Jun 19 2022

For Fathers’ Day: The Husband Shop

     It was a new establishment. Jane had only heard about it, but at the conclusion of her Saturday bachelorette’s shopping for the week, she decided to give it a look. After all, at age thirty a woman’s prospects have thinned considerably. It wasn’t that she could hear the biological clock ticking, but she was aware that some effort…possibly even some expense…would be required of her if she was to avoid spinsterhood. So she entered the five-floor structure, murmuring “I’m just here to look around” in case there was anyone within earshot.

     The first floor was warehouse-like. On display were a number of very workman-like men, most of them in overalls or similar sturdy garb. A sign stood next to the turnstile before the display:

These Men Have Jobs.

     None of them thrilled her – having a job was the least of her requirements – so she mounted the escalator to the second floor.

     The second floor displayed men who looked fairly similar to the ones on the first floor. However, the sign at the turnstile was different:

These Men Have Jobs,
And Love Kids.

     “Hmmm,” said Jane. “That’s an attraction – we’d have to get to work on a family pretty promptly – but perhaps I can still do better. So she mounted the escalator to the third floor.

     On the third floor she saw displays of men who were tall, well built, well groomed, and handsome of face. These made her heart beat faster. The sign at the gate told her that:

These Men Have Jobs,
Love Kids,
And Are Very Good-Looking.

     “Now we’re rockin’,” thought Jane. But there were two more floors. She had to know what more could possibly be on offer. So she mounted the escalator to the fourth floor.

     The men displayed on the fourth floor were just as good-looking as those on the third, but each of them held a cleaning implement – a broom, a mop, a pail, a sponge, and so forth – as well. The sign at the gate was almost irresistible:

These Men Have Jobs,
Love Kids,
Are Very Good-Looking,
And Don’t Mind Housework.

     “Good grief,” thought Jane. “How much better than that can a man get?” But she had to know what was on the fifth floor. The men there had to be the ultimate in masculine attraction. So she mounted the escalator to the fifth floor.

     The fifth floor was empty except for the turnstile and a large electronic billboard:

You Are The 31,415,728th Woman
To Visit This Floor.
There Are No Men Here.
It Exists To Illustrate A Terrible Fact:
There’s No Pleasing Some Women.
This Way To The Down Escalator.
Have A Nice Day!

     (</rimshot>)

Jun 19 2022

Connections: A Quickie

     A reminder: there is more than one sort of tyrant.

     Not all aspiring tyrants are motivated by a conscious ideology. Yes, the most famous tyrants of the century behind us rose with the aid of a superficially attractive ideology – socialism, in every case – but history goes back more than a single century. The smaller tyrannies of Renaissance Italy were entirely a matter of a powerful family imposing itself on a whole city by force of arms. The tyranny of Calvinist Geneva was religious in origin. There are others aplenty, but those examples should suffice to make the point.

     Today’s would-be tyrants – WBTs, for convenience –trumpet their chosen “shield ideology” – again, nearly always socialism – while downplaying to the point of inaudibility what its implementation would entail. Anyone who points out the ugly consequences is denounced aloud and hunted by the WBT’s thugs. This pattern is easily observable today in many parts of the world, America included.

     The point here is not to trouble overly about whatever ideology the demagogue is promoting. Watch what he and his allegiants do. The methods they use in their quest for power are the giveaway.

     This recent essay at American Thinker cites W. Cleon Skousen’s famous book The Naked Communist and notes the connections between Communist methods and those of today’s Left. The connections are plain as the print in which Skousen describes them. Yet it is not necessarily the case that the Communist ideology lies behind the aspirations of today’s WBTs. If they were to be charged so, they could probably defend themselves adequately. The charge they cannot refute is that they want unchallenged power over us.

     That charge is well supported by the obviousness of the WBT’s major tactics: the systematic suppression of communications among those who oppose them, and the disarming of anyone who might rise against them once they’re in power.

     Don’t assume you know a demagogue’s motives ab initio. Reason “backward:” from his tactics to his strategy, thence to his objectives, and thereafter to his motives. In the usual case, his ultimate motive, above and beyond all other considerations, will be power.

     “Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” – George Orwell, 1984

     Verbum sat sapienti.

Jun 18 2022

My Health, Post-Covid

I’m not fully recovered. Still have diminished sense of smell, still easily tired (I nap a lot), and haven’t been able to fully resume my walking regime. So, overall, maybe 75% better.

I DID, as it happens, have the original 2-shot Moderna injections, in April 2021. I wasn’t forced by work, but by relentless nagging by my kids. I’m still unhappy about that, as I feel, at 71, fully capable of making my own decisions about my medical care.

I did check the Lot number, but I can’t find the site now (it broke down reported adverse events – what we call side effects – by lot number). If anyone has the link, put it in the comments. Only a few of the lot numbers had the vast majority of complaints – most had little to no effect. I identified myself as a reactive person when getting the shots (multiple episodes of hives and breathing issues with antibiotics and other drugs), and they kept me for an extended time. I was fine, on both visits.

There’s a Heinlein story, about a group of military men – four of them – undergoing a thoracic procedure for treatment of TB. The first one dies, in a rare side effect. The second one collapses, after his treatment. The third one is offered another doctor, but climbs on the table, and is treated, without problems. The kicker is that the second one died of fright.

And, I suspect, many of the reports of adverse reactions are similar. A rare natural occurence, not able to be predicted or prevented. Or, hysteria leading to a similar result, with that outcome much more common than the first outcome.

Now, I have little direct knowledge of COVID shot problems. I personally know no one who had a bad reaction to the shots. Those who participated are a huge group, and in no medical treatment are issues unknown. Even the polio shots/drops had some issues. And, years later, many of those who survived polio, and went on to normal lives, find that they experience a revival of polio neuro-muscular symptoms. So, neither immunization nor natural immunity from contracting disease are failsafe against future events.

In my view, it’s up to the individual. If you want to take a chance, skip the shots. No employer should bar you from duty, except possibly in the case of caring for immunocompromised individuals, or other high-risk occupation. The same with parental choice – it’s YOUR kid. If you feel that making a non-vaxx decision is right, the doctors should make a reasonable attempt to persuade you to to contrary, but, failing in that effort, have you sign paperwork that you know the possible consequences, and still maintain your right to decide for your child. Maybe a required video presentation, followed by signing off, for those who may not read all that well.

But, that’s IT. Parents may safety-related choices all the time – sports participation, use of tools, supervision needed, operation of various vehicles (bike, car, lawnmower). In the end, it’s THEIR kid.

Given the rarity of serious problems for the under-18 crowd of catching Covid, I disagree with the idea that refusing the shots should lead that child to be barred from school, or forced to mask. Certainly, reasonable care of that child would have the parent keeping him/her home, if displaying symptoms.

You would THINK that was the norm. But, given the penalties for parents keeping a kid at home if they work (loss of pay or job), many parents send children with mild symptoms to school/daycare. And, the fact is, MOST of the cases of childhood runny nose/slightly elevated body temp/just don’t feel all that well, turn out to be a mild illness, or even an allergy attack. It can be difficult to make that judgement flawlessly.

I’m generally in favor of personal responsibility and trusting to people’s good sense. However, the last 1/2 century has shown that all too many people have very little ability to manage their lives without making boneheaded decisions (or lack of decision-making, trusting to luck in the outcome). So, mandating ANY blanket policy will have some downsides.

Life is filled with risk. Life will, eventually, lead to death. No one gets out alive.

Jun 18 2022

No More, It’s Too Much!

     Too much to write about, that is.

***

     The recent reports of violent assaults on crisis pregnancy centers, and the announcement that more are coming, have had me worried. It was heartening to learn that the operators of such centers are staunch in the face of such threats:

     I began my conversation with the Georgia pregnancy center director by discussing the lay of the land when it comes to the forthcoming Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

     “I think the Court is going to go the way of life and overturn Roe,” she told me. “Roe is an obsolete ruling that doesn’t function or work. We’re not living in 1980; today’s pregnancy tests can give women an accurate and positive result at three weeks of pregnancy.”

[…]

     “There have been no specific threats against us consequently we’re trying to be prepared but not paranoid,” said the Ohio pregnancy center chaplain. “We’re told through some of our national relationships that one of every six centers nationwide have had threats or vandalism.”

     The Georgia pregnancy center director told me that her center is working with local police for protection and is working on fortifying the facility. They’re also searching for volunteers to help with security. The goal is to keep everybody — staff, volunteers, clients, and their children — safe.

