Jan 07 2022
Knives
Circus knife throwers go through a lot of beautiful young assistants in scanty costumes. That’s not because they “miss” all that often; obviously not, or their unique occupation would have been banned long ago. Rather; it’s because the young beauty’s fear that sooner or later the day will come eventually wears her down. She “retires” alive, well, and determined to find a less emotionally trying trade.
I have a feeling that this is what’s happening to the Usurper Administration.
The stories about departures from Vice-Usurper Kamala Harris’s staff are already legion. While the reasons given for those departures are varied, many of them cite hostile working conditions and a lack of appreciation from Harris. It doesn’t surprise me. It’s the no-talents of the world, like Harris, who are most prone to blaming others for their failures.
But give Harris this much: she’s sentient. She’s aware of her surroundings. She reacts consciously rather than needing to have her strings jerked. Rather a lot of knives have been hurled at her for her inability – or unwillingness – to deal with any of the matters placed in her orbit, particularly the crisis at the southern border. There’s a sense in the air that this is wearing her down…and that she’s transmitting the stress to those around her.
I doubt that the staffers around Usurper-in-Chief Joe Biden are receiving the same sort of treatment from their marionette. Biden is barely able to stir the needles on an electroencephalograph. The rumor is that the White House physician was given two EKG charts, one from Biden and one from a bowl of lime Jell-O®, and was unable to tell which was which. At any rate, Biden has given no indication that he’s resisting being told to spew pure shit.
Yesterday’s rant from Biden is evidence that he still does what he’s told, without rebelling. It was tripe liberally seasoned with lies and slanders of a man whose name he’s not fit to speak. It was the sort of emission that’s dropped his credibility to zero and his approval ratings to below Jimmy Carter. Only his boughten allies in the media treated it as serious statecraft. If Biden were even dimly aware of its absurdity – or of the public’s reaction to it – he wouldn’t have emitted any of it.
The public knows he’s a puppet. But that doesn’t bother him. Why should it? He gets to sit in the Oval Office and “play president,” with all the perquisites of that post, which is all he’s wanted or sought since 1987. The sort of knives that are gradually flaying his vice-president don’t affect him. They don’t even register on his awareness, such as it is.
But those are not the only knives of significance.
A rational man of, say, 1945 would look upon our current political situation and reject it immediately. “A federal government knowingly doing its damnedest to destroy the country? C’mon!” he would say. “This is a plot for an absurdist novel, right?” But it is not so. That is our predicament at this time. It doesn’t look as if it will change soon.
And as threatening as it is, it’s not the only knife at our throat. Consider all of these:
- The COVID-19 pseudo-pandemic and the vaccine mandates;
- The decimation of the American workforce;
- Red China’s stranglehold on our electronics industry;
- The truncation of American energy production and exploration;
- The feminization and politicization of our military;
- The supply-chain crisis;
- The paralysis of law enforcement by accusations of “racism;”
- The penetration of the schools by explicitly anti-American doctrines;
- The insane evangelization of “transgenderism;”
- The destruction of trust in the integrity of America’s elections.
That’s ten critical threats to the nation off the top of my head. Any one of them could cut our national throat. I’m sure the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch can think of several others.
How long can we possibly have left? Sooner or later, one or more of those knives will bite flesh.
Private, law-abiding citizens are weary and more. They’re disaffiliating from the public discourse, unwilling to give it any more of their sharply diminished energy. This is not a formula for improvement. Rather, it’s a key to the corridors of power for the very worst men in the world.
Perhaps it had to happen. “States, like men, have their growth, their manhood, their decrepitude and their decay.” (Walter S. Landor) Or we have this poignantly funny formulation from no other than Allan Sherman:
Every government is a geejy bird.
The geejy bird is a strange creature; it flies only once in its lifetime, but that flight is a spectacle to behold. The geejy bird appears suddenly, standing on a limb, young, elegant, proud, and respectable. Surveying the horizon, it spreads its majestic wings and swoops upward in a wide graceful curve, with magnificent wing flappings, and loud glory whoops. When it reaches maximum altitude, it begins its elegant descent, an ever narrowing spiral. It makes smaller and smaller circles in the sky until, suddenly and mysteriously, it vanishes through its own asshole.
No one knows where geejy birds go—probably back where they came from. Unfortunately, when they go, they take us along. We are all subjects of one geejy bird or another; we are born and live and die during one of these mad flights. To be born early in the flight is, at least, exciting; the air sparkles with hopes and dreams, and there are worthwhile things to be done. To board the flight in the soaring stage is next best; there is a fresh wind and a feel of strong wings and a dizzying view of the world.
But what about those of us who are born near the end of the flight? We can’t jump off; the fall would be fatal. In vain we scream, “Turn around, great geejy bird! Turn back in thy flight!” Too late. There is nothing to do but make the best of it. We snap to attention, salute, and begin to sing our stirring anthem. “God Bless Our Geejy Bird!” Together we bravely enter the turd tunnel to oblivion.
Even the friendliest geejy birds share certain boorish instincts with the disgusting ones. The species is fundamentally predatory. Thus, over a 200-year period the American geejy bird slowly gobbled up all the power it could eat, until it began to look suspiciously like the Louis XIV geejy bird.
Sometimes I get so mad at government, I could almost become an anarchist—but not quite. In my opinion, anarchy is nothing more than the embryo of government—an inadvertent way to hatch another geejy bird, and there are enough geejy birds already.
I’ve written about anarchist societies and their inherent instability, too. But that’s merely a special case of a general rule, first formulated in pre-Christian Era China for the benefit of a troubled Emperor: “And this, too, shall pass away.” All the signs of the moment point to a “passing away” of the Republic in the foreseeable future.
What, then, must we do?
“For centuries Galactic civilization has stagnated and declined, though only a few ever realized that. But now, at last, the Periphery is breaking away and the political unity of the Empire is shattered. Somewhere in the fifty years just past is where the historians of the future will place an arbitrary line and say: ‘This marks the Fall of the Galactic Empire.’
“And they will be right, though scarcely any will recognize that Fall for additional centuries.”[Isaac Asimov, Foundation]
The five-word question that ends the preceding section was Lenin’s question to the Bolsheviks in pre-Revolution Russia. (Sometimes quoted as “What is to be done?” but I prefer the active-voice form.) It’s a serious question. If the Republic is fated to “pass away” – indeed, it may have done so already – that does not mean that our communities and our lives as individuals will pass away with it. What constructive actions can individuals or small communities take to lessen the sting of the blade?
It’s not an easy question to answer, for the answer depends heavily on one’s context. I know several people who’ve purchased land and constructed refuges for their families and similarly minded friends. I was invited to join one. I found the prospect appealing, but my personal circumstances forbade it. For myself and others, personal preparations for shortages, the collapse of collectivized services, the demise of established institutions, and an outbreak of unrestrained predation may be the best we can do. But for all of us the key insight is common:
Things are changing,
And not for the better.
Mind you, there is still a small but non-zero probability of righting the ship. We can certainly hope for it…but as has been said too many times, hope is not a strategy. While our prayers are with those laboring to save the Republic, the odds are not.
The ideals of freedom, of individual rights, and of objective justice under easily understood laws can be preserved. But needless to say, that won’t be a role for to those who fall with the Republic. It will be the job of those who outlast it. As Mark Steyn and others have noted, the future, whatever shape it may take, will belong to those who show up for it.
For those who marvel at our ability to stagger from crisis to crisis without experiencing a disaster and think we can continue indefinitely to overload our economic and social system with laws of plunder and legislative nonsense, I will remind you that the man who is guillotined is breathing right up to the moment the blade hits his neck. — “John Galt”
Have a nice day.
Jan 06 2022
I’m Making a List, Checking it Twice…
…gonna find out who’s naughty or nice.
