On Sunday evening, police in Burnsville, Minnesota were called to the scene of a domestic disturbance. While the reason for the original call doesn’t seem to have been made public, it is widely reported (or at least rumored) that a suspect was in bed with a fourteen-year-old girl.
Police arrived at the scene and found that the suspect was armed. They engaged in lengthy negotiations with him, but he refused to come out from the house where he was holed up. At some point, for reasons that are not yet clear, the suspect started shooting. He killed two Burnsville police officers and a fire medic who came to the aid of one of them. Scott wrote about the case here.
For some reason, legacy news outlets initially decided not to identify the perpetrator, who shot himself after murdering the three law enforcement personnel. But his name was Shannon Cortez Gooden.
Here is / was Shannon Cortez Gooden:
Undermine one element of The Narrative, and you’ll get a modicum of protection, perhaps having your race obscured in media reports. Undermine several elements of The Narrative, and you may receive the “blanket” defense of unpersoning: your identity and deeds will be “memory holed,” never thereafter to be mentioned in any major-media organ.
I maintain that no further commentary is required.
So, when an Amazon driver has to defend himself from one of Joe Biden’s illegal aliens who was also masturbating in public, you would expect the cops to grab the guy who was pulling his pud on the sidewalk.
Police arrested Abu and charged him with third-degree assault after Sanchez claimed that Abu had punched him in the face because taking the word of a drunk guy masturbating in public over a delivery guy making his rounds is the only sensible course of action in a place as crazy as New York City.
We’re goose-stepping straight into the “I was only following orders” portion of this particular shitshow. And quite frankly, this is why a whole lot of people have stopped trusting the police. From the stupidity of the Covidiacy, and how cops shut down businesses and towns over “orders” from on high, to whatever the hell this is in NYC, this is how you lose the support of the people around you.
Expect to self-rescue. Nobody is coming to help you.
An ancient principle of the law holds that he who aids or abets the commission or the concealment of a crime is as guilty of that crime as the perpetrator of the criminal act. Clearly, the abettor must condone the crime. Equally clearly, the abettor and the perpetrator share certain convictions, whether about the rationale for the crime or the priorities involved. Sometimes, the shared convictions go all the way to the bedrock of belief.
Consider that if Smith should hand a gun to Jones at a moment when Jones is inclined to murder Davis, Smith willed that the murder of Davis should occur. Indeed, he may have wanted it even more strongly than did Jones. Perpetrator Jones might have managed to restrain himself were the instrument of death not placed in his hand. That both Smith and Jones are to be punished for Davis’s death follows naturally.
In such a case, the shared conviction is at minimum that Davis has no right to his life. But it could go deeper. It could be that neither Smith nor Jones believes that anyone has a right to his life.
Yes, there are such persons. I’ve known one.
***
In the previous piece, I addressed specifically the question of nationalized or socialized medical care, a proposition that has a lot of advocates. I asked why those advocates believe that giving control of medical care to a government would improve it somehow. In returning to that question, let’s partition the advocates into two groups:
Private citizens,
Government employees.
The private-citizen advocates would probably say that for government to “distribute” the nation’s medical resources would be “fairer.” Some who “can’t afford” medical care would be taken care of at no cost…to themselves. “The government” would pay for it. The implications of that stance aren’t often addressed in public.
My Gentle Readers don’t need for me to explain where – or how – “the government” gets its funds. It highlights the special characteristic governments have that private citizens and organizations lack:
Break a government rule and it throws you into a reinforced concrete prison with real iron bars. It hires full-time skilled employees, at your expense, to catch you, lock you in, and watch you, plus (if you try to escape) expert marksmen, to shoot you with bullets you paid for.
“Do what we say or we’ll kill you.” You and I can’t get away with an ultimatum like that, Gentle Reader. But governments can. Ergo, to award the power over medical care to a government is to award it to brutes who possess the privilege of killing you for disobeying them.
Not all those who advocate socialized medicine are fully aware of that. But some are. They want it that way.
***
I chose the subject of socialized medicine as an arguendum: a subject chosen to highlight a point that (I hoped) would emerge from the discussion. But really, any power awarded to a government will imply the same rationale: “The government should control this because it can kill you if you disobey.” It won’t matter if the proponent is explicit about that rationale. Indeed, it won’t matter that he’s not aware of it himself.
Were a private organization to do to medical care what its advocates want the government to do, that organization would be committing a crime of the most serious kind. By the “aids or abets” principle I stated in the opening paragraph, anyone who assisted or encouraged that organization would be equally guilty of that crime. The more conscious advocates of socialized medicine would prefer that you not think about that, but no matter. For the only way to maintain a monopoly over some otherwise peaceful activity is to threaten anyone who would infringe upon your monopoly with death.
And there are quite a few people – not all of them employees of the State – who think that’s quite all right.
The civility cherished by the civilized men had finally been defeated by their ideas, although they did not know that this was the cause. After years of preaching contradictions and of evading principles with an anti-ideological shrug, these men were astonished to see the nation conclude that man cannot live by principles, that reason is no guide to action, and that anything goes. After years of institutionalizing interest-group warfare, which they had justified as sacrifice or collective service, these men were astonished to see hostile gangs take to the streets and demand one another’s sacrifice. After years of undercutting the mind by preaching the primacy of gentle feeling (whether “progressive” or religious or skeptical), these men were astonished to find that irrational feeling is no counter to “wild emotionalism.”
After years of spreading or condoning or subsidizing the cult and culture of nihilism, the civilized men were astonished to find that they had nothing more to say, and that there was no one left to listen.
The moderates were helpless. The authorities were helpless. The killers were taking over.
Give them their strangling cloths. Give them their burial picks. Swear by our mother Kali to be thrice faithful to her and to me and to our order and to all of us.
Rise, our new-made brothers. Rise and kill. Kill, lest you be killed yourselves. Kill for the love of killing. Kill for the love of Kali. Kill! Kill! Kill!