     The Ohio chaplain said that his organization is making similar plans to secure its facility.

     The above is laudable beyond my power to express. However, there’s a truth being illustrated here. The Jane’s Revenge / Ruth Sent Us fanatics, inasmuch as they can choose their moments to strike, are forcing the pregnancy centers into defensive stances that they must maintain continuously and perpetually.

     This is not a formula for victory. Victory over the violent fanatics requires going on the offensive. But there are hazards involved in such a change of posture, especially with a pro-baby-killing administration in Washington.

***

     The Left cannot abide having anyone with a significant public profile contradict their dogmas – and Jordan Peterson’s profile has quite a lot of bulge:

     One of the things Peterson is doing to make it fun is turning his Twitter account into an unofficial “smash or pass” game. Previously, the good doctor set the internet on fire when he commented that Sports Illustrated’s new swimsuit model, Yumi Nu, wasn’t beautiful due to her very obvious obesity and that authoritarians attempting to force the “big is beautiful” concept on people won’t change that.

     Fast forward to last Thursday and it was announced that golfer and Instagram model Paige Spiranac was named Maxim magazine’s “sexiest woman alive.” Naturally, Peterson decided to add his commentary.

     “Ok,” tweeted Peterson. ” She might be beautiful.”

     Beauty is emphatically not in the eye of the beholder. With regard to female beauty, it inheres in objective characteristics that are common among women found beautiful by men — and on this subject, only men’s opinions count. No amount of “body positivity” propaganda will draw a young, mating-mind man toward a visibly obese woman. But I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know…even if the Left wants to crawl down Jordan Petersons collar (and mine) for saying so.

     A grace note: Ayn Rand, in one of her collections of essays, took scornful note of a certain Peregrine Worsthorne, a left-wing critic who promoted “alternative rights” in place of the ones Americans champion. Among those “alternative rights” was “a right to feel beautiful.” We haven’t heard much from that particular buffoon lately, but his “spirit” plainly lives on in the “body positivity” cranks. Bad ideas are as timeless as the envy and resentment that inspire them.

***

     It has never been safe to openly slag off the boss. It certainly isn’t today:

     SpaceX has reportedly fired the employees who released an open letter this week criticizing CEO Elon Musk and referring to his recent behavior as a “distraction and embarrassment” to the company.

     SpaceX president and Musk ally Gwynne Shotwell said in a memo that the firm had “terminated a number of employees involved” in crafting the letter – noting the workers in question had “upset many” with an “unsolicited request” to add their signatures.

     “The letter, solicitations and general process made employees feel uncomfortable, intimidated and bullied, and/or angry because the letter pressured them to sign onto something that did not reflect their views,” Shotwell said in the memo, which was obtained by The Verge.

     Ace calls this SJW jujitsu — an appropriate term for doing to them what they habitually try to do to those who disagree with them. It also goes by another traditional term: “Biter Bit.” The celerity and elegance of it reinforces my admiration for Musk.

     Twitter’s large complement of SJWs should consider themselves on notice.

***

     It seems the apostles of transgenderism have done a great deal of harm while maintaining that they’re doing good:

     One of the radical woke left’s favorite narratives is that if we fail to socially and medically affirm the gender confusion of queer or transgender individuals, it will have devastating and potentially fatal consequences for them, due most significantly to supposedly higher suicide risk in those individuals who are denied that affirmation. But the data on the subject do not at all support this narrative. In fact, it shows just the opposite.

     The Heritage Foundation just published a report of their study on “Puberty Blockers, Cross-Sex Hormones, and Youth Suicide,” by Jay P Greene, PhD, in which they show that youths who received so-called “gender-affirming care” are actually at significantly greater risk of suicidal ideation and attempts than those who are not. This directly contradicts the leftist assertion that failure to provide “gender-affirming care” results in higher suicide rates and is thus fatally dangerous to trans and queer youths.

     Please read the whole article, and if you have both time and patience, the linked articles as well. The ground data appears to be both undisputable in its provenance and irrefutable in its implications. But my Gentle Readers should always take the opportunity to make up their own minds.

     Yes, I’ve written sympathetically about a (fictional) transwoman. Yes, I have two transwoman friends — adult friends, whose choices are their own and who are aware that the consequences of their decisions are entirely theirs to bear. Children are a completely different matter, especially in this era when they can be “medicated” with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones without their parents ever knowing.

***

     Finally for today, Mike Hendrix has a few words to say about the foolishness of “red flag” laws:

     No one seems to really know for sure, but there are currently betwixt twenty and perhaps as high as forty thousand-plus gun laws on the books in this *cough cough* “free” country—a country in which a solid share of its citizenry is constantly congratulating itself on having done such a bang-up job of understanding, treasuring, and defending its precious Second Amendment rights. INESCAPABLE FACT: One more gun-control law, or a hundred of them, is not going to prevent a single sad-sack whackadoodle bound and determined to engrave his name into the annals of mass-murdering fiends from securing his fifteen minutes of notoriety. Only children and/or the blood-simple could seriously imagine that a real solution might be so easily found.

     Are there effective measures that could be taken to make it more difficult, even damned near impossible, for such sickos to consummate their diseased fantasies of score-settling and schoolyard mayhem? Absolutely, yes. But we’re unlikely to avail ourselves of them, because they will necessarily involve a sort of cascading series of long-term projects that will strike a lethargic, by-and-large contented adult population as too extreme, too unpleasant, and in direct contravention of the verymost fundamental American principles. Which, okay, I admit they are at that. But still. For whatever it might be worth, then, we must:

  • Surgically excise the malignancies seeded by the Left like time-bombs throughout American society and institutions, which in turn will require that we
  • Disrupt and erode the Left’s ability to exercise unwholesome or destructive influence on American society and institutions henceforth, no matter what it might take
  • Develop uncompromising, proactive strategies to counter and/or prevent dissemination of political philosophies which advocate replacing our Founding ideals with collectivist, Statist, Marxist/socialist, or totalitarian-Left ideological systems.

     Yes, that would work. But the steps required would include measures that would horrify John Q. Public. Have a few:

  • The elimination of all government involvement in education;
  • A knowledge-of-civics requirement for participation in any public institution;
  • Uncompromising public hostility toward any creed opposed to the Constitution of the United States.

     Would you find those terms acceptable, Gentle Reader?

***

     That’s it for today. I must now undertake a chore I’ve been putting off for far too long: jacking up my lawn tractor, crawling under it, scraping the mower deck clean of encrusted grass clippings, and coating it with Teflon®. All this while the C.S.O. “spots” me, which will probably consist mainly of “helpful” suggestions about how to do it all.

     Well, it’s that or have my lawn continue to look like a Sargasso Sea of mini-compost piles, which evokes a quite different array of “helpful” suggestions from the C.S.O. Pray for me.

Jun 17 2022

Let’s Transform Labor Day

And, in the process, honor those laborers who have specialized knowledge that is worth something in the labor market.

Now, this story is one that points out the special value to America of some very highly qualified craftsmen. But, many types of knowledge need to be honored:

  • Those that learned how to do their job – beyond the basics – and do their work with excellence. This could be a bartender who takes the time to pull the draft properly, the waitress who delivers your food hot and with all the garnishes, condiments, and drink refills.
  • Those that take the time to instruct younger co-workers on how to perform their tasks with care.
  • Those that don’t settle for a “good enough” job. I’m remembering several problem-solvers who made sure that the problem was properly addressed, even if it took a little longer.
  • Those that treat their customers as though they were family, with care, respect, and a cheerful willingness to do everything they can to make their experience a good one.
  • The people who, on the early shift, man the microphone, collect the money, and never forget to wish me a “Blessed Day”. Literally, service with a smile. And doing it before most of use even wake up.
  • The cooks and kitchen staff who work the sweltering months of the year (or, in much of the Southwest, EVERY day). God bless them for showing up, every day, and helping the rest of us get fed. Please, if you stop by a restaurant on a hot day, ask the manager to convey your appreciation to the kitchen staff. Wouldn’t hurt to leave some money on Labor Day for a treat after work.
  • Those who can’t attend the barbeque, because they were scheduled to cover a shift that day. Make up a plate with all the trimmings, and hand-deliver it to them.
  • Learn the names of your mail carrier, the cashiers, the janitorial staff, and the clerical staff. Take the time to tell their bosses what a great job they do, and how it brightens your day to shop there/meet them in the course of the day.

