One Trustworthy Commentator

     Thank God there’s still at least one:

     Please watch it, listen to it, and reflect.

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     I’ve been going on about this for some time, but mine is a very minor voice. Tucker Carlson reaches a much larger audience, a vast swath of America…but who is listening to what he’s saying? Who is contemplating what’s being done to us? Is anyone thinking about resistance?

     Here in the Vampire State, no one has risen up. No one of any stature has publicly screamed that the state lacks the Constitutionally licit authority to do what it has done. New York Metro, the fringes of which extend to my own abode, resembles a grave in its immobility. The fear of this virus, which has proved to be no more dangerous than the flu – and to the same age and health cohorts, at that – is too pervasive, and too intense.

     We have shackled ourselves out of fear of a microorganism.

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     There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy [i.e., God]. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them. – C. S. Lewis

     Fear is the aspiring tyrant’s best tool. Fear of violence; fear of disease; fear of the infirmities of age; fear of the future; fear of one’s neighbors; fear of one’s countrymen; fear of faceless others in distant lands. He who can make you afraid can make himself your master…and your fears need not be of him.

     But fear is not an objective aspect of reality. It’s an emotion: a reaction to some perception, whether real or imagined, that we find threatening. We can choose not to cower in fear but rather to face the perceived threat and take up arms against it. Yes, even a microscopic virus.

     Note that no government, no agency, and no politician can actually relieve you of the threats that make you fear. Only you can do that. Indeed, that’s the most ironic facet of our current condition: were Americans merely to practice enhanced hygiene, and protect our most vulnerable relatives from contagion, we would be out the back end of this Wuhan virus business in a few weeks, with no more fatalities than we’re suffering under this lockdown regime and with herd immunity, to boot. Instead we’ve surrendered our rights as Americans for absolutely no gain – and that’s to say nothing of the economic devastation the lockdown has wrought.

     But our politicians value our fear far more than our lives, our rights, or our economy. They’re doing their best to keep our fears stoked high. It’s what aspiring tyrants have always done:

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

     And we’ve fallen for it.

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     I can’t go on any further about this. It makes me too angry. But I’ll propose a Gedankenexperiment for those of you who still have spines:

     Imagine a public figure – any public figure. Imagine that that public figure were to proclaim the following desire, openly on national television:

“I want you to be afraid.”

     Would you respect him? Would you kowtow to his decrees? Or would you become angry, perhaps angry enough to raise your own voice in opposition to him?

     Yet keeping you afraid — almost literally paralyzed by fear – is the principal aim of the tyrants who demand that you remain immobile in your homes. At this juncture, can you reasonably doubt it?

     Time for a closing quote:

     “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” – Frank Herbert

     Have a nice day.

Fear Exhaustion

     This morning, Sarah Hoyt notes a tragic death: a man who decided not to fear the Wuhan virus:

     A Virginia pastor who criticized the “mass hysteria” surrounding the coronavirus pandemic has died of the illness, according to new reports.

     Landon Spradlin, of Gretna — a small town halfway between Lynchburg and Danville — started to feel sick while in New Orleans, where he went to preach to the crowds gathered for Mardi Gras celebrations, according to the BBC.

     A month later, Spradlin — who was also a seasoned musician inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2016 — died.

     [T]he pastor said he believes the coronavirus “is a real issue, but I believe the media is pumping out fear and doing more harm than good.”

     There's an important phenomenon being played out for our viewing pleasure, and Pastor Spradlin is one point on the graph. Each of us has:

1. A certain level of risk-aversion;
2. A limited supply of "fear energy."

     If Smith is highly risk-averse and Jones is not, then a threat that would make Smith cower behind a locked door will leave Jones unaffected. The threat might be real, in the sense that some percent of those who don't take the necessary precautions will be afflicted by it. Some might even die. But Jones is willing to accept the risk involved, whereas Smith is not.

     But the "fear energy supply" matters, too. If Smith has been terrified repeatedly over a range of threats, his ability to fear another one actively — call it his marginal fear-reaction capacity — might be down to zero. Under such circumstances Smith is likely to be paralyzed by the new threat. He'll fear it, but he won't be able to respond with deliberate action as he has to the threats he already fears.

     Quite a lot of Americans are in Smith's position. Consider the many things the media has tried to get us to fear. Yes, many of them have proved (or will soon prove) to be phantasms. That doesn't matter to the risk-averse. While the Wuhan virus might terrify them, their capacity to deal with this marginal fear has been exhausted...so they refrain from doing things that those who still possess a non-zero marginal fear-reaction capacity think wise.

     Pastor Spradlin had either exhausted his fear energy or was a "Jones" whose level of risk tolerance was higher than many others. If he got the dirty end of the stick, that doesn't mean he was in some objective, absolute sense "wrong," any more than a cliff-climber whose equipment fails him and sends him plummeting to his death was "wrong" to embrace his dangerous pastime.

     But beyond that, there are issues of governmental usurpation of authority – incursions into Americans’ few remaining freedoms – before us. The Wuhan virus, and the fear of it promoted by the media and assorted power-mongers in government, has enabled government at all levels to do something that has never even been attempted before: a nationwide “quarantine” that locks all of us into our homes, whether or not we’re sick.

     If that doesn’t terrify you, check your pulse: you may have died and not noticed.

     With regard to this subject and many, many others, I exhort my Gentle Readers to read Sarah’s essay from Monday. It’s both personal and passionate. A snippet:

     This is a situation designed to induce madness, particularly when all our news apparatus is trying its best to drive us to panic fear, because they think they can use it to then panic us into socialism. Destroying the economy is a plus value in this, as then we’ll need (they think) socialism. Socialism never really fixes such situations, but it is often something people embrace when desperate (before they get defeated and starve.)

     He who genuinely prizes freedom and understands how fragile and easily infringed it is will resonate to her sentiments. He who doesn’t? Well, let’s just say he’s exactly the sort of low creature the government-run school system has been trying to produce these past sixty years.

If You Need A Pandemic To Worry About...

     ...I think there’s a verifiable one in progress. Here are the symptoms du jour:

• SJW’s Wishing Death Upon Jordan Peterson
• Kevin Williamson Wants Roger Stone To Die In Prison
• Kim Hirsch on Recent Outbreaks of Trump Derangement Syndrome

     Mind you, the Left’s hatred of the Right has a long lineage. You could argue that it began with Marx and Engels, though it took Lenin and Beria to perform the first instantiations on record. But the most recent outbreaks display the ferocity that characterizes a genuinely dangerous disease.

     To the best of my knowledge, while the Democrats were certainly willing to defame Barry Goldwater in his campaign for the presidency, no one suggested that he or any of his supporters belonged behind bars. No one attacked him or his supporters physically. At that point the hatred was still incubating.

     While the Left fulminated when the GOP renominated Richard Nixon in 1968, it was a phenomenon largely confined to the fringe: the outright socialists and communists, and the “student activists” who sought media attention for themselves. Leftists’ antipathy to Nixon had to wait for the Watergate scandal, at which point it could burst forth in the desired fashion. Their success in compelling him to leave office whetted their taste for further campaigns.

     Ronald Reagan’s campaign for the presidency excited the Left’s derision, but at first leftists and liberals were confident that he would lose: he was too old and too conservative to win a majority. Reagan’s smashing victory really got the ball rolling. President Reagan suffered denunciations America hadn’t seen since the Lincoln Administration – and if you’re not familiar with those, they make illuminating reading.

     Policy denunciations and belittlements were the fodder of the two Bush Administrations. However, the Bushes were personally warm and likeable, especially Bush the Younger a.k.a. Dubya, which made savage personal attacks on them politically unwise. There came a time of retrenchment. The Left needed a new and more assailable devil figure.

     Then came Donald Trump. He was an answer to the Left’s prayers: the exact opposite of its social-fascist hero Barack Hussein Obama. More, he had pledged to undo Obama’s “achievements” root and branch. His “America First” stance is the antidote to the Left’s principal political weapon: identity-group politics. And the more Trump has succeeded for America and Americans, the more the Left has hated and assaulted him, his agenda...and his lieutenants and supporters.

     As Aerich noted in yesterday’s citation from The Phoenix Guards, it can be dangerous to succeed where another has failed.

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     The emotions are motivators. Indeed, if we omit the drives of the body for sustenance and safety, they’re the only motivators of importance. Once we understand what has elicited a strong emotion, we have a chance of making some headway to counter its effects – if countering its effects is what we decide is appropriate.

     The Left is currently in a state of great fear. It faces an opponent who has called it out, most recently and explicitly during his recent State of the Union speech. Moreover, he is in the process of demonstrating, even in the face of strong and sustained opposition from the political and media elites, that his positions are correct: the best ones for America and Americans generally.

