Jul 27 2023

Music For A Windy Afternoon

     We’re getting gusts of thirty to forty knots out of the northwest, and Weather.Com is predicting thunderstorms, so let’s have some thematic music. This is Glass Hammer’s cover of the Yes classic South Side of the Sky, featuring Jon Anderson and Susie Bogdanowicz on lead vocals:

A river a mountain to be crossed
The sunshine in mountains sometimes lost
Around the south side so cold that we cried
Were we ever colder on that day
A million miles away
It seemed from all of eternity

Move forward was my friend’s only cry
In deeper to somewhere we could lie
And rest for the day with cold in the way
Were we ever colder on that day
A million miles away
It seemed from all of eternity

The moments seemed lost in all the noise
A snow storm a stimulating voice
Of warmth of the sky
Of warmth when you die
Were we ever warmer on that day
A million miles away
It seemed from all of eternity

The sunshine in mountains sometimes lost
The river can disregard the cost
And melt in the sky warmth when you die
Were we ever warmer on that day
A million miles away
We seemed from all of eternity

Jul 27 2023

The Frenzy of Global Cooling Climate Warming Change

And I do need to thank Kim du Toit for that little descriptor.

Maybe it’s just me, but I have seen a frenzy of propaganda recently regarding how we’re all gonna die and how we just need to give up our money and our personal freedom to the government in order to save Mother Gaia or some other rot like that. I’ve we’re not being told to stop driving cars, we’re being told to stop eating meat. The fact that these statements are coming from people who fly around in private jets and eat whatever they want seems to not bother the propagandists one bit, which should really be all that you need to see. However, the thing that annoys me the most is the drive for electric cars.

“SAVE THE EARTH! DRIVE ELECTRIC CARS! STOP USING OIL!” The message is blunt and in your face, 24/7. Remember when the illegitimate Biden junta screwed up the petroleum supply and made the price of gas skyrocket, and the snide commentary from the glittering idiots was “Oh well just buy a Tesla”?

Where, pray tell, is all that electricity going to come from, given that our infrastructure can barely manage what we do have, and what we have still isn’t enough for consumers as proven by the brownouts and rolling blackouts that seem to happen every summer in communist shitholes like California? How often are we hectored about how much electricity we use by corrupt con-men like Al Gore, while at the same time being told to purchase a vehicle that would force us to use MORE electricity, all while Al Gore, Pope Prius the First, keeps his 10,000 square foot mansion in Tennessee air-conditioned (but his pool is also kept warm!) and his fleet of private vehicles gassed up and running while he flies on jets around the world telling people to use less oil? And Al Gore claims that this is all OK because he buys “carbon offsets”, In the real world, we call this “Grade-A Bullshit”.

Anyways, back to electric cars. The oh so earth friendly option to those horrible gas guzzlers, right?

Well, let’s see about that. I suppose you could call it earth friendly if that means strip-mining entire rain forests to get the minerals needed for the batteries. I’m certain that wiping out entire species in the Philippines probably isn’t that good for the earth, but what do I know? I’m just a humble Soldier, not some well-paid “scientist”. That doesn’t include the massive amounts of pollution caused by refining those minerals. That doesn’t include the human cost of slave labor in the cobalt mines of Africa, and the massive pollution left after the cobalt is refined there. You say you don’t need oil with an electric car? 50% of an electric car is plastic, a necessity in order to keep the weight down. Where does plastic come from? Oil.

I could go on for days. But the bottom line is that you could find an old Chevy Bel Air, restore it to factory new condition, and then run it for twenty years straight and you still wouldn’t do the environmental damage caused by building ONE electric vehicle.

The people pushing the Global Cooling Climate Warming Change hoax know this. Which is why the propaganda has to be so overt and in your face, never-ending. If the low-information voters actually figured out that they were being lied to, they might refuse to eat the bugs, or refuse to live in their assigned places. The people pushing this hoax know that what they’re pushing for isn’t going to save the earth, or affect the climate one whit. It’s not about controlling the climate, it’s about controlling YOU.

Act accordingly.

Jul 27 2023

The Chronicle of the DC: 27Jul23

This may only serve to prove that newsreaders are not the sharpest tacks in the box.

Yet the survivors still ploy their trade. They are either ignoring these events or are denying the obvious link that they are told to overlook by their institutional bosses. Of course they still get paid very well to keep The Narrative ongoing.

Could be that feel they dodged the bullet that hit the other poor schnooks of their “profession,” and go happily along with the scam. Bonus: they have less competition. Hey, each one figures he can escape karma forever. Heh.

Jul 27 2023

Decline And Fall, Informational Edition

     Every institution arises to serve a purpose. If the purpose is accorded good and worthy, and if the institution serves it well, it will flourish. But that’s not a permanent state of grace. An institution that ceases to serve its intended purpose, no matter how well it may have done so in the past, will fail. Sometimes its failure will rain consequences on other institutions as well.

     Not too difficult, eh? Yet it appears to be little respected by the large institutions of our time. Today I have in mind those institutions whose stated purpose is to inform. They did so reliably enough, for a while, but their star has fallen.

     On this subject, a piece from a Negro-oriented fashion Website is particularly ironic:

     In a world increasingly dominated by sensationalism and misinformation, conspiracy theories have found fertile ground to flourish. Dismissed by many as the ramblings of a paranoid few, these theories have long been relegated to the fringes of society. But the experts now warn that they are witnessing the emergence of a new threat vector: conspiracy theorists being proven right….the fact that a modern conspiracy theory could potentially hold elements of truth has raised alarm bells among guardians of democracy like journalists and experts.

     The unsigned piece cites opinion pieces from the New York Times and the Tulane News in support of its message. That message may be concisely stated thus: Just because we were wrong and they were right is no reason to distrust us!

     And of that I must say – girls, hold on to your boyfriends – it contains a germ of truth.

     We don’t withdraw our trust from an institution because it was once wrong. Trust, if built over a long period of demonstrated reliability, can withstand even a significant parade of errors. However, there’s a condition: when the erroneous institution is confronted with his error(s), it must admit its error(s) and show appropriate respect for those who were right. America’s informational institutions have failed to do this. In fact, those institutions have cast aspersions on those who were right when they were wrong, which speaks to a much larger and darker fault.

     “The ends determine the means. A hen is only an egg’s device for producing another egg.” – James Blish

     The major media which consistently and for years told us things we now know to be false weren’t innocently wrong. They weren’t misinformed; they were deliberately promulgating falsehoods. Moreover, even after they were demonstrated to be wrong, they maintained:

  1. That they were right;
  2. That those who were really right ought not to be trusted.

     This is reason to believe that they were serving a purpose other than the one for which they arose – and to withdraw our trust from them.

     We can trust the honestly mistaken man or institution. We cannot and must not trust the deceiver.

***

     “If you don’t read the newspapers, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.” – Originator unknown; most recently spoken by Denzel Washington

     The problem of misinformation deliberately spread by institutions that have long records of reliable and trustworthy service to the facts is central to our current crisis. For it is a crisis of trust. The “high-trust society” of pre-World War II America was founded, among other things, on the ease of access to reliable information and on the willingness of those who had misinformed us by mistake to admit their error. But the suspicion that our informational institutions had shed their original purpose for another has grown near to a certainty. We ask “What other purpose could they have?” We note the repeated conformity of those institutions with the emissions of another – the political Establishment – and we ask “Who’s paying whom, and for what?”

     The questions are unsettling. The possible answers are devastating.

     It’s unnecessary for me to unravel all the implications of these factors to an intelligent audience – and the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch are an intelligent bunch. Trust is slowly and painfully amassed, but quickly lost. The informational institutions on which we relied will not regain our trust in an instant. They certainly can’t command us to trust them. In all probability, they will be replaced by others now making the slow, laborious climb to trustworthiness.

     That upsets certain other persons and institutions: those that have relied upon the existing media to proclaim “the official truth,” “the party line,” “the Narrative.” But no more than those media revealed as deceivers can they command us to accept lies once the facts have been unearthed, confirmed, and disseminated.

     For a final dollop of irony, here’s how that Afru.com piece concludes:

     We must all come together to strengthen the fact checkers and counter narratives that exploit people’s fears, insecurities, and distrust. Our efforts should focus on rebuilding trust in institutions, amplifying marginalized voices, and ensuring that accurate information is priority-available to the common person in the street.

     How are a gaggle of deceivers, once revealed as such, to do that?

     But the fight against conspiracy theories goes beyond facts alone.

     Really? I leave it for my Gentle Readers to decide.

Jul 26 2023

Wandering Through Wednesday

     After the Jeremiads of the last few days, I think it’s time to “kick back” with an “assorted” piece.

***

     Recently, an observation from Herbert Spencer has been much on my mind:

     In the very nature of things an agency employed for two purposes must fulfil both imperfectly; partly because while fulfilling the one it cannot be fulfilling the other, and partly, because its adaptation to both ends implies incomplete fitness for either. As has been well said a propos of this point, “A blade which is designed both to shave and to carve, will certainly not shave so well as a razor or carve so well as a carving-knife. An academy of painting, which should also be a bank, would in all probability exhibit very bad pictures and discount very bad bills. A gas-company, which should also be an infant-school society, would, we apprehend, light the streets ill, and teach the children ill.”

     [Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State ]

     Now Spencer was talking about the insane multiplicity of functions that the English Parliament had assigned to the English government, but the “one item – one function” dictum obviously has a wider application than that. (Besides, if Spencer had lived to see all the crap American governments claim to supervise, he might have died of a stroke.)

