Jan 16 2022

Every Time You Think They’ve Hit The Bottom…

     …they pull out their shovels and dig like giant moles on meth:

     It’s possible that this isn’t a first – that at some time in the past, unknown even to me, there have been presidents and Supreme Court justices unacquainted with the concept of enumerated powers, unaware of the significance of the Tenth Amendment, and unfamiliar with the notion of federalism. It’s mind-boggling and supremely distressing…but it’s not the most distressing aspect of the federal government today.

     You see, this was foreshadowed. Trust a writer to know about foreshadowing and what it portends.

     Not many people were paying proper attention during the antics that eventuated in the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare. Those of us who were took special note of one particular incident:

     That’s the response of a politician desperate to avoid answering a question. Had Pelosi been fully conscious of the gravity of her response, she would have said nothing more about it. Yet within a day, she claimed that the “necessary and proper” clause of Article I, Section 8 empowers Congress to do anything it pleases.

     Once again, those of us who noticed this outrageous statement can never forget it. Neither can we forget that the Democrat-controlled Congress of the time was fully on board with Pelosi’s assertion. Nor can we forget that for whatever reason, Chief Justice John Roberts allowed them to get away with it. Worse yet, the late John McCain, supposedly a Republican, permitted the PPACA to remain on the federal law books out of sheer malice toward President Donald Trump.

     It’s beyond serious question that the leaders of Congress today believe that Congress has the “right” to do whatever it pleases. We are fortunate that for the moment, there are two semi-sensible Democrats in the Senate who aren’t willing to go along with the gag. Yet take note of the rhetoric emanating from other Democrats, including the demented, lying moron in the Oval Office, about their inability to strong-arm Sinema and Manchin into compliance: because they can’t proceed at full speed with their schemes, therefore their opponents are “destroying democracy!”

     Given politics – and politicians – like this, is it any wonder that the great majority of Americans simply want it all to go away?

***

     Twenty-one years ago, at the old Palace of Reason, I wrote:

     Over the past century, liberty has been flensed away from Americans, slice after thin slice. That’s the way to subordinate a free people. Get them used to bending the knee and tugging the forelock in little things first, things that don’t appear to be relevant to them personally. Get them thinking that only antisocial curmudgeons would raise a fuss over matters as trivial as zoning restrictions, or licensing requirements for hairdressers. Better yet, get them thinking that anyone who would resist these “obviously desirable” new requirements of the law must want to do them harm.

     With each slice of lost liberty has gone a little of the defiance that animates a free people. We’re closing in on the point of no return, the threshold that, once crossed, will become an impenetrable wall that forbids us a backward step.

     In parallel with the loss of personal defiance has gone a slackening of the national will toward foreign enemies. The recent contretemps with the Chinese is an important harbinger of things to come. Few have dared to suggest that, when America puts young men and women into uniforms and weapons into their hands, it’s preparing them to risk their lives for some purpose beyond a trade agreement. Few have dared to suggest that a country whose government dares to take Americans hostage, to stake their lives and freedom as counters in a game, has committed an act of war, an act to which a country with dignity could respond in only one way.

     We have become comfortable with subordination at home and humiliation abroad.

     Where do we stand today, Gentle Reader? Do we retain any smallest sliver of the freedom we once possessed? We, who were locked away from our businesses, neighbors, and loved ones by a bureaucrat’s ukase over a cold virus? We, who have been told that there are products we’re forbidden to buy, and other products we’re commanded to buy? We, whose children have been systematically taught to ignore biological reality, to feel guilt over things they have not done, and to hate their own country and their own race?

     But note this: At any point in our steady devolution toward utter subjection, we could have halted it all. We could have done what a fictional character did:

     “Then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality—and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan—so throughout the world and throughout men’s history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collective countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values—the impotence of death. I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win—and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was ‘No.’”

     That book has many flaws. Yet its moral vision, its grasp of the supreme importance of personal moral agency, which overrides any command from any would-be ruler, is perfect. A later writer would echo the sentiment in a science-fictional setting:

     “A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘society’ and ‘government’ have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame… as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world… aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure.”…

     “I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”

     I once called this applied practical anarchism. The phrase still fits. If you haven’t read the linked essay, please do so at once. The need has become overwhelming.

***

     People see the word anarchism and think “chaos,” “total disorder,” “rampant violence,” “blood in the gutters.” That is not what the word means. It means the rejection of a “legitimate” State. It means that the phrase “legitimate authority” is semantically null – completely without objective meaning.

     The late Poul Anderson, pace Heinlein’s conception, noted in his novel The People of the Wind that the phrase “legitimate authority” decomposes into two concepts most of us would rather not face. Legitimacy, he noted, derives from tradition; there is no other source for it. Authority, he noted, derives from force: the force required to impose the will of the rulers upon the ruled. Yet in perfect truth, can tradition be deemed permanently above reconsideration? Can tradition legitimately force us to accept as rulers a gang of thugs who stole their offices, who are resolved to suppress dissent, and who believe their power to be unbounded by individuals’ rights? As for force, can any government genuinely impose its will on a nation of 330 million persons, nearly half of whom are armed? And is it not the moral duty of such persons to ignore a group of “rulers” who propose to run roughshod over their traditions and their rights?

     Yes, yes, I know my Emerson: “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.” Well, here’s what I know:

We have reached the midnight hour.

     There’s no sense remaining in trying to “vote our way out of this.” There’s no temporal savior waiting in the wings for the perfect moment to strike. The task is ours, and ours alone. Either we reclaim our heritage as free men or we will be swallowed by the darkness.

     “You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” — Ursula Le Guin

     Have a nice day.

Jan 15 2022

The Most Meaningful Speech I’ve Ever Heard

Here it is.

Jan 15 2022

Why I Can’t Get Too Worked Up About Hiroshima

Because the Japanese Army committed FAR greater atrocities than dropping a bomb – with MULTIPLE warnings.

Jan 15 2022

Even The Greatest Men Are Sometimes Wrong

     Men are fallible. We make mistakes. Some of us are wrong more often than right. And yes, “men” includes women, so no smirking, ladies. Especially since the majority of you react worse to being criticized than to being publicly groped.

     The history of Christianity knows few mortal figures to compare with Saul of Tarsus, better known as Saint Paul the Apostle. He was phenomenally important to the early history of the Church, both as an evangelist and in disseminating the Gospel to the people of the classical world. But Paul had his flaws, as we all do. One of them was his willingness to present his own opinions as Christian doctrine.