Jun 17 2022

Nixon’s Revenge

I’d been a hard-core Democrat in in the early 1970’s. At that point, I was working lunches and cocktail hour as a bartender, and had time to watch the Watergate hearings in the afternoon. It’s hard for people today to imagine just how addictive they were. The coverage was everywhere – newspapers (at that point, Cleveland was a 2-newspaper town), magazines, evening news (the 24-hour coverage that we take for granted wasn’t available then).

Those media personalties that did exist were, themselves, overwhelmed by the suddenness of the change in How Things Were Done. Rather than a short national report (and OCCASIONAL special reports), followed by the local news – the whole evening report seldom took up as much as an hour, and that included weather and sports time.

But, Watergate! It must have been heady – for a relatively brief investment of time and energy, reporters could chase the “leads” of disgruntled federal employees and envious political rivals, and be given their own spotlight on national TV. Most of them had never had that kind of attention before, other than the anchors (and, remember, most locations had but 2-3 channels available).

Well, we now know what sudden fame does to people who are thrust into it – the Real Housewives of Whereever, various ‘Idols’ and social media influencers, and others caught up in a media frenzy – all for the opportunity to shine for a nano-second. It can lead to evermore outrageous lies, inventions, and creative re-writing of history.

Bad as the attention-seekers that populate Hollywood, media, and other spotlights are, imagine the effect on obscure people – bookkeepers, secretaries, bureaucrats – who are sought after for just a teensy betrayal of confidential information. Stories, once based in some smidgen of fact, become exaggerated and filled with baseless speculation. They are coaxed, seduced, and manipulated by the media.

And, some, like Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky, never do get their lives back. On some level, you have to have pity for the mess they have made of their lives.

At the link, some background for those who have forgotten – or never knew – about Watergate Days.

Jun 17 2022

Concerning Yesterday’s Tirade

     A great many well-meaning persons in the Right stoutly resist the suggestion that the only guaranteed way to end racial strife is to separate the races. I know a number of such persons. One for whom I have great respect commented here just yesterday evening. It’s the most commonly expressed sentiment among Americans of all political inclinations, and it speaks of the good will that animates them.

     But it reduces to this: “We can’t give up now! We haven’t tried everything yet! Something has to work!”

     No one wants to admit failure. Failure is humbling. It hurts us where we’re most vulnerable: in our self-regard. The wound is especially bloody when we’ve thrown so many resources at the problem. And of course, one can never be sure one has “tried everything,” which gives the plaint special poignancy.

     But I must reply with a certain weariness:


How many more lives lost,
How much more destruction and chaos,
And how many more trillions of dollars
Must we expend before you accept that you’ve failed,
And allow us to cut our losses?

     For we must accept that regardless of the problem, no one can ever try every possible solution. When the problem has been completely politicized, such that its solution has been relegated to government(s), the matter is extremely acute, for a reason the late Milton Friedman expressed better than anyone else:

The Benefit Will Accrue To Me The Benefit Will Accrue To Others
The Cost Will Be Borne By Me
I
II
The Cost Will Be Borne By Others
III
IV

     This is the incentives matrix each of us faces any time he has to make a spending decision.

     In Type I and II situations, the spender is spending his own money, and so has strong incentives to control cost. In Type I situations, where the spender will be purchasing some benefit for himself, he will attempt to maximize the quality of the thing purchased. In Type II situations, where the benefit will go to someone else, the quality of the thing purchased declines in importance, and is sometimes sloughed entirely.

     In Type III and IV situations, which embrace all government spending, the spender is spending someone else’s money, and so has little or no incentive to control costs. In Type III situations, where the spender is buying something for himself, he’ll attempt to maximize the benefit. In Type IV situations, where the spender is buying something for someone else, there are no compelling reasons to control either cost or quality.

     When a government addresses a problem, it does so in the “Type IV context:” the costs and benefits will go to persons and institutions other than the government itself. Those within the protective envelope of the State are almost never touched by the problem or by the cost of the putative solutions to be applied. The problem of racial hatred and violence is no different from any other.

     There must be a limit. There must be a point at which We the Put-Upon say, “No more experimentation! You have squandered enough of our blood and treasure on your schemes. We’re taking the problem back into our hands.”

     Reasonable people will disagree about where that point should be. No matter where the emerging consensus puts it, admitting that we’ve failed to solve the problem will hurt. (That’s why the last word heard from a Cockpit Voice Recorder recovered after a crash is usually “Shit.”) The torrent of if-onlies and maybe-ifs doesn’t salve the wound. Nothing can.

     American society is in extremis. The machinations of recent Democrat administrations have brought it to the brink of total failure, and the racialists and their mascots are doing their damnedest to finish the job. Few neighborhoods are acceptably, reliably safe. Whole cities have been laid waste. The “public” schools are turning into mini-arenas for interracial violence. Retailers face increasing losses to pilferage. Government treasuries are exhausted and worse.

     If we were discussing death and destruction brought about by an identifiable individual, the solution would be to execute or incarcerate him. Is it not so? But we’re not. Instead, we have before us a tide of death and destruction being brought about by an identifiable race. Why, then, must we eschew the simple solution – separation of the races – simply because the perpetrators are many instead of just one? Haven’t we tried hard enough, with great enough patience, and at great enough cost to the innocent among us?

     I could be wrong…but even if I were certain of that, I would not want the odium for imposing yet another remedial scheme upon millions of others willy-nilly, knowing that they, not I, would bear the cost. The time has come for humility: a virtue those in the corridors of power notably lack.

     And so I prescribe:

  • Repeal the Civil Rights Acts of:
  • Repeal all other federal and state anti-discrimination statutes.
  • Terminate all agencies and commissions relevant to “equal opportunity.”
  • End all transfer programs that pay clients based upon “single mother” status.

     Once these things have been done, the races will separate — peacefully — to the degree required. It’s our last chance to do so. If we miss this one, this is the most pleasant of the outcomes remaining.

Jun 16 2022

Reality, Not Realities

     Perhaps the reason for our current plague of cognitive dissonance lies in all the “multiverse” movies and TV shows we’ve been watching. Ultimately it won’t matter. In this reality, where the speed of light in a vacuum is a generous 299,792,458 meters per second and Planck’s Constant is a steady 6.62607×10-34 Joule-seconds, the facts are not merely stubborn (John Adams) but lethally inescapable (Sir Harold Bowden). We will face them and act on their implications, or we will be destroyed by our own willfulness.

     And one of the facts that will destroy us is this one:

We Can’t All Just “Get Along.”

     Not if we’re too close to one another, at any rate.

***

     Cognitive dissonance: The mental stress (discomfort) experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values; when performing an action that contradicts one of those beliefs, ideas, or values; or when confronted with new information that contradicts one of the beliefs, ideas, and values. (Infogalactic)

     Many Americans suffer from cognitive dissonance on certain subjects. They strain to harmonize their adherence to some prescriptive axiom (“We can all get along if only we try harder”) with the indisputable facts (the race warfare that’s been going on for some six decades). I once suffered from it myself. Then I resolved to hew strictly to the facts, as I personally witnessed them and as they’re reported by persons and institutions I know to be reliable.

     That decision has cost me several friends. I refused to say or imply convictions I don’t hold in order to retain them. For commentators more prominent than I, the consequences have gone further than some social losses. It takes quite a lot of courage for someone whose livelihood depends upon retaining a publisher (or publishers) to stand to his tack under such pressures.

     But there are organizations determined to maintain the fiction against the pressure of the dissonance. There’s money and power in it. And they press their agenda in every imaginable format.

***

     Let’s start with this piece from a colleague:

     In the West, we used to enjoy being able to speak our minds. Now we have cancel culture. Unless we share the pernicious and depraved ideology of the ruling class, we either keep our mouths shut or recite lies, lest our lives be destroyed by woke lynch mobs. This is for the best, according to academia:

     “Cancel culture” has its benefits, according to an online anti-racism course being taught to over 100 British academics.

     “Union Black,” a class being taught by The Open University, teaches professors that “In relation to racial/social justice, cancel culture has been shown to realize benefits.”

     What else would you expect of the “Open” University in the land of George Orwell?

     These benefits, according to class materials, include “holding people or entities accountable for immoral or unacceptable behavior” and “promoting collective action to achieve social justice and cultural change through social pressure.”

     Read that last paragraph slowly and carefully. Its full impact takes two or three passes to grasp. The key lies in reifying the final phrase: “promoting collective action to achieve social justice and cultural change through social pressure.”

     Here as in many other places, the riposte that wins the day is “Exactly what do you mean by that? Be clear and specific.”

