Vacua

     It seems that for some kinds of learning, you have to get old.

     I’m old. I’ve lived 73 years as of the fifth of September in this Year of Our Lord 2025. And I sometimes thank God that I can’t clearly remember the foolishness I espoused in my younger days. I’d die of embarrassment if some of it were to come to light. And that’s enough for personal disclosures.

     I was educated as a physicist. I’ve retained very little of that knowledge. I couldn’t solve a Schrodinger’s Equation problem to save my life. But I did hold on to one critical insight. It’s one you probably acknowledge, too, even if you would express it in other terms.

Excepting the effects of entropy,
The universe is ruled by equilibrium.

     Practical living incorporates that insight in particular ways: “The goldfish will grow to the size of the bowl.” “Water seeks its own level.” “Dirty is automatic; clean takes work.” “Nature abhors a vacuum.”

     That last one is much on my mind this morning. No calculus will be required to follow it out.

***

     Experimenters create vacua for specific purposes, often to gauge the consequences of a reaction that cannot occur in air. Vacua are also required for certain types of high-tech manufacturing. But have you ever contemplated the production of vacua by activists and politicians? Why would they do it?

     (Before we proceed further, yes: the plural of vacuum is vacua. The alternate plural vacuums is best reserved to the discussion of floor-cleaning devices.)

     Nature abhors a sociopolitical vacuum just as much as the physical kind. Indeed, a sociopolitical vacuum is often paralleled by a physical one. Both demand to be filled by something. All it takes is time.

     Now consider what’s happened to birth rates in the First-World nations. I don’t know of any advanced nation other than Israel that’s reproducing at or above replacement rate. Without an influx of immigrants, those countries would “empty out” within a few generations. The effects are already visible in Russia and Japan.

     Those declines in fertility don’t create a hard vacuum... but they indicate a reduced pressure within the affected countries. The pressure against their borders is higher than the pressure to maintain racial, ethnic, and cultural norms can resist. Moreover, there are elements within those countries that want a flood of immigrants, regardless of any countervailing considerations.

     Those pro-immigration elements have effective control of the governments of Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

     Yes, movements have arisen in all those nations to agitate against unrestricted and unqualified admission to their lands. But to this point, the pro-immigrant elements in their governments are holding sway. It’s unclear whether the balance will tip in the other direction in the near future.

     I’d bet against it, because of a cooperating vacuum that’s been under construction for several decades.

***

     Moral and ethical norms are best inculcated in the young person by his parents. Should they fail to do so, he might manage to acquire them in some other fashion, but he’d likely give and receive a lot of pain and damage in the process. Some of that damage would be to his beliefs about individuals’ rights.

     For decades the trend in Western nations has been away from firm moral-ethical norms and toward a freewheeling relativism: “whatever’s right for you.” Parents have been swayed in that direction as much as anyone else. But relativism acts like a vacuum. Under the guiding principle of “whatever’s right for you,” even a nation whose heritage is strongly Christian will lack the will to defend Christian norms against an incursion by an aggressive and confident opponent.

     Relativism synergizes with the reluctance to confront – an unwillingness to risk conflict, even if it’s just verbal conflict. The relativist will not argue for any absolute norm. How can he? Under the relativistic principle, there are “no right answers.” Everyone is entitled to “his own truth.” But a time may come when someone else’s “truth” mandates the relativist’s subjugation or death.

     That’s what’s happened to Canada, Britain, and Australia. It’s beginning to raise its head here in the United States. The great majority of Americans are at least nominally Christian. Our Nation’s laws were founded on Commandments Four through Nine of the Decalogue. But we have exhibited an increasing disinclination to take up cudgels in support or defense of Christian norms.

     Those norms will not prevail without a stouthearted defense. Their adversaries’ numbers are growing while ours are stagnating. Do the math.

***

     My personal conviction is that Islam is toxic to human life and must be destroyed root and branch. I feel similarly about the tide of Negro savagery that’s manifested in recent years, most notably in the larger cities. But underlying those threats to Christian-Enlightenment civilization are the vacua of relativism and non-confrontation. Those vacua will be filled by something. It behooves us of the Christian Enlightenment to be ones to fill them.