     What institutions of contemporary American society can you name that have taken on missions that clash with their core purposes? Might it be less taxing to list those institutions that haven’t done so?

***

     Now and then, when I find myself without fresh reading material, I “take a flier” on a writer I’d previously dismissed as not worth my time. Yesterday was such a day. Unfortunately, the consequences were not good.

     There is a writer, whom I’ll call Jethro (not his real name), whom I’d tried out a few years ago and recoiled from for several reasons:

  • Unoriginal ideas and motifs;
  • Ramshackle plots;
  • Low skill with words.

     Life’s too short to allow some things to occupy one’s time, money, and energy. That definitely includes cheap booze, vicious women, and mediocre books. So after two tries at his best known series, I decided that I would ignore Jethro’s rather copious output henceforward.

     Fast forward to yesterday. While flipping through Amazon’s recommendations, I noticed a new release from Jethro. As he’s widely championed as the king of the “keep the pipeline filled” school of writing, curiosity impelled me to check just how many books he’d authored in the seven years since I first noticed his stuff.

     I nearly died. According to Amazon, Jethro has authored or co-authored over 2000 novel-length tomes. (To be fair, when I delved further, it developed that a few hundred of those volumes were translations of his English-language oeuvre.) It didn’t seem possible…but while computers can be poor judges of some things, counting is not among them.

     So I purchased his new release. “After all,” I said to myself, “with that many tales under his belt, he has to have learned something.” I downloaded my purchase, poured myself a fresh cup of coffee, and sat back to read.

     It wasn’t long before I concluded that Jethro hasn’t learned anything.

     Danny remembered the curt speech of a violin teacher who’d given him up in disgust twenty years ago:
     “Practice makes perfect,” the teacher had said. “But it can also cut your throat.”

     [James Blish, Jack of Eagles]

     Verbum sat sapienti.

***

     The more widely I survey contemporary goings-on, the more I appreciate the wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson:

     You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong…. Justice is not postponed…. Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.

     We have a striking example of this today:

     The “#MeToo” phenomenon originated as a reaction against (supposed) sexual harassment of women in the workplace. I have no way of knowing whether the early, heavily publicized cases were just, or were justly handled. I do know, from personal experience, that ambitious women of low morals used the immense publicity given to the phenomenon to advance their own careers through falsehood: accusations of sexual harassment against innocent male coworkers.

     But Emerson’s observation about natural justice has had its say, as the video above makes plain. The overall prospects of women in the commercial world have been set back by the amoral exploitation of “#MeToo.” A great many employers are now extremely wary of female employees and applicants. The EEOC committees are finding it impossible to discriminate between real instances of sexual discrimination and situations where nervous managers have turned women away simply out of self-protectiveness.

     We can only hope that this backlash equilibrates against false claims of sexual harassment. Neither is something to celebrate, after all.

***

     I’ve long admired John Whitehead and his Rutherford Institute. (I missed a chance to meet him some years back, on a visit to a dear friend who lived near his office.) In this piece, he points at a possibility that should chill the heart of any lover of freedom:

     Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes: mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions….

     In communities across the nation, police are being empowered to forcibly detain individuals they believe might be mentally ill, based solely on their own judgment, even if those individuals pose no danger to others.

     In New York City, for example, you could find yourself forcibly hospitalized for suspected mental illness if you carry “firmly held beliefs not congruent with cultural ideas,” exhibit a “willingness to engage in meaningful discussion,” have “excessive fears of specific stimuli,” or refuse “voluntary treatment recommendations.”

     Please read it all. Comparisons to the Soviet Union’s use of this method to suppress dissent are entirely appropriate.

***

     That’s all for the present, Gentle Reader. It’s time for me to get ready for Mass, so be well and happy, and when the political scene begins to oppress you, remember: It’s always darkest just before it turns pitch black. Have a nice day.

Jul 25 2023

What a load of hogwash

Yet another idiotic article proclaiming that eating meat is global warming climate cooling change. This really is a religious cult.

University of Oxford experts say eating just 100g of meat per day – less than a single burger – creates four times more greenhouse gases compared with a vegan diet.

And this is where I say that these “experts” are full of bullshit, and have never once stepped foot onto a farm in their lives, much less understand what it takes to produce said vegan diet.

Ladies and Gentlemen, in order to produce vegan food, you need to farm incredible amounts of land. You have to first spray it to kill the native plants, so you’re applying lots and lots of herbicide. Then you have to fertilize it, so now you’re dumping more chemicals on the soil. Lots of phosphates. The run-off from that does amazing things to the local water sources. While your food crop is growing, you’re dumping more herbicide on the farm, but these are typically targeted at certain weeds. And during harvest, while the combines are chopping and slicing the “vegan” grains and crops, you’re slaughtering thousands of animals who have made a home in your fields.

Yeah. Read that again. You want to see what a slaughterhouse looks like, go check out the combines after they’ve harvested a wheat field. Careful you don’t get too close, because those wheat fields are typically sprayed with Roundup a couple days prior to the harvest so that the combines aren’t harvesting weeds with the wheat. Oh, you didn’t know that the farms doused their wheat with Glyphosate? It’s a common enough practice that people who actually study health and the human body are saying that when people have a “gluten allergy” what they’re actually allergic to is the massive amount of weed killer found on the wheat harvest. This is different from Ciliac disease.

So you’re dumping herbicide, fertilizer, more herbicide, and then killing all manner of animals in order to get your “vegan” diet. Gosh, that’s so earth friendly! And after you’ve essentially raped the soil in order to grow your vegan food, and the soil can’t produce anything else, would you like to know the best way to restore that soil?

You let it go fallow. And then you put ruminant animals on it. COWS. YOU LET COWS GRAZE ON IT TO RESTORE IT.

At the bottom of this so-called article is a blurb extolling the virtues of lab grown meat. Save the planet! Grow your burger in a petri dish! Just the idiocy of praising lab-grown meat instead of real cows makes my head hurt. Did any of these so called “journalists” bother to look up the energy consumption that growing meat in a lab requires?

As opposed to turning out a cow into a pasture. And then letting nature do it’s thing.

These people are arguing, unironically, that growing meat in a lab that requires massive amounts of energy to heat, light, sterilize, and operate is somehow saving the planet but allowing a cow to eat grass for a year or two is going to destroy the planet.

Remember, folks: If X is an unknown quantity, and a spurt is a drip of water under pressure, then an “expert” is an unknown drip under pressure. This entire article is garbage, and the so-called experts who made these pronouncements are either some of the dumbest people on earth, or they’re lying to you deliberately. My money is on the latter. Act accordingly.

Jul 25 2023

Among Friends

     Today, there are things one cannot say:

  • Out loud;
  • In public;
  • Without unpleasant consequences.

     That’s indisputable. The reason is the militancy of those who differ with you: i.e., the contemporary Left. They’ve learned that militancy is the trump suit: that militant tactics – from slander to outright violence – won’t be effectively opposed. In combination, aversion to confrontation and fear of unpleasant consequences will inhibit the great majority from “speaking the unspeakable.” It doesn’t help that the “received wisdom” that dominates the great majority of Americans is opposed to some of those unspeakable things. So they get away their tactics.

     To defy the Left and “received wisdom” in this regard requires a combination of brashness and personal armor. No matter how personally invulnerable you are, you must be able to withstand the slander campaigns, which are always hurtful and cost the slanderer approximately nothing. More, you must be aware that to those who dominate contemporary discourse, facts and logic are irrelevant. Knowing this, you must be willing to follow through even so.

     The irrelevance of facts and logic is so stunning that few can accept it. Yet the use of these things in debate between political opponents has been shouted down as “racist” and “fascist.” For example, dare to mention the incredible preponderance of Negroes among the perpetrators of felony crimes, or the shocking failure rate of Negro-dominated cities, schools, and other institutions, and brace yourself. Dare to mention the enormous difference between the longevities of heterosexuals and homosexuals, or the skyrocketing suicide rate among those who “transition” from their biological sex, and be prepared to be called “everything but white.” And of course, dare to note the terrible, well documented prevalence of child trafficking that’s taking place today, especially in the chaos at the southern border, and you’d better be wearing your Kevlar bodysuit.

     Try it and see.

***

     An old novel of which I’m fond describes one minor character in a memorable fashion:

     [Senator Millwood] was an ideal choice for vice-president. He was proud but had no pride. It was impossible to hurt his feelings, for a lifetime of politics had worn his sensibilities so smooth that nothing could engage them. When once a heckler shouted at him “Shut your fat-assed mouth,” he replied—gravely, “Thank you for your contribution. This is a free country, and freedom of expression is what made us great.”

     [Michael Halberstam, The Wanting of Levine]

     (Letter-perfect. If I write another fifty novels, I may have a slim chance of penning a character description that piercing.)

     That’s the other way of armoring oneself against the calumnies of the Left: not to care at all. But most of us in the Right care deeply, even passionately. Thus the Millwood Defense is unacceptable to us. Yet our awareness of critical facts and their clear implications urges us to speak. How, then, do we keep silent, when like Jeremiah of old, silence lights a fire in our bones that bids to devour us from within?

     It’s a serious question. That silence in the face of evil, the forcible repression of that which demands to be spoken, has actual physiological effects. Of this I speak with authority.

     But the price for speaking thus is high, too.

***

     By now even those well acquainted with my circumlocuitous ways are probably wondering if I’ll ever get to the point. But I’ve already expressed that point, Gentle Reader. What we say to one another here, among friends, must be spoken:

  • Out loud;
  • In public;
  • And damn the consequences!