     The scamsters of “racial / social justice” never permit themselves to be clear or specific. It would make their aim too obvious: the reduction of whites to second-class citizens, racial dhimmis, to facilitate a massive transfer of wealth from whites to blacks. They’ve already made strides in this regard, as witness the many federal and state laws that privilege, de facto, blacks over whites in education, labor, and commerce. No “equal opportunity” commission has ever penalized a prevalently black organization or institution under the quota laws routinely wielded against prevalently white organizations and institutions.

     As I commented at Dave Blount’s site, I’m minded to start a pro-racism course. I’d load it up with irrefutable, easily confirmed facts and exclude all statements of opinion or conclusion, whether or not I find them defensible. I think I’d get a good number of takers, if I could survive the announcement.

***

     Next, there’s the Colonel’s most recent citation. It’s just below this one, so no need to over-exercise your mouse. The author of that piece, Anthony Bryan, first attacks one of the falsehoods I most despise: the one stated in the paragraph the Colonel quotes. He proceeds thence to note conservatives’ conventional refutation, which is premised on the noble sentiments of the Declaration of Independence. However, Bryan notes that this is a losing strategy:

     The Republican appeal to color-blind civic nationalism is no match for the vengeful emotionalism of the 1619 Project. But this asymmetry is typical of racial discussions in America — blacks, with the backing of liberal whites, aggressively push whatever argument or policy benefits them, while the “MLK-Cons” respond with feeble appeals to the Constitution and universal principles.

     Indeed, there is no effective counterstroke to the racialists’ furiously emotional pitch other than an equally furious, equally emotional pitch from the Right: a “brush-back fastball,” high and tight, that highlights the factual asymmetries between black and white:

  • lower aggregate intelligence (roughly 15 points in IQ testing);
  • higher aggregate aggression, especially among the young,
  • higher aggregate participation in legal and social pathologies (e.g., 70% rate of illegitimacy);
  • the enormous legal imbalance between blacks and whites built into our “civil rights” laws.

     But conservative commentators willing to throw that pitch are few; conservative politicians willing to do so are unknown.

***

     Finally for this tirade, a personal note. Among the reasons I canceled my television subscription two years ago was that I was sick of the left-liberal / progressive / SJW propaganda being larded over every item of “entertainment” available from the broadcast and cablecast stations. There were a couple of things whose loss I lamented, but I wasn’t willing to pay the enormous TV subscription fees just for “first run” access to them. However, I kept an eye peeled for the availability of the shows I liked on DVD. One of them, the CBS drama Evil, recently became available, so I purchased the first two seasons thereof.

     I found the first season of Evil refreshing for its largely evenhanded attitude toward the Catholic Church and one of its more “controversial” doctrines and practices: the reality of demonic possession and the concomitant need for exorcism. The Church tends to be badly abused by the media. The clerical pedophilia scandals are just about the only thing the news media ever mention. Few drama series have treated the Church and its clerics with even mild approbation. Yet the dedication of its priests and its two-millennia fidelity to promulgating the Gospels of Jesus of Nazareth are unequaled by any institution of any sort anywhere or in any era. During its first season, Evil treated the Church with unusual respect, while nevertheless making room for critics and unbelievers to differ with its preachments and practices.

     I was appalled to discover that the second season has departed from that practice. Instead, I was treated to diatribes about Church “racism,” founded on the relative paucity of black Catholics and black Catholic priests. We also get a repetition of a familiar canard against the United States: the notion that, as character David Acosta asserts in a homily in season 2, episode 5, “E is for Elevator,” “America’s tremendous wealth was built from the labors of black slaves.”

     I suppressed the urge to use the DVD for target practice, but just barely.

     Clearly, the racialists will allow no form of entertainment to go unpolluted by their vicious fantasies. Flight is useless, for the pursuit shall never tire.

***

     There is no “Last Graf,” for there is no solution. Or perhaps there is one, but American whites from whose eyes the scales have not yet fallen remain vainly committed to the attempt to “get along.” In either case, the suffering will continue. For how long, I cannot say. Whatever the outcome and how long it takes to arrive, the realities will remain as they are. Therefore, let us at least spare ourselves any further cognitive dissonance about them.

     And do have a nice day.

Jun 16 2022

Pearls of expression. — anti-“1619 Project” edition.

The 1619 Project is a more detailed version of the “we built this country” claim, and it is rooted in the same solipsism and indignation that motivates most black political and cultural commentary. Giving blacks credit for America’s achievements is like giving a hospital’s janitors credit for a successful heart transplant. In a sane age, the 1619 Project would be something handed out as a pamphlet on street corners. But we don’t live in a sane age, thanks to white liberals. It is their policy of credulity and indulgence regarding black grievances that gave the 1619 Project prominence in elite circles and mainstream media, and makes it an addition to school curricula.

“The 1865 Project.” By Anthony Bryan, The Unz Review, 6/10/22 (emphasis added).

Jun 16 2022

Trust the experts.

Last year, the International Energy Agency made headlines by calling for an end to new oil and gas exploration by the end of the year.

A few months later, the IEA was calling for more oil.[1]

They see far into the future.

In the Pearls of expression. category we have:

Taking care of the demand side, the European Parliament recently voted in favor of a ban on internal combustion engine car sales, to enter into effect in 2035. This means that EVs must go from 0.5 percent of all cars in the European Union to 100 percent in eight years. Nobody is calling this delusional.[2]

The delusional descriptor is choice. It refers to the statement of the U.N. Secretary General “that investing in new oil and gas production was ‘delusional.'” Same source.

I like to speak of the “iron laws of arithmetic” and here it seems that there is a simple matter of arithmetic where one adds up energy needs and subtracts energy production of “renewables.” Somehow to the experts and wise leaders the result is — after a short transition period involving vague but breathtaking technological developments yet to occur — always and forever a negative number. This is Magic Wand Territory where the wand is waved and, lo, renewable energy issues forth in vast quantities.

Public policy based on magic.

Notes
[1] “Anti-Oil Lobby Faces Reality Check As Global Demand Is Set To Break Records.” By Irina Slav, ZeroHedge, 6/16/22.
[2] Id.

Jun 15 2022

Do You Really Think…

     …that we can share a country with savages like these?

     The U.S. Marshals Service arrested three men accused of fatally beating a 17-year-old high Ethan Liming outside the high school founded by LeBron James.

     The three men beat Liming to death and later bragged about it to friends.

     The murderers:

     Their victim:

>

     I want them expelled from this country. Every. Last. One Of Them. And I don’t care who calls me a racist for saying so.

Jun 15 2022

Pandora’s Last Gift Versus The Gospel Of Despair

     I’m in an odd mood this morning (“So what’s new?” come the mutterings from the peanut gallery), in part owing to two pieces I recently stumbled over:

     My reaction to these stories might have been different had I not just enjoyed a rather satisfying breakfast of fresh cherries and yogurt. (“First breakfast, then Armageddon” is a working principle here at the Fortress.) As matters stand, I’m able to write about them in a relatively tranquil mood, with only a quick slug of Maalox® for ballast.

     It’s easy to say “I’m fed up with it all and I’m dropping out.” It’s a lot harder to say “I still have hope that things could be better, and I’m going to act on it.” In the first case, you’ve put your listeners on notice that they should expect nothing from you. In the second, you’ve announced that you’re putting yourself to work on achieving your aspirations, whatever they may be. On first blush, these are personal matters that should concern no one but the speakers’ loved ones. On second thought, the reactions to them tell us quite a great deal that we need to know…whether we like it or not.

***

     Amil Niazi, the author of the first cited piece, evokes from me both pity and contempt. Surrender is just about never praiseworthy. The surrender of a privileged first-world office worker is particularly contemptible – and I could wear out my fingers listing the various privileges this self-pitying woman enjoys. If she’s sincere about her proclamation, I doubt she’ll enjoy herself much henceforward; the determinedly mediocre seldom do.

     The subject of the second piece, high school football coach Joe Kennedy, has displayed a great deal of courage. He risked his livelihood to act on his faith. From the details reluctantly provided by the Sports Illustrated hit piece, he enjoys a considerable amount of support. That’s notable, in these days when so many parents merely wring their hands over “public schools” that force their kids to listen to drag queens, apostles of transgenderism, and lectures on anal sex.

     In both cases, the word no one can avoid mentioning is hope.