     Fear’s natural companion is hatred:

     [H]atred is best combined with Fear. Cowardice, alone of all the vices, is purely painful—horrible to anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to remember; Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate. And Hatred is also a great anodyne for shame. [C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters]

     It thus comes naturally to the Left to hate the man who is showing it up in such brilliant American colors. But of course, this combines naturally with a pre-existing hatred: the Left’s hatred of the sole unbending bastion against its ascension worldwide: the United States of America itself.

     The Left’s hatred has reached a pitch and tempo that demands its expression in action. We’ve seen expressions of that hatred ever more frequently as time has passed. From leftists in the political class we get demands for President Trump’s removal from office, his prosecution for imagined crimes, the confiscation of his wealth and businesses, and so forth. We also get crusades against those of his lieutenants who prove vulnerable, such as Michael Flynn and Roger Stone. We can expect more such between now and November 3.

     Lower-level supporters of President Trump and the GOP have suffered physical attacks with increasing frequency. You’ve read about them: assaults on citizens wearing MAGA hats, attacks on Republican voter-registration drives, and cases of vandalism against Republican district headquarters. There will be more. Not only are they the only things the Left can do to intimidate Trump supporters and conservatives generally out of participation in the political arena; they also help to assuage Leftists’ hatred of the man and his movement that are making them look like fools.

     It will continue. It will get worse as the year wears on. Whether it will cease after the election is doubtful. We must hope that it won’t deteriorate to open, blood-spilling warfare in the streets.

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     And now, a coda:

     Coda n: a more or less independent passage, at the end of a composition, introduced to bring it to a satisfactory close.

     In this piece of yesterday, I counseled the reader not to panic: not to give in to hysteria that would cause him to sever all his ties with the world beyond his door. That is my assessment of Dr. John Campbell’s recommendations: that to subscribe to them fully would involve the severance of economic and interpersonal relations, with an effect on our society so devastating that only a threat on the order of the Black Death could make it seem appropriate.

     Fear can make us do things we would not otherwise do. Sometimes that’s appropriate. As I said yesterday, judicious fear – fear proportional to the dimensions of the threat – can be protective. But at this time, I dispute that the dimensions of the Coronavirus threat are well enough established to justify a contraction of our interactions that would effectively stop both our economy and our society.

     The Chinese are panicking. Perhaps they have a good reason. But the virus has not yet begun to spread to any great extent in North America. The most recent count of American cases I’ve seen is fourteen. Watchfulness and the avoidance of unnecessary risks are appropriate measures. More than that? I don’t think so. Choose according to your own judgment.

Puff Adders

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

     The Left has capitalized on one of the most unworthy of emotions, which appears to dominate the minds of men who should surely know better: the men who set the policies of large corporations.

     Delta Airlines’ recent experience with left-wing pressures provides an excellent example. After the Parkland, Florida massacre, Leftist agitators decided to revive their persecution of the National Rifle Association. They found that Delta, like many other large companies, attempts to attract customers by offering discounts to members of popular affinity organizations. The NRA was one of those groups. A few Leftists harangued Delta into canceling that discount, threatening a boycott and a campaign of vilification against the airline should it fail to comply.

     Why did Delta fold? We are encouraged to believe that it was because Delta’s corporate management feared the consequences of what the Left had threatened. But was there anything to fear, in actuality? What objective successes have Left-wing boycott / hate campaigns had in punishing their targets?

     I don’t know. I don’t even know how to research the matter. And I’d bet the rent money that those corporate managers don’t know either. Their fear of “losing customers” was sufficient to emasculate them.

     Of course, that assumes that losing customers is what they feared.

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     Among commentators on such things, another possibility has been raised: that what corporate CEOs who fold to the Left’s threats really fear is losing the good opinion of persons of “their sort:” i.e., other highly placed persons in business and finance, movers and shakers who direct the affairs of their firms. A case can be made for this. Even in the highest circles of commerce, people still prefer to do business with others they like and respect. Therefore, if a CEO were to lose the good opinion of others with whom he hopes to make large deals, it’s possible that they would “stop taking his calls.” Most major corporations depend on inter-corporate arrangements and deficit finance to keep their companies healthy, which makes this plausible.

     Yet there are few enough really big businesses that those who negotiate purchase and finance agreements among them are unlikely to let their personal biases intrude into such deals. The company whose CEO allows his personal opinions to affect the bottom line in those arrangements is likely to suffer for it. That effect seems more to be feared than the fear that Company A will be harmed by any association with Company B which the Left has targeted. Once again, reliable information about such things, especially as affected by political activism, is hard to get.

     There have been a few visible effects of political activism and corporate faux pas. The best current example is the National Football League, whose managers badly misestimated the effect of allowing its players to denigrate the national anthem. Indeed, the NFL’s loss of viewership and aftermarket revenue has been great enough to endanger it as an enterprise. Contemporary Hollywood provides another example: its leftward swerve correlates strongly with a sharp reduction in movie-going and the retail purchase of movie DVDs, though technological developments have played a part as well.

     Overall, it’s hard to say with confidence that threats of boycotts and adverse publicity are anything for a major company to fear.

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     I think it more likely than not that left-wing activism against targeted corporations is an attempt to frighten that’s not backed up by an objective capability to do harm to its target. The evidence for any true capability to inflict harm on the Left’s targets is scant and unconvincing. Yet the Left has garnered a fair amount of obeisance, obsequious compliance, and public forelock-tugging from the companies it’s targeted. There’s information in there.

     It puts me in mind of the puff adder, which hisses at one threateningly before it strikes. The salient fact here is that the puff adder’s hiss is a defensive measure. It’s deployed to frighten a creature the puff adder fears. If the “target” should back away, the hiss has obviated the puff adder’s need to deploy its objective defensive capability: its venom. As a venomous snake regenerates its supply of venom slowly, that helps the puff adder to conserve its weaponry for use against other nearby threats.

     The puff adder’s venom is potent. It can kill a man, though there are antivenins available which, if administered promptly, will neutralize it. In that regard, the puff adder may have more objective ability to harm than does the Left through its boycotts and vilification campaigns. But while the puff adder is a well studied and understood creature, to this point insufficient attention has been given to the Left’s true capacity to inflict commercial harm on organizations it targets. This is a knowledge deficit we should eliminate.

Weaponizations Part 2: The Understratum.

     The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion. – Edmund Burke

     Among the least pleasant events of life is a visit to a medical professional: doctor, dentist, orthopedist, urologist, gastroenterologist, ophthalmologist, what have you. Such trips tend to be postponed a number of times, even when the (eventual) patient knows he should stop farting around, get off his ass, and go. In a seeming paradox, the reason for postponing the visit is often the same as the reason for agreeing to it: fear.

     Fear is one of the two reasons for consulting a physician. Pain is the other. These are strong motivators, yet we frequently attempt to talk ourselves out of acting on them: “It’s probably nothing.” “Maybe it will go away.” “Fred had this, and he got over it.” And so on.

     I’ve done this a number of times. On one occasion it nearly cost me my life. Clearly, a superior power of reasoning doesn’t automatically defend one against it. Similarly, there is no automatic defense against the fears those who wish to enslave us attempt to instill in us.

     A mentally healthy human being can usually discriminate between that which he should fear and a conjured-up phantasm. So our would-be masters do all they can to make us mentally unhealthy. In particular, they labor to weaponize our fears: to direct them away from true dangers and toward imaginary or improbable threats, to intensify them, and to harness them to their agenda.

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     “The State is based on threat.” – Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus!

     A politically useful fear is always a fear of something larger than oneself. It’s usually kept from being linked to a namable individual who could be approached and confronted one-on-one. There are exceptions, of course, but the pattern is a strong one. Thus, fear of a particular neighbor could not be made politically useful, but fear of the possibility of an unrecognized maniac who just might go on a killing spree can be used for political purposes, if it can be made widespread and strong.

     That unnamed maniac might not seem larger than oneself at first blush. After all, should such a person spring into action, he’ll be a man like other men. He won’t have the strength of Hercules or the speed of Mercury. He’ll have weapons, but then, don’t we all, at least potentially? America has many gun stores, many shooting ranges, and many instructors qualified to teach the skills required for the effective use of a firearm.

     No, the unnamed maniac is fearsome – and politically useful – because he’s unnamed, and therefore unpredictable. He could be anyone. He could arise from any point of the compass. He could select his targets on any imaginable basis, including none at all. How does one defeat the fear such a conjuration inspires?

     Today we have a name for Nikolas de Jesus Cruz. Before he acted, we had only the unnamed maniac-to-be. The political operators of today are striving with all their might to make us fear the next such before he acquires a name, a locale, and a target. It’s their best shot at getting us to surrender more of what little freedom remains to us.

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

     Our would-be masters usually work with several supposed threats at a time. “Global warming.” “Loss of species.” “Air pollution.” “Natural resource exhaustion.” “Automation.” Those are just the ones that come to mind this morning. There are surely others.