     I subscribe to a daily emailing from The Catholic Company called “Your Morning Offering.” It’s a simple little thing that presents Bible passages, commentaries from Catholic polemicists, selected prayers, and a brief bio of the saint of the day for the reader’s contemplation. I’ve often found it a valuable stimulus to thought. Today, however, it presents a passage from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans:

     “For rulers are not a cause of fear to good conduct, but to evil. Do you wish to have no fear of authority? Then do what is good and you will receive approval from it, for it is a servant of God for your good. But if you do evil, be afraid, for it does not bear the sword without purpose; it is the servant of God to inflict wrath on the evildoer. Therefore, it is necessary to be subject not only because of the wrath but also because of conscience.”
     –Romans 12:3-5

     This passage is complete and arrant nonsense. Moreover, it was written at a time when the rulers of the Roman Empire were doing their best to eradicate Christianity, which makes it utterly inexplicable. Needless to say, it has its fans among the political elite and the admirers of governments.

     An objective appreciation of government is that it is like unto a weapon. While there are exceptions – bioengineered diseases, for example – a weapon need not be evil in and of itself. It’s nearly always the wielder who determines whether it will be put to good or evil uses.

     A ruler who does evil, as so many do and have done throughout history, is not “a servant of God for your good.” I could make a good case that the majority of governments extant today are being used for evil. The world’s Christians have absolutely no reason to subject themselves to such regimes. That includes the Usurper Regime currently ascendant in Washington, D.C.

     But Paul of Tarsus, among his flaws, was intolerant of both contradiction and constraint. His peremptory nature wore out the affections of more than one acolyte. The passage above irritated Christians who had lost loves and homes to official persecutions. It also presents a severe problem to Biblical literalists, who insist that the Bible is entirely the word of God and that no part of it is to be questioned or dismissed.

     A man need not be perfect to be, on balance, a force for good. But humility is vital. One of the most important lessons of the Church is that we are all fallible, and all sinners. It was a lesson that Paul of Tarsus failed to internalize. His self-importance is often perceptible in the tone of his writings. The unwisdom of the cited passage from the Epistle to the Romans, which is overall a vitally important document in the development of Christian thought, makes plain the importance of humility.

     Donald Trump is a great man and was an unusually good president. But he was wrong to repose so much trust in the medical bureaucracy generally and Anthony Fauci in particular. It may be a minor blot in comparison to the good he did from the Oval Office, but it’s there nevertheless. We should remember that as a shield against the encroachment of cults of personality.

Jan 15 2022

Yowza! We got us some disinformation here!

I grow weary over reading about asinine — but widespread — claims that this or that is DISINFORMATION. The essence of the charge is that certain statements are

  1. reprehensible, unacceptable, poisonous, vicious, deleterious, horrific, right-wing, and generally bad manners,
  2. so utterly irresistible and beguiling that any hearer must figuratively bind himself to the mast to escape the siren songs of untruth (SSU), and
  3. hideously damaging to whatever the party line is at any one moment.

Yes, the earth will stall on its axis if such a powerful untruth is permitted to be promulgated. If an innocent, unsuspecting citizen has the slightest encounter with this truth the consequences are dire.

(From one of the great movies of all time, “Top Secret.”)

Of course, all that is required is to level the charge of “disinformation.” It is unnecessary to make any kind of a case for the falsity of the statement or to focus on any of the elements of fraud. It’s wrong and that’s all anyone needs to know and the infantile understanding of the citizenry is a given.

Well, what ARE the elements of fraud? In the common law the practice developed over the centuries to require fraud to be proved with particularity as, for one reason, it’s a serious attack on another’s reputation for good character to allege that he or she is a lying sack.

In 1996, the Montana Supreme Court laid out the elements of fraud in great detail.

The elements are: (1) a representation; (2) falsity of the representation; (3) materiality of the representation; (4) speaker’s knowledge of the falsity of the representation or ignorance of its truth; (5) the speaker’s intent it should be relied upon; (6) the hearer’s ignorance of the falsity of the representation; (7) the hearer’s reliance on the representation; (8) the hearer’s right to rely on the representation; and (9) the hearer’s consequent and proximate injury caused by the reliance on the representation.

H/t: Montana “Workers’ Compensation Court.

Other courts say essentially the same thing but this is the most detailed list I’ve run across. I would add after (1) that the representation or statement must be of fact not opinion.

So you can see that making a fraud (or “disinformation”) case stick requires more than proving that a false statement was made. If I’m buying a used car and the seller tells me that the suspension and engine are in top shape I can’t claim I was defrauded if the front tires are obviously worn unevenly and the engine runs but with clouds of blue smoke coming out of the muffler.

But the “disinformation” maroons take it to another level by standing pat on a mere allegation that a certain statement was made. Ergo fraud. But we all know their angst is merely that they don’t care for the statement because it is destructive of their agenda. If they have to break the unsuspecting speaker’s neck in the process then, well, that’s just what the bastard deserved.

This approach at best assumes that words, allegedly false, have merely to touch the ears of any citizen schlub and the damage is done like the bumper strike we saw above. Independent agency or responsibility of the hearer is blithely assumed away and he or she is implicitly treated as a gullible infant without critical skills of any kind.

Bear in mind too that this phenomenon has arisen in that very nation whose citizens devised or at least perfected the term “bullshit.” Can we accept in the public sphere of this particular country the notion that citizens have no concept of that term or of their own responsibility to assess information from others with a critical eye? And what citizen doesn’t every bleeping day exist in a blizzard of commercial hype? Do they just sit there like rubes and assume that their lives are incomplete if their family circle doesn’t include at least three homosexuals, four black Harvard grads, and a Mexican feminist?

So, the next time you hear someone level the charge of “disinformation” ask yourself who it is in that case who is a lying, deceiving, vicious horse’s ass?

Jan 14 2022

More Anarchy, More Tyranny

     I’m in a particularly dark mood this morning. It derives from several causes, most of which my Gentle Readers would deem irrelevant to them. However, there is one that’s worth a mention.

     Though I disapprove of the linguistic hijacking that has conflated anarchy with chaos, I can do little about it. Worse yet, the late Samuel Francis’s term anarcho-tyranny is so powerfully evocative that I cannot do without it. This essay from 1994, while it wasn’t the one in which the term first appeared, provides an excellent argument that the condition to which it refers is the current sociopolitical status of these United States. If you haven’t read it before, please do so. If you have, please refresh your memory of its contents and overall import, so I can refrain from importing huge segments of it into this piece.

