The Debunking: Nice Guys

Good morning, Gentle Reader. Yes, it's the start of another series, possibly a long one. These "Debunking" pieces will have a common aim: to tell you, in no uncertain terms, what you already know but are unwilling to admit to yourself.

Many of Man's troubles stem from the widespread insistence that things are other than they really are, in the face of imperative, irrefutable evidence to the contrary. However, the overwhelming majority of commentators are rather too polite about our preference for such fantasies. As a fantasist of some accomplishments, I can sympathize, but not to the extent of silently watching the destruction of the United States of America or the human race generally. Anyway, someone has to pick up this gauntlet, and my colleagues in the DextroSphere appear, ah, disinclined to soil themselves by doing so. So here we go.

---

    The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious.
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest—
For Brutus is an honorable man;
So are they all, all honorable men.

[Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene II]

Hearken to Ann Althouse about some Republican strategic and tactical decisions during the 2012 campaign:

The Republicans had good reason to believe that the American people resisted thinking ill of the famously likeable President and so they pursued campaign strategies that allowed people to maintain this treasured belief. Their idea was: He's a nice guy but it would be good to switch to this other person who's also nice and will do an even better job. That's lame, we can see in retrospect, but it was the decision at the time.

I added the emphases in the above. Let's explore the ramifications:

• Nice guys, Obama and Romney, contended for the highest office in the land;
  • Whose occupant is Commander-in-Chief of the mightiest military machine on Earth, with the power to lay complete and utter waste to any region thereof at his sole command;
  • Whose occupant also directs the Executive branch of the federal government, which wields powers so vast that the Constitution has become a present-day nullity;
  • Whose occupant also commands the resources of several intelligence-gathering bureaucracies, capable of eliminating the privacy of any person or institution upon which it might focus;
• And hired thousands of "opposition researchers" to dig up dirt upon one another;
• And slung whatever those researchers could find at their opponents, without conscience qualms or other inhibitions (other than "might this rebound against me?").

How many "nice guys" do you know, Gentle Reader, who would stoop to any of that, regardless of the potential gain? Of those you know who would do so, which ones would you be willing to trust with power over you?

Give that a spin on your mental merry-go-round while I pour myself more coffee.

---

Among the political maladies of the nation, this one ranks high: The coverage of national politics by our news media -- including the much vaunted New Media -- focuses on the federal level with near-absolute dedication. State and local politics receives attention only when it evinces a degree of disorder verging on general rioting and bloodshed. Yet federal-level figures often get their start at the state and / or local levels, where, according to Ferdinand Lundberg, things are routinely less than savory:

...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....

As to other legislatures, Senator Estes Kefauver found representatives of the vulpine Chicago Mafia ensconced in the Illinois legislature, which has been rocked by one scandal of the standard variety after the other off and on for seventy-five years. What he didn't bring out was that the Mafians were clearly superior types to many non-Mafians.

Public attention, indeed, usually centers on only a few lower legislatures -- Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois -- and the impression is thereby fostered in the unduly trusting that the ones they don't hear about are on the level. But such an impression is false. The ones just mentioned come into more frequent view because their jurisdictions are extremely competitive and the pickings are richer. Fierce fights over the spoils generate telltale commotion. Most of the states are quieter under strict one-party quasi-Soviet Establishment dominance, with local newspapers cut in on the gravy. Public criticism and information are held to a minimum, grousers are thrown a bone, and not many in the local populace know or really care. Even so, scandalous goings-on explode into view from time to time in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri and elsewhere -- no state excepted. Any enterprising newspaper at any time could send an aggressive reporter into any one of them and come up with enough ordure to make the Founding Fathers collectively vomit up their very souls in their graves.

[The Rich and the Super-Rich, 1968]

To rise in American politics, the aspirant must be more ruthless and less scrupled than his opponents. The dynamic of political power requires it, for, as Friedrich Hayek noted in The Road to Serfdom, "the worst always get on top." Only men who love power and prize it above all other things will even attempt to scale that cliff, and woe betide him whose conscience forbids him a useful toehold:

In order to obtain and hold power, a man must love it. Thus the effort to get it is not likely to be coupled with goodness, but with the opposite qualities of pride, cunning, and cruelty. -- Leo Tolstoy

Just how many "nice guys" would you expect to find among such persons?

---

There are no "nice guys" in politics. It's really that simple. Yet enormous effort goes into persuading the electorate that this or that official or aspirant to office is a "nice guy:" in Robert A. Heinlein's formulation, "good to dogs and children." The "nice guy" image appears to be essential to political elevation, at least in the thinking of political strategists and image engineers -- and they're likely to be right.

