The Weirdest Transference

     Blame this one on my memory.

     I’ve always been a mouthy sort, free with my convictions and opinions. It’s gotten me into a fair number of battles over every subject under the Sun. Moreover, I’ve never been a “respecter of persons;” I didn’t care about the supposedly greater knowledge or credentials of whoever I’d decided to dispute.

     The Sixties were a tumultuous time in many ways, including for the inception of a distinctly anti-military current of belief that infected persons from every walk of life. Contrary to what most might imagine, it didn’t start with Vietnam. The tempest over that affair came second to another campaign that was orchestrated by America’s enemies, especially the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA).

     The expansion of the Soviet Union’s satellite empire in eastern Europe, formally known as the Warsaw Pact, was checked by NATO, especially America’s “nuclear umbrella” over the NATO nations. Our ground forces in Europe, even at their largest (approximately 330,00 troops), would not have been sufficient to defeat the enormous Red Army. They were there to slow its advance long enough for the U.S. to mobilize and dispatch its nuclear deterrent forces, especially the long-range bomber fleet. At that time Our European containment strategy depended totally on those forces, and on the specter of complete devastation they posed the U.S.S.R.

     Naturally, the Communists wanted to see those forces vanish. But the masters of the Soviet Union could make no progress in their “disarmament” initiatives at that time. The Cuban Missile Crisis alerted America’s strategists to the Communists’ intent to expand in the Western Hemisphere. The analysts at RAND, Hudson, and other strategy-oriented think tanks saw the situation too clearly: in the absence of our nuclear deterrent, the Soviets would continue their military advance wherever they had or could establish a beachhead. They had a huge number of men at arms, and were willing to pauperize their subjects to whatever degree was required to provision them.

     So the Communists and their fellow travelers attacked America’s nuclear warfighting power “from underneath:” i.e., by striving to turn ordinary Americans against it. Their propaganda campaign emphasized the horror of a worldwide nuclear holocaust. And as has so often been the case with left-wing propaganda efforts, theirs included a strong thrust into the schools. After all, it’s easier to frighten impressionable youngsters than adults with greater knowledge of facts and conditions.

     In high school, seldom did a day go by that I failed to hear some sort of anti-nuclear slogan or diatribe. Mostly they came from the teachers. Whenever I had the opportunity, I would argue against them. But of course, a high school student’s views don’t count for much in an argument with a credentialed adult.

     Then as now, the most striking aspect of such exchanges was their horror of nuclear weapons themselves. They were “dangerous beyond measure,” “instruments of mass death” that could “poison the whole world.” The prospect was “too terrible even to contemplate.” They simply “had to go,” lest some “warmongers” in the Pentagon decide that there was no point to having them but not using them.

     None of the people spouting such drivel ever mentioned the Soviets’ nuclear arsenal, which was growing even faster than America’s. Their focus was always on America’s nuclear forces and the absolute, immediate, imperative necessity of eliminating them.

     Perhaps some of them were sincerely afraid of the possibility of a nuclear exchange and what it would do to the United States. Some were definitely pacifists, who opposed the existence of conventional armed forces with equal fervor. But some were enemies of the United States...and not all of them bothered to hide their convictions.

---

     The propaganda campaigns against America’s nuclear forces always focused on the weapons themselves: their massive destructive power and the supposed after-effects of their use. The propagandists strove to inculcate fear of the devices themselves in whoever would listen to them. The mere existence of the weapons, they proclaimed, “puts the whole world at risk.” The weapons’ role in preserving the peace of Europe and checking Soviet expansionism was never mentioned.

     Ironically, to this date no one has ever been harmed by an H-Bomb. Even liberal New York Times columnist Russell Baker, himself no great fan of the military, admitted it:

     Although I don’t exactly love the H-bomb, it comes close to my idea of what a bomb should be. First, it fulfills the human need to have a bomb. Second, of all the bombs in circulation these days, it is the one you are least likely to be assaulted with.
     In the more than thirty years since it became popular, it has never been used against anybody. A person could get fond of a bomb like that. There is no other bomb with a comparable safety record.

     [From “Son of H-Bomb,” published on July 31, 1977.]

     Compare Baker’s clarity in the above to the hysteria of the anti-nuclear-weapons types and decide which you prefer. I’ve made my choice, and not solely for Baker’s semi-facetious reasons.

     The campaign against nuclear weapons foreshadowed the efforts of today’s Left to make young Americans fear guns: not their use but their very existence. That effort moved into high gear only much later. Yet its psychology was exactly the same: Make them fear the inanimate object. Never mention the men who control it.

     I could go into all sorts of rhapsodies about the civilizing power of weapons, but there’s no need for that here. What came into sharp focus this morning, as I was contemplating various aspects of our milieu, was this: If you’re focused on A, you’re not looking at B – or anything else.

     The propagandists who harped on the unacceptable danger of nuclear weapons knew this. Whether or not they did so consciously, in compelling attention to the weapons themselves they succeeded in deflecting attention away from other important matters. They never addressed the humans who control the weapons, who pondered why and how to use them, and the weapons’ other “merely by existing” effects on international relations.

     Nuclear weapons, I’ve argued in other places and at other times, have “democratized” warfare. For some time before them, national “leaders” felt immunized against the personal consequences of war. The H-Bomb and the intercontinental delivery system ruined that for them; they can no longer be certain of surviving an all-out war. Deep bunkers provide only superficial reassurance, as there’s no theoretical upper limit to how large an H-Bomb can be. If detonated at ground level, the Soviets’ 50 Megaton “Tsar Bomba” could destroy any bunker in existence. Larger H-Bombs can be built without straining the physics involved. If any such superbombs exist, they’re a closely guarded secret.