     The common characteristics of those threats are size and nebulosity. Each of them presupposes a large danger. In no case is the imputed source of that danger localizable and identifiable, such that ordinary Americans could address it without political interference. That is by design.

     Our capacity to fear can only be weaponized against us by the invocation of such phantasms. Fortunately, there’s a limit: when our fear energy is exhausted, we tend to dismiss all such bugaboos as a batch. Recent developments suggest that Americans might be nearing that threshold.

     More anon.

Christian Ethics In Practice

     Now that I no longer solve other people’s problems for a living, I can allow my thought processes to prowl: to range hither and yon among the many stimuli available, carrying conceptual pollen from one to another, and then to watch, sometimes amusedly and at other times bemusedly, to see what hybrid might emerge. It’s about as close as a contemporary American can come to the job I’ve wanted most of my life: Vice President In Charge Of Thinking Good Thoughts. (Career-hunters be warned: there’s no money in it.)

     It’s been two years now since I retired from wage labor, yet I continue to be amazed at how an old movie, wedded to a seemingly unrelated article, can elicit new and potentially important ideas. But of course, the critical word in that sentence is seeming. The connection had to be there from the start; I just didn’t see it until I’d had some time to think.

     (Memo to me: Must write something about the terrible lack of time to think that afflicts so many Americans today. After thinking about it for a while, of course.)

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     Yesterday’s essay coupled to the previous day’s tirade in a fascinating fashion. The “Preparations” piece is rather grim, while the “Shangri-la” piece has a great deal of hope in it. Yet they exhibit a fundamental concurrence. I said as much, obliquely, in the opening to the latter. It’s time to make the concurrence explicit.

     Superficially, the great shortcoming, in our nation and our world, is the lack of true Christian charity.

     When Lost Horizon’s Father Perreault says to Robert Conway that the world’s true hope is for “a way of life based on one simple rule: Be Kind,” he’s expressing the essence of Christian charity. Jesus of Nazareth stated it in a slightly different fashion: in the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and in the Second Great Commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Paul of Tarsus, in one of his few moments of complete lucidity, put it thus:

     Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if [there be] any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love [is] the fulfilling of the law. [Romans 13:8-10]

     The great challenge this presents us isn’t because Christian charity is complicated. Rather, it’s because we’re presented with so many seemingly compelling reasons to behave otherwise.

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     “The State is based on threat.” – Illuminatus!

     Our world is hagridden by malevolences: agents of predation and violence. Some of them operate in the open: governments. There isn’t one government anywhere on Earth that doesn’t deserve to be destroyed, root and branch, and all its masters and its minions publicly condemned to sackcloth and ashes lifelong. Yes, that includes the 88,000-plus governments of these United States. Their evil cannot be offset by the trivial amounts of good they (accidentally and unintentionally) do.

     The primary aim of persons in government is the primary aim of “The High” as Orwell put it in 1984: “The aim of the High is to remain where they are.” Their master tactic is fear: specifically, engendering fear in their subjects:

• Fear of other governments;
• Fear of punishment for disobedience;
• Inducing their subjects to fear one another.

     The pattern reaches all the way back to the origin of states. Franz Oppenheimer found that in marauding predator bands that got tired of marauding and settled down to mulct their fattest victims in perpetuity. (Cf. The State) Consider the behavior of Eli Wallach’s raiders in The Magnificent Seven dispassionately. How, apart from not remaining in a single place, do those bandits differ from government tax collectors?

     Perversely, other governments and private predators are what make the exactions of one’s government seem acceptable. The aggregate provides stability to the individual components. They who operate through fear serve as one another’s allies and justifications. They also deprive us of the resources – material and emotional – with which we might otherwise practice Christian charity.

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     There’s evil in the world apart from that of governments. There always has been; there will be until Man is no more. The awareness of our vulnerability to that evil, and the sense that we must guard against it, deflects us from positive and constructive relations with others. Charity and distrust are mutually antagonistic – and distrust nearly always wins the contest between them.

     The critical significance of community is its role in damping our fear and distrust of one another. We build communities largely without realizing it. The essential mechanism is the gradual acceptance – nearly always subconscious – that those around us are worthy of our trust.

     He whom we trust is easy to love, in the sense of the Golden Rule. We accept that he’s benevolently inclined toward us, which makes us capable of reciprocal benevolence. A community will form on that basis and no other.

     Yet there are limits to the operation of community. A community of a few hundred souls is plausible; a community of several thousand strains credulity. How can anyone know that many persons well enough to trust in their benevolence? The concatenative assemblage of community – Smith trusts Jones, and Jones trusts Davis, so Smith, reposing faith in Jones’s judgment, trusts Davis – becomes tenuous and weak after three links. When we add significant differences in language and customs, it becomes effectively impossible. We’re aware of this subconsciously as well. Otherwise we wouldn’t be “on guard” when away from our homes. We certainly wouldn’t casually venture beyond them, trusting in the Omnipotent State for our protection.

     The safety Americans once felt when abroad arose from the awareness of the tyrants of other lands of the great power of the United States to take vengeance for offenses done to it. Isaac Asimov captured this in fictional form in The Foundation Trilogy:

     [The lieutenant] motioned curtly to his men, "Take him."
     Toran felt the clown tearing at his robe with a maddened grip.
     He raised his voice and kept it from shaking, "I'm sorry, lieutenant; this man is mine."
     The soldiers took the statement without blinking. One raised his whip casually, but the lieutenant's snapped order brought it down.
     His dark mightiness swung forward and planted his square body before Toran, "Who are you?"
     And the answer rang out, "A citizen of the Foundation."
     It worked-with the crowd, at any rate. The pent-up silence broke into an intense hum. The Mule's name might excite fear, but it was, after all, a new name and scarcely stuck as deeply in the vitals as the old one of the Foundation - that had destroyed the Empire - and the fear of which ruled a quadrant of the Galaxy with ruthless despotism.
     The lieutenant kept face. He said, "Are you aware of the identity of the man behind you?"
     "I have been told he's a runaway from the court of your leader, but my only sure knowledge is that he is a friend of mine. You'll need firm proof of his identity to take him."
     There were high-pitched sighs from the crowd, but the lieutenant let it pass. "Have you your papers of Foundation citizenship with you?"
     "At my ship."
     "You realize that your actions are illegal? I can have you shot."
     "Undoubtedly. But then you would have shot a Foundation citizen and it is quite likely that your body would be sent to the Foundation - quartered - as part compensation. It's been done by other warlords."
     The lieutenant wet his lips. The statement was true.

     That Americans abroad no longer feel quite that safe arises from seventy years of federal government indifference toward the mistreatment of its citizens by such tyrants. Otherwise, Kim Jong-un and the ayatollahs who rule Iran would not have dared to mistreat Americans who’d dared to venture into their domains. Yet those obscenities bear a powerful lesson about community and its limits.

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     Fear nullifies the charitable impulse. How can we be kind – to do unto him as we’d have him do unto us – to someone against whom we must guard ourselves? The thing is plainly impossible; the “ought” is impotent in the face of the “is.” Yet having established that, we are not finished with the problem.

     If you’ve been wondering what “seemingly unrelated article” set me off on this course, the moment for “the big reveal” has arrived:

     Everyone who has tried them tells me threesomes are difficult. And anyone can imagine that threesomes with the government are the most difficult of all. Suddenly it’s no longer a matter of whose elbow is in whose eye, but a matter of whose legal rights are getting stripped, which way the courts lean, and who is likely to lose his parental privileges and, likely, his liberty or at the very least his wealth.

     Which is why I find it absurdly rich of CNN (All the News Fit to Fake) to wonder why American couples are having less sex than they were 20 years ago.

     The article disingenuously roots around for an answer (so to put it, to coin a phrase) and comes up with several. It’s not that they’re wrong – precisely – it’s more that they determinedly ignore what is at the back of those obvious causes of the – ah – dry spell enveloping Americans.

     Please read it all. Among the influences Sarah gradually articulates is how the anxiety under which we labor is made manifest within our marriages and similarly intimate relations.

     Anxiety is stress. All stresses other than the purely physical wear the guise of anxiety. Cicero wrote that “No power is strong enough if it labors under the weight of fear.” Whether he had it in mind or not, that includes the power of sexual desire and attraction.

     Anxiety enervates. It synergizes with our other labors to drain away our energies – and don’t kid yourself; sex requires energy. Indeed, all desires and other impulses to action require energy to be actuated. If you don’t have it, you won’t act, no matter how beautiful your spouse or alluring her new negligee and perfume. And that’s not the end of the story.

     The anxious man naturally wants to feel less anxious...less burdened. But what if he comes to see his beloved as a source of burdens rather than a helpmeet? What if as he contemplates her, the difficulty of pleasing her looms larger than her attractions? Hasn’t that been a principal aim of the gender-war feminists for forty years and more? And doesn’t it transform her from an object of desire to yet another source of anxiety and stress?