     That gnawing you feel inside is a microcosm of the gnawing taking place at the foundations of this country. If we truly want our country back, we cannot remain silent. The measures required demand candor and fearlessness in the face of reprisal. The price for continued deference to “received wisdom” and acceptance of the oppressive ways of the Left will bankrupt these United States of America once and for all.

     A very few are speaking of what ails us candidly and fearlessly. One and all are being vilified and assailed in ways that frighten the average American into silent withdrawal. Charles Murray. Jared Taylor. Matt Walsh. Jim Caviezel. There are others less well known. They know the dangers, yet they continue on. They deserve our audible, visible concurrence. More, they deserve to have us stand alongside them – and to stand firm.

     He who keeps silent in the face of evil has acquiesced to evil’s agenda. He will watch evil progress, make converts and conquests, and stand mute. Soon enough, he will even believe evil of himself. There is no lower estate to which a good man can fall.

     Have a nice day.

Jul 24 2023

The Chronicle of the DC: 13Jul09 Archives

John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, says: Forced abortions and mass sterilization needed to save the planet

At that link is strong evidence that the Biden regime is clearly following through on what the Obama regime started. Not only that, but the Trump interim didn’t seem to slow them one bit as the excesses we’ve witnessed in Wokism’s trans and free-the-pedos movement must have had their seeds and sprouts well tended in the hot-houses of the education, health and corporate HR institutions long before media and the Biden WH went full court press.

The most troubling aspect for this author is the language cleansing the Death Cult provided the advocates of Holdren’s original list of recommendations.

• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.

Back in 2009, when Fran and I posted on this and other sources telling us what they intended to do, we were mostly greeted by silence. And even today we still encounter mostly silence. Because it was somewhat refreshing to see, we’ve permitted a few bold commenters to voice grudging(?) agreement with the DC goals.

It’s really as simple as recognizing two different moral codes: the one that believes that only what is deemed to be useful human life is to be preserved versus the one that believes that innocent human life is sacred. The one that has skulked its way into power is thoroughly at war with the second which has had its moral underpinnings shaken and much of its institutional leadership co-opted.

If you wish to support the second one — if nothing else but in gratitude for the improved lives it has made possible — it might be best to restore your moral underpinnings, and then find and install leaders whose lives align with that code.

Jul 24 2023

Domains

     I recall being introduced to the concept of a domain in a mathematical context. A function, our algebra teacher told us, has a domain of values for its independent or X variable, and a range of dependent or Y values it produces from that domain. In that formulation, a function is a sort of machine: the domain is its “input,” and the range is its “output.” Turn the key, throw the switch, pump the bellows, and the function will crunch each X value and produce the corresponding Y value.

     “But what about values for the X variable that aren’t in the domain?” I asked somewhat naively. Teacher smiled. “It doesn’t operate on them,” she said. “But what if you were to feed it one?” I persisted. She shook her head. “On any value outside its domain,” she said, “the function is undefined.”

     For a twelve year old boy already entranced by the beauty of mathematics, that came as a disagreeable surprise. Wasn’t math in the business of defining things? How could we casually say of something, “Oh, that’s undefined,” and pass on as if there were nothing more to say about it? It took me awhile to come to terms with it. (Never fear; they were well-defined terms.)

***

     We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

     The above gives five purposes for the federal government of these United States. They sound admirable, one and all. However, there’s something missing from the statement:

     …establish Justice for whom?
     …insure domestic Tranquility where?
     …provide for whose common defence?
     …promote whose general Welfare?
     …secure the Blessings of Liberty for whom?

     In other words, the domain is left unstated, though the intent of the document is to define a federal structure for the United States.

     The Constitution that structures and authorizes the federal government didn’t do so to provide those noble goals to the denizens of other lands. Nowhere in its pages does it authorize Washington to go forth establishing justice, etc. for the subjects of other regimes. The domestic tranquility of places beyond America’s borders was of no concern to the Founding Fathers. Should the Golgafrinchans or the Whackistanis decide that they want the blessings of liberty – never mind their posterity – they’d just have to do the work for themselves.

     These subtle distinctions are lost on today’s political class.

     We generally look at America’s participation in the World Wars as a noble thing. What goes unexamined is on what grounds we intruded into them. What was the Constitutional justification? Woodrow Wilson made a big deal out of the Zimmerman telegram — “The world must be made safe for democracy!” he orated – but in fact it was no more relevant to the U.S. and its interests than the nebular hypothesis. FDR practically had to invite the Japanese military government to strike American soil for his war. “We have reached our rendezvous with destiny,” he announced. Once more, Americans bled and died. American treasure flowed forth in a hemorrhage. Evil regimes were put down…and others far worse arose in their wake.

     But the appetites of our political elite had been whetted. After Versailles, America was a world power. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was the world power. We could reshape the globe after the American model…and flex our muscles a lot and make bundles of bucks as we did so. Some of us, anyway.

     After that, any excuse to go to war would be good enough. After all, aren’t we the world’s policemen? Isn’t justice ours to maintain? Isn’t the peace of Mankind ours to safeguard? High-minded ideals can’t just be mouthed or set down on parchment by skilled calligraphers; they must be acted on! Especially if we can do so at a profit.

***

     The proper domain of the federal government was defined in the Constitution. It set out a short list of enumerated powers and responsibilities, and no others. The Bill of Rights emphasized its limitations in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. But after decades of chiseling at the margins by high-minded men – perhaps a bit tipsy with power, but surely animated by nothing but the desire to promote “the general Welfare” – the Constitution seemed to have become a mere historical footnote.

     Just now, we’re propping up a kleptocrat in a corrupt nation half a world away for the ludicrous notion that we’re “defending democracy.” Once again, American treasure is flowing forth in a torrent. Present trends continuing, American blood will soon be spilled. At that point, the habitues of Washington’s corridors of power will be too deeply enmeshed to give up. They can only “justify” their actions to date by carrying the nation into the horror of a third world war – but this one, we’ll start ourselves.

     We’ve been tiptoeing in this direction since Vietnam. After the Afghanistan disaster, our politicians’ pride is at stake. Our love affair with Volodymyr Zelensky and his satrapy is unique only because the adversary is Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation: the owner of the largest nuclear arsenal on Earth. It involves the biggest opponent and the biggest dangers. Men with the biggest egos seen this past century are pushing the biggest pile of chips ever hazarded to the center of the table.

     Hey, I know a place. Let’s go. – Russell Baker

Jul 23 2023

The Chronicle of the DC: 20Jul23

I was alerted to this article by Wretchard at FB.
More Than a Million Americans “Missing” as US Endures a Crisis of Early Death

As you read it, it won’t take long to recognize it has been authored by concern trolls. Almost all of the alleged major contributions to early deaths of Americans are the usual propaganda items that were used to make Obamacare into law. And of course, blaming the bankrupt NRA for continued blocking of gun control “which works.”

But now they identified a whole new reason for the early deaths:

“While COVID-19 brought new attention to public health, the backlash unleashed during the pandemic has undermined trust in government and support for expansive policies to improve population health,” Bor points out.

And expect that problem to get worse. So, for our own good, expect a new round of coercion that I will sound like explicit admission of endorsement of the goal of the population reduction crowd.

“Not heeding approved authorities will wind up with your death, one way or another.”

Jul 23 2023

Mysteries

     As an adherent to a “mystery religion,” I am frequently challenged – sometimes by others; sometimes by my own restless intellect – to explain particular assertions of my faith, to make them comprehensible. There’s an obvious contradiction in this, which I’m sure any Gentle Reader will see at once. Religious mysteries aren’t on the same plane as the murder mysteries the C.S.O. loves. They are mysteries because they involve Divine attributes and operations that lie beyond the realm of things men can understand. One who insists that such things be explained, brought into the time-dependent rubric of cause and effect, implicitly rejects the supernatural / supratemporal realm, where decision, action, and cause and effect as we understand them have no meaning.

     In short, some categories of questions that are critical to human thought – i.e., the “whys” and the “hows” – simply don’t apply to God and His workings. But that tiny bit of understanding is among the trickiest of stumbling blocks. Paradoxically so, for it is the only thing in all theology and theocosmogony of which we can be perfectly sure.

     Yet we continue to ask those unanswerable questions…and sometimes, on special occasions, the asking brings us somewhere we did not know that we needed to go.

***

     The sciences are those areas of human action where the goal is greater knowledge. The technologies are those areas where the goal is specific results. Despite my initial ambitions, as a young man I left the sciences for the technologies…because, in the simplest terms, I wanted to get things done. But I never lost the desire to extend and expand my knowledge: “the theory of things,” as Albert Jay Nock put it, above and apart from any practical applications.

     When I rediscovered faith, that need to know more was still with me. In theology it had found a new application of the most difficult sort. It continues to animate me today, and probably will until I am shorn of the flesh.

     But human intellect has limits. Cosmologists have been grappling with it for some time. We can theorize endlessly about ultimate things without any hope of ever proving our conjectures. I have no doubt that certain possibilities much discussed by cosmologists today are of interest to them because they lie outside our powers of investigation and experiment.

     In other words, science is aware, and an honest scientist will admit, that there are things we cannot know with the degree of confidence we attribute to the regular rising of the Sun. The infinity of possible explanations for those things cannot be condensed by any means available to men. Those “whys” and “hows” are as unanswerable as questions about why God created Man, or how Man emerged from the chaos of natural selection.

     But that doesn’t invalidate the pursuit of knowledge, does it? It merely acknowledges our limits. In the acceptance of those limits lies the gateway to faith.

