Liberty's Torch: trust

Showing posts with label trust. Show all posts

Thursday, April 9, 2020

Nostrums

These days it seems as if everyone’s got one.

We know so little. No one is particularly knowledgeable outside whatever he’s made his specialty. (And quite a lot of “specialists” aren’t as special as they claim to be. Yes, I have a couple of names in mind. I’m sure you do, too.) Yet the number of persons prancing about, posturing as Anything Authorities, is larger than ever. I don’t think it’s due to the growth of our population. Not entirely, anyway.

The consequences of this self-anointing by persons known for (at most) one accomplishment or field of expertise are entirely bad. Those who reject the BS involved become ever more disinclined to place credence in anyone’s knowledge of anything. That devalues authentic expertise. Those who swallow the swill soon find themselves trapped in a maze of dubious representations and pseudo-intellectual conjecture. Such habitats spawned all the great demagogues of history.

It’s no coincidence that a great many Anything Authorities head for careers in politics. That’s where the truly disastrous nostrums known to history have all taken root and produced their evil blossoms. But perhaps I should refrain from saying anything quite so “obvious” at such an early hour. Anyway, this is all merely prefatory to what’s really got under my saddle.

There was a recorded-comedy group, way back when, that called itself the Firesign Theater. You might remember them if you’re near to my age. They were something of a sensation in their day, in part because, like the Babylon Bee, they poked fun at everyone, omnidirectionally. In one of their early recordings, Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers, they presented aspirant to office George Tirebiter saying in one of his radio pitches that:

“You Can Trust Me,
Because I Never Lie,
And I’m Always Right.”

Right down to brass tacks, eh what? No real-life politician would say that where others could hear it. (Well, maybe Barack Obama. But I digress.) Yet it’s the subtext of many a campaigner’s pitch that he should be elevated to high office because he knows how to fix whatever ails us.

It’s almost never true. Even President Trump, who’s doing a better job as President than any of his predecessors since Grover Cleveland, has gone wrong on some issues. He’ll continue to be wrong about them because he lacks enough objective knowledge about them to overcome his personal biases. Moreover, his inner circle of advisors is either equally under-knowledgeable, or suffers the same biases, or both.

The tragic fact of individual limitation is why we develop specialties in the first place. The “Renaissance Man” was a dream, an illusion that only manifested itself hazily in a handful of persons who were unusually knowledgeable in two or three fields – certainly not the whole of human knowledge. In all candor, most of us aren’t even particularly good at our chosen specialties. Good enough to earn our livings, perhaps, but not much beyond that.

But they who seek power over others – or excessive influence over others, which can have equally deleterious effects – will continue to posture as Anything Authorities. If they have pet nostrums to peddle, they’ll work them into every speech they give, whether planned or impromptu.

By now you must be wondering what’s lit my boiler this early on a Holy Thursday. Quite simply, it’s this:

     Pope Francis has said the coronavirus pandemic is one of "nature's responses" to humans ignoring the current ecological crisis.
     In an email interview published Wednesday in The Tablet and Commonwealth magazines, the pontiff said the outbreak offered an opportunity to slow down the rate of production and consumption and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world.
     "We did not respond to the partial catastrophes. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia, or remembers that 18 months ago a boat could cross the North Pole because the glaciers had all melted? Who speaks now of the floods?" the Pope said.
     "I don't know if these are the revenge of nature, but they are certainly nature's responses," he added.

Jorge Cardinal Bergoglio a.k.a. Pope Francis – why did he have to take that name? — is less of a Holy Father than a Socialist Nuisance. With the conspicuous exceptions of abortion and homosexual marriage, he’s glommed onto every trendy left-wing “issue” that’s raised its head over the past half-century. The above is a poorly concealed pitch for his notions about “global warming / climate change.” This is surely the greatest pseudo-scientific fraud ever perpetrated upon Mankind…yet Bergoglio, who’s an antipope in many Catholics’ assessment, is relentless about it. He postures as if global meteorology were something about which he’s an expert. We should be grateful that he hasn’t made an ex cathedra pronouncement about it. No, he doesn’t have the authority to do so, but his lack of humility renders it a perpetual possibility.

A properly humble Supreme Pontiff would never have allowed himself to orate about politics, economics, immigration, the global climate…indeed, about anything other than his specific area of authority: the theological doctrine of the Catholic Church. But this Pope refuses to restrain himself.

An assertion of authority where it does not exist is wholly destructive. It contributes to what Samuel Johnson called “the general degradation of human testimony,” and to the decline of the condition upon which all possibilities for human cooperation depend: trust.

It is shocking, devastating that a pope should exemplify the willingness to claim unwarranted authority. Who in this world has more influence over the convictions and decisions of men? Who is more looked to as a peacemaker, one who can spread oil over troubled waters by reminding us of the eternal verities, the simple requirements for a decent society on Earth? The Redeemer Himself prescribed them:

     But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
     Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.
     And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
     On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
     [Matthew 22:34-40]

The two Great Commandments, and the Ten which they imply, are all we need to live with one another in a tolerable degree of peace and harmony. Were they given the pre-eminence which is their due, they would eliminate nearly all strife. Granted, men would still snore. Women would still chatter on about their girlfriends’ boyfriends during the Big Game, without waiting for a commercial break. Neighbors would still borrow tools and forget to return them. But we would manage to get along without resorting to pistols at dawn.

Yet the peddlers of nostrums – panaceas that cure nothing and often have only fraud and lies for their bases – will not relent. To them belongs the odium for the greater part of the hostility and misery that afflict us. Today they have a Pope to lead the way.

Pray.

Thursday, December 5, 2019

Status Quo Ante Uber Alles

Yes, yes, I mixed languages in the title. It was deliberate. Most of what I do here is deliberate. Consider the title to be a summation. You’ll see why by the closing.

First, a brief video of a statement from Congressman Mike Johnson (R, LA-04) at (...groooaaannnnn...) the “impeachment inquiry” hearings:

Congressman Johnson’s well intentioned statement, while important in its sentiments and its context, contains words and phrases that raise some unpleasant questions:

Are we in any sense a “self-governing republic?”
What was Americans’ level of trust in their “institutions” prior to this farce?
Do “institutions” deserve trust? Under what conditions?

“Self-government” is a phrase with a long history. It was intended to denote a nation whose citizens select their own lawmakers and other public officials, nothing more. But it suggests something more: i.e., that those We the Governed select will faithfully represent our intentions and interests to the best of their ability, rather than haring off on personal initiatives or jaunts into fantasy. To be maximally gentle about it, that is not the case today. Perhaps it never was.

Concerning trust in our “institutions” – Congressman Johnson plainly had our governments in mind when he used the word – it’s been a long time since Americans have reposed their trust in those bodies. It didn’t take the impeachment farce to destroy public trust in government. America’s 88,000 governments, which comprise over 500,000 elective offices and many millions of appointive and Civil Service positions, have given us ample reason to distrust them. For one thing, the majority of them constantly strive for more and more power and money. For another, they treat any opposition to their actions as seditious at the least. Why should We the Governed trust such persons, especially since they’ve been tireless in their efforts to disarm us, while arming themselves ever more threateningly?

Now, concerning trust in our “institutions,” I’ve often cited this piercing statement from a great economist of the century behind us:

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

Given the almost complete record of untrustworthiness governments have compiled since the presidency of Grover Cleveland, what basis is there for trusting them? Was there ever a basis for doing so, or was it a phantasm from the beginning?

With regard to Dr. Anderson’s exhortation above, consider that he made that statement in a very particular context: FDR’s seizure of Americans’ privately held gold. Think about it.

About five years ago, I wrote:

     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.