     In a world partitioned into States of varying rapacity, the ability to threaten the inescapable annihilation of any would-be warmaker is precious beyond price.

     I could go on, but I think the point has been made. Remember always that he who wants you to obsess over one thing is keeping you from giving serious attention to other things. Keep in mind the possibility that getting you to focus on A isn’t his true aim – that what he really cares about is preventing you from thinking about B. Ask yourself: Is this person’s desire that I should become absorbed with his issue really about keeping me from addressing other things of equal or greater importance?

     Don’t be satisfied with any easy answers.

Covington, The Media, And The Program

     I must have written it a hundred times by now, but apparently it hasn’t yet sunk into some heads:

They who value power over all else:
Will do anything to get it;
Will do anything to keep it;
And will do anything to increase it.

     In other words, the power-luster has no ethics and no inhibitions. He does not recognize the concept of morally forbidden, as that would impede his pursuit of his One True Love. Moreover, his hangers-on will bend over backwards to serve him. The health of the remora, after all, depends on the health of the shark.

     There! Now that I’ve buried the lede about six feet deep, let’s proceed to the meaty part of the day’s fulminations.

---

     I’m reasonably sure I don’t need to explain what I mean by the Covington Catholic incident, so let’s pass on immediately to the core of the thing.

     The media, Leftists in the Punditocracy, Leftists throughout the Internet, and a bunch of Democrat politicians and activists collaborated on a deception: a video clip edited to produce a wholly incorrect portrayal of the incident. Then they used that portrayal as black propaganda:

• Against the assembled group of Covington Catholic students;
• Against white Christians (especially Catholics);
• And against Trump supporters.

     And as you know if you’ve paid attention to subsequent developments, unedited videos of the actual events have revealed their deception for what it was.

     I’ve said to myself over and over that “they’re not stupid.” Yet one could easily think they believed, in this age of the ubiquitous video-capturing cell phone, that they could get away with it. Or is that a step too far? Did they merely think that even if their deception were unmasked a day or two afterward, it would nevertheless be tactically useful? If so, why?

     It took me a while, and a lot of hard thought, but I believe I have the answer. Rather than dump it on you like a truckload of gravel, I’m going to lay out the breadcrumbs I followed to reach it, in the hope that you’ll find them equally illuminating. So empty your bladder, refill your coffee cup, and fasten your seat belt. It’s about to get ugly.

---

     The annual March for Life excites hatred among Leftists like no other political event. It’s predominantly white, Christian, and conservative. It attacks the Left’s supreme sacrament: abortion. And year after year it is entirely peaceful and orderly. Compared to practically any Left-oriented event, it’s a glowing model of what a political demonstration should be.

     Therefore, the Left deems it a high-priority target. With an outspokenly pro-life Administration in Washington, it becomes an even higher priority target. They seethe at the event and strain to defame or corrupt it. But until this year they’ve done no better than to deny it significant media coverage.

     The Left has other targets, of course. The Trump Administration, the steadily blossoming popular support for it, and the New Populist Conservatism have excited its ire. To some extent it shares that ire with the Old Conservative Establishment of institutions such as National Review and the (defunct) Weekly Standard. Over the past two years the Left’s tacticians have learned that they can expect a degree of cooperation from the Old Conservative mouthpieces when an event that stimulates their superciliousness toward Us the Unwashed can be suitably framed. So they remain alert for potential opportunities.

     Along comes the 2019 March for Life, a gaggle of young white Catholics, and a scattering of MAGA hats. The confluence of targets is incredibly juicy, but what can be done about them? Can we send in a provocateur? Who’s available?

     An ideal provocateur would be non-white and presumptively non-Christian. It would be best if he were old and wizened as well, and willing to take a modest risk for the Cause. Hey, that’s Nathan Phillips standing over there with his drum. Let’s see what he can do!

     Phillips wades in. Nothing much happens. But a suitably edited clip can be used to make it look as if the Covington boys encroached on him. It will take time for an accurate depiction of the event to surface and circulate. Meanwhile our media allies can whip up the base, which as we know is fueled by hatred of Christianity, Trump, pro-lifers, and everything traditionally American. Let’s run with it!

     And they do. And for a little less than a day they get everything they want from it. The Internet explodes with fury at the Covington boys, at Christianity, at the pro-life movement, and at the “racism” of President Donald Trump and his Administration. The Old Conservative Establishment farts dutifully chime in with their own condemnations. The doxxing and death threats get into high gear. The Left’s base is satisfyingly energized.

     But here we come to the punch line: Even though the extended videos swiftly circulated immediately afterward give the lie to all this Leftist outrage, the Left’s planners still regard their tactic as having made a profit. They got enough of what their base needs to bolster its allegiance and activism to outweigh the hit on their media allies’ credibility. Besides, they reason, it’s only “our people” who think the media has any credibility left, anyway.

     They will do it again. Mark my words.

---

     Dystopic / Thales’s essay of yesterday nicely lays out the Left’s assignment of roles to its media allies. Whatever they might claim (or posture), the major media are not purveyors of facts. They are not interested in true depictions of important events. That would lose them the love of their Leftist masters, and with it all the “access” their service has earned them over the years. Their task is to spread propaganda: the blacker, the better.