***

     There are those who’ll tell you, in a self-satisfied sort of way, that a belief in God, or in a religion of any kind, is an indication of weakness, or naivety, or – this is the one that always ruffles my feathers – stupidity. I’ve had jousts with a few such people. Some of their sallies are rather clever. Indeed, the best of them are good exercises for the refinement of the logical faculty. They embed assumptions that are neither provable nor disprovable, which makes them statements of faith.

     The irony here is enough to choke a brontosaurus. For Smith to claim that his faith is preferable to Jones’s faith is common. Smith will undoubtedly have reasons for his preference…but it is in the nature of things that those reasons are founded on faith-like premises. He’ll be as unable to prove them as Jones is to disprove them. They don’t constitute defensible grounds for the attitude of personal superiority that so many irritating atheists wear like an obnoxious tie.

     More irony, if you can stand it: Just as Christians, in particular, were unlearning the sin of aggressive evangelism – i.e., the sort of evangelism that attempts to bludgeon the nonbeliever into faith – the Western world suffered the rise of the aggressive atheist. His mindset parallels that of some of the most aggressive Christian evangelists: he needs for you to believe what he believes. He cannot have full confidence in his convictions unless everyone shares them. Thus, he must contrive to label and dismiss those who decline his entreaties as somehow defective. It’s his only defense against the fear that lurks in the shadowed places in his mind: the possibility that he could be wrong.

     I pray for those people. They need it more than most.

***

     Yes, this is about humility.

     We are told that faith requires humility. It does; no argument. But then, so does any sort of inquiry into the “whys” and “hows” of existence. The sciences could not proceed without first accepting that no item of knowledge is final and indisputable. Under the veil of Time, no material proposition – i.e., outside of pure mathematics – can be proved. A beautiful passage from a novel of great importance expresses this requirement brilliantly:

     Not that the count was a drone. At last reports, he had been involved in some highly esoteric tampering with the Haertel equations—that description of the space-time continuum which, by swallowing up the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction exactly as Einstein had swallowed Newton (that is, alive), had made interstellar flight possible. Ruiz-Sanchez did not understand a word of it, but, he reflected with amusement, it was doubtless perfectly simple once you understood it.
     Almost all knowledge, after all, fell into that category. It was either perfectly simple once you understood it, or else it fell apart into fiction. As a Jesuit—even here, fifty light-years from Rome—Ruiz-Sanchez knew something about knowledge that Lucien le Comte des Bois-d’Averoigne had forgotten, and that Cleaver would never learn: that all knowledge goes through both stages, the annunciation out of noise into fact, and the disintegration back into noise again. The process involved was the making of increasingly finer distinctions. The outcome was an endless series of theoretical catastrophes.
     The residuum was faith.

     [James Blish, A Case of Conscience]

     Be not afraid of what you cannot understand. There are things we time-bound types simply cannot know with certainty or even with fair confidence. It’s like that for everyone, and about everything. Either the lack is of no importance whatsoever, or we’ll know what we need to know soon enough: each of us in his own appointed time.

     May God bless and keep you all.

Jul 22 2023

Things Predators Like

     Predators of all sorts will concentrate where the prey is fattest. — Arne Stromberg, Gallatin University

     Robert A. Heinlein promoted this concept of a human trichotomy:

     …and no third category. What follows from that partition is an even simpler dichotomy:

You’re either a Maker or a Predator.

     Anyone who doesn’t get that should see me after class. We can talk about your hobbies and BOCES.

     There are innumerable sub-categories of predators, but all share the defining characteristic of that set: they get part or all of their sustenance from the Makers, and not necessarily with the Makers’ consent.

     For some time now, American companies have been filling up with predators, at the expense of the makers. Some of them are easy to identify. The Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is a predator: sub-category Taker. The head of the Human Resources department is a predator: sub-category Faker. They clearly don’t produce anything the company can sell.

     American society generally has been filling up with predators. Quite a number of them are open about it, too. That streetcorner panhandler you pass on the way home from work? Likely he’ll finish his day’s “work” by getting into a nice car and driving away. He might notice you watching, but he’s unlikely to care. There are plenty of ignorant sheep to fleece, after all.

     Predators like fat, unaware and unresisting targets. Those predators that have the skill will even create them. One of their most effective techniques is to promote the idea that they perform an important service, one that seems indispensable. If they can pull that off, the sheep will come to them.

     Sophisticated predators will often use unwitting makers to do the preliminary work of sheep-gathering for them. The kind of maker they prefer to exploit for that prep-work is the high-minded idealist. He’ll have an idea that seems entirely benevolent and beneficent. It might strike him as a way to make life better for everyone. And who knows? In the absence of slick, adroit predators, it might even work that way.

     But the mission of the predator is to see that it doesn’t.

***

     You’re probably wondering why I’m nattering on about such obvious things. As usual, I have a reason: an outfit that calls itself Worldcoin:

     Some Web3 projects are trying to create a better cryptocurrency. Some are tackling the problem of self-sovereign identity. Some are trying to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s an AI-created fake. Some are building systems for better governance. Some are trying to improve the development of AI through the principles of decentralization. Some are trying to reduce global inequalities.
     Worldcoin is trying to do all of the above.
     The goal is simple and modest: To create a system that will, eventually, freely distribute tokens to all eight billion people on the planet, as a form of universal basic income (UBI). But because the rise of AI will make it tricky to figure out who is human and who’s a digital fake, Worldcoin first needs to create a system that lets people — all people, across the globe — prove that they are in fact human beings.

     Please read it all. It’s a mind-boggling combination of uplifting and depressing. It’s also the sort of target that the largest and most voracious predators on Earth – governments – love best: the sort that would extend their control over the rest of us to an infinite degree.

     I have no personal stake in any cryptocurrency. I know people who think they’re the greatest thing since bottled beer. I refuse to put any of my wealth in any of them. The reason is Porretto’s Pessimistic Principle:


For Every Engineer,
There Is An Equal But Opposite Engineer.

     The cryptocurrencies, being software artifacts, can be corrupted. Hacked. Twisted beyond all recognition. It just hasn’t happened yet…but you can bet the rent money that there are thousands of clever software nerds working on it as you read this. The blather about a token-system based on blockchain substructures being proof against such things is self-serving propaganda.

     The idea of a worldwide cryptocurrency united to a worldwide identification scheme must have the governments of the world salivating at the prospect. Let the high-minded private-sector developers and promoters do the hard work! When they’ve completed the grubby chores, governments will swoop in to “regulate” it. It will be “necessary,” you see, to make it all “fair.”

     What would eventuate were governments to impose themselves on this system? Surely they would want to control it. Indeed, for governments’ purposes, it’s the Philosophers’ Stone. If they could compel everyone to participate in it, it would give them complete control over all buying and selling. No one could transact for any purpose without government knowing about it…and issuing a permit-or-forbid edict about it.

     Then there’s the shameful “universal basic income” notion the proponents advance. They either have no understanding of money and credit or believe that they can set the laws that govern such things aside by dint of their brilliance and noble goals.

     Let’s put it in the simplest possible terms: If you produce nothing, what you consume must be produced by others. Therefore, you are seizing some of the value created by others without giving anything of your own making in exchange for it. It simply doesn’t matter whether you’re a common thief or you’re using some fiction of a currency, given to you by well-meaning but naïve persons, to do so. Every “token” you’re given for free leaches value from those “tokens” that are earned by productive labor.

     “But it’s for the greater good!” the proponents screech. “It would eliminate poverty!” they protest. As if poverty weren’t the natural and rightful lot of those who can’t or won’t produce something others will value. “It would reduce inequality!” they whimper. As if equality were a characteristic that Nature will tolerate for even a femtosecond.

     I know, I’m raving again. I’ll stop.

***

     This is really a special case of a general law:

Beware The Idealist!

     Aspiring benefactors of Humanity have done more harm to the general lot of Man than any category of entity other than governments. They’ve put tools into governments’ hands with which States can carry out their mission of subjugating us. Always with the highest of motives in mind…but what was that saying about good intentions?

     Keep away from high-minded idealists. Close your door in their faces. Work for your own purposes and pleasures. Do charity by giving survival goods: food, clothing, shelter, and energy. To protect your savings, buy gold and silver.

     And preach Christ. He wasn’t an idealist; He simply knew, as you’d expect of God, how things must be – the way the laws of the Universe are structured. Of course He did! As we hear near Christmas time: Wise men still seek Him.

Jul 21 2023

Tapped Out

     That’s me. Pounding these keys has used me up, at least for the moment. (Memo to me: Remember to unclench your fists next time.) I’m going to use the day for things that won’t involve me with computers. However, I dislike to leave my Gentle Readers with nothing, so have an old short story of mine. If memory serves, I wrote this one sometime around 2000. Despite the stylistic weaknesses it displays, I’m still rather fond of it.

==<O>==

Class Action

     Kenneth MacMillan laid the filing on the scarred pine workbench and stared into Jared Tillotsen’s eyes. “You can’t be serious.”
     The lawyer’s mouth tightened. “I am.”
     “There have to be a thousand reasons why I can’t hear this.”
     Tillotsen nodded once. “I await Your Honor’s decision and explanation.”
     MacMillan snorted. “Don’t get shirty with me, Jared. I’ve known you since…” The judge trailed off. Mentioning that was in bad taste, and always would be. “First, the class needs at least one stakeholder who’s willing to appear in open court.”
     Tillotsen’s lips quirked at the pun. “I have one.”
     “You’re kidding!”
     Tillotsen said nothing. His eyes rested lightly on the judge’s countenance.
     “With all the restrictions we’d have to put on him, with all the hazards he’d have to face to come before us, he’d still be willing to do it?”
     Another nod. “It’s a she, actually.”
     MacMillan waved the irrelevancy aside. “Second, no precedent has been established under which one of them may prosecute a legal action against one of us, much less all of them against all of us.”
     “I’m aware of that, Your Honor.”
     “It doesn’t appear to disturb you.”
     “It’s why I brought the case to you.”
     I should have known my reputation would land me in hot water someday.
     “Well, third, what justiciable controversy exists to propel the action?”
     Tillotsen pointed to the stapled sheaf of papers on the workbench. “It’s on the front page, Your Honor.”
     And indeed it was, in the blackest of letters:

MURDER.