Five years before that, I’d written:

     Whenever and wherever men decide that they cannot trust one another to behave honorably, to meet their obligations and honor their commitments, or to cleave to fundamental moral principles about violence, theft, fraud, filial duty, and false witness, the sequel is always the same: we recur to the State, the institution whose sole instrument is force. We accede to laws innumerable, expecting them to substitute for trustworthiness in our fellow men. They seldom have that effect, for every law, however well intentioned and carefully designed, creates a black market in the behavior it forbids: an inducement for evil men to sell their willingness to accept the risks of violating it.
     The State, of course, is perfectly happy to take the burden, for its operators are past masters at the twinned arts of taking credit for good outcomes and sloughing the odium for bad ones onto others' shoulders. By gentle, all but imperceptible degrees, it pares away our freedom, our property, and what remains of our willingness to trust one another, gobbling down the slices with Pantagruelian voracity. The progression can have only one terminus, yet most of us remain willing to accept politicians' protestations of devotion to the commonweal in the teeth of all experience...until the day we find our own oxen being filleted for our masters' tables.
     That's usually the day we discover that all the sand has fallen to the bottom of the hourglass...that the vector of our subjugation can no longer be reversed.

The salient thing here is that the State, a.k.a. government, that ominously potent institution, is really only a concept behind which we find human beings. The State doesn’t actually do anything. It is merely the protection for the deeds of men: deeds forbidden to those not protected by the State.

If we have lost our willingness to trust the “institution” of the State, or of any of its identifiable components, it is because the men who shelter under its aegis have proved that they cannot be trusted. Worse, “turning the rascals out” come election time has only resulted in the installation of a new and more rapacious gang of rascals...when it’s been possible at all.

And this morning, in reflecting on those pieces, the conclusions they oblige, and the despair-tinged anger that fueled them, I’m moved to ask myself whether anyone is listening.

Today, we confront a spectacle that might have come directly out of the Grand Guignol: a mass of elected legislators of one party, who currently constitute a majority in one House of Congress, are straining to impeach the first president in decades who actually seems to have been sincere in taking his oath of office: Donald J. Trump. To do this they have committed every known variety of dishonesty: misdirection, misrepresentation, slander, and outright lies. They have adduced not one single offense for which an elected official might be Constitutionally removed from office. However, their fixed determination to bring about President Trump’s downfall has been evident since shortly after he was inaugurated. With a majority in the House of Representatives, and united in purpose, it seems they cannot be halted.

Yet these legislators are such lowlifes that a decent American wouldn’t invite any of them into his home. They’re living embodiments of what Ferdinand Lundberg wrote in 1968:

...it is a settled conclusion among seasoned observers that, Congress apart as a separate case, the lower legislatures -- state, county, and municipal -- are Augean stables of misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance from year to year and decade to decade, and that they are preponderantly staffed by riffraff, or what the police define as "undesirables," people who if they were not in influential positions would be unceremoniously told to "keep moving." Exceptions among them are minor. Many of them, including congressmen, refuse to go before the television cameras because it is then so plainly obvious to everybody what they are. Their whole demeanor arouses instant distrust in the intelligent. They are, all too painfully, type-cast for the race track, the sideshow carnival, the back alley, the peep show, the low tavern, the bordello, the dive. Evasiveness, dissimulation, insincerity shine through their false bonhomie like beacon lights.

In our era, it is flatly impossible for a public figure to evade public attention. The cameras are everywhere. The media are relentless. In consequence, the public is aware of what the officials are doing – and what they’re not doing. The amount of outright lawlessness among them would qualify any other group as a criminal organization. Yet the truly shocking thing about it is neither its magnitude nor its ubiquity, but that they’ve contrived to get away with it so regularly that it constitutes “business as usual:” i.e., the status quo ante that prevailed unchallenged before the elections of 2016.

Trump has made it plain that he opposes that order of business. He’s threatened it on several fronts. To those who have profited by it, that notion is worse than intolerable. It is a literal menace to their lives and incomes: enormous fines and prison terms.

Before you ask: Yes, there are Republicans complicit in the corruption, too. Their shield – Trump’s willingness to support them out of party unity – is thin, but it has a chance of holding. The Democrats in this affair have no such shield.

All the forces aligned against the president:

The Democrats;
The NeverTrumpers;
The Republican Establishmentarians;
The mainstream media;
The Deep State;

...are united around a single objective: Return federal politics to the status quo ante Trump. To them, nothing else matters.

That, not some phantasm of presidential abuse of power, obstruction of justice, or maladministration, is what current political maneuvering in the nation’s capital is all about.

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Attacks And Defenses

First, a brief citation from another blogger that expresses the sentiments of many on the Right today:

     I am exhausted of having to campaign or every red c**t hair’s breadth of my civil rights.
     I am so ready to stack bodies of black bloc and the pussyhat #Resistance on the National Mall like firewood, grab microphone and shout into the night:
     “I am tired of these radicals setting the tone of the national debate. I am tired of having to fight constantly to preserve even the basic semblances of the rights guaranteed to me in the Constitution. Go argue over tax rates and spending cuts and those kinds of things that normal Americans care about. Stop being beholden to the insane Radicals. If you do not understand that, I’ll stack up another 10,000 in black masks and pink hats until you do get the message that we don’t want Socialism and we don’t want to give up our civil rights. It’s the economy you stupid fucks, fix that and leave the Bill of Rights fucking alone.”

Have you been feeling like that, Gentle Reader?

The period between the invasion of Poland in September of 1939 and the blitzkrieg against the Low Countries and France in May of 1940 is often called “the Phony War.” It didn’t look like there was a war in progress. There were no maneuvering armies, no shooting, and no casualties being reported among the major combatants. Things were happening at sea, but they seemed largely irrelevant to the people of Britain and Western Europe. Nazi Germany had invaded Denmark and Norway, and the Soviets had attacked Finland, but those contests, like the sea engagements, were largely ignored by the citizens of the Allied Powers.

Yet a war was in progress. It would prove to be the largest war ever fought on Earth. Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would host its battles. Many millions would die. The geopolitics of the world would be completely rewritten.

America is currently in a “phony” phase of its domestic war: i.e., the war over who (and what ideas) shall dominate our nation’s governments. There’s a lot of angry rhetoric, but very little actual violence. Indeed, much of the fighting is explicitly over the meanings of words:

     One of the key lessons of the 2018 elections is that the Left is waging – and winning – a linguistic war. The Left claims and occupies more and more linguistic ground with each new fight.

Defense of the Founding Fathers becomes defense of white, racist, slaveowners.
Defense of American identity becomes an act of white male domination.

     ....Wanting to obey the law in counting votes becomes an effort to suppress votes and disenfranchise poor people, minorities, and immigrants.
     The presumption of Democrats winning is so great that Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown said, “[I]f Stacey Abrams doesn't win in Georgia, they stole it, it's clear.”
     Every day, we are watching Democrats break and stretch the law for the sole purpose of winning, while they attack Republicans for wanting an honest count of legal voters.
     Democrats and their liberal media allies know that if they repeat something often enough it begins to be accepted as truth.

Newt Gingrich’s column goes on to argue that these verbal attacks on the Right are a kind of battlespace preparation: the creation of conditions in which mob violence against conservatives, whether public servants or private citizens, seems morally justified. He could well be right.

There a war on, and it’s no phony.

I’ve wanted to believe that the electorate would come home to traditional American values: individual freedom, the free market, Constitutionally limited government, and national sovereignty. At various points over the previous three decades it looked as if we might be making progress. At other points we appeared to be backsliding toward socialism, globalism, and authoritarian government. All the while, the Left strove to change the meanings of words essential to political discourse.

How long has it been since you first heard the ominous phrase our truth? I recall seeing it in print more than twenty years ago, during the height of the Sturm und Drang over government funding for AIDS research. The implication that truth itself could be “privatized,” such that what’s true for Smith might not be true for Jones, is terrifying. If we don’t face a common reality with objectively perceptible facts, how could we manage to communicate or cooperate to any worthwhile end?

