We’re unable to cope with its relentlessness. And the greatest of all ironies is that in nearly every case, we collaborate in our own deprivation.

     Only silence makes it possible to hear clearly and distinctly. But in a regime of silence, what could we possibly hear? When all the external voices are silent, whose voice comes through? What might He be saying?

     That is the great challenge of temporal life to the believer. And though you style yourself an atheist, your need for silence is no less than his.

***

     Many an unbeliever has found God in silence. He who has managed to exclude the noise from without will often hear the “still, small voice” that emanates from within. For some, nothing else can do the trick. Evidence and reasoning are impotent against the convictions of one determined to disbelieve…but His voice is another matter.

     The precondition of silence can be obtained through sincere prayer. Indeed, that is prayer’s highest objective: to exclude the voices from without that persistently drag us away from God, so that we may hear the voice from within. And that voice’s first statement to you will be simple yet profound: the fact that lies beneath all other facts:

“I Am.”

     May God bless and keep you all.

Oct 17 2023

No… Well, Only Minimal Comment Dept.

     I have a busy morning before me, so please enjoy the following examples of something for which your Curmudgeon is not generally known: brevity.

***

1. Why?

     Bull’s-eye, Tuck.

***

2. The Professor Misfires.

     From Glenn Reynolds:

     Is everything going to hell?

     Maybe, maybe not.

     BZZZT! Wrong, Professor, but thank you for playing. The correct answer is “Yes! You only just noticed?”

***

3. A Two-Parter.

     Quoth the Dementia-Patient-In-Chief:

     While speaking at the Human Rights Campaign National Dinner on Saturday night, President Joe Biden pushed for an “assault weapons” ban and asked, “Who in God’s name needs a weapon with 100 rounds in the chamber?”

    

  1. I do.
  2. Piss off, cabbage-brain.

***

4. (Facepalm)

     From Tablet Magazine:

     The more we listened to freshly minted universal experts, the more we were struck by the increasing lunacy of their pronouncements on every topic under the sun, always backed by “studies” and “science”—where COVID-19 came from, how many genders there are, which skin tones and personal experiences qualify a person for protection status and which do not, whether it was OK for a Syrian dictator to bomb and gas 500,000 of his people, whether the U.S. should ally itself with a Holocaust-denying medieval theocracy, whether the president of the United States was secretly a Russian agent, whether large American cities should let drug addicts and violent schizophrenics get high on the streets and steal stuff—and more. Indeed, over time, we were struck by how little the ideas themselves seemed to matter; what so many people seemed most attached to was power.

     I’m shocked that when the light went on it didn’t BLEEP!ing blind you.

     We were also alarmed that … no one else was alarmed, especially among communal leaders. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Civil Liberties Union, once the protectors of the vulnerable, became handmaidens of power.

     Ever heard of Robert Conquest’s Laws of Politics?

     As a result, our archive now looks like the answer to the question faced by so many people this week—namely: What the hell is going on?

     See segment #1 above.

***

5. (Facepalm #2)

     It takes some people a blow to the head to get the idea:

     The Wexner Foundation is ending its relationship with Harvard University.

     […]

     “We are stunned and sickened at the dismal failure of Harvard’s leadership to take a clear and unequivocal stand against the barbaric murders of innocent Israeli civilians by terrorists last Saturday, the Sabbath and a festival day,” the non-profit said.

     Haven’t been watching closely, have you? This crap’s been going on at universities for a while now – and not just at Harvard.

***

6. Failure To Abide By Plainly Printed Instructions.

     Shamelessly stolen from Kenny “Wirecutter” Lane:

     It does say “Do not drive or operate heavy machinery” on the label, doesn’t it?

***

7. (Facepalm #3)

     Wanted: Event planner (preferably not insane).

***

     And do have a nice day.

Oct 17 2023

After Some Time to Think About It…

…I’m growing more suspicious about those “burned babies”.

Now, in some ways, I’m your average person. My FIRST response to the thought of an atrocity – against women or children – is to fire up the emotional burners to REVENGE!

But, I am NOT in favor of getting involved in YAP-FoW – Yet Another Pointless Foreign War – in more than any SLIGHT agreement for facilitating with purchase or transport of weapons. Note, that is NOT financing the guns – that’s their responsibility – nor is it physically ferrying them.

I’m not in favor of ANYTHING that entangles us in ANY foreign wars or puts American citizens in danger. I also believe that any person/business/NGO heading out of the USA for more than a short vacation needs to have a ‘Come to Jesus’ discussion with the State Department about their proposed activities in other countries, that includes the government making it clear that they will be on their own (with signed, notarized legal agreements) that lay out the terms:

  • The traveler(s) will be expected to comply with all rules, laws, and customs in the countries they visit. Failure to do so will result in, at BEST, quiet negotiation for their release, coupled with PERMANENT removal of their passport, should they be permitted to return to the USA.
  • If any business or NGO engages in political/cultural interference in a foreign country, any consequences will be on THEM. No exceptions. Their business/NGO may ask for quiet assistance in reducing the penalties/sentences, but ALL costs of that activity will be born by the organizations. The same with bribes – THEY have to manage the process themselves.
  • The agreements will acknowledge that they have been warned about the social customs/laws of said countries, that the safe thing to do is NOT consume alcohol or drugs, or engage in sex acts with locals, and that – should they decide to ignore that advice, it’s THEIR problem.