There are things we’ve known for a long time. Some of them are expressed in the quotes above. They’re indisputable, both logically and from the evidence. Yet in recent years we’ve become afraid to admit them to our consciousnesses, much less to proclaim them in public.
The promotion of an evil idea must be expected to bring evil in its wake. How could it be otherwise? We know the power of an idea – and evil ideas have a unique power. They appeal to those who will evil: they who seek to do evil deeds, whether for personal gain or for the sheer pleasure of wounding others.
We’ve had any number of fictional depictions of such evil ideologies in our time, but the one that rings most clearly to my ear is one you’ve seen cited here before:
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”
Orwell illuminates and emphasizes the evil idea we’ve not dared to articulate: Power is not a means; it is an end. They who seek power do so for power’s sake, not for any “noble” or “public service” reason.
But there’s another link in the ideological chain we must follow. Orwell illuminates that one, as well:
“Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing…. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.
The utility of power over others is in inflicting suffering and death on those others. To inflict suffering and death upon helpless others brings happiness to only one sort of person. It cannot be made plainer than that…another evil idea we refuse to confront with our conscious minds.
***
Yes, the 800 words above are mostly “previous work.” (Lemmas, for the mathematically inclined.) I’m sure my Gentle Readers are familiar with all the quotes I’ve presented. Yet there’s something bloodless about the evil ideas they express. They appear to the decent, peaceable man as dicta held by someone else: some enemy lurking in the shadows.
It is not so. Many of your neighbors hold them, or their precursors.
“But surely, Fran,” I hear you murmur, “something specific must have triggered that flood?” You’re quite correct: something did:
Explosive leaked documents have emerged that show medical staff were ordered to euthanize patients who had been admitted to hospital and tested positive for COVID-19.
The official documents were leaked from the UK’s state-funded National Health Service (NHS).
The docs further confirm the previous reporting from Slay News that revealed patients were euthanized in order to boost the numbers for “Covid deaths.”
As Slay News reported, smoking gun evidence revealed that tens of thousands of elderly people were murdered to boost the mortality rates.
The data produced for the report indicated that people were being euthanized using a fatal injection of Midazolam.
The cause of their deaths was then listed as “Covid,” indicating that the virus was killing far more elderly people than it was.
The explosive data from the report was made public by Australian politician Craig Kelly, the national director of the United Australia Party.
The report obtained official UK government data on death rates and causes.
According to Kelly, the patients were euthanized in order to boost “Covid deaths” and ramp up public fear to garner support for lockdowns and vaccines.
I’m going to pause here to attend to some necessities. While I’m dealing with them, read the story above carefully, and find the evil idea that made possible the slaughter it reports. I’ll be back.
***
Did you find it? It’s not stated explicitly in the cited story. However, it lies beneath the atrocities the story describes.
We don’t have a “national health service” in the United States. Pressure is rising for the creation of one. Our neighbor to the North has one. Those fleeing its “services” mainly come here.
What is the idea behind the nationalization – or socialization, if you prefer – of medical care and services? I’m not thinking of the cost-savings its promoters claim will arise from one. Neither am I thinking of the lamentations the bleeding-heart crowd chant about people who “can’t afford health insurance.” I want to go deeper than that.
For what does it mean to say “Let the federal government operate all medical care in these United States?” What special attribute does a government possess that distinguishes it from other entities? Why would that attribute conduce to “better” or “fairer” medical care for Americans? What other consequences might flow from it?
You know what I’m talking about.
***
In the Peikoff citation at the head of this piece, he describes the conclusion of the ideological-ethical degeneration that allowed Weimar Germany to become the Third Reich, with all that followed. The ideological atmosphere of the Weimar Republic was, for all practical purposes, “anything goes:” nihilist. But an ideological vacuum is as voracious as a physical one: it pulls thought and action into its maw. What comes out the other end is as septic as any other creature’s excreta.
The U.S. has never yet had a complete ideological collapse. We’ve suffered some partial evacuations, but always there has been a national ideological-ethical redoubt: a core populace that remained faithful to the principles expressed in our ideological birth certificate: the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, the Left’s conquest of our organs of communication, education, and entertainment has allowed our resident nihilists to chip at the margins of that core. Some have given up; others have withdrawn into themselves. The core is dwindling in size and giving ground thereby. What’s flowing into the evacuated spaces is not friendly to freedom, justice, or individuals’ rights.
I could be talking about population flows and demographic trends here. I’m not; those are consequences of our accumulating ideological losses, not primaries. The primaries are the ideas dominant among us, always. We can see some of the consequences of one particular idea in the Slay News story cited above.
Many years ago, when I was still a teen, my brother was auditioning to be accepted into a musical school. He played bass. I say “played”, but in reality he made that instrument sing in ways that most people won’t understand, and I’m not about to try to explain it. My brother has more musical talent in his left nostril than most people have in their entire body. However, his ability isn’t the focus of this tale. I was a drummer, and he needed a drummer to accompany him on his audition tape.
I was in-between basic training and my first duty station. We were in Spokane, WA at the time. He asked if I would be willing to accompany him and his guitarist on the piece. It was Thelonious Monk’s “Well You Needn’t.” I protested that I didn’t have a drum set, or even a pair of drum sticks to use. He told me that he had what I needed at the recording studio. So I said yes.
When we got to the studio, what I had was a cardboard box and a pair of brushes. Not even a stool to sit on.
I played the hell out of that cardboard box. It’s amazing the sounds that you can get when you apply yourself. And in the end, when the studio guy played the recording, you couldn’t tell it was just a cardboard box. It sounded like a full drumset. Running the brushes over the box sounded like a ride cymbal. I made sure to add the pops and snaps when needed, to the point you couldn’t tell I didn’t have a snare and toms to play, and in the end my brother sent his audition tape off with me playing a cardboard box as accompaniment.
He got accepted. Unfortunately, his life choices ended up with that acceptation being withdrawn. That’s another story.
Sometimes in this life God asks you to do something. And you’re not prepared. You don’t have the right equipment, you haven’t taken the time to practice, you’re not in the right space. But God can and will give you what you need to succeed, you just have to use it, even if it’s not what you wanted or thought you needed.