     Not only does that anxiety affect relationships already formed; it also keeps them from forming in the first place:

     [W]omen aren’t going out into what they’ve been told is a rape culture, and men, particularly men in college – the prime reproductive age – don’t have to deal with kangaroo courts and mattress girls should their partners decide that the sex wasn’t entirely to their satisfaction and thereby retroactively withdraw consent and claim they were raped. Do you blame them? When public officials and the cultural power structures spend so much time convincing both sexes the other is out to get them, we should thank our lucky stars some young people are still willing to risk sex, despite everything.

     More fear, less love and sex. Less love and sex, less children...and less Christian charity. Especially when we note the intimate connection between fear and hatred.

---

     I could go on. Perhaps I will, at a later date. But I believe the point has been made.

     For Christian charity to have a dominant role in life, that our homes and communities might less resemble bunkers and more resemble Shangri-la, life must be largely cleansed of fear. That will require that we do away with the things that make us fear. How that might be accomplished, I cannot say. Anyway, it’s time for Mass. Be well.

The Fear Weapon

     "Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." [Frank Herbert, Dune]

     Just a week ago, an important article appeared at Chateau Heartiste. It’s a long narrative about an attempted carjacking, in Baltimore, of a white man by a black thug, and it deserves to be read in its entirety. However, for me the most important bit is at the conclusion:

     The experience hasn’t really changed me, but it certainly has honed my resolve, Heartiste. If white men are to take back the cities they built, they will need to use the same weapon on the dindus as they do on us – fear.

     Oh my stars and garters, yes. Mega-emphatically YES! But generalized. For the enemy isn’t just the army of black thugs that have made so many of our urban areas into combat zones. The threat goes well beyond them...all the way to the pinnacle of our political system.

---

     There’s a story about Timur i-leng, the Oriental warlord of the Fourteenth Century, becoming so greatly feared that his armies had no need to fight: the mere notice by a sitting ruler that Timur was approaching and would demand his fealty was enough to make several such potentates submit without resistance. While the tale is fanciful and probably mere legend, the lesson it bears is important.

     Fear is, in a sense, the ultimate weapon. He who can create sufficient fear in his enemy can induce the enemy to surrender without fighting: the highest form of victory. Failing that, swords must clash and men must die.

     A few years ago, I wrote at some length about the power of fear. One particular bit seems especially relevant today:

     Today, when the State has become predatory beyond all expectation and its eyes are everywhere, the sense of insecurity among those of us ill-equipped to fight it directly is stronger than ever. The urge to withdraw into anonymity and invisibility can overpower us. And that, of course, is exactly what our political masters want.

     Have a gander at this article, reflect on what it means for the right to keep and bear arms, and ponder: Will that right be undone de facto, by Gestapo tactics of the sort John Filippidis and his family endured? Then have a look at the statistics in this paper, and ponder whether you can master your fears sufficiently to speak out against such tyranny.

     That’s the power the fear weapon in the hands of the State has over ordinary, peaceable citizens: enough to have us all cowering before its agents look in our direction.

     But the fear weapon is indifferent to the identity of its wielder. Is there some possibility that We the People could wield it as effectively against the State as the State has done against us?

---

     Here are the material bases of the State’s fear weapon:

• Its agents act “under color of law.”
• The great majority of those agents are effectively protected against any redress.
• The “alphabet agencies” have managed to place themselves “above the law” de facto.
• The laws themselves are so many, and so obscure, that no one can be certain he hasn’t violated them.
• Even an innocent man fears to face an accusation in court, because of the expense and the damage to his reputation.

     There are some lesser (and not entirely material) elements to the State’s fear weapon, but we can neglect them for the moment. What about the material elements private Americans could use to cause the State to fear us?

• We have the numbers.
• Americans are rather heavily armed.
• Without our funding, the State could not survive.

     Those three considerations are what make “the consent of the governed” more than a pretty phrase. However, at this time none of them are being put to effective use. How might that be changed?

---

     A lot of ink and a great many pixels have been lavished on a phantasm: the “government shutdown.” Whenever Congress bestirs itself to limit federal spending in any way, we’re threatened with a “government shutdown”...as if the federal government would ever willingly shut down 100%. Note that in each of the “government shutdowns” of recent years, approximately 85% of all federal employees have remained at their jobs, guaranteed to be paid their full salaries.

     The most recent “government shutdown” frightened Americans so little that Barack Hussein Obama had to make it irritating: he instructed Parks Department employees to prevent access to any federal park or monument, even though the Parks Department remained open and functioning.

     Clearly, the “shutdown” wasn’t frightening enough...yet the phrase “government shutdown” remains a scare-staple of the Establishment, particularly among Democrats. They want us to think that calamity of some sort will ensue should we dare to deny them what they demand. It just isn’t so. In reality, the fear runs in the opposite direction: The Establishment and its minions fear that we’ll discover that we don’t need them and in fact would do better without them.

     Doesn’t that stimulate a few fresh thoughts?

---

     There’s much more to be said on this subject, but this is enough for now. At least I want to get my Gentle Readers thinking about how we might frighten “our governments” back into the posture of humble submission the Founding Fathers intended that they should occupy. The State has made us cower for so long that turnabout wouldn’t just be “fair play;” it would be the most welcome of all refreshments. Atop that, it might be exactly the remedy for what ails us.

“Islamed Out”

     When Mark Steyn throws his hands up:

     I've spent the entirety of this no longer new century writing about this stuff. As I told Steve Paikin on a turbulent edition of his TV show all those years ago, the remorseless demographic transformation of the western world is the biggest story of our time, so why wouldn't a writer want to write about it? Apart from anything else, once you're aware of it, it haunts your dreams. But most of us still aren't aware of it. I've been fortunate enough to get a couple of bestselling books out of the subject, but that's no comfort if, by the time they're my age, my children are living in a post-western world. And, of course, you can have a "bestseller" and 99.999999999 per cent of the population need never know of it. Every day I get letters from people who come here via a link from someone or other beginning in effect: "What do you mean, 'the Islamization of Europe'? It's the first I've heard of it."

     Really? Why did the Charlie Hebdo guys get killed? Because they provoked Islam. Why is Europe's political class so willing to trade away free speech and women's rights? Because they're desperate to appease Islam. Why did the same young secular childless German women who supported Angela Merkel in her multiculti delusions spend the New Year getting groped and raped by the young men they so generously opened the doors of their country to? Because when you appease Islam you provoke Islam.

     I'm pretty Islamed out, because I don't have a lot to say I didn't say ten years ago.

     ... you know the situation is grave. If you’re a minor-league commentator who’s been screaming at the top of his figurative lungs for just as long, you have to ask yourself whether there’s any point in going on.

     However, the exploitation of Islam by Western governments still demands emphasis. Also, that which drives me is less under my conscious command than I’d like to believe. Accordingly, one more probably vain screed coming up.

---

     Given the attitudes displayed by the members of our political class, it no longer seems rationally disputable that they regard Islam and the fearsome aspect it presents to us of the civilized world as a useful tool with which to ensure our continued submission. Every State is founded on the fears of its subjects. It follows that anything that accentuates those fears, that makes the individual look about for a protector, will be of value to the State.

     Therefore, it is unwise to expect that our government will “do anything” about any of the various aspects of the Islamic threat:

• Politicians will not speak ill of Islam.
• They won’t causally associate Islam with terrorism or other brutality.
• They won’t act to punish any Islamic nation, no matter what it might do.
• They won’t hurry to note that the perpetrators of any given atrocity are Muslims.
• They certainly won’t unambiguously side with Israel against the Palestinian irredentists.
• They won’t hinder – indeed, they might encourage, as Angela Merkel has – the hijra: the migration of Muslims from dar al Islam – the lands where it’s currently dominant – to dar al Harb -- the West.

     Of course, there is a problem with the tactic: while fearful subjects are easily commanded and controlled, the generators of that fear – Muslims – aren’t fearful at all. Should they displace the native populations of Europe and America, our politicians might well wish they’d thought the matter through a wee bit further.

---

     As with Steyn, I’ve been jabbering on about this for quite a few years. At the old Palace of Reason in 2004, I wrote:

     All of Islam's theocosmogony to the side, its usefulness to the Left in wearing away our edifice of freedom is undeniable. For one thing, Islam's instantiations in other countries, both political and cultural, are fodder for the apostles of multiculturalism. For another, Islam propounds so complete a system of dominance that most men of good will are unwilling to compare it to any "lesser" agenda of regimentation; it makes our domestic Leftists look good. For a third, as matters stand, Western societies are unable to bar their doors to an influx of immigrants solely because of their "religion." For a fourth, our necessary response to Islam's violent attitude toward other creeds and social systems provides leftists with specious justifications for accusing the West's defenders of tyranny, even though it's the Left's own program of control that's the real thing. It's hardly necessary to go on from there.

