They Keep Trying

     There’s never been a defensible rationale for censorship – of anything. Attempts to construct one have always run up against insuperable problems. Even many of those who ardently wish for some sort of restriction on what people may say, and when, where, and to whom, will tell you that it can’t be done without creating still worse problems that will rebound against its creators.

     Nevertheless, they’ll keep trying.

***

     A censor always claims that he seeks to “protect” something or someone. Consider the suppression of sexually-charged books or movies. In the usual case, the censor claims that he seeks to protect the “innocence of children.” It’s a worthy aim; there are certainly better things for preteens to be thinking about than sex and its many facets. But it’s a demonstrably false claim, for the sex-focused censor seeks above all to keep sexually oriented materials out of the hands of adults, who are presumably already acquainted with sex.

     Today, the aim of the would-be censors is the suppression of dissent from the Official Line®. I know, that’s not a hold-the-presses news flash. Yet it deserves some thought, for it diverges dramatically from previous rationales for censorship. Who or what are these censors trying to “protect?”

     If the answer doesn’t leap at you and bite you on the nose, you haven’t been paying enough attention.

     Is their effort understandable? Certainly; everyone seeks to protect that which he believes is his by right. But it’s not defensible by American standards. It requires something like a Divine Right of Political Establishments. We don’t do that here. At least, we haven’t done it before this.

     Nevertheless, the censors will keep trying.

***

     There are bolder and subtler degrees of censorship and suppression. Generally we only call it censorship when force or the threat of force is involved. However, in recent years other techniques have come to the fore. The rise of “cancel culture” speaks to one of them. Another recently poked its head above the high-slime line: the “move on” gambit:

     Some Republican lawmakers are bristling at the idea of spending another two years talking about Jan. 6 — viewing the renewed focus as part of a self-destructive streak undermining their agenda for the new majority.

     What’s happening: Each time Democrats or the press appear ready to move on, the insurrection is dragged back to center stage by the GOP’s most influential voices.

     Why it matters: House Democrats used their majority to ensure the roots, violence and consequences of Jan. 6 received maximum attention through carefully choreographed prime-time hearings.

  • When Republicans won power in the midterms, they earned the right to set the agenda and divert attention away from what polls have shown is a serious political vulnerability.
  • Instead — due in large part to the empowerment of the far-right — Republicans have helped ensure wall-to-wall coverage of the 2021 Capitol attack is again blanketing cable news.

     Andrew Solender has cleverly and subtly emphasized Republican divisions over Tucker Carlson’s January 6 revelations. The portion of the GOP he styles “far-right” has distressed the rest of the party by harping on something from which “it’s time to move on.”

     If this sally sounds familiar, hearken to Athena Thorne:

     One thing Axios clearly doesn’t feel like doing is commenting on the actual, genuine footage aired on Carlson’s show — footage that proved the Brian Sicknick “insurrectionists killed cops” narrative was a lie, and that “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley peacefully wandered the halls with Capitol Police at his side when he was supposedly waging a violent insurrection….

     In fact, the second Axios article is called “Frustrated Republicans want to ‘move on’ as far-right revives Jan. 6.” Hm, move on, move on — where have we heard that expression before? Oh, I remember! It was the narrative back when then-President Bill Clinton got caught with the intern and compounded his dilemma by perjuring himself and tampering with witnesses and evidence. Clinton earned himself an impeachment with those crimes, though he wasn’t convicted by the Senate. Back then, Democrats didn’t like impeachment, lol.

     Apropos of nothing, how does the “move on” gambit differ in substance from calling someone with whom you disagree “an obsessive?” Is it appropriate to call someone who insists on airing and correcting a blatant injustice “obsessive?” Isn’t the “obsessive” the one who insists that the injustice not be discussed?

     Nevertheless, they’ll keep trying.

***

     At least this isn’t the U.K. Things are much worse there:

     The House of Commons has approved the UK’s first “thought crime” law after MPs rejected a move to protect silent prayer in public places.
     In a free vote, MPs rejected an amendment to the Public Order Bill by 299 votes to 116, a large majority of 183, to protect private prayer and consensual conversations within any “censorship” zone.
     Among those to support the amendment were Home Secretary Suella Braverman and Attorney General Victoria Prentis.
     Jeremiah Igunnubole, legal counsel for ADF UK, which has represented people who have been arrested for praying near abortion clinics, said the vote marked a “watershed moment for fundamental rights and freedoms in our country”.
     He said: “Parliament had an opportunity to reject the criminalisation of free thought, which is an absolute right, and embrace individual liberty for all.
     “Instead, Parliament chose to endorse censorship and criminalise peaceful activities such as silent prayer and consensual conversation.
     “Today it’s abortion. Tomorrow it could be another contested matter of political debate,” he continued.

     That’s right, Gentle Reader: the nation that gave us George Orwell has criminalized thoughts. Moreover, in practice it won’t matter what you’re thinking about if you’re standing or sitting “too close” to an abortion center. What will matter will be who you are and what associations and causes you’re known for.

     Britain’s Catholics have faced the ire of the State before. I doubt this will cow them any more successfully than the pogroms of the Tudors. But abortion is sacrosanct, don’t y’know. To speak – or think – otherwise is therefore blasphemy. And we can’t have that. It’s simply not done.

     Oddly, the British were among the first to discover by experiment that persecution causes a conviction to take hold and grow. Britain’s Death Cultists won’t have any more luck suppressing the pro-life movement today than the Tudors had with Catholicism.

     Nevertheless, they’ll keep trying.

***

     I could go on. I could spend a few hundred words on the motivation behind Washington state’s attempt to define conservative opinion as “domestic terrorism.” But I think the point has been made.

     Censorship is the last tactic of the loser: he who cannot prevail in an argument founded on evidence and reason. Considering what a giveaway it is, an intelligent man who finds himself losing an argument would be smart to concede, or at least to walk away, rather than to try to silence his interlocutor. But then, intelligence is a tool, not a state of grace. One must choose to use it…and not everyone accepts defeat in an argument over a contentious topic. Many would rather try to suppress the prevailing argument, even though it’s always been an unsuccessful ploy.

     Nevertheless…oh, never mind. You know how the story ends. Or doesn’t.

When Life Improves On Art

     There was once a British writer named John Brunner who was given to writing scathing novels about a fictional United States mired in one or another sort of crisis or calamity. His writing was excellent even if his vision was perverse. One of his novels, Stand On Zanzibar, won the Hugo Award at a time when that was a genuine badge of merit. Several of his others:

     …won various degrees of acclaim.

     Brunner was an open socialist. In at least one novel (The Long Result) he seemed to endorse totalitarianism. His others were hardly kinder to freedom or capitalism. Yet his imagination was prodigious and his fictions were compelling. The one I have in mind just now is The Shockwave Rider. In that tale, he posits the takeover of the U.S. federal government by organized crime, which might strike my Gentle Readers as prescient. His protagonist, a high genius of software, contrives the downfall of that government by sheer brilliance at his vocation.

     But that’s not why I’ve thought of it today. It’s a secondary motif: a non-profit service, privately organized, called Hearing Aid, which is maintained by an isolated, quasi-agrarian community that calls itself Precipice:

     Precipice is also the home of “Hearing Aid”, an anonymous telephone confession service accessible to anyone in the country. Hearing Aid is also known as the “Ten Nines”, after the phone number used to call it: 999-999-9999. People call the service, a human operator answers, and they simply talk while the operator listens. Some rant, others seek sympathy, still others commit suicide while on the phone. Hearing Aid’s promise is that nobody else, not even the government, will hear the call. The only response Hearing Aid gives to a caller is “Only I heard that, I hope it helped.”

     That’s right: all Hearing Aid guarantees is privacy and a listener. The subtext of this imagined service and its posited popularity is hardly obscure. In Brunner’s fiction, millions of people feel that no one cares about them or is listening to them, and are willing to talk, sometimes for hours, to a listener who does not respond simply to feel less lonely. The operators are supported by donations alone.

     Fanciful? Perhaps, though there is a wave of loneliness and anomie sweeping real-world American youth. However, I doubt that many of them would be at all satisfied by a “listen-only” service. The great majority of them want to feel that they matter to someone. It’s a lack to which many modern developments have contributed.

     Which brings us to The Hope Line:

     TheHopeLine was founded over 30 years ago by acclaimed youth speaker and radio host, Dawson McAllister.
     What started out as a way to support listeners of the Dawson McAllister Live radio show has now become one of the world’s premiere resources for students and young adults in crisis. In 2020 alone TheHopeLine received 3.3 million visits while completing 9,902 live chats and 1,564 suicide interventions.
     We are a non-profit organization that provides free resources like live chat with Hope Coaches, email mentors, blog posts, podcasts, and eBooks because of donors who believe in our mission. We would love for you to join our team!

     In its FAQ section we find this:

     What’s The Catch?
     It makes perfect sense that you would ask a question like this. Nothing’s really free right?! Well, believe it or not, TheHopeLine is. Our team is made up of people you will never meet, but who care deeply about you. Here’s something else that may just blow your mind, we pray for you…A LOT! We don’t believe it’s an accident you are here. You matter to us and more importantly, you matter to God. Whatever you’re going through, you don’t have to go through it alone. Let’s get your Hope Journey started!

     I had a brief conversation with one of the counselors there, a young woman named Bailey, who tells me that the principal malady callers have cited to her is a lack of love. That makes perfect sense to me. Isolation and the sense of being unloved go together perfectly. Those of us who’ve never suffered any such feeling are likely to find it difficult to comprehend. Yet it’s real, and more prevalent today than you can imagine.

     How many organizations would you say are genuinely and solely doing good works – even God’s work? For my money, this is one. Hope Line counselors are literally engaged in one of the great works of mercy: comforting the afflicted. If you feel like supporting a truly worthy charity, I can recommend The Hope Line without reservation.

The Lies Are Coming Apart In Glorious Technicolor

     …and we’ve got front-row seats:

     Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired the first set of previously-unseen surveillance video captured by Capitol police security cameras on January 6, 2021 that undermines several aspects of the reigning narrative about what happened that day.

     House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) last month gave Carlson’s team “unfettered” access to 41,000 hours of footage the government kept hidden from the American public and individuals charged in the Justice Department’s unprecedented and ongoing investigation into the events of January 6. Capitol Police and the Justice Department designated the recordings as “highly sensitive” material in March 2021; the trove remains under tight protective orders and defendants must agree to strict rules before gaining access to clips entered as evidence against them.

     Capitol Police turned over to the FBI roughly 14,000 hours of video covering the hours of noon and 8:00 p.m. on January 6 but the full 24-hour reel has been in the hands of House Democrats for two years—reportedly the footage that Carlson’s team was authorized to view.