     MacMillan tore his eyes from the accusation and regarded the lawyer at length.
     Tillotsen wasn’t looking well. He’d lost a great deal of weight. Most of his hair was gone. His pallor was extraordinary, as if his flesh had been coated in plaster. The effort of standing upright appeared to tax him to the edge of his resources. He probably thought he disguised it well, but MacMillan had caught him leaning against the crate beside him, and panting as inconspicuously as he could.
     “You still aren’t…?”
     Tillotsen shook his head.
     “You’re going to die, Jared.”
     Something like amusement flickered across the lawyer’s face. “Not likely, Your Honor. Now, as to the matter at hand — ?”
     MacMillan ground his teeth. He shifted his weight and nearly toppled the stack of detergent boxes on which he sat. “You ask far too much. I can’t let this proceed for all the reasons we’ve already discussed and a great many more.”
     “I ask,” the lawyer said in a formal cadence, “that you do justice. We have a theory of rights that explicitly authorizes this case.”
     “We have a theory? No, Jared, they have a theory. We have laws, no more. And none of our laws even nod sideways to your action.”
     Tillotsen nodded and shoved his hands into his pockets. He stepped around the crates and mop buckets to stand before the sole window in MacMillan’s chambers. The building’s parking lot was all that lay beyond. The lights showed few cars scattered below. The lawyer stared down at them as if they could be decoded into a message from God.
     “On what are our laws based, Your Honor? Are they merely matters of expedience, little adjustments of social mechanisms that have no moral significance?”
     MacMillan would have flushed, were he able. “You know better, Jared. They codify the basis of our survival. There’s no deeper morality than that.”
     Tillotsen awarded the judge a knowing smile. “You never disappoint me, Kenneth. How many years, how many cases have I brought before you? And you have yet to miss the point. You always find the principles beneath each case, and you never betray them. Even when I’ve lost, I’ve never disagreed with you at the end. And that’s why I’m here tonight.”
     MacMillan started to speak, stopped and clamped his mouth shut much too hard. He suppressed a grunt of pain. “You expect me to elucidate a theory of rights that will cover this case, for the purpose of allowing the case to proceed in the first place, when all our legal practice and everything deducible from it forbids me even to look at your papers! Jared, the strain of being your hero is getting to be too much for me.”
     Tillotsen turned back to the window. MacMillan rose and went to join him.
     The darkness was at its deepest point. The brilliant arc lights shone upon an utter stillness below. Few of the office tower’s windows were illuminated. MacMillan and Tillotsen were close to having the building to themselves.
     “I’d like a dinner break, Jared. It’s been a long evening, and I’ve had nothing for quite a while.”
     Muscles rippled along the lawyer’s bony jaw. MacMillan was struck by a realization. “Your… client is in the building, isn’t she?”
     Tillotsen continued to stare through the window. “She is.”
     “Which room?”
     “Six twenty-four.” The answer came without hesitation, delivered in a mechanical monotone.
     She must be as extraordinary as he is.
     MacMillan laid a hand on the lawyer’s frail shoulder. “I’ll have to sleep on this, Jared. What you’ve asked of me is far more than I can commit to after an hour’s thought. It goes to the root of our society’s existence. It could affect more than even you realize.” He clapped Tillotsen’s shoulder gently. “Go to your client. Take her home, make sure she gets there safely. Come back tomorrow and I’ll have an answer for you. And, Jared?”
     “Yes, Your Honor?”
     “Don’t expect too much from me.”
     Tillotsen nodded and went silently from the room.

***

     The sound of the door opening catapulted Ann Mears into a state beyond terror. She leaped from her chair, dropped to the floor and slithered under the pile of scrap cardboard, struggling to restrain a shriek.
     “Ann?” Jared Tillotsen’s voice was soft in the darkness. “It’s all right, it’s only me.”
     That’s bad enough.
     Tillotsen’s reassurance wasn’t enough to bring her out of concealment. She held still and listened until she was certain that only the lawyer was there with her. When she’d finally garnered the courage to leave the shelter of the piled garbage and stand upright, she found him leaning against the doorjamb, a glint of kindly humor in his eyes.
     “The judge suggested that I take you home,” he said gently. He started to offer her his arm, then chuckled and let it fall.
     “What…” She swallowed and tried to calm herself. “What did he say?”
     “He needs time, Ann. Your kind don’t have standing, by the usual reading of our laws. Therefore, the class action is ab initio invalid. The judge has to find a basis for even conceding that you and yours could file such a suit.” The corners of his mouth rose. “I think he wants to, but without a well reasoned basis, our people would simply ignore his decision.”
     “How long do you think it’ll take him to decide?”
     “He said to come back tomorrow. Can you?”
     “Can your friend stay with Melissa again tomorrow night?”
     Tillotsen nodded.
     She offered up a silent prayer for strength. “Then I’ll be here.”
     He gestured at the door, and followed her out.

***

     MacMillan couldn’t sleep. He writhed in the confines of his bed, shifting from one position to another, but his real discomfort marched within his skull.
     Jared Tillotsen was an idealist and a crusader of the best kind, or the worst, depending on whether you agreed with him. In MacMillan’s eyes, the law could boast no brighter jewel. Tillotsen would take no case that didn’t square with his sharply defined views of justice. He was bulldog tough once the contest was joined. Yet he never deviated from principle. When he lost on the merits, he accepted the defeat and tried to learn from it. When he won, he was as gracious as anyone could ask.
     The lawyer idolized Kenneth MacMillan. The wonder of receiving such a paragon’s esteem was exceeded only by the burden of carrying it.
     Tillotsen had laid a blueprint for the destruction of their society before MacMillan and had asked him to rule on it. His belief in the rightness of the cause was written on every fiber of his rapidly deteriorating body.
     There will come a point where his course will become irreversible. Even if he recants, his body will no longer be able to recover.
     MacMillan was certain that the lawyer knew as much.

***

     The judge nodded once, very slowly. “It can proceed.”
     Delight spread across Tillotsen’s face. “And the basis, Your Honor?”
     MacMillan grinned. “You put me in an impossible position. I had to ponder it for quite a while. What basis exists in our jurisprudence for determining whether a particular creature does, or does not, possess rights? Only a hearing in a recognized court. I cannot reject Miss Mears’s claim summarily based on no standing, because the rejection itself would entitle her to file for certiorari as to why I had rejected it. One way or another, she’s entitled to stand before me and demand to know whether she has rights in our eyes, and why. That alone would compel me to concede them.”
     “And all her people as well?”
     The judge nodded again.
     Tears welled in Tillotsen’s eyes. He leaned heavily against the pallet of paper towels beside him. “Thank you, Kenneth. Have you set a date?”
     “Monday next, in the main room in the basement. Your action will be first on the docket. I expect it’ll be heavily attended, so you’d better be ready.”
     Tillotsen nodded without looking up. The weakness that was stealing over him had never been more visible. MacMillan fought down the urge to take the lawyer in his arms.
     “Jared, forgive me for saying so, but I can’t believe that you’re going to last until then.”
     Tillotsen pulled himself upright, forced himself to stand straight. “I’ll be there, Your Honor.”
     “I hope so, considering all the trouble this will make for me.” The judge shifted uneasily on his crate. “You’re going to lose the class action, you know.”
     The lawyer grinned. “I expected to. No matter what you decide about standing, it would be ex post facto to permit any prosecutions. But that’s not the main event.”
     “Jared, do you really think they’ll help us, after all the history we have with them?”
     “Yes. The basis of every unforced exchange is mutual advantage, and we have a lot to offer them.”
     And they to us, of course. “Do you suppose I might meet your client now?”
     Tillotsen’s grin vanished. He was silent for several seconds. “Do I have your word that she’ll leave here unharmed, Your Honor?”
     “Jared!”
     The lawyer’s jaw clenched. “Please just say yes or no, Kenneth. I haven’t made arrangements to protect her from you tonight, and you can see that I’m not up to the job myself.”
     The judge sputtered. “I could simply follow you to where she’s waiting, if that were on my agenda.”
     Tillotsen would not relent. “Yes or no, Kenneth?”
     A hand closed around MacMillan’s heart and squeezed. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and rose. “You have my word that I will not commit physical violence against your client, nor permit any other of our people to do so, tonight or on any other occasion. Now please, Jared, bring her here.”
     The lawyer turned and left.

