Out Of Uniform

     This morning, Black Dumpling, a uniquely intelligent and provocative X poster, asks this critical question:

This is the question.

If an invasion fired only arms one out of one hundred of their soldiers is it unethical to open fire?

What if those other 99 are explicitly there to serve as cover and the one out of a hundred only starts shooting after they're deep within your territory… https://t.co/qZsVxSSm33

— BLACK DUMPLING™ (@BlackDumpling) July 30, 2026

     Underneath BD’s question is another: the question of the hour. Considering how critical the answer is to many other questions, it’s a wonder that it hasn’t been explicitly asked.

Are we at war?
How do we decide? * * *

     I don’t know of many periods in recorded history comparable to this one. There have been large-scale migrations in the past, often motivated by political upheaval, famine, or destructive weather. In 1971, an estimated 10 million Bengalis fled into India, to escape West Pakistani forces’ ferocious attempt to suppress East Pakistan’s moves toward regional autonomy. Those events et sequelae touched off a war between West Pakistan and India, and gave birth to the nation we call Bangla Desh.

     But the immense flood of migrants into these United States, mainly pouring over our somewhat porous southern border, can’t be ascribed to any of the “usual causes.” It’s essentially economic in nature: Third Worlders looking for economic opportunity. That motivation even applies to the agents of Mexican and South American drug cartels.

     That flood has been called an invasion… perhaps not always metaphorically. But if it were taken seriously as an invasion, we would be forced to ask Who is invading us? The invaders’ ethnicities are scattered rather than uniform. The great majority bear no weapons and carry no standards. No nation has declared that a state of war exists between it and the U.S.

     Now, just because no government has said that a war is in progress doesn’t mean that a war isn’t in progress. What constitutes a state of war? is a tough question to answer definitively. Time was, for a government to order an armed man across another nation’s borders was deemed an act of war. But once again, the migrants are nearly all unarmed when they wetback our borders. And no government will say that it has ordered them to penetrate these United States.

     We’re in a situation that the usual understandings of war and peace fail to cover. We need clarity desperately.

* * *

     By the most trusted estimates, illegal aliens now make up nearly 10% of the population of our nation. Other estimates are higher still. The destabilization of the American economy, the large increase in robberies and crimes of violence in alien-heavy districts, and the formation of de facto exclaves within our borders have the nation in a state of crisis.

     As Robert Higgs has shown us, a crisis provides an opportunity for a government to increase its powers and exactions. Rahm Emanuel has said so explicitly:

     You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.

     A serious crisis allows The State to act extra-legally, with “necessity” as its rationale. People are sympathetic to the plea of “necessity,” especially if the crisis at issue directly affects them. But as Isabel Paterson wrote, increases in political power to deal with a crisis are seldom entirely retracted:

     The difficulty of taking back powers once granted is illustrated in the repeal of the Prohibition Amendment; although it was demanded and carried by overwhelming sentiment of the citizens, the article of repeal contained a proviso which would retain numerous Federal jobs; it was impossible to make a clean sweep of the pernicious usurped power.

     In that sense, the migrant flood constitutes two kinds of crisis: one that threatens the integrity and stability of the federal and state governments, and another that threatens the freedom, prosperity, and security of the American people.

     Black Dumpling’s question addresses both crises. If the illegal-alien flood into the U.S. were recognized as an invasion, albeit of a novel sort, we would recognize the illegals as non-uniformed invaders. Under the laws of war, they would have no rights. They would be “outlaw” in the old sense of lacking the law’s protections. Shooting them on sight would be perfectly licit.

     The prospect may horrify. But is it worse than the prospect of accepting the invaders – of tacitly conceding that the invasion is beyond our power to counter?

     Those are among the most difficult questions I can imagine. The aliens are much like a swarm of hungry locusts. None of them are wholly innocent; all have broken the laws of the United States. But summary execution is an extreme penalty for wetbacking the border. And granting the federal government permission to militarize the whole country on the strength of the illegal-alien tide would have far-reaching consequences for the future.

     Perhaps we’re not looking at it the right way. Or praying enough. You decide.

A Quick Thought

     Every society has its own set of vise clamps. Every society tries its subliminal damnedest to squeeze the individual in them until he conforms to some life pattern that society has deemed acceptable. And most of us aren’t nearly strong enough to resist it.

     That’s neither good nor bad; it simply is. But the “is-ness” of it accounts for a fair amount of human dissatisfaction. For at any given time and any selected society, there will be individuals who cannot or will not conform. Their desire to deviate from the accepted patterns makes them unhappy. Oftentimes it makes others unhappy as well.

     In witness whereof, have a declaration from a brilliant writer, Armond Boudreaux:

You are not an interchangeable economic unit. Your life isn’t interchangeable with someone else’s. Your gifts and talents aren’t interchangeable with those of others. Your family isn’t interchangeable. Your neighbors aren’t interchangeable. Your community isn’t interchangeable. https://t.co/yIkS0AC3IH pic.twitter.com/ORPtS0gTj5

— Armond Boudreaux (@armondboudreaux) July 30, 2026

     All that is indisputable. Yet survival itself sometimes hangs on conformity. When that’s the case, finding a modus vivendi is a major challenge. It can absorb one’s whole existence.

     The general level of prosperity that obtains in a society is a rough determinant of how much nonconformity it can tolerate. A few seconds’ thought will make the correlation clear. Thus, if you live in a poor society, you may not be able to escape conforming to one of the life patterns your society tacitly prescribes. But if you live in a rich society, you’re far more likely to find a “middle way” that will both allow you your differences and permit you to support yourself.

     Americans, especially radical nonconformists: Give thanks for capitalism. It makes your deviance possible. If you understand this, you’ve grasped a fact few of your fellows can comprehend.

     Have a nice day.

The Storyteller's Art: Metaphorically Speaking

     “Avoid clichés like the plague!” – a well known “Fumblerule.”

     This one is for the aspiring writers in the Liberty’s Torch audience. It concerns a subspecies of reader with which most writers are familiar: the critic that’s determined, for whatever reason, to pick apart individual sentences and phrases within a sentence for judgment. There are plenty of them, and not all of them work at publishing houses or in university departments of “literature.”

     Forgive me, Gentle Reader. I can’t help but remember a high-school teacher I had who possessed a fetching way with words. As he taught European history, it was incumbent upon him to season the factual material with segments on “culture.” I think he enjoyed them, but every so often he would say something to the opposite effect. On one particularly memorable occasion, he came up with the following:

     “I can’t help it. When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I think of things in those little Petri dishes.”

     Indeed, culture as a grab-bag term for the aggregate of a people’s efforts in the arts does derive its application from the “Petri-dish culture” of microorganisms. Metaphorically, it expresses what is happening to that people as it grows: that is, as it becomes ever more prosperous and therefore ever more able to afford for some of its members to devote themselves to the arts rather than to “practical” activities.

     (A digression: Persons who use the word culture to refer to the practices of some savage tribe are departing from the foundation of the metaphor. Savages’ “cultures” are largely propelled by superstition. They’re attempts to propitiate unseen powers: “We’ve sacrificed to you and done as you wished. Please don’t harm us.” That distinguishes them from the arts as civilized peoples practice them: efforts to express themes and motifs that are significant and inspiring to themselves. End of digression. Back to metaphors and clichés.)

     As I’ve written before, a cliché is a dead metaphor: that is, a metaphor which, due to overuse, no longer evokes its original foundation. “Avoid it like the plague” derived its original metaphorical effect from the horrors evoked by the Black Death, one of the greatest tragedies in the history of Mankind. But people no longer react to the mention of the Black Death in horror. It’s too far back in time, and anyway, no one alive today has had any contact with it. So the metaphor is dead. Rest in peace.

     As a general matter, the avoidance of clichés in your writing is a good idea. But it must be said that that “rule,” like all the other “rules” of good writing, can be superseded by a higher rule. One higher rule was best expressed by George Orwell:

     Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

     Now, in the cited essay, Orwell was principally concerned with nonfiction writing, especially exposition and opinion about public matters. As he put it, he was addressing “language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.” But when we come to fiction, the rules, such as they are, don’t bind nearly as firmly.

     The storyteller’s agenda is a different one. He writes about people under conditions that stress them. Such conditions compel them to confront needs that demand change. Sometimes, as in the speculative genres, those conditions depart radically from what men alive today would call “reality.” (Never mind that reality is a term insusceptible to definition.)

     The storyteller isn’t there to teach physics, or economics, or – God help us all – the rules of prescriptive English grammar. His aim is to evoke emotion in the reader. Rules are only relevant if they serve that end.