However, it remains the case that the Left cherishes some sorts of latitude, at least for itself, to which Islam is as rigidly opposed as it is to all others. Sexual freedom is one example; artistic license is another. Thus, while the jihadis are a temporarily useful tool in destroying freedom "in the large," the Left could not tolerate them once the libertarian-conservative ethos that protects personal liberty, private property, and individual initiative has been overthrown.

Each of these monstrosities alone would present a formidable foe, simply for its ruthlessness. Together, they appear tactically to be much the worse...yet the tensions between them offer the defender of freedom an opportunity not to be missed.

     At that time, I believed that it was possible to kill two birds with one stone, as it were. Compelling the representatives of the Left to admit that their apparent sympathy for Islam is a tactical ploy would poison American left-liberalism / “progressivism.” It would simultaneously prompt increasing numbers of unengaged or marginally engaged private citizens to take a closer look at the Religion of War, Murder, Slavery, and Rape. The consequences could only be to the good.

     Why this hasn’t happened, I cannot say. Certainly enough writers have noted the way the Left coddles Islam for sins infinitely more grievous than the peccadilloes for which it castigates the traditional religions, cultures, and customs of normal, decent Americans. Yet somehow, the necessary connections haven’t occurred in enough minds.

     Perhaps we the politically engaged have been firing the wrong ammunition.

---

     I’m terribly tired just now – it’s been a “medical morning” – so I’ll close here. But expect me to return to this subject. Not only haven’t we made any progress on it; apart from the possibility of a declaration of martial law after the election results come in, there’s nothing on the national radar that looms any larger. Indeed, I question whether any subject short of imminent nuclear war really could.

Plots

     Conspiracy theories about secret alliances between European governments are flying, owing to recent developments in the “refugee crisis.” Substantial numbers of persons – ironically, more here in the U.S. than in Europe, where the problem is at its worst – have adopted the thesis that the political elites of the First World find the Islamic tide useful: a stick with which to beat us cranky types into submission to the Omnipotent State. Those recent developments, and the wildly irrational behavior of highly placed public officials in response, make the notion more credible than not, though we must concede that in such matters proof is always elusive.

     I wrote earlier this year:

     If we can be induced to fear others, particularly those nearest to us, the more credulous among us will be more likely to look to the government for “protection.” The government is quite amenable to such developments. In fact, it strives to help them along:

Crime stats published by the FBI and relied upon by the media distort the gun violence and leave the public with the impression "mass shooting" incidents are a much bigger threat than they really are, according to a criminologist and Second Amendment scholar.

The bureau's annual reports tabulating and classifying a wide range of crime throughout the nation have been historically free of politics, but John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, said the latest statistics contain numbers that are misleading at best and deliberately fudged at worst. Lott believes the numbers may have been presented to overstate for political purposes the true risk of being a victim of random gun crimes.

“The FBI put out a clearly incorrect set of numbers on public shootings shortly before the November election last year,” said Lott, a frequent opinion writer for FoxNews.com and author of "More Guns, Less Crime." “I have been reading FBI reports for 30 years and I have never seen anything like this. It is one thing for the Bureau of Justice Statistics or the National Institute of Justice to put out politically biased studies, but there has always been a Chinese wall separating the FBI raw data collection from political pressures.”

     Also, I wrote several years ago at Eternity Road:

     There's a lot of entertainment value in a good thumping conspiracy theory. Your Curmudgeon is particularly fond of the ones that involve aliens, subterranean civilizations, and the control of the president by radio signals tuned to the resonant frequency of his fillings. Mel Gibson's marvelous movie Conspiracy Theory puts the subject to excellent use. But the significance of the growing frequency of conspiracy theories with political coloring must not be overlooked. They're not just a way to cast one's ideological adversaries as devils intent upon despotism, death, and destruction. A conspiracy is invariably rooted in the perception or construction of a plausible common motive.

     And also:

     Political conspiracy-theorizing that garners a significant number of participants is possible only when the power structure becomes remote -- that is, when those who wield power are sufficiently detached from “ordinary folks” that we groundlings cannot see them as ethically or emotionally comparable to us.

     By my assessment, all the prerequisite conditions are in place.

---

     A conspiracy is a variety of widely shared but difficult-or-impossible-to-prove belief. Needless to say, there are many other such beliefs that don’t bear the conspiracy label:

• Religious creeds;
• Political / economic ideologies;
• Confidence in the virtues of “statesmen;”
• Convictions about the fidelity of one’s spouse;
• Confidence that “he really will leave his wife for me;”

     ...and many more. Of course, that a belief is widely shared doesn’t guarantee its veracity. Neither does the impossibility of proving it guarantee its falsity, as various supposedly smart persons such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris really ought to know.

     The impact of a belief flows from the behavior it impels, among both assenters and dissenters. A belief that aliens control the president’s brain by sending radio commands through his fillings isn’t likely to stimulate a lot of action. A belief that our political class has decided to subjugate us thoroughly by importing predators while simultaneously stripping us of our weapons is the sort of conviction that breaks kingdoms.

     At this time, there are many in Europe who have opened their minds to that latter idea. The majority may not yet be convinced, but they’ve started the necessary search for evidence and are trying to measure it against their political masters’ statements and behavior. It doesn’t take a lot of raped mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives to get a people accustomed to public safety wondering what the Hell the forces of order are doing instead of rounding up the savages and deporting them.

     America is not and will not be exempt. The Obamunist plan to import the very same savages currently despoiling Europe, on the grounds of “compassion,” will reap the same fruit here as it has there. Already Muslims are disproportionately represented in rape statistics – as the perpetrators. And of course, while their mouthpiece groups scream “Racism! Bigotry! Islamophobia!” the miserable excuse for a human being the electorate was persuaded to install as president – twice! – is Dutch-uncling us about our fears, telling is that all will be well. Why will all be well? How can anyone be confident that all will be well here when all plainly isn’t well in Europe? No answer.

     The sovereign attraction of high office is power over others. The avidity of those who lust for it exceeds all their other desires. More, once they have it, their every word and deed is bent toward keeping it, or gaining more of it. Fear and envy are their principal tools.

     We might not be looking at a conspiracy of men in high places. It might be more of a Hive effect: that is, persons with comparable characters and highly similar motives, responding to a common set of incentives, are merely acting in a fashion that resembles a secret, malevolent plan among them. But as I said above, the impact of a belief is in the behavior it impels – and the millions, both here and in Europe, who are gradually coming to believe that their rulers have leagued against them have already begun to act on it.

     Stay tuned.

Easy for me to say...

Let's see if I can take my own advice as events unfold, shall we?

A short video (really, honest!) about Liberty's long game + Bonus apology to FDR (gag!).

Quickies: There’s That “Security” Business Again

     If you thought I was kidding about “national security,” I suggest that you take a look at this easy-to-digest summary of The Won’s most recent TV appearance:

     [Obama] made yet another pitch for barring anyone on the no-fly list or terror watch list from purchasing firearms. He simply ignored any of the objections, whether it’s the lack of due process or judicial review, the arbitrary, foggy nature of how someone gets on the list, or the fact that 280,000 people with no recognized terrorist group affiliation are on the list.

     He ominously declared, “this is a matter of national security.” Yet for some reason, all of those people on the no-fly list and the terror watch list who allegedly represent a national-security threat aren’t being arrested. Earlier today Rep. Stephen Lynch (D., Mass.) disclosed that a congressional investigation recently found that at least 72 people working at the Department of Homeland Security also “were on the terrorist watch list.”

     At this point in our national devolution, any time a politician invokes “national security” for his purposes, we should reach for our pitchforks and dip our torches in some fresh pig fat. There hasn’t been a single sincere use of that shibboleth since January 20, 2009...and damned few before that.

     The policy change that would most conduce to Americans’ security in any sense would be the complete repeal of every gun-control law – state or federal – and an absolute ban on any new ones. Likelihood? Somewhere between all the air collecting in one corner of the room and Angelina Jolie demanding to have my love child.

     Terrorism being a diffuse, decentralized threat, the only imaginable counter is a diffuse, decentralized defense: an armed populace. But don’t expect any politician to propose that; it would weaken the miasma of fear he and his ilk need to maintain control of us. No, what we’ll hear – and not exclusively from persons on the Left – will be garbage about “gun violence,” as if the little darlings could wander the streets reaping lives while their owners sleep.

     We have another year of this to suffer. Stay staunch.

Oops, they did it again...(a CNN "interviewer," that is)

If you want to talk about navigating interviews in hostile territory "like a champ" then look no further than Pamela Geller - especially since the Garland, Texas jihad attack. Oh, and my dear "journalists," it was NOT an attempted-attack; it WAS an attack! The sound of gunfire should have been your first clue.

But back to Geller, one of the lone female figures walking-the-walk in Lady-Liberty's footsteps...her appearance earlier this week on CNN with the disgrace-of-a-journalist, Erin Burnett. The link to the version I watched is here, on Geller's website. My graphical reaction is at the end of this (the audio of me F-bombing as I watched it the first time might have made for an "amusing" YouTube video!).