Well, maybe not ‘naughty or nice’. Maybe just:
- A person I can count on to show up, armed, when needed
- A person I can count on to defend me against lies, in public, and not weasel out by suggesting that he “Just didn’t know me, apparently”
- A person who will take me in, without questions, should it be necessary
- A person who will help me escape, fully provisioned, and keep quiet about it, no matter what
- A person who will listen to unpleasant truths, even if it causes them isolation
- A person who will act against their own personal self-interests, on principle
Now, that type of person is rare. Far more common is the half-way supporter:
- Will lend me money or other support, as long as they don’t have to do it openly
- Will look the other way, and not turn me in – may eventually crack, but not before allowing me time to get away
- Will refuse to join in to the chorus of those condemning me
And, then, of course, is the Truly Naughty Type:
- Actively looks for ways to undermine my credibility
- Joins in enthusiastically to the mob’s accusations of wrongthink
- May pretend to support me, then stabs me in the back behind the scenes
- Will put pressure on my family to turn their back on me
- Will pretend concern for my mental state, and be acquiescent with authorities locking me up and drugging me into submission
One means I am using is Lists. For example, some of us use Facebook to keep in contact with family or friends who are not easily reachable otherwise (I do suggest that you reach out to such people, via email or phone, and start replacing that online connection with face to face, or, at least, video calls). If you are in such a position, make lists for your posts:
- One list for everyone – call that list the BDs (Brain-Dead) – on those posts that you use to keep the connection alive. Dumb people doing stupid things, cat videos, cute baby pictures – nothing controversial. A picture of your Christmas tree, a vacation picture, or similar posts. Bland, non-political/cultural, just meant to keep you from being out of the loop on THEIR posts. Watch what these people post, and continually evaluate – are they ready to move to the next level? Or, should I keep a close eye on their activities and be VERY careful not to let them know what I’m doing and who I am associating with.
- The next list is for those people who are generally anxious not to offend others, but who are becoming moderately annoyed/concerned about street violence, illegal immigration, or over-reach by elected officials. At this point, they are merely complaining in mildest terms – they will NOT entertain the idea of serious action, but look for a reformer they can vote for, who will “clean up” things. For these – call that list the Sheeple – and post some slightly edgier material. Post a horrifying video of an older non-minority person getting stomped on. Caption it: What is this world coming to! See how they respond, and make a note of their willingness to question the Woke narrative. If they push back, move them to the BD list. If they respond favorably, continue nudging them, slowly and in small steps, along the continuum of the Red-Pilled People (RPP List). At any time, you will find that a few of them are ready for the next step. That’s where messaging comes in, with the ability to keep them on track by suggesting videos (again, don’t dump Alex Jones on them – Baby Steps, remember).
- The Red-Pilled People (RPP List). These are the newly-awakened people, who are seeing all of the lies that surround them, and have not learned to keep much of it to themselves. They will need to be able to talk at length; listen and learn about their progress. Suggest some books to read, and videos to watch. Help steer them towards useful goals, and non-nutty channels. Don’t lose them to a rabbit-hole of Illuminati discussion.
- The Last List is the NLDs – Non-Leftist Dissidents, and that is where you post links and memes that they can share with their lists. The goal of the group is to use their contacts to make incremental progress in moving them, from Clueless to Aware. It may take years (what the hell else do we have to do with our spare time?).
- Don’t neglect building your local support group (use a similar strategy with the non-virtual contacts, feeling your way slowly). Listening is MORE important than talking. Take advantage of those times when you meet, one on one (for example, in Neighborhood Watch patrols), and help them open up. Most people are not accustomed to being listened to; many will spew their thoughts like water through a firehose, should you show interest in learning what their thinking is on various topics.
Jan 06 2022
Anarcho-Tyrannical America, The Continuing Story
It’s beyond the possibility of dispute today.
Consider the following short video:
Stephen Miller of America First Legal has stated the matter perfectly. But it’s not just medical care that’s at risk:
Manhattan’s new DA has ordered his prosecutors to stop seeking prison sentences for hordes of criminals and to downgrade felony charges in cases including armed robberies and drug dealing, according to a set of progressive policies made public Tuesday.
In his first memo to staff on Monday, Alvin Bragg said his office “will not seek a carceral sentence” except with homicides and a handful of other cases, including domestic violence felonies, some sex crimes and public corruption.
A “carceral sentence” means a term in in jail or prison. Bragg is literally forbidding Manhattan prosecutors to send lawbreakers, including felons, to prison. Why not?
Assistant district attorneys must also now keep in mind the “impacts of incarceration,” including whether it really does increase public safety, potential future barriers to convicts involving housing and employment, the financial cost of prison and the racial disparities over who gets time, Bragg instructed.
So in Bragg’s view, the “impacts of incarceration” on convicted felons’ prospects for future housing and employment are more important than punishment, deterrence, and the safety of the law-abiding public. Poor criminals! Never mind that we have honorably discharged veterans – thousands of them – who can’t find work. Never mind that a lot of those veterans are homeless. The criminals come first!
And it’s not just New York, Gentle Reader:
Arlington County, Virginia, recently introduced a proposal for a new grading system, based on the idea of equity, that would allow an unlimited number of retakes on assignments, ban extra credit, and would block grading on homework assignments, Fox News reported on Thursday. In response, numerous teachers from Arlington slammed the proposal, saying that it would essentially give children a free pass and dramatically reduce the quality of education in the county.
Proponents of the new system claim that having certain standards — like having late penalties in education — often harms poorer children who may not have access to resources necessary to complete assignments on time.
“Additionally, it has been suggested that students should not be graded on homework assignments because the fear of making mistakes will have a negative impact on their learning process,” Fox News added.
Parents are already being prevented from learning what goes on in the classroom, or having any say in it. And without grades, they won’t have the ghost of a chance of knowing whether their children are learning. They’ll have to take their teachers’ word for it – the very same teachers who’ve been demanding that a day or two of each school week be made “remote learning!” Showing up at the schoolhouse is just too much like work!
No, you mustn’t expect a reduction in your school taxes.
As I muttered to the C.S.O. a little while ago, the Establishment protects its own:
[D]id you even know that the FBI found [the late Jeffrey] Epstein’s cache of sex tapes labeled “(name of underage girl) + (name of VIP)” — and then lost them?
Immediately after Epstein’s arrest at Teterboro Airport in July 2019, the FBI executed a search warrant on his New York mansion. Following a daylong search, agents discovered a hidden safe in the closet of a fifth-floor dressing room, used a saw to break into it, and found an enormous collection of photos of naked girls, and CDs of the girls apparently having sex with influential men.
Then, the agents left — abandoning the photos and CDs, with Epstein’s employees free to wander about the place. As Kelly Maguire, FBI special agent in charge of the search, explained during Maxwell’s trial, they only had a warrant to search the house, but not to remove evidence — evidence at the heart of the entire sex trafficking scheme.
It didn’t occur to Maguire to leave a single agent behind to guard the CDs? How about the intern who just gets coffee?
You’ll never guess what happened next.
The CDs and photographs disappeared. By the time the FBI returned with a new warrant — four days later — to remove the CDs and photos, they were gone. Later, after a few phone calls, Epstein’s lawyer, Richard Kahn, “returned” the cache in two suitcases. I had no idea they were important! I was just tidying up!
Were the videos tampered with? Were all of the photos returned? Who knows!
Of course, you already know that the transcripts of uber-pimp Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial have been sealed. Mustn’t let the names of her “clients” get befouled with accusations of pedophilia and rape! Especially not accurate, documented ones.
And while all this is going on, let’s have a look at the Justice Department’s top priority:
Attorney General Merrick Garland on #January6th: “The actions we have taken thus far will not be our last. The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law…” pic.twitter.com/l0qbBKfQT3
— CSPAN (@cspan) January 5, 2022
On January 6, 2021:
- The evidence is strong that the “riot” was fomented by FBI plants in the crowd.
- The intrusion into the Capitol Building was facilitated by the Capitol police.
- The only deaths that took place that day were caused by the Capitol police.
- The intrusion was over soon after it began. Damage to property was minor.
- Not one of the “rioters” was found in possession of a weapon.
But it was “an assault on our democracy,” eh hoser? While the flagrant vote fraud, ballot-box-stuffing, ballot harvesting, and other hijinks of the election the previous November – the stuff that crowd in D.C. was there to protest – deserve no attention? We should just “move on?”
I refuse to insult my Gentle Readers’ intelligence by stating the unavoidable conclusion for them.
Given all the above and much more, it’s my conclusion, pace Stephen Miller, that America as founded is no more. The Constitution of the United States is a historical relic without functional import. We are now a Society of Status, in which personal identity and connections determine to whom the law applies.
If you think I’m wrong, tell me so… but with evidence and reasoning. Convince me!
Jan 05 2022
The Devolution Of The American Female
Among the truly stupendous lies of the decades behind us, this one is near the top:
You Can Have It All.
It’s shorthand, of course. “All” is an abbreviation for “all the fulfillments and satisfactions known to Mankind, without limit and without cost.” It was one of the inducements for young American women to align themselves with the feminist Left: the force that strove to persuade them that the reason they didn’t “have it all” is / was “the patriarchy.” Men, it seems, had enslaved women as a group and enslaved them to a pattern of life that would limit them irreversibly.