That should cover probably 90% or more of the problems caused by idiots in foreign places. For that matter, it’s not bad advice for those traveling in parts of this country with different cultural expectations.

As for foreign wars, there is no upside to our getting involved, whether that is direct financial assistance, agreements to support/defend any country (other than PERHAPS Mexico or Canada – that truly IS a legitimate concern, should they be attacked), or some nebulous principle.

Oct 16 2023

When Everything Hits the Fan at Once

Wednesday afternoon, I got a panicked call from my sister (who was home alone – her husband had gone on a trip to visit his sister). She was having trouble breathing, and her O2 levels were in the high 80s. She did NOT want to call an ambulance – not sure what her thinking was, assuming she was rational enough to have a reason for her preference.

So, I called around. One daughter was already at a hospital with her husband, who was very sick with a respiratory infection. My son stepped up, and drove over, coaxed her into his car, and dropped her off. We arrived about 5 minutes later.

I stayed with her in the ER. The whole thing took a lot of time, and they only finally got around to dealing with her because I had a minor hissy fit. We were finally seen, and she was directed to treat her infection symptomatically.

I told my husband I was staying the night (didn’t like to leave her with no one else in the house). I ended up staying 3 nights, and left around 11 on Saturday. At that time, she was functional, feeling better, and able to manage.

That evening, she called me to say that our brother was also quite ill (he is medically retired from working, and his health is fragile). I talked to him, got him to check his O2 (in the mid-80s), and told him to unlock his door. When he did, I told him to call 911. After some back and forth about whether this was necessary, he did.

He was examined, treated, and – as his O2 levels had improved – released to home. When I talked to him today, he was feeling much better.

My husband and I both came down with the Chinese Crud. Fortunately, for me a mild case. My husband is still considerably under the weather.

Today, my son informed me that he was feeling ill, too. I told him to go out and get an oximeter. The prices of them have been dropping, and it’s a good thing to have in the house (generally, if your O2 levels drop into the 80s, get your heinie to the hospital). It’s a good way to make sure that you don’t fall into the danger zone, but get prompt help should you be sick enough to need medical assistance.

Easy to use, takes up little space, and handy for anyone with respiratory issues.

The above one is available on Amazon. There are others, too, and my son’s will be delivered today.

So, REALLY busy for the last week.

Oct 16 2023

Lessons Not Learned

One might think that after Kevin McCarthy worked a deal with the National Socialist Democrat Workers Party, and then was promptly bit in the ass by said National Socialist Democrat Workers Party, people in the GOP might step back from further deals with the National Socialist Democrat Workers Party.

Sadly, the GOP establishment has far more in common with the National Socialist Democrat Workers Party than they have with their own voters.

NBC News reported that U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) and several other Republicans have participated in closed-door meetings with Democrat House Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) to reach a solution to keep Jordan from securing the required 218 votes to become the new House Speaker.

I have two words for the GOP establishment. Fuck. Off.

My hatred for the two-faced backstabbing traitors of the GOPe is only eclipsed by my hatred for the National Socialists on the other side of the isle. I would have no problem if the entire legislative body was dropped into an abyss. If a new sun was suddenly formed in the middle of the Capitol building and eliminated every single member of Congress, I would shed a tear for the very few of them that actually stood up for their constituents, but that number is a tiny fraction of Congress. The rest of them are grifters, communists, bought-and-paid-for puppets and con men. The fact that Mike Rogers is meeting with the National Socialist Democrat Workers Party to determine the next Speaker of the House should result in his being expelled from the GOP, but we all know that’s not going to happen. Just like they’re not going to pass a budget, as they have refused to do so since 2007. The grift and the con must go on, and we’re now at the point where the people in D.C. are now just looting the treasury as the country crumbles around them.

Mike Rogers and “several other republicans” have proven that they care more about the grift and the con than they do about representing the people who voted for them. This is why the GOP is hated by their own voters. Because time and time again, when the rubber meets the road, the GOP folds like a cheap suit and does what the National Socialist Democrat Workers Party tells them to do.

A pox on both their houses.

Oct 16 2023

Against The Odds

     I could have titled this one “Choosing Your Battles,” but the scope of the thing isn’t purely a matter of strategic or military considerations. It’s more about not being as stubborn as a mule while simultaneously being a horse’s ass…and before you ask, yes: I did search for equine metaphors and images before choosing the title above.

     Chess players have a saying: “One lemon leads to another.” A good player who’s just realized that he’s made a strategic mistake will try hard to retreat from it. However, a lesser player will try to “justify” it with further bad moves. This is merely an expression of the human reluctance to admit to error: i.e., to concede that your game plan wasn’t well thought out.