This link will take you to my site and a "cartoon search" page if you'd like to see a couple more Islam-/Liberty- related cartoons from this week I didn't get around to posting here.

I'd love to hear your feedback on my attempts to win the coveted Bosch Fawstin Wannabe Award. ;-) What works for you and what doesn't.

The Cowing

“The State is based on threat.” – Robert Anton Wilson

“I was never molested by any person but those who represented the State.” – Henry David Thoreau

Every government demands immediate, unresisting obedience from every one of its subjects at every instant of every day. No, not every government gets such total submission, and not all of them expect it at all times, but they all demand it...and they have their ways of working toward it.

In the majority of cases, the key element of the government’s strategy is fear:

• Fear of the government’s agents;
• Fear of the opinions of other subjects;
• Fear of those from whom the government claims to “protect” us.

All three of those varieties of fear are being deployed here in the Land of the Formerly Free.

---

Concerning fear of the agents of the State, John Whitehead provides an example from the words of a generally decent man:

Most police shootings can be avoided. It comes down to respect for authority and obedience. If a police officer tells you to stop, you stop. If a police officer tells you to put your hands in the air, you put your hands in the air. If a police officer tells you to lay down face first with your hands behind your back, you lay down face first with your hands behind your back. It’s as simple as that. Even if you think the police officer is wrong—YOU OBEY. [Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham]

Needless to say, the government is happy to have Reverend Graham’s assistance in cowing the public. Here’s a little self-exculpation for police wrongdoing from a Los Angeles cop:

Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?

...While most citizens are courteous and law abiding, the subset of people we generally interact with everyday are not the genteel types. You don’t know what is in my mind when I stop you. Did I just get a radio call of a shooting moments ago? Am I looking for a murderer or an armed fugitive? For you, this might be a “simple” traffic stop, for me each traffic stop is a potentially dangerous encounter. Show some empathy for an officer’s safety concerns. Don’t make our job more difficult than it already is.

Interpret that however you will.

---

Prosecutors’ offices are masters of the fine art of untraceable slander: spreading accusations about a targeted citizen that causes his neighbors and friends to view him unfavorably. Thus the second technique for cowing us comes into play: The willingness to believe an accusation from an “official” source.

Consider the number of recent cases of false accusations of rape. Rape is a particularly horrible crime; back when we were more civilized, it was punishable by death. Surely it’s an accusation no one should take – or make – lightly.

That doesn’t mean such an accusation, once made, should be immediately and uncritically believed:

In March 2006, Crystal Gail Mangum, an African-American student at North Carolina Central University[1][2] who worked as a stripper,[3] dancer and escort, falsely accused three white students, members of the Duke Blue Devils men's lacrosse team, of raping her at a party held at the house of two of the team's captains in Durham, North Carolina, on March 13, 2006. Many people involved in, or commenting on the case, including prosecutor Michael "Mike" Nifong, either called the alleged assault a hate crime or suggested it might be one.[4][5][6][7]

In response to the allegations Duke University suspended the lacrosse team for two games on March 28, 2006. On April 5, 2006, Duke lacrosse coach Mike Pressler was forced to resign under threat by athletic director Joe Alleva and Duke President Richard Brodhead canceled the remainder of the 2006 season. On April 11, 2007, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper dropped all charges and declared the three players innocent. Cooper stated that the charged players – Reade Seligmann, Collin Finnerty, and David Evans – were victims of a "tragic rush to accuse."[8] The initial prosecutor, Durham County, North Carolina District Attorney Michael Nifong, labeled a "rogue prosecutor" by Cooper, withdrew from the case in January 2007 after the North Carolina state Bar filed ethics charges against him. In June 2007, Nifong was disbarred for "dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation", making him the first prosecutor in North Carolina disbarred for trial conduct. Nifong served one day in jail for lying about sharing DNA tests (criminal contempt); the lab director said it was a misunderstanding and Nifong claimed it was due to weak memory.[9] Mangum faced no charges for her false accusations as Cooper declined to prosecute her.[10]

Cooper pointed to several inconsistencies in Mangum's accounts of the evening and Seligmann and Finnerty's alibi evidence, in the findings report's summary. The Durham Police Department came under fire for violating their own policies by allowing Nifong to act as the de facto head of the investigation; giving a suspect-only photo identification procedure to Mangum; pursuing the case despite vast discrepancies in notes taken by Investigator Benjamin Himan and Sgt. Mark Gottlieb; and distributing a poster presuming the guilt of the suspects shortly after the allegations.[11] The ex-players are seeking unspecified damages and new criminal justice reform laws in a federal civil-rights lawsuit against the City of Durham.[11] The case sparked varied responses from the media, faculty groups, students, the community, and others.

Nor are prosecutors the only ones who exploit the power of a charge of rape:

Tawana Glenda Brawley (born 1972) is an African-American woman from Wappingers Falls, New York, who gained notoriety in 1987–88 for falsely accusing six white men of having raped her. The charges received widespread national attention because of her age (15), the persons accused (including police officers and a prosecuting attorney), and the shocking state in which Brawley was found after the alleged rape (in a trash bag, with racial slurs written on her body and covered in feces). Brawley's accusations were given widespread media attention in part from the involvement of her advisers, including the Reverend Al Sharpton and attorneys Alton H. Maddox and C. Vernon Mason.[1]

After hearing evidence, a grand jury concluded in October 1988 that Brawley had not been the victim of a forcible sexual assault and that she herself may have created the appearance of such an attack.[2] The New York prosecutor whom Brawley had accused as one of her alleged assailants successfully sued Brawley and her three advisers for defamation.[3]

That case made the odious Al Sharpton a national celebrity of the order (and variety) of Jesse Jackson.

---

If we can be induced to fear others, particularly those nearest to us, the more credulous among us will be more likely to look to the government for “protection.” The government is quite amenable to such developments. In fact, it strives to help them along:

Crime stats published by the FBI and relied upon by the media distort the gun violence and leave the public with the impression "mass shooting" incidents are a much bigger threat than they really are, according to a criminologist and Second Amendment scholar.

The bureau's annual reports tabulating and classifying a wide range of crime throughout the nation have been historically free of politics, but John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, said the latest statistics contain numbers that are misleading at best and deliberately fudged at worst. Lott believes the numbers may have been presented to overstate for political purposes the true risk of being a victim of random gun crimes.

“The FBI put out a clearly incorrect set of numbers on public shootings shortly before the November election last year,” said Lott, a frequent opinion writer for FoxNews.com and author of "More Guns, Less Crime." “I have been reading FBI reports for 30 years and I have never seen anything like this. It is one thing for the Bureau of Justice Statistics or the National Institute of Justice to put out politically biased studies, but there has always been a Chinese wall separating the FBI raw data collection from political pressures.”

About half of the population of the United States owns one or more firearms. The government is laboring mightily to make the other half suspicious of us. Fraudulent statistics that can be blared out by anti-gun-rights media organs make a major contribution to the government’s efforts. One need only look at the hysteria the state of Connecticut engendered after the Newtown massacre, or the comparable aftermath of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, to grasp the utility to the government of having our neighbors fear us.

---

One final thought before I close for today. The government’s efforts at cowing us have intensified greatly in the last few years. The reason might seem counter-intuitive: it’s a response to the upsurge in political activism by Americans unhappy with the direction the country has taken and determined to reverse its course. The government and its hangers-on could have adopted an attitude of conciliation, which will strike many a Gentle Reader as the more sensible approach. However, those in its driver’s seat find such an approach unpalatable, as it would imply a willingness to admit to errors and to make concessions, at least on conditions: an attitude any power-worshipper would deem anathema.

But if the government must struggle to make us fear, by implication we have little objective reason to fear. Indeed, we might be in far less danger – from anyone or anything – than we’ve long supposed. It suggests that our response to the government’s efforts should be to redouble our own.

“Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Politics Of Fear: A Rumination

“Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.” – Robert A. Heinlein

“Then I said, I will not make mention of Him, nor speak any more in His name. But His word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.” -- Jeremiah 20:9

Voices crying in the wilderness rarely accumulate a big following. Neither are they usually granted credit for having called the turn.

I don’t like being a voice crying in the wilderness. But I suffer a compulsion to keep at it. Whether you think that’s a good thing is your own affair.

---

There are a number of voices crying in the wilderness today. Unfortunately, we’re not all crying in the same key. That makes it easy to dismiss us individually. The usual term of derision is “crank.”

We constitute quite a riotous variety of cranks. See how many of each of the following sub-varieties you can name:

• Taxation cranks
• Firearms cranks
• Vote fraud cranks
• Regulation cranks
• Police-state cranks
• Border control cranks
• Surveillance-state cranks
• Child indoctrination cranks
• Money and currency cranks
• Freedom of expression cranks

Those are just the ten types that come to mind at this moment. I could probably double the length of that list if I were to think about it for a minute or two more. I’ve occupied each of those categories, one essay at a time, at some point during these past eighteen years: here at Liberty’s Torch and at its predecessors, Eternity Road and The Palace of Reason. I’ve never restrained my feelings or my diction on any subject I decided to address, which makes me a member of a sub-sub-variety: the “hairy-eyed crank.”