That nonsense is still very much a part of America’s public discourse. A lot of women have accepted it unquestioningly. The consequences of that belief range from disillusion and disappointment to the destruction of the family, women’s health, and the social order that protects children from adults’ caprice.
I shan’t go into my usual fulminations today. I have too much to do to rant at length this morning, and anyway. regular Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch, V1.0 and V2.0, have already read enough of them. But I will provide a few links:
- On Feminism, Power, and Groups
- The Unrepealable Law Strikes
- Marital Instabilities
- “Accidental” Abuse of Husband
- The Terminus of Lies
- An Outcropping in the Gender Wars
- Do Feminists Have a Point?
- Love in the Time of Combat
- “Retro-Sexism”
- Taming the She-Beast
- A “Divorce” Story
I could provide many, many more, but those should suffice.
Pay particular attention to the last link in that list, Gentle Reader. It’s the perfect illustration of how the Gospel of “You can have it all” has ruined marital relations, childbearing and child-rearing, and the overall stability of American society — including the stability of the workplace. You would think that something that destructive would be rejected with prejudice once it’s shown its colors. Why, then, does it still afflict us?
Possibly for the reasons delineated here. Yes, it’s an excerpt from a novel, but try matching it to reality. How much divergence is there, really?
I’ll be back to this, probably tomorrow. Have a nice day.
Jan 05 2022
Living in the Matrix Times 100.
FURTHERMORE, we have also been living through the most massive, globally coordinated propaganda and censorship campaign in the history of the human race. All major mass media and the social media technology companies have coordinated to stifle and suppress any discussion of the risks of the genetic vaccines AND/OR alternative early treatments.
“What if the largest experiment on human beings in history is a failure? A report from an Indiana life insurance company raises serious concerns.” By Robert W Malone MD, MS, Who Is Robert Malone?, 1/2/22.
Jan 04 2022
The Transplaining Continues
“Mansplaining” is a word that resonates with many women. It refers the experience of a man deciding to “clarify” a technical topic to a woman, usually in overly simplified terms, based on his assumption that – being a WOMAN – she just wouldn’t understand. It can be infuriating to women in STEM fields, and sometimes creates a comic moment, as writer Rebecca Solnit described (a man explained the content of her book in simplified terms, not realizing that she was the author).
Now, a lot of that tendency in men stems from their long experience having to simplify their area of study or work to people who truly are clueless about any aspect of it. After a while, they assume that a woman will generally have little understanding of their work, and make an effort to explain it in terms they might be able to relate to.
So, not evil, just not taking the time to check on background before launching into a soliloquy. I’ve occasionally experienced it, and can be annoyed (once refusing to buy a computer from a guy who was informed I was the person purchasing it, who addressed his spiel at my husband – who really didn’t know much about tech specs).
The one that I find the most insulting are those who – having recently ‘transitioned’ from male persona to female – decide to lecture me about being a woman. THEIR understanding about that status so recently assumed is considered the Gold Standard on Feminity.
Bitch, PLEASE!
I’m fine with someone talking about THEIR personal experiences in navigating the world in female appearance, as opposed to their previous experience as a man. That draws upon their own areas of understanding.
I’m not at all happy to be TOLD what women think, feel, or experience, by someone whose experiences are relatively recent, and don’t include the norms of female body shape and size, muscular weakness, puberty changes, menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause. Not every woman experiences all of these, but most have some knowledge of most of them.
And, contrary to stereotype, not all women have similar emotional, mental, or academic functioning. We’re human, and, like all humans, we are BOTH a product of our genetics and our environment. And, for that matter, of our time period and the norms of that time.
Jan 04 2022
The Search For Exculpations
It continues.
I admire Maura Dowling. She’s done terrific work at her site for many years now, which has put her on my twice-daily reading list. Besides, she’s one of the only two Long Island bloggers in the Dextrosphere, which makes her special indeed. So the following should not be interpreted as an attack on her, merely a disagreement.
The following comes from one of her recent pieces:
I believe a lot of people on the left are moral and decent people so why are they doing this? It leads me to the conclusion that it is a mass psychosis brought about by countless 24/7 lies, propaganda, and hate. Mass psychosis is a phenomenon known throughout recent history.
The mass-psychosis thesis is being advanced in several quarters. Is there evidence for it? No, there is not. Indeed, there is powerful evidence against it. A psychosis sustained even for a few weeks is massively disabling, to the point of justifying imposed, round-the-clock supervision on the sufferer to prevent harm to him or others. Psychosis sustained for years, in an individual trusted to run and sustain his own life without a minder, is unknown.
The mass-psychosis thesis is a convenience for conservatively-inclined bien-pensants. It allows them to excuse a terrible phenomenon, a thing that horrifies all of us in the Right. And it should horrify us, for it represents the widest and most complete moral-ethical default in the history of this country.
Ask yourself a probing question: If you were confronted by ravening hatred of you in some arbitrary individual, founded upon easily disproved assertions, which explanation would you prefer:
- That your hater actively, consciously wishes that you would come to harm;
- That your hater is psychotic, and just needs some help to return to reality.
Mind you, I’ve asked which explanation you would prefer, not which one is correct. The great majority of Americans, in a politics-free context, would prefer the second explanation – not because it’s more likely to be true (it isn’t), but because we have become unwilling to admit the existence and the power of evil.
Yet there is evil, and it has been hard at work in our politics.
In The Shockwave Rider, one of John Brunner’s later novels, he has his protagonist Nicky Haflinger conclude that the essence of evil is regarding other human beings as things, of importance only in how they can be manipulated to one’s advantage or forced out of one’s way. That is the core of the Left’s Weltanschaaung, the essence of its thinking. There is no innocence in it – no way in which it can claim to be pursuing morally justifiable ends. It can only attain its goals by treating men as rightless objects to be manipulated.
Now, there may be a few Americans who vote for the Democrats’ agenda witlessly, without thought for what it implies for Americans generally. There may be a few who vote Left because they’ve been successfully deluded about the Left’s aims and how its proposals and demands point toward those aims. And no doubt there are some who do so because their fathers and grandfathers did so. But given the weight of the evidence before us, how forgivable are such persons? Don’t they have the same moral responsibility to others as do we in the Right? Are they excused from the obligation to think about the implications of the measures they approve…or to answer for the consequences, once they’ve become visible? For such are the implications of a diagnosis of “psychotic.”
After them, consider the larger number who have embraced hatred – who actively wish harm to those who disagree with them, i.e.: us. To them, we are not individuals with rights, but things upon whom they’re free to splatter their venom. Ultimately, we are to be forcibly “re-educated”…or should we resist them further, removed from the body politic by any means expedient. Are they psychotic or evil?
There’s the comfortable explanation for which no evidence exists, and the horrifying one consistent with everything we’ve seen and heard for five years and more. Choose according to your reason, not your tastes.
Allow me to present, once again, my favorite snippet from my favorite Neal Stephenson novel:
“You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of climate, you are not allowed to criticise others — after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?…
“Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others’ shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all the vices. For, you see, if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour — you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all the political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.
“You wouldn’t believe the things they said about the original Victorians. Calling someone a Victorian in those days was almost like calling them a fascist or a Nazi….
“Because they were hypocrites… the Victorians were despised in the late Twentieth Century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves — they took no moral stances and lived by none.”
“So they were morally superior to the Victorians — ” Major Napier said, still a bit snowed under.
“– even though — in fact, because — they had no morals at all.”
“We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy,” Finkle-McGraw continued. “In the late Twentieth Century Weltanschaaung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception — he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course. most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it’s a spirit-is willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing.”
“That we occasionally violate our own moral code,” Major Napier said, working it through, “does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.”
“Of course not,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It’s perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved — the missteps we make along the way — are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power.”
It could hardly be put better. Humans are naturally censorious. It proceeds from the desire to feel superior. You cannot feel superior to others without cause. That powers the search for a justification for one’s censorious inclinations: the fuel of an immoral politics.
An immoral politics – one that runs roughshod over the rights of those who disagree with it – is evil. The hatred it engenders is the best possible evidence.
An early edition of Dale Carnegie’s famous tome How to Win Friends and Influence People contains a piercing summation about the human desire to feel superior to others:
Do you feel that you are superior to the Japanese? The truth is that the Japanese consider themselves far superior to you. A conservative Japanese, for example, is infuriated at the sight of a white man dancing with a Japanese lady.