I’ve been ruminating on that quite a bit recently.
The topic of COVID-19 vaccine shedding has long been controversial, but now, some doctors say it is real.
“Shedding is unfortunately real,” said Dr. Pierre Kory at the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) conference in Phoenix, Arizona, in early February. “The FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) knows that.”
Dr. Kory is a co-founder of the FLCCC, a non-profit advocacy group founded by physicians for the treatment of COVID-19, long COVID, and postvaccine syndromes. He is also the co-founder of the Leading Edge Clinic and has treated over a thousand long-COVID and postvaccine patients.
Dr. Kory is not proceeding on the basis of opinion or excessively localized reports:
COVID-19 mRNA has been found in the breast milk of vaccinated mothers, indicating possible exposure of the vaccine to infants. Another study showed that spike protein, the product of COVID-19 vaccination, can last for at least half a year in the blood of vaccinated individuals, indicating prolonged spike protein persistence.
The FDA, however, denied that the 2015 document applies to COVID mRNA vaccines.
“COVID-19 vaccines are not regulated as gene therapy products by the FDA; therefore, the guidance document cited is not applicable to the COVID-19 vaccines,” an FDA spokeswoman told The Epoch Times.
Oh, how nice! “Not regulated” as gene therapy products! That makes everything wonderful, doesn’t it? But wait: there’s more!
In Pfizer’s COVID mRNA vaccine protocol, the company instructs investigators to report “environmental exposures” if trial participants expose people around them to the vaccine through inhalation or skin contact.
We have been deceived in so many ways, by so many “reputable experts.” Yet the “experts” can’t imagine why we no longer trust them. Strange, isn’t it?
Thank You, God, for the scientific knowledge and suspicious nature that persuaded me and the C.S.O. to avoid the COVID-19 “clot shot.”
Pascal passed the following video along to me for my contemplation:
Jordan Peterson has become a hugely important voice in the ideological war. There’s no question of his significance, nor of his reach. Why else would the Left be working so hard to destroy him? In the video above, he emphasizes responsibility as the missing element in the Right’s armory. There’s an important insight in there…but unusually for Dr. Peterson, his pronouncement isn’t quite complete.
“They’re selling rights,” he says, whereas we in the Right should be selling responsibilities.” And yes, we should…but both a conjunction and a disjunction must be discussed here that Dr. Peterson omits to address:
What are rights?
How are they connected to responsibilities?
The connection is both inherent and indissoluble.
As I’m about to head out to Mass, I’ll leave this here for my Gentle Readers to ponder. Perhaps I’ll address it myself a bit later.
No man was ever endowed with a right without being at the same time saddled with a responsibility. – Gerald W. Johnson
Mostly I’m pissed off that nothing is off limits. Everything is political. Yes, Breitbart was correct, “politics is downstream from culture,” but sometimes I just want to listen to music or watch a movie and not be punched in the nose by somebody else’s politics. — Charlie Brown’s Dildo
Politicizing everything inescapably is the Left’s supreme goal, CBD. Surely you’ve noticed before this? But I digress.
Freedom in the political sense – i.e., the sense we call liberty — is the absence of power politics from human life and action. If you want to be free, this is the goal. There is no alternative – and it must be enforced a outrance. “Entertainers” of every sort have been seduced into venting on politics. Nothing will dissuade them but the loss of their fame and fortune.
The conclusion of this excursion in logic is left as an exercise for my Gentle Readers.
It’s distressing to feel that I must write about such things, but why else would I blog? There are plenty of softer types to handle the easier stuff.
Throughout America, there’s a near-overpowering awareness that things are going to Hell. Indeed, the bottom of the national handbasket has started to smolder. The sense arises from several sources, but today’s focus is on the promotion of fear and hatred through “othering.”
By “othering” is meant the division of our populace into groups that are – supposedly – hostile to one another. Such groups can be based on race, ethnicity, creed, sexual orientation, or views on one or more “wedge issues.” A simple Google search will turn up any desired amount of hectoring in those veins.
Now, some groups genuinely are hostile to others. We’ve seen enough undisguised promotion of racism by blacks against whites to have a sense for the racial divide. Not all Negroes subscribe to the “white devil” creed, but there are enough who do to constitute a pseudo-community dangerous to whites. Also, Muslims in the U.S. are getting ever bolder about their hostility to…well, to everyone and everything that isn’t Muslim. Their mouthpieces were once more careful about expressing such antipathy, but then, this is the era of Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
The Left has an interest in promoting every such division. A divided populace is the easiest sort to conquer; the infighting among its mutually antagonistic groups will sap the energies required to resist an “outside” enemy. And make no mistake: the Left is an “outside” enemy. Outside, that is, of the ethics and customs that once provided the foundation of the freest, most prosperous, highest-trust society in world history.
Just recently, the Left has mounted a big fear campaign against a chimera that has a tenuous basis in reality: “Christian nationalism.” Its propagandists have attributed every imaginable sort of evil intention onto American Christian patriots. A YouTube search provides a great many examples of their craft. Mike Miles’s Mystery Box has an assortment today. Hard-Left actor-director Rob Reiner apparently has a “documentary” on the subject in the works.
But Christians who are also American nationalists are among the warmest, most accommodating, most generous people on Earth. I know rather a lot of them. If I were forced to pick a “worst of breed,” in the sense of an arguably un-Christian attitude toward others whether named or unnamed, I’d have to pick myself. If “Christian nationalism” means something other than American Christians who are also American nationalists, no one has been terribly specific about it.
If “Christian nationalism” has import as a political force, it would be in the ethical sense: that is, that Christian ethics, as Jesus expressed them to the “rich young man” of Matthew Chapter 19 and to the Pharisees in Matthew Chapter 22, are the basis of American law – and well they should be! But very few Christians, and none that I know personally, insist that all Americans must subscribe to Christian theology. Conform to the ethic, and you’ll be okay. We won’t probe your convictions with hot lamps, waterboards, or bobby pins under the fingernails. Violate the ethic – i.e., commit murder, theft, fraud, false witness, or adultery in the proper sense – and we’ll have words, and we won’t give a damn what beliefs you claim to hold.