     Chess, of course, lacks the element of chance. Everything in the game is deliberate. Everything is visible except for the thoughts of the opponent. But games that incorporate chance can produce results that occasionally seem to justify a success-averse decision: i.e., they can award victory to the player who’s chosen to play against the odds. The player who doesn’t recognize that he’s defied the probabilities of his situation will be “reinforced” in his behavior by such an outcome.

     To be maximally gentle about it, that seldom ends well.

     I have in mind today two cases of strategies planned against the odds. One of them, entirely well intentioned from the beginning, might end in a great tragedy after a long period of seeming success. The other, whose perversity could have been foreseen ab initio, has already brought a great nation to grief out of pride and the unwillingness of its political class to retreat from a mistaken posture.

***

     “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong — but that’s the way to bet.” – Damon Runyan

     If at the racetrack, you bet on a longshot and win, you’re likely to win big. But winnings are transient. There will be more races, in which the odds will favor certain outcomes. If you persist in betting against the odds, you’re likely to lose heavily. That’s why smart handicappers with strong track records are highly prized by racetracks and racing publications.

     Geostrategy is similar. The game goes ever on. While a “player” is seldom “bankrupted” and thus eliminated from further “play,” it does happen now and then. Consider the fate of the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I, or that of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.

     It hardly needs to be said that no “player” in the Great Game actively wants to be eliminated. Yet men at the levers of power have made longshot bets that brought about the fall of their nations…and sometimes the loss of their own lives. Sometimes the consequences of those fatal decisions were long delayed, which can muddy the waters for strategists looking backward in time.

***

     Consider Israel.

     The State of Israel was founded in the midst of its enemies. Moreover, those enemies were and are animated by their religion. Never mind that Islam is a maniacal, homicidal creed that exalts violence against non-Muslims. What matters is that it proclaims its dictates to be the will of God. And how many times must it be said? Religious warriors never accept defeat. They win or they die.

     Six million Israelis are surrounded by approximately 220 million Muslims who hate them with a wholly irrational passion. That passion is often expressed with explosives. As time has marched on, those explosives have grown mighty big. Eventually some Islamic power will acquire the capacity to wage nuclear terror against Israel. What are the odds that it will never happen?

     For those who like their ironies blunt, Israel was also founded out of religious conviction: i.e., that historical Israel is the true and proper homeland of the Jewish people. As much as I want to see Israel survive and flourish, the whole nation is a bet against the odds and has been from the beginning. Unless some unimaginable event eliminates the entire Islamic population of the Middle East, or retracts the hatred and hostility prescribed to them by Islamic dogma, that bet will remain a longshot. Israel will never know peace.

     It’s a friend of Israel who writes this, sadly and reluctantly to be sure. But the odds are what they are. To those who play the Great Game, nothing matters but power: its acquisition, retention, and enlargement.

***

     In the first years after World War II, it probably seemed to American politicians that they could get away with anything. After all, we had the Bomb and no one else did. Besides, the other signatories of the Bretton Woods agreements hadn’t spotted the long-term consequences of that pact. And we’d demonstrated that we could and would send our young men and our weapons anywhere in support of a favored cause. The whole country was aflame with pride in American power and the victory it had achieved.

     Let there be no mistake about it. Among ordinary Americans, that pride was essentially wholesome. Yes, it was founded on a kind of historical myopia. Moreover, anyone familiar with the dynamic of power would have realized that what We the People might intend is unlikely to march in lockstep with what the political elite would prefer. Still, our hearts were in the right place.

     But the vision of a benevolent American Colossus bestriding the world, ruling it unopposed in the name of right and justice, lasted less than five years. That’s how long it took the Soviets to get the Bomb. Britain, France, Red China, and other nations soon acquired it too. So the vision of a Pax Americana guaranteed by our monopoly over atomic power could not be sustained. “Quality” had to be augmented by “quantity.”

     In truth, the U.S. was successful at using its military might to impose our preferences in some faraway places. We failed singularly in Vietnam, and more recently in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the determination of the political establishment to remain the “world policeman” did not flag after a “few setbacks.” The powerful never willingly relinquish their power…not even when events have proved that power illusory.

     From the outset, it was a bet against the odds. In 1945, there were approximately 140 million Americans, out of a world population of 3 billion. America’s Gross National Product was slightly more than half of Gross World Product. Today the odds are even more dramatically against us: 330 million of us out of 8 billion. Our GDP is barely more than a quarter of the GWP. Present fertility rates continuing, the odds will lengthen still further.

     Bets against lengthening odds become ever more likely to reap huge losses.

***

     Trees do not grow to the sky. – Baron Philippe de Rothschild

     The longer a trend has persisted, the more suspect it becomes. — “John Galt”

     Every bankrupt gambler will tell you about his “system.” They all dream of recouping what they’ve lost. But a dream is usually what it is. It seldom manifests in reality.