The answer isn’t hard to find; it’s just hard to face. Yet the Left has assailed the concept of objective truth – an accurate statement of fact independent of anyone’s feelings or opinions – for decades, promoting in its place a quasi-solipsistic notion that “my truth” need not have any relation to “your truth.” That’s the entering wedge for the replacement of evidence and reason by propaganda.

The only defense is infinite stubbornness about the meanings of words: an absolute refusal to grant an iota of respect to persons who misuse them. Such persons might think they’re on the side of the angels. Indeed, the Left rhetorical machinations are designed to get them to think so. But they aren’t – and under no circumstances should we accord them the presumption of integrity, for they have enlisted in the effort to make communication and cooperation impossible.

Columnist Maggie Gallagher once observed that if there is no such thing as objective truth, our communications amount to nothing more than attempts to manipulate one another, a constant struggle to use and not be used. The battle over the reliability of words we use and the statements we construct from them will only remain nonviolent for a little while. After that, our ability to trust one another will be gone, perhaps forever. Then the lead will start to fly.

I wish I could end this on a hopeful note. I can’t.

Saturday, October 6, 2018

Now That The Preliminaries Are Over...

...the Left can get down to what it’s held in reserve ever since Donald Trump denied Hillary Clinton the presidency. Make no mistake: it’s coming:

We are now learning that left-wing domestic terrorism groups are openly discussing “kill team” tactics on Twitter and Facebook, discussing methods of carrying SBRs (short-barreled rifles) under their clothing, blending in with crowds, then popping out of the crowds to assassinate prominent conservatives such as U.S. Senators, Supreme Court justices and prominent conservative radio personalities. All this was first reported by PJ Media.

Fair use rules limit what I can excerpt from the linked article, which is relatively short but rich in links to other sources. Please read it all, and follow as many of the embedded links as you can stomach.

The truly horrifying thing about this is that it started with the abuse of language: more specifically, the conflation of “conservative” with “Nazi” and the hurling of wholly fictional accusations at innocent men – who, when they became angry and defended themselves, were then castigated as monsters for daring to do so.

Bookworm has some thoughts for us:

     The Kavanaugh defamation is a terrorist tactic leading to real violence. So far today, three people have sent me a link to James Simpsons’ article The Kavanaugh Allegations Are Psychological Terrorism, And It’s Time They End. The article is long, but well worth reading because it talks about the way the Left uses these tactics both to drive good people out of the public square and to incite the masses to actual violence:
     The charges do not need to be true, or even credible. People do not recoil because of the charges themselves (although, as we see, the left spares no effort to dream up the worst accusations they can think of). People recoil out of fear.
     This tactic relies on the human herding instinct. People naturally shy away from anyone so vilified, whether the charges are credible or not, simply out of fear of being smeared with the same brush. They don’t want to be ostracized by the group.
     Such excommunication has real consequences on reputations, jobs, relationships, even survival. The real goal is to threaten the rest of us into silence. How many people, for example, never used Donald Trump yard signs or bumper stickers out of fear of ostracism, or even property destruction?

Indeed. Fear is the dominant characteristic of a low-trust society – and ours has been descending into that abyss for some time.

Consider also this incisive observation from Laird Wilcox:

In order for a ritual defamation to be effective, the victim must be dehumanized to the extent that he becomes identical with the offending attitude, opinion or belief, and in a manner which distorts it to the point where it appears at its most extreme. For example, a victim who is defamed as a "subversive" will be identified with the worst images of subversion, such as espionage, terrorism or treason. A victim defamed as a "pervert" will be identified with the worst images of perversion, including child molestation and rape. A victim defamed as a "racist" or "anti-Semitic" will be identified with the worst images of racism or anti-Semitism, such as lynchings or gas chambers.

That has been the core rhetorical tactic of the Left for several decades. A peek at the Left’s hysteria over Susan Collins’s decision to support Brett Kavanaugh should be enough to confirm that.

Thanks to Bookworm’s piece, I was reminded of something I wrote four years ago:

Confusion can only benefit him who seeks to prevent accurate perception and thought. The Left must confuse its targets for a simple reason: the Leftist agenda, to the extent that it's persistent in character, is wholly at odds with human nature and the laws of reality. In practice it conduces to misery and destruction. No hyper-charismatic leader and no amount of tinkering can "make it work," the representations of Leftist mouthpieces notwithstanding. Moreover, this could never be concealed from a person of ordinary rational capacity...if he were equipped with accurate symbols for the key components of the socio-economic-political tableau and were permitted to employ them in thought unobstructed by cant about "inequality," "exploitation," "racism," "patriarchy," "institutionalized bigotry," and the like.

Add to the trigger-words listed above the words “rape” and “survivor,” both of which have been added to the Left’s arsenal. What do those words mean? What constitutes a “rape?” What does it mean to call someone a “survivor” – and is it not the case that the great majority of rape victims survive the experience, at least physically?

Without publicly-agreed meanings for the words we use in our discourse, we cannot have a stable conception of truth. Have a snippet from an even earlier, equally apposite piece:

Truth is an evaluation: a judgment that some proposition corresponds to objective reality sufficiently for men to rely upon it. The weakening of the concept of truth cuts an opening through which baldly counterfactual propositions can be thrust into serious discourse. Smith might say that proposition X is disprovable, or that it contradicts common observations of the world; Jones counters that X suits him fine, for he has dismissed the disprovers as "partisan" and prefers his own observations to those of Smith. Unless the two agree on standards for relevant evidence, pertinent reasoning, and common verification -- in other words, standards for what can be accepted as sufficiently true -- their argument over X will never end.
An interest group that has "put its back against the wall" as regards its central interest, and is unwilling to concede the battle regardless of the evidence and logic raised against its claims, will obfuscate, attack the motives of its opponents, and attempt to misdirect their attention with irrelevancies. When all of these have failed, its last-ditch defense is to attack the concept of truth. Once that has been undermined, the group can't be defeated. It can stay on the ideological battlefield indefinitely, preserving the possibility of victory through attrition or fatigue among its opponents.

Add this, from an Eternity Road essay I wrote in 2003:

In commenting on the importance of objective truth, columnist Maggie Gallagher once noted that if truth does not exist, then the exchanges of statements among men amount to nothing but assertions of power, attempts to use one another. The same observation applies with equal force to those who hold that there is no absolute right or wrong. It licenses them to do anything they please to whomever might be made to serve their ends:

They may use force whenever it would be favorable to them.
They may lie, defraud, and break promises whenever it would be to their advantage.
They may excoriate others in the vilest possible terms for daring to obstruct them.
They may demand that different standards apply to those that agree with them and to those that disagree with them.

...for, if there is no wrong, then these things cannot be wrong. All that matters are the practical questions:

Will it get me what I want?
Can I get away with it?

I see it all coming together now. Can you see it, Gentle Reader?

It’s time for serious preparation. If there is to be politically motivated violence, it will be impossible to “play defense.” The attacker can come out of nowhere at any time or place, and his target cannot look in every direction at once. Should there be any such assaults, and should there be reasonable evidence of Leftist coordination in such events, it will be time for decent Americans to go on offense: to hunt down AntiFa, BlackBloc, and similar miscreants and hurt them badly, possibly even mortally.

Yes, I’m talking about a shooting war, with other (supposed) Americans as the enemy. If there is such a war – and the indications are that we’re teetering at the edge of one – I’m determined to win it.

Are you appalled by the prospect? I am. But that doesn’t alter the calculus of survival.

Think it over.

Wednesday, July 4, 2018

Some Sad Thoughts On Our Nation’s Birthday

I know, I know: A birthday is supposed to be a happy occasion. I’m supposed to celebrate, not mope. Anyway, these past eighteen months things have definitely been looking up, in the political sphere at least. But there are other things on my mind, and it seems I can’t manage to flush them.