***

     Ann Mears was barely able to walk. With each step her knees tried to buckle and send her to the floor. Her backbrain screamed that she was going to her death. Only by separating her body from her consciousness and running it on automatic was she able to continue forward.
     At some point during the walk from room 624 to the fifth floor janitor’s storage area, Tillotsen had taken her arm. She hadn’t noticed at first, but when the frigid clasp on her flesh penetrated the fog around her thoughts, her entire body turned to ice. Yet she would not pull away. She did not want to offend him. She did not want to discover the consequences.
     He ushered her into the storage room with gentle, formal courtesy. A dim light seeped in from the parking lot. It silhouetted a stooped male figure perched upon a cardboard box. The figure did not move, but allowed Ann and Tillotsen to approach.
     “Good evening, Miss Mears. My name is Kenneth MacMillan. I’m pleased and proud to meet you at last.” The old man smiled.
     At the sight of those pronounced canines, so well suited to their legendary purpose, she almost succumbed to the urge to flee, but Tillotsen squeezed her arm gently and she stood her ground.
     “Good evening, uh, Your Honor. Is that the title you use?”
     MacMillan nodded. “Just as do judges of your kind. The dignity of the court and all that. I suppose Jared has told you that I’m going to permit your action to go forward?”
     “Yes, Your Honor, just before. Thank you.”
     The judge chuckled. It was the strangest sight Ann had ever seen. There was no bloodlust in the eyes under those bushy gray brows. There was wisdom, and honor, and a considerable amount of respect. Ann’s fear subsided.
     “I…” MacMillan halted himself and gave another chuckle. “I was about to say I’ve been dying to meet you, but that wouldn’t be quite right, would it? I’ve been looking forward to this encounter, Miss Mears. Jared has told me only a little about you, but just on the basis of your presence before me, I think it safe to say that you’re the most courageous person your species has ever produced.”
     It pricked a laugh from her. “Thank you, Your Honor. But if you could hear my knees knocking you might not think so well of me.”
     “To the contrary, my dear.” The judge waved at Tillotsen. “Jared has said he can protect you for the hearing on Monday. Have the two of you discussed it?”
     She glanced up at the lawyer. “We have.”
     “And you’re satisfied?”
     She nodded.
     “Then I suppose there’s no more to be said about the practical arrangements. But Miss Mears, please take care in all things.” MacMillan’s expression became somber. “You’ll be the first living human to appear in one of our courts in all our history. Those around you will have no cause to love you and every reason to wish you ill. You must avoid anything that might be construed as a provocation, no matter how elaborate Jared’s protections are. No religious emblems. No perfume. No mirrors. For the love of God, no wooden stakes! And don’t approach anyone in the room without Jared’s approval, and him at your side. Are you comfortable with those restrictions?”
     She swallowed. “It won’t be a problem, Your Honor.”
     “Good.” The judge seemed about to dismiss them when she found her voice.
     “Sir, why did you decide to allow our suit? It has to be the biggest threat to your people that they’ve ever faced. If we win, your own laws will forbid you to feed on us.”
     MacMillan was silent for a long interval. Ann wondered if she had triggered something she would regret. Tillotsen remained impassively still beside her.
     “I am not an elected official, Miss Mears. I hold my responsibilities because our people hold me in high regard. In part, because I am the oldest of our kind.
     “There are not many of us in the world. How could there be? Perhaps twenty thousand on this continent, and perhaps twice that on all the others together. We will never be a populous species. You living humans, who… provide our sustenance, must always outnumber us dramatically.
     “For at least ten thousand years, there has been war between us. I, whose memories span three hundred seventy-two years, have never known anything else. Though we feed upon you, ours is a miserable and frightened existence, a continuous cowering in the dark before your superior numbers and other advantages. The human who believes in the reality of our kind may fear us, if he should chance to leave the lighted places, but the vampire fears humankind in all places and times.
     “War is no species’s preferred state, Miss Mears. We want peace, just as you do. We want stability, just as you do. We want the privilege of walking the earth openly and without fear, just as you do. But Jared has convinced me that until we cease to look upon you as our cattle, that can never come to pass.
     “So on Monday, I will take a bold step. I will allow you to claim rights before me, rights to life, liberty and property that would not accrue to a mindless meat animal, and I will uphold the claim. News of my decision will spread through our numbers from that night forward, and our world will change.”
     “Will it, Your Honor? Laws seldom change the behavior of the living.”
     MacMillan grinned ruefully and stared at his knees. “I know, Miss Mears. Before I… crossed over, I was a judge among living men. Vampires are different. We have always had very little, and our laws have always been few.” He looked up with an expression of entreaty. “We’ll be gambling that your world will change as well, though it will surely take longer. Will you do what you can to hasten it?”
     Ann nodded. “I will, sir.”
     MacMillan rose and moved slowly toward her, one hand extended. Tillotsen released his grip on her arm, allowing her to stay or go as she wished.
     She raised her own hand and took the judge’s in a soft clasp. His flesh was cool to the touch, as was Tillotsen’s, but it closed on hers with a suggestion of strength that no creature, living or undead, would dare to challenge.

***

     “He’s a great man.”
     Tillotsen squeezed her hand. “He is.”
     “Will he be putting himself in danger?”
     The lawyer shook his head. “Kenneth MacMillan could never be in danger among other vampires. You would never believe the love we have for him. He’s the glue that holds us together.”
     “Still…”
     Another squeeze. “Don’t worry about it, Ann. Just be ready on Monday.” He opened her door for her, then gasped strangely and bent double, hands pressed to his middle.
     She stooped and took his head in her hands, and his eyes met hers. She could not read those eyes, the eyes of a man dead longer than she had lived. But her concern seemed to reach him, and he straightened and smiled.
     “I’m all right.”
     Vampires lie no better than humans.
     “How long has it been, Jared?”
     He shrugged. “I’ve ceased to keep track. A month, maybe.”
     “Since you met me, right?”
     He nodded.
     In time, it will change. We’ll come to accept them, make provisions for them, learn how to synthesize what they need. But for now, only the old ways will do.
     “Melissa’s not going to make it, you know.”
     She would not have believed that he could become paler still, but he did. “Are you sure?”
     “Yes,” she murmured. “Jared, would you… change her for me?”
     His mouth dropped open. “You honor me more than I can say, Ann.”
     Not half as much as you deserve.
     “It will have to wait until after the hearing on Monday, though. I can’t risk it before that. I’ve grown too weak.”
     Ann gathered both the lawyer’s hands into her own. “Thank you, Jared. For everything. When…” A rush of grief flooded through her, momentarily washing away all her words. “When she wakes up as one of you, I didn’t want to have to fear my own daughter.”
     “Or for her to fear her mother,” he whispered.
     Ann Mears came to a decision. She gestured Tillotsen across her threshold. “Come in, Jared.”
     His eyes clouded with confusion. “Why, Ann?”
     She reached up and pulled his head down to hers, brushed her warm lips across his cold ones.
     “I want to fix you something to eat.”

==<O>==

Copyright © 2000 (or thereabouts) Francis W. Porretto. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Jul 20 2023

Assume Trump Is A Living Emmanuel Goldstein. What Then?

Anyone who ever read Orwell has likely had this assumption cross their mind. But it is the “What Then?” that becomes a very difficult problem to contemplate.

Let’s explore the reasons for the difficulty simply arising from even thinking about the assumption.

  1. Getting people who like Trump to accept any notion that he’s an establishment creation.
  2. Getting people to take seriously as grand a conspiracy as this assumption requires.
  3. Being prepared to accept attacks orchestrated by the conspirators.
  4. The first three problems create the fourth: finding enough people who have courage enough to withstand charges of, respectively, suffering from TDS, being a conspiracy nut, or a dangerous counter-revolutionary.

I’m willing to bet I haven’t exhausted all the problems simply from raising the possibility, only that these three seem to be the most apparent to begin with.

And you will notice I haven’t even begun to consider:

What Then?

I am not sure anyone who is reading this has a clue as to what to do even if Trump is a legitimately pro American man. The leadership of every American institution — public, private, clerical, charitable — appears to be manned by those predicted by Robert Conquest’s Third Law.

But to a certain extent, once we consider the assumption plausible enough, it does throw out the likelihood that the normal channels of politics are ever going to provide a solution to rescue America from those who’ve usurped her.

Let us look at a series of facts that made it possible for Trump to become a creation of the enemy.

  1. The very notion of the TEA Party was instigated by a member of corporate media. The idea grew out of so much material produced by American bloggers and from callers to the top Talkshows. Only the Right made any headway in advancing ideas. The Left only succeeded where they could block the info coming from the Right, and then poorly at that. Leftist Air America was a huge flop. It was a failed effort to regain all that the old liberal talkers lost after Rush became the Big Dog.
  2. As has became known about a decade ago , IRS commissioner Lois Lerner prevented the formation of any organization that had any suggestion of TEA Party in its charter. No clear leader grew out of the few that formed. Learner retired and suffered no consequences. What unmistakable signal could that have sent to other deeply partisan DC bureaucrats?
  3. Trump became a star out of the blue with his Apprentice show. “You’re fired!” became his tagline, and it is remembered to this day. Yet this is one area where he arguably most let down those who counted on him to rid us of demigod like agents. Still virulently active are those who fined, confiscated property, and imprisoned people; their victims never granted a legitimate defense in court or even any court hearing.
  4. Trump was able to destroy in the primaries all opponents, using lies and distortions, all with the help of the same corporate media (he bragged how he had to spend so little money in the primaries) that would become his ardent enemy the day he secured the GOP nomination.
  5. The media built him up, and then turned on a dime and began the “two minutes hate” for 24/7/365, so that Trump Derangement Syndrome far exceeded Orwell’s dystopic indoctrination method. O’Brien was the author of Goldstein’s manifesto. Who or what media team was and is writing Trump’s scripts?

Then let’s look at the things for which Trump is known to have done poorly with but for which his fans — helped by the media again — never seem to remember or are too willing to overlook because “Who else talks like Trump? We NEED his fire!!!!”