     The significance of that distinction is most obvious when writing dialogue. People use clichés frequently in spoken English. Indeed, the English language depends so heavily on metaphorical constructions that one could argue that without clichés, speaking English would be impossible. An attempt to evict all clichés and similar phrases from one’s speech would effectively silence him.

     But there’s also non-dialogue matter, isn’t there? And the “literati” are so fond of picking at one’s sentences! So we must ask whether clichés in narrative and descriptive passages are ever acceptable.

     I claim the answer is yes.

     As I’ve already written, the determinant is the storyteller’s agenda. Does he want the reader to proceed slowly, pausing to savor individual images and expressions? If you’re Vladimir Nabokov, you might aim at that; at least, the beauty of his prose is the only conceivable reason to read Lolita. Or does he want the reader to move swiftly, absorbing the tale at a speed possible only if he needn’t stop repeatedly to ask “What’s the BLEEP!ing author trying to tell me here?” Most thriller writers would seek to impose that pace on their prose.

     The aim is prior and superior to the tool. The tool must serve the aim. The cliché is just a tool. If immediate recognition and swift forward motion is the storyteller’s aim, clichés can sometimes serve that aim.

     This is not an argument for or against clichés. It’s an exhortation to the storyteller: Know what you’re trying to do. If you have a particular aim, tools that serve that aim are entirely justified, even if the “literati” should quibble. Unless you’re one of the benighted forelock-tuggers more concerned with what some prize jury will think of your style than whether the reader enjoys your story, approves of it, and is willing to recommend it to his friends, use clichés if and when they serve your purposes. You have my blessing, for what that’s worth.

Chronicles Of The Death Cults 2026-07-29

     Europe is still ahead of us:

     Just days after France legalized “assisted suicide,” the French government has now ruled that doctors can euthanize a conscious patient against his wishes by withdrawing life-sustaining treatment, even though he repeatedly says he wants to live.
     The bombshell ruling has intensified fears that France’s euthanasia regime is already sliding toward a system in which doctors, not patients, ultimately decide who lives and who dies.
     At the center of the case is Rémi, a man who regained consciousness after a devastating accident and now consistently tells doctors and his family that he wants to continue living after getting a second chance at life.

     I can’t say I anticipated exactly this course forward for the Apostles of Death. But tell me, Gentle Reader: doesn’t it make a demonic kind of sense? France has legally codified the notion that doctors, not the patient being sustained nor his family, can rule an ongoing course of life-sustaining treatment “disproportionate:”

     Hospital physicians nevertheless concluded that continuing treatment would merely prolong [Rémi’s] life without any realistic prospect of meaningful recovery.
     They invoked France’s Claeys-Leonetti Act, which governs end-of-life medical decisions for the nation’s socialized healthcare system.
     The act permits doctors to discontinue treatment they deem medically futile or disproportionate.

     Merely being alive and conscious and wanting to remain that way is considered insufficient to override the doctors’ judgment.

     “He who pays the fiddler calls the tune.” France’s socialist medical system makes the State the paymaster. Rémi, a mere citizen of the Republic, is subordinate to the will of the State. Indeed, the decision that confirmed the doctors’ “collegial judgment” said so explicitly:

     France’s Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court, has now sided with the doctors.
     In one of the ruling’s most alarming declarations, the court stated that “the patient’s wishes are subject to the law.”

     We don’t have that kind of medical system in these United States… yet. But the penetration of third-party payment – insurance, Medicare, Medicaid – into medical decisions has reached a depth that makes the complete federalization of medical care likely, owing to the many clashes between patients in need of expensive care and insurance companies’ focus on their loss ratios. Under such circumstances, the demand for “correction” will swell. How far, we cannot know in advance.

     We’ve already had the worldwide legalization of abortion. The demand for the legalization of euthanasia and “assisted suicide” is spreading; it’s already won in nine European nations. We’ve heard about the Groningen Protocol, too. A helpless woman has been starved to death legally, by the decision of her estranged husband. And now in France, a helpless, severely injured man will lose his life by the decisions of physicians, with the concurrence of the State.

     In one of my most contentious essays, which was stimulated by the starvation-to-death of a helpless woman, I wrote:

     Were a condemned serial killer to be sentenced to the same ordeal, every civil-rights and humanist group in the country would be up in arms. Nay, it would arouse every such group in the world. Such groups cannot abide the death penalty even for men convicted of the most heinous crimes. The United States would be castigated in every organ known to Man for its callousness, its brutality, and its lack of respect for human life.

     So never, ever imagine that “It can’t happen here.” It already has. Those of us whom age is steadily rendering ever less capable of caring for ourselves are in more danger than we might know.

     When the late, great Joseph Sobran wrote that “The State should not deliberately kill,” I was troubled. I had the usual rationales in mind: war and the most heinous of crimes. I’d accepted H. L. Mencken’s observation that the lives of some demonstrably vicious men were “incompatible with the reasonable safety of the rest of us.” I still struggle with those arguments. But Sobran was right, as he nearly always was. Once you have admitted the deliberate infliction of death to the laws and morals of your country, you’re aboard a train on a single, unalterable track. The terminus of your journey is plain.

     Pray.

Unthinkable Or Inevitable?

     After the parliamentary systems piece appeared, I got an inquiry from a reader about religious affiliations among political parties. He wanted to know whether there were other parties that explicitly aligned themselves with specific religions.

     It’s a subject of some interest, yet I’d never actually researched it. So I took the lazy man’s way out: I asked Google’s powerful AI component, Gemini:

(My query:) What European political parties are explicitly aligned with a particular religion?

European political parties aligned with religion include Christian democratic and small confessional parties like the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Germany, the Christian Democrats in Sweden, and the Christian Union in the Netherlands. While major historical parties have evolved into broad-based centrist groups, explicitly faith-based and niche religious parties still operate at national and European levels. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Christian Democratic and Conservative Parties

• Christian Democratic Union (CDU) / Christian Social Union (CSU) (Germany): Historically confessional and explicitly rooted in Christian ethics, though it now functions as a broad center-right "catch-all" party. [1, 2, 3]
• Christian Union (ChristenUnie) (Netherlands): An explicitly orthodox Protestant party that bases its practical policies directly on the Bible. [1]
• Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) (Netherlands): A traditional center-right party formed from a merger of historic Protestant and Catholic parties. [1, 2]
• Christian Democrats (Kristdemokraterna) (Sweden): Centers its platform on Christian social ethics, family values, and human dignity. [1, 2]
• European Christian Political Party (ECPP): A transnational European political party uniting socially conservative, Christian-values-focused national parties across the continent. [1]

Niche and Regional Confessional Parties

• SGP (Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij) (Netherlands): A strict, traditional Calvinist party that advocates for governance explicitly based on biblical principles. [1, 2, 4]
• Islamic-oriented / Immigrant-focused groupings: While mainstream Islamic political parties do not hold major seats in Western Europe, smaller local or niche lists (such as Partij Ideal or various minor inclusion/diversity movements) occasionally organize around Muslim community interests, though most operate within secular frameworks or general immigrant-advocacy platforms rather than as formal theocratic entities. [1]

     Forgive me for not inserting the links. I’m sure that those who are deeply interested can find the references as easily as I did.

     These are pointers to a past Europe whose vestiges have not yet been erased. Europe was once called Christendom: “the land of Christ.” Its Christian heritage was once overwhelming, in testimony to which we have the innumerable beautiful cathedrals, other architecture, and works of Christian-influenced art, music, and sculpture for which the Old World is known. That makes it especially sad that Europe has become so secular.

     North America, a heavily Christian continent, could be called Christendom with equal justice… but it isn’t. Heavily Catholic Mexico and heavily Christian America and Canada entitle the New World to that label, yet I cannot recall ever hearing it called that. North America just isn’t thought of that way, even though today its people are more Christian than their Old World cousins.

     I could go on in this vein, but I won’t. What I find myself wondering this morning is whether there will ever be a recognized political party in America that openly aligns itself with any religion. If one should arise, with which religion would it identify?

     The most plausible answer is not pleasant. Neither is the political direction in which such a party would be most likely to take us. And with that, I shall wish all my Gentle Readers a very nice day.

A Word About Parliamentary Systems

     There aren’t many polities structured as is the United States. Most other First World nations have parliamentary systems, which vary from the American Constitutional model in several important ways:

1. The legislature is elected at irregular intervals.
2. The executive branch is not elected; the dominant party or coalition in the legislature determines the control of the executive.
3. Within limits, the executive determines when elections will next occur.
4. All members of the executive have seats in the legislature.