I could go on about this – I have in the past – but I’ll spare you. Have a nice day.
A parent has shared a distrubing worksheet provided to students in a Seattle Public School high school English class as part of Black Lives Matter at School Week with KTTH radio host Jason Rantz.
Rantz reports that students in a World Literature and Composition class at Lincoln High School were given a handout with definitions of the “9 characteristics of white supremacy.”
Among the examples is “Worship of the Written Word” because it is “an erasure of the wide range of ways we communicate with each other.”
Further, it suggests that it is wrong to value written communication because it’s a form of “honoring only what is written and even then only what is written to a narrow standard, full of misinformation and lies.”
In Seattle, a love of reading and writing is white supremacy.
The worksheet labels “objectivity,” “individualism,” and “perfectionism” as white supremacy. If students deny their own racism — or that any of the nine characteristics are legitimately racist — is also white supremacy. Denialism or being overly defensive is a racist example of an “entitlement to name what is an [sic] isn’t racism and that those with power have a right to be shielded from the stresses of antiracist work.”
The father argues the concepts are “incoherent and cannot stand any sort of reasoned analysis.” And he notes that it’s set up to ensure students accept every concept without ever questioning the claims.
“How is a 15-year-old kid supposed to object in class when ‘denial and defensiveness’ is itself a characteristic of white supremacy? This is truly educational malpractice.”
The point of such vicious indoctrination of essentially defenseless teenagers, of course, is to insulate them against contrary sources of evidence, reasoning, and opinion. Thus, their “knowledge” may be limited to whatever their indoctrinators choose to feed them. That would render them incapable of critical thinking and self-education. But leave aside the political aspects of such treatment. Of all the varieties of education, self-education is by far the most important. We learn far more outside of any “educational institution” than inside one. If it were otherwise, an adult would need to get by throughout his life solely on what he learned in school.
The cited story comes from Seattle, a hotbed of contemporary Leftism in its most hateful, authoritarian, and doctrinaire form. But the disease is everywhere, if not always as overt or as violent as is depicted above. Why else would “educators” be so immovably averse to parental monitoring of what happens in the classroom?
If you love them, get your kids out of the “public” schools.
He was just a social drinker but social every night
He enjoyed a pint or two or three or four
She was just a silent thinker, silent every night
He’d enjoyed the thought of killing her before
Well he was very rarely drunk but very rarely sober
And he didn’t think the problem was his drink
But he only knew his problem when he knocked her over
And when the rotting flesh began to stink
Cry freedom for the woman in the wall
Cry freedom for she has no voice at all
I hear her cry all day, all night
I hear her voice from deep within the wall
Made a cross from knitting needles
Made a grave from Hoover bags
Especially for the woman in the wall
She’d knitted him a jumper with dominoes on
So he wore it every day in every week
Pretended to himself that she hadn’t really gone
Pretended that he thought he heard her speak
Then at last it seemed that he was really winning
He felt that he had some sort of grip
But all of his new life was sent a-spinning
When the rotting wall began to drip
Cry freedom for the woman in the wall
Cry freedom for she has no voice at all
I hear her cry all day, all night
I hear her voice from deep within the wall
Made a cross from knitting needles
Made a grave from Hoover bags
Especially for the woman in the wall
The “assorted” columns are something I try to limit, as – despite my intentions going in – I often blather for hundreds of words after each citation. Trust me, Gentle Reader: I know I’m an addict. But to date, there’s no known cure for boring long-windedness.
***
1. Stunning.
As I no longer watch pro sports – or any broadcast or cablecast material, for that matter – I learned about this only this morning:
Thank you, Mark Wahlberg. That needed to be said.
***
2. Saying It Straight Out.
In this column on Argentine president Javier Milei, Austin Petersen lays into the whining leftist feminists who’ve been accusing Milei of attacking women’s rights. Every paragraph is a Sunday punch: sharp and decisive. An example:
Regarding the contentious issue of abortion, it’s crucial to remember that being pro-life is not an assault on women’s rights. It’s about protecting the rights of all humans, born and unborn. Milei’s stance is a bold move in a world that often forgets the value of every human life. It’s not about controlling women; it’s about acknowledging and respecting the sanctity of life at all stages. The article ties Milei’s actions to a supposed attack on feminism.
(What did Milei do to enrage those feminists? He closed the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity. The horror. But I digress.)
Either an unborn baby is a human, with human rights, or he’s “just a blob of tissue.” To me, the former case is indisputable – and yes, I know there are people who dispute it. But if I’m right, then calling abortion a “woman’s right” is proclaiming that a woman has a right to commit murder, as long as her intended victim is helpless within her womb.
If you don’t like that, prove to my satisfaction that an unborn baby is not a human being. Go ahead; I’ll wait.
***
3. Living in a Goldfish Bowl.
The unobservant and under-observant might not have noticed the proliferation of surveillance devices here in the Land of the Formerly Free. But Patriotman has:
We live in a time of unprecedented, near-ubiquitous surveillance. Almost everything we do or say is recorded, tracked, correlated, analyzed, categorized, and alerted on. Not just by devices in public spaces, but those we voluntarily place in our homes or on our person as well. Increasingly, law enforcement is using data from these devices to enforce an ever more Orwellian, dystopic rule.
Today, I want to educate you on one such device, commonly known as the Police Observation Device, or POD. These devices can be found in growing numbers in urban, suburban, and even rural areas. Police Observation Devices (PODs) are specialized equipment used by law enforcement agencies for surveillance and monitoring purposes. These devices can range from simple CCTV cameras to more advanced systems with multiple sensors and analytical capabilities. Manufacturers include, but are not limited to: Axis Communications, Hikvision, Dahua Technology, Bosch Security Systems, Panasonic, Honeywell Security, FLIR Systems, Samsung Techwin (now part of Hanwha Group), Pelco, and others.