     With that, it’s time for a little – a very little – of the odious Jen Psaki:

     So it becomes clear that the Usurper Administration has no intention of backing off on its attempt to use economic coercion to enforce its everybody-must-get-vaxed decree upon Americans. Virtually all of America’s largest companies do a significant amount of business with the federal government. Some even receive subsidies. Those that don’t kneel to the Usurpers will see that business, those subsidies negatively affected. In many – perhaps most – cases, the aggregate impact would leave red ink on their bottom lines. As most such companies are secretly in thrall to their accounting departments, they will refrain from “pointless, profitless resistance.”

     How’s the southern border looking these days, Joe?

***

     I feel no need to detail the total failure of the “vaccines” to immunize those who accept them against the COVID-19 virus. Nor need I discourse on the dangers the “vaccines” pose to the human immune system or any other aspect of bodily integrity. The rash of infections and deaths among the “vaccinated,” and the tsunami of young people dying suddenly, or being diagnosed with bizarre ailments virtually unknown among the young after being “vaccinated,” should already be known to the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch. There’s no need to recap what we already know.

     No, I have something else in mind this fine January morning. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the pandemic or the “vaccines,” except as they illustrate the central theme of this piece. It’s about the nature of Americans’ relationship to government.

     Allow me a useful analogy that I’ve used before:

     [I]n the American Constitutional system, a government is an agent: a hireling charged with specified responsibilities and allowed to engage in certain delimited activities in discharging them. The relationship is exactly parallel to a homeowner who engages a landscaper to trim his hedge. The job is defined by the homeowner, and the landscaper is to do that and nothing else.

     Imagine that the landscaper sees himself as having “interests” that include turning the homeowner’s hedge into a topiary. Would the homeowner be justified in becoming upset? Would he have a good case for refusing the landscaper his fee for that “service?” If the answers strike you as obvious, ask yourself why claims of “compelling government interests” should be treated any differently.

     Our “landscaper” is just such a despicable creature. It mulcts us for oceans of tax money and uses it as it pleases. It then imposes all sorts of anti-Constitutional compulsions and constraints on us – things the Founding Fathers never even contemplated handing over to a government – and enforces its will with humorless ferocity. But as for “trimming the hedge” to our specifications – the job we hired it to do, keeping the peace and a reasonable degree of public order? Forget that; it’s too busy making sure all of us think, speak, and act in its prescribed fashion.

     Anarchy and tyranny combined, in ever-increasing doses.

***

     That arrogant landscaper: what would you do about him? Would you merely reprove him and express your hope that in the future he’d do what you’d hired him to do? Would you excoriate him mercilessly for his presumptions but pay him anyway? Or would you fire him summarily and send him packing without his fee?

     Anyone with three functioning brain cells can see where I’m headed with this, and my Gentle Readers have a lot more functioning brain matter than that. So why sit we here idle?

     Henry Louis Mencken saw the writing on the wall nearly a century ago:

     The typical lawmaker of today is a man devoid of principle – a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would cheerfully be in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism….

     The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary….

     Politics, as hopeful men practice it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance. The American colonists, when they got rid of the Potsdam tyrant, believed fondly that they were getting rid of oppressive taxes forever and setting up complete liberty. They found almost instantly that taxes were higher than ever, and before many years they were writhing under the Alien and Sedition Acts….

     At each election we vote in a new set of politicians, insanely assuming that they are better than the set turned out. And at each election we are, as they say in Motherland, done in.

     To summarize: There is no voting our way out of this. The elections of November 2020 should have established that beyond all possibility of doubt. Yet the “hopeful men” persist in their delusion.

***

     Very few persons today read the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Yet they are among the most important fictions of their era. Their importance extends deeply into our understanding of right, wrong, and justice. The one best known, at least by its title, is Crime and Punishment:

     “….Listen, I want to ask you a serious question,” the student said hotly. “I was joking of course, but look here; on one side we have a stupid, senseless, worthless, spiteful, ailing, horrid, old woman, not simply useless but doing actual mischief, who has not an idea what she is living for herself, and who will die in a day or two in any case. You understand? You understand?”
     “Yes, yes, I understand,” answered the officer, watching his excited companion attentively.
     “Well, listen then. On the other side, fresh young lives thrown away for want of help and by thousands, on every side! A hundred thousand good deeds could be done and helped, on that old woman’s money which will be buried in a monastery! Hundreds, thousands perhaps, might be set on the right path; dozens of families saved from destitution, from ruin, from vice, from the Lock hospitals – and all with her money. Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the services of humanity and the good of all. What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? For one life thousands would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and hundred lives in exchange – it’s simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence? No more than the life of a louse, of a black-beetle, less in fact because the old woman is doing harm. She is wearing out the lives of others; the other day she bit Lizaveta’s finger out of spite; it almost had to be amputated.”
     “Of course she does not deserve to live,” remarked the officer, “but there it is, it’s nature.”
     “Oh well, brother, but we have to correct and direct nature, and, but for that, we should drown in an ocean of prejudice. But for that, there would never have been a single great man. They talk of duty, conscience – I don’t want to say anything against duty and conscience;- but the point is, what do we mean by them? Stay, I have another question to ask you. Listen!”
     “No, you stay, I’ll ask you a question. Listen!”
     “Well!”
     “You are talking and speechifying away, but tell me, would you kill the old woman yourself?”
     “Of course not! I was only arguing the justice of it… It’s nothing to do with me…”
     “But I think, if you would not do it yourself, there’s no justice about it…let us have another game.”

     The insight here is overwhelming, practically transcendental:


Groups have no more moral authority than individuals.
Neither do governments.

     Many have said it in other contexts. In the main, their audiences have nodded agreeably. Yet we concede not only moral but trans-moral authority to governments. On what basis? The vote? Superior firepower? Or merely our personal preference to see it as “someone else’s problem?”

     But authority and responsibility must be equal. He who holds the one must hold the other. And so, though I intended to resist, I find that I must insert a snippet of Sam Francis’s essay here:

     Yet there are signs that some Americans are not buying into the lie of anarcho-tyranny. At least as far as crime and personal safety are concerned, some are awakening to the ancient lesson of republican government, that in order to govern yourself politically you must first be able to govern yourself personally and morally. And, that lesson means assuming responsibility for your own protection. For months in 1987 in Detroit, citizens complained to the police about teenage prostitutes from a crack house in the neighborhood who solicited old men and adolescents on the street, about drug dealers firing guns in the air for fun, and about a shoot-out between drug gangs while neighborhood children played in the street. Not once did the police respond to any of the repeated calls. Then one day after the shoot-out, two local men named Angelo Parisi and Perry Kent walked up the street, set fire to the crack house, and burned it to the ground, and within minutes police arrived to charge them with two counts of arson and assault with a deadly weapon. With community support, both men were acquitted by a jury of all charges, and there are stories similar to theirs in other American cities.