     Persistently betting against the odds courts the same sort of national bankruptcy as it does at the racetrack or the casino. This is not at all affected by rights or justice. Do the Jews of Israel have a right to exist? Of course they do, just as do you and I. Does that right armor them against the malice of the enemies that surround them? Afraid not. Despite their ever more exhausting military preparations, the Israelis must hope and trust in the benevolence of God. While I, too, trust in Divine benevolence, as has recently been said, it’s Pollyannaish to lean on your shovel and pray for a hole.

     As for the perpetuation of America as Globocop, reality has been serving us notice these past two decades. Once again, rights and justice play no part in the matter. Whether our forces are deployed in good causes or bad ones hardly matters. We’re simply outnumbered and outgunned – and suffering an economy in decline, as well.

     The late Walter Williams, in a column that excited much anger and vilification, once wrote that you have a perfect right to leave your wallet on top of your car, but that doesn’t affect the odds that it will be there when you return. The subject of that column was feminists’ strange belief that their right to dress as they please is all that matters – that the odds of being preyed on are irrelevant. That belief is and was so absolute that feminists treat accusing a woman of bad judgment for going scantily clad among predators as “blaming the victim.” Dr. Williams was talking good sense, not rights…but the message was rejected and the messenger attacked viciously. I’d expect the message of this column to be treated similarly.

     Have a nice day.

Oct 15 2023

The Chronicle of The DC, 15Oct23: Shameless, Merciless, Godless

The story below is bad enough. That it occurred in a Jewish state that has become as secularized as any ostensibly Christian one is what prompted my choice of title.

Israeli boy featured in COVID vaccine campaign dies of heart attack at age 8

The Death Cultists are shameless, merciless and Godless with clear consciences because they believe they are saving the world from overpopulation.

So don’t ask for mercy in the traditional sense. They believe they are being merciful: for those who survive because of their (monstrous) efforts. It the future humans they claim to be saving. The current billions who are their targets — well that’s just too bad.

The Jewish belief is there is still hope for them if they repent of their evil and strive to make some recompense for their past misdeeds. But they rather simply believe that Christianity is nonsense and they won’t suffer Hell in eternity, so forget trying to get them to repent — even those who are allegedly still Jewish.

And there is something that else that really roasts my hide. This allegedly “Life Site” publication chose to highlight this one criticism:

‘How many more children will die on the golden altar?’

That is more a socialist complaint about profit motive than one about the sanctity of human life that Judaism pioneered and that Christianity, being easier to live with, increased the notion of more universally. So this publication is no better than the rest who refuse to concede that God said DO NOT HARM THE CHILDREN! beginning in Genesis 22 at the very peak of mount Zion.

I cannot begin to tell you how sickening the behavior of major clerics of all the religions have become. In the United States the number who have been cowed by the qualifications “requested” by IRS code 501(c)1 in order to keep donations and properties tax free are the real golden altar that keeps them silent.

It is the lay individuals, mostly Christian, who fight the sacrifice of children. They have earned my praise.

Oct 15 2023

The Battle For Your Soul

     What’s that you say? You don’t feel as if you’re being fought over? Well, I’m not one to argue feelz. However, the objective evidence is as plain as a fart. Would you like some?

     Please read all five of those articles. I’d expect any Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch to see the relevance.

     If you are not permitted to defend yourself when attacked, you have no rights whatsoever. If you are not permitted to speak your mind, you are disarmed when facing those who seek to program you. If the major institutions of the nation are steadily turning hostile to you, such that you must create alternatives specific to your convictions, you are under siege. Finally, if virulent, hatred-soaked hostility is permeating even the rituals by which we form our marital unions, what will become of us?

     This is not about any particular set of beliefs, religious, political, or otherwise. Rather, it’s about the multi-front attack on freedom of conscience.

     Sometimes an attacker isn’t identifiable. For example, Co-Conspirator Ragin’ Dave received this “comment” to this piece:

     Says the Judeo Christian Boomers. When the Jihad or whatever it will be called breaks out in America your asses are done. The younger generations have had enough of your postulations to last a lifetime. Nobody likes Judeo Christian Boomers. The only thing standing in the way of all of you getting your asses kicked up and down the street daily is the law and God’s threat of Hell for taking your sorry asses out. Make no mistakes, your on the list.

     Charming, eh? I trashed it, of course. But the point is clear: the “commenter,” too much a coward to post under his actual name, hates Dave for daring to speak his mind, and wants to let Dave know it. Were enough such haters to register their “opinions” in concert, a weaker man than Dave might be cowed out of expressing his opinions.

     Of course the attacker was identifiable in the case of Nathan Perry. The bullhorn-toting villain who had him charged with assault has many confreres. All of them have the same agenda: to silence their opponents by any means necessary. They often infest pro-free-speech rallies and pro-life demonstrations. They’ve even attacked those rallying for the incarcerated January 6 protestors.

     I’d say the pattern is “obvious,” but, well, you know.