     Americans have traditionally been strivers, not because we’re guaranteed to gain thereby, but from the hope that we’ll become more valued and better off. When our markets aren’t being interfered with by governmental imbeciles and our economy isn’t half-paralyzed from neo-cartelization, we tend to do better and better over time. Quote Henry Ford II:

     It is worth remembering that output per man in this country has increased on the average by about two percent a year during this century. Mere continuation of this trend will mean a future full of better things for more people.

     The “rising tide” that “lifts all boats” arises from improvements in capital, especially human capital. We learn to do better as we persist in our various trades. Doing better results in greater productivity. Employers that recognize and value productivity confer rewards on those who do better.

     As for Coach Joe Kennedy, the whole of the Christian faith is founded on hope:

  • That the life, words, ministry, Passion, and Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth are accurately recorded in the four Canonical Gospels;
  • That we may therefore trust that He was who He said He was;
  • And that we may therefore hope for a blissful afterlife if we only love God and our neighbor as ourselves, just as He directed us.

     (Pascal’s Wager isn’t perfectly on point here, but it is relevant.)

     The prevailing Establishment in this country, and in most of the world today, is rabidly hostile to Christianity. Where Jesus preached hope, they preach resignation. Where Jesus said that “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” they counter “What is truth? Ignore all that blather and do as we say.”

     Do you really need any better explanation for the expulsion of all traces of Christianity from our public institutions – especially our schools?

     There’s a reason hope is one of the three theological virtues.

***

     I could go on about this for many pages, but I’ll spare you. Let it suffice to say that they who seek to delegitimize hope, and who preach surrender to mediocrity and subjection, know what they’re about. The infiltration and subornation of organ after organ of information and opinion is too obvious. The messaging is too consistent. The attacks on those who defy them are too vicious and too vigorously sustained.

     “There’s nothing to hope for, so why hope? Stop striving. Surrender. Ignore that guy on his knees; he’s just an unreconstructed dupe of a god-myth two millennia old. Why follow his course when all it could possibly bring him is trouble? Especially trouble from us.”

     The wheel is turning, Gentle Reader. You know not the day nor the hour, so place your bet. Choose your side and stand fast to your post. Prepare to defend yourself.

Jun 14 2022

Illusion and Reality

I’ve been binging on Perception, as how about a professor of neuropsychology who is also a paranoid schizophrenic. Trust me, it’s good.

Today’s episode (season 2, episode 2), is one that centers on how unreliable our perceptions are in showing what actually happened, rather than what we perceived.

So, how does that relate to 1/6 investigations?

Simply, at this point, asking the officers and other witnesses to testify about events is not likely to yield any reliable record of events. Worse, EVEN WITH VIDEO EVIDENCE AVAILABLE that would contradict their biases, people who have viewed the footage (however truncated and edited) have made their decision about the “truth”, and, being human, are not likely to change their mind about what “happened”.

Over-writing Memory sectors of the brain is quite difficult. Once something is encoded in the brain, it becomes remarkably hard to cut it out. Trust me on that one. I used to play Trivial Pursuit (until I experienced problems finding others to play against – turns out that winning every game is not conducive to fun for my opponents). What I learned is that, once I answered a question wrongly, on every occasion that I encountered that same question, I answered it wrongly – and with the same answer I’d provided before.

On one hand, I KNEW the answer was wrong. But the pull of my brain towards that answer was stronger than that knowledge. The synapses had engraved a chemical pathway to that answer that had a stronger pull than my conscious knowledge that the answer was wrong.

In that case, as in many others, I made a choice, and, in doing so, blocked off all possibility of making another, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Jun 14 2022

The Requirements Of Civil Debate

     Just a quickie this morning, as I have a powerful need to unshackle myself from this electronic ball and chain and do something that will have a true effect on the world, even if it’s only to mow my lawn again.

     We know that genuinely civil debate is impossible today. Most Americans have at least a dim comprehension of the effect and its cause. But it helps to express the matter openly and clearly once in a while, if only to scrub it off the brainpan and make room for a new, possibly more exciting encrustation.

     A republic such as ours can only conduct its affairs in peace if there is nearly unanimous agreement – what the late Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman called essential consensus — on the rights of individuals and the proper responsibilities of government. In the absence of such agreement, ugliness will predominate. Indeed, violence over political differences will arise. It might even become rampant, inescapable. Moreover, the weaker the degree of agreement over individual rights / government responsibilities, the more likely the nation is to dissolve in chaos.

     Today, there is effectively no agreement as is described above. Violence is approaching inescapability. And so, via Mike Hendrix, we find commentators uttering laments such as this one:

     If the recent assassination attempt targeting Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh weren’t sufficient proof that a divided America is tiptoeing toward violent conflict, a research firm released a “disturbing poll” showing that nearly half of male Democrats under the age of 50 believe it acceptable to assassinate a politician “who is harming the country or our democracy.” Given that James Hodgkinson nearly succeeded in assassinating an entire baseball field of Republican members of Congress just a few years ago, the appetite for continued political violence shows no sign of abating….

     It says, I believe, that we are advancing down a dangerous path in the United States, one that will only become more treacherous the more we refuse to “agree to disagree.”

     Mike notes the false premise behind the article immediately:

     The author’s overly delicate sensibilities prevent him from digging down deep enough to uncover the root cause behind both the eschewal of rational, respectful debate and the escalating inclination towards bloodshed: the America-hating Left’s open advocacy for extreme authoritarianist tyranny, an ideology which is impossible to reconcile with the ideals of our Founding Fathers.

     The aims of the two poles in our contentions are completely irreconcilable! There is no imaginable way those who seek freedom and those who seek tyranny can argue civilly. There can be no compromise between them. The matter is insoluble other than by the test of arms.

     The aspiring totalitarians know and accept this. The seekers of freedom refuse to acknowledge it. And that is all you need to know to understand the disappearance of civil debate from our society.

Jun 13 2022

Why the Trendy Thing is Seldom the Right Thing

Let’s take plastic bags, for example. The so-called single use plastic bag (which often isn’t) is LESS disruptive in the environment than many of the alternatives that are pushed by the fervently pro-Green advocates. City Journal has an article about it that neatly skewers the Meant-to-be-Holier-Than-Thou Crowd, and explains, in simple terms, why their arguments are wrong.

In my house, the plastic bags serve as:

  • Trash can liners, in the bathroom, and in the office
  • Tote bags for meals on the go
  • A lint bag for the dryer that corrals it until I add it to the garbage
  • A place to put my wet bathing suit and towel when I go swimming
  • A place to put damp items on, so the car seats or floors don’t get wet – boots, coats, gloves
  • An emergency ‘rainhat’ to save my hair from getting drenched
  • A dog-doo-doo bag (my daughter had used a roll of bags, but this is not only easier, but saves using one-time bags for that purpose)

I came up with those uses in less than 10 minutes (I could do more if I had more time)

Plastics have their uses. Less harmful than broken glass, lighter weight than other materials, a convenient way to move mass quantities of fresh water in emergencies, and a practical alternative to carrying around items (metal straws, silverware, or heavier hiking gear) that are both more expensive, and – if lost – more damaging to the environment.

I’ve been known to use styro or paper cups for starting seed – cups can be reused for that purpose. A coffee cup with a lid, with holes poked into it, can be used to distribute seed in a garden. A cup can be cut into strips, and used to as a plant marker.

And, despite all that, kids in schools are still hounded to lecture their families about the horrors of plastics, and how they MUST spend more money for “proper” solutions to their waste.

Too many families have abdicated their responsibility for moral/character education to teachers and the schools. Too many schools believe it is their right to override parental decisions, and impose their own moral framework on their unsuspecting students. Use of the word “Fuck” is not punished, but ANY use of words that distinguish between people that relates to size, age, ethnicity, or sex are treated worse than those words that would have gotten your mouth washed out with soap, back in the day.

YOUR presumed-privileged child had BETTER watch what they say; presumed-downtrodden people are free to abuse and insult YOUR child with impunity.

Just another reason to keep your kids out of government schools.

Jun 13 2022

Whence The Problem, Thence The Solution

     Concerned about crime, Gentle Reader? Baffled as to why the justice system sits idle as felony crime rates explode? Bemused by the untouchability of the rioters, vandals, and looters that have laid waste to America’s great cities? You’re not alone; according to the polls, it’s one of the top political priorities of our time.

     You’d think, given the obsessive data gathering of the day, that we’d know more about crime and its prevention than we did five or six decades ago. Whether or not we know more, we’ve got a lot more crime, especially crimes against life and property, than we did in the Sixties and Seventies. So either what we “know” ain’t so, or we’re misusing the knowledge.