My thesis, for what it's worth, is that we're more likely to trust a "nice guy" with power and discretion no public official should have...and all aspirants to power crave.

Whenever a common citizen is told, directly or indirectly, about what a "nice guy" politician X is, he's being propagandized. Were the great majority of Americans aware of this -- consciously aware during political campaigns, rather than grudgingly willing to concede it to his asshole buddies over beer and pretzels on a Friday evening after work -- we would have far less taste for the sort of Government Uber Alles regime we suffer today. We would grasp viscerally that which we occasionally admit intellectually: that no man should be allowed power over others.

Whatsoever, for any cause,
    Seeketh to take or give,
Power above or beyond the Laws,
    Suffer it not to live!
Holy State or Holy King—
    Or Holy People’s Will—
Have no truck with the senseless thing.
    Order the guns and kill!

[Rudyard Kipling]

Freedom’s Scion Now Available!

My latest novel, Freedom’s Scion, sequel to the widely praised Which Art In Hope, is now available for your reading pleasure.

Althea Morelon, polymath, psi adept, and the highest child of the anarchic world of Hope, wants to travel the galaxy. Indeed, it’s her dying grandparents’ last wish that she put her enormous gifts to the task of finding a way around the lightspeed barrier and voyaging to Earth, to discover what has become of Man’s homeworld, which has lain silent for many centuries. However, her clan, the foremost of Hope, has other plans for her. Nor will her husband Martin let her go without a fight. Inter-clan struggles, dynastic tensions, and love combine to obstruct her path, as Hope gestates that which its settlers fled Earth to escape: the State.

Only $2.99 at Smashwords, in a wide variety of eBook formats.

Because I lack the grace to accept with serenity...

...all the downright dangerous shenanigans

going on in the world, I create.

"Deliver us from Evil, one Beasturd at a time. Amen."

I must thank Mr. Porretto for the opportunity to share my work with you, his trusting readers (fingers crossed that a few of you will thank him, too). I passionately favor Jeffersonian Liberty; passionately oppose Hypocrites of all colors, flavors, and shapes, regardless their field of expertise or station in life. If, through my work, I can show them-and-their-kind the Fool and/or dangerous, I will have succeeded. I know I'm not the best creative I can be, so I honestly ask for your help in getting closer to that goal. Tell me if my characters aren't likeable/believable or are just plain MEH; ditto for their quandaries or solutions to their problems. Additionally, let me know if I use too many: obvious anagrams, commas, far out foreign words, or am just too wordy, generally. (I probably won't ever give up: hyphenated-words-and-phrases, ellipses...or parentheticals. You can try.)

I write fiction for several reasons, not the least of which is to shut-the-voices-up :-). (Of course that only encourages the ones previously in the wings to step to center stage, so off we go again.) Many ideas come out of pure frustration noted above, which is primarily "political" - and fiction therefore serves as a way to vent, constructively.

I'm pretty quick to assess news and other information, so unfortunately can come across as purely "opinionated." But believe me, in the face of compelling feedback in the case of my creative work, or new facts about some real-world issue? I'll readily accept my mere-humanity (maybe get a little embarrassed) and change my method or my mind, depending.

You'll find my work quite different from the other Liberty-Literature out there. My theory is that I choose  "magical realism" or "paranormal elements" because I'm a bit too timid for the times, and therefore for my own good! By weaving in such otherworldly- or fantastic- abilities, my good-guys and gals can often avoid the whole getting down & dirty & bloody & gutsy. They avoid (as do I, as their "cinematographer") all the throat-cutting, all the exploding skulls, and all those beyond messy crime-scene cleanups and explanations. (Just so you know, I'm not opposed to such doings. For instance I take pride in being in the first wave of Rob Olive/"Essential Liberty" fandom; find my Amazon review here.)

The following is my first offering at the Torch. It was written in April and first posted on my writing blog.

"Three if by fire"

Part 1 of 5 - "Don't change horses..."

Yoshi Pratt bolted out of the nightmare and straight up in bed. The 26-year-old D.C. native’s hand flew to his heart. He pressed mightily, as if the wildly beating thing would break free at the next beat…or the next.

It didn’t. He threw off the now cold clammy sheet and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He couldn’t stay up. Still too many hours before the alarm would screech.

From the bathroom, by shear contrast in the dark, the mussed up bed’s expanse of pale colored cotton-innards glowed. He grabbed the top sheet; it was far from dry. He flipped on the overhead fan. His dream, like the fan on low, was still going around and around his mind lazily. Though Yoshi didn’t think much about politics normally, the pulse-pounding final scenes had been nothing but.