     Carlson exposed falsehoods that bolster key animating aspects of January 6 including the movements of Jacob Chansley; the activity of still-uncharged agitator Ray Epps; the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick; alleged “reconnaissance tours” conducted by House Republicans the day before; the “escape” of Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.); and the overall deceptiveness of the January 6 Select Committee. “Taken as a whole, the video record does not support the claim that January 6 was an insurrection,” Carlson explained. “In fact, it demolishes that claim. And that’s exactly why the Democratic Party and its allies in the media prevented you from seeing it.”

     You can almost hear the cringing of the RINOs and the hysterics from the Democrats as you read that. No one in the Political Establishment is happy about the Carlson revelations. They threaten to overturn the whole of the political applecart for good and all…and that is exactly what should happen. Whether it does will be up to us. Only we can see to it — and not by balloting.

     While we wait and deliberate, here’s some appropriate music from composer Mark Isham, set to a gorgeous photomontage by Gary Richards:

     “On the threshold of liberty?” Maybe we are; if so, we owe a great debt of thanks to Tucker Carlson, who has endangered his career and his life by undertaking this mission. My colleague Mike Hendrix thinks he should be decorated for it:

     Tucker Carlson—who some on Our Side contend is variously A) a phony; B) Controlled Opposition; C) even a witting sock-puppet being used by The Enemy for steam-valve purposes, which I think is just ridiculous—has done enough in his dogged pursuit of the truth here as to have earned a Medal of Honor for meritorious, above-and-beyond-the-call service to his country. Endless kudos to him for his determination and derring-do.

     Thresholds are slippery places to stand; ask Janus. But regardless of our current deplorable condition, the trials it has brought us, and the possibility of still worse to come, remember that this is the greatest country in history, the crowning glory of human civilization. One way or another, we must take it back.

For Those Who Are Dubious About AI

     …have a look at this article:

     ChatGPT is a fancy auto-complete: what it does is finding the most likely continuation of text for the text it has already printed out (or as a reply for the prompt, when it is starting printing stuff out), according to the large corpus of text it has been trained with.

     Pixy Misa at AoSHQ put it this way: “ChatGPT cannot think, only speak.” That statement got me thinking about a few folks I’ve known who can’t do either. You know, the blokes who spout all manner of nonsense without ever forming a coherent sentence. Some are drug burnouts; others are schizophrenics; still others are victims of a substandard upbringing and a “public” education.

     And some, determined to find a trade where their disabilities would be assets, have gone into politics:

     “Hire the Handicapped! They’re fun to watch.” – Originator unknown

Do This! It Could be a Game-Changer for Your Online Work

I happened to be talking to my baby brother (hey, he is 10 years younger – 62 this month – he will ALWAYS be the Baby), and he showed me a trick he used to increase the speed at which his devices charged.

You go to Settings–>Accessibility–>Color Filters. Turn it to On status, if it is off. Gray Scale will show as one of the options. Select it.

ALL your computer’s screens will show in Grayscale. Even the browser.

Now, what I can see is that this reduces the “GrabMe” aspect of pages, pictures, and popups. You won’t grab for your device, obsessively checking to see if there are new messages. I would expect to see a drastic reduction in wasted time on social media, ‘news’, and sites trying to grab your attention.

I experienced this once before, when our color TV quit, and we didn’t have the money to replace it immediately. My father donated his old black & white portable TV to us. What I immediately found was that aimless TV watching fell sharply. We tended to turn the TV on for specific shows or purposes (to find out the weather forecast, for example), then turn it off again.

I’ve since seen this option suggested on other sites – link here – and think it would be a neat idea for teachers to pass this along to students and their families, maybe even promoting a Gray Week Challenge. Anything that reduces dependency on devices would be a plus.

The War On Life: Dispatches From The Front Lines

     I’d hazard a guess that most people either don’t know about the abovementioned conflict, or are desperate to ignore it. That’s usually the case with wars: anyone not actually toting a rifle usually does his damnedest to act as if everything is perfectly, peacefully normal. Even so, many who pretend so must struggle to maintain the pretense. This is especially the case in the United States, where wars seldom touch the homeland and armaments are one of our principal exports.

     Yet there is a war on. It’s rising in intensity as we speak. Should current trends continue, you might soon find yourself toting a rifle too.

     Have a few links:

     While that’s all recent stuff, I’ve been on this beat for quite some time. You can read my compendium of earlier essays if you like, or you can read the more recent pieces Pascal and I have posted here. Or you can cover your eyes and pretend it isn’t happening, a distressingly popular option. But it is happening. It’s not just a blockbuster film coming soon to a theater near you.

     As I dislike having to repeat myself, I’ll let the above-cited book and articles stand on their own. Consult them or not as you please. I have another thread of the anti-life tapestry in mind this morning.

***

     At the moment, the hard Left is in power in Washington. As it has instituted various mechanisms for electoral fraud across the continent, and since the nation’s many Boards of election are heavily dominated by its allegiants, the prospects for displacing it by ballot are poor. Add to this the Republican Party Establishment’s seeming embrace of permanent minority status, and it begins to look as if a Twenty-First Century form of socialism will be fastened upon us willy-nilly.

     That form will differ considerably from socialist practice in the century behind us. Those earlier socialists prized their subject populations and took measures to prevent their diminution. The socialists of today are of another mindset.

     The masters of the political Establishment have a much shorter time horizon than any previous generation. A key theme of their rule is the sterilization of the populace, to the greatest possible extent. It’s plain that they oppose human reproduction, as witness the various anti-natal fads they champion. Though it might seem unconnected, they dislike to see orphaned children adopted for a related reason: we the living are not merely to eschew reproduction, but to be discouraged from thinking of the future for any reason.

     He who thinks of the future will naturally make provisions for it. He’ll save. He’ll acquire useful skills. He’ll ponder measures that might preserve and propagate those things he values, and will choose among them according to their efficiency. Not least of all, he’ll become involved in his community, for a man alone is far more vulnerable than a numerous and well prepared group.

     Leftist policies oppose all of that:

  • It has degraded the currency to discourage savings.
  • It has destroyed education in useful and practical disciplines.
  • It has made it ever more difficult to arm oneself and become proficient.
  • It has discouraged community involvement through “domestic terrorism” nonsense.
  • It has promoted concepts and practices that are inherently anti-natal and destructive of families.

     Add the current drive toward global war, and the future starts looking pretty bleak. Might as well live for the moment, eh what? But having babies? That’s so not on the agenda.

***

     Hans G. Schantz has provided a thought-provoking graphic:

     That might have been intended to be “tongue-in-cheek.” Yet it hews very close to the truth. It points up another element in the Left’s anti-future campaign: the distancing of the sexes from one another. Anyone familiar with militant feminism’s all but explicit condemnations of men as such, and with the swelling male “go your own way” counter-reaction, will see this at once.

     This is all congenial to those at the levers of power – national and global. They intend to thin us out. Their thinking is not connected to “climate change,” or “the population bomb,” or any of their other nostrums for popular consumption. It’s solely and entirely about power.

     Certain threads in their campaign have been growing more solid day by day. Consider the measures various countries have taken that retard food production. Consider the ongoing campaigns to deny irrigation water to agricultural districts. Consider the open hostility toward the meat industry. And don’t forget the drive to get us to eat bugs.

     You have to get the feeling that “they” don’t like “us” very much at all. But that’s surely consistent with being members of a death cult.

***

     One last thought and I’ll close for today. Now and then the media will focus on some large family – large in that it has more than three children – and bring it to public attention. What is the usual gloss laid onto such families? Are they celebrated as champions of life and love? Not in my experience; indeed, one of the most famous, the Duggars, have been under continuous attack. Another, the Duck Dynasty clan, has been ridiculed and castigated for everything but being white…and don’t worry; the Left will get around to that as well.

     There can be only one conclusion from all this. I’ve already stated it, but here’s a handy graphic I encourage you to pass around:

     Have a nice day.

The Coverups Have Failed

     …and the attempts to silence those who know the truth have become supremely frenzied.

     Good morning, Gentle Reader. I have a slew of things to deal with today, and must soon turn back to them, but the following three stories strike me as imperative to publicize, despite Liberty’s Torch’s modest readership:

     The many malfeasances of the Democrats, especially those in the Usurper Administration, can no longer be concealed. They’ve lied. They’ve cheated. They’ve brutalized patriotic Americans. They’ve prosecuted men for their politics. They’ve stolen, stolen, stolen until the magnitude of the theft exceeds that of all the gangsters and crime lords in history added together. They’ve done everything except hand the keys to the U.S. Treasury to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But there is something they refuse to abide: they don’t want anyone with a media perch to tell us – as if we really need to be told – that we’ve been right all along about them, and to show us the evidence.

     The Usurper Regime must come down at once. Moreover, the Democrat Party has become wholly corrupt and must be eliminated as a political force of importance. There is no more time to wait.

The Gift Room

     [This is an excerpt from Priestesses, my erotic novel about two women who operate the most unusual retail enterprises on Earth. FWP]

***

     Marilyn Cullinane set the box at the exact center of the sheet of wrapping paper and peered around all four sides for unevenness as carefully as if it mattered. With a sharp nod, she pulled the red and gold foil tightly around the box, made neat triangular flaps at the opposed sides, and checked once again for a discrepancy. When she was satisfied that no device at the disposal of mortal Man could detect a difference in the length of the flaps, she tore two small strips of cellophane tape from the dispenser at her side, smoothed them over the edges of the flaps, and thrust the box at Gordon.
     “To the gift room,” she said.
     Gordon rose and toted the box down the bedroom hallway to their guest room. The immaculately kept room hadn’t known an actual guest for nine years, but each year it provided seasonal shelter to dozens of Christmas gifts.
     It was December twenty-fourth, and the queen-sized bed was piled high with boxes, each wrapped in gaily colored seasonal paper and tagged with its recipient’s name. He looked down at the package in his hands, noticed that it lacked a tag, and turned to bring it back to Marilyn, only to find her standing behind him with the tag between her fingers.
     She grinned briefly, jabbed the tag onto the top of the box, and made to return to the pile of boxes on the living room floor when Gordon said, “Sweetie?”
     Her head jerked around. “Hm?”
     “What did we get for, uh, Jason?”
     Another quick grin. “An electric shaver. Don’t you remember? You bought it.” She swept away, leaving him alone at the door to the guest room.
     He glanced within one more time. The ziggurat of glittering presents for their relatives and friends was as neat and precise as his wife’s wrapping technique. The bed beneath was tightly made, almost military in its lines and the tension of its coverings. Though they hadn’t entertained a visitor in almost a decade, Marilyn changed the sheets every week nonetheless.
     It had been their nuptial bed, given to them by her father as a wedding gift twenty years before. It had become their guest bed when, on their tenth anniversary, he’d surprised her with the gift of a cherry bedroom set. After ten years’ trying, they’d failed to beget a child. She’d concluded that they never would, and had lost interest in sex. He, as fond and foolish as always, had treated it as a phase that would pass. He’d thought the bedroom set would remind her that their devotion to one another was what mattered most.
     Her reaction had taken him aback. She was all but silent as they jockeyed the new dressers and vanity around the room, seeking an optimum arrangement. She did as he directed, but made no suggestions of her own. It had made him fear that he’d somehow offended her with the gift, perhaps by not consulting her.
     The one act to which she’d brought some animation was the exile of their old bed to the guest room. They had not made love since.
    