     Soon after the Los Angeles riots, the New York Times recounted the story of a 20-year-old janitor, David Penso, who enjoyed the less-than-bracing experience of watching a local discount store being looted and burned by rioters as Los Angeles police cars drove past and did absolutely nothing. Mr. Penso—unlike George Bush, Jack Kemp, Bill Clinton, and George Will—learned something. “The cops were there,” he told the Times, “but they didn’t do anything. The only way people can be protected in Los Angeles is if they protect themselves with guns.” Some months before the Los Angeles riots, the Washington Post carried a story about women and guns, reporting that there are now about 12 million of them across the country, and one of them, a woman named Paxton Quigley in Beverly Hills, a former activist for gun control and now owner of a gun store that offers firearms training to women, told the Post, “We cannot depend on anyone to protect us. We must do it ourselves. And, the only way is to acquire the firepower it takes to dissuade violent criminals.”

     Mr. Parisi and Mr. Kent, Miss Quigley and Mr. Penso, have discovered the dirty little secret that can sweep anarcho-tyranny out of office, that anarcho-tyranny flourishes only when citizens surrender their rights and their duties of protecting themselves, assuming responsibility for themselves, and governing themselves, and that when the anarcho-tyrants promise to take over and perform these duties themselves, they are uttering a lie that leads to slavery and the jungle at the same time. When anarcho-tyranny flourishes, it protects no one except the elites who fatten on it, and it encourages only the withering of self-government and responsibility.

     To what extent are We the Formerly Free, having abdicated all responsibility for our personal safety and the safety of our communities, responsible for our own anarcho-tyrannization?

***

     I told you I was in a dark mood. It’s been growing, weighing ever more heavily upon me, for a whole year. I am no longer one of Mencken’s “hopeful men.” I am no longer able to see a better, freer future for my country. That inability is nudging me toward a fatal conclusion.

     Herbert Stein has told us that “If something cannot continue indefinitely, it will stop.” Can the anarcho-tyrannization of the United States of America continue indefinitely? If not, what will put a stop to it? And how long will that be in arriving?

     Have a nice day.

Jan 14 2022

Bold action is called for.

On Tuesday last week (4 January), the markets got spooked by the released minutes of a Federal Reserve Open Market Committee’s meeting held three weeks prior. What was the fuss all about? Well the minutes indicated that the Fed seems to be inclined to envision starting to prepare to begin planning to initiate raising interest rates sooner and more aggressively than previously thought and to “normalize” their balance sheet beginning already toward the end of this year.

“Will the Fed walk the hawkish talk?” By Akrainer, ZeroHedge, 1/9/22.

Jan 13 2022

Pearls of expression.

The figure [150,000 female deaths from anorexia] has been quoted by everyone from Ann Landers to college textbooks, because as Carol Iannone remarks about the general atmosphere of women as victims, “It is almost as if feminism had finally discovered a problem that can unite all women across all barriers: the existence
of men.”

“The Integration Of Faith and Learning. A Worldview Approach.” By Robert A. Harris, occububble.com, draft of October, 2003.

Jan 13 2022

A Brief, Bitter Tale

     Forgive me, Gentle Readers. I have a great need to vent about a semi-personal matter, and this is my only outlet for it.

     As you probably know, I sell my fiction through Amazon. Like it or not, Amazon commands approximately 85% of the eBook market, so a writer who seeks to move his wares can’t really afford not to use that channel. It’s limiting, and has occasionally been frustrating, but that’s the reality.

     Amazon sells certain advertising services to writers such as myself. They structure them as “campaigns,” the ads to appear in specified contexts and the campaign to last a specified time. I’ve purchased such campaigns in the past, and despite the slender response from the previous ones, I had decided to try another.

     As with everything that’s bought or sold through Amazon, the process is online. It’s not hard to navigate…unless you encounter a problem of the sort I faced.

     You see, Amazon Ads wouldn’t accept my ad campaign. I was informed that there were “problems with my payment method” and that I should “go to billing and payments” to resolve them.

     “Billing and Payments” – another part of the online system, of course – didn’t offer a way to resolve the problems. Indeed, it didn’t even tell me what the problems are. I wrestled with it for a while, got nowhere, and decided to seek help.

     I must be naive. Help? From Amazon? The concept seems not to be recognized there. If you can’t do it through the website, you can’t do it at all – and the proof is in this: Through the Amazon Chat Help system, and subsequently through two phone calls, I was connected to a total of ten people. Each transferred me to another…and another…and another…at each juncture assuring me that the next person would be able to help. Yet it was not so. I don’t think they took much of an interest in helping…if, indeed, they understood what I was talking about; conventional North American names were not to be found among them.

     Finally, I asked the tenth person for an email address to which I could send a letter of complaint. He couldn’t – or wouldn’t – give me one. At that point I had spent about two hours trying to get help, and was still without any idea what I, or anyone, could do.

     The C.S.O. told me to contact corporate headquarters. It took a bit of Googling, but I found a contact number for the staff there. A very nice young lady provided me with a U.S. Mail address for Amazon’s Complaints Department, to which I’ll be writing after my blood pressure is back from the transfinite realms beyond the domain wall, where tachyons perform their eternal pirouettes to amuse and divert audiences of lovelorn quarks. Will anyone read the letter I’ll be writing? Dubious, to say the least, but it’s all I have left.

     I’ve been an Amazon customer for many years – roughly from when Amazon started selling books over the World Wide Web. I’ve sold my own fiction through Amazon for about nine years now. If I get no response to the letter I’ll write, both relationships will be severed, and the story of this kerfuffle spread far and wide.

     There. I feel a little better. But there’s no way to get back the two hours I spent forlornly seeking help from Amazon. And they used to say Ma Bell didn’t care because she didn’t have to!

Jan 13 2022

Is Comment Required?

     There are days when even an idiot would easily draw the moral:

     In this purported hot sauce incident, a few weeks back, Drake had allegedly met up with some model on Instagram at a party, and the two ventured back to his hotel room. Reports note that Drake and this woman engaged in consensual sex, with the rap artist wearing a condom at the encounter.