Do you consider yourself superior to the Hindus in India? That is your privilege; but a million Hindus feel themselves so superior to you that they wouldn’t befoul themselves by condescending to touch food that your heathen shadow had fallen across and contaminated.
Do you feel yourself superior to the Eskimos? Again, that is your privilege; but would you really like to know what the Eskimo thinks of you? Well there are a few native hoboes among the Eskimos, worthless bums who refuse to work. The Eskimos call them “white men”—that being their utmost term of contempt.
Each nation feels itself superior to other nations. That breeds patriotism—and wars.
The unvarnished truth is that every man you meet feels superior to you in some way….[A]nd the pathetic part of it is that frequently those who have the least justification for a feeling of achievement bolster up their inner feeling of inadequacy by an outward shouting and tumult and conceit that are offensive and truly nauseating.
I consider it noteworthy that that passage was removed from later editions of Carnegie’s book.
If you feel yourself superior to others, it’s a short step to regarding them as things to be manipulated. You can convince yourself that all manner of force and fraud are justified in doing so, because they’re means to “good ends:” your ends. And you will look on with approval when others – others who agree with you, of course – do the same.
We must cultivate the inclination opposite to our natural desire to feel superior – humility – precisely because it’s unnatural.
Catholics are taught early on that evil is real, and that there is an animate force that promotes it at every opportunity. That force – Satan – exploits such opportunities by pandering to Mankind’s weaknesses, most notably our appetites, our propensity for excusing our own faults, and our desire to feel superior to others.
As with God, Satan’s work is often furthered by human wills and hands: his agents among us. Many such men are in politics. No small number of them have risen to the captaincy of nations.
One of the foulest of the corruptions worked upon Christianity these past few decades has been the imperceptible but steady nudging of evil out of our conceptions and teachings. Of course, if evil is unreal, then there cannot possibly be an animate evil force, a Satan. But to refuse to see evil it is not to make it go away. It certainly won’t protect or defend us from its agents.
It is mandatory that we oppose evil: that we recognize it when we see it, label it accurately, refuse to excuse it, whether on utilitarian grounds or any other, and act against it swiftly and resolutely. That removes the exculpation of “mass psychosis” from the sphere of acceptable reactions, for that would take the matter “out of our hands.” Surely we cannot be blamed for not curing the demented when there’s a perfectly good psychiatry industry to see to it for us.
Evil, on the other hand, is something we can all fight – and we must do so.
Who can protest and does not is an accomplice in the act. – The Talmud
Jan 04 2022
Sorry bastards MXXXIV.
Dr. Peter McCullough:
“Lots of messaging on the vaccine, but zero mentioning on treatment, none. And it’s been from the very beginning. There is a theme here, I hope everyone’s starting to get the theme. There is zero effort, interest, promotion, or care about early treatment, people who are sick with COVID-19,” said McCollough.
“But there is a complete and total focus on people who don’t have COVID-19 and giving them a vaccine.”[1]
What the swine want, they push relentlessly. Like closing the border. It won’t happen because they want it open. If border jumpers voted Republican, the border would be hermetically sealed by midnight tonight.
Notes
[1] “Dr. McCollough Says Outpatient Treatments For COVID-19 Have Been Suppressed.” By Jan Jekielek, ZeroHedge, 1/3/22 (emphasis removed).
Jan 03 2022
The Truth WILL Hurt
At least, it will hurt those who Live in The Lie.
Look, you who do Live a Life of Lies, will find this post – disturbing. That is exactly why you need to click on the above link.
Look, anyone who functions in some sort of group – family, friends, work ‘friends’, neighborhoods – all need to ‘shade the truth’ on occasion. That need can range from the trivial (“Gosh, your homemade pie is just great” – when it really is dry, overseasoned, and practically inedible) to the serious (I have NO idea why that person is calling me! No, of COURSE I’m not having an affair!). Sometimes, despite knowing that lying is a sin, we justify our duplicity (A spouse asks “Do these pants make my butt look big?” – not TECHNICALLY a lie to say, “Why, no, the pants don’t make your butt look large.” That would be sidestepping the actual reality – “It’s not the pants’ fault, it’s that extra 50 pounds of lard you’ve added to your rump.”)
But most of us try to avoid those untruths that aren’t just a sop to social conventions. We may have some sleepless nights, as we wrestle with the Big Questions, like, can I risk losing my job by outing my boss or coworker’s financial shenanigans? Or, should I put that Trump or MAGA sticker on my car/house, and risk being ostracized? And, just how honest do I need to be with the IRS?
We may choose to provide ourselves with a relatively stress-free home environment. We may choose to leave dissent outside of the workplace. Or, we may choose to confront the partisans head-on.
Often we don’t. We pretend that we aren’t “on the other side”. We fail to stick up for our right to disagree, and, worse, we fail to support those who are under attack.
Your choice.
But, the Larry Correia post is brutal in laying out the reality. He is straightforward in calling those who choose not to see the Left’s abuses Cowards. He is even more brutal about calling them out for failing to openly defend those who are under attack.
Jan 03 2022
Threatening Or Heartening?
I’m in the habit of sending out “Happy New Year” notes to my friends, cordial acquaintances, and other regular correspondents. Those who reply usually just echo the wish, perhaps with a few words of personal news attached. However, this year one friend, whom I’ll call Smith, included in his response that he’d decided to become a Christian. As he and I had not previously discussed faith or religious affiliation, it took me by surprise.
Of course, it was a very good surprise. I congratulated Smith and wished him all the best… then sat back and contemplated the development in a wider context. You see, Smith is extremely bright. Moreover, he’s a recognized authority in a difficult field. One does not lightly introduce subjects that depend on unfalsifiable premises in conversations with such a person. It cross-cuts the mindset – and on this I speak with authority.
Now, it’s among the unquestioned maxims of our time that religious solicitors – the sort who come to your door uninvited and seek to involve you in conversations about faith, religion, and religious practices – are to be shunned as pests. Mind you, I find them annoying too. But they are motivated, in the main, by a sincere belief that they have something of value to offer you – and at no cost to you. They mean well, even if their methods are intrusive and somewhat presumptuous. Indeed, no one could “mean better.”
View this brief video from Penn Jillette, a notable atheist. You may have seen it before. If not, please take the time:
The most striking thing in there is Jillette’s announcement that he disrespects religious people who don’t proselytize. It’s a radical departure from the common attitude, but Jillette is known for charting his own course in all things. When I first saw it, it put me in mind of a story my dear friend Duyen told me, about the early days of her husband-to-be’s courtship of her:
Yesterday I visited with a new friend who’s rapidly becoming a very close friend: Matt, the gun store manager I met on my “armament shopping trip” a few weeks ago. He’s a little younger than I am — he’ll be 26 just about as I turn 34 — but he has a hard sense about him that a lot of older people could stand to learn from. Maybe that comes from working around “deadly weapons” and the people who love them. I couldn’t say. But I really enjoy the spin he puts on some of the stuff we talk about. (I also love that he has no fear about driving into New York City on the spur of the moment.)
Matt has no religion. I, of course, told him that I’m a practicing Catholic…just yesterday evening, for the first time. In the process of getting to know someone who might become really important to you, you can’t just blurt out the most important stuff about you; you have to choose the right time and setting. You also have to work up enough nerve, for some things at least. Religion is one of them.
Matt was curious. He wanted to know more. Not in a prosecuting-attorney sort of way, either. He really, truly wanted my reasons. He wasn’t about to let me get away with a synopsis, either; he wanted the whole story. So I did my best to give it to him.
I had no problem explaining the core of Christian doctrine — hey, we sum the whole thing up in one prayer — and no problem with the basic rituals of Roman Catholicism and why we practice them. But how do you explain conversion? It’s an internal process. It involves things no one else can see, hear, or feel — what Fran calls private knowledge. Talking about it can make you sound like some kind of nut.
I tried to avoid it, but Matt wouldn’t let me. I became curious about the intensity of his interest, but I kept all my questions to myself and just did what I could.
He took it seriously. That surprised me more than anything else. He didn’t pull a face. he didn’t act as if I was someone who had to be handled very carefully. He accepted what I said as a truthful narration of what I’d experienced.
After a while, he said, “Do you think that happens to everyone? Because it hasn’t happened to me.”
I tried flippancy. “Well, you’re not dead yet.”