     The progenitor of modern parliamentary systems was England of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Note that its descendant, the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, lacks a written Constitution. Long ago I read a claim from a British commentator to the effect that the lack makes British parliamentarianism “superior” to the American system. His argument was that a written Constitution “can be an impediment to doing what’s needed.” I have no idea if that commentator is still alive; if so, I’d like to ask him if he feels the same today.

     Parliamentary systems are friendly to small parties. That’s because there are no national elections; the voter votes only for local officials and his member in the legislature. Thus, elections tend to concentrate on local issues. Unfortunately, there are national issues, especially in a nation which lacks Constitutional guarantees of individual rights and limits on government. So it matters very much, as you’ve probably already guessed, who controls the national executive.

     In the practical realm, such a system will have two major parties, just as does the U.S. Those major parties will differ sharply in their policy prescriptions, just as do the Democrats and the Republicans. Yet in practice no major party will exercise complete control over the national agenda, whatever it may be, because it will need to form a coalition with one or more minor parties to achieve control of the executive.

     Those minor parties can be terribly difficult to control, even after their legislators have agreed to form a coalition with a major party. They know that they can bring down the executive by defecting. That gives them outsized political power – and that gives the major parties a strong incentive to find ways to dampen the influence of minor parties that are regarded as particularly fractious or unruly.

     So political dominance in a parliamentary system requires a coalition and mutually agreed suppression of minor parties regarded as unacceptable. This is an important political influence in Europe today. The reason is an effect similar to what’s happening in America: the major parties and the coalitions they build have demonstrably failed their peoples. Thus, new parties better attuned to popular sentiment are on the rise – and the major parties want nothing to do with them.

     The best observable example of this is Germany. Two parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP), have dominated German governance for decades. But those parties, both of which are Euro-socialist, have largely lost the allegiance of German voters. The Alliance for Germany (AfD) has attracted so much support that, were free, fair, non-fraudulent elections to be held in Germany today, the AfD would outpoll the CDU and the SDP combined.

     But the AfD is explicitly nationalist. It’s also far less socialist than the older parties. That has thrown the ruling class of Germany, and indeed much of Europe, into a panic. Without German participation in and support of the European Union (EU), that union would dissolve. Continent-wide policies would cease to bind. Establishments throughout Europe would totter and fall.

     So the CDU and the SDP are straining to assemble a coalition whose sole purpose is to exclude the AfD from the selection of the German executive branch. They’re pleading for support from other European powers as well. Their sotto voce appeal is to stability. Whether German voters value stability more than national policies that strengthen Germany and ethnic Germans is uncertain.

     Analyst and commentator Haretina Kukuri, whom I admire greatly, has this to say:

     The CDU governs with a partner that blocks the reforms it needs. The SPD governs with a partner that demands them. Both leaderships are under internal fire. Neither can deliver anything, and neither can walk away, because there’s nowhere left to go.

     BUT if the AFD rules then we are talking about a divided Europe. They are against Europe as a union.

     Clearly, Haretina views that unfavorably. In a reply to a comment, she adds this:

     [B]e careful what you wish the AFD will take us some decades back

     Would the dissolution of the EU, a “mock,” pseudo-parliamentary federation of European nations headquartered in Brussels, whose policies have inflicted a great deal of damage on the Old World, really “take us some decades back?” “Us” being Germany and / or Europe, that is.

     I’d like to say that “German voters will decide,” but there’s a strong possibility that their preferences will be overridden by Germany’s courts, or ballot manipulation, or a continental “super-coalition” unprecedented in European political history. It’s happened in these United States. German nationalists must not imagine that “It can’t happen here.”

Something Off The Beaten Track

     A reader just wrote to ask if I simply must continue with the doom-and-gloom pieces for some unexpressed psychological reason involving my boyhood, or might I be persuaded to post something, say, a bit uplifting? He was graciously complimentary about my usual output, my selection of topics, my focus, my writing style, and so forth. He just didn’t want to have to surf over here, as he does each morning, in anticipation of being brought down, as he put it. He’s a sunny sort who can find the silver lining around any dark cloud – I’m sure you know and despise a few people like that – and he wanted to register a vote in favor of more lighthearted pieces. You know, the kind that aren’t likely to get you eyeing the Barrett .50 and thinking about clock towers.

     It confused me, at first. I mean, do people really come to Liberty’s Torch for that kind of drivel? Posting that sort of thing makes me wonder if I’m letting my Gentle Readers down. Well, at least one person does, or hopes to do. So I tried to think of a topic about which I could hold forth with warmth, humor, and Christian love, yet do so with the splendiferous effulgence that characterizes my usual crap.

     For a while, I came up drier than the Mojave Desert. I suppose I was in the wrong frame of mind for happy stuff. So I decided to seek a distraction… and I found one:

When I was a steak cook at Ponderosa steakhouse, age 16, this beautiful waitress that went to another high school would always come back and sit next to me after her shift was over and talk.

I finally said “why are you still here? You are not getting paid. You should go home.” pic.twitter.com/2LEoel4rxQ

— Adam Rossi (@rossiadam) July 25, 2026

     Gentle Reader, you must read the comments to that tweet. Especially if you’re a man. I lack the words to capture the poignancy of those tales. If you don’t have a personal story that belongs in that collection, you’re a rare and precious jewel.

     But I do.

* * *

     It was 1967. I was a senior in high school, and my eyes were on the stars. Almost literally! I was soon to depart to my chosen university and begin (I hoped) a career in physics. More on that some other time.

     As the school’s Brainiac, I had had the usual young nerd’s experience of romance: that is, none. I’d noticed the girls around me, some of whom were quite fetching, but I’d never dared to approach any of them. As I was two years younger than all of them, it struck me as pointless.

     I was a loner even then. I used to walk to school and back, even though it was a three-mile distance from my family’s apartment and I was fully entitled to bus transportation. Needless to say, I had to set out early. But I walked fast, and I always got there well before anyone else. I would sit in the cafeteria and read until the time came to report to homeroom, where attendance was taken. For a long time I did so alone.

     But not always. There came a day in late winter when, with some fifteen or twenty minutes to go before I had to scurry off to homeroom, a very pretty teen girl sashayed down the hall. I noticed, of course. I tried hard to maintain “situational awareness” even back then, as the Class Nerd often becomes the Class Target. She glanced over at me, smiled, and hurried along. I gave it no further thought.

     Until the next morning, when she didn’t hurry along. She came directly to my table, perched herself next to me, gave her name as Shelly, said she was a junior, and started to chat. It was high school girl stuff: her classes, her friends, who so-and-so was seeing, new pop music, what’s good on TV, and so on. Nothing hugely consequential.

     I don’t think I’ve ever been so terrified, before or since.

     I was the focus of a girl. That is, she was there because I was there. She was talking to me. And she was pretty! Beautiful, really. Her nose was a little larger than she might have liked, but I could find no flaw in her. I couldn’t imagine why I had her company and her attention. In that, perhaps you can see the embryo of the Curmudgeon Emeritus I would someday become.

     As with most Class Nerds, I had no small talk. My head was full of equations. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. She gave me plenty of opportunities to respond, but I hadn’t the faintest idea how to do so. I just tried my best to smile. It must have been the most artificial-looking smile in the history of Mankind.

     Well, at long last the bell rang, we wished one another a nice day, and parted to go to our respective homerooms. I gave a silent prayer of thanks for having been released from that conversation before I could beclown myself and tried to have a “normal” day thereafter.

     But she came to chat me up the next day, too. And the next. And the next, which was a Friday. If your high school years are too far back to remember the significance of Fridays to high school kids, allow me to refresh your memory: They matter. A lot.

     Friday was “game time.” Commitment time. It was when your hopes for the evening and weekend become either if-onlies or palpably real. If you have plans to socialize, Friday is when you discover who will have you, if anyone, and for what.

     High schoolers make a lot of bad decisions on Fridays. Some prove to be mere embarrassments. Others are destructive, or cruel.

     I had no evening or weekend socializing plans. No one else would have me, which made such plans moot. At least, that was how matters stood when I arrived at school Friday morning.

     As I mentioned, Shelly showed up again. In fact, she was there a little before me. I was in a wobbly state of mind. Yet I knew that I had to be there. If I didn’t show, she might take offense, and I didn’t want that.

     She started chatting with me again, the same pattern as before. You know how that goes: Math is really tough this year! Nancy has to go to summer school. Karen has started going out with Joel! Have you heard the new one from Paul Revere and the Raiders?