     Black propaganda of the sort depicted here has several aims:

• To occupy and divert the public’s attention;
• To present a fallacious but useful slant on recent events;
• To fuel the portion of the electorate that seeks reasons to be enraged;
• To motivate that portion to undertake further action against the Left’s targets.

     Even if the propaganda has a limited lifetime – and less than a day is very limited indeed – it can still be counted as profitable if it succeeds adequately in those aims. Compare this with the newspapers’ practice of making lurid claims on the front page above the fold...and then retracting them two or three days later with a “correction” on Page A38.

     We are so far gone from a time in which Americans trusted one another to be men of good will, to dispute with facts and reason under the assumption that those are the things that matter, and to hold to the moral absolutes that have underpinned Western Civilization since the time of Christ that I can’t even see it in the rear-view mirror. We have gone from being a “high trust” society to a society in which trust is awarded only after checking the other guy’s bona fides and finding them satisfactory.

     But the Left is pleased. Totalitarians cannot rule enduringly over a high-trust society. The consolidation and maintenance of their power requires that their subjects be more suspicious of one another than of them. Divide et vince, divide et impera.

     With that I yield the floor to my Gentle Readers.

Compilable Specifications, Characterization, And Propaganda

     Yes, Gentle Reader, you get two pieces today...though I can’t imagine what you’ll think of this one. I just know that I need to write it.

---

     First, a segment from an old story by Robert A. Heinlein:

     King was reminded again of something that had bothered him from the time Silard had first suggested Lentz’s name. “May I ask a personal question?”
     The merry eyes were undisturbed. “Go ahead.”
     “I can’t help but be surprised that one man should attain eminence in two such widely differing fields as psychology and mathematics. And right now I’m perfectly convinced of your ability to pass yourself off as a physicist. I don’t understand it.”
     The smile was more amused without being in the least patronizing nor offensive. “Same subject,” he answered.
     “Eh? How’s that—”
     “Or rather, both mathematical physics and psychology are branches of the same subject, symbology. You are a specialist; it would not necessarily come to your attention.”
     “I still don’t follow you.”
     “No? Man lives in a world of ideas. Any phenomenon is so complex that he cannot possibly grasp the whole of it. He abstracts certain characteristics of a given phenomenon as an idea, then represents that idea as a symbol, be it a word of a mathematical sign. Human reaction is almost entirely reaction to symbols, and only negligibly to phenomena. As a matter of fact,” he continued, removing the cigarette holder from his mouth, “it can be demonstrated that the human mind can think only in terms of symbols.
“When we think, we let symbols operate on other symbols in certain set fashions—rules of logic, or rules of mathematics. If the symbols have been abstracted so that they are structurally similar to the phenomena they stand for, and if the symbol operations are similar in structure and order to the operations of phenomena in the real world, we think sanely. If our logic-mathematics, or our word-symbols, have been poorly chosen, we think not sanely.
     “In mathematical physics you are concerned with making your symbology fit physical phenomena. In psychiatry I am concerned with precisely the same thing, except that I am more immediately concerned with the man who does the thinking than with the phenomena he is thinking about. But the same subject, always the same subject.”

     [From “Blowups Happen,” in The Past Through Tomorrow]

     Mathematician / psychiatrist Lentz is one of the first of Heinlein’s trademarked omnicompetent man characters: the sort of chap who, having witnessed the total collapse of the civilization he knows, perhaps due to pandemic smartphone addiction, he would analyze the event, determine the critical factors, then roll up his sleeves and set to work personally rebuilding that civilization – minus the smartphones, of course. And he’d get it done on time and within budget.

     Heinlein was passionate about human competence. His protagonists weren’t uniformly of the omnicompetent-man variety, but they did appear in a great part of his fiction. They were responsible for a great part of the love his readers felt for him. To them as to him, omnicompetence was an ideal toward which to work. As an ideal it has much to recommend it. As an achievable reality...well, let’s just say that most of us fall short of the mark.

     But fiction, though it must “make sense,” doesn’t need to mimic reality in all its particulars.

---

     Ayn Rand is probably more responsible for the rise of realist philosophical thought and the renascence of the liberty movement than any other writer. It’s plain from both her fiction and her nonfiction that she had those ends in mind. Moreover, she shared with Heinlein a vision of the human ideal: the perfectly rational man capable of thinking his way through any problem, of surmounting every obstacle by applying keen observation and hard intelligence unburdened by irrelevant emotions or unrealistic desires. Her protagonists, especially in her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, depict those qualities to a 200-proof distillation.

     It’s an inspiring vision, quite as uplifting as Heinlein’s omnicompetent man or Girolamo Saccheri’s ideal of a Euclidean geometry that doesn’t require the postulate of the parallels. And just as many persons revere Rand for showing them that vision as do Heinlein.

     One could make a good case that Heinlein’s and Rand’s heroes came along at exactly the time they were most needed. They came to a society that was on the brink of surrendering to the darkest elements of the human psyche: envy, power lust, and appetite unburdened by conscience. If they didn’t “save” our society, whatever that might mean, they created enough of a countercurrent to the madness bidding to swallow it whole to keep it at bay for a generation or two.