     One way to misuse knowledge, of course, is to ignore it in favor of “other factors.”

     Consider this: Most felony crimes are committed by repeat offenders. That’s a well-established bit of information. It follows that if a criminal is apprehended and convicted, he will be unable to commit further crimes while incarcerated – and therefore that incarcerating him will remove his “contribution” to the crime rate. Making it a policy to keep convicted criminals in prison, rather than sentencing them to non-custodial penalties or blithely releasing them early, would seem a simple and direct way to act against crime.

     If memory serves, in the Seventies the state of Oregon had an administration and a justice system that recognized the facts and their implication. It abolished plea-bargaining for felony crimes, enhanced minimum sentences, and curtailed pro forma parole hearings. The result was a dramatic drop in the crime rate. When a district attorney was interviewed about the policies, he said, quite plainly, that most crimes are committed by repeat offenders. Therefore, if we keep the offenders behind bars, they won’t be able to commit further crimes, and the crime rate will decrease.

     The candor exhibited in the interview was as striking as the realism and success of the policy. I can’t imagine why a state that had succeeded so greatly in curtailing felony crimes would have reversed course…but it did.

     Why? Moreover, given the failure of virtually every other attack on crime, why hasn’t the rest of the nation tried that approach? It’s one of the most imperative unanswered questions before us.

***

     I’ve written before about the Washington Monument Defense: Punish the citizenry for not conceding what the government has demanded:

     It hearkens back to an incident in which, when Congress dared to reduce the rate of increase of the budget for the operation of the District of Columbia, the city’s lower levels of government immediately retaliated by closing down Washington’s most popular tourist attractions — that is, by denying non-residents access to the only features of the city they really enjoy and value. The outcry was so sharp that Congress immediately restored the full amount the bureaucracy had demanded.

     Like other items with the WMD acronym, the Washington Monument Defense can bring an opponent to heel with no more than a suggestion. Consider, if you will, this passage from William E. Simon’s A Time For Truth, about the 1975-1976 New York City budget crisis:

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

     Anyone familiar with New York City’s monstrously bloated government — no less so in the Seventies than today — will realize at once that Beame and the aforementioned unions were playing the Washington Monument Defense. It worked, by the way.

     The Defense is highly relevant to the crime problem: Want more police and greater public safety? You’ll just have to pay more in taxes. And never mind all the bucks we’re squandering on boondoggles and giveaways that purchase the votes of special interests. In certain parts of the country, the Defense has become a continuous thing, an unrelenting pressure on the citizenry to pay more and concede more in the hope of an improvement in public safety. Those hopes continue to go unrealized, as the squeeze rampant crime puts on taxpayers has become too valuable to the politicians for them to contemplate doing without it.

     This is certainly one component to the never-ending acceleration of the crime rate. But it’s not the only one. Indeed, it might not be the most important of them.

***

     Special interest groups abound. You can hardly throw a rock into a left-wing demonstration without hitting one. Politicians vie for their allegiance, on the theory that purchasing votes en bloc is cheaper than “buying retail.” In one of the greatest ironies of the degeneration of our Republic, the members of two such interest groups commit the majority of crimes against life and property.

     The first group is illegal aliens. It might surprise some Gentle Readers to see me call blatant lawbreakers, illegally here in America, a special interest, yet it is so. One party – any guesses which? – has founded its political hopes upon those aliens. It wants them to see it as their benefactors. Therefore, it cannot afford to penalize illegals in a recognizable fashion. Other illegals would take note and turn against the party.

     The second group is American Negroes. It has been established on innumerable occasions that the majority of crimes against life and property are committed by black males under the age of 40. To use this fact as a driver of law enforcement policy would seem a “no-brainer”…but it won’t happen, again because of the Democrat Party’s need to retain the allegiance of black voters. Indeed, the wild success of Rudolph Giuliani’s mayoral administration at curbing crime in New York City was assailed almost entirely on the basis that the criminals Giuliani was taking off New York’s streets were too preponderantly black! (Whether the same effect operated against the aforementioned successful policy in Oregon, I cannot say.)

     Is it not clear that when law enforcement refuses to target the lawbreakers, the lawbreaking will continue and increase?

***

     I have one more influence to mention this morning: the tendency of American Negroes to shield their criminals from the weight of their crimes. I’ve commented on this before:

     When older, peaceable blacks:

  • Choose to accept the preachments of Jeremiah Wright, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, and Al Sharpton;
  • Tolerate irresponsible tomcatting by young black men and the consequent production of illegitimate children by young black women;
  • Decline to discipline unruly black youngsters, including those from female-headed households;
  • Automatically reject as “racist” the objective evidence that blacks are disproportionately the perpetrators of every kind of violent crime and crime against property;
  • Support groups that claim that Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were gunned down in cold blood;

     …they shield black predators from the retribution that would make it possible for whites to trust and accept them.

     More to the current point, they thwart the efforts of law enforcement to enforce the law. Politicians hungry for black votes exacerbate the effect.

     For yet another irony, go here:

     During the city council meeting last week, a patriot from Rocky Mountain, North Carolina, criticized Durham officials for lacking leadership and courage to do what’s right.

     The city of Durham conducted a public hearing for the city manager’s proposed budget for the fiscal year 2022-2023, and fiscal year 2023-2028 Capital Improvement Plan.

     One of the people who shared his grievances was former mayoral candidate Jahnmaud Lane….

     According to Lane, white supremacy and segregation are not the problems. The real problem is in the black community.

     “We have a problem in the black community and you need to address it. Black male, black police chief, black chair, black district attorney, and who are the ones laying on the street bleeding down and getting shot? Black folk!” Lane rebuked.

     As Mr. Lane said quite plainly, there is “a problem in the black community.” But to whom did he repair for redress? The Durham city council, politicians highly unlikely to shift law enforcement resources in the direction Mr. Lane demands. It could cost them votes.

     The political dynamics are simple: predominantly white districts, where crime rates are more tolerable, are unlikely to change their voting patterns because of problems in black districts. The votes most likely to be affected are those in the black districts…but in which direction? Given the prevalence of the belief among American blacks that “The Man is out to get us,” how could those politicians be confident that any changes in the voting patterns would be in their favor?

     American blacks like Jahnmaud Lane, desperate for relief from the crime that tortures them, must accept that the job is theirs. The political Establishment will not help them.

***

     There are other factors, of course. The increasing reluctance of police nationwide to risk their own well-being for the sake of the citizenry has been widely remarked. The increase in black racism against whites doesn’t help either. But the critical elements of the siege are easily understood:

  • Prosecutorial and judicial coddling of criminals for political reasons;
  • The Washington Monument Defense and its political dynamics;
  • Blacks “circling the wagons” around black criminals;
  • Reliance on political solutions.

     How much more will the nation tolerate before the return of the vigilance committees? No one can say with assurance. Ponder that possibility in light of the Left’s intensified push for the elimination of the right to keep and bear arms. It makes for a gloomy picture, doesn’t it?

Jun 12 2022

Is This The Hill To Die On?

     Well, is it?

     A bipartisan group of senators announced an agreement on principle for gun safety legislation Sunday, which includes “needed mental health resources, improves school safety and support for students, and helps ensure dangerous criminals and those who are adjudicated as mentally ill can’t purchase weapons,” they said in a statement.

     Notably, the announcement includes the support of 10 Republican senators, which would give the proposal enough support to overcome the Senate filibuster. The agreement is significant given how divided lawmakers have been over the gun issue, but the actual legislative text is not yet written….

     Critically, the legislation includes a so-called red flag provision, with the government providing “resources to states and tribes to create and administer laws that help ensure deadly weapons are kept out of the hands of individuals whom a court has determined to be a significant danger to themselves or others,” according to the release. The proposal would also include “major investments to increase access to mental health and suicide prevention programs; and other support services available in the community, including crisis and trauma intervention and recovery.”

     Now that Republicans are siding with the Democrats and against our Constitutionally guaranteed rights, is it time to lock and load? Have we reached the point at which rebellion is not only thinkable but obligatory? I’d like to know.

Jun 12 2022

Intimations

     Quite a lot of people hate these pieces. Happily, not too many are among my Gentle Readers. But as I’ve said before, I write from what’s on my mind at the moment.

***

     I spend a fair fraction of my day actively straining to listen.

     That statement tends to provoke a lot of “Huh? Say what?” reactions. After all, we expect that there’ll be a bit more to the sentence: “Listen to what?” is the usual rejoinder. And there is some justice in it, for most of the time a man who is listening has a specific “speaker” in mind. He’s trying to “tune out” everything else.