     Time is not on our side.

Clarity For Nothing

     (But, sadly, no “chicks for free.”)

     Seriously, there are moments in the midst of what seems completely senseless turmoil that everything becomes perfectly, undeniably clear. Some of us attain clarity faster than others, owing to having paid more attention to developments and having resisted the urge to “ignore it and maybe it will go away.” But even the least attentive, most reluctant Americans, when they confront an array of stories such as this:

• The Racist New York Times: We've Discovered the Fundamental Problem With Public Education. It's (Prepared to be Stunned) White People.
• Dear White Parents, Stop Caring About Your Children
• Soros-Funded Revolutionary Prosecutor Kim Gardner's Office Tampered With Evidence to Charge The McCloskey's With Crimes
• Mentally Deranged Black Man Attacks White Women in Laundromat With Handsaw, Using It as a Slashing Weapon; Police Try to Arrest Him, But Antifa Crowds Taunt Police and Force Them to Let Him Go
• “Peak Depravity” Edition
• Pro-Life Is A Racist Term That Must Be Cancelled

     ...will be jarred willy-nilly into clarity.

     If you haven’t yet read those stories, please do. Follow the embedded links. Reflect on the momentum being given to the vector of American dissolution – a Second Civil War – that such events and exhortations provide. Yes, just now the violence is confined to a few cities along the nation’s “blue margins.” But will it remain there? Reflect on what you would do – you personally — were the chaos to swell large enough to threaten your community.

     Did I mention that I had plans to relocate my family to North Idaho? No longer, but I’ll get to that a bit later.

---

     We are witnessing history in the making. Never before in our nation’s 200-plus years has a political movement deliberately fomented lethal tensions between the white and black races. Yet that is what is happening as we speak.

     The “Black Lives Matter” movement isn’t even slightly about “black lives.” It’s about creating an Us versus Them mentality: the sort of “class struggle” tableau revolutionaries need to advance toward their objectives. Without fracturing society into mutually hostile groups, they cannot rise to power. A society at relative peace will always reject their demands.

     The violence is the giveaway. Violence polarizes a society. It inculcates a survival attitude in those at whom the violence is aimed. Thus, we see hordes of decent persons fleeing the riot-torn cities as fast as they can. They’re fleeing the violence, certainly, but there’s more: they’re internalizing the Us versus Them attitude. Their refuges, which are nearly uniformly white, will fiercely resist any influx of blacks. The folks already there already fear what could happen if blacks move in, and the folks moving there are learning to fear it through immediate experience.

     Ironically, the overwhelming majority of American blacks are peaceable, responsible people. Self-supporting. Sincere Christians. But the non-conforming fraction – this may be as low as 1% or as high as 20% – are spoiling for a fight, and doing their damnedest to make it happen. Why? Because they think white Americans can be had. They’ve been convinced by the demagogues that they can beat us into giving them what they want: above-the-law status, generous, labor-free incomes, and complete dominance of the government sector.

     The Democrat Party hopes to profit from the disorder, but only a handful of their figures are among the fomenters. This is much more about the aspirations of totalitarian revolutionists who’ve decided that this is their best chance to strike...that there may never be a better one. And given the confusion and disharmony that has flowed from the Russian Collusion hoax-coup and the Chinese Coronavirus shutdowns, they could well be right.

---

     What will come of all this depends on who will mobilize to do the jobs local and state governments have (so far) refused to do. That is: to pacify the chaos-stricken regions by force.

     We have police forces and a military to maintain peace in the streets and to put down insurrections. Yet with very few exceptions, our local and state “authorities” have refused to given them the appropriate orders. Indeed, President Trump has been vilified, even condemned, for sending federal forces to Portland, where the violence and vandalism are currently the worst. Figures on the Left have called him a dictator for using federal agents to restore order and protect federal property. Some have called the deployments a “rehearsal” for what Trump would do should he lose his bid for re-election.

     It’s unacceptable, from bottom to top. That Democrat office holders who have no excuse for not knowing better should dare to denounce the president for doing his Constitutionally assigned job is beyond the pale. Yet there are several such, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and Congress can do nothing about them.