#

     To the skilled walker, a great city can be a great delight, but one must take care. Most persons on the streets of such a city will not be skilled. Attention to their deficiencies is required. In addition, the city’s own attractions can create hazards, both fleeting and persistent, to a too rapid or heedless stride.
     Gordon had resolved to walk the streets of Los Angeles until his head had cleared and his marital dissatisfactions had retreated. He did it often; he fancied that knew the byways of the city as well as any man alive. But that day a moment’s inattention had caused him to take a turn he hadn’t planned. After twenty minutes of strolling while scanning the area for familiar signs, he realized that he’d entered a part of the city’s downtown that was altogether new to him.
     The shops bore unfamiliar names. Many seemed to be in languages other than English. The merchandise in their windows ranged from the exotic to the wholly incomprehensible. The buildings themselves were uneven in construction: some tall, others short; some broad, others slender; some aggressively eye-catching, others almost secretive of decor. They varied in a multitude of directions from the blend of chrome-and-glass modernity and Southwestern regionalia that characterized the city overall.
     There were few people on the streets. Those Gordon saw resisted eye contact as if they feared that he might demand an explanation for their presence.
     The strangeness of the district disturbed his rhythm. It caused him to shift his attention away from his pace and footing. Inevitably, moving too fast for the surroundings while gawking at the mysteries around him, he tripped and fell.
     He collected himself painfully, brushed the dust from the arms of his windbreaker, and looked about for the cause of his tumble. A pace away, a large black cat, the sleekest specimen of felinity he’d ever seen, sat staring at him as if amused at his clumsiness.
     Must’ve tripped over her. Haven’t done that in a dog’s age.
     Despite his pratfall, the internal play on words caused him to smile. He nodded courteously to the cat, who stared at him a moment longer, then turned and slinked away with a cat’s typical sinuousness into the open door of a shop he hadn’t yet consciously registered.
     It appeared to be a lingerie shop. An assortment of corsets, waist cinchers, camisoles, merrywidows, and teddies stood in the display. The name embossed at the base of the window in baroque red curlicues was Naughty But Nice.
     A tall, raven-haired woman of statuesque build and aristocratic carriage emerged and peered down at him. He felt his pulse quicken.
     If a sixteen year old boy were challenged to draw the perfect female body, he might have produced the long-legged vision that contemplated Gordon as he sat upon the sidewalk. If Gordon were then asked to clothe that body, and to top it with a face to challenge the fantasies of a mature man, he could not have improved upon the form-fitting silk bustier, the leather miniskirt, the stiletto-heeled pumps, and the perfectly composed, slightly intrigued face that stood above him.
     He could not place her age.
     “Are you hurt, dear?” Her voice was an alto melody. Each word throbbed with passionate vitality.
     “Uh, no, I’m fine, really.” He levered himself up from the sidewalk and tried to assume a dignified stance. “But thank you for asking.” Without thinking, he held out his hand, as if he’d just been introduced to a business associate or the wife of a friend.
     She took his hand in a curious grip, almost as if she were about to raise it to her lips and kiss it. “Not at all.” He expected her to let go; she did not. “Were you doing some late Christmas shopping?”
     “No, not really.” The soft warmth of her grip was as disturbing as the rest of her. “Just strolling a bit. I wasn’t paying proper attention, and I tripped over your cat.”
     She smiled. “Yes, Astarte can be a hazard, no doubt of it.” Her eyes locked with his. They were as magnetic as the rest of her: large, jet black, and preternaturally steady upon his own. He found that he couldn’t look away. “Even if you’re not looking for something special for your special someone, might I interest you in a cup of tea? I’ve had no guests for some hours, and a spot of company would be very welcome.”
     Never afterward could he remember giving assent. But he followed that dangerously beautiful woman into the shop, his hand held lightly but inescapably in hers, and allowed her to lead him into a place of wonder.
    

#

     “So she shows no desire at all, then?”
     Gordon grimaced and looked away. “I can’t see any. But in all honesty, it’s been so long that I’m not sure I remember what it looks like.”
     Helen nodded. “She might not remember what it feels like. The suppression of desire can bury it so deep that the feel for one’s sensual, sexual side is completely lost.”
     “Have you had that problem?”
     Helen chuckled. “Never, dear. But I’ve made a career out of other people’s troubles with it.” She nodded sideways toward the aisles of erotically oriented goods on display.
     Gordon blushed despite his attempts to repress it. A Catholic upbringing and a sustained unwillingness to think dispassionately about sex had left him unready for so intimate a conversation with a perfect stranger. He could hardly believe it was happening.
     Helen smiled at his discomfort. “Really, Gordon, did you think your neighbors are that much more like the gods and goddesses on television than you and Marilyn? Did you assume that their nights were all red revels in the pleasures of the flesh? I assure you, they’re far closer to your station than our popular culture would have you believe. Otherwise, I’d never sell a thing.”
     She rose from the little table at which they sat, ambled into the aisle nearest them, and picked out a device from the array of goods. She returned to the table and held it out for Gordon’s perusal. It was a rubber contrivance mounted on a set of elastic straps.
     “Have you ever seen one of these?”
     Gordon shook his head.
     “It’s called a French nub. It’s made for a woman to wear. The conical bit goes into her vagina, and the straps go around her waist and legs. It draws out her lubrication and compels her to think about her sexual parts, but it doesn’t provide quite enough stimulation to bring her to a climax. The idea is to evoke desire without satisfaction, so that when her man arrives, she’ll be eager for him.” Helen smiled. “It was devised to ready a virgin bride for the consummation of her marriage. I doubt Marilyn has ever heard of it, much less worn one. But what if she did?”
     Gordon fell back against his chair and howled a laugh replete with pain. “Do you have any idea how she would react to the suggestion? I couldn’t get her into that thing if I had the whole United States Army behind me!”
     Helen didn’t react in any way he could have predicted. She nodded once slightly, returned the nub to its shelf, and reseated herself across from him, fingers steepled before her. Her eyes slid slowly closed. Gordon had the sense that she’d entered a new state of consciousness, one at which he could not guess.
     Is she a sex shop entrepreneur, or something else? Something subtler?
     “So Marilyn’s problem,” she murmured, “isn’t necessarily that she feels no desire for you. Perhaps she does and perhaps she doesn’t. But it’s very likely that she doesn’t want to feel desire, for you or anyone.” Her eyes opened, a black tapestry of mysteries behind them. “Could it be that your mutual infertility made her feel a failure?”
     Gordon swallowed. Helen had arrowed straight to his darkest fear. He had wanted children, quite as much as Marilyn had. In the first years of their marriage, he’d talked about it nonstop.
     “Gordon,” she said, voice ringing with new command, “How’s your own desire? Are you sure you want Marilyn’s desire to return?”
     Though he was securely seated, Gordon was seized by vertigo, as if he’d been snatched out of the shop and set upon a precipice where strong and swirling winds blew all about him. Any movement could be fatal, but in so fickle a gale, standing still was no safer. Helen’s eyes, darkly brilliant, told him in a tongue without words that a cusp had arrived from which he could not retreat.
     “Who are you?” he whispered.
     Helen smiled microscopically. “Don’t you mean ‘what are you?’”
     He gaped, shorn of words.
     “Consider me a specialist of an unusual kind, Gordon. So unusual that there’s no other anywhere in the world. My purview is desire and the loss of desire. So, lucky you, you’ve brought your troubles to exactly the person best equipped to help you with them. Now answer my question.”
     “I…don’t know,” he forced out at last. “I love her. She’s a good woman…a good wife. I wouldn’t want to lose her…” He ran down in confusion and fear.
     “Except,” Helen supplied, “that you feel as if you’ve lost her already. Don’t you?”
     He nodded.
     “So she must overcome her sense of failure, and you must overcome your sense of disappointment and loss.” Helen sat back and smiled. The intensity seemed to have faded from her. “A pretty problem. But soluble—if you’re still man enough to commit yourself fully to the contest.”
     Gordon frowned. “What do you mean by that?”
     “How does one dispel a sense of failure, Gordon?”
     The question puzzled him. It seemed to have no handles. He strained to ignore its metaphysical implications and take it literally.
     “By succeeding at something, I suppose.”
     Helen nodded. “And if the sufferer is not oneself, but one’s wife?”
     It stopped him. “I don’t know. Can anyone do that for someone else?”
     “It depends. In this case, the answer is yes.” She leaned forward and peered directly into his eyes. “And how does one dispel a sense of loss?”
     Gordon started to answer, clamped his mouth shut.
     Helen rose and went through the beaded curtain to the back of her shop. Some minutes later, she returned with a large box covered in a satiny red paper and handed it to him.
     “Tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock exactly, you’re to go to your bedroom, open this box and make proper use of the contents. Then wait about ten minutes more, and go to your ‘gift room.’ That’s all.”
     “Why? What’s in the box?”
     She shook her head. “You have no need to know that as yet. Just do as I’ve said, exactly and without reservation.
     “Some men defeat themselves before the contest begins, Gordon. And some women adjudge themselves failures without ever grappling with what failure really means. A man of character must resist the temptation to lower his banner out of presentiment of doom. When his beloved needs his gifts, he must not withhold them for fear of rebuff.” She looked down at him, once again a figure of power, secrets, and unknowable intent. He started to speak, but she waved him back to silence. “Go home, Gordon. Prepare yourself.”
     He went.
    