Do you, Gentle Reader, ever worry about what kind of company you’re keeping?

---

Compulsions can be exhausting. This one certainly is. But then, fear is exhausting ipso facto. That’s one of the reasons fear so often evokes hatred:

Cowardice, alone of all the vices, is purely painful—horrible to anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to remember; Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate. And Hatred is also a great anodyne for shame. To make a deep wound in his charity, you should therefore first defeat his courage. [C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters]

Unfortunately, the hatred-response is usually directed at the “bearer of bad tidings,” rather than at the causative agent of what one fears. So all too often we cranks are resented for daring to tell bad news, while those who’ve caused the badness get away with inadequate scrutiny, if any.

Clearly, “crank” is not a career path to be recommended to one’s adolescent children.

---

I write these pieces because I fear. I’ve made no secret of it. And I’d wager that, if you’re a regular, you stop by Liberty’s Torch to see if my post of the day addresses something you fear. Under current circumstances, that’s normal behavior for those of us on the pro-freedom Right. Huddling is a common response to the sense of threat.

The threats are more numerous and more threatening than at any previous time in the history of this Republic. Virtually any individual American feels threatened by at least one of them, when he allows himself to become conscious of it.

That makes it supremely ironic that we cranks, who are the most likely to be resented and mistreated for “making” others fear, should labor so diligently at it. Yet we continue. Many of us have openly proclaimed ourselves unable to stop, just like Jeremiah.

There’s that compulsion business again.

---

”I’m gonna be a happy idiot and struggle for the legal tender.” -- Jackson Browne

‘Suddenly I saw Hagbard's eyes burning into me and heard his voice: “Your heart will remain calm. Your adrenalin gland will remain calm. Calm, all-over calm. You will not panic. you will look at the fnord and see it. You will not evade it or black it out. You will stay calm and face it.” And further back, way back: my first-grade teacher writing FNORD on the blackboard, while a wheel with a spiral design turned and turned on his desk, turned and turned, and his voice droned on, IF YOU DON'T SEE THE FNORD IT CAN'T EAT YOU, DON'T SEE THE FNORD, DON'T SEE THE FNORD...’ [Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus!]

The “If I refuse to acknowledge it, maybe it won’t hurt me” attitude toward the threats around us is the most common one. It’s made easier, and more palatable, by the range of available distractions: the opportunities and pleasures of agreeable work; the glittering array of consumer goods; the immersive worlds of video games; the vast and prolific entertainment industry; the many sports spectacles presented to us; mind-numbing drink and drugs; food; sex. We might not admit to ourselves, much less to others, that we’ve fixed our attention on one or more of those things to keep our minds off our fears, but I’d wager that that, too, is common.

The political class is aware of this. Inasmuch as that class is the source of nearly all the threats we face, it should come as no surprise that it has encouraged us, in ways both overt and covert, to wallow in the distractions and leave it to work unmonitored.

Mask slippages are uncommon...and when they occur, the prevailing tendency is to shrug the revelations aside as “just what they do.”

---

“What prompted all this?” I hear you ask. Well, for starters there was this article, cited yesterday by the invaluable Mike Hendrix. Also, it’s Sunday. My Sundays aren’t cut from the same pattern as the other six days of the week. Call it a Sabbath habit of thought.

My days begin and end with prayer. There’s plenty of prayer in between, too. (It becomes especially impassioned when I’m hot on the heels of an annoying FibreChannel bug.) But prayer, though it’s good for him who prays in nearly every other way, can also deflect him from necessary action. Indeed, it can deflect him even from thinking about what action would be appropriate.

Just yesterday, the C.S.O. and I watched Valkyrie, which depicted the 1944 plot, designed and executed by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, to kill Hitler and rescue Germany from moral and physical obliteration. Though the movie underemphasized it, Stauffenberg’s Catholic convictions were central to his resolution that Hitler must die and the Nazi regime be toppled. Nevertheless, it’s an excellent movie that should serve to remind us both of the depths of human evil and of the hard choices a man unwilling to suppress his moral convictions will sometimes face. Tom Cruise is exceptional as Stauffenberg; the supporting cast is equally impressive, including those who accepted roles they probably would have preferred not to play.

Moral standards are inherently religious: Not in the theistic sense, but because, like all other religious propositions, they can neither be proved nor disproved. If we accept them, we accept them as articles of faith. A brilliant friend once put it thus:

“What if you were somehow to resurrect Hitler, and were to ask him ‘Herr Hitler, why did you kill all those Jews?’ What if he were to reply ‘Because it was intrinsically right’ -- ? How would you argue against him?”

My friend was pointing directly at the fundamental nature of sound moral standards. As C. S. Lewis has told us, they are embedded in the Tao, the metaphysical understratum of all reality:

This is what Confucius meant when he said 'With those who follow a different Way it is useless to take counsel'. This is why Aristotle said that only those who have been well brought up can usefully study ethics: to the corrupted man, the man who stands outside the Tao, the very starting point of this science is invisible. He may be hostile, but he cannot be critical: he does not know what is being discussed. This is why it was also said 'This people that knoweth not the Law is accursed' and 'He that believeth not shall be damned'. An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else. In particular instances it may, no doubt, be a matter of some delicacy to decide where the legitimate internal criticism ends and the fatal external kind begins. But wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position. The legitimate reformer endeavours to show that the precept in question conflicts with some precept which its defenders allow to be more fundamental, or that it does not really embody the judgement of value it professes to embody. The direct frontal attack 'Why?'—'What good does it do?'—'Who said so?' is never permissible; not because it is harsh or offensive but because no values at all can justify themselves on that level. If you persist in that kind of trial you will destroy all values, and so destroy the bases of your own criticism as well as the thing criticized. You must not hold a pistol to the head of the Tao. Nor must we postpone obedience to a precept until its credentials have been examined. Only those who are practising the Tao will understand it. It is the well-nurtured man, the cuor gentil, and he alone, who can recognize Reason when it comes. It is Paul, the Pharisee, the man 'perfect as touching the Law' who learns where and how that Law was deficient.

The above might be the most important philosophical statement of the Christian Era. It explains perfectly why even those who don’t know why will immediately recognize that “morally different” is merely a circumlocution for evil.

---

‘As Aragorn has begun, so we must go on. We must push Sauron to his last throw. We must call out his hidden strength, so that he shall empty his land. We must march out to meet him at once. We must make ourselves the bait, though his jaws should close on us. He will take that bait, in hope and in greed, for he will think that in such rashness he sees the pride of the new Ringlord: and he will say: “So! he pushes out his neck too soon and too far. Let him come on, and behold I will have him in a trap from which he cannot escape. There I will crush him, and what he has taken in his insolence shall be mine again for ever.”

‘We must walk open-eyed into that trap, with courage, but small hope for ourselves. For, my lords, it may well prove that we ourselves shall perish utterly in a black battle far from the living lands; so that even if Barad-dur be thrown down, we shall not live to see a new age. But this, I deem, is our duty. And better so than to perish nonetheless – as we surely shall, if we sit here – and know as we die that no new age shall be.’

[John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, The Lord Of The Rings Book III: The Return Of The King]

We fear, in large measure, because we perceive the massing of evil forces. We are aware that evil’s only imaginable target is good: good persons, good institutions, and good standards. When we see evil on the march, making incursions against what we know to be right and just, we sense the possibilities that flow forward from there...and we shudder.

Evil is truly on the march.
Its forces have never been more numerous.
It seeks the destruction of all that is good: the Tao itself.
To fear evil and its goals is only rational.
To sit idle as it marches is not.

Politics, divorced from the pursuit of power over others, is about collective action. The politics of fear are simple: either we allow our fears to paralyze us, hoping only that evil will somehow overlook us, or we take up arms and march against it, aware of our duty, confident in our standards and their ultimate victory.

Why stand we here idle?

May God bless and keep you all.

The Cry Of The Left: “Eat Your Neighbors!”