     I’m acquainted with other writers who dislike Rand and have little use for Heinlein. In fairness, those writers don’t dismiss Rand or Heinlein; mostly, they disagree with the premises in Rand’s and Heinlein’s most influential works and consider their depictions of human behavior unreasonable. As it’s impossible to argue about premises – especially moral premises, which are critically important to both Rand and Heinlein – there’s no point in discussing who’s “right.”

---

     And now for something...well, not completely different, but near enough to that as I can get in an essay that “shouldn’t” persuade my Gentle Readers that I’ve flipped my wig.

     One of the Holy Grails of software development is the never-ending quest for a path that descends from:

1. Requirements,
2. through Design,
3. to Implementation,

     ...that eliminates the possibility of error. Some mighty minds have been put to that effort, including the late, great James Martin. Yet we’re no nearer that goal than we were in the Seventies, when the possibility was first seriously discussed in the literature. What it would require, the consensus decided, was a way to produce a compilable specification: i.e., a comprehensive statement of the requirements that an automated process could transform into a matching implementation. Many of the arguments made for this or that method of describing software requirements were basically that “our method makes the compilable specification plausible.” As no one has yet reached that glittering prize, the arguments remain unresolved.

     However, the storytellers of the world pursue it daily. Not all of them have an innocent end in mind.

---

     Political propaganda is largely about persuading the target to accept a certain set of premises. It has that in common with every sort of fiction. The theory is simple enough: if you can dictate the premises from which a particular issue must be approached, you can dictate the outcome. And indeed, both of the principal political families of our time strive to impose their preferred premises on every issue that arises in American political discourse.

     That’s an open secret, to be sure. The palmed cards are anything but obvious.

     When political propaganda succeeds – in other words, when advocate Smith makes target Jones into a convert on the subject under discussion – we may be reasonably sure that all the following are true:

1. Jones has accepted, at least temporarily, the premises Smith has laid out.
2. Jones has followed the argumentative trail that leads from Smith’s premises to his conclusion.
3. Jones does not see Smith’s conclusion, or any of Smith’s objectives, as unacceptably averse to his own interests.

     By implication, nothing of relevance to Jones has intruded to derail the path from premises to conclusion, nor to knock him off it at the end of the ride. You may rest assured, Gentle Reader, that the professional political propagandists of our time are masters at selecting exactly and only the premises that will lead inexorably to the conclusions they want us to reach. Yet their advocacy fails far more often than it succeeds. Why?

     Because while the Joneses among us might accept Condition #1 at least for the sake of argument, and might be willing to allow that given the suggested premises the conclusion is inexorable, they will not allow that the suggested premises are beyond question. Neither will they allow that Smith’s premises are the only considerations that apply.

     Thomas Sowell’s famous three-point rejoinder to the Left:

1. “Compared to what?”
2. “At what cost?”
3. “What’s your evidence?”

     ...is a three-strike body blow to the sort of political propaganda routinely emitted by both sides. In ordinary discourse, those three questions would silence ninety-nine out of a hundred political polemicists. Virtually no one arguing for any position – including all the ones I support! — could answer all three sufficiently well for his argument’s premises to hold the field unopposed.

     Which is a complete explanation for why the Left, unwilling to accept dissidence from anyone about anything, has moved to colonize and conquer the communicative trades.

---

     As should be clear to all but those who read this dive in Braille, I write fiction as well as nonfiction. If you’ve taken an interest in the recent fusillades in the speculative-fiction publishing industry, some of which I’ve written about:

• Sad Puppies, Outrage Edition
• Even Sadder Puppies: An Insider Cops to the Scam
• Sad Puppies: The Denouement
• Hugos 2015: Further Thoughts
• These Puppies Have Staying Power and Teeth
• Wrapper and Product
• Scaly Wings and Rocket Ships
• More on Politicized Fiction
• More Fun With Hugo
• More Fun With Hugo Part 2

     ...you already know how I feel about the whole dustup. I can’t imagine that the gunfire will abate any time soon. But it does serve to illustrate a critical aspect of storytelling and why it’s a target for the propagandist:

Buy The Premise, Buy The Tale.

     The Left wants to command the heights of the publishing industry and all its periphera so that the stories it favors will be unopposed by stories that embed divergent premises and enable divergent outcomes. This is especially critical as regards character motivation.

     What motivates a protagonist – i.e., his values and the priority scale into which he fits them – determines how he’ll react to the events of the story. To get any enjoyment out of a story, the reader must empathize with its protagonist(s). He must accept their premises, at least for the duration of the tale. This is easier if the reader isn’t too far personally from those premises, but it remains a requirement of reader enjoyment regardless.

     For example: I greatly enjoy the fiction of Robert A. Heinlein, Larry Niven, Jack Vance, Tom Kratman, and John Ringo. Those writers’ premises about the ways people act in dangerous or otherwise stressful conditions are close to mine; I have no trouble accepting their protagonists’ motivations and decisions. By contrast, I cannot enjoy the fictions of socialist writers Mack Reynolds, Kim Stanley Robinson, or Octavia Butler. Their protagonists’ motivations and decisions strike me as unreasonable – unreal. “People don’t act that way,” I say to myself. Yet another socialist writer, the late John Brunner, has entertained me greatly, even though we’re poles apart politically. Brunner has managed a trick the aforementioned three have not: he got me to buy into his characters’ motivations, at least for the duration of his novels, even if I rejected them (and their political implications) once I’d closed the book.

     Do you see the parallel with the “compilable specification,” Gentle Reader? Do you see how a convincingly drawn protagonist character exemplifies that ideal?