That there are nine manufacturers – at least – of such devices should surprise no one. Governments pay big bucks for the gear they want. (Ask anyone who’s worked in the defense sector.) So at this time, your default assumption should be that whenever you leave your home, you will be watched. Agents of the State will have access to the record of your movements. Moreover, there’s nothing you can do about it.
To those who’ve equipped their homes with “smart,” Internet-enabled devices capable of hearing and recording what’s said therein: You’re helping to fasten collars around your own necks. Get rid of that crap and get smart yourself.
Joe Biden is the worst presidential candidate since Vermin Love Supreme Al Sharpton. He “brought class back to the White House” in his first term by allegedly dropping a crabcake in his pants while chatting up the Pope. A week later he “stepped on a goose” while making small talk with the wife of then-Prince Charles. But hey, that’s just “blue-collar Joe” being one of the folks.
Biden has managed to get away with political murder for decades. Sure, he was forced to bail on his presidential ambitions in the 1980s when being a liar and a plagiarist had consequences, but apparently those malfeasances are no longer enough to keep a good-for-nothing trickster out of the White House.
Even the ole stand-by nuke in the Democrat’s quiver — an accusation of racism — hasn’t stopped Biden, despite a decades-long history of bigotry.
Downey then lists five major reasons to spurn the Usurper-in-Chief come November. (Yes, yes, there are more than five, but pixels are expensive.) They constitute good arguments for Biden to be sent, not back to the White House, but to prison. Still, it won’t happen, and you know why.
The Deep State, of which the Justice Department is a key component, will not prosecute a man who has been such a generous enabler and supporter. Neither will they permit the mud he deserves to be spread over his reputation to be thoroughly documented and aired in a court of law. Documents will vanish. Prosecutors will be instructed about “proprieties.” Witnesses – the lucky ones – will be prosecuted or discredited. (You know what will happen to the unlucky ones.)
Don’t expect a better outcome than Biden’s removal from office next January.
***
5. A Trial Over An Entirely Legal Act.
Remember this classic Monty Python skit?
Yes, it’s absurd; that was the Pythonic idiom. But the meat of it is now being tried in a Georgia courtroom. The defendant, of course, is President Donald Trump – and it appears that his prosecutors are guiltier than he is!
Today, in an Atlanta courtroom, a judge heard testimony on a motion by defendants to disqualify Fani Willis from her prosecution of Donald Trump and others. The hearing was live-streamed, but I didn’t watch it. From all accounts, though, the day went badly for Fani.
The issue is being framed as whether Willis had a conflict of interest in her prosecution of Trump et al. The conflict would arise, I take it, from her hiring Nathan Wade, her illicit lover, to prosecute the case (a task for which he had few apparent qualifications), paying him extravagantly, and then benefiting herself when her lover, in turn, spent some of the money on her.
Ironic enough…but wait: there’s more! What Trump is being tried for is a completely legal act:
The complaint charges Trump with trying to overturn the result of the 2020 election in Georgia, but of course there is nothing wrong with that. Al Gore tried to overturn the result of the 2000 election in Florida, and Al Franken became a senator by successfully overturning an election in Minnesota. In my opinion, Fani Willis’s lengthy complaint alleges only a single crime, and it wasn’t committed by Donald Trump. You can’t make legal conduct illegal by calling it a conspiracy.
Now do you see why I posted the Python snippet?
***
6. In Conclusion.
According to my Merriam-Webster, a fricassee is “a dish of pieces of meat (such as chicken) or vegetables stewed in stock and served in a white sauce.” Well, one must be true to one’s words, so here’s the white sauce:
Yes, they call Rhodesia Zimbabwe these days, but you have to expect that sort of thing from savages. Anyway, watch South Africa draw the moral.
***
I think that will be it for today, Gentle Reader. I’m very tired. Even so, I have a great deal to do. So hang in there, be of good cheer, and remember: The State loves you! (Why else would it want to know everything you say and do and everywhere you go? 😒)
Had the surgery on my other eye yesterday. After a lifetime of bad vision, the fact that I can wake up, open my eyes and actually SEE is somewhat awe-inspiring. What a fascinating modern age we live in.
Although the eye drops aren’t much fun, but they’re only temporary.
What comes to mind when you hear or read the phrase “weapon of mass destruction?”
For most, it stimulates thoughts of things that can wreak physical destruction. H-Bombs. Poison gases. Biowar bacteria and viruses. And yes, those certainly are nasty things we’d rather not have to face. But physical destruction isn’t the only kind we should worry about.
Some talented writers have made use of another kind of mass destruction: the destruction of freedom of thought. If Jones can nonviolently compel Smith to accept a specific position on a chosen subject as unquestionably true, Smith is a mental slave to Jones. Vernor Vinge, one of the most creative science fiction writers of our time, called such a “You Gotta Believe Me” weapon a weapon of mass destruction in his award-winning novel Rainbows End. I concur.
I trust no one will ask “But who would want such a weapon?” The aspirants number in the tens of millions.
Vinge isn’t the only writer to have toyed with that notion. John Barnes exploited it in Kaleidoscope Century. Larry Niven gave that power to the Grogs, a sessile race, in his “Known Space” canon. No doubt there are others.
But “You Gotta Believe Me” (henceforth YGBM) isn’t a conception reserved solely to fictional technology. It can be pursued through much more mundane means…and many alive today are pursuing it.
***
How, using noncoercive, informational methods only, could any person or organization acquire a power approaching YGBM? While it might not be universal and absolute, I think such a “dilute” version of that power is achievable. However, the route toward it would be a long one, possibly measured in centuries.
The core to the concept, immediate and unquestioning acceptance on the part of the target of the YGBM weapon, implies the acquisition of unquestioned credibility on the part of the wielder. There are known ways to build up one’s credibility with others. However, none of them can convince someone absolutely and permanently that one’s statements are always:
accurate: i.e., a correct and complete statement of the relevant facts;
valid: i.e., any conclusions drawn from those facts are logically unassailable.