He scowled. “Look, if this is a good thing, then it ought to be available to everyone. Catholics don’t believe in predestination like the Calvinists, do they?”
That set me back. “No, of course not.”
“Then I want to know why you and not me,” he said.
Oh boy, I thought, now I have to play theologian.
“Look,” I said, “I’m not a missionary, I’m just a believer. I wouldn’t dream of trying to convert you.”
“Why not?”
I was punch-drunk by then. “Well, most people consider it impolite to press their religion on other people.”
And this twenty-five-year-old man who sells steel, lead, and gunpowder for a living, who’s surrounded six days a week by people whose every third word is obscene, who described the household he grew up in as “a demilitarized zone,” said to me, “That’s their problem. If this is good stuff, I want in. And if you believe it’s good stuff, you should be out there trying to share it with others. Especially as it costs you nothing.”
Wow.
And so we begin.
Just in case it isn’t entirely clear yet, I’m of the opinion that the world needs more sincere Christians. (The Westboro Baptists and such aside, denomination hardly matters. Smith isn’t becoming a Catholic, but so what? All Christians profess the same fundamental faith. All pledge to adhere to an Ethic based on the Ten Commandments and the two Great Commandments of Matthew chapter 22.) America is in the direst imaginable need of such Christians. So how do we go about increasing their number, in a world that reacts negatively to explicit attempts to proselytize?
Smith cited the examples of his Christian friends. Matt was moved by Duyen’s own faith and its promises. But neither case is typical.
Early in The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis cites another case, which his demon-protagonist Screwtape was at pains to thwart:
I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum. One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment. Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years’ work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch.
The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion (you know how one can never quite overhear What He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been His line for when I said “Quite. In fact much too important to tackle it the end of a morning,” the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added “Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind”, he was already half way to the door. Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true. He knew he’d had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about “that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic.”
Such reactions against “the aberrations of mere logic” are commonplace today. You can’t discuss Thomas Aquinas’s discourse on the necessity of an uncreated Creator with a man whose attention is on his stomach, his bills, or the traffic noise from the street outside. It is quite possible that the modern world is simply too busy for argument to be useful. Besides, how many people are interested in logical argument today, whether in this context or any other?
Today, evangelization must be by example.
There’s a story about Francis of Assisi, one of the greatest of the saints of medieval times:
Saint Francis of Assisi was known for his embrace of poverty and utter simplicity. His evangelism was largely by example. An illustrative story about his style of evangelism concerns a brother in a monastic order where Francis had taken lodging. One day the young monk begged Francis for permission to accompany him on a day’s preaching. The saint assented, and they went forth from the monastery at daybreak.
First they came upon a group of men laboring in the field. Francis said “Let us work beside them,” which they did, in silence, for several hours before passing onward.
Next they came upon a village where they found a group deep in prayer. Francis said “Let us pray with them,” which they did, in silence, for another hour before passing onward.
Late in the day they entered a village where a wedding celebration was in progress. Francis said “Let us rejoice with them,” which they did. At last dusk was upon them and it was time to return to the monastery.
When they had returned to the monastery, the young monk said to Francis, “Brother, was it not your intention to preach today? Yet we spoke not a word of preachment from departure to return.”
Francis smiled. “Brother,” he replied, “this day we have done nothing but preach, from dawn till dusk.”
This tale might be the origin of Francis’s exhortation to “At all times preach the Gospel. When necessary, use words.” Perhaps it was easier in Francis’s time. Even so, the method remains applicable. Ask Smith.
There’s a lot of loose talk about “root causes” for this and that. Most of it comes from persons determined to avoid all consideration of proximate causes. Proximate causes – the decisions and actions of the people who actually do things – are absolutely unarguable. Under a doctrine of human free will, they’re the only thing that really matter…which is why the “root causes” fans prefer to avoid the subject altogether.
Consider the rioting, vandalism, looting, and other violence that’s afflicted America’s cities these past two years. It wasn’t perpetrated by ghosts, aliens, or werewolves, but by human beings: mostly young men. Didn’t those persons possess free wills? Didn’t they choose to go rampaging, looting, and destroying? What about the perpetrators of the “smash and grab” robberies that have been in the news of late?
The “root causes” fan waves those questions aside. He’d rather talk abstractions: lack of opportunity; poor upbringing; inadequate schooling; what have you. Never mind that plenty of young men afflicted by some or all of those conditions have chosen not to go rampaging, looting, and destroying. Why not? Why haven’t they joined their coevals? Don’t they want to be “in with the in crowd?”
A sincere Christian would not go rampaging, looting, and destroying. It would violate his pledge to the Christian Ethic. But without the Ethic, what would deter him? Certainly not the impossibility of the thing; the rioters and “smash-and-grabbers” of our time have clearly demonstrated how possible it is. So why not join the gang for fun and profit?
As I’ve written before, the countervailing forces to such behavior are:
- Fear of the potential consequences of lawbreaking (e.g., being shot down while committing a crime);
- Fear of punishment as applied by the secular justice system;
- Fear of the opinions of others.
All three of those deterrents have been badly weakened. The steady assault on the right to defend oneself, one’s loved ones, and one’s property with lethal force is eroding #1. The “rehabilitation over deterrence” philosophy has eaten deeply into #2. The “what’s right is what’s right for you” thesis has all but destroyed #3. As a result, an increasing number of Americans have adopted “whatever I can get away with” as their standard.
The recent trial of Kyle Rittenhouse is a data point of importance. The prosecution strained logic and evidence completely out of proportion to convict that young man for daring to defend himself against murderous thugs – two convicted criminals and a domestic abuser – who had already attacked him. The huge number of hardened criminals being granted clemency, suspended sentences, or paroles without any substantial justification is a forest of data points. Yet the judges who commit those crimes against public safety preen themselves for their “compassion.” Of the diminution of the force of opinion, it’s unnecessary to speak.
I trust no more need be said on that subject.
This is getting to be quite the diatribe. I can’t be perfectly sure I’ve accomplished my mission in all its particulars. But I trust my central thesis is clear:
The remedy for nearly all “social problems”
Is a return to sincere Christianity.
Indeed, it might be pointless to discuss any other course. Certainly it’s pointless to look to government, for governments fatten on problems. They propose “solutions” that increase their power, regardless of whether they have even a cosmetic curative effect. (Of course they reject all suggestions that they’re the cause of the problem.) If this hasn’t become clear over the two years immediately behind us, I can’t imagine what would make it so.
So, Gentle Reader, I’ll be returning to this line of reasoning frequently in 2022. I want a return to sincere Christianity. I want the social order that prevailed when the overwhelming majority of us were Christians, sincere about it, and willing to castigate and punish persons who violate the Ethic. I want all talk of “root causes” to be dismissed with prejudice and proximate causes – the conscious decisions of individual actors – to be all that matters, just as it was when we learned the Ten Commandments at our mothers’ knees.
For now, turn from the words of Francis Porretto and contemplate the methods of Francis of Assisi. I hope they appeal to you, for I have none better. But note that they begin with your behavior: your adherence to the Ten Commandments and the two Great Commandments. As Albert Jay Nock said, the only way to improve society is to present it with a single improved member: yourself.
May God bless and keep you all.
Jan 02 2022
Crisis: The Agar Of Leviathan
[A repost from four years ago. It came to mind when I read this John Hinderaker piece. History might not be perfectly cyclical, but its “greatest hits” surely do get a lot of replays. — FWP]
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before. – Rahm Emanuel
Crisis-mongering has a long history:
If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.
With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.
[Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933]
The underlying idea being promoted is unpalatable in its raw form: “You can’t help yourselves. I can help you. Just surrender your rights to me, and all will be well.” If it were presented that way, very few Americans would go for it. We’ve been too deeply steeped in the traditions of limited government and individual rights.
Wait, what did I just say? If that’s so, then how has the federal government grown so large over the century past? Is it possible that when convinced that a crisis is upon us, we’re just as susceptible to the siren call of dictatorship as the people of any other land?
Maybe so:
“Even the iron hand of a national dictator is preferable to a paralytic stroke.” – Alf Landon, governor of Kansas and 1936 candidate for President, in a letter to newly elected president Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933
“If this nation ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now.” – David Reed, United States Senator of Pennsylvania, on the floor of the Senate, 1933
Those two gentlemen were Republicans. One of them ran against FDR in 1936. Ponder that in your spare moments.
Francis Turner at L’Ombre de l’Olivier notes – and makes absolutely plain – the most disturbing pattern ever to intrude on American political discourse:
Step 1: Something must be done.