Partly, it’s about my damnably retentive memory. I remember too much, and too vividly. You’ve seen some of the consequences. But it’s also about trends in motion that fill me with fear. Here’s one, from a realm of human enterprise on whose probity I’d once have been willing to bet my life savings:

     WHETHER to get a promotion or merely a foot in the door, academics have long known that they must publish papers, typically the more the better. Tallying scholarly publications to evaluate their authors has been common since the invention of scientific journals in the 17th century. So, too, has the practice of journal editors asking independent, usually anonymous, experts to scrutinise manuscripts and reject those deemed flawed—a quality-control process now known as peer review. Of late, however, this habit of according importance to papers labelled as “peer reviewed” has become something of a gamble. A rising number of journals that claim to review submissions in this way do not bother to do so. Not coincidentally, this seems to be leading some academics to inflate their publication lists with papers that might not pass such scrutiny.
     Experts debate how many journals falsely claim to engage in peer review. Cabells, an analytics firm in Texas, has compiled a blacklist of those which it believes are guilty. According to Kathleen Berryman, who is in charge of this list, the firm employs 65 criteria to determine whether a journal should go on it—though she is reluctant to go into details. Cabells’ list now totals around 8,700 journals, up from a bit over 4,000 a year ago. Another list, which grew to around 12,000 journals, was compiled until recently by Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado. Using Mr Beall’s list, Bo-Christer Björk, an information scientist at the Hanken School of Economics, in Helsinki, estimates that the number of articles published in questionable journals has ballooned from about 53,000 a year in 2010 to more than 400,000 today. He estimates that 6% of academic papers by researchers in America appear in such journals.
     Behind all this is a change in the way a lot of journals make their money. Over the past decade, many have stopped selling subscriptions. Instead, they charge authors a publication fee and permit people to read the result for nothing. This “open access” business model has the advantage of increasing the dissemination of knowledge, but it also risks corrupting the knowledge thus disseminated.

This problem is connected to several others. Prominent among them is the centrality of government funding for the sciences, a cancer that was guaranteed to metastasize into something horrible. But the critical element is the “I can get away with it, so why not?” mentality that’s utterly necessary for the problem to arise in the first place.

“I can get away with it, so why not?” Why not? WHY NOT?? Is this a question a man of character would ask himself? More specifically, would a man who’d gone into the sciences because he was dedicated to the search for knowledge ask himself that question? And if he weren’t dedicated to the search for knowledge, why would he have gone into the sciences at all? A skilled con man can make a much better living in several other fields.

I don’t get it. But perhaps I shouldn’t expect to.

Some time ago, I wrote the following about the East Anglia Climate Research Unit “global warming” fraud:

     Scientists, just like the rest of humanity, respond to incentives and penalties. The warmistas in the scientific community were drawn there by a variety of incentives.
     Some were undoubtedly sincere, certain that with enough evidence they could validate the greenhouse-gas thesis and willing to explain away "inconvenient data" with the usual dismissals of the true believer.
     Some were loyal Hessians, willing to go wherever their idols and masters might point them.
     Some were "following the money," as ever greater amounts of money poured from government coffers and the treasuries of left-leaning foundations to support the promulgation of the anthropogenic-global-warming thesis.
     Some were merely publicity hounds, who would ride any wagon that appeared to have the media's attention.
     Some were flogged into sullen support of [anthropogenic global warming], fearful that refraining would cause them to be stripped of their funding and relegated to the outer darkness.
     No doubt there are other reasons...in light of the fraud the Hadley CRU docments have revealed, none of them in any way connected to the core doctrines of science.
     What matters is the fraud itself. Some thousands of "scientists" were moved to abandon science as it's been practiced for centuries by motives that, if they're to be summed up in one word, could only be called evil. Yes, tens of millions of persons worldwide cheered them on, but that's hardly an exculpation.
     We have created -- and institutionalized -- incentives for fraud and penalties for honesty and candor. Not just for men of science; for virtually every trade and walk of life. For many men, the touchstone of ethical judgment is no longer "Is it right?" It's "Can I get away with it?"
     We have destroyed the bedrock of freedom: our ability to trust.

And a few years later, I wrote this:

     Trust is one of the social assets we seldom stop to appreciate until it's gone.
     America was once a land in which trust was near to universal. Men trusted women. Customers trusted merchants. Even strangers encountering one another on the street trusted one another, at least in modest things. And why not? This is was America, where talent and effort were everything, where your word was your bond, where you learned right and wrong at your mother's knee. Besides, word got around. You simply couldn't get very far if you short-weighted someone or misdirected him to his loss and your gain.
     The conditions of life in these United States made duplicitousness a losing strategy. It wasn't that we were "all in it together;" it was that the existing structure of incentives and penalties made lying, cheating, and stealing unprofitable in the long term. As another favorite quote puts it:
     A thousand truths do not mark a man as a truth-teller, but a single lie marks him as a damned liar....Lying to other people is your business, but I tell you this: once a man gets a reputation as a liar, he might as well be struck dumb, for people do not listen to the wind. [Robert A. Heinlein, Citizen Of The Galaxy]

     Trust must be accumulated over a long interval of honest dealing. It can be lost with a single lapse into venality. Therefore, when the incentives reward honest dealing better than fraud and theft, people generally will gradually accumulate trust while the few "dissenters" are forced to society's margins. Society will slowly embed a default assumption of honesty among men.
     Today's incentive structure does the opposite.

Ponder that.

I don’t know how a whole nation of over 300 million people recovers the integrity required to engender and support mutual trust as the default condition. I do know that it will be required of us to do so, if we want our freedom back. Free men must trust one another; there’s no way to maintain a condition of freedom in the absence of near-to-automatic trust. You can never have enough fact-checkers...or enough police.

Two hundred forty-two years ago, fifty-five influential men – yes, they were prosperous, but they were also highly influential – pledged “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” to a grand experiment: a nation “conceived in liberty.” They trusted one another with everything they had and were. Some eventually paid with their lives...but not because their colleagues in the experiment had betrayed them.

People natter about the need for a contemporary “second American Revolution” to restore the freedom we’ve lost this century past. But no such revolution is possible in the absence of mutual trust.

Without the ability to trust our fellow man – his words, his products, and his willingness to stand in defense of what is right, never yielding to venality or cowardice – we cannot have a free country.

That is the true problem of our time. Not how to overthrow the many governments, large and small, that run roughshod over us; that’s a mere exercise in arms, once those arms have rallied. Without a restoration of trust – the willingness to believe that the other guy’s pledge of his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor is sincere and reliable – the rally will never occur.

Happy Independence Day.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

Weaponizations

No forest of hyperlinks today. No citations of news stories about which you’ve already read or heard more than enough. This will be one of my purer tirades, the sort I emit when it all gets to be too much for me -- and in case you’re not a regular Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch, allow me to inform you: that takes one hell of a lot.

“To weaponize” is one of the more useful neologisms of the past few decades. Its meaning is clear: one weaponizes an item by converting it from its current form, in which it could not be used to harm others, into a new form in which it would be harmful, perhaps lethal. Needless to say (though, in keeping with time-honored tradition, I’ll say it anyway), we don’t speak of “weaponizing” something that’s already a weapon: e.g., a gun, a bomb, or a tank. The item in question must be relatively harmless before the process begins, at least by the standards that apply to normal usage. Weaponization obviously dismisses those usages and standards in the hope of coming up with something deadly.

The rise of no-prisoners / no-mercy politics has been accompanied by the weaponization of a number of things we once regarded as harmless or benign. A brief list:

Sex.
Race.
Food.
The schools.
The weather.
The children.
The churches.
The news media.
Charity and charities.
Other nominally virtuous “causes”.
Entertainment, including various sports and their major spectacles.

Those are the ones that come easily to my frazzled mind at this unGodly hour of the morning. There are probably others.