***

     Once more, with feeling:

     [C]ourage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky. [C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters]

     A time is upon us when the courage of one’s convictions is one of the most important virtues one can possess. Indeed, it may be the most important. Concerning the “whistleblower” whom Divemedic cited, a fainting-flower type tried to argue that under those conditions, no counteraction is possible because “it’s all videotaped” and “the police are against us.” I argued to the contrary, in response to which he accused me of spouting “noble words” – “Please have a name tag on so we know you actually acted on your fine words.” – i.e., being a poseur. But cowards are like that; for anyone near to them, even on the Web, to express more courage than they possess is intolerable to them.

     The Left has been capitalizing on our reluctance to “go to the mattresses” for quite some time. Consider the 2017 inauguration ceremony for Donald Trump. Consider what went on in Washington that day. It might not be the first time persons in the Right were physically attacked for daring to be in the Right, but it was a dramatic demonstration of where matters stood that day…and since then.

     God will not easily forgive those who refuse to stand to their tack when assailed or threatened.

Oct 15 2023

Marital Matters

     This might become an occasional feature at Liberty’s Torch. There are few things that interest me more than the pressures on marriage and families today. The rise of militant feminism has exacerbated the natural tensions that will always exist between men and women. Yea verily, even when he’s an actual man and she’s an actual woman. Nowhere have those tensions produced funnier / sadder stories than in the last moments before the supposedly happy couple tie the knot.

     In all probability, as few of my Gentle Readers live in an unelectrified cave, you’ve heard the term “Bridezilla” and have read a few tales about such. A “Bridezilla” story that amuses you will seldom be about someone you’re fond of. That would make it too painful. But some such tales are instructive, and deserve to be propagated. The following is one such, shamelessly stolen from the frugal-living publication Money Awaits:

     The bride was always complaining about how the groom was “wishy-washy” with picking a date, while he was always silent. The mother of the bride was your stereotypical Brooklyn Jewish Mother and had her hand in EVERYTHING to make sure things were perfect for her little princess.

     Well, the engagement party starts, and everyone except for the couple seem to be having a great time.

     Then, halfway through the party, we suddenly heard the girl scream at her fiancé “WE WILL NEVER HAVE A CHRISTMAS TREE IN MY HOUSE, SO YOU CAN GET OVER IT!!!!” And from there it devolved into a shouting match between the couple, who moved from the banquet room to the lobby so their “guests” couldn’t hear the argument.

     (Didn’t work. They heard everything).

     Apparently, she was Jewish and he was Protestant and not once in their relationship had they discussed religion. They went at it on and off for two hours.

     She was screaming at the top of her lungs about how their (non-existent) children would be raised Jewish, and how his traditions didn’t matter. Her mother was standing at her side, nodding in agreement, and interjecting occasionally with a “that’s right” or “you tell him.”

     The groom was pleading for her to at least compromise to let him at least invite his pastor from his hometown for the wedding, and said that their (non-existent) children could possibly do things with his parents for Christmas, even if they didn’t celebrate.

     The guests just kept partying, pretending nothing was happening, but you could see on all of their faces that they wanted to leave.

     Only, well, they couldn’t since they would have to pass by the couple to get to the only exit. Only after two hours and the argument eventually devolving into her INSISTING her children would never see a Christmas tree in their whole lives, the groom finally dejectedly said, “Well then maybe this isn’t going to work.”

     She threw her ring at him and said, I swear to god, “THEN WHY DID YOU LET ME MAKE YOU PROPOSE?!?!?!?!?!?!” She then changed her mind, picked up the ring, and said, “Whatever. I’m keeping this.” Then she stormed off. Her mother looked at her ex-potential-son-in-law, told him he was an idiot for letting her baby go, and went after her.

     I’ve NEVER seen a banquet room clear out so fast. Within 15 minutes, everyone was gone and it was a ghost town. From the looks of it, everyone took their “gifts” with them, too.

     I hope Money Awaits won’t be too ticked off at me for lifting that tale wholesale from its pages. It’s one vignette in a much longer article. While the other Bridezilla incidents it recounts are amusing in the horrifying way that characterizes the genre, the one I filched speaks volumes. It asks questions that every man must ask his beloved before they “get serious:”

  • What are your religious beliefs?
  • Do you have an aversion to any other religious beliefs or practices?
  • If we have children, in what religion will we raise them?

     Moreover, he must be satisfied with nothing less than absolutely clear answers, and he must be convinced that they will not change.

     Clearly, the groom-to-be in the above story never made such a demand of his intended. He probably lacked the courage. The consequences speak for themselves.

Oct 14 2023

Ah, the joys of country living

So, my sainted mother had some work done to the barn. That work necessitated the removal of a portion of the fence line, and so now I get to rebuild a new fence line to replace the one that came down.

In order to support the end of the fenceline, as well as add a new gate into the pasture, you need to sink some pretty large supports into the ground. Around here we typically use old railroad ties that you can purchase at stores such as North 40 for exactly that purpose.