#

     Marilyn had finished with her cleaning and was desultorily tidying up the house, which didn’t really need it. It was an excuse to move about, and to survey the one achievement of her adult years in which she took some pride.
     When the master bedroom was as tight as a drumhead, everything in its exactly proper place, she proceeded to the guest room. Though the door was kept closed, opened only to add a freshly wrapped gift to the pile, she would give it the same micrometric going-over that every other room received.
     Within, all seemed to be as it ought…except for the large purple box set all but invisibly behind the television stand, and which she was certain she had never seen.
     Slowly, in suspicion of a trap laid for an excessively curious spouse, she pulled the stand away to reveal the full dimensions of the package. It was cubical, about eighteen inches on a side. Its satiny royal purple wrappings bore no design. They were as tight and careful as any she’d ever made. There was no tag anywhere upon it to indicate either its provenance or its intended recipient.
     She stooped and hefted it. It seemed to weigh about ten pounds. She shook it gently, and a low rustle came from its innards.
     Did Gordon put this here?
     Gordon could wrap a decent package, but this one was beyond his standard. More, he’d never have chosen wrapping paper so richly colored, or so voluptuous to the hand.
     If I’m not sure it’s for me…but how will I know who should open it, without opening it?
     The edges of the wrappings were free of tape. The paper had to be self-adhesive on its underside. She probed one flap with a fingernail. It came free to her touch. She peeled the flap back gingerly, looking for any clue to the package’s source or destination.
     She found it almost at once:
    
     Naughty But Nice
     4095 Altamura Drive
     Los Angeles, CA

    
     She started, and the package slipped from her hands to thump against the floor. She squatted there in confusion, afraid to touch it again.
     It has to be an exotic lingerie shop. Gordon went to an exotica shop for a gift for me. He couldn’t have meant it for anyone else.
     Couldn’t he? He certainly wasn’t obvious about it, and he did his best to hide it. And…I haven’t touched him in years.

     If there were another woman in Gordon’s life, he hadn’t given any sign.
     The need to see what was in the package swelled in her. Her hands moved of their own accord toward that dangerously sensual purple package. As her fingertips brushed the surface, she jerked them back by main force.
     I mustn’t. Not until I know it’s for me…or not.
     She rose, strode to the telephone nook, and looked for the shop in the directory. There were no listings, either in the white or the yellow pages.
     How could a commercial establishment not have a telephone listing?
     She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and flipped pages to the listing for the local taxi service. The address of the shop was burned into her memory.
    

#

     Naughty But Nice was indeed an exotic lingerie shop. The displays near the front presented all the usual flirtatious undergarments, and a few she’d never seen before. As Marilyn walked further in, the lingerie gave way to marital aids of obvious function, and then to stranger items whose purposes she could not divine.
     The statuesque, glamorously clothed woman at the front counter raised an eyebrow as Marilyn entered. She pushed her book to one side and lined her fingertips along the counter.
     “Welcome, dear,” she said in a soft coo that throbbed with sensuality. “What may I do for you?”
     The woman’s presence threw Marilyn momentarily off balance. She hadn’t planned out her approach; she’d merely hoped that a polite inquiry would draw forth the information she wanted. But the right questions were as elusive as morning mist.
     Seconds passed. The woman at the counter smiled steadily and enigmatically, apparently content to wait as long as Marilyn needed.
     Finally, Marilyn dipped into her purse for her wallet, pulled out the photo of Gordon she carried, and laid it on the counter. The woman glanced down at it briefly. Her expression did not change.
     “Have you seen this man recently?” Marilyn said.
     The woman cocked an eyebrow. “Are you sure he would want me to tell you, dear?”
     That’s as good as a yes.
     The woman put out her hand, a friendly twinkle in her eye. “I’m not really trying to fence with you. Yes, he was here earlier today. I’m Helen, by the way.”
     Marilyn took the hand and shook it gently. She was somewhat surprised when Helen failed to release her. She looked up, and her gaze caught on Helen’s eyes, the deepest, darkest orbs she’d ever spied in a human face.
     “I can see,” Helen murmured, “why he’s so devoted to you. You have the face of an elven princess and a beautifully delicate figure.” Her thumb passed caressingly over the backs of Marilyn’s fingers. The contact was hypnotically soothing. Marilyn could hardly remember where she was, and not at all why she’d come.
     Without letting go of Marilyn’s hand, Helen rounded the counter and pulled her toward a small table and two chairs placed inconspicuously in the corner.
    

#

     “I know he still loves me,” Marilyn said, “and of course I still love him. It’s just that—“
     “’Of course? Of course?’” Helen’s smile vanished and her face darkened. “You deny him all enjoyment of your body, you make him feel a churl even for thinking about it, you reave him of one of the essential achievements of manhood, but that’s all right because you still love him?
     Marilyn gaped. “What achievement do you mean?”
     “Do you have any idea,” Helen said, “how radically different a man’s experience of sex is from a woman’s, dear?”
     “…no…”
     Helen sat back and folded her arms over her breasts. She looked at Marilyn as a teacher might an underachieving pupil, one who had more than adequate ability but refused to apply himself.
     “We hold the veto power. We compel them to woo us, seduce us, cater to us. When we oh-so-generously let them near, they do almost all of the work, yet their orgasms involve only a tiny portion of their bodies and last a mere second or two. Ours are incomparably fuller and longer—and at so much smaller a cost that it doesn’t bear comparison.” She shook her head. “We get so much more out of it than they do, it’s a wonder they bother with us at all. So why do they bother with us, Marilyn?”
     Helen’s silent glare accused her of having missed something critical, something she ought to have known without needing to be told.
     “I don’t know. I…never thought about it.”
     The reproof in Helen’s eyes remained strong, but something else entered to temper it, something wryly amused.
     “You ought to have thought about it. But you’re not the only one. Harridans all across this land have been telling women like you that you’re owed, that men’s desire for you is barely a hair’s breadth from chattel slavery, that ‘a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.’ And you’re too afraid to contradict them, or too proud to ask your mothers whether it might just possibly be some other way. So they go on to catechize the men, telling them what oppressors they are, and how awful the burdens of womanhood are, and how unfair it is that they should get to exhaust their bodies and erode their spirits with wage labor while women sit in the safety and comfort of their homes, being most oppressively provided for.” Helen shook her head. “If a hundredth of that were true, the race would have died out thousands of years ago. It’s we who owe them, Marilyn. Without them, we would still be cowering in caves. They have made us a world where we can be whatever we please.”
     “What…” Marilyn swallowed. “What should I do?”
     The beaded curtain to the rear area crackled softly as a large black cat poked through. It jumped onto the little table, went to Marilyn, and bumped the underside of her jaw with its head. Marilyn stroked it tentatively, and felt a sensuous charge travel through her. Helen watched them with an air of amusement.
     “If I tell you,” the shopkeeper murmured, “will you promise me that you’ll do it? All of it, omitting not the slightest detail?”
     Marilyn stiffened. She’d never been happy about following instructions. But she knew in a preconscious, pre-rational way that the survival of her marriage, and possibly of her mind, hung in the balance. She rummaged through her purse for a notepad and a pen.
     “Tell me.”
     Helen smiled. “You won’t need those, dear. It’s quite simple. Tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock exactly, go to your ‘gift room,’ open the purple box, and don everything you find inside it. When you’ve done that, just wait. That’s all.”
     Marilyn put down her pen and looked levelly at Helen. “So the box is for me after all? What’s in it? Did you help him pick it out?”
     Helen shook her head. “Not at all, dear. Yes, the box is for you, but he doesn’t know the first thing about it, or about any of this. I assembled that package and put it there. Gordon’s gift to you will be of another variety. Now go home.”
    

#

     As they sat over their coffee and muffins, Gordon tried to keep an unobtrusive eye on the clock. It wasn’t easy. He didn’t want Marilyn to notice. He had to pretend that the newspaper, which, as usual on Christmas Day, was little more than filler, had his complete attention. That required him to glance back and forth among the paper, his wife, and the digital display on the microwave oven, thankfully just behind her.
     He couldn’t quite understand why she would be doing the very same thing, but there was no doubt of it. He’d caught her eyes moving toward the clock on their coffeemaker, just a few degrees to starboard of his head, several times.
     …10:58…
     She looks as if she has something to tell me. Something she’d rather not say.
     …10:59…
     Could she be thinking of leaving me? I couldn’t bear it. But what if her coolness toward me is because her warmth has been going to another man?
     …11:00…
     The arrival of the awaited instant left him briefly paralyzed. He knew what he was supposed to do. He’d guessed at the contents of the shiny red box, but his conjectures had been unconvincing. How could the contents of a cardboard box empower him to take away his wife’s sense of failure?
     You won’t find out by sitting here. Get on with it.
     He rose, and Marilyn’s gaze jerked up from her paper, to the coffeemaker, and then to his face, all in the space of a single second.
     “Excuse me.” He laid his paper on the table, went to their bedroom, and closed the door carefully behind him. After a moment to let his heart slow, he pulled the red box out from under their bed.
     The wrappings came off easily. He pushed them aside, put hesitant fingers to the lid, and pulled it away.
     The box contained a tuxedo.
     He lifted out the jacket and inspected it. It was a fine piece of clothing, beautifully woven from natural silk, all the stitching and details just so. He held it briefly against his torso, and noted that the tailoring was an exact match to his figure. Clearly it had been meant, and perhaps made, explicitly for him.
     How?
     He laid the jacket on the bed and looked through the other contents of the box. It yielded a white dress shirt, a clip-on bow tie, and a pair of black dress shoes with over-the calf socks stuffed into them.
     Helen’s command echoed in his head: Make proper use of the contents. But what could those uses be, on a Christmas Day at home with one’s wife, with no outings of any kind in prospect, much less the sort of thing to which one wears a tuxedo?
     He removed his sweatshirt and jeans and put on the suit. As he’d expected, it fit him perfectly, accommodating his height, the breadth of his shoulders, and his slight paunch all just so.
     He took up the shoes, and pulled the socks out of them. A round golden circle fell out of the toe of the right shoe and into his hand: a wedding ring.
     He sat, stunned.
     “A man of character must resist the temptation to lower his banner out of presentiment of doom…When his beloved needs his gifts, he must not withhold them for fear of rebuff.”
     Is this what Marilyn needs?
     Do I love her enough to give it to her…again? Am I
man enough?
     The clock on the nightstand read 11:17. He donned the socks and shoes, slipped the ring into his jacket pocket, and made to wait.
    

#

     Marilyn stared dumbfounded at the pile of garments in the box.
     Am I supposed to wear all this? Under what?
     Her accumulated fear, a store ten years deep, rose to block her thoughts and pluck at her will. It seemed an hour before she could do more than stare into the box in her lap.
     It’s a mockery. It’s not…appropriate. It’s not about me!
     But Helen had been explicit.
     “It’s we who owe them, Marilyn…They have made us a world where we can be whatever we please.”
     The huge pile of presents that would soon find their way to various relatives, friends, acquaintances and coworkers tottered and tumbled around her. A few of the smaller packages slid off the edge of the bed and thumped onto the floor. She peered down at them and spotted the flat rectangle that contained her gift to Gordon.
     I got him a monogrammed folio. Something for work, no pleasure or joy in it. Nothing of me in it at all.
     Shakily, she slid the box off her lap, stood, and removed her blouse and jeans.
    