First, a snippet from one of my books:

    Patrick Wolzman mounted the dais and addressed the crowd.
    “Things have been fairly quiet around here lately,” he said. “Quiet enough that you might be wondering why I called this meeting. It’s simple enough, really. Has anyone else been following developments at Morelon House?”
    Barton started. Althea came to full alert. The crowd murmured uneasily.
    Wolzman nodded. “I thought not. I have, for several reasons. The Morelons have turned their mansion into a fortress. They’ve mounted big guns at all points of the compass. Laser cannons like the ones here.” He waved at the Spacehawk laser turrets. “It got me wondering why, and about what else they might have planned for the near future.”
    His gaze fell directly upon Barton. “I see the Morelon patriarch has graced us with his presence. Perhaps he’d care to join me up here and explain the actions of his clan, which many of us might deem provocative.”
    Barton growled “Hold hard, Al,” moved to the front of the gathering, and hoisted himself onto the dais with some difficulty. He glared at Wolzman with unconcealed anger.
    “Refresh my memory, Patrick,” he said in his sweetest tones. “Your clan is in the weapons business, is it not?”
    Wolzman nodded warily.
    “Have you had a downturn in business lately?”
    “Not noticeably, no.”
    “Well, what moves you to question the desire of Clan Morelon to develop some weapons of its own? You don’t mean to claim a monopoly over the trade, do you?”
    In the perimeter lights around the battery, Wolzman’s face darkened visibly. Yet glimmering behind the mask of anger was a well-concealed smile of satisfaction.
    “Monopolies are why we’re here, Bart,” he said. “Just now, Clan Morelon wields a trio of them. And a few of us here and a few not so nearby are getting just a wee bit worried at the trend.”
    Barton frowned. “We have no monopolies. Everything we sell is available from other sources.”
    Wolzman produced a smile of triumph. He turned to face the crowd.
    “Who here gets his power from a source other than a Morelon fusion plant? Please raise a hand.”
    No one did so. Wolzman nodded. “And what clan, whether or not it’s represented here, possesses ground-to-orbit capability and an outpost on the Relic? Please! Don’t all answer at once.”
    The uneasy rustling from the crowd became more pronounced.
    “Monopolies,” Wolzman said. “Not engineered by the destruction of your competition, I’ll grant that. But complete enough that if you wanted to ruin any of us, for any reason, you have the wherewithal, either by cutting off our electrical power or by bombarding us from sperosynchronous orbit.”
    —Don’t interfere, Al.
    It’s hard.
    —I know. Don’t.
    “What would make anyone think we plan any such thing?” Barton was maintaining his composure with an all too visible effort. “We’re merely using technology to provide electrical power—a product, I might add, that derives completely from my kinswoman’s massive investments and embrace of enormous personal risks to achieve that bastion on the Relic, where she did the research that produced it.” He waved at Althea, who had moved to the front of the crowd. “There she is, Patrick. Will you castigate her for her industry, her bravery, or both?”
    “Neither,” Wolzman said. “I’m castigating you and your clan, for not sharing her breakthroughs with the community at large.”
    Barton snorted. “And what ethical principle would compel us to do that? Oh, by the way, I’m still waiting to hear about our third monopoly. You did say ‘trio,’ didn’t you?”
    Wolzman nodded. “I did. Show the crowd your left arm.”
    Barton stared at him in incredulity. “Are you serious?”
    “Please, Bart.”
    He skinned back his sleeve.
    The arm was essentially regrown. It hadn’t yet developed to a mature girth or muscle tone; that would take time, nutrition, and a long course of steadily intensifying exercise. Nevertheless, it was complete, all the way to a hand with fingers and a nail at the end of each.
    “A brand new appendage, ladies and gentlemen,” Wolzman purred. “For those of you unaware of it, Bart lost that arm in combat with forces to which my clan was allied. Forces that came together for the same reasons I’ve asked you here this evening: to break the Morelon stranglehold on facilities that no single clan should command. Facilities that simple justice demands they be shared with all of Hope.
    “There’s the third of them, Bart. With the adoption of Claire Albermayer—”
    “It’s Claire Morelon now, Patrick,” Barton spat.
    Wolzman nodded. “As you wish. With that adoption, Clan Morelon has acquired the power of bodily regeneration. The ability to replace any lost or damaged body part, as long as the victim remains alive. Do you plan to share that with the rest of us, Bart?”
    Althea had reached battle readiness. She restrained herself from leaping onto the dais by the narrowest of margins.
    “It will be commercialized,” Barton said.
    “Oh?” Wolzman snorted. “How generous! What you’ve received as a gift from your adoptee, we will have to pay for! Shall we bow to your majestic beneficence now, or would you prefer to have our obeisance choreographed?”

[From Freedom’s Fury, the third volume of my Spooner Federation trilogy.]

Hope, a world populated by the descendants of anarchists who fled Earth before the genocidal wrath of the States, has grown prosperous and well populated...well populated enough that some have arisen who envy their fellows’ superior achievements and seek power over them. They tried, earlier in the series, to take what they wanted by force, but failed. (That’s the reason Clan Morelon fortified its two mansions as described above.) In the above, we see one of their leading lights trying the other perennial tactic of the Left: inducing neighbors to distrust one another.

Eowyn of the excellent Fellowship of the Minds notes a smaller-scale example of the tactic:

Use of snitches seems instinctive to the Left....

B. Christopher Agee reports for Western Journalism, Dec. 4, 2014, that in response to a shooting incident last week in downtown Austin, Police Chief Acevedo held a press conference to emphasize the shooting could have been prevented had someone reported the gunman’s behavior to law enforcement before his rampage.

Saying that he stays awake at nights worrying about “these homegrown extremists that are lone wolves, that are mad at the world, that are angry,” Acevedo encouraged Austin residents to report to authorities anyone “who’s a gun enthusiast or is armed with these types of firearms and they’re showing any type of propensity for hatred.”

The police chief said: “It’s important for us as Americans to know our neighbors, to know our families. Tell somebody if you know somebody that is acting pecu—with a lot of hatred toward any particular group.”

Couching his instruction with the caveat that turning in a friend or family member for owning guns “doesn’t mean that we’re going to take them to jail,” Acevedo noted that “we might want to vet these people.”

By my lights, Acevedo’s words, if they were reported accurately in the above, constitute adequate grounds for removing him from his position and barring him from ever again occupying a position of public trust. But Austin, despite being the capital of gun-friendly Texas, is rather far to the left politically, so I doubt that any such thing will occur. However, it’s Eowyn’s first sentence that’s most thematic:

Use of snitches seems instinctive to the Left.

Not only is it reflexive on their part; it’s also highly revealing. Totalitarians of all stripes are aware that they can never command sufficient police power to impose their will on a whole nation, unless their subjects actively participate in the process of oppression.

But in a free, peaceful, prosperous commonwealth, that’s a very difficult thing to do ab initio. It requires an emotional infrastructure that must be carefully designed and laid down.

It requires a pervasive atmosphere of fear.

---

Among the Left’s recent losses of more than transient importance has been its loss of two tactics of longstanding importance: racism-shouting and “women’s issues.” Note how badly candidates who leaned on those traditional pillars were beaten in the recent elections. The implication seems obvious: it’s no longer sufficient for the Left to accuse conservative or libertarian candidates of wanting to oppress Negroes and / or women. Yet those tactics have been instrumental in its rise to political power and to its grip on what it still possesses. Therefore, it must seek new weapons to take the place of those it has unintentionally blunted.

The Left’s gropings appear to have landed on an approach no man of good will would have expected: accusations of sexual predation. Consider the following stories:

• Lena Dunham’s claim that she was raped “by a College Republican.”
• Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s whole-cloth fantasy about a gang-rape at a University of Virginia frat house.
• Danmell Ndonye’s claim to have been raped at Hofstra University.
• This case, which the hard-left Sacramento Bee appears to have scrubbed from its online edition.

Each of these “rapes” was used by the Left as a tool for encouraging women to fear men – especially for young women to fear young men. If that doesn’t have you thinking about Rupert’s cri de coeur, check your pulse: you may have died and not noticed.

Pervasive mutual fear is the most fertile of all soils in which to germinate a totalitarian State.

---

Only by turning us against one another can the Left succeed in completing its campaign to extinguish all traces of freedom.

We already live under a cloud of fear, but at this time it’s principally fear of government. So many organs of government at all levels have been revealed as predacious exploiters of power and privilege that Americans’ trust in government has sunk to an all-time low. No one believes any longer in the restraining effects of the Constitution or the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. No one grants any agent of the State the presumption of benevolence. And no one with three functioning brain cells willingly allows a uniformed “law enforcement officer” into his home...especially not those of us with dogs.

I find myself wondering if there’s a wandering planetoid in our future...or perhaps, given the ESA’s recent achievements, a habitable comet.

---

The situation is grave, and becoming graver as we speak.The IRS has embraced its role as Censor of the Right to a degree even I could not have predicted. Other of the “alphabet agencies” are striving with all their power to suppress American enterprise, that the Left’s gains in reducing so many of us to dependence on State handouts not be reversed. And of course, we have the rampant use of militarized local police forces and their unConstitutional use of “civil asset forfeiture” to fund their operations and keep us all cowering behind our curtains.

Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley has several times spoken of a “tipping point,” passing which could put an end to any remaining semblance of Constitutional government. If we haven’t yet passed such a point, we’re surely teetering at the edge of it today.

Food for thought.

(Cross-posted at League of Outlaw Bloggers.)