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     I lit into this subject upon learning this morning that the great Ursula Leguin had passed away. Let there be no mistake: Leguin is a giant of twentieth-century speculative fiction. Yet in her crowning achievement, The Dispossessed, she presents the reader with Anarres, a wholly unbelievable “ambiguous utopia.” Her protagonist, Shevek, is devoted to the principles upon which Anarresti society is founded:

1. Anarchism;
2. Communism.

     The combination of the two is Leguin’s vision of “freedom.” The most superficial acquaintance with the nature of freedom and the nature of Man makes obvious how nonsensical that is:

     “Without private property there can be no private decisions.” [Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus!]

     Freedom is founded on ownership of property....For the normal human being who is not a creative artist nor a scientist by profession the means of self-expression consist largely or rooms to modify and gardens to tend, trees to plant and offspring to rear. Losing these opportunities for expression, the individual loses individuality, freedom, and hope. [C. Northcote Parkinson, The Law, Complete]

     Which is why Karl Marx, though never to be adequately condemned, was clearer sighted in demanding a dictatorship for his socialist paradise. Yes, he did envision “the withering-away of the state,” but no one who has accepted his premises has ever signed on to that notion.

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     It’s the grand project of the Left to marginalize (at least) or eliminate (at horrifying most) all fictional depictions of people behaving as people normally behave. Their objectives cannot withstand that sort of realistic, believable counter-propaganda. You could say that they seek to build their “new progressive man” in part by creating characters that embed their preferred premises. Such characters are “compilable specifications” for their sort of political order. If such fictional premises are the only ones people read about, those fictions will pull the young, the impressionable, and the intellectually unformed to the Left without their targets’ conscious knowledge.

     Which is why the independent writers and artists movement is worth every thinking man’s support.

Home Truths And The I-Want Milieu

     I’m feeling pretty good this morning, and it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with political trends, my finances, the collapse of the NFL, or the timely repair of my oven...though I must admit that those are all fairly uplifting in their own right.

     No, it’s about a cleft that runs through American society. It’s not a physical division like the San Andreas Fault, but a conceptual one. It’s the sort of partition that arises when a significant number of putatively responsible American adults start to behave like whiny children socialists. That cleft is becoming ever more visible, and the people on the wrong side thereof purely hate it.

     They should hate it. Its edges are crumbling rapidly, pulling them ever nearer to its maw. Unless they get their heads on straight P.D.Q. it will suck them down into oblivion...and they will have earned it.

---

     Kurt Schlichter is quickly becoming the go-to guy for penetrating snark:

     Some of you misguided young women (the non-misguided ones can ignore me) will resist the obvious fact that you need the romantic advice of a married, 53-year old retired Army officer who identifies as male. Well, judging from that Aziz Ansari story in babe.net, many of you sure need some guidance from someone. And since your fathers apparently went AWOL – or maybe you just didn’t listen – I’ll step in to help. Because I’m a helper. And because since so many of you are so utterly ill-equipped to interact with men, maybe you need a man to mansplain things to you.

     I know what’s coming: You’re condescending and patriarchal!

     Probably, but I’m still right.

     Please read it all. It gets better as it goes, and every word is home truth.

     “Home truth? Whazzat?” I hear you cry. Quite simply, it’s a truth one learns at home; in the old formulation, “at your mother’s knee.” More candidly, it’s a truth one is expected to learn at home. Because if you don’t, the moment you step past the threshold of your Olde Home Stead, that terrible nasty unfeeling thing we physicists call reality will chew you up and spit you out faster than a lump of Bazooka^® or Dubble-Bubble^®.

     Schlichter’s core home truth is this:

Others will judge you by your behavior.
There’s no way to prevent it.

     Or, as Schlichter says to “Grace,” who is almost certainly not paying attention:

     Let me break this to you gently, misguided Misses. If you want a guy for the long haul who will actually care about your feelings – because guys can do that, you know – you might not want to leave the guy with the impression all those observations lead to. It makes you not girlfriend (much less wife) material. It makes you a notch on a bedpost.

     And it is so.

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     Way back in the Early Obscene – or was it the Later Moronic? I forget – I wrote a couple of essays for Eternity Road on the subject of “Sturdy Wisdoms:” my phrase du jour for a home truth. They were little bits of reality encapsulated in a thousand words or so. A fair number of my readers disliked them for their “I told you so” tone, and said so in the comments. I was unsurprised; in the usual case, the advice we least like to hear is the stuff to which we ought to pay proper attention.

     I expressed three such home truths in this essay. I thought I’d seen hate mail before that. How wrong I was!

     People hate to be told that they’ve been stupid – and that’s the message within any evocation of “I told you so.” But these past few decades a lot of people have been told that it’s their God-given right to behave stupidly and suffer no consequences. You’d think they’d aim their fury at those who misled them. You’d be wrong.

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     We’re at the edge of another abyss just now. It was created by a federal government that has refused for decades to punish the miscreants within its own ranks. The technical term most commonly applied to that refusal is sovereign immunity.

     The doctrine of sovereign immunity – in the medieval formula, “the King and his agents can do no wrong” — has been used to protect criminal behavior by law enforcers, by bureaucrats, by elected and appointed officials...and by private citizens who were once elected or appointed officials. It’s a clear contradiction to the classical Rule of Law, which holds that a person’s status has no bearing on his culpability under the law. But as it’s the political elite protecting themselves and their confreres, the common citizen has had to watch in helpless frustration when such scum as Lon Horiuchi and Janet Reno commit open murder under color of law and go scot free.