When it came to Washington machinations and his so-called civic-duties, he’d describe himself as frozen in time. 26-going-on-18.

After college he’d tried living at the ground zero of American politics. Had dreams of working at its newspaper, The Post. That dream died, however, with multiple rejections; quickly followed by a bailing roommate, then a near-zero bank balance. He preferred renting a stranger’s basement than bunk for “free” with parent-babysitters in his boyhood room. Now he lived just over the river and through a wooded part of Virginia.

Though he’d finally been hired by a suburban newspaper, the 18-year-old in him was still angry at The Post’s rebuff. To “punish” their stupidity he purposefully donned a political cone-of-silence. Lifted it for one thing only: the Presidential Elections. He went back under the cone after the inaugural parade. This time the election “cycle” seemed to last years.

“To torture us longer,” Yoshi’d joked.

Assorted

Hope you're enjoying the Week of Five Scandals, Gentle Reader. I know I am!

---

1. Underground.

This article on the rapidly expanding underground economy makes the critical point:

The question is, what are the consequences? There are the obvious: The government does not collect taxes on the income of such workers. Because otherwise legitimate businesses can and indeed must pay "informal" workers in cash and therefore cannot deduct those wages as expense, we imagine most owners are, er, qualifying their own reported income. Also, we cannot count off-the-books workers, so government figures probably understate employment and economic growth, which might result in poorly-reasoned fiscal policy (in the alternative universe where actual economic conditions drive the political decision to increase or decrease the size of government).

But there is this, too, which concerns us far more than even hundreds of billions in lost tax revenue: When with regulation and taxation we drive the legitimate economy in to the shadows, we turn otherwise honest people who are only trying to earn a living in to dishonest people. Just as broken windows, litter, and graffiti beget more serious crime, underground business corrupts the soul, and makes people more likely to take or pay bribes, evade taxes, or otherwise break the law more comprehensively. Increasing quotidian dishonesty is a symptom of a culture in decline, and we ignore its consequences for posterity at the peril of our children.

The underground economy is an assemblage of black markets.
Black markets are outlaw markets.
Those who work or trade in outlaw markets eventually see themselves as outlaws.
Outlaws have no respect for the law.
When law receives insufficient respect, it ceases to operate -- at all.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

---

2. The Beat-Down Is Working.

Ponder this observation of our current inanition:

Occasionally, I miss the Bush years.

Not because I’m a “compassionate conservative” or because I have a hawkish foreign policy outlook, or even because I miss the leader of the free world routinely asking after my lunch plans (and the lunch plans of everyone in a large crowd). I miss the Bush years because, back then, when someone in the government did something ridiculous to infringe on the personal liberty of American citizens, people would turn out in droves to Hula Hoop for Peace on Pennsylvania Avenue, and plaster what social media sites existed with Ben Franklin quotes about how people are stupid for giving up their rights to the illusion of security.

But now, the government just does sh*t like this and everyone is like, “meh.”

Outrage when outrage is appropriate is a sign of a healthy polity. Ours ceased to be healthy some time ago -- but we managed not to notice. We're certainly not terribly disturbed by it. That would require us to turn off Real Housewives Of Orange County and actually do something. Who has the energy?

---

3. At Last!

You know, I've always wanted one of these -- they're so useful! -- but as a white man, and a conservative to boot, I was told I couldn't have one:

Thank you, Sister Toldjah!

Incompatible Strategies

The coverage of the recent burst of Obamunist scandals has been brisk enough that I feel no need to recap it here. It's even seeped into the Main Stream Media, which are beginning to display an inchoate sense that something about The Won -- their hero! -- and his regime is not...quite...right. At any rate, any sensible American stopped relying 100% on the MSM for his news feed long ago, so I feel confident that the Gentle Readers of Liberty's Torch are already well informed about the specifics.

For me, the question of greatest interest is strategic: Will Obama and his lieutenants continue in their current isolate-and-insulate strategy, to preserve the positions and reputations of the high at the price of the low, or will it eventually take John Dean's advice and "come clean?"

Dean's suggestion is a good one, viewed outside of all contexts. The absolute best way a high official can protect himself from the odium associated with shady doings is to "get out in front" of the investigations, the disclosures, and the distribution of punishments. But that assumes his own fanny isn't in any of the various slings being slung. If so, the deny/deny/deny strategy of the Watergate period and the isolate-and-insulate technique currently employed by Obama and his inner circle are the preferred alternatives.