     I did my best to provide appropriate responses, though I doubt I improved on our previous encounters. She rambled on for a few minutes in an engaging, perfectly pleasant fashion. Never a mean word about anyone or anything. But it didn’t take long for her to get to the Sunday punch.

     She didn’t ask me out directly. She was subtle. She mentioned that her usual crowd was going to a concert that evening. Rock concert tickets were comparatively cheap back then. All the same, she didn’t want to go; she disliked rock-concert volume levels. I sympathized, of course. But her next two sentences are engraved on the inside surface of my skull:

     “But I don’t want to just sit at home. What do you think you’ll be doing tonight?”

     It blindsided me. I couldn’t believe she was asking me out. And I had no relevant, coherent idea how to respond. But she was looking at me, compelling me to make some kind of reply.

     Eventually I replied that I had no plans other than to go another chapter forward in Halliday and Resnick (my AP physics text). You can imagine how that went over.

     I think that blindsided her. She didn’t say anything for a long moment. Maybe she was hoping I’d come up with a suggestion spontaneously. Soon enough the bell rang, she wished me a good day, and ambled off.

     That was the last time I sat in the cafeteria before homeroom. I never saw her again.

* * *

     “She doesn't love you anymore. Maybe she did once, I don't know, but she doesn't now! These are used emotions. It's time to trade ‘em in! Memories are meant to fade, Lenny. They're designed that way for a reason.” – From Strange Days

     The memory above hasn’t faded. I knew I’d blown an opportunity that had been brought to me on a silver platter. I was smart enough to realize that. And I still wonder, now and then, how things would have turned out had I untangled my teenage tongue and suggested something moderately fun to Shelly.

     Maybe the reason memories are designed to fade is to spare us old folks the regrets and self-disgust that would arrive with them if they were fresh and vivid. I couldn’t say.

     I know this isn’t a bright and cheery piece. Sorry. But once I remembered, I had to get it out. Forgive me.

Schismata Part 4: The Biggest Chisel

     There are days when the total lack of shame of anti-Americans in power completely occupies my thoughts. Yes, I speak here of the Democrats. It’s impossible to embarrass them. It’s equally difficult to squeeze the truth out of them. One thing comes through clearly: they will do anything to get and retain absolute, unbounded power.

     Their principal opponents in that quest are not Republican politicians, who are spineless almost to a man and care far more about media air time and column-inches than they do about any supposed principle, but actual Americans. The bulk of us are of European descent, though there are exceptions. Thus, the Democrats strain to the utmost to conceal their machinations from us, though occasionally they’ll let favored members of the GOP in on the scam.

     Apparently Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri is not one of the favored ones:

BREAKING: I am releasing a newly obtained internal Presidential memorandum from the Biden White House.

It details how Biden was advised to block President Trump's deportation of 3.1 MILLION noncitizens—including Tren de Aragua members—through “Temporary” Protected Status. pic.twitter.com/oIquq3pRm7

— Senator Eric Schmitt (@SenEricSchmitt) July 23, 2026

     The Democrats’ political conquest of these United States of America requires that the Euro-American bulwark of the nation be diluted and, ultimately, erased. The replacement population must have no attachment to any aspect of Americanism, especially the constraints on government codified in the Constitution. Why else would the “undocumented Americans” come almost exclusively from Third World nations?

     Recently I’ve been writing about the Left’s creation of fault lines in the American national culture and ethos. While some of those are rather subtle, the importation of non-Americans, mainly uneducated and unskilled and often of a creed hostile to everything American, is blatant. They’ve become so numerous that, as the saying goes, you can’t swing a fist without hitting one. Current estimates of illegal aliens within our borders hover around 60 million.

     Those aliens constitute the gravest of cracks in our common culture and ethos. They maintain numerous exclaves within which American law is effectively unenforceable. They don’t yet outnumber us, but they’re outbreeding us. They’ve already managed to take over a few of our larger cities. Their culture contains little that a Euro-American would recognize.

     Illegal immigration is the Left’s most devastating weapon against America as she was founded. That makes this memo more than a smoking gun of Democrat duplicity. By making plain the Biden Interregnum’s plans to impede the Trump / MAGA agenda, it makes the war against the Constitution and the American political ethos too visible for anyone to overlook.

     The SAVE Act has become critical to the future of America’s elections. Now is the time for maximum pressure on the Senatorial Republican caucus to suspend or eliminate the filibuster and pass that bill. They don’t want it – a lot of them profit from illegal immigration, and nearly all of them are in terror of what the media will say about them – so they must be compelled to pass it against their wills.

     Get on the horn to Republican Senators. Make sure they know that you will actively work against any of them who refuse to support the SAVE Act. If you think you know of a Democrat Senator who may be persuasible, contact him too.

     Don’t let up.

A Pointed Observation

     This one is from John Hinderaker:

     [26th Texas Congressional district Representative Brandon] Gill is the new hero of the conservative movement, largely because of his skill at questioning liberal witnesses…. Gill’s secret is that, instead of giving speeches as most members of Congress do, he actually asks the witnesses fair questions. And, time after time, it turns out that their ideology prevents them from giving coherent answers.

     Hinderaker scores twice in that short passage. If you’ve ever listened to a Representative interviewing a witness, you know what constitutes a “question” from a Representative. Virtually every one of them attempts to fold his own viewpoint into the question, such that the witness cannot possibly reply in a useful fashion without first conceding the Representative’s viewpoint. This is tolerated because it serves the agendas of the Representatives doing the questioning.

     Brandon Gill doesn’t do that. He asks simple, one-part questions. Usually, the witness can and should answer yes or no. A hostile witness will feel trapped by that. He’ll do his best to dance around the question: to obfuscate, to divert to side issues and irrelevancies, or to swerve to an attack on some disliked figure. He will never, ever answer yes or no.

     A sharp question must be simple. It must not have several parts; that clouds what the questioner is asking. It must be possible for the witness to answer it clearly. Indeed, in its simplicity it will make plain when the witness doesn’t want to answer clearly.

     Don’t look to Congress for copious examples of sharp, simple questions. Brandon Gill is just about the only Representative who asks them.

     “[N]ot just politicians but everybody responsible for communications in any way ought to take such a pledge [i.e., of a commitment to clarity]. The point, of course, is to cut through the thick grease and old varnish to discover what kind of material lies beneath. And the best tool the radical skeptic has is the sharp question—“Why?” “What for?” “When?” “What do you mean?” “Who?” These are terrifying questions, in a way, considering how seldom they are answered. And when the answers are given, they don’t appear to be the right answers.” -- Arthur Herzog

     Words to live by.

Schismata Part 3: The Cracks

     I’ve received a couple of questions about the neologism in the titles of these pieces. The resemblance to stigmata is deliberate. The wounds inflicted on Jesus Christ during his Passion and Crucifixion were preliminaries to His death on the Cross. The last of the stigmata, the spear wound to His side, was inflicted to guarantee that He was dead before His body could be taken down.

     My concept of schismata parallels the stigmata in that regard. The cracks in our philosophical and cultural unity being inflicted by the Left’s vanguard are preliminaries to a deathblow. They’re intended to soften us up for the kill. And they’ve been doing a bang-up job… or they were.

* * *

     As reality itself is a unity, all true wisdom is a unity as well. For wisdom is something other than material knowledge about “how things work.” True wisdom is the acceptance of reality in all its facets. The truly wise man “concedes the Tao,” as C. S. Lewis might have said. He doesn’t attempt to deny any part of it, for he knows its unity.

     Philosophy, “love of wisdom” etymologically, is a unity as well. Most peoples with a common culture share a philosophical outlook that’s seldom articulated. One aspect of that outlook is made visible in what they hail as beautiful. The architectural wonders of Europe, especially its cathedrals, testify to the esthetics of the culture that produced them. That esthetic cannot be separated from the rest of its enveloping outlook without destroying both.

     As I noted previously, that is where the Left chose to attack. No other part of the Western outlook was as vulnerable. Esthetics was uniquely sensitive because of the notion of relativism.

     In retrospect, we ought to have known better. To place the cathedrals and symphonies of Christian Enlightenment culture on a balance scale with the mud huts and grunted chants of self-mutilating savages was insane from the first. But the premise that beauty is “in the eye of the beholder,” rather than an aspect of reality itself, made it possible.

     The rejection of esthetic absolutes provided the ingress the destroyers needed.

* * *

     Once esthetic relativism had swept over Western culture, other aspects of the Western philosophical outlook became vulnerable. The key target was objectivity itself. Undermining the conviction that reality is real was the goal of the anti-Western forces. That could not be done by direct attack. It had to be through the promotion of non-Western outlooks, concepts of beauty, and “ways of knowing.”