     But our present moment, in which the FBI is blandly denying Congress a large amount of vital evidence of Justice Department corruption under a literally unbelievable rationale, has confronted those elites with a specimen of defiance that might just get them to reconsider:

     Maybe I'm just getting paranoid, but today's limp excuse is so lame that it almost seems as though there must be something more sinister going on here than simply failing to comply with a congressional investigation.

     What the FBI is doing is demonstrating its political power -- baring its fangs, if you will -- by showing in the most obviously unbelievable way that it will do what it please. The FBI wants the people who count to understand that the Bureau cannot and will not be held accountable....

     The FBI didn't come up with a lame excuse because that's all they could come up with. They came up with a lame excuse because they think that's all they need.

     And unless Congress steps up, they'll be right.

     FBI agents committed multiple murders at both Ruby Ridge and Waco...and the agents involved in both atrocities weren’t just protected from the just consequences of their actions, they were promoted. It would have been logical for FBI agents from top to bottom to conclude that if they could do what they did in those incidents and suffer no penalty, they could get away with anything. What will Congress’s response be today?

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     I could go on for thousands more words, but I’ll spare you. The final home truth for the day will come from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

     The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the solution of one problem,--how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual bright, &c., from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a one end, without an other end. The soul says, Eat; the body would feast. The soul says, The man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion over all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have the power over things to its own ends....

     You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong....This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Res nolunt diu male administrari. Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will not convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in. [From Emerson’s essay “Compensation”]

     And it is so, and not all the “But I want” whinings of all the ages of Man can gainsay it.

Ominous Yet Idiotic

     You might be familiar with the name of Cass Sunstein. He’s currently the Obama Administration’s Administrator for the federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. (What, you didn’t know we have a Ministry of Truth?) He’s also the hard-left ideologue who proposed (among other things) that the pull-based nature of the World Wide Web gives rise to “me-zines” that “should” be broken up in favor of a “common public experience of the news.” (I cannot say with certainty that he was in the pay of any major media organization, but one never knows.) And it appears that he’s really, really stupid. Some tidbits from the linked paper:

     ...conspiracy theories are a subset of the large category of false beliefs, and also of the somewhat smaller category of beliefs that are both false and harmful. Consider, for example, the beliefs that prolonged exposure to sunlight is actually healthy and that climate change is neither occurring nor likely to occur. These beliefs are (in our view) both false and dangerous, but as stated, they do not depend on, or posit, any kind of conspiracy theory. We shall see that the mechanisms that account for conspiracy theories overlap with those that account for false and dangerous beliefs of all sorts, including those that fuel anger and hatred. But as we shall also see, conspiracy theories have some distinctive features, above all because of their self-sealing quality; the very arguments that give rise to them, and account for their plausibility, make it more difficult for outsiders to rebut or even to question them.

     Mind you, Sunstein and co-author Adrian Vermeule make it plain that they’re looking for active techniques to discredit conspiracy theories. But the very attempt to discredit a conspiracy theory will cause its holders to lump you into the conspiracy. That strengthens the believing community’s internal allegiances: to the theory and to one another.

     (I did say he was stupid. But he’s a Harvard man, so how could that possibly be?)

     But there’s more and better to come:

     This is not, and is not be intended to be, a general claim that conspiracy theories are unjustified or unwarranted. Much depends on the background state of knowledge producing institutions. If those institutions are generally trustworthy, in part because they are embedded in an open society with a well-functioning marketplace of ideas and free flow of information, then conspiracy theories will generally (which is not to say always) be unjustified. On the other hand, individuals in societies with systematically malfunctioning or skewed institutions of knowledge – say, individuals who live in an authoritarian regime lacking a free press – may have good reason to distrust all or most of the official denials they hear.

     The howler there is only implied, but it’s enormous even so, as will become apparent from reading Sunstein’s suggestions about cognitive infiltration:

     What can government do about conspiracy theories? Among the things it can do, what should it do? We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. Each instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5).

     And exactly why should “government” concern itself with conspiracy theories? I think my Gentle Readers can answer that one for themselves...if they can bear to put themselves oh-so-temporarily in the place of “the government.” Apropos of which, apparently we’re supposed to trust those noble souls:

     In Section C, we examine the role of law and judges in fashioning the government’s response. We will ask whether judges do more good than harm by invoking statutes such as the Freedom of Information Act to force government to disclose facts that would rebut conspiracy theories. Our conclusions are generally skeptical: there is little reason to believe that judges can improve on administrative choices in these situations.

     Feeling all warm and cozy about “government,” Gentle Reader?

     Rather than taking the continued existence of the hard core as a constraint, and addressing itself solely to the third-party mass audience, government might undertake (legal) tactics for breaking up the tight cognitive clusters of extremist theories, arguments and rhetoric that are produced by the hard core and reinforce it in turn. One promising tactic is cognitive infiltration of extremist groups. By this we do not mean 1960s-style infiltration with a view to surveillance and collecting information, possibly for use in future prosecutions. Rather, we mean that government efforts might succeed in weakening or even breaking up the ideological and epistemological complexes that constitute these networks and groups.