     Once the sex had wrapped up, Drake allegedly went into the bathroom to dispose of the condom he used.

     After that, the woman allegedly went into the same bathroom after Drake had finished up and fished the used condom from the garbage and allegedly stuffed the contents of the used condom inside of her genitals.

     The woman allegedly began to scream after feeling a burning sensation from what she’d put inside of her, which led to Drake reportedly rushing to the bathroom to see what was wrong. After learning of what occurred, Drake allegedly admitted to the woman that he intentionally poured hot sauce into his used condom to effectively kill his sperm so as to avoid this very kind of scenario.

     I do love that word “allegedly.” It gets a real workout in the above.

     Why did Drake do what he did? That seems fairly clear. Why did the unnamed woman do what she did? I doubt it was to sell the condom on eBay. Nor do I find it plausible that the woman is desperate to bear a child and can’t get knocked up any other way.

     Men are increasingly reluctant to trust women. The incident captured here shows why. It also displays the precautions one man is willing to take to keep from being financially victimized. If this story gains traction, men of lesser wealth and notoriety will likely copy his example. As for the woman, if she were at all honest with herself, she would become a high-priced prostitute, rather than using the life of an unborn baby as the ticket to a life of luxury.

     Hmm, wait just a moment. Do prostitutes – high-priced or otherwise – ever do things like that? And wouldn’t the exceedingly affluent and marriage-averse yet sex-hungry men of the world be better off going to high-priced prostitutes? Perhaps the vice laws should include an exemption for men whose net worth exceeds a certain threshold. Ah, well. Back to the salt mine, Fran.

Jan 12 2022

Ultra-Quickies: Conical Pizza?

     I sometimes lament my memory. It’s too good; it forces me to remember things I’d rather forget. But then something like this comes along:

     A lot of people like to make rules around what pizza is and isn’t. From where a pizza is made to what toppings are on it, a pizza can be deemed illegitimate if it doesn’t meet their strict set of standards. I, however, am not a pizza purist. While I have my preferences, I think the beauty of my favorite food is that it’s highly adaptable and inclusive. This is why, when I stumbled upon something called a “pizza cone” on Reddit, I looked into it with an open mind.

     …and my lumber-room memory, which discards nothing, throws this up:

     Rest in peace, Bernard Kliban.

Jan 12 2022

It’s PAST Time to End the Hold of the Entangled Elite

They may have the same college associations.

Their parents may have been influential/powerful in a past administration.

They may have married someone who was connected to a power broker.

They may have, as a ‘media representative’, pushed the correct narrative for their allies.

But, whoever they are – family, friend, college roommate, or simply toadying supplicant – the Rule by the Entangled Elite needs to be brought to an end.

Michelle Obama should NOT get into the White House by virtue of having married a man who became president.

Hillary Clinton should not be annointed as the Dem presidential candidate because of her association with Bill Clinton.

Neither woman accomplished very much on her own; they would function essentially as their husband’s 3rd term as president.

The same goes for all the other people who are pushing for their place in the Cool Kids Group. If you cannot point to specific, measurable accomplishments, then get out of the race.

We fought a war to end heredity privilege. We don’t need to install a pallid version of it in the Republic.

Jan 12 2022

Patterns Redux

     Long, long, LONG ago, I wrote a half-satirical essay about patterns in the lives and doings of public men. It’s in the “Baseline Essays” section, which should tell you a wee bit about what I think of its significance. Before proceeding here, I exhort you to go thence and read it, even if you already did so long, long, long ago…

     Back so soon? My, my. Well, I did know that our Gentle Readers are bright folks. Anyway…

     Courtesy of Co-Conspirator Linda Fox…
          …who cites blogger Lawrence Person…
               …who invokes commentator Neil Oliver…

     …comes the stimulus for my thoughts this fine Wednesday morning:

     The patterns Person and Oliver have noted have been apparent to me for many years. Typeset phrases widely employed trigger my internal trap for events of significance. I take note; I look for mechanisms of coordination; I ponder meanings and agendas. I usually manage to figure out what’s going on, and why. But that’s not the exclusive province of a Certified Galactic Intellect. Just about anyone who pays attention can do it equally well.

     The “trick,” so to speak, lies in remembering rather than dismissing what you’ve detected. Remember the cant phrase; remember the speaker; remember the context. And remember always that no one who rises to office in any First World country is without an agenda. Seldom is such an agenda entirely wholesome.

     All politicians pursue high office because they want power. A tiny fraction think of us of the hoi polloi as deserving of respect, competent to run our own affairs. The far greater number are convinced that they know what’s good for us…and that we don’t. The ratio of the first group – officials who sincerely honor Christ’s Second Great Commandment – to the second – self-serving bastards who regard the rest of us as brutish inferiors, less than the dust beneath their feet – is no higher than 0.02. It’s probably far lower.

     But here’s the punchline: They know themselves and one another for what they are. Our task is to know them just as well.

***

     This November 2019 essay at American Greatness captures an important aspect of the uber-political agenda: i.e., the one all politicians pursue regardless of their supposed ideology and convictions:

     From my first volunteer gig in 1970 at the age of 9 to the last campaign I ran 10 years ago, I could and regularly did fall into the trap of obsessing on politics to the detriment of much else. It may even have cost me a good marriage.

     After I took the hits like that, however, I started to see that people…who base their lives around politics are so one-dimensional you can lick the back of their heads and stick them to the wall. Latest book on a fascinating topic? Interesting work of art they saw at an exhibition? Best new cigar? OK, we did do the cigars. But as to the other matters and many others like them, they were subsumed under such vital world-shaking subjects as who is up in the latest poll in some obscure county in Iowa.

     The author, David Kamioner, was speaking of the people around him in political operations: i.e., campaign workers, strategists, and tacticians. But his observations have enormous significance, which is revealed most clearly by the answer to a simple question: Did the politicians those people were working for approve of their total-politicization attitude?

     If your answer is anything but “Hell yeah, they did,” you haven’t been paying attention to the trends. Politicians want everything to be a political subject. That’s their demesne, and like all petty barons, they want to make it as large as possible. Never mind whether they’d be competent to rule a ten-foot-square garden patch…or to do anything worthwhile with whatever might sprout from it.

     To proceed from any other premise is to render oneself open and vulnerable to the manipulations of the worst men in the world. The worst men in the world always predominate in realms where everything is political.