In consequence, for any of these matters to occur in casual conversation is enough to ruin that conversation. The widespread desire to avoid any sort of unpleasant confrontation will make most people change the subject at once, if not excuse oneself “on the grounds of a previous engagement.”

It’s a commonplace that we all have opinions. (“Opinions are like assholes; everybody’s gotta have one.” – Me) However, in earlier times a difference of opinion was safer than it is today. In our hypercontentious milieu, allowing yourself to express a “disapproved” stance can cost you heavily...in some cases, everything you have. Ask James Damore.

But a society in which an ever-enlarging sphere of ordinary matters is deemed a minefield where even an angel dare not tread is one that’s in danger of losing its cohesion. What follows is never pretty.

Perhaps what I mean by social cohesion isn’t intuitively obvious. Nevertheless, it’s the most important characteristic of any society.

Social cohesion is the prevalence of mutual trust among members of that society. If it’s high, even strangers will assume one another trustworthy, at least in routine matters. I’ve written about this before:

     It might sound implausible to younger Americans, but half a century ago the typical American would reflexively trust the word even of a passing stranger. We trusted one another because we knew ourselves, in the small and in the large, to be honorable men. It was a knowledge forged from experience and tempered by our recognition of a common moral and ethical foundation: the Judeo-Christian code of conduct.
     We believed in the manly virtues. More, we believed that those around us believed in them, too.
     Were there thieves, con men, and chiselers among us then? Of course. But their number was far smaller than it is today. The social-legal environment didn't yet incorporate all the inducements to dishonesty and chiseling that we suffer in the year of Our Lord 2009. Perhaps more important, we didn't yet endure the perpetual hectoring about how cruel, venal, and untrustworthy we are, from institutions that wax upon men's distrust of one another.
     We trusted our merchants and business associates. We understood free enterprise to be an inherently honorable, honesty-promoting thing. We trusted our spouses, knowing that the marriage vow was taken seriously by our communities and that a departure from it would be held against the violator. We trusted lawyers to represent us honestly and capably at need, and courts to return just verdicts and sentences. We even trusted politicians, which was the beginning of unwisdom.

I was there. I remember. So don’t bother accusing me of hallucinating a fantasy about “the good old days” in defiance of your notions. That having been said, it’s the next paragraph from that article that should focus our attention today:

Whenever and wherever men decide that they cannot trust one another to behave honorably, to meet their obligations and honor their commitments, or to cleave to fundamental moral principles about violence, theft, fraud, filial duty, and false witness, the sequel is always the same: we recur to the State, the institution whose sole instrument is force. We accede to laws innumerable, expecting them to substitute for trustworthiness in our fellow men. They seldom have that effect, for every law, however well intentioned and carefully designed, creates a black market in the behavior it forbids: an inducement for evil men to sell their willingness to accept the risks of violating it.

That’s the price of the loss of social cohesion.

It’s possible you feel confident, as you see a stranger approach, that you’ll walk away from the encounter unharmed. But that’s not trust. That’s confidence in your personal resilience: your ability to weather what’s coming. Trust is the assumption that you and the stranger approaching you share a common ethic: one that protects you from him and vice-versa.

Some examples might help. Just yesterday morning, I went to Mass at a parish other than my own. It was the first time I’d been to that parish. As I didn’t know where to find the entrance to the chapel, I approached a woman in the parking lot and asked her to guide me. She, having correctly taken me for a fellow Catholic, smiled and did so with no stress apparent. That’s trust in action: a demonstration of the sort of interaction that’s commonplace when social cohesion is high.

Compare the above to another episode from about three years ago. I’d just parked my Mercedes in a shopping-center parking lot, gotten out of the car, and saw a stranger approaching me. My hand immediately went to my weapon. I was confident that the outcome would be endurable, but my trust in the approaching stranger was zero.

Today it would be unwise for a visibly well-to-do American in a place where muggings are, if not common at least not unknown, to trust someone he’d never met. Yet fifty years ago I would have trusted that stranger by default. I’d have granted him the “presumption of decency” that characterizes a society with high social cohesion.

The weaponizations of so many things have put all of us on our guard. It might not be clear to my Gentle Readers what that means for our future. Take it from me: it ain’t lookin’ good.

I occupy a difficult position: I see things others don’t, especially patterns and threads of causation. I write about them, when I can. (When I can’t, I declare a “day off.” I spend most days off trying to calm down before I pop a brain aneurysm. Harvey’s helps.) But one who describes a problem is often looked to for a solution, and that I cannot give you.

I don’t know how to reverse it. I don’t know how we could reacquire the amiability and trust we once shared. I don’t know how we could revive the willingness “to agree to disagree” – i.e., to treat differences of opinion (or personal practice) on subjects of widespread interest as tolerable, even potentially educational. It’s wrapped in weaponized threads that are peculiarly difficult to sever, especially as the forces that have already weaponized so much of what’s common among us labor constantly to strengthen them and add to their number.

I said this would be one of my purer tirades. I hope I haven’t disappointed you.

Sunday, February 28, 2016

More On NIRP And The War On Cash

Articles addressing these threats have been multiplying. An increasing number of commentators are treating them as real possibilities rather than fever-dream nightmares.

Here’s a thoughtful piece from Tyler Durden, which demonstrates en passant why one should not put too much faith in anyone’s forecasts:

     Back in August 2012, when negative interest rates were still merely viewed as sheer monetary lunacy instead of pervasive global monetary reality that has pushed over $6 trillion in global bonds into negative yield territory, the NY Fed mused hypothetically about negative rates and wrote "Be Careful What You Wish For" saying that "if rates go negative, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing will likely be called upon to print a lot more currency as individuals and small businesses substitute cash for at least some of their bank balances."
     Well, maybe not... especially if physical currency is gradually phased out in favor of some digital currency "equivalent" as so many "erudite economists" and corporate media have suggested recently, for the simple reason that in a world of negative rates, physical currency - just like physical gold - provides a convenient loophole to the financial repression of keeping one's savings in digital form in a bank where said savings are taxed at -0.1%, or -1% or -10% or more per year by a central bank and government both hoping to force consumers to spend instead of save.
     For now cash is still legal, and NIRP - while a reality for the banks - has yet to be fully passed on to depositors.
     The bigger problem is that in all countries that have launched NIRP, instead of forcing spending precisely the opposite has happened: as we showed last October, when Bank of America looked at savings patterns in European nations with NIRP, instead of facilitating spending, what has happened is precisely the opposite: "as the BIS have highlighted, ultra-low rates may perversely be driving a greater propensity for consumers to save as retirement income becomes more uncertain."

Please read the whole thing. Once again, people’s responses to changes in economic and fiscal policies have baffled the “planners.” It’s a reminder that no one should be certain that he sees – or feels – all the incentives that apply to a given context.

Now, Europe and Japan are not the United States. It’s quite possible that Americans’ response to the imposition of NIRP would be different. What seems assured is that we wouldn’t passively accept the new monetary regime without at all changing how we store and handle our wealth.

This is highly relevant to the accelerating disaffiliation, among ordinary Americans, from the political system and the laws and policies promulgated by our political class.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve cited this supremely important observation from the late Benjamin M. Anderson:

There is no need in human life so great as that men should trust one another and should trust their government, should believe in promises, and should keep promises in order that future promises may be believed in and in order that confident cooperation may be possible. Good faith -- personal, national, and international -- is the first prerequisite of decent living, of the steady going on of industry, of governmental financial strength, and of international peace.

Among the seemingly irrefutable facts of our time is that trust is everywhere declining. Trust in large institutions – emphatically including governments – is at what might be an all-time low for the era of recorded human history. It behooves us to try to grasp why.