Slinging around 250 pound railroad ties isn’t very fun, but hey, I have a tractor. Digging the holes to put the ties into is a whole ‘nother world of suckitude. I spent the first hour of the day putting the auger onto the back of the tractor. I don’t think it had been used in years, so you had to grease up all the joints, find the pins, hook up the attachments, hook the drive shaft up to the powertrain, and then it was off to the races. Or so I thought. The soil in this part of the country is trash. Garbage. It’s clay. And we have a layer called “hardpan”, which sits just under the topsoil. Sometimes it’s a foot down, sometimes it’s a couple inches. And that auger just sat on top of the hardpan and spun. And spun. And didn’t move one damn inch of dirt. I put the bucket down and then used the hydraulic system to lift the front of the tractor UP so that I could put some force on the auger.

Didn’t budge the hardpan. Ho. Lee. Crap.

So myself and two other fine gentlemen spent all morning and a goodly portion of the afternoon taking a pick and a cheater bar to the hardpan, breaking it up so we could shovel it out. I haven’t done crap like that since I left home the first time. My shoulders are screaming at me right now. I’m too damn old for this shit. That’s why I have a tractor in the first place! Turns out I should have purchased a jackhammer. But we got the supports in, cemented and packed with gravel. I’ll be pounding T-posts into the ground starting on Monday, and hopefully by the end of next week I’ll be stretching wire and getting the pasture ready for the horses again.

Damn, I thought I was done with this kind of stuff.

Oct 14 2023

Complexities And Human Capability

     Today, over at Cold Fury, there’s an excellent and thought-provoking essay by co-contributor SteveF that explores one of the funnier fallacies commonly advanced as an aphorism:

     (NB: I have no idea who Hanlon is or was and bear him no ill will, but I will say that as a vendor of rose-colored glasses, he has few equals.)

     Robert A. Heinlein, no slouch in the intellect department, added this codicil:

“But don’t exclude malice.”

     From here we delve into the real meat of Steve’s essay: system complexity and what its emergence presages.

***

     Steve cites several cases of seemingly inexplicable functional incompetence and addresses them as an engineer would. (Rather than force myself to steal big honking pieces of his essay, I implore you to read the whole thing. It’s worth your time and your full attention, as few of my dollops of crap are.) Here’s his conclusion, as narrowly as I can grab it:

     Many systems today are too complex for anyone but a genius to fully understand. Engineered systems, business systems, economic systems, organizational systems. Most systems start simple but as needs change or problems are found they gradually increased in complexity, from something comprehensible by an bright but not outstanding man to a Gordian knot of relationships and dependencies and “don’t change this section; we don’t know why but if you touch it the whole thing breaks”. Others were complex from the start, set up by a genius and then put into the hands of the only-slightly-above-average to operate.

     I wouldn’t expect to understand many of those systems in their entirety myself. But I do know how to analyze and explain a failure in a complex system. It nearly always starts with the principles of feedback.

     Feedback is the most important principle in practical design. No matter how complex the whole, each of the active or reactive parts must be balanced by a source of feedback that will correct its deviations from planned behavior. A simple example of this arises from the steam engine.

     A steam engine will always embed the possibility of a “runaway:” i.e., the rising of the pressure in its boiler to a point that will cause it to explode. Early steam engines lacked a provision for this hazard. The explosions that resulted caused their designers to incorporate what was called a governor: a device that would sense that the pressure of the boiler was rising to a dangerous height and had to be released. Here’s an abstract design for one such:

     The pressure generated by the fire in the engine’s boiler rotates the top of the governor assembly. When that rotation reaches a certain speed, the balls pictured will spin fast enough to pull the bottom part of the assembly upward. That uncovers an opening in the pipe through which steam will escape, lowering the boiler pressure. Thus, the source of the potential explosion is used to provide negative feedback that will restrain its behavior to within an acceptable limit.

     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.

     So by looking for the points where the necessary negative feedback was absent, it’s usually possible to figure out what went wrong: why this bridge wasn’t inspected, or that hospital didn’t receive the drugs it needs, or this other bureaucracy didn’t catch on to the fact that Smith had his hand in the till until the scoundrel had fled to Argentina. The great problem is at the design stage…and sad to say, no system can be designed ab initio in such a fashion that later, a posteriori changes – expansion of personnel or accretion of functions not originally intended (a.k.a. “mission creep”) – can’t screw it up beyond recognition.

     Bureaucratic systems experience such expansions and accretions with near-perfect predictability. Examples of bureaucracies that haven’t suffered such things are so rare that I can’t name one.

     And as usual, that’s not the end of the tale.

***

     Systems of every sort will tend to expand: to acquire more parts and more functions over time. Engineers usually call this retrofitting, when they’re not calling it something profane or obscene. It happens because of the human tendency to avert labor and expense. Doing a whole new design that provides for the “omitted” parts or functions is almost always much more laborious and expensive than jiggering it “just a little bit.” There are other factors, of course, especially in governments. For the analysis of such cases, please refer to the wisdom – really! – of the Great Lawgiver, Cyril Northcote Parkinson.

     Every such expansion will multiply the niches in which an opportunist with low motives can cause trouble:

  • He might be bent on sabotage,
  • Or perhaps peculation,
  • And in every case has no real interest in the functions assigned to his position, nor in the system of which he’s a part.