***

     In this world under the veil of time, you cannot study anything human at great length without gradually being overcome by a sense of tragedy. Sometimes it’s tragedy of the simple sort: a continent littered with cathedrals in ruins, libraries in ashes, and the broken bodies of the young. Sometimes it’s tragedy of a more subtle variety: the sort that comes from the perception of a missed opportunity to raise Mankind to a new, higher plane of self-comprehension and respect. Either way, the tragedy is always there. Take it from one who spent twenty years studying the Western Front of World War I.

     Politics is like that. I’ve been keenly interested in politics all my adult life: at first from an ideological perspective, but more recently in an attempt to understand why we have permitted the prolongation of so much horror. In the process I’ve become convinced of the unalterable reality of what I call the political dynamic. It consists of a single, overriding recognition:

To pursue power over others is evil.

     It’s what John Brunner called the essence of evil: the willingness to treat others as pieces to be moved around a game board, manipulated and sometimes sacrificed to achieve particular effects. It does not matter whether such a person “means well.” No one, no matter his intentions, deserves to have power over me – or you – or Smith down the block whose dogs bark at annoying times and who can’t seem to keep his lawn properly tended. Yet that is what politics is about: the pursuit of power over me…and you…and that hapless old schnook Smith.

     And we permit it to continue. We even participate in it, now and then.

     The patterns Neil Oliver has cited point to a world-girdling conspiracy of the grandest imaginable sort. It amounts to a campaign to reduce the entire human race to absolute subjection to the will of a ruling elite, under a rubric of permanent emergency. The current emergency is the COVID-19 virus. But that will soon be yesterday’s news. It will be supplanted in due course, just as COVID-19 supplanted “climate change.”

     The patterns in political rhetoric proceed from a specific intention: the programming of the public mind. Those who repeat them ad nauseam want them lodged in our brains, irremediably connected to the subjects on which they blather. We’re intended to notice them…and in a sense, to not notice them. That is, they want us to internalize the subliminal message – for the phrases Neil Oliver cited, the subhuman nature of the unvaccinated and vaccine-hesitant – while overlooking the significance of the coordinated messaging that’s drowning us in them.

     It is not accidental. It is not without purpose. And it is not innocent.

***

     I could go on, but either you get the idea or you don’t. It took me a while. Like most of my generation, I was immersed in several supposedly noble causes as a young person and only slowly overcame their grip, and the grip of the ubiquitous mantras of the era: “the personal is political” and “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” So if it’s taken a while to strike home with you, don’t feel too bad.

     Don’t feel too bad…but don’t take too much longer.

Jan 11 2022

Formulas

     Enough of the political / current events crap for today. Maybe Linda or the Colonel will ring in with something later. My mind is on matters fictional.

     I’ve ranted several times, here and elsewhere, about the priority I place on originality. Even before the “indie explosion,” original ideas and approaches in novel-length fiction were becoming very rare. The problem remains especially pronounced in my favorite genres: the speculative ones of science fiction and fantasy. But it’s affected other kinds of fiction as well.

     That having been said, in some sense every item of worthwhile fiction proceeds from a formula. According to some reliable authorities, there are only three kinds of plots:

  1. Boy Meets Girl
  2. The Little Tailor
  3. Man Learns Better

     Each of these concerns a category of reasons for a human being to experience growth-inducing change. (Not physical growth; mental, emotional, or spiritual growth. For advice about how to achieve or avert the physical kind, consult your nutritionist.) Since good fiction must be about people experiencing change, every plot must derive from a reason for change:

  1. Change because of interaction with another person or persons;
  2. Change in response to a challenge from the external world;
  3. Change owing to introspection or a breakthrough in understanding.

     Those are the categorical sources of change. There are no others. They correspond to the three shorthand labels above. In a sense, they express the “writers’ formulas” for concocting a plot. But within each category, the variety of events and cause-and-effect relations that fit the formula is effectively infinite.

     Romance fiction, in which I’ve dabbled, has a popular “sub-formula:”

  1. The “meet cute:” the event that touches off the romantic consequences;
  2. Problems arise that threaten the embryonic romance;
  3. The problems are resolved, usually after he and she realize how important they are to one another.

     Two hundred twenty-seven million, four hundred sixteen thousand, and seventy-two romance novels (by actual count) have been written from that sub-formula. Such romances sell pretty well, which suggests that the old publishers’ maxim – “Give us the same, but different” – is a reliable guide to what romance readers want. If you write romance and want to maximize your sales figures, the sub-formula will naturally be of interest to you.

     That’s quite all right, you know. If you intend to make your living as a romance novelist, your sales figures will clearly be immensely important. Very few novelists actually aspire to live in an abandoned packing case and dumpster-dive for their meals. For one thing, it would leave them critically dependent on the kindness of strangers. For another, there aren’t a lot of sturdy packing cases in good neighborhoods, to say nothing of the spotty availability of free WiFi. So in the romance field, formulaic writing, produced at a brisk rate, is at least financially defensible.

     The same sort of logic applies to other genres of fiction. There are sub-formulas galore in fantasy, science fiction, horror, military thrillers, espionage fiction, psychological fiction, and what have you. Moreover, if one keeps an eye on “what’s hot” and is able to pump out three or four books a year, those formulas can translate to a substantial and reliable income. The downside is twofold:

  1. Your readers will eventually notice a certain sameness in your products;
  2. You’ll gradually “groove” yourself: i.e., you’ll find it progressively more difficult to break away from the formula.

     I try consciously to stay away from the formulas and the trends. I prefer to write stories that others won’t – in some cases, that others have never attempted. In consequence, my readership is fairly small. I certainly couldn’t live on my fiction revenues, but as I make a nice living advising (and occasionally toppling) Third World dictatorships, that’s not a concern for me. So I can indulge myself in unique plots, characters, and themes. I can also take my time, which, being a finicky sort who simply can’t abide finding a typo in his own work, conduces to my mental health.

     If you elect to go a similar way, you must be prepared for consequences that will resemble my experiences. But you won’t be bored. Moreover, your readers won’t likely react to your latest by groaning “Oh jeez, not this shit again.” You’ll probably have fun…and you might learn more about yourself through the stories you choose to tell than you could learn any other legal and relatively inexpensive way.

     You might meet some interesting people, too: readers who resonate to your tales, imagine you to be a kindred spirit, and make an effort to contact you. I have, and it’s a great refreshment to the spirit. This heartwarming essay by John C. Wright captures it beautifully.