     They would like to paralyze President Trump, so the riots can go on indefinitely. They believe that would increase the Left’s chances in the November balloting. Whether it’s within their power to do so, I cannot say. However, I can say what would be required of us were federal forces somehow restrained from acting in the face of such an obvious insurrection.

     Decent private-citizen Americans would have to rise up – and I don’t mean by voting.

     That’s why I’ve decided to remain on Long Island. I anticipate a time in which we who love America as founded – the bastion of liberty this website celebrates – must take up arms to defend it. As old as I am, I refuse to run from the confrontation. I will be there, and I will participate to the best of my ability and armament. I expect that many Americans as old or older will be there with me.

     No, I don’t anticipate it with pleasure. I fear it. It would cost many lives, possibly including mine. The toll on the nation would eclipse that of the first Civil War. But we who love this country must be ready to defend it.

     A dear, departed friend of great wisdom and insight once said to me: “If you think the time has come to fight, grab your gun and your gear and go stand on your porch. Then look toward your neighbors’ porches. If they have done the same, then go forth with them to join the battle. If they haven’t, go back inside and wait, for the time has not yet come.”

     Perhaps the time has not yet come. Perhaps the Trump Administration will act with dispatch and vigor, now that it’s clear that the Democrat mayors and governors of the afflicted cities and states are willing that the chaos should continue. But we cannot wait for much longer...and I think we will not.

     “When the system fails, righteous men rise up.” – Bosch, Season 6, Episode 10

Civil War II Journal: To See, You Must Look

     The more you look, the more you see. -- Robert M. Pirsig

     The observation above seems a tautology. Its import rests on connotations that strike some as “obvious” but leave others scratching their heads:

• To look is an act of volition; it requires the willingness to see.
• To see is to perceive reality and to accept it as supreme over all preconceptions about it.

     As with so many other things, it does seem perfectly simple once you understand it:

     Almost all knowledge, after all, fell into that category. It was either perfectly simple once you understood it, or else it fell apart into fiction. As a Jesuit—even here, fifty light-years from Rome—Ruiz-Sanchez knew something about knowledge that Lucien le Comte des Bois-d’Averoigne had forgotten, and that Cleaver would never learn: that all knowledge goes through both stages, the annunciation out of noise into fact, and the disintegration back into noise again. The process involved was the making of increasingly finer distinctions. The outcome was an endless series of theoretical catastrophes.
     The residuum was faith.

     [James Blish, A Case of Conscience ]

---

     The chaos of contemporary sociodynamics arises from a rampant particularism: the assignment of personal allegiances to ever more narrowly defined groups or – in the current argot – “identities.” Today the focus is upon political and racial allegiances.

     It’s an open secret that political affiliation tends to condition attitudes toward lawbreakers and miscreants. For example, as the mainstream media are now firmly aligned with the Left, they routinely downplay horrors committed by the Left and its mascot groups. When we in the Right dare to expose such media malfeasance, Leftists try their damnedest to silence us. Failing that, they strive to shout us down: “Racist!” “Sexist!” “Homophobe!” “Xenophobe!” and so forth.

     The mainstream media also strain to give the Left’s preferred coloration to the statements and actions of politicians in the Right. Who could possibly forget how the media characterized President Trump’s magnificent Mount Rushmore speech? “Divisive” was the mildest of their condemnations. Anyone who listened to the speech or read the transcript would know the condemnations for lies...but persons on the Left would rather swallow the media’s portrayal uncritically, in a state of self-imposed ignorance, than check it against the facts.

     Is it possible that we in the Right are guilty of the same sort of self-imposed blindness in the service of our partisanry? Yes, it is. However, I can’t put my finger on an example of it. That should tell you something as well, especially if you can cite examples of it.

     Allegiance groups are hardening the boundaries that define them, partly in response to the hostility of their opponents, but also to keep their allegiants within them. Fewer and fewer persons are actually willing to look. The consequences for what they see “should” be “obvious.”

---

All the Protestants...hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics...hate the Protestants,
All the Hindus hate all the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews!