When I wrote in 2009 that:

Our military is being emasculated as we speak, with funding cuts to deprive it of men and machines, and legal entanglements to ensure that no soldier in the field can ever be certain that he won't be tried for murder by civilians, or worse, by foreigners.
Our alliances are faltering as no one ever expected, as our chief executive kowtows to the worst men in the world and fails to uphold America's actions in its own interest.
Our politicians are interested solely in getting elected and staying in office, and will do anything, sacrifice anyone, and betray any principle of right, to achieve those goals.
Our economy is being bled to death by layer after layer of taxation, regulation, legal mandates, and outright nationalizations, nearly all intended to benefit some provincial interest some gaggle of politicians counts on for support.
Our currency has been so debased that the other nations of the world, fooled over the decades into accepting mountains of it for their wares, are getting ready to write it off.
Our schools have become cesspits of socialist indoctrination and multicultural propaganda, where a child saying grace over his lunch is subject to harassment as a bigot.
Our cities and communities are weakening under the assaults of illegal immigration, eminent-domain attacks on property rights, forced injection of "refugees" who hate America and all it stands for, and the use of insane lawsuits to prevent development in the name of "saving the planet."
Our churches -- the ones that still respect God and value freedom -- are steadily being muzzled by the moral and cultural relativists, the "inclusionists," and the Muslims.
Our women are largely persuaded that killing an unborn baby constitutes a "woman's right" and a "safe medical procedure."
Our arts have become unfathomably vile.
Every right we have is under sustained, determined assault.
Our people are losing faith in one another, in themselves, in their futures, and the futures of their children.

Things were already pretty bad. Here we are, six and a half years further down history’s road. Would anyone care to claim that they’re better?

Trust is the consequence of prior experiences: specifically, the fulfillment of promises, guarantees, and predictions. Smith, unless he’s a total moron, would not trust Jones on the basis of zero prior acquaintance. Few Smiths would trust Jones on a serious matter – that is, a matter pertinent to Smith’s well-being or security – unless Jones had already accumulated a record of good performance. And no Smith who belongs anywhere but a sanatorium would trust Jones had Jones accumulated a record of poor performance: inaccurate forecasts, failures, and betrayals.

Poor performance is the hallmark of governments in our time. They exhibit all three kinds:

Forecasts that turn out to be wildly wrong;
Failures to perform as promised;
Outright betrayals of trust.

This is especially the case in economic and fiscal matters.

From March 1933 onward, the federal government has done nothing but steal value from the dollar. Over the eighty-three years since then, a pound loaf of bread of good quality has gone from $0.10 retail to over $4.00 in most metropolitan areas. That’s not because of a shortage of wheat flour, ovens, or bakers.

Now and then we’ve been told about policy changes to “strengthen” the dollar. Such “strengthenings” have always been strictly relative to the currencies of other nations. Governments cannot create value. They can only consume it.

Trends in the financial markets are never infinite. (“Trees do not grow to the sky.” – Baron Philippe de Rothschild) They will always come to an end. However, trends in political motivations can be relied upon...and the motivation of governments is always to steal.

Not one of the economic or fiscal developments of the last thirty years has conduced to greater prosperity for Americans. Not one points to a brighter future for our descendants. Perhaps worst of all, few of us believe that a “change of regime,” such as the one that will nominally occur on January 20, 2017, will improve matters. Our trust in the words, intentions, and deeds of politicians is gone.

Yet, with personal attention to our circumstances and the exercise of prudent, well thought out efforts, many Americans have endeavored to secure their personal and familial situations against the dark tides they foresee. Many of those efforts went to securing our wealth and our ability to ride out a financial storm. Ann Barnhardt and others have exhorted us to back away from the existing financial system in all its manifestations. Some Americans have heeded that advice in its entirety; others only partway.

Some, but not nearly a majority. The great majority of us are still exposed to political and financial predation. Some disbelieve the prognostications of calamity. Others feel they have no alternative but to remain in the system. Still others are betting that by dint of careful timing, they’ll be able to profit from whatever might develop.

How would you, Gentle Reader, endeavor to protect your savings if they were made wholly electronic or promissory – that is, if they could not be converted into a tangible form? Given that the demand for physical gold and silver is already so high that delivery delays now average three months, what would you expect if, say a year from now, the $100 bill were entirely out of circulation and American banks had followed Europe and Japan into negative-interest-rate territory? Can you imagine being able to acquire the money metals at any price in non-material currency?

More critically: Would you repose your trust in an entity that to continue in existence must feed upon the value you create, if it moved toward such a situation?

Today, the esteemed Glenn Reynolds cites a Peggy Noonan column of considerable insight:

     There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.
     The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.
     I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.
     They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.
     Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.

Noonan might be late to the party, but she’s correct nevertheless. The “protected” – the political elites and those “connected” who can shelter under their wings – might imagine that they can destroy cash, impose NIRP, and somehow not suffer along with the rest of us. After all, they’ve imposed so many shackles and depredations on us “unprotected” ones, and as Noonan indicates, have managed to evade the consequences. But destroying the money is a quite different kettle of fish.

The destruction of our money will involve the final destruction of general trust, for as David Friedman has written, there are only three ways people can interact:

Love,
Trade,
Force.

Without a trustworthy medium of exchange, trade will be impossible, and the “unprotected” surely won’t feed, clothe, and house the “protected” out of love. Perhaps what would ultimately come of that would be better than what we endure today. But it wouldn’t be guaranteed to get here quickly.

It’s time for all Americans to look to their defenses: to their larders, to their savings, to their armaments, and to the reliability of their relatives, friends, and neighbors. As Tyler Durden notes in the article cited in the opening segment, you don’t want to be the last to panic:

     And then this from "Demand For Big Bills Soars As Japan Stuffs Safes With 10,000-Yen Notes":
     “Demand for 10,000-yen bills is steadily rising in Japan, even as the nation’s population falls and the use of credit cards and other forms of electronic payment increases,” Bloomberg writes. “While more cash might sound like a good thing, some economists are concerned that it shows Japanese households are squirreling away money at home instead of investing it or putting it into bank accounts -- where it can make its way back into the financial system and be put to productive use.”
     One safe maker who spoke to Bloomberg said safe shipments have doubled over the last six months. While part of the demand for safes is likely attributable to the country's new "My Number" initiative, "the negative-rate policy is likely to intensify the preference of Japanese households to keep cash at home,” Hideo Kumano, an economist at Dai-ichi Life Research Institute said. “Overall, the trend of more cash at home reflects concern about the outlook for economy among households. This isn’t a good thing.”

     No it isn't, and not because of concern about the outlook for the Japanese economy: that had no chance long before Abe and Kuroda came on the scene, mostly as a result of Japan's demographic spiral of doomed.
     "It isn't a good thing" because it confirms that the global run on physical cash - as much as the bankers of the world would like to keep it under wraps - has begun, and as the chart above shows, in a fractionally-reserved world in which there are $10 in savers' claims for every $1 in physical currency, it quite literally pays to panic first, as the 9 out of 10 people who panic after the first one, will be stuck with nothing.

Verbum sat sapienti.

Monday, June 15, 2015

Wastrels In High Places

If the title of this piece seems vaguely familiar, you might be thinking of this old favorite, from which I shall now borrow:

     We have created -- and institutionalized -- incentives for fraud and penalties for honesty and candor. Not just for men of science; for virtually every trade and walk of life. For many men, the touchstone of ethical judgment is no longer "Is it right?" It's "Can I get away with it?"
     We have destroyed the bedrock of freedom: our ability to trust....
     We have lived, collectively, as wastrels. We have consumed much and produced little. Especially, we've consumed the trust and good will of our fellows, with our conniving, our chiseling, and our gaming the laws and the courts in search of personal or provincial advantage. That can only go on for so long before Hobbes's "war of each against all" must resume.

But a descent into venality is seldom uniform in depth or in pace. There will always be some who move faster and go deeper than others. We call them the political class.