Step 2: This is something.
Step 3: Therefore we must do this.
Let that sink in for a moment. Doesn’t every call for gun control over the past hundred years conform perfectly to it? Doesn’t the current drive to ban “assault weapons,” afloat on the blood of the victims in Parkland, Florida, conform perfectly? What does it suggest about the attitude of the gun-controllers – people-controllers, really – toward the American electorate? And what does it suggest, given that the Democrats propose the same anti-freedom strokes after each and every “crisis,” about the true, covert motives of the American Left?
It’s time we drew the moral.
I’ve done this before, but now is a good time to repeat it: I cannot recommend Professor Robert Higgs’s superb book Crisis and Leviathan highly enough. The amount of information and insight Higgs compresses into a reasonably compact treatment, written for the intelligent layman, is simply stunning. To the best of my knowledge, no other scholar has approached the thesis Higgs advances – i.e., that the general perception of a crisis creates the best possible grounds for the expansion of State power – in an organized fashion. Yet once presented with Higgs’s lucidity, it becomes, if you’ll pardon the choice of terms, too obvious to be overlooked afterward.
Crises as promoted by politicians and their handmaidens are seldom real. That is, they seldom threaten as greatly or as widely as the promoters would have you believe. But with the media as assistants, they can often convince enough persons to believe…and the media loves nothing better than a crisis. Crises sell column-inches and air time. Indeed, they’re even better for circulation than sex crimes.
Some years ago, a phrase appeared in our political lexicon that achieved considerable resonance: compassion fatigue. Americans, we were told, had grown tired from being harangued about feeling sorry for every group the Left chose to promote as “oppressed” or “underprivileged.” That might have been the case, but it didn’t cause an appreciable reduction in Americans’ charitable action, and none at all in the size, extent, and expense of the welfare state. Though I hoped otherwise, no reductions in government-modulated welfarism occurred.
Perhaps it’s time to start promoting the concept of crisis fatigue: the reaction to being overburdened with shouts that “something must be done.” It has a sound psychological basis: a man overloaded with fear ceases to act on his fears; he becomes enervate. Further attempts to flog him with the lash of crisis have no effect…at least, none that would repay the effort. Might it be possible to elicit a degree of crisis fatigue deliberately, by a shift in rhetoric? If the effort were successful, might we provoke, at long last, Arthur Herzog’s recommended remedy for political overreach: the mass yawn?
Food for thought.
Jan 02 2022
Pearls of expression.
From one of the best articles you will read about the Covid-19 hysteria and the real agenda of those creating it:
In the [unreal] Metaverse, a public health crisis caused by a virus has zero medical advice given out to people, but just a relentless barrage of talk about cases, hospitalisations and deaths, with all knowledge of effective early treatments ruthlessly suppressed.
Annnd:
In the Metaverse, the injection of billions of lipid nanoparticles containing mRNA, which has never been injected into people before, which tricks the cells into allowing it to enter, which then causes billions of cytotoxins to be produced in cells throughout every organ, and which the manufacturers have indemnity but no proper safety data for, is hailed as a saviour. In the real world, this is the most dangerous, reckless medical experiment ever performed on masses of people without their knowledge of what they are being given, and the long-term consequences could be unimaginably disastrous, as Professor Sucharit Bhakdi explains in this horrifying warning.
Both quotes from:
“Reflections On Another Year Of Covidian Lies & How The Truth Will Ultimately Prevail.” By Rob Slane, ZeroHedge, 1/2/22.
Jan 01 2022
Alert! Alert!
They killed him! The wisest man on Earth, a godlike being with superior intelligence who has absolute evidence and proof of his theory. He could not have expired from any natural cause. He’s been taken from us by the Worldwide Single-Day-Time Conspiracy!
To gauge the immeasurable height, width, and depth of what we have lost, go here. But try not to mourn too loudly. They might be listening!
(Just kicking 2022 off on a high note. Laughter is the best medicine, you know!)
Jan 01 2022
The death rattles of political legitimacy.
Yes, the 1% now own more wealth than the entire US middle class, a definition traditionally reserve[d] for kleptocracies and despotic African banana republics.[1]
This ZeroHedge year end review from which this is taken is well worth your time to read in its entirety.
Right after this passage you will find the thought that “the world’s established forces will not allow it [change desired by the people] and will fight to preserve the broken status quo at any price . . . .” That is the subject of much of my head scratching these days, namely, how have we so successfully fouled our own nest; driven integrity, wisdom, law, common sense, originality, and decency from the public square; and allowed ourselves to be controlled by our enemies and inferiors? Where are the leaders? And why are we on autopilot?
As one wit put it, the left went from “Occupy Wall Street” to “Occupy Restrooms.” One hell of a deflection but an inevitable one it seems.
But the right has been no less feeble and ridiculous. Raise the “debt ceiling”? Sure. Play hard ball on sealing the border or instituting mandatory e-Verify? Never. Make speeches from the floor after hours to educate the people? Too much effort.
We have the bright future of an animal with its paw in a trap. Every move is pointless and changes nothing. Repression, manipulation, and oligarchy are the order of the day with people like Gates, Zuckerberg, Soros, Bezos, Cuomo, Pelosi, Shiff, Brennan, Clinton, Newsom, Biden, Dorsey, nameless, pimply-faced fact checkers, and assorted other political whores calling the tune of public life. Algorithms cancel free speech. Whites and our culture are filth.
This appears to be set in stone as little has been done to wring vote fraud out of the equation. Honest debate on any issue is impossible and even hazardous. A political resolution of the nation’s ills is thus remote. Representative government has withered everywhere in the West and only the forms remain.
Political legitimacy takes centuries to create but the great statist experiment inaugurated by FDR has both succeeded totally and brought us to the brink of collapse as only an abandonment of liberty will do. Some 90 years on countless economic graphs bloom with curves soaring to the skies on the right side. You know the ones. But no corrective force operates. We have piss ants for statesmen and incompetents command the armies. Buffoons rule the airwaves and the Constitution is an afterthought at best, its destruction a matter of complete indifference to every state bar association.
Donald Trump was the hope of the Deplorables but he faltered and will ultimately be seen as a lost opportunity of epic proportions. The Marjorie Taylor Greenes will be the next to be heard from, she herself being of vastly sterner stuff than Donald. If she and the Bronx Tinas are shut out then there will be no peaceful resolution to our political decay. The forthcoming economic spasms will catalyze the worst of our pathologies and the radicalization of the productive. Ownership of media monopolies will count for nothing. If the left so hates the present, eviscerated constitutional order, what bright thing will replace it exactly? Does anything in the last century look remotely familiar?
Notes
[1] “2021 Greatest Hits: The Most Popular Articles Of The Past Year And A Look Ahead.” By Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge, 12/31/21.
Dec 31 2021
The Next Great Migration
In this guy’s case, from SF to Miami.
He is eloquent about the problems of urban hellholes from the perspective of upper middle class residents (He doesn’t say whether he is a citizen or a resident; he does refer to his South Asian heritage). His prior enjoyment of his SF environment was relatively superficial, and that of a “world citizen” – diverse foods, interesting conversations, entertainment, outdoor avocations, and, of course, access to the entrepreneurial tech businesses.
He doesn’t mention family. He even admits that he has many superficial acquaintances, but few friends. In his move to Miami, he is trading one interchangeable location for another.
He boasts about the more affordable housing and cost of living, the diversity of the food and atmosphere (gee, where have I heard that before?), and the ability to escape any threat of hurricanes or other calamities with ease. What he doesn’t mention is how HIS presence helps that community. There is no excitement about what HE can contribute to the well-being of his new city, other than his influx of cash.
Not the kind of neighbor I’d want around me.
These Itinerant Global Elites – so common in American life today – will gladly suck out the flavor of their new – and temporary – homes, but be perfectly willing to move on after the grazing fields are barren, the mines played out, and the easy cash no longer be available. It’s the same old song the old Imperialist Colonials used to sing – in India, in Southeast Asia, in China and nearby, in Africa – Kenya, South Africa, Rhodesia, et al. Come in, spread a bit of cash around to pacify the Natives, then haul off when your contribution to bleeding them dry, while allowing corruption and graft to buy off the Native Elite has reduced the country/region to a hellhole that your Elite Status can no longer insulate you from.