     Give it some thought. And remember: in this domain as in few others, one’s decisions are usually reversible. (Beware of the temptation to write porn, though.) The formulas will always be there.

Jan 10 2022

We Need Some Music Around Here!

     And so we shall have some:

Last night I dreamed about you
I dreamed that you were older
You were looking like Picasso
With a scar across your shoulder
You were kneeling by the river
You were digging up the bodies
Buried long ago
Michelangelo

Last night I dreamed about you
I dreamed you were a pilgrim
On a highway out alone to find
The mother of your children
Who were still unborn and waiting
In the wings of some desire
Abandoned long ago
Michelangelo

Were you there at Armageddon
Was Paris really burning
Could I have been the one to pull you
From the point of no returning
And did I hear you calling out my name
Or was it forgotten long ago
Michelangelo

Last night I dreamed about you
I dreamed that you were riding
On a blood red painted pony
Up where the heavens were dividing
And the angels turned to ashes
You came tumbling with them to the earth
So far below
Michelangelo

Last night I dreamed about you
I dreamed that you lay dying
In a field of thorns and roses
With a hawk above you crying
For the warrior slain in battle
From an arrow driven deep inside you
Long ago
Michelangelo

Did you suffer at the end
Would there be no one to remember
Did you banish all the old ghosts
As the terms of your surrender
And could you hear me calling out your name
Well I guess that I will never know
Michelangelo

Last night I dreamed about you
I dreamed that you were weeping
And your tears poured down like diamonds
For a love beyond all keeping
And you caught them one by one
In a million silk bandannas that I gave you long ago
Michelangelo

— Emmylou Harris —

     Never has a love song incorporated more beautiful, more evocative imagery.

     If you’ve never heard Harris’s album Red Dirt Girl, treat yourself. There’s never been anything like it.

Jan 10 2022

The Lash Indirect

     I’ve written on several occasions about the Left’s power-tropism, and how it targets organizations to garner more of it. Every “formally organized” organization – i.e., one with by-laws or a charter, a hierarchy, and a procedure for becoming and remaining a member – offers a kind of power to those who can rise within it.

     The power that accrues to the political class through the outright creation of organizations is therefore a subject of importance. And governments are the biggest organizers of all.

     This is on my mind today because of this story:

     The Chicago Teachers Union voted 73% to go on strike last Tuesday, forcing millions of children out of the classroom and back to remote learning….

     Some teachers don’t agree with the strike and want to be back in the classroom teaching.

     However, a Chicago Teachers Union delegate threatened to “report” dissenters who show up for work.

     The CTU is ready to target any dissenters and put them on a “list”

     One of the people in this picture follows this account and I’m curious to see if they’ll see it. pic.twitter.com/ImIBp7Wz4V

     — 16th & 17th District Chicago Police Scanner (@CPD1617Scanner) January 8, 2022

     The purpose of unions is to restrict entry to various occupations, and to compel employers to bargain with the union rather than with individual employees. It’s pure collectivism, but has always been sold to public as a benign measure: a remediation of the “power imbalance” between management and labor. Today private-sector unions are nearly extinct, but public-sector unions are more powerful than ever. The aspiring totalitarians in our political class are happy to use those unions to further their acquisition of power over private citizens.

     A union can expel a member for arbitrary reasons, including disloyalty to the union. An unwillingness to abide by a strike, once voted and passed, constitutes such disloyalty. So the union can deny a dissenter his job, and thus his livelihood. That makes the threat mentioned above more threatening than it might appear. It also makes the Left’s iron-fisted control of public-sector unions a threat to be feared.

     I wonder how America’s unions stand on the subject of mandatory vaccinations for (given their lack of efficacy, they’re hardly “against”) COVID-19? Does any Gentle Reader happen to know?

Jan 09 2022

Immanentizing the Eschaton of the Republic

     “Don’t let them immanentize the eschaton!” – William F. Buckley, 1966

     It has been said, and truly, that whatever the Left accuses the Right of doing is what the Left is already doing, or planning to do in the immediate future. In today’s political battlespace, that has a particularly large force.

     Have a few links:

     Washington state, where Jay Inslee is governor, appears to be the “test case” for whether the Democrats have a Chinaman’s chance to achieve their dream: permanent, unlimited electoral fraud that would keep them in power indefinitely. Jonathan Tobin’s article addresses the subject in a national context, with special mention of the two Senate Democrats standing in the way: Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

     Democrats are pivoting in the new year to a renewed effort to pass something that is likely even dearer to the hearts of their left-wing base: changing voting laws to make it easier for Democrats to win elections. They are tying the “nuclear option” on the filibuster and passage of voting bills to their attempt to turn the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot into a festival aimed at demonizing all Republicans as “insurrectionist” traitors who present a threat to democracy.

     With their cheering section in the corporate media treating “Insurrection Day” observances as if it were a new national holiday and more important than 9/11, they’ve created more leverage that could shift their two holdouts. If it does, that would allow Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote to transform the electoral landscape in a manner that will end federalism for all intents and purposes and give federal bureaucrats unprecedented power to help Democrats win elections.

     The crucial point here is that, unlike “Build Back Better,” Manchin and Sinema have already endorsed both the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the even more far-reaching “Freedom to Vote Act.” So this will be a far sterner test of their principled opposition to a move that would essentially seek to make the Senate, like the House of Representatives, a purely majoritarian institution.

     Add to Tobin’s observations the demise of the U.S. Senator as a representative of his state, its government, and its interests. With the emergence of the Senatorial carpetbagger (e.g. Hillary Clinton in 2008; Mitt Romney in 2016), the linkage between the Senator and the state he “represents” has vanished. All that matters is that the state offers a good prospect of electing the candidate. After he’s securely in office, his interest in the state’s particular concerns is minimal at best. Thus proceeds the federal government’s steady usurpation of powers previously reserved to the states, as is emphasized by the Tenth Amendment.

     But the Left is panicking about the suggestion, penetrating among ordinary Americans, that the 2020 presidential election and probably several Senate seats were polluted by electoral fraud. They don’t want that notion going around. For one thing, there’s been a steady accumulation of evidence for it in several “swing” states. For another, no one in his right mind can believe that Joe Biden, an ambulatory puppet whose mental condition resembles a rutabaga, got 81 million votes when he didn’t even campaign. And for a third, the most popular political figure in the United States at this time is the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.