#

     Gordon restrained his urge to knock by the narrowest of margins. He hesitated, put his hand to the knob of the guest room door, twisted and pushed.
     Marilyn stood there, an erotic vision in white. She wore a white lace and satin teddy. A white satin G-string. White satin garters and white silk hose. White leather pumps with five inch heels. A bridal crown with an attached veil of the finest white gauze. In her hands she clasped a small bouquet in blue and white, plainly artificial yet with leaves and petals as soft as any natural flowers.
     Her eyes went wide as he entered. They stood appraising one another, unmoving and unspeaking, while time itself seemed to stand still.
     “I…” He blinked and shook his head. “I forgot how beautiful you are.”
     “I forgot how handsome you are,” she whispered.
     He moved forward and put his hands around hers.
     “Can you forgive me?” she said.
     “For what?”
     “For not giving you children.”
     A bubble of joy burst in his chest. His eyes filled with tears as he regarded his wife.
     “You are the only gift I’ve ever wanted.”
     She dropped the bouquet and clutched him to her.
     Presently she said, “That strange woman…”
     He knew at once who she meant. “She said she was a specialist.”
     She looked up at him, puzzled.
     “Does it matter?” he said.
     “Well, maybe not…but she gave me this thing.
     He frowned. “What sort of thing?”
     She blushed. “It’s…well…it’s under my G-string.”
     He let one hand trail down her finery, laid his fingers against the satin panel over her loins and pressed gently. There was a small protrusion beneath it that yielded like rubber.
     Marilyn immediately tensed. Her eyes slid closed, her head tipped back, and she emitted a humming murmur that came from deep in her chest. Her pelvis pressed forward and rubbed against him.
     “I see. Well, before we explore that line of thought any further, perhaps I should give you this.” He fumbled out the ring. Her eyes went wide again as he sank to one knee.
     “Will you have me as your husband…again?”
     Silently, she held out her hand. He slipped the ring onto her third finger, alongside her original wedding ring, rose and clasped her once more.
     “Shall we retire to our bedroom?” he said.
     She backed away at once, and fear that he had spoiled the moment lanced through him. But she smiled, and cleansed the bed of its burden of packages with a sweep of her arm, and his heart grew light once more.
     “This is our marriage bed, isn’t it?”
     He nodded.
     She lay down upon it and held out her arms.
     “Then come give me your gift.”
     And he did.

==<O>==

Copyright © 2010 Francis W. Porretto. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

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Toward Ungovernability

     Every process occurring in nature proceeds in the sense in which the sum of the entropies of all bodies taking part in the process is increased. – Max Planck

     Dunghills rise and castles fall. – Yankee proverb

     If there’s anything a public servant hates to do, it’s something for the public.” – Kin Hubbard

     If you’re not a physicist or haven’t dated one recently, you might not recognize the first statement above as Planck’s verbal formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy, the technical term for the aggregate disorder of a system, is a poorly understood concept among laymen (and among many physics students, as well). It’s been approached several ways by powerful thinkers, but no verbal formulation brings home the concept any better than the one from Planck. That’s because entropy is one of the most maddeningly elusive of physical phenomena: a state function.

     State functions don’t express something you can easily get your hands around. They express an overall property of a physical construct that doesn’t exist in reality: a closed system, i.e., a finite enclosed volume of (space / time) and (matter / energy) whose contents do not interact with anything outside it. Such systems are entirely conceptual; physicists use them to construct models of what would happen within one. That’s right, Gentle Reader: there are no genuinely closed systems, nor will there ever be one under the veil of Time.

     The Yankee proverb that follows Planck’s statement merely restates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

     That’s the end of the physics for this morning. Now let’s talk about cities.

***

     In the wake of the failure of failure Lori Lightfoot to gain admission to the Chicago mayoral runoff, The Atlantic, a left-inclined publication, has decided to salve her wound, though not the wound her mayoralty has inflicted upon Chicago, with an article proclaiming that “Big Cities Are Ungovernable:”

     The article is paywalled, but from the graphic above any Gentle Reader can deduce the gist of it.

     If that thesis were put to a for / against debate among scholars of urban history and dynamics, how do you think the discussion would go? Myself, I expect the participants would squabble endlessly over the definitions of “big,” “cities,” and “ungovernable.” (That would consume them so completely that they’d have nothing left for “are.”) Thus they could evade all discussion of the actual proposition until the last of the audience had drifted away.

     Robert A. Heinlein was no fan of the big city:

     “As a thumb rule, one can say that any time a planet starts developing cities of more than one million people, it is approaching critical mass. In a century or two it won’t be fit to live on.”

     And so my own preference is clear, though it might have a Mae West feel, I shall add this: I’ve been a country dweller and I’ve been a city dweller, and honey, the country is better. But that’s all to the side.

     It’s hardly a state secret that America’s largest cities are in bad shape today. They’re overrun with social pathologies, consistently underperform at “public services,” and cost a fortune to live in. Yet that was not always the case. Indeed, during the mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani, New York City returned from an abyss of squalor to a quality and livability it hadn’t known since Fiorello La Guardia. The Di Blasio and Adams mayoralties have dissipated that. Los Angeles during Ronald Reagan’s governorship over California was equally a beautiful, highly livable place. It’s not enough to say sic transit gloria mundi and pass on. We must discover the reasons for the changes and what “governability” or the lack thereof has to do with them.

***

     “I regard politicians rather as I regard the instruments on the dashboard of my car. They tell me what is going on in the engine of state, but they don’t control it.” — Sir Frederick Hoyle

     Large numbers of people cannot be “governed,” in the original sense of the word, by a discrete “government.” (If that statement mystifies you, look up the function and operation of a steam engine’s governor.) They must ultimately “govern” themselves, which destroys the usual interpretation of governable and governability. Moreover, the “large number” doesn’t need to be in the millions, as The Atlantic would have it.

     Here we come to grips with what governments can and cannot do. As no one can compel anyone else to do or not do anything against his will – yes, you read that right – a government’s only tool is to threaten and deploy coercive force, such that the wills of those under its jurisdiction conform to its preferences. But the threats and deployments of force will necessarily be limited by:

  1. The enforcers available;
  2. The money with which to pay them;
  3. The government’s ability to get those enforcers to do what they’re told.

     These are limiting factors whose ultimate determinant lies in the populace itself. Indeed, we must add a fourth factor, which trumps all other considerations of any sort or any size: the willingness of a substantial fraction of the populace to risk defying the government, for whatever satisfactions are available thereby. We’ve already seen how this limits a government’s ability to impose its will. The War on Drugs is the most obvious example.


If a sufficient fraction of the “governed” refuse to be governed,
No scheme for “governing” that populace will work.

     Today, sufficient fractions of the populaces of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and other major cities simply refuse to be governed. They do as they please, aware of the potential consequences but willing to risk them. That has rendered those cities ungovernable, in the sense generally understood by private citizens. But clearly it was not always thus.

     No doubt Heraclitus would have had something to say about this, but he’s dead.

***

     If you’re one of the Gentle Readers utterly convinced that “Porretto must intend some point here,” and so slogged through the opening segment about closed systems and entropy determined to thresh out my intent: congratulations: I did have something specific in mind. I was thinking about Coronado, California.

     Just yesterday we had this article about the success of the Coronado city government in dealing with the homeless problem:

     Richard Bailey, the mayor of Coronado, has reinforced a no-encampment policy in his city, which now reports the lowest homeless population in the state.
     Speaking to Fox News anchor Ashley Strohmier, Bailey discussed the policies that he has put in place in his city and how he avoids the mistakes other California cities are making in regard to the homeless crisis that has taken hold of the state.
     “The policies that are in place at the regional and statewide level that are tolerating this type of behavior that is personally destructive and also destructive to the surrounding communities are really enabling this situation to increase throughout our entire state, and throughout our entire region,” said Bailey.
     “Changing these policies will actually have a major impact,” he added, speaking from his own experience.

     So what has Mayor Bailey done?

     Bailey has enforced a strict no-tolerance policy for municipal code violations.
     “We also make it very clear that we don’t tolerate encampments along our sidewalks, and we don’t tolerate other code violations such as being drunk in public or urinating in public or defecating in public,” Bailey said. “We just simply don’t tolerate these basic code violations. What ends up happening is an individual either chooses to get help or they end up leaving.”
     “The fact of the matter is that, although there are a myriad of reasons that people end up homeless, they eventually only fall into two camps – those that want help and those that do not want help,” Baily continued. “And if those that are refusing to get help shouldn’t be granted… the ability to break laws such as tent encampments on the sidewalk or urinating or defecating in public.”

     Amazing! What a city’s enforcers and populace refuse to tolerate won’t hang around! It really is that simple…if the city government has the will of the populace behind it. Coronado is a largely military town. The people who live there actively want a clean and orderly city. Therefore, they back Mayor Bailey’s policy of strict code enforcement, in contrast with the laxity of other California cities.

     But note: Coronado’s undisciplined homeless aren’t dissolving into the luminiferous ether. They’re going somewhere else. Where? Wherever their dissolute preferences will be tolerated. For Coronado is not a closed system. Nor are its residents willing to execute the homeless for violating their municipal code.

     Other California cities tolerate such dissolution. I’d bet Coronado’s undisciplined homeless migrate to those other cities, where their tent encampments and their other antisocial habits will be tolerated. So we might say that Coronado is “exporting” its undisciplined homeless to places more favorable to their “lifestyle.” That will continue until the rest of California adopts the same “No Tolerance!” policy that Coronado has accepted.

     But California’s cities are overwhelmingly too liberal for their own good. Even if San Francisco, for example, were by some quirk of the machinery to elect a conservative, no-public-nonsense city government, it would not be able to use Mayor Bailey’s method…because the people of San Francisco would not accept it.

     The same can be said with equal justice for the other California cities with severe homelessness problems.

***

     The residents of Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, New York City, Chicago, and other homeless capitals have elected to tolerate the public degradation that their homeless populations impose upon them. Conditions there have made them resemble “closed systems” de facto where homelessness is concerned. They would rather tolerate huge homeless camps and what comes with them than strict code enforcement. The homeless find the results congenial to their filthy and dissolute preferences. What the city governments could do, they will not, for fear of electoral backlash.

     And day by day, their entropy increases.

     Is this a verdict on whether “Big Cities Are Ungovernable?” I don’t think so. History speaks to the opposite effect. But it does cast an interesting light on whether large groups of left-liberals are governable.

     See also this baseline essay, and reflect.

Conversations

     I won’t speak for you, but I know I could use a little levity these days. Compliments of the C.S.O., I had one a little earlier.