     At some times I fit that pattern, but at others I’m simply trying to attend to whatever is “speaking.” Or not speaking, come to think of it. A great jazz guitarist once said that the spaces between the notes are quite as important as the notes themselves. It’s a perspective to remember.

     The worlds speak to us in innumerable ways. Yes, worlds plural. And if one disciplines himself sufficiently, such that he can achieve a high degree of internal silence, the voices of unusual things – other than human, and at times other than immediate or temporal at all – can get through to him.

     Some of them have stories to tell. Some are stories in and of themselves. Some are stories yet untold. And all stories want to be told.

***

     I’ll bet the great majority of my Gentle Readers have read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In my junior year in high school it was required reading. I was mesmerized by it, and have reread it many times since then. Yet even today, more than fifty years later, I find that it has messages that I hadn’t previously grasped.

     Consider the quasi-apotheosis of “Ford,” a name which appears in many locutions where one might expect the name of God or Lord: “Once upon a time,” the Director began, “while Our Ford was still on earth…” For a very long period before the time of Our Ford… “Ford’s in his flivver,” murmured the D.H.C. “All’s well with the world.” It didn’t occur to me, then, why Huxley chose to do this.

     Henry Ford, a name that has hardly been lost in the mists of time, was among the first industrialists – perhaps the very first; the records are a bit inconsistent – to treat men as components in a mechanical process: mass production as it arose in the early Twentieth Century. That was the beginning of the end of the dominance of the artisan, who “programmed himself” rather than repeating an action prescribed by a superior. The artisan, in contrast to the assembly-line worker, usually worked alone. He also worked in silence.

     Ponder the social and occupational-environment changes that arose in the decades that followed.

***

     We are “programmed” to a greater extent than any generation before us…and our generation might not be at the terminus of the progression. We don’t resist that programming, in the main. Rather, we collaborate in it to the extent required to “get ahead.” Those of us who resent it, however inarticulately, tend to do so through a kind of counter-programming. That is, we organize our “free time” – the time left to us by our occupations and other obligations – around activities distant from those things.

     Those “free time” activities are freely chosen…aren’t they?

     It’s unclear, at least. The indications are somewhat ominous. Not many Americans of today actually reserve time to think. It’s a difficult undertaking, after all. It requires solitude and silence, commodities that are becoming rare. But without conscious thought there can be no conscious action. What we believe we choose for ourselves might be as programmed into us as the duties of our jobs.

     This has the aroma of danger. No, we’re not all Thoreaus who have the luxury of toting a supply of beef jerky and toilet paper to a cabin in the woods such that we can be alone with ourselves in the silence. But a man who never allows himself any time for solitude and silence just might surrender his remaining autonomy to the many voices that continuously strive to direct him into channels of their preference. A creature that succumbs ceases, in any sense other than the strictly biological, to be a man.

***

     You knew a quote was coming, didn’t you? It won’t be the last:

     What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing. – Archibald MacLeish

     Some years ago I read a remarkable novel, The Dice Man, whose protagonist discovered a unique compromise between absolute personal choice and a pre-programmed existence. Protagonist Luke, bored and frustrated by his ultra-mundane existence at midlife, develops a quasi-aleatoric approach to his days: he’ll chart his course by the fall of dice. He creates options and assigns one to each of the possible combinations one die – sometimes two – can produce, rolls it or them, and proceeds with the option the fall of the dice has decreed.

     Somehow, this improves his lot. Moreover, it catches on. But the authorities of Luke’s tale dislike it intensely. And yes, they do what authorities tend to do to those they dislike.

     I cannot recommend this as an approach to life. And I shan’t tell you any more about the novel. It’s worth reading in its entirety. But it’s worth reflecting on how the world around Luke reacts to his novel technique for injecting even a little unpredictability, a little surprise, into a programmed, stultified existence that brought him to the verge of suicide.

***

     The intent of programming – take it from one who knows – is to eliminate the unpredicted, the random, and the unaccounted-for. In so doing, the programmer constrains the behavior of the programmed person or thing to the set of responses with which the program can cope. In the software field, he who does this successfully and consistently is regarded as a master of the craft. As difficult as it can be in software, in the social, economic, and political realms it’s much, much harder. That’s why so much time and ingenuity is put into it by so many persons, agencies, and institutions.

     It’s not all “Mad Ave,” Gentle Reader. Consider only this: How many times have you heard about “our two-party system” — ? Are you aware that there are other parties? I hope so. Are you aware that those “minor” parties have often determined the result of an election – without getting their candidate(s) elected? Are you aware of the influence the vote totals that go to “minor” parties have on the platforms of the major parties, and the positions adopted by their candidates in subsequent elections?

     Yet a million screaming politicians, commentators, and “influencers” will tell you that to give your vote to a minor-party candidate is to “waste it.” Is it really? Are you totally convinced of that proposition – and if so, what would you make of the influence the Socialist, Green, Libertarian, and Right To Life parties have had upon major-party platforms and the outcomes of state and federal elections?

     Quite a number of citizens who are non-voters abstain from voting because “there’s no one worth voting for” and “my vote can’t affect anything.” Defy the programming! Consider voting for a minor party’s candidate(s) next time around. You might have more influence than you know.

***

     The room had grown dim. It had gotten quite late, but neither Ray nor Christine was in any hurry to conclude their chat.
     “What makes it hard for most people,” Ray said, “is that we tend to think of God as just a very powerful temporal entity, like some sort of super-magician. But He’s not. He created time. He looks down on it from above, the way you or I would read a map. He knows the path we follow because He knows all the paths we might follow, and what might flow from every one of them.” He sat back and reflected for a moment. “So our time-dependent language about ‘choosing’ and ‘knowing’ gets us into trouble when we try to apply it to God.”
     “You know,” Christine said, “that would go a long way toward explaining the Trinity, too.”
     “Hm? How so?”
     “Well, why is the Trinity a tough nut to crack? Because people can’t be in more than one place at a time, right? Wherever you go, there you are, and you’re still you.”
     “Uh…” Am I getting in over my head here? “That could be part of it.”
     She leaned toward him, intensity and delight merging in her expression. “But if you take the Gospels as factual, then the evidence says there were three divine Persons, even if that’s tough for us time-bound types to imagine. You don’t have to figure out how you could pull it off. You just have to allow that He can do that sort of thing even if we can’t!”
     Ray opened his mouth, closed it without speaking. Christine frowned.
     “Did I say something wrong, Father?”
     “Not at all, dear,” he said. “In fact, I think you’ve been teaching me my trade.” He grimaced in rueful remembrance. “I used to think more about these things when I was a teen. Talks like this one were why I wanted to become a priest.”

     [From Shadow of a Sword]

     Among the things we’re programmed to accept is an insidious one that crosscuts faith in a particularly vicious way: Mysteries must be solved; that’s what they’re for.

     I mean no disrespect toward the aficionados of murder mysteries – I’d better not; I’m married to one – but the sort of puzzler mystery writers present to us isn’t all-encompassing. The mysteries of faith are of another order. They’re emphatically not problems to be solved.

     They’re gifts.

     How can there be an Uncreated Creator who knows all things, even things that haven’t yet happened and, quite possibly, might not happen? How can there be one God who is nevertheless three divine Persons, each of the Three able to operate independently yet all united in their divinity? How can a virgin conceive and bear a Son? And what about all these miracles that would be contrary to the laws of nature? How are we supposed to understand them?

     We’re not. They were given to us for two reasons. The first of these is simple: By accepting them, we enter into a community of faith that accepts Man’s littleness before God. The second is perhaps the hardest thing that has ever been asked of Mankind, despite its infinite benevolence: By accepting them despite our inability to “solve” them, we submit to the ultimate Authority. We take our first, tentative step out of the temporal and toward the eternal. And we learn to adore.

     C. S. Lewis put it thus:

     [T]he one really adequate instrument for learning about God is the whole Christian community, waiting for Him together. Christian brotherhood is, so to speak, the technical equipment for this science—the laboratory outfit. That is why all these people who turn up every few years with some patent simplified religion of their own as a substitute for the Christian tradition are really wasting time. Like a man who has no instrument but an old pair of field glasses setting out to put all the real astronomers right. He may be a clever chap—he may be cleverer than some of the real astronomers, but he is not giving himself a chance. And two years later everyone has forgotten all about him, but the real science is still going on.
     If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.