Is that status even asymptotically approachable?
Don’t be too quick to wave it away. Remember Walter Cronkite and his status as “the most trusted man in news?” An awful lot of people took him at his word without ever bothering to examine the facts or what other conclusions they might support. His calm, fatherly demeanor had a lot to do with that, though just as much and maybe more could be attributed to CBS’s dominance of the broadcast news business at that time.
Cronkite was opposed to American participation in the Vietnam War. That’s not a criticism; I was too, as were a lot of my contemporaries. But Cronkite lent his credibility to serial defamations of the American war effort and the conduct of our troops in Vietnam. He was believed more often than not.
There is no individual of Cronkite’s status in our time. I have no doubt that many in the news business are avid for it. Perhaps we should be on the lookout for such individuals. I would consider Zaphod Beeblebrox’s prescription for things more important than his ego to be an entirely suitable treatment for them.
There’s more to consider, of course, including questions of relative credibility and the disqualification of alternative sources of information and reasoning. And so, as you’ve heard all too often, dear Gentle Reader:
[This piece first appeared at Liberty’s Torch V1.0 on April 6, 2017. I was missing and mourning my late friend Joe – if you haven’t yet, you’ll “meet” him in this piece – and decided that, considering Americans’ rising fears of an economic collapse, a second look at the division of labor is warranted. – FWP]
The reactions to this piece, coupled with my experiences of the past few days, which I spent in the Blue Ridge Mountains of deepest, darkest Virginia, have me thinking along the lines of this piece once again – but not in a purely romantic or inter-gender relations way.
A few days separated from one’s usual surroundings, most emphatically including all his “stuff,” can result in a massive realignment of his perspectives. Mind you, I like “stuff.” I certainly own a lot of it, as the regular financial extractions I undergo for its repair surely remind me. However, it takes up space, both physical and mental. I have to stay on top of its maintenance. I also have to remember how to use it. (Sadly, I’ve lost the product manual for my Qwert Iggle and can’t find a copy on the Web. No more emu juice with my Cheerios®. Sigh.) And in the strict sense of “required for survival,” I don’t need most of it.
My host these past few days, whom I’ll call Joe, has a lot less “stuff” than I, and he gets by much better than I do. Indeed, Joe designed and built his own home in the mountains – no small feat, especially as there was no access road at the time and Joe’s plot is so sharply sloped that I had difficulty ascending it on foot. He also wired, plumbed, fenced, and gated it. I have no doubt that despite any and all difficulties he could and would do so again, from scratch and Home Depot, were circumstances to demand it.
Joe’s place is not some sort of primitive hunter’s lodge, either. It’s a comfortably furnished home comparable in its amenities to a typical middle-class suburban home you would find in less sharply sloped America. His main building is a bit smaller than most, but that’s nicely offset by his three satellite buildings – his workshop, his wife’s workshop, and his guest cottage – which Joe also designed and built himself.
The typical example of the contemporary cults of “preppers” and “survivalists” would fall to their knees in awe at Joe’s achievement. And well they should. It’s a testament to what a determined man capable of mastering the skills normally left to “specialists” can do with the application of sufficient physical and mental effort. It’s an absurdity of Brobdingnagian dimensions that Joe thinks I’d do just fine on his mountain – I, who recently had to call a master plumber for instruction on how to replace the flush lever on a toilet.
I don’t imagine that most of Joe’s contemporaries could hope to replicate Joe’s achievement. He put a lot of time, money, and effort into it, to say nothing of the array of skills he had to acquire. (Plus the need to go armed at all times; the Blue Ridge Mountains weren’t free of predators back then. Nor are they today.) But setting that undertaking alongside my habitual reliance on “specialists” is a humbling experience.
I’ve accepted the division-of-labor economy. Indeed, without it I’d be a starving wretch; the only things I can do that are worth anyone’s valuta are software and fiction. (What, you think the crap I post here is worth anything? Millions of people worldwide are doing the very same thing as we speak. Some of them do it better than I. Virtually none of us get paid.) But the simplicity available to Joe is something I envy greatly. He needs absolutely no one for anything. All his associations are by choice; none arise from necessity. What would you give to be able to say the same?
Simplicity is, quite ironically, one of the most complex conditions a contemporary American can contemplate. Try to imagine how you would contrive to live well, according to your personal standards, with no need for the support of specialists in dozens of fields.
Now, as to the title of this essay. A “bad buy,” by most people’s understanding, is an expenditure whose consequences are “not worth it.” In some sense, no element in the fantastic array of devices that surround me and support my existence is a “bad buy.” Indeed, I rely on them for many daily “necessities.” But in aggregate, coupled to my own specialization, they’ve rendered me dependent on innumerable others to whom I must regularly pay obeisance in Federal Reserve Notes. Most of those others have nothing else in common with me. I wouldn’t think of inviting them to a party; if I did, they’d be shocked right out of their skivvies.
On those occasions when I desire merely to sit and think, which are more frequent than ever, those dependencies can be irritating in the extreme. For example, I need to invoke the services of three specialists today, owing to conditions that arose while I was in Virginia. I can’t spend the day merely contemplating how to proceed with my current novel-in-progress. Like it or not, I must open my home to others – don’t get me wrong; I greatly appreciate their attention and pay for it willingly – and await their verdicts about various matters pertaining to plumbing, basement drainage, and how to repair certain of my mechanical assistants.
And then there’s this:
“That’s the whole bill of lading?” Adam Grenier said.
Martin nodded. “As near as we can figure it. You said twelve thousand pounds was the limit, right?”
Grenier nodded. “For the Guppy. If you think you’ll need more lift—”
“We won’t,” Althea said. “That list ciphers out to about ten thousand, eight hundred.” She glanced up at the craft they were chartering. “She seems awfully small for that kind of load, Adam.”
“You might be surprised,” Grenier said. “That’s her safe rating with all possible hazards taken into account, including things like short-field takeoffs and landings. Her lift rating is about fourteen five, and her structural rating is higher still. But ten eight is severe enough, thanks. With all the miles she’s got on her, I don’t like to tax her.” He glanced back and forth between them. “You’re both coming along?”