     Because she’s still recovering from her recent operation and is medically forbidden to do…well, anything but sit, read, and watch the Idiot Box (damn good thing she likes British murder mysteries), I’ve been doing a lot of stuff that would normally fall on her shoulders. One of those things is grocery shopping, an activity that has never been one of my favorite pastimes. She makes up the list; I go off in search of the often strangely spelled items on it…when I can puzzle out what she means by the marginally-legible scrawls on the tiny sheets of paper she uses.

     Ah well, such is the life of a devoted husband, right? But at least it affords an occasional giggle. Like this morning’s list, which included some remarkable entries (what follows is verbatim from the scribbles on the list):

  1. Unc G Xlg eggs
  2. Chix PP or Shep PP (BOGO)
  3. Ceaser salad (no chix)
  4. 3 lg cans enchaleda sauce
  5. Tortilla’s

     I was able to puzzle out what was meant by the first four of those:

  1. Uncle Giuseppe’s Extra Large Eggs
  2. Chicken Pot Pie or Shepherd’s Pot Pie (Buy one get one free)
  3. Caesar salad (without chicken)
  4. 3 large cans Enchilada sauce

     …but the fifth… Tortilla’s what, for Pete’s sake? Is it a brand name? Wait, hold hard there: did my highly educated wife – two count ‘em two degrees – upon whom legions of Catholic nuns depend for the precise management of their finances, actually mean Tortillas? Could she have… no, I couldn’t bear to think it. So I asked her:

FWP: Sweetie, you’ve just been added to a dispreferred list.
CSO: (looks up from her spreadsheet) Hm? What do you mean?

FWP: (in most solemn tones) What is the plural of tortilla?
CSO: Isn’t it tortillas?

FWP: And how is that spelled?
CSO: Uh…
FWP: Does it contain an apostrophe?
CSO: Uh…does it?

FWP: I must inform you that it does not.
CSO: Oh.
FWP: I’ve enrolled you in Apostrophe Abusers Anonymous. It meets at seven PM on alternate Tuesdays.
CSO: It’s an extra one! I forgot where it was supposed to go and had to use it up.
FWP: I’ll consider your appeal after I finish rewriting the shopping list.
CSO: And done the shopping, the laundry, the cat room, and picked up the back yard, right?
FWP: (facepalm)

     Well, at least she spells my name right. Granted that it took nearly twenty years, but still…

A Must-Read

     Mike at Cold Fury has excerpted a fascinating story that must be read in its entirety. It’s about an incident in an American “public” grammar school. The resolution of the real-life conflict it depicts will have you howling with laughter. Hie thee hence!

The Weapon

     Eric Frank Russell, one of the most talented writers of his day, left as his legacy to the developing field of science fiction a magnificent novella titled “And Then There Were None.” (Yes, I’ve commended it here before this.) This novella is so powerful, and so memorable, that it was awarded a place in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame despite being utterly free of the usual pseudo-science / gee-whiz technology by fiat that characterized science fiction at that time (1951). I regard it as required reading for anyone who wants to understand what it takes to prevail against an enemy — any enemy. Russell called it The Weapon: capitals mandatory.

     Russell’s Weapon was quite simple: “I won’t.” Just two words! Amazing! (Yes, Ayn Rand managed to knock it down to one word – “No.” – six years later, but she had to write a half-million-word novel to do it. You pays your money, et cetera.) Its simplicity has commended it to readers for seventy-two years. It’s made Russell a hero to freedom advocates forever more.

     The Weapon is unanswerable and unstoppable. More, it’s useless to those who desire to oppress us. But there is a cost to it: one must be ready to face the consequences…and those can be quite painful. For those who desire our subjugation can wield other sorts of weapons, the fire from which is not to be lightly accepted nor easily weathered. One of them is on my mind this morning.

***

     I know that most Gentle Readers are dismissive of video presentations. Unfortunately, I can’t provide a useful transcript of this one. But despite its length – 17.5 minutes – the video is eminently worth your time, I promise you:

     Matt Walsh would once have been called a “controversialist.” And there’s no question that his forthrightness upsets a lot of people. Beyond question, having one’s nose rubbed in an unpleasant fact has an upsetting effect, regardless of the specifics of the fact. But as Matt makes plain in this video, that doesn’t keep it from being a fact.

     Matt has fingered the most distressing tactical feature of contemporary argument: the exploitation of the disinclination among good persons to court conflict – i.e., to upset anyone – including conflict with openly evil persons. “You’re being too rough!” and “You’re hurting people’s feelings” are accusations Matt has faced many times. You see, he dares to speak plainly of actions undertaken to do grave harm to children and our society.

     (Say, remember when “It’s for the children!” was the unanswerable justification for any and every Leftist lunacy? I do.)

     Yes, the subject is the transgender madness: specifically, how it’s affecting American children.

     Many who agree with Matt about the facts of the matter are horrified by his bluntness. But Matt is merely stating observable facts. To criticize a man for speaking the truth is to endorse dishonesty. But he who states a preference for dishonesty, even if he limits it to certain subjects, has condemned himself as dishonest. On what subjects could he be trusted thereafter?

     George Orwell’s vital essay Politics and the English Language comes immediately to mind. Indeed, Orwell was speaking of this very thing. If you haven’t read it recently, do so before continuing on here.

***

     In his classic treatise The Art Of War, Sun Tzu posited that perfection in warfare lies in inducing your enemy to surrender without ever meeting him in battle:

     In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them. Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting….Therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemy’s troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field.

     This ideal can only be achieved by weakening the enemy’s will through non-martial sallies: combative strokes that appear unrelated to the combat.

     In the ideological warfare of our time, “You’re hurting my feelings!” is the stroke that has most successfully weakened the will of the Right. Indeed, it has proved so potent that many commentators in the Right, perhaps unaware of what they’re doing, have picked it up and wielded it against themselves and others of like mind.

     They balk at calling evil evil.
     They balk at calling insanity insanity.
     They balk at calling cowardice cowardice.
     Because such statements might hurt someone’s feelings.

     How do they rationalize this? They don’t. They simply say “There’s no need to be so rough.” “You can make your point more sensitively.” “You’ll never convince them like that.”

     Convince whom? The enemy, whose open agenda is the maiming of children? The anathematization of all that is right, good, and decent? The destruction of American society itself?

     Matt Walsh has pinned the matter to the wall.

***

     I’ve noted, in other contexts, that once you’ve realized that you’re at war, before all else you must identify the enemy. If you’re unwilling to do that, you become a “Jim Taggart caricature:”

     [James Taggart] “What I mean is, there are practical problems to solve, which…For instance, what was that matter of our last allocation of new rail vanishing from the storehouse in Pittsburgh?”
     [Dagny Taggart] “Cuffy Meigs stole it and sold it.”
     “Can you prove that?” he snapped defensively.
     “Have your friends left any means, methods, rules or agencies of proof?”
     “Then don’t talk about it, don’t be theoretical, we’ve got to deal with facts! We’ve got to deal with facts as they are today…I mean, we’ve got to devise some practical means to protect our supplies under existing conditions, not under unprovable assumptions, which –”
     She chuckled. There was the form of the formless, she thought, there was the method of his consciousness: he wanted her to protect him from Cuffy Meigs without acknowledging Meigs’s existence, to fight it without admitting its reality, to defeat it without disturbing its game.

     [Do you really need to be told?]

     The next step after that is to determine whether the enemy can be induced to surrender without fighting. But in ideological combat, that is only possible if the enemy can be persuaded that he’s unwittingly gone wrong or has been misled. That’s a judgment that must be accurate. To treat a hard-driven, undauntable enemy that thirsts for your blood as someone who can be “reached” is perhaps the worst of all possible mistakes, for he will use your error to disarm you.

     Massive plaudits to Matt Walsh. He has done the Right a service whose importance is impossible to overestimate…if we’ll just take it seriously.

An Utterly Absurd Bit of Gaslighting Accepted By Majority

Popped up from memory, a large segment of the American public ends up responding as does Imogene Coca at the end of this vignette.

My point is Hollywood demonstrated this for the benefit of our political class 55 years ago.

An Attitudinal Imperative

     And it came to pass, as he went to Jerusalem, that he passed through the midst of Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered into a certain village, there met him ten men that were lepers, which stood afar off: And they lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.
     And when he saw them, he said unto them, Go shew yourselves unto the priests. And it came to pass, that, as they went, they were cleansed.
     And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, And fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks: and he was a Samaritan.
     And Jesus answering said, Were there not ten cleansed? but where are the nine? There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger.
     And he said unto him, Arise, go thy way: thy faith hath made thee whole.

     [Luke 17:11-19]

     What I find fascinating about this passage is that Jesus doesn’t retract His gift of healing to the other nine lepers. He notes their absence, but goes no further. Moreover, He commends the grateful one for his faith rather than for his expression of gratitude. In doing so He observes that the grateful one is “a stranger:” a Samaritan, a people with whom the Jews did not have warm relations at that time.

     Regard this episode in the light of these others: the Roman centurion He met in Capernaum:

     And when Jesus was entered into Capernaum, there came unto him a centurion, beseeching him, And saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented.
     And Jesus saith unto him, I will come and heal him.
     The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed. For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.
     When Jesus heard it, he marvelled, and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel. And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven. But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
     And Jesus said unto the centurion, Go thy way; and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee. And his servant was healed in the selfsame hour.

     [Matthew 8:5-13]

     …and the Canaanite woman who begged Him to heal her daughter:

     And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil.
     But he answered her not a word. And his disciples came and besought him, saying, Send her away; for she crieth after us.
     But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
     Then came she and worshipped him, saying, Lord, help me.
     But he answered and said, It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.
     And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.
     Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. And her daughter was made whole from that very hour.

     [Matthew 15:22-28]

     The Pharisees and Saducees, the “religious snobs” of the day, exhibited a dogmatic certainty that they knew the Law. This Johnny-come-lately of a street preacher had nothing to teach them. Nor did they show gratitude for His teachings even when they recognized the truth in them. Jesus was less than friendly toward them. He displayed great warmth toward those who, not being Jews, had no particular reason to honor a Jew who came among them…yet did honor Him and praise God for Him.

     Gratitude is not the same as faith. It is a consequence of sincere faith. For sincere faith recognizes the love of God for His creatures. Such a love irresistibly inspires gratitude; the reaction is automatic.

     Gratitude, as I’ve said before, is the secret to happiness.

     Ponder the connections for a moment. Then have a look at this essay by Michael Pakaluk:

     [I]n this year of renewal of Eucharistic Devotion I like to think that another lesson is: how easy it is to give thanks. Simply go to Our Lord and say thank you. In human terms, one might have thought the healed leper was bound, say, to lifelong servitude to Our Lord for the favor done; or dedicating his life to helping lepers. But apparently it was enough for him simply to find Our Lord and thank him – “It is mercy I desire not sacrifice.”