     That trend began in Europe before the World Wars, but it accelerated sharply in the Sixties. That was when relativism as a philosophical primary took firm root. Millions of credulous young Westerners seized upon it. Their elders did little or nothing to correct them.

     Nonsense was promulgated as truth. Bizarre notions about reality as a plastic that individuals could reshape as they please were touted as wisdom. Relativism, already established in the arts, made it possible to introduce absurdities as acceptable alternatives to the real… and to get them accepted by millions.

     I was there. I was part of it. I remember it too well.

* * *

     “What is truth?” – Pontius Pilate

     Once, in giving a presentation to a college class in philosophy, I asked the students whether any of them had ever been interested in magic. A few hands went up...all of which belonged to persons who were somewhat reluctant to admit it. I smiled and told them not to be overly embarrassed, for magic, if it worked, would appear to be an easier way of achieving one’s aims – some of them, at least – than the alternatives. That’s its attraction.

     But magic doesn’t work. Why, then, are there persons who call themselves witches and claim to practice magic? Why are they granted the smallest amount of respect?

     If magic worked, it would be the focus of intense study and experimentation. Researchers would flock to the field, hoping to tease out the laws that govern it. Money would pour into the exploration of its limits and potential applications. None of that has happened.

     Another set of notions, similar to magic, is that of psi powers: in essence, mind over matter/energy. For a time, that was a field of investigation for some fringe researchers, but it yielded nothing and has been relegated to the mediums (not “the media”) and stage magicians. But again, there are persons who proclaim themselves to be telepaths, or clairvoyants, and make a living out of demonstrating those “powers.” Why are they accorded any respect?

     Ironically, a brilliant fiction writer, Robert Silverberg, provided a summary of the reasons:

     “For the last eight, ten years, we’ve all been trying to stumble toward some kind of workable synthesis, some structural correlative that’ll hold the world together for us in the middle of all the chaos. The pot, the acid, the communes, the rock, the whole transcendentalist thing, the astrology, the macrobiotics, the Zen—we’re searching, right, we’re always searching? And sometimes finding. Not often. We look in a lot of dumb places, because basically we’re mostly dumb, even the best of us, and also because we can’t know the answers until we’ve worked out more of the questions. So we chase after flying saucers. We put on Scuba suits and look for Atlantis. We’re into mythology, fantasy, paranoia, Middle Earth, freakiness, a thousand kinds of irrationality. Whatever they’ve rejected, we buy, often for no better reason than that they turned it down. The flight from reason. I don’t entirely defend it. I just say it’s necessary, it’s a stage we all have to pass through, the fire, the annealing. Reason wasn’t sufficient. Western man escaped from superstitious ignorance into materialistic emptiness: now we’ve got to continue on, sometimes down blind alleys and false trails, until we learn how to accept the universe again in all its mysterious inexplicable tremendousness, until we find the right thing, the synthesis, the getting together that lets us live the way we ought to be living.”

     [From The Book of Skulls]

     They – we – were looking for magic.

* * *

     But “mythology, fantasy, paranoia, Middle Earth, freakiness,” et cetera are not of the Tao. To compel respect for them, by whatever means, violates the precepts of rational thought. Silverberg may have known that, back in 1972 when he wrote The Book of Skulls. Indeed, a man that intelligent could hardly fail to know it. Those who sought to undermine the Western outlook – the philosophical bedrock of the Christian Enlightenment – knew it well.

     The fragmentation of that bedrock proceeded apace throughout the second half of the Twentieth Century. Magic, irrealism, and outright solipsism, propelled in part by the burgeoning drug plague, advanced as alternatives to reality itself. A critical moment arrived with the introduction and acceptance of a nonsense phrase: “our truth,” or alternately “your truth.” That became popular with the moral / ethical relativists, those determined to open a crack in the moral norms promulgated by Christianity.

     The assault on esthetic norms had made inroads for assaults on other norms. In large part that was through the personal charisma of the “new artistes.” It was also powered by the adolescent thrill of rebellion, flipping off the “straights” and “doing your own thing.” The cracks would soon be exploited by the purveyors of a deadly kind of magic: the “reality is plastic” notion that makes it possible to believe in impossibilities.

     More anon.

Schismata Part 2: The Unity

     A long time ago, I wrote:

     In the kitchen, Louis took a small saucepan from the cabinet beneath the cooktop, filled it half-full with hot water, and set it on a burner. From a drawer he produced a large bulb-type thermometer, attached it to a pair of wooden grips, and passed the combination to her.
     “This is going to be a little different. I’m going to make a prediction, and then we’ll see if it comes true.” He gestured at the saucepan. “I’m going to light the stove and heat the water in the pot. You put the thermometer in and watch the reading, but don’t let the bulb touch the pan! I predict that no matter how high we turn the flame, and no matter how long we let it heat, the temperature of the water will never rise past two hundred twelve degrees. Okay?”
     “Okay.” She dipped the bulb into the pot. The reading rose to a hundred fifteen degrees. He lit the burner, turned the flame up high, and they watched.
     When giant bubbles began to rise through the water, the thermometer read two hundred twelve. She kept it as steady as she could, never allowing the bulb to touch the metal of the pan. The water level dropped and the kitchen filled with steam, but the reading stayed at two hundred twelve until Louis quenched the burner ten minutes later.
     “We’ve boiled away too much to keep going safely. So? What does that mean to you?”
     She shrugged. “I don’t know. Is it supposed to mean something?”
     “Well, maybe not. But what does it mean to you that my prediction came true?”
     “You knew it would be that way.”
     “And what does that mean?”
     She started to speak and stopped herself. She knew his style. There was a pattern in the sequence of apparently unrelated things he had shown her that day. He was waiting for her to see it. The Nag lent a hand.
     Limits. He’s shown you three limits. Three things that wishing can’t do anything about.
     “Water’s just that way, right? It always stops at two-twelve. You can’t force it any higher.”
     He nodded as the huge grin returned to his face. “That’s right. Not at sea level, anyway. That’s one of the unvarying properties of water.” He took the saucepan to the sink and emptied it. There was a hiss and a new cloud of steam as the water ran over the cold porcelain.
     “Scientists study the properties of things all the time.” He set the pan down in the sink and turned back to her. “They look for patterns in the way things behave, and then they test their understanding by making predictions. When their predictions work, they gain confidence that they’re on to something. When their predictions fail, they junk their theories and start over. Mostly by little steps, sometimes by big ones, always building on the learning of those that came before them, this is how scientists come to know the world.”
     He leaned back against the counter and folded his arms against his chest. There was something in his demeanor she hadn’t seen before, a kind of all-pervading delight that transformed him and made it impossible to look away from him.
     “Scientists always look for the widest, most comprehensive patterns they can find, and then they try to explain them. And they’ve noticed that, the wider and deeper they go, the simpler the explanations seem to get.
     “The great discoveries of the past three centuries have all pointed toward the existence of an enormous central fact, a single law for the whole world and everything in it. All the little patterns we see in things, like legs only being so fast, or arms only being so strong, or water never rising past two-twelve Fahrenheit, are just special cases of that central law, like the differently shaped shadows a statue will cast depending on how you turn it in the sun. Does that suggest anything to you, Chris?”
     It took her a moment to register the question. She began to think. He waited in silence.
     A million million details. A single truth giving rise to them all. Human reason sifting the details for the patterns that hid in them. Human knowledge of the patterns accumulating over the centuries, gradually reconstructing the statue from its innumerable shadows.
     “The more you know, the simpler it all gets,” she whispered. “The parts might be confusing, but it’s made to be understood whole.” The thrill of discovery was coursing through her like an electric current. “Louis, it couldn’t have happened that way by chance, could it?”
     He folded his hands and looked down at them.
     “Some people think it could have, Chris.”
     “Do you?”
     “No.”
     “And that’s religion?”
     He nodded.

     That was a young genius attempting to explain the impulse toward religious belief to another young but untutored genius. He’d found God in natural law. The uniformity and consistency of natural law seemed to him to mandate a single great Lawgiver. Other great minds have done the same, though not all of them.

     Yet Louis’s insight, entirely apart from its religious overtones, has another implication of critical import: All laws are one. All truths are one. They intertwine and support one another. Were any one of them to be pulled loose, the edifice would crumble.

     Though many would disagree, the unity is there.