     Complexity always favors the machinations of such men. Unfortunately, the dynamic of power, which operates in all bureaucracies, will privilege him above even his superiors in the bureaucracy. They will never possess enough corrective feedback mechanisms or enforcement power to thwart him. Indeed, the odds favor the superiors being denied any information that might evoke corrective reaction. This hearkens back to the SNAFU Principle. In the classic trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus, Hagbard Celine expresses it most memorably: “A man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger.”

     And so an important theorem is revealed:

Complexity privileges layabouts and villains.
Therefore, layabouts and villains will seek complexity.
If they can’t find it, they’ll attempt to create it.

     I’d call that the FUBAR Theorem, but I’m not sure that epithet hasn’t already been assigned to other uses.

***

     Heady stuff for a Saturday, eh, Gentle Reader? I hate it, myself, as it offers no recipe for corrective action once a bureaucracy is in place. But it’s important information even so. It guides the man who merely wants a place to work at what he does best, unhampered by his surroundings and those who inhabit them.

     A coda with which to close: the late, much lamented Ol’ Remus advised us all to stay away from crowds. This is advice of the first water. Crowds are themselves complex entities that facilitate the actions of villains. It hardly matters what particular variety of villainy he intends; whatever it is, a crowd will surely be more favorable for what he intends, and will provide a higher chance for a clean getaway, than a sparse district.

     Verbum sat sapienti. And make sure you have enough ammo.

Oct 14 2023

Why?

     Some recent stories are enough to enrage a saint:

     …and I’m no saint.

     I never expected to see anything like the degree of malice and arrogant self-protection exhibited by “our” “government” concerning the dangerous pseudo-vaccines for COVID-19. Nevertheless, it fits the character of the locusts who’ve swarmed into it. Owing to their positions and their anonymity, there is no compelling them, and no trusting them. They are the lowest of the low.

     This is the dynamic of power in a font too large and too bold to be denied or ignored. Further comment is unnecessary. (If you believe otherwise, see your brain-care specialist at once.)

Oct 13 2023

Let There Be No Mistake

     I stand with Israel. Faiths don’t matter. Locale doesn’t matter. This is a war between civilization and Seventh-Century barbarism. Israel is civilization. Work out the rest for yourself, if you must.

     And now we have proof:

     A member of the Palestine Scholars Association in the Diaspora, Mahmoud Al-Shajrawi, is on video boasting about a new “fatwa” issued by his organization that allows the murders of Israelis “wherever they may be.”

     The stunning claim was captured by the Middle East Media Research Institute:

     Dr. Mahmoud Al-Shajrawi of the Palestine Scholars Association in the Diaspora: A “Wonderful” New Fatwa Permits Killing Israelis Wherever They May Be – in Palestine, Israel, or Abroad

     That organization explained, “Mahmoud Al-Shajrawi of the Palestine Scholars Association in the Diaspora said on an October 9, 2023 show on Al-Quds Al-Youm TV (Palestinian Islamic Jihad – Gaza) that his organization issued a ‘wonderful’ fatwa stating that it is permissible to kill Israelis wherever they may be, whether it is in the West Bank, within Israel’s 1948 border, or in the Arab countries that have normalized relations with Israel.”

     His comments, translated, were, “A wonderful fatwa was issued by the Palestine Scholars Association in the Diaspora yesterday. The fatwa permits killing Israelis wherever they may be – in Palestine, in the West Bank, inside the 1948 [borders], or outside Palestine, even in [Arab] countries that normalized their relations [with Israel], that a large number of so-called ‘Israeli tourists’ visit. Most of them are soldiers or conscripts in the occupation army, and when they return [to Israel], they take part in killing us and our sons.”

     Do you understand, Gentle Reader? How about you, Chicolini? Well, do you?

     They have made their aims perfectly clear. It’s time to show them exactly what that will get them: death, in wholesale quantities.

     If civilization is to survive, there can be no compromise with savages – nor with anyone who takes their side. Ponder well.

Oct 13 2023

Events To Commemorate

     If you’re not a devotee of unusual holidays, you might not know that today is National M&M Day. The M&M, one of America’s iconic candies, is exceptionally versatile. Not only can you eat them “raw” or bake them into cookies and brownies, you can also play Go with them. The rules differ only slightly from “classical” Go:

  • Each player chooses one color of M&Ms for his pieces.
  • Captured pieces become the capturer’s property to do with as he likes.
  • At the end of the game, whatever pieces are still on the board are eaten by the winner.

     I suggest purchasing the pound bag to supply an M&M Go game.

     But enough of that. One hundred six years ago today, the most famous Marian apparition of modern times occurred in Fatima, Portugal. Our Lady appeared to a huge crowd – estimated at 75,000 souls – and produced a miracle, as she had promised Lucia Dos Santos, Jacinta and Francisco Marto: The Miracle of the Sun.