“Of course,” Althea said. “That pile of crap isn’t going to do much on its own.”
“That adds about three-fifty to the load, so we’re just over eleven thousand. Look,” Grenier said, “it’s better to be safe than sorry. Planes have fallen out of the sky for being overloaded. None of mine, but all the same, if you can avoid expanding this list any further, I’d strongly advise it.” He awarded her a wholly artificial smile. Something’s going on here, Grandpere.
—Almost certainly, Al. His father was a better, more pleasant man, and he was never this accommodating.
So how do I find out what?
—I have no idea.
Damn. I suppose I’ll have to ride it to the end, won’t I?
—What if you retreat to your earlier plan?
Martin said we wouldn’t. In front of all our neighbors, at that. I can’t make a liar out of him.
—I know.
“When do you think you could fit us in?” she said.
Grenier waved unconcern. “You get your stuff together, get it over here, and I’ll take care of the rest. There’s enough slack in the scheduling to squeeze in one flight just about any time from now through November. Oh, and don’t worry about the loading. My crew will see to all of that. They understand the issues quite well.”
Martin’s eyes narrowed. “What makes you think we wouldn’t?”
A quick flicker of the eyelids was all the reaction Adam Grenier produced. It was enough.
“Well, maybe you do,” he said. “But do you want the responsibility for a possible midpoint fuel shortfall because of unbalanced aerodynamics? For a plane that has to turn around before it’s delivered its cargo? If you load, it’s on your shoulders. If my guys do it…?” He shrugged. We’re being set up for a fall.
She glanced at her husband. He shook his head microscopically.
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll be back in touch when we’ve assembled all this junk and have arranged to truck it over.” She stuck out a hand. “Thanks for being so helpful, Adam.”
His plastic smile was still fixed in place. “Not at all.”
As they exited the tree-lined corridor from the commercial strip and turned onto the pathway to Morelon House, Althea halted her husband and turned to face him. “I can’t figure out what he’s planning, can you?”
Martin gazed at her ruefully. “I’ve been thinking about that and nothing else, love. But I’m dead certain it’s nothing we’d enjoy.”
“So what now?”
He grimaced. “I don’t know. Postpone the trip, for sure. How to get our initial load up to Thule? Frankly, I don’t think we have much choice. Our clan had heavy-lift capacity at one point, didn’t it?”
She nodded. “Yeah, but we sold the plane when Adam’s dad set up shop here. Charisse said she was happy to get rid of it. It made more sense to hire it out, so we wouldn’t have to maintain a plane and train pilots.”
She glanced at the entrance to Morelon House. The old mansion looked as sturdy as ever. It presented an appearance of immutable strength to all who saw it. Yet it had begun to seem to her that the clan had undermined that strength in several ways, with several decisions. None of them had been fatal; indeed, when each was made, it had appeared to be the obvious choice. Yet in combination, they had rendered Clan Morelon massively dependent upon the wills and skills of a multitude of outsiders…persons who might not be as available or dependable as one would hope. —That’s the downside of the division of labor, Al.
Yeah. I can see that, Grandpere. But how could we have avoided it?
—By resisting all the temptations to specialize and to make use of specialists. By purchasing absolute self-sufficiency at the price of economic advantage. Which, incidentally, no clan or society known to history has ever managed to do.
The incentives are too strong, aren’t they?
—Judge for yourself, dear. Put yourself in Charisse’s place at the point when Jack Grenier moved into the area and started offering his services around. Would you have done as she did, knowing only what she did at the time?
Probably. If there’s a lesson in this—
—If there is, Al, no one has ever drawn it. The division of labor is the one and only path toward general prosperity. It can go to an incredible depth. A frightening depth. And it is utterly reliant upon the character and good will of the specialists. Let one critical specialty be corrupted by political forces, or conceive of a grudge against some other group, or even decide that it can rape its customers without fear of reprisal, and the destruction spreads faster than anyone can act to check it.
No human society has ever successfully resisted the division of labor…and no human society ever will. That’s part and parcel of the political dynamic that we suffer.
Yet I don’t adjudge it all as a bad buy…except for those times, which have been coming more frequently of late, when I yearn for the simplicity of a cabin on the side of a mountain, surrounded by nothing but trees and wildlife. Give me a stick, a stretch of sand, and time to think about geometry just as Pythagoras did long, long ago. Well, that plus a centerfire rifle chambered in .30-06 and a thousand rounds for it. Pythagoras might have appreciated those conveniences, too.
“It’s a danger of taking responsibility for others, of course. A strong leader might have to make decisions that others wouldn’t. I can’t even tell you it’s wrong for you to be doing it. Just be careful. Taking on too much at once can be as bad of a plan as doing too little. You get time to see to things, too. Not everything has to be done now, after all.”
He nodded at the wise sounding words.
“Yeah. Plus, now I’m seeing my hands, stained with blood. A hallucination, not just, you know, well, do they look red to you?” He held them out, asking for confirmation, or possibly magic to happen. Instead the slightly curly haired woman simply shook her head.
“Not at all. If anything they look a little green. From the grass clippings. That, well hallucinations are common for a human being when they meet a Wendigo. Especially things like blood. That it’s on your hands, well… yes. You’re a warrior. Perhaps a great leader, or a guardian. You have blood on your hands and will.”
In the above, the subject is murder – executions, really – in one case, with extensive torture included. The protagonist is a fifteen-year-old boy, Jake Hines, who has been in the lead in orchestrating the murders. He’s even participated in the torture. He describes one of the psychological consequences above.
Jake’s interlocutor is a military commander, a Colonel Calley. What she tells him about himself is plainly disturbing…but it’s also true. The truth of it is borne out by Jake’s decisions and actions in two previous novels plus this novella. Here we come to an important auctorial decision.
There are three legitimate ways to characterize in fiction:
By what the character says;
By what the character does;
By what other characters say about him.