     I’ve written that for an individual to accept any single fact as objectively irrefutable would compel him to accept all the rest of reality, given time. But after long reflection, I’ve come to believe that the reverse is true as well: If he could successfully deny any one objectively demonstrable fact, it would force him to deny all the rest of objective reality. He’d have to! They’re intertwined. Any one thread that’s pulled loose would unravel the whole garment.

     It may be that the enemies of the Western edifice – what I’ve called the Christian Enlightenment — are more aware of this than are most of us who strive to defend it. Their attacks have demonstrated that their tacticians have some insight. A smart tactician doesn’t pit strength against strength. He always looks for a weakness to attack.

     The weaknesses of Western civilization are those realms of thought in which we’ve entertained disputes about objective truths… including the mystifying determination of some to dismiss the concept of an objective reality entirely.

* * *

     I led off yesterday’s piece by rhapsodizing, a bit wistfully, about the Apollo 11 mission. In what probably struck many Gentle Readers as the all-time champion of jagged segues, I leaped thence into a tirade about the Left’s attack on the arts.

     By now, you know that what I do, I do deliberately.

     Though I know that there are people who claim that the moon landing was faked – that men have never crossed that divide – only they take themselves seriously. They’re in a special category of naysayers, along with the flat-Earthers and Man Will Never Fly Society. But the naysayer, a.k.a. the skeptic, is an important creature. Provided that he is honest, he assists the rest of us in answering questions about natural laws. The honesty part is not optional: he must be willing to concede when he’s been proved wrong by objective means.

     The nature of objectivity is a tender point in the Western psyche. It’s unprovable, because proof is inapplicable to things that cannot be categorized. Objectivity isn’t a concept; it’s reality itself. To deny objectivity is to deny that the world we perceive is anything but a figment of our imaginations.

* * *

     I feel no need to go into the solipsist or social-constructionist fallacies today. Suffice it to say that these are the end states of the denial of objectivity. They who strive to destroy the Christian Enlightenment don’t want to go that far. They want something like this:

     ’There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,’ he said. ’Repeat it, if you please.’
     ”Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” repeated Winston obediently.
     ”Who controls the present controls the past,” said O’Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. ’Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?’
     Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted towards the dial. He not only did not know whether ’yes’ or ’no’ was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one.
     O’Brien smiled faintly. ’You are no metaphysician, Winston,’ he said. ’Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?’
     ’No.’
     ’Then where does the past exist, if at all?’
     ’In records. It is written down.’
     ’In records. And- ?’
     ’In the mind. In human memories.
     ’In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?’
     ’But how can you stop people remembering things?’ cried Winston again momentarily forgetting the dial. ’It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!’
     O’Brien’s manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial.
     ’On the contrary,’ he said, ’you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.’

     With themselves as “The Party,” of course.

     If all of reality is truly a unity, then successfully attacking it at one weak point offers the best chance of destroying the acceptance of reality itself – that is, reality as objective, ontologically prior to perception, statement, theory, and opinion. The weakest point was in esthetics, the special province of the human activities called the arts. Accordingly, that was where the destroyers struck.

     “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” ran the old saw. Nothing that blatantly false has ever received as much deference. Beauty – esthetic Quality, as Pirsig would say – inheres in the object itself. We perceive it, call it beautiful, and think that in doing so we’ve rendered a personal judgment, but in point of fact we are merely recognizing a fact – something prior to our perceptions; something that simply is. The artists of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment eras accepted that without bothering to debate it. Their works exemplify their acceptance.

     As usual, C. S. Lewis had something to say about it:

     She saw from the windows of the train the outlined beams of sunlight pouring over stubble or burnished woods and felt that they were like the notes of a trumpet. Her eyes rested on the rabbits and cows as they flitted by and she embraced them in heart with merry, holiday love. She delighted in the occasional speech of the one wizened old man who shared her compartment and saw, as never before, the beauty of his shrewd and sunny old mind, sweet as a nut and English as a chalk down. She reflected with surprise how long it was since music had played any part in her life, and resolved to listen to many chorales by Bach on the gramophone that evening. Or else—perhaps—she would read a great many Shakespeare sonnets. She rejoiced also in her hunger and thirst and decided that she would make herself buttered toast for tea—a great deal of buttered toast. And she rejoiced also in the consciousness of her own beauty; for she had the sensation—it may have been false in fact, but it had nothing to do with vanity—that it was growing and expanding like a magic flower with every minute that passed. In such a mood it was only natural, after the old countryman had got out at Cure Hardy, to stand up and look at herself in the mirror which confronted her on the wall of the compartment. Certainly she was looking well: she was looking unusually well. And, once more, there was little vanity in this. For beauty was made for others.

     If yesterday’s piece didn’t make sense to you at first reading, perhaps it will today.

* * *

     I try not to go on at great length here. This is one of my longer pieces, yet it’s composed principally of citations of other works. In the next segment I’ll attempt to solidify the connections between the attacks noted here and the pillars of our intellectual realm.

     Have a nice day.

Schismata Part 1

     Depending on what time zone you were in at the time, either today or tomorrow, in the Year of Our Lord 1969, Neil Armstrong first set foot on the surface of the Moon. For many, that moment was the high-water mark of Western Civilization. In the person of an American astronaut, Mankind had escaped its womb and begun its journey to the stars.

     But the matter was far from settled. “Those who have not joy” (C. S. Lewis) immediately began to denigrate or cast doubt on the achievement. Some were blatant, others subtle. A number strove to recast the Apollo landing as somehow tainted by slavery, “imperialism,” or whatever else they could conjure up. A few tried to reduce its significance by stressing that the Moon is “conveniently close,” which makes getting there “no big deal.” Others pointed to the competitive, quasi-combative aspect of the “Space Race.” Had it not been for the Soviets’ early lead in space travel, they claimed, America would never have cared about a Moon landing. And so on, ad nauseam.

     We ought to have paid more attention to the denigrators and naysayers. They were the point of an invisible spear aimed at America’s heart. There was significant pressure behind that spear. It had already made an inroad into our national psyche. It penetrated ever more deeply as the years rolled past.

* * *

     The Sixties, for all the hype that’s been lavished on them, were the beginning of America’s decline. Those who sought to destroy us knew that you don’t start at the top. To bring down a society, you locate its foundation and work to undermine it. The foundation stones of the extraordinary achievement that Robert A. Heinlein called “the Renaissance Civilization” were all but invisible to the great majority of Americans. In consequence, we failed to recognize their attackers or grasp the aim of their efforts.

     Rather than follow my usual practice, I’ll cut to the chase:

The foundation of the United States of America
Was made from Christian ethics and political freedom.

     Those aren’t things that would yield to the first blows of the chisel. They are – or were – too deeply ingrained in the American psyche to be quickly shattered. So deeply, in fact, that the average American of the first decades after World War II never thought about them. They were omnipresent, like air. More, we had inherited them from prior generations. It was easy to believe that that’s just how things are and always will be.

     We never thought about why we believed that. That made it easy for the underminers to chip away undisturbed.

* * *

     It was the Sixties in which the attacks on our foundation became generally visible. Conspicuous socialist and communist movements began to proliferate in “centers of higher education.” Those things are inherently opposed to both freedom and Christianity. Their purveyors were clever; they aimed first at cultural targets: the arts. They strove to displace the esthetics that ruled music, painting, sculpture, dance, fiction, and entertainment. For they understood, as many of us did not, that those things reinforce a people’s sense of themselves and their achievements.

     Ironically, those who railed against the new, anti-Christian esthetics were beaten back with a weapon that baffled them: artistic freedom. That was presented to us with the implication that the nouvel artiste has an affirmative right to stand alongside traditional practitioners. It occurred to very few that freedom includes the freedom to condemn.

     Collectivist nostrums would soon infiltrate the educational system. Clouds began to form around basic concepts such as rights and justice. The arts had lifted the tent flap and made it possible. Eastern European intellectuals had embraced the Gramscian prescription and brought it to receptive American “scholars” who were looking for something “new.”

     First in the arts, then in “soft” studies such as psychology, sociology, and economics, American universities became battlegrounds between the Left and the Right.

* * *

     This is really an introductory piece. I can’t finish it in one Sunday; there’s too much ground to cover. (Besides, I have laundry to do, a cat room to clean, and meatballs to make.) I wanted to introduce the idea and ideas of the Sixties, “the Summer of Love,” as the appropriate starting point for examining the attack on America’s conceptual foundation.

     It’s time for the gloss that’s been smeared over that decade to be wiped away, in the interests of clearsighted understanding of our plight and its roots.

The Unique Product

     States, like men, have their growth, their manhood, their decrepitude and their decay. – Walter S. Landor

     Incentives and disincentives determine everything.