In some of the more fanciful romances of ancient Britain, the fall of King Uther, father to legendary Arthur, was foredoomed by his deceits. He had squandered the trust of the nobles upon whom his reign depended. When an opportunity arose to put an end to him, they took it, and the rest is (Arthurian) history. The pattern repeated itself with King John and King Charles I Stuart, albeit with variations.

So it is when men lack trust in their monarch. (Of course, it hardly helped that back then, one attained a throne mainly by killing off all the other aspirants.) A king has specific responsibilities. His rule will be tolerated only for as long as he meets them without unduly burdening the nobility and the common folk. If he shirks his responsibilities, or betrays them, his fall is inevitable, for no man can maintain himself in a position of absolute authority by his own hand.

This is equally the case in a republic such as the United States. However, owing to the distribution of authorities and responsibilities among our political class, its loss of trust is a more involute development, and its fall a thing of exquisite complexity.

Merely as a sample of what passes for political talk today, consider the following:

     [JAKE] TAPPER: “First I want to ask you about this breaking news in Washington D.C. today and about Secretary Clinton’s position on the President’s trade bill. In a 2012 speech in Australia, Clinton who was a big proponent of the Pacific Partnership bill said quote, “It sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free transparent fair trade. The kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field.” It sounds to me like she is a big supporter of it but as a candidate she said nothing about it.”
     [KAREN] FINNEY: “Well, but what you just read, that was from 2012 and we are now in 2015 and this deal has gone back and forth between the House and the Senate and then it sounds like we are going back and forth again another couple of times so that is part of why as you played earlier on your show, Hillary has made it very clear that she has her two kind of standards. Any trade deal has to meet those two tests and she has voted for trade agreements that she thought were good and she has voted against those that she thought were bad.”
     TAPPER: “Okay so she opposes this one?”
     FINNEY: “Well, no, that is why she has said that though that she really believes what’s really important from a policy perspective, not the political conversation, she really believes that the final language is really what is important. Because we can talk about currency manipulation but how do we get there? How do we accomplish that?”
     TAPPER: “But Karen I am talking about policy because Democrats in the House and Senate have now voted on this. This is an issue that every single Democrat who has announced that they are running for the presidency has taken a position on except for the one who helped push it and did she even help write it? I believe she helped write it.”
     FINNEY: “I can’t speak to that because I wasn’t at the State Department. But again I just go back to the bigger picture and that is what she has really been focused on. And I hear what you are saying and I know that there are people who, you know, they have things that they want her to say about this but she and, you know, you played her own words. This is how she has laid out her position on this issue in terms of does it protect American workers, does it keep America safe, what is the final language? I mean again you have seen the ping-pong back and forth…”

Remarkable, eh? A presidential candidate, one of the co-authors of an enormous bill the contents of which have been concealed from the public while Congress deliberates over it, has refused to take a specific position on whether that bill should be passed. Why? Because she doesn't want to come down on the "wrong side:" i.e., the losing side.

If the polls can be believed, the general public is heavily against this bill -- now colloquially referred to as "ObamaTrade" -- because of its secret nature. When a government starts to make laws in secret, it forfeits the trust of the people. Why are you keeping secret what you plan to do to us? What you plan to take from us? Is this not a government of the people? These are perfectly sensible questions...but not questions prominent politicians ever want to face.

It doesn't help that "ObamaTrade" is heavily supported by Barack Hussein Obama, whom no one trusts any longer, or that former vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan, himself in poor odor with Americans, has openly said “By the way, TPA—it’s declassified and made public once it’s agreed to.”

The GOP's Congressional caucuses' collaboration with the least trusted president in history in making secret law has drained all the remaining trust from the political class. The polls have told us that as well.

In all probability, the demise of the American political class will not take place through a violent revolution. It's more likely to develop as a rolling disaffiliation from government and governmental emissions: a tide of rejectionism in which growing numbers of Americans simply resolve to ignore Washington, and possibly the state and county capitals as well. There isn't enough enforcement power in the world to reverse such a tide. King Canute had a better chance with the coastal waters of Denmark.

That wouldn't produce a "new America," or an "America reborn." It would Balkanize the country into dozens, perhaps hundreds, of smaller polities. The cohesion of those polities might be at the expense of peaceful relations with others. Given the fractionation of American commerce and culture into pockets dominated by sectionalism and ethnic concentrations, that would seem the most probable course. Should it be the outcome, we'll have incurred it by standing idly by and allowing our political class to behave as it has these past hundred years.

The political class has no one to blame outside itself. Politicians' descent into habitual evasion, dissimulation, and deceit has squandered the public trust, tarring their number indelibly. Many of them are aware of this. Some hope to reverse it as it pertains to themselves; others hope merely to outlast it, to "ride the tiger" of popular disenchantment hoping to wear it out.

If the fates of Kings Uther, John, and Charles I Stuart are any indication, their hopes are overwhelmingly likely to be dashed. Unfortunately, their fall could take the country with them.

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
    Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
    We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
    Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
    Within a dream.
     [Ernest Dowson]

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Wastrels

[In response to the quite overwhelming number of readers who remembered it and pleaded for it after reading this piece, below appears a post that first appeared at Eternity Road on November 22, 2009. -- FWP]

To those who come here for spiritual reinforcement, to those seeking uplift or tools with which to defend their faith, to those whose sense of direction is wavering, and to those who read these Ruminations for their chuckle value:

Forgive me, Gentle Readers. I'm having one of those days.

***

The C.S.O. and I went to a concert yesterday evening at the Capital One Theater, formerly called the Westbury Music Fair. It was part of the theater's "Legends" series, which features some of the iconic performers of the past half-century. Last night's headliner was one of the immortals of song, the great Tony Bennett.

Tony Bennett, baptized Antonio Dominic Benedetto, is 83 years old this year. He's been a musical professional for sixty years. Were it his preference, he'd have every right to regard his career as successful -- and concluded. Any number of other entertainers younger than he have hung up the mike and retired on their laurels, well-earned or not.

It was clear from last night's performance that Bennett still "has it." His voice retains all its old power, ever so slightly roughened by the years. He hardly needed a microphone to fill the theater with song, nor did his several soft-shoe episodes suggest that there's a walker in his near future.

It was equally clear that Bennett still loves music, particularly the soft-jazz ballads for which he's famous. He performed, with his daughter Antonia, for nearly two hours, and might have gone on longer were it not for theater policy and local zoning ordinances. He stinted nothing, reaching all the high notes with apparent ease, caressing the pianissimi and belting out the fortissimi like a young man of twenty-five.

There wasn't a soul in that theater who didn't love him unreservedly. Nor were we all nursing-home escapees.

With that love came a wholehearted trust. We paid big bucks to see and hear Bennett perform. We endured a horrible traffic pattern, a crowded, overheated theater, and thirty minutes of misery struggling to get out of the worst-designed parking lot on Long Island. No one does that without trusting in the performer's fidelity to his trade: not to slough his responsibility to perform only at his best, never to turn in a pro forma hack job just because he needs the money.

In large measure, that love and trust was inspired by Bennett himself, an entirely admirable performer whose fidelity to his art and his chosen idiom has never wavered, and who answered that trust by giving us his best from first to last. But there was another component to it.

Bennett reminds us of better days.

Days of innocence, when we trusted ourselves and one another, and expected nothing that was not ours by right.
Days of promise, each to build upon the ones before and prepare for higher ascents in days to come.
Days of open-eyed, confident engagement with life's challenges.
Days of enterprise, achievement, and glory.
Days of love.

America's days of wine and roses.

***

Often, when an old fart like me starts rambling about "the good old days," he's trading on highly polished memories that bear only a passing resemblance to the texture of the time he thinks he recalls. Lord knows, memory can be polished to a very high gloss. But there's always a chance that the veneer genuinely reflects the reality, at least in essence. The persistence of a Tony Bennett, even in an age of doubt and gloom, is evidence to that effect, albeit most circumstantial and not at all conclusive.