However, not all three techniques are appropriate in every situation. The above snippet is a good example. Jake could never convincingly – convincingly to the reader, that is – describe himself as “a warrior” or “a great leader.” The evidence for each of those things is plentiful…but he could not say those things about himself. P. S. Power put the attributions in the right place: the mouth of a commander who clearly knows something about the burdens of leadership. Jake himself was only just coming to understand them.
Just another episode in the continuing saga of “how it’s done.”
A dear friend, Lynn Chesnut, has opined for a long time that “broadcast journalism” is inherently untruthful, illegitimate, and generally unnecessary. When I first encountered Lynn’s thesis, I was seriously disturbed by it. Is there an actual social benefit from American citizens not knowing what’s going on in distant places? Perhaps, perhaps not. But Lynn’s argument is more about the subversion of journalism by power-seekers and influence-peddlers:
By formatting the bands and standardizing the bandwidths the government actually created broadcasting as we know it. The FCC regulates broadcasting–licensing a handful of privileged people to broadcast at different frequency bands in particular locations. That is something not contemplated in the First Amendment, and which should never pass constitutional muster if applied to the literal press. Not only so, but the FCC requires application for renewal on the basis that a licensee broadcaster is “operating in the public interest as a public trustee.” That is a breathtaking departure from the First Amendment.
No one questions the political power of broadcasting; the broadcasters themselves obviously sell that viewpoint when they are taking money for political advertising. What does it mean, therefore, when the government (FCC) creates a political venue which transcends the literal press? And what does it mean when the government excludes you and me–and almost everyone else–from that venue in favor of a few privileged licensees? And what does it mean when the government maintains the right to pull the license of anyone it does allow to participate in that venue? It means a government far outside its First Amendment limits. When it comes to broadcasting and the FCC, clearly the First Amendment has nothing to do with the case.
There’s a tremendous amount of substance there. We know from experience that power-seekers will gravitate to any organization that wields power. They’ll also do their damnedest to rise within it…and to block the entry or elevation of persons opposed to their agendas. That’s the basis of Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics. The years since World War II have proved that the “journalism industry” is no exception.
Reporters overwhelmingly lean Democrat. A survey by The American Journalist found that for every Republican in a newsroom, there are 10 Democrats.
The reporters claim to be objective.
They aren’t.
News networks always covered Iowa Caucus victory speeches. Not this year — after Donald Trump won. CNN cut away from his speech, and MSNBC didn’t carry it at all.
Recently, NPR hired a new CEO. They chose Katherine Maher, who once tweeted that “Trump is a racist.” During BLM looting, she tweeted, “It’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression.”
Now she’s the boss of government-funded radio?
Sadly, yes.
Please read Stossel’s whole piece.
Lynn makes the point that journalism – with emphasis on broadcast journalism – is about entertainment. That’s very close to the center of the bull’s-eye. Journalism is an industry, which, like all industries, seeks profits. The journalism industry will produce “what sells.” The reader / listener / viewer is largely interested in diversion: entertainment. To divert and entertain, a “story” must be dramatic: a significant departure from the norm. Editors are fully aware of this. “If it bleeds, it leads.” “Sex crimes sell newspapers.”
You might think that Stossel’s observations about the political slant in big-time journalism are off-axis to Lynn’s thesis. But it is not so. Smart journalists know that simply haranguing the reader / listener / viewer will cause him to turn away. They know that to push their message effectively, they must entertain. For many years, the barons of broadcast journalism understood this and based their media strategies on it.
But somewhere in the past decade, they slipped. They went too far in one direction. It became obvious that facts and sound reasoning about them were of no real interest to them. Their political agenda had become too blatant. In that lies a great part of our hope.
Trust is misplaced when awarded to persons with an axe to grind – and nearly all journalists fit into that category. So trust no journalist, no editorialist, and no opinion-monger. No, not even me. Check everything. More, never be perfectly confident that you’ve done the whole job. Even in the smallest and lightest matters, the odds are heavily against that and always will be.
Wait a moment: I do have a couple of exceptions to the “trust no one” rule. The first is one I’ve cited before:
Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it – no matter if I have said it! – except it agree with your own reason and your own common sense. – Siddhartha Gautama, perhaps better known as the Buddha
The second is also widely known:
“To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.” – Jesus of Nazareth
If you live in a small town and have some degree of prominence, it is vital to be on good terms with the editor of the town’s newspaper. This is especially important if you and he are of different faiths. The following story will give you an inkling as to why.
Father O’Malley, the Catholic pastor of a small-town parish, entered his donkey in a local charity race and, to his considerable surprise, it won. The priest was so pleased with the donkey that he entered it in another charity event and it won again. But apparently, the editor of the local daily was a Baptist, owned one of the other donkeys in those races, and was incensed about being defeated twice. The next day, the front page of the local paper read:
FATHER O’MALLEY’S ASS OUT FRONT
The diocesan bishop was so upset with this kind of publicity that he ordered Father O’Malley not to enter the donkey in another race. That proved insufficient to mollify the editor. The next day, the paper’s headline read:
BISHOP SCRATCHES FATHER O’MALLEY’S ASS
This was too much for the bishop. He ordered Father O’Malley to get rid of the donkey at once. Not wanting to deprive the donkey of some connection to the Church, the unhappy priest decided to give it to Sister Mary, a nun in a nearby convent. The editor, hearing of the news, decreed the headline for the next day:
SISTER MARY HAS BEST ASS IN TOWN
The bishop fainted. He informed the nun that she would have to get rid of the donkey. Being obedient to her superiors in the clerical hierarchy, she sold it to a nearby farm for $10. The editor was still on the warpath, so the next day the paper’s headline read:
SISTER MARY SELLS ASS FOR $10
This was too much for the bishop. Desperate to put a stop to such japes at the Church’s expense, he ordered the nun to buy back the donkey, lead it to the plains, and set it free where it could run wild. But the editor was still furious. The next day, the headline read:
(I don't endorse any of these sites. I list them to marvel at how many people and organizations want to run a "news site," but have no idea what that entails. -- FWP)