     How might this tactic work? Recall that extremist networks and groups, including the groups that purvey conspiracy theories, typically suffer from a kind of crippled epistemology. Hearing only conspiratorial accounts of government behavior, their members become ever more prone to believe and generate such accounts. Informational and reputational cascades, group polarization, and selection effects suggest that the generation of ever-more-extreme views within these groups can be dampened or reversed by the introduction of cognitive diversity. We suggest a role for government efforts, and agents, in introducing such diversity. Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.

     Oh, it’s about “diversity!” Well, that must be all right, then. But this hearkens back to Glenn Beck’s best-known epigram...which I’ll reserve for a moment longer. On to Sunstein’s thrilling Conclusion:

     Some conspiracy theories create serious risks. They do not merely undermine democratic debate; in extreme cases, they create or fuel violence. If government can dispel such theories, it should do so. One problem is that its efforts might be counterproductive, because efforts to rebut conspiracy theories also legitimate them. We have suggested, however, that government can minimize this effect by rebutting more rather than fewer theories, by enlisting independent groups to supply rebuttals, and by cognitive infiltration designed to break up the crippled epistemology of conspiracy minded groups and informationally isolated social networks.

     In fewer words: “This wouldn’t work if we do it only a little, so we should do it a lot! But none of that nasty transparency in government, mind you; we must trust Our Leaders to know best.” IF there’s any stance more capable of fueling conspiracy theories, I can’t think of it at the moment.

     I told you at the outset that Sunstein is stupid. I hope that by now you see what I meant. It’s an open question whether a stupid statist is more dangerous than a smart one, or vice versa. However, America is well supplied with both sorts.

     “First they nudge, then they shove, then they shoot.” – Glenn Beck

     Have a nice day.

Science project or PSYOP?

My YouTube take here.

It’s not a paranoid-American’s conspiracy theory when the Muslims tell each other “Here is our plan to conquer Western Civilization from within.” Muslim teenager Ahmed Mohammed's clock stunt, the propaganda-theater in Irving, Texas this week is just one more example of how Islamists use their holy-deception or taqiyya to intimidate the host-nation.

Quickies: A Brilliant Summation

     I found this comment attached to a discussion of emissions trading schemes: one of the Left’s favored devices for promoting allegiance to the Cult of Global Warming:

     All of this of course is aided and abetted by propaganda. We often think of propaganda in this context as simply a semi-hysterical knee-jerk reaction of hasty bare-faced lies.

     It’s not. It’s a finely crafted science and we would do well to remember it, else be seduced by it.

     I found this rather crisp description in Norman Davies ‘Europe – A History’. Page 500, almost exactly halfway through this brick of a book.

     “Theorists of propaganda have identified five basic rules:

1. The rule of simplification: reducing all data to a single confrontation between ‘Good and Bad’, ‘Friend and Foe’.
2. The rule of disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.
3. The rule of transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one’s own ends.
4. The rule of unanimity: presenting one’s viewpoint as if it were the unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: drawing the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star performers, by social pressure, and by ‘psychological contagion’.
5. The rule of orchestration: endlessly repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.”

     All this sounds familiar to you?
     It certainly does to me.

     I’ve encountered no better summation of the tactical structure of Leftist propaganda. Their propaganda’s efficacy frees them from having to debate their positions on the merits...which, as they have none, is a good thing for them.

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.

Kinda says it all when it takes a lawsuit to get the Truth

Like the proverbial junkyard dog, I can't seem to let go of anything "1st Amendment" these days.

Here's the link to the cartoon on my site where you can find the related news links plus an earlier post containing the other cartoon I did today.

Awakenings

Is everyone properly terrified yet? We all know the reasons to fear everything but our own shadows, don't we? So no excuse remains for trusting that all will be well.

But there's still a lot of mindless, heedless trust out there, Sarah Hoyt's essay on the subject notwithstanding. More, it's the worst kind of trust: confidence in the benevolence and competence of institutions, including governments.

Why anyone would ever trust an institution, be it a private corporation or a government, I cannot imagine. Yet the phenomenon is appallingly widespread, even in these days when governments appear determined to prove that they cannot and should not be trusted.

What's that you say? You think an exception should be made for eleemosynary organizations such as the Red Cross and the United Way? Bubba, are you ever in for a shock. The annual balance sheets of such institutions are matters of public record. Take a close look at a few of them. Tell me afterward if you still feel the same.

Trusting an individual can be hard, given what each man knows about his own fallibility and corruptibility. Trusting an institution -- a faceless, bodiless construct which, in the usual case, was created specifically to shield its members against personal responsibility for what "the institution" does -- is insane.

Yet trust is the sine qua non of a decent, functional society. We literally can't conduct the least of our affairs without it. But to extend it foolishly turns it into a blade we hold to our own throats.

---

Regular Gentle Readers of Liberty's Torch have seen this quote before:

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

I have no doubt that Dr. Anderson was a thoroughly decent man, at least as ethical as any other individual of his time. More, the above statement from his landmark economic history of the Nightmare Years contains much truth. Where it falls short is in its absolutism.

Isabel Paterson noted in The God of the Machine that "A corporation has neither a soul to be damned nor a body to be kicked." It is immune to the consequences of its misdeeds, with the sole exception of financial consequences. As true as this is of any private organization, it has much more force when applied to a government: a body invested with coercive powers and pre-indemnified for their use. The consequences of governmental wrongdoing fall solely on those it wrongs. Even when one of its agents commits an outright murder, he nearly always escapes all penalties for it. When one of its agencies runs totally amok, the inevitable sequel is a cover-up, sometimes effective, sometimes not.