     Have you wondered why we have tabernacles in our churches at all? They are not there by accident. What is their purpose? Yes, they are Our Lord’s answer to the plea at Emmaus, mane nobiscum, Domine, “remain with us, Lord” as St. Pope John Paul II taught. But, presumably, they have some purpose other than being a focal point of devotion during Mass.

     That request by the Apostles that He not leave them is answered in the Eucharist.

     I know that many Protestants differ with us Catholics about the nature of the Eucharist. As it is possible to disbelieve anything not readily reproducible before witnesses, it is possible to disbelieve in Transubstantiation despite the various reports of Eucharistic miracles, simply by rejecting such reports as mistaken…or fraudulent. But regardless of which Eucharistic doctrine you prefer, the origin of this gift, the Last Supper, makes plain His intentions:

     And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. [Matthew 26:26-28]

     And that intention is reinforced as He prepares to leave this world:

     Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen. [Matthew 28:20]

     Surely that is reason enough to be grateful.

     May God bless and keep you all.

From Cynicism To Sarcasm: Progress Or Regress?

     The Diogenes of history — i.e., “the one with the lamp” – was known as The Cynic, for good and sufficient reasons:

     Diogenes of Sinope was a controversial figure. His father minted coins for a living, and when Diogenes took to debasement of currency, he was banished from Sinope. After being exiled, he moved to Athens and criticized many cultural conventions of the city. Diogenes modelled himself on the example of Heracles. He believed that virtue was better revealed in action than in theory. He used his simple lifestyle and behaviour (which arguably resembled poverty) to criticize the social values and institutions of what he saw as a corrupt or at least confused society. In a highly non-traditional fashion, he had a reputation of sleeping and eating wherever he chose and took to toughening himself against nature. He declared himself a cosmopolitan and a citizen of the world rather than claiming allegiance to just one place. There are many tales about him dogging Antisthenes’ footsteps and becoming his “faithful hound”. Diogenes made a virtue of poverty. He begged for a living and often slept in a large ceramic jar in the marketplace. He became notorious for his philosophical stunts such as carrying a lamp in the daytime, claiming to be looking for an honest man. He criticized and embarrassed Plato, disputed his interpretation of Socrates and sabotaged his lectures, sometimes distracting attendees by bringing food and eating during the discussions. Diogenes was also noted for having publicly mocked Alexander the Great.

     You don’t have to approve of all of that to get the gist. Certain parts of it strike me as admirable, particularly his thrusts at Plato. But I digress.

     Cynicism is largely misunderstood. It’s not curmudgeonry, a stance about which I’ve already ranted sufficiently, but rather a strong disinclination to believe in protestations of selfless virtue. The cynic holds self-interest as the default explanation for all human behavior, and insists on copious evidence for any other proposed motivation.

     In other words, the cynic knows himself and assumes that others are, in the main, much like him. My assessment is that he’s likely to be right far more often than wrong. In this I differ with one whose wisdom I’ve often praised:

     “I have sometimes wondered whether [Twentieth-Century liberals] possessed a vested interest in disorder – but that is unlikely; adults almost always act from conscious ‘highest motives,” no matter what their behavior.”

     For in the decades since Starship Troopers was published, we have seen far too much “behavior” which can only be explained by a vested interest in disorder. Moreover, the evidence is so strong for this explanation that virtually anyone who’s lived through the Usurper Years is compelled to accept it… whether he’ll admit it or not.

     And from this, we arrive at our contemporary Diogenes: the Sarcastic. In her most recent post, she cites a recent self-beclownment by a Congressional Democrat:

     I bring you Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), a man that’s no stranger to beclowning himself for the cameras. After all, this is the same guy who once brought a bucket of KFC to a hearing because then-AG Bill Barr rescheduled.

     On Tuesday, Cohen decided to go on a rant denouncing the “right-wing” Supreme Court for doing things like upholding the constitution and forcing the Biden administration to follow the law. In the midst of that, the congressman proclaimed that women and black people don’t have God-given rights….

     COHEN: I’d liked to have asked him some questions about God-given rights, and he was saying all our rights are God-given. I just wondered when God decided to give women the right to vote and why God didn’t decide to give women the right to vote back in the, uh, 1700s. The Constitution was drawn up in the 1780s. I can’t believe God would say “no, women shouldn’t have the right to vote…”

     …And when God decided slavery would be illegal. God was okay with slavery until we have a war where millions of people were killed and then God changed his mind? That’s hard to fathom.

     I’m sure that sounded a lot smarter in his head.

     It’s hard to satirize something as idiotic as Cohen’s statement. That’s Democrats for you. The ones that aren’t outright evil are too stupid to be believed. And yes, a healthy fraction of them are both. (Before I proceed, allow me to state it plainly: Most Republicans are no better. Politics has little attraction for the intelligent and honest.)

     Unfortunately, Cohen’s view, dumb as it may be, is popular on the left. They have turned the US government into a god to be worshiped. No one has the right to do anything unless the overpaid elites in Washington give their stamp of approval. Thankfully, at least for now, the United States has a Supreme Court that is willing to check the Democratic Party’s most authoritarian instincts. That probably won’t always be the case, though.

     Diogenes the Sarcastic lets it stand, in all its awful majesty, with only this comment:

     I’m sorry, you’ll have to forgive me, or praise me (your choice) but I just cannot look at Congressman Steve Cohen and not see Lon Chaney’s 1925 Phantom of the Opera with glasses on. Sometimes I can’t keep from bursting out laughing.

     In this she is quite correct. What need is there to poke fun at one who has already poked himself in both eyes? Perhaps in the political realm even sarcasm has outworn its usefulness.

     There isn’t much more to say about this particular emission from a not-particularly-prominent Democrat Congressvermin, except for this: His constituents should reflect on what having elected that low a creature their Representative says about them.

Educational Necrosis

     In his classic study Systemantics, author John Gall presents a compelling case for the proposition that human systems of all kinds, no matter their origins or aims, will operate in failure mode –— the overwhelmingly greater part of the time. System failure in Gall’s analysis is determined by the comparison of the system’s ostensible aims with its observable behavior and performance. His argument has many similarities to the observations of such thinkers as Cyril Northcote Parkinson, author Jerry Pournelle, historian Robert Conquest, sociologist Robert Michels, and Public Choice economists James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Mancur Olson. And indeed, the available evidence strongly supports Gall’s assertion.

     Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy nicely summarizes the rot at the heart of the majority of failing systems:

     …in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

     This can be compared to the Iron law of oligarchy.

     Visible evidence of this phenomenon is all around us. I can hardly name a human system that deviates from the pattern. Yet we are constantly told by the bureaucracies’ spokesmen – and would someone please tell me why a bureaucracy should have a spokesman? – that all is well, things are, if not perfect, at least acceptable, and with time they’ll get better yet. “We’re working on it,” the spokesdroids assure us. “Just give us time…and more money.” Their programming permits them to issue no other explanation.

     When we speak of the problems with education in America, we almost always have the government-run “public” schools in mind. (Colleges and universities are a separate study.) It has been plain for some time that this system is in a condition of failure so horrendous that virtually any alternative would be preferable. Yet the system, which has great size, huge resources, and enormous political clout, manages to maneuver both to retain its privileged, tax-funded position and to obstruct alternatives that outperform it.

     Today I have three stories that bear upon this problem:

     Would any Gentle Reader care to argue that these stories don’t constitute strong evidence of failing systems, according to the criterion I stated above? Yet such developments are legion, from coast to coast. Parents sincerely concerned with their kids’ educations are furious about them. School board meetings are rife with anger and demands for change. And year after year, nothing changes.

     The problem is system. Not “the system,” but system itself: i.e., the notion that a systematized institution for this purpose can remain true to its ostensible aims for more than a generation. Within two decades any such system will be infiltrated, colonized, and conquered from within by the very forces we would move heaven and earth to exclude from it. After that, it will co-opt any attempt to “reform” it by the very methods it used to suborn it.

     As regards specific practices in the schools, this essay provides important illumination:

     I’ve surely made it clear that I’ve very little (and by ‘little’, I mean less than zero) respect for the textbooks, materials, and purposes, employed in our schools today, but as bad as the sketchy facts, ideological spin, and lies by omission or commission (hello 1619 Project) of most educational content is, those alone don’t have the power to implant their ‘key facts’ into a bored student’s memory, or to significantly alter how they think. How such materials leave their mark on a student’s mind has less to do with what’s laid out on the page in black & white, than with what questions are asked, and how they’re expected to answer them. Schools devote a significant amount of time to drilling in the habit of how students are expected to ask and answer questions (quizzes, worksheets, tests, homework), because that pattern is what will persist in their thoughts & actions long after the ‘key facts’ and details of their more recent test scores, or total cumulative GPA, have been forgotten.

     Please read it all.

     The fundamental fact about the failure of the educational system is not the specifics of what’s being taught, though that’s execrable enough, but the inexorable internal dynamic that has corrupted it. Allow me to lay out a skeleton for you:

  1. The system originates under full local control.
  2. Persons with varying motivations enter its gates. Some do so out of a love for knowledge; others for the opportunities to profit in various ways. The latter group includes a few power-seekers uninterested in education as we’ve classically understood it.
  3. Over time, the power-seekers rise to positions of power. Thereafter, they arrange that persons of like mind will be favored in all matters over which they have sway. Over time the purely self-interested align themselves with the power-seekers; it’s their best prospect for continued gain and job security.
  4. The power-seekers solicit the state governments to become involved in funding, curriculum, and the rules that govern teacher advancement. The politicians are happy to comply.
  5. Rules proliferate that disfavor the Socratic-style teacher who strives to impart understanding, encourage critical thought, and foster independence of mind. After all, they make the “drill” instructors look bad, and we can’t have that.
  6. It now becomes vital that dissenters in the ranks be silenced or driven out of the system. Teachers are no longer free to follow the Socratic method; this is rendered impossible by system-wide standardized tests and methods of assessment.
  7. Parents and others outside the system start to notice that while Johnny might be able to read and cipher, he hasn’t learned to think in a logical and organized manner, and is without any idea how to go about researching a matter in which he has not been drilled. Attempts by persons outside the system to investigate the reasons for these deteriorations are thwarted or deflected by a variety of methods.
  8. Those within the system focus ever more narrowly on ensuring that it will serve their own interests. Political forces are led to cooperate with their efforts through various incentives.

     It’s the way of things in the American education system and has been so from John Dewey, if not even earlier.

     It would do your kids little good to recur to “private” schooling. Those institutions are about as far gone as any element in the government-run system. Even Catholic education has been greatly degraded by the developments of the century and more behind us. The emphasis on standardized tests composed of multiple-choice questions gradable with an “answer key” is to blame – less work for the teachers and their aides, right? – and little can be done about it.