  1. “You’re Fired” hardly made an appearance. Him not firing Sessions until too late, and not firing Barr nor Fauci. Or hiring Wray. Or backing McConnell and Romney for reelection. Again, I’m sure I’m overlooking many more names.
  2. The lockdowns. No big box biz, and all but selective businesses shut down, mostly Mom and Pops. You’ve seen the weird lists: Churches and gyms shuttered, but brothels and rioters are ok. Lost jobs. Kids out of school. Preschoolers having their growth retarded by forced masking.
  3. Operation Warp Speed. Dangerous, deadly; but lucrative and free from liability for scumbags. Was that only stupid or could it be far worse than stupid?
  4. The beginning of multi-trillion dollar deficits every year since 2020. Inflation is only the most noticeable component. So many people who will never again work to live — or at least until the collapse as dreamed of by those who love Cloward-Piven.
  5. Every decent executive order he signed was reversed on Biden’s first day in office. And Biden increased the numbers of EOs. If rule by fiat was ok under Trump, why isn’t it ok under Biden? Did anyone who loved the way Trump ruled ever think it could come back to bite them?
  6. The best thing to come of rule by EO was that it proved that all the good ideas that TEA Party thinking came up with WILL WORK if only we could be rid of the wealthy bastards and foreign enemy globalists who hate America and Americans.

I still do not have an answer to “What Then?”

It probably doesn’t matter. I fear the reluctance to be courageous enough to really consider that the primary assumption is a real issue is too great.

I don’t even have the strength left to finish editing this properly. I want to publish this before I have second thoughts and chicken out.

At least I had felt compelled to risk scorn and hatred for bringing it up. Come on. Attack me. Let’s see what you got.

Jul 20 2023

Love, Possibility, And The Fatal Hesitation

     Writers are constantly on the alert for other writers who can teach them something. I’m no exception. I know my descriptive skills to be sub-par, so when reading I’m especially alert for a display of exceptional power in that aspect of the fiction writer’s trade.

     And today, I encountered one in the work of a writer I hadn’t previously known about:

     It was only when their couch neighbors made a particularly frisky, lip-smacking claim for even more couch space, and Nate found himself with Gwen all but sitting in his lap, that their conversation hit a lull. Or screeched to a grinding halt, rather.
     In that moment, feeling her warm weight on him, smelling the electric blue jungle juice on her breath and the lavender in her moonlight-struck hair… In that moment, locked in the depths of her eyes, intoxicated with the closeness of her, and with gods knew what else, Nate thought in earnest about kissing Gwen—about reaching up, looping a stupid, sweaty palm behind her head and pulling her face to his, just like he’d seen at least one guy do at pretty much every shitty party he’d ever been to. Just like the neighbors who were practically dry humping on top of them now had no doubt done a minute ago.
     She was right there. She was watching him. Not shying away. Watching him. Searching his face for… for what?
     Just do it.
     His hand twitched like a defective toy on the arm of the couch.
     Gwen shifted ever-so-slightly on top of him, the slight movement sending ripples down to the core of his being. The oddest smile was tugging at her lips—sweet and yet somehow sad, vulnerable.
     Kiss her.
     He should do it. Was going to do it.
     Then he thought of Todd, and of the loyal goon squad that would no-shit happily murder Nate’s IT Guy ass for even sitting here with their Alpha’s girl like this—assuming they could even stop laughing at him long enough to bother…
     “I’m sorry,” Nate whispered, so quietly he wasn’t sure he’d made the sound at all. He was staring down at her thighs now, not even remembering having dropped his gaze.
     Jesus, why was he like this?
     He felt hollow. Clammy, almost.
     Then she laid a hand on his chest, and tremors ran through him at the touch.
     “Same old, same old, huh?” she said, almost as quietly.
     Before he could rally himself to do or say anything, she shifted again, and then she was climbing off of him, rising from the couch, and the moment was dead and gone.

     [Luke Mitchell, The Eighth Excalibur]

     I have seldom encountered a passage simultaneously as beautiful and as poignant as the above. I’ll let you know how the rest of the book stacks up.

Jul 20 2023

Mary Celeste, Where Are You?

     This incident is enough to make anyone wonder:

     LYNCHBURG, Va. (WSET) — A man in Virginia had a not-so-average trip to Waffle House recently. He went there to grab a bite to eat, but when he went inside there was no one to be found.
     William Davis woke up hungry and drove from Brookneal to the Waffle House in Lynchburg around 3 a.m. Tuesday morning.
     When he got there, he saw something he never expected: an empty restaurant.
     “All kinds of things go through your mind when you see stuff like that, you know, out of the ordinary,” Davis said.
     Davis was not expecting to find a scene like this. In the Facebook live he posted you can see dishes out on tables and signs that people had been there, like hot water running, but not a single worker.

     Beware, munched-out late-night eaters! That waffle you crave might not be available on easy terms. But perhaps we should spare a thought for the staff. When contacted, the manager said there were two staff assigned to that shift. Did they ever report in? Will there be a follow-up story, perhaps an investigation? Who is kidnapping the great short-order cooks of Virginia? Film at eleven!

Jul 20 2023

Boiling Over

     Links? Who needs links? Not me, not today. You’ve probably already read about all this stuff, anyway.

***

     Yes, the Left is filled with liars, hypocrites, and criminals of several kinds. Remember that conviction of intellectual and moral superiority? It’s their “Get Away With Anything” card, and they use it freely. Most commentators on the Right are loath to declare it overdrawn.

     So Pramila Jayapal and the rest of “The Squad” can shriek anti-Semitic imprecations and denunciations of Israel from dawn to dusk, but when Republicans call them on it, the Left’s media handmaidens leap to their defense with “Republicans Pounce” articles, plus a few opinion columns from Michelle Goldberg and her ilk. And we dare not mention the times when those loyal Leftist lackeys have condemned anti-Semitism as purely a phenomenon of the Right, naturally. What else is new?

     The Left can strain to its utmost to sexualize American children, convince them that they’re homosexual, or bisexual, or something other than the sex they were born – I’ll say it again: “gender” is for nouns and connectors; a human being has a sex – but for American parents to object to such treatment, or to demand that school libraries remove sexually explicit materials as inappropriate, is somehow oppressive. Never mind that the Left has condemned homeschooling and religious schooling as “fascist.” Never mind that among their declared aims is the abolition of parental rights and the parental bond. And never mind that attempts by parents to have those highly sexual materials aired at school-board meetings have been denounced as public obscenity. Those parents are unAmerican, period.

     The testimony from whistleblowers about the preferential treatment Hunter Biden has received is utterly damning, but the Left is screaming that going after Joe Biden’s family members is both irrelevant and wrong. Does anyone else remember the treatment they gave George W. Bush’s daughters, or the children and grandchildren of a certain Donald Trump? It seems that was okay with them. Politics ain’t beanbag, y’know. But let Marjorie Taylor Greene show an open session of Congress a photo of the naked Hunter Biden doing one of the things he does best – i.e., smoke crack and bang prostitutes – and the gates of Hell are thrown open.

     And for lagniappe, we have this:

     Makes a nice after-dinner aperitif, doesn’t it?

***

     But don’t look to the supposed political arm of the Right – the Republican Party – for salvation. It’s just not in the cards. They can’t bring themselves to represent their own constituents. Several Republican Senators are threatening to defect to the Democrat Party out of revulsion toward President Trump, the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, and the mushrooming power of – gasp! – populism. Two of the best of the GOP Representatives, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, are having a catfight, God alone knows why.

     Alone among the declared GOP candidates for President, only Donald Trump has said that he intends to pull the nation completely away from the ever more deadly Russia / Ukraine conflict. All the rest of them think it’s Americans’ responsibility to bleed and beggar ourselves for that corrupt satrapy. So what if its chief kleptocrat has shut down the opposition press, imprisoned his opponents, and outlawed the Ukrainian Orthodox Church while amassing a fortune near to a billion dollars? Shovel some more at him! Send him F-16s! No sacrifice is too great for the preservation of Ukrainian territorial integrity!

     Then there’s the “January 6” protestors and their fates. Some of them have been in detention for nearly two and a half years. Speedy trials, as required by the Sixth Amendment? Not for them; they’re insurrectionists. The only “insurrectionists” ever to mount their “insurrection” entirely unarmed, but hey, who wants to split hairs? No Republican of any stature has demanded that they be immediately tried or immediately exonerated.

     The protestors claim that FBI plants incited whatever disorder occurred that day. They claim, with some evidence already marshaled, that they were admitted to the Capitol by the Capitol Police – that some of those police actually conducted a guided tour of the place. There’s a whole lot of video – federal video from federal cameras – that would put the matter to rest once and for all…but of all people, Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t want it released? Why not?

     Election fraud? What Republican in either house of Congress is leading the charge on that? What have any of them proposed? Given that all the fraud-enabling changes that stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump are still in play, how can they reasonably hope to prevail in November 2024? None of them are willing to say on camera that the 2020 election was stolen; the press might call them “conspiracy theorists,” and they can’t have that.

     These are the people, and the party, that claim to represent “your interests.” They bombard you with emails that thunder of the danger to the Republic. They demand your money and votes. They seek to have you infer that only they can defend what remains of your rights. But ask them to actually perform as they advertise? No, too soon; they have to have the White House, both houses of Congress, a clear majority on the Supreme Court, and fair treatment by the major media before they can do anything. And anyway, “[insert issue here] is not the hill to die on.”

     Throw these guppies back; they’re too spineless.