     That third part really terrifies the Democrats:

     Concerning the third link in the earlier list, there’s a strong correlation between conservative sentiments and a refusal to be vaccinated for the COVID-19 virus. If those persons could be…subtracted from the electoral contest, it would heavily disadvantage Republican candidates in 2022 and 2024. Besides, the unvaccinated are a “control group” for the efficacy and side effects of the vaccines, and we’re making the vaccines look bad! So the Left has two strong reasons to pen us up and shut us up.

     Somehow I doubt that the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch, a well-above-average intelligence group, need a deeper explication de texte of these matters. Let it suffice to say that while it’s the Democrats who are prattling about the Republicans “destroying our democracy,” it’s the Democrats who are actually scheming to do so. So why not do something pleasant with the rest of your Sunday? Read a nice romance, for example?

***

     That’s it for the political / current events crap. Now I must turn to a pressing practical problem: how to get eight ounces of holy water into a four-ounce bottle. Pray for me!

Jan 08 2022

Miscellany

You Have To Wonder Dept.

     Just how blatantly can a Democrat lie and still get away with it? From the Supreme Court oral arguments over federal vaccine mandates:

     Ohio Solicitor General Benjamin Flowers, representing the coalition of GOP-led states opposing the OSHA rules, was quizzed by Justice Sotomayor on the mandates — which she again said was not a mandate.

     She objected to his claim that Omicron represented a new situation than Delta, given its lesser severity in many instances, as well as his claim that vaccines appeared to be less effective at stopping transmission.

     Sotomayor pointed to increased hospitalizations and said that “those numbers show that omicron is just as deadly for the unvaccinated.”

     “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators,” she said.

     According to the Department of Health and Human services, the current national pediatric COVID census is 3,342. Yet as far as I know, none of the other Justices (and of course, none of the attorneys) called Sotomayor out on her falsehood.

     The Democrats keep lying, getting caught, and told so to their faces…and they go on lying. Their last-ditch defense will probably be the “Casablanca gambit:”

Captain Renault: What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?
Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.
Rick: I was misinformed.

     They’ve tried everything else.

***

Still Holding Fast, But Keep Watching.

     Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D, AZ) has surprised many – Left and Right – with recent exhibitions of good sense. Her most recent one, in which she’s accompanied by Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV) is her opposition to a “carve-out” from the filibuster rule so the Democrats can federalize election law:

     On Wednesday, Sinema announced that she is not on board with changing the Senate rules to require a simple majority or a carve-out to the filibuster. Ending or gutting the filibuster “would allow the 50-50-Senate-plus-Kamala to force through any bills the Democrats see fit, even through the dubious process known as “reconciliation.”

     She’s also opposed to the Build Back Better socialist bill.

     I guess Senator Sinema isn’t ready to be a communist yet. That qualifies her as a moderate for Democrats.

     Joe Manchin is also not going along with the carve-out at this time.

     The Democrats’ leadership, however, is not giving up. Yesterday it was reported that Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Oprah Winfrey (!) all called Manchin to urge him to go along with the demolition of the filibuster rule. And “progressive” groups are trying to coerce Sinema into compliance:

     A coalition of progressive organizations on Monday announced the launch of a $1.5 million television ad campaign targeting centrist Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) over her opposition to filibuster reform and a $15 per hour minimum wage.

     Twenty Arizona groups joined Just Democracy, a coalition of more than 40 “Black and Brown-led organizations” promoting democracy reform, in unveiling two hard-hitting ads targeting Sinema.

     The talk about “protecting voting rights” is so much froth and gas. Sinema has defied her Party’s bosses and must be brought back into line. Democrat legislators aren’t supposed to vote their consciences, you see. They’re supposed to do what they’ve been told by their Inner Party comrades. But that’s hardly news.

***

Occasionally, The Truth Gets Out

     …but when it does, it swiftly draws a “correction.” First:

     Then, ever so swiftly afterward:

     To quote a certain Paul “Rhymin’” Simon, “Who do you think you’re foolin’?”

***

You Must Get Vaccinated?

     But why?

     Why are so many vaccinated people getting COVID-19 lately?

     A couple of factors are at play, starting with the emergence of the highly contagious omicron variant. Omicron is more likely to infect people, even if it doesn’t make them very sick, and its surge coincided with the holiday travel season in many places.

     People might mistakenly think the COVID-19 vaccines will completely block infection, but the shots are mainly designed to prevent severe illness, says Louis Mansky, a virus researcher at the University of Minnesota.

     And the vaccines are still doing their job on that front, particularly for people who’ve gotten boosters.

     I added the emphasis.

     Weren’t we told – at the top of Anthony Fauci’s cringe-inducing voice – that the point of the vaccines is to prevent the spread of COVID-19?

     Doublethink is your duty, Comrade. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Oh, and thank and praise Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams!

***

An Optimistic Article.

     Here it is. Read it in its entirety — not because it’s irrefutably true, which is questionable, but because it implies some strategies and tactics for resisting the encroachments of Leviathan. Some that have always been around are easier than ever to use. Others are wholly new, ushered in by the digital revolution. And anyway, we all need a little perking-up now and then.

***

Don’t Fly!

     Unless you can do so by flapping your arms, that is:

     American pilot Greg Pearson is speaking out about a wave of post-injection illness that he says is spreading rapidly throughout the aviation industry.

In a recent interview with “Real America’s Voice,” Pearson revealed that many of his pilot colleagues are “dropping like flies” with what he describes as severe chest pains.

Pearson himself actually had to be rushed to the hospital shortly after getting his “vaccination” for the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) because the injection(s) caused him to develop serious heart problems.

“I went to the ER where they quickly hooked me up to EKG IVs, did blood work quickly and determined that I was in atrial fibrillation,” Pearson said during a segment of the show. “It’s the major cause of stroke.”

“I could have stroked out at 100 feet while trying to land an airplane. I could have just pushed down on that stick before the person next to me could do anything. Whereas it’s all over for a lot of people.”

     I’ve distrusted commercial air travel since September 11, 2001. Today you couldn’t get me onto an airliner at gunpoint. But with Australia having turned into the world’s largest prison camp, there’s nowhere I much want to go anyway.

***

     That’s all for today, Gentle Reader. Have a pleasant weekend, and try to stay positive. (No, not COVID-positive.) For as a dear friend once told me, “It’s always darkest just before it turns pitch black.” (Which, incidentally, was a pretty good movie. But I digress.)

Jan 08 2022

Genius Tucker.

Stating the obvious since whenever:

Jan 07 2022

People’s Republic of Australia.

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