Unfortunately for the Obamunists, those two techniques are incompatible. Indeed, choosing either one locks out all other alternatives, for a simple reason: They imply innocence.

Once you've claimed innocence, you cannot confess and expect to win public approbation. Indeed, it strains credulity to hope for mercy. "The cover-up is worse than the crime" has achieved homiletic status for a good reason.

However, if the Obama regime should succeed in:

• Bringing the MSM "back into the fold," and:
• Buying off or intimidating any low- or mid-level defectors from its strategy;

...it might still manage to avoid the worst possible outcomes: total regime delegitimization and / or impeachment of various high officials -- possibly including the president -- by Congress.

It's possible that the various participants in all this skullduggery are casting about for a way to "come clean," as John Dean has advised them. And for some mid-level functionaries, there are still possibilities, though they would be required to join the parade of whistleblowers. These are the persons whom the higher-ups must buy off or threaten into silence: a difficult chore when loss of career and prison time are among the possibilities.

All that having been said, Obama himself will probably survive in office, though even under the best outcome his ability to command his co-partisans on Capitol Hill will be greatly reduced. However, Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton, Kathleen Sebelius, and a large number of other State Department, Justice Department, HHS Department, and IRS officials would be well advised to get their resumes up to date.

The Accusation Of Racism: The Chimera That Will Not Die

I once posted the following questionnaire at Eternity Road:

To those who consider it racist to ask whether there might be real, objective differences among the races as regards intelligence, moral fiber, predisposition to act from emotion rather than reason, depth of religious feeling, and so forth: Please contemplate the following questions, and answer them to the best of your ability. In all of them, the use of the terms "equal" and "unequal" should be taken to refer to statistical aggregates, not to individuals.

1. Is racism:
   • The belief that the races differ in one or more measurable ways?
   • The belief that persons of different races should be treated differently by the law?
   • The belief that one race is, overall, "superior" to another?
   • The belief that the races are unequal in God's eyes?
   • All of the above?
   • Something other than any of the above?
   
   
2. Is it racist to note correlations between race and:
   • Rates of violent crime?
   • Demographic concentrations?
   • Propensity toward poverty, however defined?
   • Propensity toward single-parent, female-headed households?
   • Any of the above?
   • Something other than any of the above?
   
   
3. Imagine that predominance in some activity A consistently belongs to race R. Would it be racist to posit that race R has a natural superiority at activity A, if A were:
   • Basketball?
   • Mathematics?
   • Singing?
   • Chess?
   • Maintaining stable families?
   • Any of the above?
   • Something other than any of the above?
   
   
4. Imagine that Smith believes that the races don't really mix well -- i.e., that each race does best for itself when the races live apart. Which of the following would absolve Smith of racism?
   • He maintains that the races are absolutely equal in all important ways, but that they simply don't get along well?
   • He maintains that, though the races might be statistically unequal in some details, nevertheless all individuals should be judged, not according to their race, but according to their personal merits?
   • He maintains that, though the races are statistically unequal in one or more important ways, those disparities can be overcome over time?
   • He maintains that though the races are statistically unequal in several important ways, nevertheless the law should treat all persons equally -- i.e., the law should be "color-blind?"
   • Any of the above?
   • Something other than any of the above?
   
   
5. Which of the following contentions, in the absence of objective data, would be racist behavior:
   • To insist on the inequality of the races in some measurable way, and to be correct?
   • To insist on the inequality of the races in some measurable way, and to be incorrect?
   • To insist on the equality of the races in some measurable way, and to be correct?
   • To insist on the equality of the races in some measurable way, and to be incorrect?
   • Any of the above?
   • Something other than any of the above?
   
   
6. Imagine the following: You have been kidnapped and are confronted by four doors. Behind door A is a Negro, behind door B is an Oriental, behind door C is a Caucasian, and behind door D is a purebred American Indian. Your kidnapper tells you an activity, and commands you to select one of the four doors. Whoever is behind that door will be your champion in a contest drawn from that activity. For example, if the activity were mathematics, your champion might have to solve a set of simultaneous equations faster than his opponent; if the activity were fisticuffs, your champion would have to out-box his opponent according to standard rules; if the activity were tightrope walking, your champion might have to maintain his balance longer than his opponent. The stakes are your life. Knowing nothing about the persons behind the doors but their races, which door would you choose if the activity were:
   • Arm-wrestling?
   • Computer programming?
   • Sorting a large number of small objects by size, color, or shape?
   • Automobile racing?
   • Hunting?
   