***

     I’m tired. I’ve already thrown all organized political activity on the refuse heap as a complete waste of time, energy, and money. What boggles my mind is how so many nominally intelligent, nominally sensible Americans remain passionately engaged. What do they tell themselves? “This time it will be different” — ? Great God in heaven, what evidence do you have to that effect?

     What’s that? You want to know why I’ve boiled over this morning? Oh, nothing much. Just finding fundraising emails from eight different political candidates in my inbox when I awoke. The majority are sitting federal legislators – Republicans, of course – but two are from aspirants who claim that the edifice needs “change,” and that they can provide it. Change toward what? The emails get rather cloudy after that.

     Not long ago, a colleague, an undeniably intelligent man, hit me with this bit of arrogant idiocy: “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain.” Hearing that from someone I respected was momentarily paralyzing. It took me some time to recover my sense of reality. Unfortunately, I think he took my incredulous silence for agreement.

     American politics is now a sideshow. Our elections are cargo-cult exercises in which we simulate “democracy,” but with foreordained results and never any substantive changes. With vanishingly few exceptions, American officeholders are either lily-livered slaves to the media, or outright grifters, or would-be totalitarians. I sometimes wonder if the Men Behind The Curtain allow the presence of that handful of exceptions just to keep our hopes up. At any rate, I can’t think of a more plausible explanation.

     Apologies, Gentle Reader. I think I’ll lie down for a while, perhaps with a cool washcloth over my face. Have a nice day.

Jul 20 2023

I’m tired of being right

We told you this would happen. Lots of people, not just myself, said that women were going to be forced to deal with male genitalia in the showers under the guise of “Trans rights”. Lo and behold….

An 18-year-old military recruit forced to shower with biological males as part of the Biden administration’s transgender policies is complaining about being placed in an “extremely uncomfortable position.” .

…It was believed raising the matter in a complaint could have harmful impacts on the new recruit’s military career.

Oh, but recruiting is falling even more behind? Gosh, I wonder why ever that could be? This Soldier is a National Guard troop. What’s the over/under on whether or not she went back and told all of her friends to stay away from the Army at all costs?

Anyone? No? I think we all know the answer.

In any other context, if a man walked into the female latrine and exposed himself it would be a sexual crime. But when the man claims to be a woman, suddenly the women just need to shut up and stare at a penis in the name of “tolerance”.

Trans rights are inherently anti-woman. They erase woman’s spaces, they destroy woman’s safety. They allow a man to expose himself to women in a female latrine and then they tell the woman to shut up and take it. This is the end result of the Trans movement. They force women to be sexually harassed and belittled in a women’s restroom.

God help that troop, she’s going to get hammered to a wall for daring to speak out under Biden and Lloyd “Shitstain” Austin’s junta.

Jul 19 2023

It’s Time For Music

     …here at the Fortress – but nothing too upbeat today:

It was a night meeting
Somewhere in a troubled land
They came with no greeting
Left without a shaken hand.

Nearby the town sleeping
Was unaware of what was done
No need for watchkeeping
They’ll be gone before the sun.

You may not see just where the sense is
In the actions of the State
You may not know the consequences
Of their actions till too late
The rival factions still debate
As shadows gather at your gate.

It was a night meeting
They won’t admit on either side
There’ll be no press briefing
Information classified.

It was a night meeting
Independently arranged
To get a signed treaty
Force the government to change.

Secret diplomacy
Without the means to make their policy prevail
Meanwhile the powers that be
Behind the scenes have guaranteed to see them fail.

You seem beyond the jurisdiction
Of the democratic powers
You do not see the contradiction
Of the watchmen in the towers
You turn your back as night devours
The final chance, the final hours.

It was a night meeting
These are men who won’t be missed
Their lives were just fleeting
They don’t officially exist.

     Al Stewart is my nominee for the Twentieth Century’s greatest lyricist.

Jul 19 2023

Addictions

     First, courtesy of Mike Miles, a prediction from a visionary of a century ago:

     Brave New World predicted several things: genetic engineering, the end of human parturition, a habit-forming pleasure drug, the virtual abolition of emotion, a rigidly stratified world society, a world government, and more. Huxley’s vision was dystopic: that of a kind of Hell, in which all that makes us human has been removed from us in the name of peace and stability. We should be thankful that his predictions have not yet come to pass in their entirety. Yet they fill me with a great foreboding.

     I worked with a couple of Huxley’s ideas in my Futanari Saga. I’m not done with them. However, don’t be on tenterhooks for the next installment; these stories are getting harder and harder to write. I’ve never been terribly fond of reading horror; writing it was never high on my list of ambitions.

     One thing that distinguishes Huxley’s vision of a genetically and pharmacologically pacified world from our current milieu is the near-universal contentment of its denizens. That comes across in several ways. The great majority of its denizens live untroubled lives. They know their place and they’re happy to be in it. That happiness is buttressed by a pleasure-focused set of institutions and – of course – by Huxley’s drug soma, which is available to all. Dissidents such as Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson are segregated off to island communities where they can’t trouble the greater number. John – “the Savage” – is set loose in the larger society as a kind of experiment. To put it mildly, it doesn’t turn out well for him.

     I was not yet twelve years old when I first read Brave New World. I didn’t quite “get the point,” though it vaguely troubled my rebellious preadolescent soul. But then, quite a number of “older and wiser heads” have never gotten it either…and perhaps we should be grateful for that.

***

     I think it would be inaccurate to say that individuals in Huxley’s envisioned dystopia are addicted to soma. They certainly value it highly, but the drug as proposed appears not to have the most important property of genuinely addictive substances: a terrible and terrifying withdrawal procedure. Yet they are addicts: to peace, to comfort, to stability, and to the absence of any need to think or feel. When Bernard Marx’s thoughts veer toward the possible superiority of an emotion-laden world filled with choices individuals must make for their own survival and flourishing, he becomes an isolate. He can no longer relate to co-protagonist Lenina Crowne, for example. And of course, that openness to a wildly different vision of life and society ultimately gets him sent to an island, which World Controller Mustapha Mond characterizes thus:

     ‘One would think he was going to have his throat cut,’ said the Controller, as the door closed. ‘Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he’d understand that his punishment is really a reward. He’s being sent to an island. That’s to say, he’s being sent to a place where he’ll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren’t satisfied with orthodoxy, who’ve got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who’s any one. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson.’
     Helmholtz laughed. ‘Then why aren’t you on an island yourself?’
     ‘Because, finally, I preferred this,’ the Controller answered. ‘I was given the choice: to be sent to an island, where I could have got on with my pure science, or to be taken on to the Controllers’ Council with the prospect of succeeding in due course to an actual Controllership. I chose this and let the science go.’ After a little silence, ‘Sometimes,’ he added, ‘I rather regret the science. Happiness is a hard master-particularly other people’s happiness. A much harder master, if one isn’t conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth.’

     The powers behind Huxley’s curtain, the World Controllers and their advisors, are in much the same position as C. M. Kornbluth’s “normal men” in his classic novella The Marching Morons. The Controllers have voluntarily enslaved themselves to the happiness of millions of inferiors: quasi-humans designed and fully conditioned to accept bondage without being fully aware of their chains. But note: when someone out of the past gives Kornbluth’s “normal men” the key to escaping their comparable self-enslavement, they take it eagerly. Yes, it means the painful slaughter of the greater part of the population of the world, but so what?

     What sort of emotional relationship to one’s inferiors does that decision reveal? Is it more or less plausible than Huxley’s vision of a benevolent unseen oligarchy, self-enslaved to the well-being and happiness of far lesser humans?

***

     There is a group that aspires to the degree of all-encompassing power Huxley attributed to his Controllers and Orwell attributed to his Inner Party. They do regard the rest of us as their inferiors, fit solely for serving them. They intend our subjugation. Indeed, they intend to do away with a large fraction of us – “for our own good,” of course. What emotional relationship would you say they have with us?

     Got it in one, didn’t you, Gentle Reader?

     They strive to present themselves as benevolent. There may even be, among their number, some genuinely benevolent souls. Yet they are united in their belief that they are entitled to rule over the rest of us, by dint of their moral and intellectual superiority. And they will brook no dissent from us the hoi polloi.

     Daniel Webster once said:

     “There are men, in all ages, who mean to exercise power usefully; but who mean to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters; but they mean to be masters.”

     Some time ago, I wrote that “Power is a drug that doesn’t sate.” Today, I feel that that formulation isn’t perfectly exact. Power is the overarching aim of the abovementioned persons, but it is not power per se to which they’re addicted.

     Dare to challenge them, demand that their power be limited or nullified, and their “goodness,” whether real or pretended, will dissolve like the morning mists. Their reaction will not be a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger chastisement and correction, but undisguised and violent hatred. Our exercise of lese majeste will reveal their true nature, for they are addicted to their self-conception as our betters, and they demand that we accept it without question.

***

     As I’ve said on other occasions, I write these pieces extemporaneously. I don’t outline them first. I don’t make notes of the high points I intend to hit. If they sometimes seem murky or jumbled, you have the explanation.

     Huxley’s vision of a peaceful society filled with contented serfs is at wild variance from Orwell’s bleak dystopia. Yet it would be a far easier “sell” today. For that reason I fear that the would-be totalitarians will eventually grasp its usefulness, at least as a veneer with which to coat and disguise their ultimate aims. When they say “by any means necessary,” they mean it.

     Whether or not they mean to be good masters, they mean to be masters. Though among them there may be individuals who regard us with the kind of affection one feels for a pet, they do not love us. They cannot, for they do not regard us as their equals; their addiction forbids it. And they will not enslave themselves to our happiness.

     Have a nice day.

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