     Aleteia reports an account of the miracle from a professor of natural sciences who witnessed it:

     According to various sources, Dr. Gonçalo de Almeida Garrett, Professor of Natural Sciences at Coimbra University, was there and later recalled what occurred. (As a note, some claim the account was actually given by Dr. Garrett’s son, Dr. José Almeida Garrett.)

     Dr. Garrett explains in his account that at first nothing extraordinary occurred.

     I was looking at the place of the apparitions, in a serene, if cold, expectation of something happening, and with diminishing curiosity, because a long time had passed without anything to excite my attention. Then I heard a shout from thousands of voices and saw the multitude suddenly turn its back and shoulders away from the point toward which up to now it had directed its attention, and turn to look at the sky on the opposite side.

     What happened next defied all scientific reasoning.

     It must have been nearly two o’clock by the legal time, and about midday by the sun. The sun, a few moments before, had broken through the thick layer of clouds which hid it, and shone clearly and intensely. I veered to the magnet which seemed to be drawing all eyes, and saw it as a disc with a clean-cut rim, luminous and shining, but which did not hurt the eyes. I do not agree with the comparison which I have heard made in Fátima—that of a dull silver disc. It was a clearer, richer, brighter color, having something of the luster of a pearl. It did not in the least resemble the moon on a clear night because one saw it and felt it to be a living body. It was not spheric like the moon, nor did it have the same color, tone, or shading. It looked like a glazed wheel made of mother-of-pearl. It could not be confused, either, with the sun seen through fog (for there was no fog at the time), because it was not opaque, diffused or veiled. In Fátima it gave light and heat and appeared clear-cut with a well-defined rim.

     At first he feared what was happening and tried to turn away.

     During the solar phenomenon, which I have just described in detail, there were changes of color in the atmosphere. Looking at the sun, I noticed that everything around was becoming darkened. I looked first at the nearest objects and then extended my glance further afield as far as the horizon. I saw everything an amethyst color. Objects around me, the sky and the atmosphere, were of the same color. An oak tree nearby threw a shadow of this color on the ground.

     Fearing that I was suffering from an affection of the retina, an improbable explanation because in that case one could not see things purple-colored, I turned away and shut my eyes, keeping my hands before them to intercept the light. With my back still turned, I opened my eyes and saw that the landscape was the same purple color as before.

     At the end of it, Dr. Garrett affirmed that he was in his right mind and was not suffering from a hallucination.

     And in fact everything, both near and far, had changed, taking on the color of old yellow damask. People looked as if they were suffering from jaundice, and I recall a sensation of amusement at seeing them look so ugly and unattractive. My own hand was the same color. All the phenomena which I have described were observed by me in a calm and serene state of mind, and without any emotional disturbance. It is for others to interpret and explain them.

     Catholics venerate Our Lady not as divine, but as the highest of the saints, who has her divine Son’s ear.

     A beautiful dramatic story of the apparitions, which occurred from May 13 to October 13, 1917, is available in the movie The 13th Day. I recommend it highly.

Oct 13 2023

Just a reminder: Nobody likes the Palestinians

Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza, is smartly refusing to allow any of those sub-human barbarians across their shared border.

Don’t be fooled by the news agencies or by whatever platitudes other mooslim nations might utter. Not a single raghead nation wants to bring in the Palestinians, and they never have.

Egypt has discussed plans with the United States and others to provide humanitarian aid through its border with Gaza Strip but rejects any move to set up safe corridors for refugees fleeing the enclave, Egyptian security sources said on Wednesday.

Gaza, a tiny coastal strip of land wedged between Israel in the north and east and Egypt to the southwest, is home to some 2.3 million people who have been living under a blockade since Palestinian Islamist group Hamas took control there in 2007.

Egypt has long restricted the flow of Gazans on to its territory, even during the fiercest conflicts.

Every other splodydope understands that allowing millions of radical muslim barbarians into your country would be like injecting cancer cells into your bloodstream. These people have been radicalized and used by other jihadi savages to attack the Jews, but they’ll turn around and attack other splodydopes at a moment’s notice. They’ll happily blow up some Egyptian family for not worshipping the same way as Hamas does because they’ve had decades of hatred and bloodlust trained into them BY THE OTHER RAGHEADS. They’re like a dog that’s been beaten and trained to attack anything that moves. No other raghead country is going to allow them in. No other raghead country is going to bring them anywhere near their own cities and towns. Oh, they’ll toss money at them because they kill Jews, but they won’t lift a finger to save them. Because they don’t want to. Sometimes, dogs just have to be put down.

It should be apparent that a group of people who murder women, children and grandparents, backed by more of the same people who dance in celebration at their murders, are unfit for human civilization. And even the other towelheads know it.

Oct 13 2023

Is It April 1 Already?

That’s the kind of news I would expect on that day.

Whatever the reason – and, I’m not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth – the clampdown on the money passing into Iran’s hands is welcome. Wish I didn’t know that – if they haven’t already set up the process – The Left WILL find a way to funnel money to Iran/Hamas.

But not on my dime.

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