     This time around, there is a Last Graf: Keep your kids out of the system if at all possible. To those who operate the system, your children are bargaining chips with which to squeeze money and other perquisites from you and from local and state governments. Any notion you might have to the contrary will be shouted down at the very least. At the worst, you could find yourself under the crosshairs of the FBI, like Terry Newsome and others. Verbum sat sapienti.

Further Intrusions Into Medical Privacy

     The doctor-patient relationship is deemed legally immune to demands for information from agents of the State. That immunity is considered so important that it extends beyond the death of either party. It covers diagnoses, the results of lab tests, decisions to treat or not to treat, and details of both treatment and results. And like many other relationships once considered utterly private, it’s under attack:

     Doctors are speaking out against a new law that arguably paves the way for the FDA to prohibit treatments for purposes it hasn’t expressly authorized, going far beyond highly politicized subjects such as treating COVID-19 with ivermectin.

     The authority to ban off-label uses was buried on page 3,542 of the 4,155-page omnibus appropriations bill signed into law at year’s end, though it’s specifically applied to “banned devices.”

     The FDA requested this “very unprecedented” update after a string of court losses, Endpoints News senior editor Zachary Brennan told WBUR earlier this month, while cautioning that it’s not clear whether the agency could broadly interpret “devices” to cover drug treatments.

     Apparently the “experts” in our federal government are smarting after the string of losses and rebuffs they’ve suffered over COVID-19, chloroquine, and ivermectin. They don’t want to be shown up again; it’s bad for their reputation. But any such ban would be unenforceable as long as the doctor-patient confidentiality rule stands strong. So what’s the point of this?

     Under 5th Circuit precedent, which recognizes off-label use as the “standard of care” in many medical contexts, federalism constraints prevent the agency from even “advis[ing] whether or for what purpose a doctor should prescribe” an approved drug, they said. The doctors’ lawyers didn’t respond to Just the News queries on how the revision could affect their litigation.

     Hm. A federal attempt to muddy the waters in a lawsuit highly likely to be won by the plaintiffs? Interesting.

     Applied to existing law, the revisions grant the secretary of health and human services authority to initiate a regulatory proceeding for an already approved “device intended for human use” to ban intended uses that present “substantial deception or an unreasonable and substantial risk of illness or injury.”

     Just the News confirmed this legislative construction with Joel Zinberg, associate clinical professor of surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine and former Columbia law lecturer, who was apparently the first to widely publicize the omnibus provision in a Wall Street Journal op-ed accusing the FDA of “unwarranted intrusion into the physician-patient relationship.”

     “Since the new provision lets the FDA skirt the ban on interfering with the practice of medicine by banning devices for particular uses, the agency will likely claim this as a precedent allowing it to ban off-label uses of drugs as well,” Zinberg wrote in the op-ed.

     Even more interesting. And it would have exceedingly wide effects on current medical practice:

     “Damn — 3/4 of the stuff we use Is off label,” University of Kentucky medical professor Lisbeth Selby wrote. “This is a ploy to get more money for drug companies.”

     “Potentially catastrophic for use of antibiotics,” said Livermore, former director of antibiotic resistance monitoring at Public Health England. Restricting their use to “indication only” would “deny useful treatments to patients with highly resistant bacteria simply because these drugs never had an appropriate trial in the setting,” such as tigecycline for hospital pneumonia, he told Just the News.

     Selby provided Just the News an exhaustive list of the off-label treatments she uses regularly in her gastroenterology practice at the Lexington Veterans Affairs Medical Center, with asterisks on “those used daily.”

     There’s a whole education here. But it stands to reason: many drugs are brought to market because of their success in clinical trials at combating a single, well defined ailment. That such a drug should reveal effectiveness against other illnesses becomes more likely the longer it’s in use – which means after the patent on it has expired. There go the larger profits the manufacturer could have made for those “off-label” uses.

     Will these revisions become law? Unclear. But to have some light shed on the monetary incentives behind the attempt is clearly of value.

     Full disclosure: I take several drugs for “off-label” reasons…and they’ve done good things for me. Suffice it to say that my quality of life would be substantially degraded were I denied the use of those medicines. We shall see.

Censorshop

     I’ve ranted more than once about the usefulness of a steadily centralizing economy to those who desire total power over us. I trust the point was not lost on my Gentle Readers. However, it remains easy to miss the indications of political control over one’s workplace, so here’s a nice fresh one:

     A Christian nurse was suspended from a NHS certification program after she said “being white doesn’t make you racist.”
     Amy Gallagher said the harassment and bullying by the woke staff left her with crippling anxiety.
     The lecturers at the NHS in Britain also taught that Christianity is responsible for racism because “it’s European.”

     Britain’s National Health Service is a perfect example of what happens to medicine when the State seizes it and decrees how it shall be provided. Be aware that this is the model of what the Left wants to impose on Americans. Be further aware that it also exists in Canada, which accounts for the thousands of Canadians who’ve streamed across our northern border in search of a competent and available doctor.

     At any rate, the British NHS not only decrees who shall receive medical care, when, and on what terms, but also what its employees are permitted to say:

     Lecturers at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust told her ‘whites don’t understand the world’ and ‘Christianity is responsible for racism because it’s European’ in a series of ‘politically biased’ talks.
     One of the Tavistock’s seminars was even called ‘Whiteness — a problem for our time’ and included a description on the Trust’s website that ‘the problem of racism is a problem of whiteness’.
     When Amy challenged these controversial views she was ‘bullied’ by staff and suspended from the course, pending an investigation into whether she is safe to work with patients.

     It’s not quite that bad in the U.S. today, but it’s getting there. And it becomes ever more dominant as the large employers come to dominate an ever-expanding percentage of the workforce. The larger a company becomes, the more tempting a target it becomes to the SJWs and the assorted components of the Left’s alliance.

     I’m not going to repeat myself about the wherefores. Either you’ve been paying attention or you haven’t. These are the fruits. Scott Adams’s advice to “diversify your employer” has never been more imperative. If it’s all feasible, consider working for yourself and contracting with temporary employers as the opportunities arise.

     I’ll be back later with something else. It’s time for a grocery run.

The Longest Long Con

     I ran across this graphic only a few minutes ago:

     It’s at the center of my thoughts for a reason upon which I’ll rant a bit later in this piece. For now, I’d like to remind you about an old song, and an old practice far too many of us followed in our younger years. The song:

Every time I think that I’m the only one who’s lonely
Someone calls on me
And every now and then I spend my time in rhyme and verse
And curse those faults in me
And then along comes Mary
And does she want to give me kicks, and be my steady chick
And give me pick of memories
Or maybe rather gather tales of all the fails and tribulations
No one ever sees

When we met I was sure out to lunch
Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch

When vague desire is the fire in the eyes of chicks
Whose sickness is the games they play
And when the masquerade is played and neighbor folks make jokes
As who is most to blame today
And then along comes Mary
And does she want to set them free, and let them see reality
From where she got her name
And will they struggle much when told that such a tender touch as hers
Will make them not the same

When we met I was sure out to lunch
Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch

And when the morning of the warning’s passed, the gassed
And flaccid kids are flung across the stars
The psychodramas and the traumas gone
The songs are left unsung and hung upon the scars
And then along comes Mary
And does she want to see the stains, the dead remains of all the pains
She left the night before
Or will their waking eyes reflect the lies, and make them
Realize their urgent cry for sight no more

When we met I was sure out to lunch
Now my empty cup tastes as sweet as the punch

(Tandyn Almer)

***

     There was a “game” we young folks played, when I was a younger man, single and desirous of…well…we sometimes called it nookie, alright? It went like this:

HE: Get her high and chat her up sophisticatedly, and maybe you’ll get her into bed.
SHE: Pretend to listen and let him think he might get me into bed so I can get high on his dime.

     If you “matured” in the Sixties and Seventies, you may have been a “player” in this game yourself. It was a con, of course. He wasn’t at all interested in her mind; she wasn’t at all interested in his body. But both sides were willing to pretend for the sake of what they really sought, and yes: every now and then she would give him what he really wanted from her. (After getting higher than Icarus ever got, of course.) Tandyn Almer’s lyric above recounts this con game in Ferlinghetti-esque fashion…regardless of whether you can recite the whole thing from memory alone.

     “Along Comes Mary” was a warning…but the young have always been dismissive of such cautions. Our glands spoke in a voice that would not be denied. Our heedlessness got us into no end of trouble. That’s the way it goes when you keep playing a con game.

***

     The graphic at the start of this jeremiad tells a central truth, one which recent events have made plain…yet few are willing to accept it. There are reasons for that, most prominent among them being the continuing media emphasis on Left vs. Right, and the contemporary phenomenon of the Never-Ending Campaign.

     If the media megaphone can get you charged up about a notionally two-sided contest — with the help of the contestants, of course — it can keep your attention on what’s being said and away from what’s being done. That is the pattern of the last forty years at least. It keeps the political parties fat and happy, the media moguls dancing in dollars…and you and I bereft of the thing this nation was founded to protect and preserve: FREEDOM.

     It’s a con game, Gentle Reader. It’s been nothing else since Ronald Reagan left office — and do you want to know what the Big Giveaway is, the one that everyone in this country should reflect on? It’s right out there in front of God and everybody, but only a handful of commentators have even brushed their microphones against it:

     It’s the swindling of Donald Trump.

     Trump was a genuine Outsider, a maverick determined to do right as he saw it. That made him an unacceptable, permanently “outside the tent” figure to the master croupiers of the Con Game, they who pour the Very Best Butter over the cams of the Big Rake-Off Machine we call party politics. They labor ceaselessly to keep We the People in Us vs. Them mode, that the oceans of campaign dollars might continue to flow uninterrupted into their coffers. Despite their best efforts, Trump gained the White House and set about doing as he said he would do. Unthinkable! the masters of the Establishment said to one another. No one keeps campaign promises! That’s why we let our puppets make them!!

     So Trump had to go. The theft of the 2020 presidential election was the plainest imaginable revelation about the essential phoniness of contemporary political “conflict.” But despite Election 2020 and subsequent developments – Ukraine, anyone? — only a few have caught on.

     Disaffiliate yourselves from the farce. Stop paying it any attention. Stop expecting political mechanisms to solve any of your problems. Concentrate on doing the best you can for your family, your friends, your neighbors, and your community, however defined. The game is rigged — so completely that even though “it’s the only game in town,” there’s absolutely no point in playing it any longer.

     Be free. Freedom is not granted; it is taken: by you or from you. And the longer you focus on the con game called politics, the longer it will be withheld from you — by your own stubborn inanition.

     It’s time for Mass. Perhaps I’ll be back later.

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