[Tom Lehrer, “National Brotherhood Week”]

     Left versus Right. Black versus White. Urban versus Suburban / Rural. Muslims versus Non-Muslims. Homosexuals versus Heterosexuals. White Collar versus Blue Collar. And Establishmentarians versus Everybody Else.

     I am put in mind of George Alec Effinger’s marvelous, horrifying short story “All The Last Wars At Once.” What will be left when the shooting stops? Will there be a foundation upon which we can reconstruct our traditional E Pluribus Unum? Will there be anything worth saving?

     Unclear. Massively unclear! And mortally frightening to those who love this country and its ideals, and who honor those who have labored, sacrificed, and bled to actualize them. Millions of good-hearted people from coast to coast are screaming for it to stop, to recognize the brotherhood of all men and return to public order. They’ve had enough and they want their country’s previous, admittedly imperfect harmony restored.

     I can’t convince myself that it’s possible. The divisions have been cleaved too deeply. The hatreds have been too greatly inflamed. And some of the groups involved have admitted quite candidly that their aim is to destroy the American sociopolitical order. In favor of what? It varies...but the destruction of the existing order, they maintain, is absolutely required.

     I look with both eyes open, and that is what I see.

---

     I want to be wrong about this. I want the country of my youth back; yea verily, just as much as I want my youth back. But the more I look, the more evidence I see that the struggle has become total and final: those who cherish America as it was versus those who seek to tear it down. I remain alert for evidence to the contrary. Where is it?

     Where are the Leftists who will restrain their violent ideological brethren?
     Where are the blacks who will discipline their unruly co-racialists?
     Where are the homosexuals who want only to be left in peace?
     Where are the Muslims who will corral the jihadis?

     And where oh where are the academics, entertainers, and assorted glitterati who will rein in their fellows who persistently condemn us in the Right as ignorant, subhuman, aspiring totalitarians?

     To any men of good will who sit silent among the left-inclined, the blacks, the homosexuals, the Muslims, and the rest: Show yourselves! If you retain your decency, step forward. Proclaim the brotherhood of man: that as we are equal in our Creator’s eyes, we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us. That all lives matter! Rebuke and restrain those of your particular “identity” who would dare to say otherwise. Else I will disbelieve in you. I will have no choice.

     I will continue to look, and I will report what I see.

This Is What It Will Take

     Precisely this and nothing less:

     When word started spreading that the same protesters that had just broken windows and looted stores in Spokane were going to come to Coeur d’Alene, hundreds of citizens mobilized to protect their community. So when the protesters did show up on Monday night, they quickly discovered that a very heavily armed “welcoming committee” was waiting for them....

     If you are not familiar with the geography of the area, Coeur d’Alene is not very far from the city of Spokane, Washington, and there had been quite a bit of rioting in Spokane on Sunday night.

     In fact, one local news source described it as “a frenzied night of tear gas, rubber bullets and flash-bangs” as police worked tirelessly to end the vandalism and looting. At one point, the Spokane Police Department actually sent out a cellphone alert warning everyone in the region to “avoid the downtown core area”…

     Police used tear gas and rubber bullets to get control of protesters who were rioting and in the downtown area of Spokane, destroying property. Rioters sprayed graffiti, broke windows, and looted select businesses.

     In the aftermath of that horrible night, word began to spread that protesters were planning to show up in Coeur d’Alene on Monday night, and that is precisely what happened…

     But north Idahoans are not without their own resources:

     But there were no riots because the protesters discovered that they were vastly outnumbered by the locals that were waiting to “welcome” them.

     A reporter for the Coeur d’Alene Press was in the downtown area on Monday evening, and he reported that “hundreds of citizens” had mobilized to protect the city…

     Soon, more armed men, self-described as a loosely formed group of patriots, arrived. They took up posts at corners on both sides of Sherman Avenue.
     Later, they were joined by hundreds of citizens packing rifles, semi-automatic weapons, handguns, and bows and arrows.
     The sidewalks were packed with people walking up and down Sherman Avenue, firearms proudly displayed for all to see.

     Apparently the would-be “protestors” weren’t mortally foolish. But sooner or later, some AntiFa or BLM type will think “Naah, they wouldn’t dare.” Remember that you read it here first.