Then, boarding your escape vehicles – planes, boats, cars, and helicopters – leave before the collapse, and blithely go to yet another promising piece of dirt. America is just another temporary Elite Haven, until it isn’t. Even better, you don’t have to worry about visas or passports, as it’s large enough to provide many new places to dominate, conquer, and ruin.
And, then, leave for the next.
We’ve made residency, and citizenship, too easy. Just plunk down the cash, let your lawyers handle the paperwork, and – quick as that! – you’re in a country that has few barriers to wealth and influence for non-citizens, few restrictions on ownership of media, vital industries, or land, and will not even require military service or other sacrifice of self.
Dec 31 2021
Free Fiction!
On January 1, 2022, my new Onteora County romance The Discovery Phase will be a free download at Amazon! One day only, so get yours while it’s free!
And by the way, Happy New Year!
Dec 30 2021
Make Up Your Own Clever Title
Sorry, Gentle Readers. The “Future Columns” folder is about to explode, and as the UXB squad has professed a complete lack of interest in my peril, I’m just going to slather it all over you.
(Don’t you feel special?)
1. Alternative explanations dept.
These days, it’s unwise to settle for the first plausible explanation of some phenomenon. Take the following “incomprehensible” development:
Despite the Chinese’s massed air formations near Taiwan or Russia’s 100,000 troops poised for war near the Ukraine border, there’s a bigger threat seemingly on the defense secretary’s mind; namely, extremism in the ranks.
Columnist Brent Sadler has his preferred explanation:
[W]hy did Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on only his 12th day in office issue directives to hunt for extremists in the ranks? The only plausible explanation is political.
Sorry, but that one doesn’t hold water. Let’s imagine that the “extremists” in the military, however defined, are all identified and expelled. What then? Would they be less dangerous then – or more, having been freed from military discipline?
Alternate explanation: With Russia and China gearing up for imperialist wars, and Iran boldly proclaiming its determination to acquire nuclear weapons, thinning the ranks for any reason will provide the Usurpers with an excuse for not living up to America’s security commitments to its allies and client states. Moreover, the troops remaining after the purge will be cowed, unlikely to voice their objections to such passivity.
I could be wrong, but we’ll see.
2. Chronicles of Black-Run America.
Who is it, demographically, that perform the most murders? And who is it, demographically, that do so in “drive-by” shootings?
Congratulations! I was sure you’d know. So how do we explain this?
Seattle, Washington’s most populous city, had a record number of drive-by shootings in 2021. By July, the city’s drive-by shootings had doubled over the year before.
It’s a problem.
So why are Washington Democrats offering up a bill in the state legislature to lower the penalties for drive-by shootings? Well, there’s woke and then there’s just plain stupid. Washington state Democrats are vying to become the best stupid they can be, bless ’em.
Currently, Washington law holds that a drive-by shooter should get an aggravated enhancement if he is arrested and prosecuted—and that’s a big if. Such an enhancement could land a drive-by murderer a life prison sentence.
But under a bill proposed for the upcoming Washington state legislature by white, woke ex-con state Rep. Tarra Simmons and her co-sponsor David Hackney, the reduction in penalties is a move toward “racial equity.” That’s right, drive-by shooting prosecutorial outcomes are racist. Never mind all the black and brown people who are the disproportionate victims of drive-by shootings.
Reducing the disincentives to an act practically guarantees that the frequency of such acts will increase. More “black and brown” drive-by shootings will occur…and more “black and brown” victims will accumulate. Cui bono?
3. Chronicles of BRA, Continued.
Yes, Virginia: there is a war being waged on whites in this country:
An MDH document titled “Ethical Framework for Allocation of Monoclonal Antibodies during the COVID-19 Pandemic” states that “race and ethnicity alone, apart from other underlying health conditions, may be considered in determining eligibility for mAbs [monoclonal antibodies].”
Minnesota is turning away patients — white patients. The left is still pretending minorities require more help because they were not given adequate help due to racism. That’s nonsense. Some minorities are obese which causes many of their problems, and they are — almost always — obese because of personal choice.
Please read it all – and follow the links.
4. Two from the Era of Lawlessness:
There are days it all seems too terribly clear:
Nearly $1 million in merchandise was stolen during a smash-and-grab burglary at a boutique shop in Florida, according to the store owner.
Thirteen luxurious Hermes handbags were stolen during the night of Dec. 14 from an Only Authentics window display in Palm Beach, said Virgil Rogers, the store owner, in a Palm Daily News report.
The store is “the world’s most trusted independent dealer of Hermes and Chanel handbags and accessories,” according to its website.
Handbags sold by the store cost at least $550, and the most expensive handbags sell at $480,000.
Those handbags will assuredly be offered on eBay or similar resale channels. The thieves who stole them know better than to flaunt their acquisitions openly. So they’ll go for the bucks, which are harder to “smash and grab” than merchandise, especially in this era of payment by credit card. But there may be no remedy in Internet-order retailing:
A UPS truck driver was tied up and robbed at gunpoint Tuesday morning at 3:30 am in northwest Atlanta.
According to police, the UPS tractor-trailer was stopped at a red light when an armed man jumped into the vehicle.
The armed suspect forced the victim to drive to a specific location where he proceeded to tie up the driver and steal cargo.
The Fast and the Furious is no longer just fiction, though it’s not being perpetrated by slick drivers in fast Hondas.
5. The Children Were Our Future.
We’ve offered them up to a ravenously hungry and evil god:
Like schools across the country, [Liberty High School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania] has seen the damaging effects of a two-year pandemic that abruptly ejected millions of students from classrooms and isolated them from their peers as they weathered a historic convergence of academic, health and societal crises. Teenagers arguably bore the social and emotional brunt of school disruptions.
Nationally, the high school-age group has reported some of the most alarming mental health declines, evidenced by depression and suicide attempts. Adolescents have failed classes critical to their futures at higher rates than in previous years, affecting graduations and college prospects. And as elected leaders and public health officials scrambled to bring students back to school last winter and spring, the focus on having the youngest and most vulnerable students return to in-person instruction left many high school students to languish, with large numbers missing most or all of the 2020-21 academic year….
Throughout the fall, the effects of the coronavirus pandemic have rippled through Liberty, a diverse regional high school in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania, in the city of 75,000 where the famous Bethlehem Steel was founded.
It was clear from the outset that children’s overall socialization would suffer from the isolation and confinement idiotically imposed upon them in the name of “public health.” What was less foreseeable, if only slightly, was that their cognitive development would suffer as well:
Dr. Mark McDonald cited an Aug. 11 study by Brown University (pdf) that found that “children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic,” during an interview with host Cindy Drukier on a Dec. 25 episode of NTD’s “The Nation Speaks.” NTD is a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times.
The masks, “Zoom schools,” and lockdown mandates have led to “deprivation overall, of social contact, [of] not being able to see faces, being stuck at home all day long, [and this] has actually caused brain damage to the youngsters,” he said.
(Please also read Ace’s comments on this horror.)
We will pay for having put our minors on Cthulhu’s altar. The bill won’t be long in coming.
6. Shut Up, Citizen!
Please, please spread this around widely:
New York State Democrat Senator Brad Holyman proposed a new law to hold social media platforms accountable for knowingly promoting disinformation, violent hate speech, and other unlawful content that could harm others.
Anyone who makes “A false statement of fact or fraudulent medical theory that is likely to endanger the safety or health of the public” will be held criminally liable.
Yes, it’s a New York bill – and once again, the rationale is “public health,” as if the widely trumpeted, government-issued lies have made or kept anyone healthy. But don’t imagine that New York is alone in the campaign against freedom of speech:
The House of Representatives has passed a bill that seeks to eradicate blasphemy against Islam. The bill, H.R. 5665, is truly remarkable as it amounts to Congress making a law respecting the establishment of Islam and reducing the United States government into a tool of the world’s ayatollahs.
The actual text of the bill not only seeks to eradicate blasphemy against Islam around the world – and solely against Islam at that – but even requires the federal government to reorganize some portions of the State Department along the lines of an Islamic religious institution which will be responsible for interpreting the Quran. For example, the text of the bill mandates that “[t]he Secretary of State shall establish within the Department of State an Office” and the “purpose” of the office is described as “[m]onitoring and combating acts of Islamophobia and Islamophobic incitement that occur in foreign countries.” That is, the State Department is required to create an office that is a cross between George Orwell’s Big Brother and the Taliban.
What happened to the clause in the First Amendment that forbids Congress to make laws “respecting an establishment of religion?” Have we decided that Islam is not a religion after all?