But a hefty fraction of Americans still trust "their" government, most of the time. The reasons are various.

In part, that trust arises from the acquaintance so many of us have with individuals who work for a government. Governments employ about twenty percent of the American workforce, which makes such acquaintanceships commonplace. As the overwhelming majority of Americans, including government employees, are decent, ethical persons, at least when not tempted beyond their strength, there's a tendency to transfer the trust we extend to them to the government agencies that pay their salaries.

Another component of it stems from the general admiration for our superb military, the one and only arm of the federal government that actually seems to work as designed, and efficiently at that. There's a certain irony in this, as the purpose of an armed force is to impose the decisions of one government upon another. Yet the American tradition of the "citizen soldier," who brings the ethics he learned at his mother's knee to the barracks, thence to the training ground, and thence to the battlefield, has resulted in the most ethical warmaking power in human history: a force that kills and destroys only as absolutely necessary to accomplish its objectives. If there were a possibility of holding all of government to that standard, perhaps trusting it wouldn't be quite so irrational.

Finally for this tirade, as Sarah notes in her essay, in certain matters many feel they have no choice but to trust government:

Things for which we used to trust the government, if not exactly to at least be in the right ballpark: Unemployment, inflation, the state of the economy, the state of the population, disease statistics, warnings about what was safe and unsafe (yes, sometimes we got the alar scare, but the truth is, it usually erred on the side of too much caution), the state of the world, the state of our enemies’ forces, the state of our forces.

There are more things I’m not calling to mind now, a myriad points that informed us that civilization was in fact still working, that statistics were still being gathered, and that we could – through them – know the state of the world that we couldn’t verify on our own.

This is not – ah – to say that we, we particularly who tend to hang out in this blog, believe in these things in whole or even implicitly. No, but we did believe in them more or less, and kind of. We would say things like “Of course, the census overestimates the uncounted in the big cities, but—” or “They’re having a panic fit over the disinfectant in smokeless cigarettes, ignore that.”

However, for the big things, important things, we trusted government. You know, weather alerts, forewarning the economy was about to take a dive, election results, that sort of “big thing.”

Yet the extension of trust over those matters is waning as well...as it should.

---

I have a large collection of lapel buttons with clever sayings on them. Time was, I would hardly leave the house without choosing one that seemed appropriate for the day. One of my favorites in the batch says:

You Trust Your Mother,
But You Cut The Cards

Indeed. Always cut the cards. It's an essential element in "the game," regardless of the specifics of the playing field or the rules. It doesn't matter that the dealer is your mother, you cut the cards anyway. It's not just for your peace of mind, but for hers as well.

When "the dealer" is government, "cutting the cards" can be a matter of life and death.

On a handful of subjects, mainly pertaining to war and international relations, there's no way to "cut the cards." But on nearly everything else, alternatives are rapidly multiplying:

• Private security companies will protect life and property, rather than arriving after they've been violated.
• Water and electric power are things most of us can get from a variety of vendors, or can provide to ourselves.
• Local trade is ever more frequently conducted via barter, or with precious metals as the medium of exchange.
• There are alternative sources of information about everything demographic or economic.
• There's always an alternative to "public transportation."

Even should you choose to use the government alternative in any of those venues, you should keep the existence of the others in mind -- and you should keep in touch with those who use the others, so the government can't bamboozle you about its "superiority." That approach to "cutting the cards" is far more important than regularly reading several news sources, which, happily, is now the habit of the typical American news consumer.

The general awakening to the untrustworthiness of governments, politicians, and bureaucrats must be followed by a widespread shift toward nongovernmental alternatives in as many walks of life as possible. Now that voting can no longer effect a significant change in the direction of our deterioration, there is no better way to keep necessary trust -- trust in deserving individuals and in the soundness of our communities -- healthy and growing.

It's already begun.
Make yourself part of it.
Create alternatives of your own.
Help to publicize ones not yet widely known.
It might be the most pro-social thing an American can do.

We can all pitch in. Those of us who have awakened, that is.

Still More For My Fiction Readers: Land For Peace

Yet another free download at Smashwords.

A few words of explanation before anyone accuses me of apostasy...

Wars are rife with propaganda. "The enemy" is usually painted in the blackest hues "our side" can manage without descending into absurdity. More, "our side" almost always makes "our" victory sound inevitable... but war knows no such thing as inevitability. Unforeseen intra-war developments can discombobulate any combatant. For example, consider what the tank did to seemingly indefeasible Germany in World War I.

But far more important than that are the postwar histories. These, as they say, will always be written by the victors, who get to assert their moral propaganda a second time -- this time, without contradiction. In such histories, God is always on the side of the victors. Right and might are united, and no one dares to say otherwise.

But some wars are won by victors whose postwar conduct proves them to be the bad guys -- badder, at least, than some of the other combatants. Consider the Soviet Union, which was part of the victorious alliance in World War II. Stalin's regime was one of the most evil political entities ever to befoul this planet. It could even be argued that it was worse than the Nazi regime. Over its tenure it took more lives and inflict more suffering on its subjects than the Third Reich did.

I don't want to pound this point into the magma. Just be careful about what you believe. Try to recognize propaganda when you encounter it. Mind you, not all propaganda is deceitful, but all of it should be treated as what it is -- a weapon of war -- and assessed on that basis. And remember: what matters in war is the outcome of the final battle, which propaganda can do nothing to overturn.

May God bless and keep you all.