Despite the adage that "history is written by the victor," there are enough survivors of our better years to dispel most doubts about their veracity. Some of them are our grandparents. Some of them are our parents. And some of them, of course, are ourselves.

The past half-century has been a time of decline. The most significant aspect of that decline has been the dissipation of trust.

***

In a discussion of the big AGW scandal issuing from the Hadley CRU leak, one participant expressed bewilderment, averring that:

...a hoax on this scale would require the collusion of a whole lot of people…

Not so, in the traditional sense of "collusion." Scientists, just like the rest of humanity, respond to incentives and penalties. The warmistas in the scientific community were drawn there by a variety of incentives.

Some were undoubtedly sincere, certain that with enough evidence they could validate the greenhouse-gas thesis and willing to explain away "inconvenient data" with the usual dismissals of the true believer.
Some were loyal Hessians, willing to go wherever their idols and masters might point them.
Some were "following the money," as ever greater amounts of money poured from government coffers and the treasuries of left-leaning foundations to support the promulgation of the anthropogenic-global-warming thesis.
Some were merely publicity hounds, who would ride any wagon that appeared to have the media's attention.
Some were flogged into sullen support of AGW, fearful that refraining would cause them to be stripped of their funding and relegated to the outer darkness.

No doubt there are other reasons...in light of the fraud the Hadley CRU docments have revealed, none of them in any way connected to the core doctrines of science.

What matters is the fraud itself. Some thousands of "scientists" were moved to abandon science as it's been practiced for centuries by motives that, if they're to be summed up in one word, could only be called evil. Yes, tens of millions of persons worldwide cheered them on, but that's hardly an exculpation.

We have created -- and institutionalized -- incentives for fraud and penalties for honesty and candor. Not just for men of science; for virtually every trade and walk of life. For many men, the touchstone of ethical judgment is no longer "Is it right?" It's "Can I get away with it?"

We have destroyed the bedrock of freedom: our ability to trust.

***

It might sound implausible to younger Americans, but half a century ago the typical American would reflexively trust the word even of a passing stranger. We trusted one another because we knew ourselves, in the small and in the large, to be honorable men. It was a knowledge forged from experience and tempered by our recognition of a common moral and ethical foundation: the Judeo-Christian code of conduct.

We believed in the manly virtues. More, we believed that those around us believed in them, too.

Were there thieves, con men, and chiselers among us then? Of course. But their number was far smaller than it is today. The social-legal environment didn't yet incorporate all the inducements to dishonesty and chiseling that we suffer in the year of Our Lord 2009. Perhaps more important, we didn't yet endure the perpetual hectoring about how cruel, venal, and untrustworthy we are, from institutions that wax upon men's distrust of one another.

We trusted our merchants and business associates. We understood free enterprise to be an inherently honorable, honesty-promoting thing. We trusted our spouses, knowing that the marriage vow was taken seriously by our communities and that a departure from it would be held against the violator. We trusted lawyers to represent us honestly and capably at need, and courts to return just verdicts and sentences. We even trusted politicians, which was the beginning of unwisdom.

Whenever and wherever men decide that they cannot trust one another to behave honorably, to meet their obligations and honor their commitments, or to cleave to fundamental moral principles about violence, theft, fraud, filial duty, and false witness, the sequel is always the same: we recur to the State, the institution whose sole instrument is force. We accede to laws innumerable, expecting them to substitute for trustworthiness in our fellow men. They seldom have that effect, for every law, however well intentioned and carefully designed, creates a black market in the behavior it forbids: an inducement for evil men to sell their willingness to accept the risks of violating it.

The State, of course, is perfectly happy to take the burden, for its operators are past masters at the twinned arts of taking credit for good outcomes and sloughing the odium for bad ones onto others' shoulders. By gentle, all but imperceptible degrees, it pares away our freedom, our property, and what remains of our willingness to trust one another, gobbling down the slices with Pantagruelian voracity. The progression can have only one terminus, yet most of us remain willing to accept politicians' protestations of devotion to the commonweal in the teeth of all experience...until the day we find our own oxen being filleted for our masters' tables.

That's usually the day we discover that all the sand has fallen to the bottom of the hourglass...that the vector of our subjugation can no longer be reversed.

***

The mint-mark of political speech is the promise. We hear them by the thousands these days: give me power, give me this or that little bite from your wallet or your liberty, and I will ease whatever it is that pains you. But none of the promisers ever post a bond for non-performance. Except for the pitiful few literally caught with tainted cash in their freezers, none of them ever have to repay the electorate for their defaults.

The subtext of any political promise is, of course, "Trust me." As the late Cyril Northcote Parkinson observed long ago, only a politician would say that; since then, politicians have learned to imply it, never to be caught actually mouthing the words. But the demand is there even so, and as their failures accumulate, ordinary persons find their residual willingness to trust being whittled away.

***

After two centuries of blessedness, America has entered the hour of the power of darkness:

Our military is being emasculated as we speak, with funding cuts to deprive it of men and machines, and legal entanglements to ensure that no soldier in the field can ever be certain that he won't be tried for murder by civilians, or worse, by foreigners.
Our alliances are faltering as no one ever expected, as our chief executive kowtows to the worst men in the world and fails to uphold America's actions in its own interest.
Our politicians are interested solely in getting elected and staying in office, and will do anything, sacrifice anyone, and betray any principle of right, to achieve those goals.
Our economy is being bled to death by layer after layer of taxation, regulation, legal mandates, and outright nationalizations, nearly all intended to benefit some provincial interest some gaggle of politicians counts on for support.
Our currency has been so debased that the other nations of the world, fooled over the decades into accepting mountains of it for their wares, are getting ready to write it off.
Our schools have become cesspits of socialist indoctrination and multicultural propaganda, where a child saying grace over his lunch is subject to harassment as a bigot.
Our cities and communities are weakening under the assaults of illegal immigration, eminent-domain attacks on property rights, forced injection of "refugees" who hate America and all it stands for, and the use of insane lawsuits to prevent development in the name of "saving the planet."
Our churches -- the ones that still respect God and value freedom -- are steadily being muzzled by the moral and cultural relativists, the "inclusionists," and the Muslims.
Our women are largely persuaded that killing an unborn baby constitutes a "woman's right" and a "safe medical procedure."
Our arts have become unfathomably vile.
Every right we have is under sustained, determined assault.
Our people are losing faith in one another, in themselves, in their futures, and the futures of their children.

Soon the national motto will no longer be "E pluribus unum," but rather "Sauve qui peut."

We did it to ourselves, by squandering one another's trust.

***

They unwound and flung from them with rage, as a rag that defiled them
The imperial gains of the age which their forefathers piled them.
They ran panting in haste to lay waste and embitter for ever
The wellsprings of Wisdom and Strength which are Faith and Endeavour.
They nosed out and digged up and dragged forth and exposed to derision
All doctrine of purpose and worth and restraint and prevision:
And it ceased, and God granted them all things for which they had striven,
And the heart of a beast in the place of a man’s heart was given. . .

[Rudyard Kipling, "The City of Brass"]

No, America isn't quite as bad as that, yet, but we're headed in that direction. What Kipling foretells in the concluding stanza of his epic poem will draw ever nearer, the longer we persist in the folly of demanding that others bear our burdens for us, at no cost to ourselves -- that is, the longer we trust in the State in preference to trusting ourselves and our fellow men.

We have lived, collectively, as wastrels. We have consumed much and produced little. Especially, we've consumed the trust and good will of our fellows, with our conniving, our chiseling, and our gaming the laws and the courts in search of personal or provincial advantage. That can only go on for so long before Hobbes's "war of each against all" must resume.

It's the sort of premonition that makes me glad to be an old man. Perhaps I won't live to see this Hell-Bound Train reach the Depot Way Down Yonder.

Whatever you came to Eternity Road seeking today, Gentle Reader, I'd bet a pretty that the above wasn't it.

Forgive me.