Time to inventory the ammo again.
7. They Can’t Put A Man Into Orbit, But…
You have to wonder who makes the decisions at NASA these days:
Between heaven and Earth, where do aliens fit in?
That’s the question that NASA hopes theologians at the Center for Theological Inquiry (CTI) in Princeton, New Jersey, can answer, in a recent effort to understand how humans will react to news that intelligent life exists on other planets.
University of Cambridge religious scholar Rev. Dr. Andrew Davison, who also holds a doctorate in biochemistry from Oxford, is one of the 24 theologians enlisted to help with the project, the Times UK reported last week.
In a recent statement on the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity blog, Davison says his research so far has already seen “just how frequently theology-and-astrobiology has been topic in popular writing” during the previous 150 years.
Davison’s upcoming book, “Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine,” due out in 2022, according to the Times, will cover part of CTI and NASA’s joint spiritual exploration, in which his “most significant question” is how theologians would respond to the notion “of there having been many incarnations [of Christ]” in the universe, he added in the blog post.
Mind you, at this time there’s no generally accepted evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. (Concerning whether there’s intelligent life on Earth, the subject remains controversial.) But supposing that there is intelligent life elsewhere, and that evidence of such is found and validated, why would the reactions of religious people matter? Do the bulging foreheads at NASA think we’d demand an interstellar expedition to evangelize to them…or to wipe them out as heretics?
NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is supposed to concern itself with transit through the skies and more recently, travel beyond them. But the shaping of popular opinion has never been in NASA’s orbit. Given this atop its multitude of recent failures, the agency is ripe for dissolution.
I could see this sort of lunacy in an Islamic country, but here in the U.S.? God preserve us, especially from our overpowering vanity.
And with that, the “FUT COL” folder is finally empty! Don’t make me refill it with only today and tomorrow left to the year. I’d like to get some fiction done.
Later, Gentle Reader.
Dec 29 2021
Perfection: Its Uses And Abuses
Once again, I have to take the C.S.O. to a medical procedure a little later. And once again, my “Future Columns” folder is near to bursting. Therefore, in an <sarcasm>unprecedented act of self-assertion,</sarcasm> I’m going to write about what I damned well please.
‘Tis the season to be ornery.
To me, the world often seems to be top-heavy with people striving for mediocrity. This is especially the case when I survey the world of fiction.
Yesterday, while I was waiting for the C.S.O.’s surgeon to pronounce her sufficiently healed to be driven home, I had a conversation with a young woman about trends in fiction and how she felt about them. She styled herself an avid reader – I know, I know, these days that can mean “someone who reads a book every year or so” – so I inquired about what sort of fare pleases her best.
“The story has to be interesting,” she said. “I don’t much care about the genre, as long as the central idea is intriguing.” It warmed the cockles of my shriveled old heart to hear that, as the lack of originality in fiction – especially in the offerings of indie writers – is one of my pet peeves. I then advanced my thesis that the syndrome is largely powered by writers’ desire to hop onto seemingly-profitable bandwagons. She thought about it and said that it seemed to fit the facts.
Originality is a necessary component of a genuinely interesting story. “It’s been done before” is a statement of dismissal, after all. But the lure of revenue is a powerful one – the more so if one’s fiction is one’s principal source of income. And be it candidly said, there are a whole lot of readers out there who just want to read the same thing over and over and OVER again. Which brings me to my next subject: the one in the title of this piece.
The reader hooked on some particular fictional motif – vampires, zombies, space wars, time travel, what have you – will also likely want a lot of it. Should he find a writer who’s produced a lot of it, he’s likely to become a fan who compulsively purchases the writer’s works as soon as they arrive. This creates an incentive for the writer, eager for a solid revenue stream, to “pump ‘em out,” sloughing such minor considerations as grammar, spelling, punctuation, good syntax, careful word choice, plot and character consistency, and overall coherence. Thus we arrive at the second of my major peeves: shoddy workmanship.
Now, I try not to be a total bastard about low-level errors. We all make them. The first release of my most recent novel contains a mangled sentence I didn’t notice at that time. (Yes, I’ve corrected and re-released it.) And I once opined as follows:
Sturgeon’s Law, unlike Theodore Sturgeon himself, is alive and functioning in the realm of indie fiction. You have to wade through a lot of garbage to find a jewel…and at that, some of the jewels are semi-precious at best.
Even so – and believe me, I’m fully aware of how far indie fiction still needs to develop – it’s a field of great promise. Indie is where the originality is. Yes, there’s a lot of hackneyed stuff in the indie orbit: vampires, zombies, space wars, Tolkien derivatives, and other clichés. But the stodginess of the conventional houses is such that hackneyed crap in well-traveled subgenres, easy to categorize and market, is essentially all they’ll publish. Genuinely original fiction has essentially no chance of making it past their gatekeepers. How can we know it will sell? And indeed, that is the crux, for conventional publishers must sell lots of books to meet the bills, whereas the indie is usually under less pressure to do so out of his book revenue.
So I’m in favor of cutting writers who tell decently original stories with important themes a lot of slack. It’s bit like a taste for moonshine: You can’t get it in the store, so if you want it, you have to be willing to accept a jug without a label or a Surgeon General’s warning on the side. Hell, you might be socially obliged to commune with the vendor over a jelly-jar full of the stuff while he complains about his no-account brother in law, his lazy kids, and how his bunions are just killing him.
That having been said, how much is an appropriate amount of slack? It’s a watchword of the trade – and of my previous trade, as well – that you cannot achieve perfection. At IBM, the saying runs that “You never get the last thousand bugs out.” If you’ve spent a whole year on a book, yet are morally certain – as you jolly well should be – that there are still errors in it, you must choose whether to release it and go on to something else, or pore over it just…one…last…time…
Strictly speaking, you can achieve perfection in certain matters. For example, spellcheckers are essentially perfect today. There’s no excuse for not using one. But other sorts of perfection are too elusive to make into an absolute standard, short of which your book must not appear before the public.
Now, this is neither a demand for perfection nor a “let ‘er rip” dismissal of all quality standards. Perfection is quite useful – as an ideal to be upheld and asymptotically approached. But the quest for perfection must be tempered by other considerations. Perhaps one of them is high revenue; as I don’t share that particular aim for my fiction, I can’t address its demands knowledgeably. But whatever considerations matter most to you must be part of the decision about whether “my book is ready for its close-up.”
Many years ago, there was “an exchange of notes,” as the diplomats like to say, between two high-ranking managers at my place of employment. One – call him Smith – was dismissive of the other’s – call him Jones – procedures for the release of certain critical documents. In Jones’s reply, which came close to being an invitation to coffee and pistols at dawn, he made the following admirable statement:
This strikes me as the right attitude to take. Yes, your product will contain at least an error or two. But that does not excuse a lackadaisical attitude toward such things. Rather, decide beforehand:
- What level of accuracy you will accept in your book;
- How much time you’re willing to devote to polishing your book;
- Whether you can afford the services and turnaround time of a professional editor.
Vow to adhere to your decisions about such things without hedging or “but if” exceptions, while giving your best and fullest effort to achieving the unachievable: the perfect novel.
It won’t be perfect; I’m here to tell you. I have yet to write a perfect book, but I try to do so each and every time. I’ve never yet been seriously unhappy about the ultimate product…even if I suffer agonies about the errors my earliest and most persnickety readers find in it.
Finally, the eBook revolution has made possible a major improvement in the quest for the Impossible Dream. If you release an eBook and intend to offer a paperback as well, wait on the paperback, for at least two weeks and possibly for a full month. Your early readers, assuming you’ve made it possible for them to contact you, will apprise you of some of the faults you missed. At the end of your predetermined wait interval, correct the flaws in the eBook, re-upload it to your publication channel, and then begin the production of your paperback. You’ll thank me later.
Strive for perfection. You won’t get it. But you will get excellence. Trust me on that.
Dec 28 2021
An AFK Day
I’ll be offline much of today, as I must take the C.S.O. to a medical procedure a good distance away. It will take several hours, during which I’ll be hopping up and down and jittering about waiting with my justly famous confidence and world-renowned patience in a nearby coffee shop while the flesh mechanics surgeons tend to her needs. So a prayer or two for my sweetie and her (hopefully) soon to be corrected vision would be much appreciated… assuming, of course, that she doesn’t look at me afterward and think – or say – “I hooked up with that? Voluntarily?”
Till soon.
Fran’s Recent Novels
Margaret’s Recent Novels