     Yes, I know that’s too strong a statement. But to put it that way makes it memorable, a mantra for the armchair analyst. He can chant it as he strives to understand some process that at first looks baffling.

     Franz Oppenheimer divided human action in pursuit of a goal into two categories: the economic means, which is characterized by production and peaceful trade; and the political means, whose determinant is the use of coercion: i.e., force and intimidation. For most of the past century, the economic means has steadily if grudgingly given way to the political means. This deserves to be studied far more deeply than it has been to date, for the political means is inherently parasitic. It does not produce; rather, it feeds on the production of others.

     The organization of the political means is the institution we call the State.

     The specifics of how States originate have varied across the millennia, but the conditions required for its persistence have always been what they are today: It must possess both the tolerance, however grudging, of the subject populace, and the acceptance of all forces sufficiently powerful and proximate to challenge it. I’ve written about the latter requirement on several occasions. Today, my focus is on the former one: specifically, what might cause a State to lose the tolerance of its subjects.

* * *

     The detail questions behind subjects’ tolerance of a State are simple:

1. What “product” does the State offer us?
2. Can we afford it?
3. Is it “good enough?”
4. If any of the answers to the above questions are negative, what would it cost to oppose and perhaps ultimately topple the State?

     The answers to those questions are never uniform and never static. They change according to time, place, and the identity of the person answering them. When the answers begin to coalesce in the negative direction, the State is at risk of rebellion.

     States claim to offer their subjects many things, but beneath them all is an offer of justice. Give the State the monopoly power to define and enforce justice, and thereafter the State will see to those duties. Those who seek to offend against justice will be pursued and punished; when possible, their victims will be made whole. That offer is the State’s basic product.

     In the usual case, subjects are not permitted to refuse the State’s product. Penalties are imposed upon those who try. The State is therefore not only a monopolist, but one that can enforce the acceptance of its product. That brings the price and quality of the product to the forefront. How good is the State’s justice, and how expensive is it over the long term?

     In the marketplace, vendors compete through price, quality, and their reputations. That allows many vendors to sell products that perform the same or greatly similar functions. The State’s product is qualitatively different.

     Competition is anathema to the State, for it must involve the loss of the State’s monopoly over the use of coercion. When a competitor arises, the State immediately moves to crush it. Should it succeed in doing so swiftly and without greatly disturbing its subjects’ tenor of life, it would represent its action as justice. Otherwise, the applicable terms would be insurrection, rebellion, or civil war.

     But a competitor to the State can only be potentially viable if it can outperform the State at its own game: justice. That is the incentive for the State to deliver on its promise of justice. The open and obvious non-provision of justice by States around the world is a curiosity of note.

* * *

     Inasmuch as States have been notably deficient in providing their subjects with justice, they must defend themselves from potential competitors who are willing and able to do the job. There aren’t many ways to pre-squelch competition. Probably the commonest approach is to deny potential competitors the means by which to compete: i.e., to outlaw the possession of weapons by anyone but agents of the State. It’s been widely tried, but it’s seldom worked.

     In one of the most dramatic cases of competition in the provision of justice, the Cosa Nostra, deeply analyzed in this essay, has evolved an approach of unsurpassed competitive effectiveness. In parts of Italy it commands more respect than the State. Yet the Cosa Nostra is more voracious than the State, and even more ruthless. Russia’s Bratva is organized along similar lines, and is similarly voracious and ruthless.

     Many States have been baffled by organized crime. They recognize the threat and move against it, but without much success. That they’re being out-competed and could redress the problem simply by fulfilling their promises of justice at a modest cost to their subjects seems not to occur to them. At least, that’s the gentlest explanation.

     Justice is a unique product. The State inevitably insists on being a monopoly provider, then proceeds to underperform ever more visibly as time passes. That incentivizes the emergence of competitors.

     When several organizations in a given locale simultaneously offer to provide justice, violence won’t necessarily produce a victor. Even the most powerful State can fail to maintain its monopoly. Sometimes the only possible resolution is a fragmentation into separate territories – “turf” is the usual term – involving agreements not to compete across territorial borders.

     This is the process that has produced our current world order, in which States compete with one another for territory and population. It also accounts for how and when new nations are born. That having been said, I shall leave all further inferences to my Gentle Readers.

A Reissue

     As of this morning, a new, illustrated edition of The Warm Lands is available at Amazon:

     The world of Aeol is dying, and no one knows why.

     The mana conduits that once sustained all life on the continent have shifted. Rivers of ancient power that flowed north to south for centuries now run east to west, drawn toward a single destination no one can explain. Gregor of Serebal, a journeyman sorcerer tasked with charting these invisible currents, has crossed the lifeless wastes of the Great Waste alone. He has seen entire civilizations reduced to scattered pockets of desperate survival. He is not easily shaken.

     But nothing prepared him for Anam.

     Laella was born gifted, touched by magic she never asked for and had not learned to control. When that magic made her a virgin mother, her village turned against her. Her son was executed by the ruler who feared what she represented. She was left with nothing: no family, no home, no future. When Gregor arrives, she is a woman already stripped of everything.

     What grows between them in the wasteland is not a fantasy romance. It is something quieter and more lasting than that. Two people, each carrying damage the other cannot fully see, choosing each other anyway. Walking west together toward a mystery that will demand more from them than either imagined possible.

     The Warm Lands is a standalone literary fantasy built entirely around its characters. There are no doorstop sequels, no sprawling cast, no magic system explained in appendices. There are only Gregor, Laella, and the world they must save at the cost of everything they have fought to build together.

     For readers who have been searching for a fantasy that takes them seriously.

     Scroll down a bit and you’ll find the three-minute video trailer I’ve commissioned for it.

     Yes, I’ve raised the price. I hope to recoup some of the $4800 I’ve spent on the new cover and the illustrations. The C.S.O., ever the accountant, shrugged and said “You have to spend money to make money.” We shall see!

     There will be a companion paperback edition in a few days as well.

Applause From An Old Man

     Once in a great while, an essay comes my way that leaves me speechless from its insight. I’ve just received such an essay from Haretina Kukuri. It’s so penetrating that all I can do is applaud.

     Haretina brilliantly traces the lineaments of the world order from the days when what mattered above all else was force and geographic hegemony, to today, when finance matters as much as arms and armies.

     Within the aggregate of maneuvers and operations we call “finance,” there is always a foundation stone. When the currencies of great nations were redeemable in specie, that stone was gold. But the wars of the Nightmare Century gave the great powers the opportunity they sought to forsake specie redeemability. But a foundation stone was still required. The Bretton Woods system implied it; Haretina makes it visible:

     The order that resulted rested on a distinctive synthesis: American predominance supplied the material foundation; multilateral institutions supplied procedural legitimacy. Together they produced stability and integration without precedent — trade expanded dramatically, investment accelerated, Western Europe and Japan rebuilt into industrial prosperity. But the system’s true foundation was neither treaty nor institution.
     It was confidence: confidence that obligations would be honoured, currencies would hold, rules would bind, and institutions would function under strain. Trust was the invisible infrastructure. Central banks accumulated dollars because American markets combined depth, liquidity and legal certainty no competitor could match; investors accepted modest Treasury yields because institutional credibility reduced uncertainty more effectively than higher returns elsewhere.

     Once again, hearken to the great Benjamin M. Anderson:

     There is no need in human life so great as that men should trust one another and should trust their government, should believe in promises, and should keep promises in order that future promises may be believed in and in order that confident cooperation may be possible. Good faith -- personal, national, and international -- is the first prerequisite of decent living, of the steady going on of industry, of governmental financial strength, and of international peace. -- Benjamin M. Anderson, Economics and the Public Welfare: A Financial and Economic History of the United States, 1914 -- 1946

     Gold maintained a shadow presence in international finance even after the Bretton Woods agreement. But in truth, what mattered above all was the other parties’ confidence in American financial strength and the trustworthiness of American traders and markets. That confidence has waned somewhat this past half-century, though not to the point of revoking the dollar’s status as the world’s “reserve currency.”

     In her conclusion, Haretina tacitly invokes one of the key insights of cybernetic analysis, The Law of Requisite Variety:

     The Law of Requisite Variety (coined by cybernetician W. Ross Ashby) states that to successfully control or adapt to a complex system, the internal complexity and behavioral flexibility of the controller must be equal to or greater than the complexity of the environment it faces.
     Also known as "variety absorbs variety", this First Law of Cybernetics essentially means that the entity with the most available options, responses, and adaptable behaviors will dictate the system's outcome. If an environment throws a highly unpredictable set of challenges at you, a rigid, inflexible set of responses will eventually fail.