     As today is Trinity Sunday, the day Christians explicitly acknowledge the Trinitarian Mystery and its centrality to our faith, I had to get that in. It’s not a soluble problem, at least not here under the veil of time by the exceedingly finite minds of mortal men. It’s a “reality mystery,” a marvel in which to immerse oneself…to humble our intellects as it delights our need for wonder…and to teach us to adore.

     Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen. And may God, in all His Persons, bless and keep you all!

Jun 11 2022

Reminder of Some Old Tactics

I was reading (OK, I was avoiding housework and other necessary stuff), and I happened to see a few disturbing stories:

And, somehow, they call US Fascists!

BTW, both of the above links came from Ace of Spades.

The thing is, the Hard-Core Left does not seem to realize that they are a minority (not an ethnic minority, but a minority on the Opinion Scale). They are pushing their Seeming Omnipresence through heavy reliance on the Bandwagon Effect.

Naturally, those who have fallen for it are those that are strongly predisposed to Follow the Crowd – those whose primary personal identification is with membership in a group – Ethnic, Racial, Religious/Anti-Religious, Sex/Gender, or Elite/Near-Elite Status.

Women are the group that has been most heavily targeted for this, therefore, those issues that focus on that identity (Abortion, Sexism – as defined by the Left, Rape, Career, Oppression by Males – particularly those of pale complexion, to name a few), have been weaponized to get Womyn to Jump on the Bandwagon.

Unfortunately, once a person has added themselves to that membership, they cannot leave. Any attempt to think or act independently will result in a pile-on of massive proportions, and personal exile from ANY connection to the group.

“Who rides a tiger, dare not dismount” – Indian proverb.

There are people who cling to the group, long after the group has lost any influence, simply because they fear losing any connection to others in the group. Sometimes, the older members of the group manage to achieve a revival of influence – as, for example, Scott and Helen Nearing, old Leftists who headed to a subsistence farm, and eventually were embraced as Wise Old Souls by the Back to the Land types.

BTW, that “subsistence farm”? Never was self-reliant. Was subsidized by inheritances by both of them from Capitalist family members.

The Bandwagon Effect was never all that effective with me. I come from a long line of Hillbillies and other independent thinkers. That, and my hardheaded understanding of my need to make a living for myself, kept me from falling into the trap that others of my generation fell for. Genteel poverty was never appealing to me, and I never did have that much trust in others that claimed to care about providing for me.

But, the current trend in schools to enforce conformity in students and staff is a concern. Kids are social creatures, and suffer from ostracism. That such a tactic is used to force compliance on kids is, by itself, enough for me to want to completely defund government schools, and blackball all those who would stand by and let that abomination happen.

Jun 11 2022

The Death Cults In Ascendancy (UPDATED)

     I know that a number of readers, including some I consider friends, will be upset by this piece. I can’t let that stop me. The subject is too important.

     A few years back, I wrote a series of essays on The Death Cults, a compilation of which is available at Amazon for a pittance, if you’re interested. That was and is my preferred term for a gaggle of hateful, anti-human movements devoted to the extinction of Mankind. Nevertheless, their adherents claim to be, somehow, on the side of right and justice.

     Those essays drew quite a few scoffers, back when. I wonder how many of the readers who wrote me to say “you’re being overly dramatic” or “it’s just a passing fad” would say so today.

     Today, we are ruled by the death cultists. They own our most important institutions. They dominate our public discourse. If you’re unsure who I mean by that, here’s the giveaway: They are the answer to the dictum that if you want to know who rules over you, ask who it is that you’re not allowed to criticize.

     And being death cultists, they want you dead.

***

     The most significant common characteristic of death cultists is their hatred of human procreation. All the death cults oppose it, in their individual ways and styles. The trait is such a reliable indicator that it alone suffices to identify a death cult.

     I remember when the imminence of a new baby was a cause for joyous anticipation. (All right, not necessarily among older siblings, but let’s leave that for another day.) Today the prevailing response to discovering that one (or one’s wife) is pregnant is anxiety. The explosion of nerve-wracking possibilities is immediate and unrelenting. Public policy and social degeneration have made it so.

     If you haven’t faced that condition recently, here’s a non-exhaustive list of the questions a parent-to-be faces today:

  • How will this affect our finances?
  • How will this affect our social life?
  • How will this affect our sex life?
  • How will we divide up the responsibilities?
  • What if he has a birth defect?
  • Will we have to move so he can have playmates?
  • Will I be able to support him?
  • What about his schooling?
  • What about his college education?
  • Will I be able to keep him safe?
  • Will I be able to keep him healthy?
  • Will I be able to keep him out of trouble?

     Every trend in American life these past eight decades has made the prospects darker and more foreboding. Today’s would-be parent faces possibilities so ominous that to conceive a child – deliberately, at least – takes a considerable amount of courage and confidence. Upper-middle-class couples with six-digit incomes agonize over whether they can afford a child. Few neighborhoods are genuinely safe for children. Threats to life and health seem to be everywhere. The “public” schools have turned into cesspits of casual violence, homosexual and transgenderist grooming, environmentalist, feminist, racist, Islamist, and socialist indoctrination, and all-around anti-Americanism. The alternatives are steadily dwindling toward zero.

     And the death cults are doing their damnedest to make matters even worse.

***

     When we turn to the death cults’ attitude toward the already-born – i.e., you and me – the picture gets no rosier. We’ve been called “useless eaters,” “fat, human biomass,” “a cancer on the planet,” and worse. What’s important about us is not our right to life but our “carbon footprint.” Theorists such as Eric Pianka and Pentti Linkola want 90% of us dead. Indeed, they look forward to it. “Medical authority” Ezekiel Emanuel” says we should die no later than seventy-five. “Medical ethicist” Daniel Callahan wants to deny medical care to the elderly on the grounds that we’ve already lived long enough. The scrofulous Peter Singer advocates post-natal abortions, arguing that a mother should have that option for at least a month after birth. No doubt some “scholar” somewhere would like to send Social Security recipients into the ocean on ice floes, to reduce the burden on the fund.

     The extreme pole of the death cults’ anti-human stance is exemplified by the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which openly advocates for – drum roll, please – the complete disappearance of the human race. And not just here on Earth, mind you. Such persons also oppose our leaving this ball of rock and “spreading our filth to pristine planets.” They’re environmentalists, you see. We have to go to make room for “the environment.”

     Ask any environmentalist: Do humans have more rights than moss, trees, and weeds? He might hem and haw for a moment, but he’ll eventually say no. Then he’ll demand that you sign his petition opposing this nuclear-power plant or that oil pipeline.

     The environmentalist wife of a friend once went on a tirade about four-wheelers cavorting in the most desolate stretches of the Mojave Desert. She screeched that joyriders had no right to “scar the desert.” I was so dumbfounded by her outburst that I couldn’t speak for several minutes. (If you don’t think that’s significant, ask my wife.)

     Environmentalists aren’t just NIMBYists. They’re “Build nothing, do nothing, anywhere, at any time, and for any reason” ists. Every human action, you see, has at least one undesirable side effect. It creates waste: waste matter and waste heat. Barry Commoner said it, they believe it, and that settles it. So just sit there. And hold your breath; it’s creating more carbon dioxide.

     Don’t think I’m kidding about any of this.

***

     The death cultists rule us in the most paradoxical of ways: through fear.

     Why is this paradoxical? Simply because they want us dead. Therefore, what we really ought to fear is them. But we’re not allowed to reach that seemingly logical conclusion. Rather, they keep us busy with other fears. We must fear pollution, natural-resource exhaustion, species extinction, a gaggle of viruses, “global warming / climate change,” “structural racism,” “white supremacists”, “domestic extremists,” the private ownership of firearms, and the possibility that our boys might decide that they’re girls. Lesbians, of course.

     Yes, I left something out of the above. We’re also supposed to fear the Omnipotent State, which they have striven with considerable success to enlist in their anti-human campaign. If you’re unaware of the many ways in which our 88,000 governments encourage us to fear, you haven’t been paying attention. Power-mongers like it when their subjects huddle in fear. Fear of them is best, but fear of anything will do in a pinch.

     All of the fears I listed above are manufactured or exaggerated. Some are both. But what if we could eliminate 98% of them, and thus of the reasons for our fears, by doing away with the death cultists? Wouldn’t that simplify matters nicely? Or am I speaking heresy?

     That makes it a little more comprehensible why they want the government to have a monopoly on guns, doesn’t it?

     UPDATE: Amazon has informed me that a paperback edition of The Death Cults is now available for purchase. $6.99, at Amazon only.

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