     In Haretina’s words:

     The four-phase framework proposed here is not a rigid periodisation but a way of seeing a single transformation whole. Across two centuries the instruments changed relentlessly — sovereign loans became development finance, banking missions became multilateral institutions, fixed parities dissolved into integrated capital markets, and competition now runs through payment systems, reserve currencies, digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence, critical minerals and regulatory authority. The continuity lies beneath: states converting financial capability into political influence while economising on coercion.
     Military power remains indispensable, and negotiation remains essential. But neither now determines the structure of international order by itself. Order increasingly depends on who designs the institutions through which capital moves, liquidity is created, payments settle, technology is financed and confidence is sustained.
     The next chapter of international politics will not be written primarily through territorial conquest or ideological confrontation.
     It will be written through competing financial architectures.
     The decisive question is no longer who possesses the greatest wealth.
     It is who organises the networks through which the world’s wealth circulates.
     That is the diplomacy of finance.

     I told you to keep an eye on this young woman. She’s going places.

Because That’s What They Do

     First, Happy Bastille Day. If your schooling didn’t include the details of the French Revolution of 1789, you can read about some of the more prominent ones here. Even if their reasons differ, mobs storming prisons have taken Bastille Day as their model ever since.

     Second, Long Island is about to be broiled once again, which may force me into our basement for the duration. Yes, we have central air conditioning, but the system starts to struggle when the outdoor temperature exceeds 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Fortunately, there are two more computers down there… but there are also a large TV, a comfortable recliner, and several hundred movies on DVD. Which of those will command my attention is always a crapshoot.

     Third – here we are again, Gentle Reader – a news item that slipped past me a few days back has been brought to my attention:

     Alarming new satellite images show signs that the Iranian regime appears to be rebuilding its suspected nuclear facilities at Pickaxe Mountain and Parchin.
     Footage of both areas – which sustained extensive damage during US and Israeli-led bombing campaigns that began in late February – reveal “major signs” of activity, according to CNN, which obtained images from private firms.
     Such construction likely runs afoul of the Memorandum of Understanding that Iran and US negotiators reached last month during a cease-fire that President Trump called “over” this week following Iranian attacks on shipping vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.

     Are there any Gentle Readers who didn’t expect that? Who sincerely expected the ayatollahs to abide by the MoU? That could only be due to a severe case of wishful thinking. Imagine me tut-tutting and waving an index finger.

* * *

     Long ago, I wrote:

     Possibly no novel in history has excited as much admiration or discussion as J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy classic The Lord Of The Rings. If you're one of the three remaining English-speakers who has yet to read this extraordinary work of the imagination, it's essentially the tale of the final conflict between the Free Peoples of Middle Earth, belatedly come together in a defensive federation, and Sauron the Dark Lord, the superhuman embodiment of evil, who seeks to enslave the entire world, simply because that's what he does.

     Enslaving others makes Sauron happy. Perhaps he could also get some use out of them – as soldiers against Gondor, for example – but even if he could not, enslavement is his supreme temporal aim.

     For Islamists worldwide, the supreme temporal aim is the destruction of all competing creeds. The destruction of all Jews must come first, for it was Jews who first defied Muhammad. No agreement struck with another power will change that. Their creed – I refuse to call Islam a “religion” – demands the death of all Jews everywhere. The concentration of Jews in Israel and Israel’s geographic placement make it Islam’s foremost target.

     But Islamists know that destroying Israel will require nuclear weapons. They also regard agreements struck with “unbelievers” as to be dismissed when doing so would bring “advantage to Islam.” Thus, their creed makes it next to obligatory for them to enter a “peace agreement” fully intending to violate it. The MoU, in which Iran’s rulers supposedly agree to abandon the quest for nuclear weapons, was signed under the falsest of pretenses, for they intended to violate it from the start.

     I can easily imagine how President Trump, a consummate deal-maker, feels about this. To Trump, keeping one’s given word is a matter of honor and respect for the other party. While Iran’s violation of the MoU is consistent with the behavior of Islamist rulers, it must surely enrage him. We must hope that fury won’t lure him into a ground war, an outcome few Americans would approve.

     Yet what the Post reports is just what Islamists do. They always make such a promise with their fingers crossed.

* * *

     There is no Last Graf. Given prevailing attitudes and America’s experiences with 21st Century warfare, we must not expect an American expeditionary force to invade Iran and topple the Islamic regime. President Trump would resist the idea fiercely, and the preponderance of our citizenry would support him. If the Post’s report of Iranian duplicity is confirmed, the most likely consequence would be the resumption of bombardment of military and political targets within Iran.

     It’s a bleak prospect, but the alternatives are unpalatable.

A New And Vital Voice

     For some time now, I’ve been casting about for “new voices” to whom the beleaguered of our era should pay attention. In the process, I’ve encountered a lot of pompous asses – hey, a man should recognize his kind when he meets one, shouldn’t he? – and no small number of persons who parade erudition in place of insight. What’s missing from most discourse offered to the general public today is something I’ve prized lifelong.

     In Three Days of the Condor, one of the most impressive movies of the Seventies, director Sydney Pollack includes a thematic snatch of a conversation between CIA Director Wabash, played by John Houseman, and Assistant Director Higgins, played by Cliff Robertson:

Wabash: I go even further back than that. Ten years after The Great War, as we used to call it. Before we knew enough to number them.
Higgins: You miss that kind of action, sir?
Wabash: No… I miss that kind of clarity.

     Clarity is the most underappreciated virtue in the discourse of our time. It has often seemed to me that many writers treat it as an enemy – something that could get in the way of achieving public acclaim, or a position in the State Department. You might easily conclude that such a writer isn’t willing to say what he means and stand his ground when confronted about it.

     Clarity makes demands of both the writer and the reader. A clearly written opinion / analysis piece leaves the reader in no doubt about its contentions. It requires the reader to engage with it open-eyed. A lot of readers aren’t happy about being compelled to do so. They need the cushion of periphrasis to keep their sensibilities from getting scuffed up. But readers who matter – readers who reach definite conclusions and base their subsequent decisions on them – love clarity.

     I do.

* * *

     This era might one day be called the Age of Orwell’s Lament. There is so much that’s “plain as a fart,” staring us right in the face, that millions are unwilling to confront. That unwillingness is fundamentally defensive, as Orwell himself was at pains to tell us:

     ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten….
     ‘The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’
     One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.

     Yet there is a hunger for clarity among Us the People. It accounts for the elections of Donald Trump to the presidency. Trump’s style may be extravagant and occasionally self-glorifying, but he is nevertheless clear. He makes no secret of his intentions, and the common citizen loves him for it.

     The new voices that will command popular sentiment will be champions of clarity. They won’t hide. They may strut, as Trump does, but no one will be able to justly say that they weren’t clear about what they planned. Aspiring opinion-formers – I hear they’re called “thought leaders” these days – should take note and act accordingly.

* * *

     To those Gentle Readers who’ve been asking “But what’s the point?” I must admit to a bit of lede-burying. Yes, there is a new voice to which attention should go. She’s a young woman of conspicuously clear vision, high intelligence, and hard sense. I encountered her by chance at X, where so much is said to so little effect. I hope she will be heard.

     Her name is Haretina Kukuri:

     Haretina Kukuri is a strategic consultant operating at the intersection of commercial brokerage, geopolitical intelligence, and cross-border market navigation.
     Her practice is built on the understanding that the most consequential business decisions are never made in a vacuum. Markets respond to politics. Politics responds to power. And power rarely announces itself in advance.
     Working across emerging and frontier markets, Haretina advises clients who need more than analysis — they need actionable intelligence integrated directly into their decision cycle.

     Miss Kukuri first impressed me with a statement of convictions at X:

Hello. I’m Haretina. 25. Born in Greece

I’ve studied tourism management, criminology, and business with finance. I’ve lived in five countries. I speak five languages. I write about geopolitics, markets, power, and history.

I believe in common sense, which has quietly become a… pic.twitter.com/AnZQ1z0g3K

— Haretina (@HaretinaK) July 5, 2026

     If you want a dose of clarity about important matters, including many that other commentators are loath to address, read Haretina’s whole tweet. Follow it into the comments.

     Europe needs this young woman. Indeed, the whole world needs insight and forthrightness of her caliber, but Europe is dying from the lack of it. Her penetration and clarity are conspicuous in the essays at her website as well.

     Haretina Kukuri is a vital voice for our time, and for times to come.