   
7. Having answered the above questions sincerely, has your definition of racism changed?

I received very few responses, which is understandable. Even one who travels the Web anonymously is likely to be reticent about the subjects of racism, race relations, and racial integration. The accusation of racism remains a damaging thing, not to be courted by anyone who fears the possible consequences.

One of the advantages the old possess that the young do not is that our time horizons, foreshortened by the finitude of human life, render some fears less compelling than others. That's certainly been the case for me. In particular, I no longer fear baseless accusations made by persons with an axe of any sort to grind. My body of expressed opinions, every last one of which has been made under my right and full name, should speak for itself -- at least, to anyone I respect and whose opinion I value.

So give that questionnaire above your full attention, Gentle Reader. Don't bother to post your answers; I'm not really interested in them. How does it make you feel? Nervous? As if you're being watched? As if I might be inviting you to step into a mine field?

Now ask yourself why.

---

Recently, a post that linked to Mark Butterworth's "Tales of New America" series appeared at the heavily traveled Free Republic Website. It brought Liberty's Torch a lot of traffic...and a lot of very nasty comments and email, all of which I've suppressed.

Mark's stories were forthright about the tensions and sporadic violence that currently characterize relations between Caucasian and Negro Americans, and one of the probable paths that might arise from those facts. But in America in the year of Our Lord 2013, even to speculate about such things is baiting the bear of the racialist Left. And so the torrent of venom was unleashed, and I was compelled to exercise my powers as moderator of this site.

The Left is aware that charges of racism, though no longer the mortal wounds they once were, are still potent enough to silence many an American. Inasmuch as the subject of interracial relations is becoming ever more critical -- you have been keeping up with the news, haven't you? -- they're swinging that hammer more frequently, and more viciously, than ever.

This was to be expected. Not only are race relations becoming the hottest of hot topics once again; the Left's bastions are crumbling in plain sight. Its most prominent figures are disgracing themselves; the policies it's championed are visibly causing social and economic deterioration; and its other rhetorical weapons are failing it. So it's falling back on the tool that's never failed it: the baseless accusation that this or that commentator is a racist; in the most extreme formulation, that the target "wants to bring back slavery."

I am reminded of another post from long ago:

Some years ago, a theater impresario whom we shall call Smith, whose current production Hoity-Toity was, shall we say, not repaying its production costs received a phone call from Jones, a well-known reporter for the prestigious publication Theater Life. Their conversation ran as follows:

"Mr. Smith," Jones said, "I'm calling to ask a few questions about Hoity-Toity."

"Go right ahead," Smith said.

"Well, first of all," Jones said, "the talk is that Hoity-Toity is falling deeply into arrears and will soon be closed. Is that the case?"

Smith, a careful and experienced man, counted to ten before answering. "I would imagine that if I were to say no, your story in tomorrow's edition would be headlined 'Smith Denies Hoity-Toity Near To Closing.' Am I correct?"

"Well, yes," Jones said. "Something like that, anyway."

"Well, then," Smith said, "I'll answer your question if you'll answer one for me. How's that sound?"

"Fair enough," Jones said warily. "What's your question?"

"Mr. Jones, is it true that your wife has syphilis?"

"What?" Jones shrieked. "Why are you asking me that? What put such an idea into your head?"

"Oh, you know how the rumor mill churns," Smith said breezily. "But, as it happens, you're on speakerphone and Davis is here from Variety. If you were to answer no, he might have a story in tomorrow's edition headlined 'Jones Denies Wife Has Syphilis.' What would you think of a story like that?"

There was a long silence on the line. Finally, Jones said, "All right, Smith. I take your point."

Do you take the point, Gentle Reader?

---

So much of what I write here "should go without saying" that I sometimes despair. But then, it's a commonplace that "common sense" is among the least common things in the universe.

Many an accusation is made merely to provoke a denial. Experienced politicos know that -- and know that the denial, if one is offered, is grist for the PR mill. It will displace all the other news about the subject or persons in controversy; it will invite further questions about the character of the accused; and worst of all, it will stimulate further accusations, probably no better founded than the original, to prevent the accused from returning to the case he was trying to make.

The denial of a substanceless accusation is "blood in the water" to the sharks of the political scene. Yet resisting the urge to deny such an accusation -- especially the charge of racism -- takes more fortitude than many accused persons can summon.

The moral should be obvious...but once again, the Latin roots of obvious mean overlooked.

It's far better to be forthright about one's convictions, even on an ultra-sensitive subject such as race relations, than to hedge them about with qualifiers, exclusions, and exculpations. Mark Butterworth has made his convictions about race relations plain, which marks him as an unusually courageous writer. More, he has the good sense not to "feed the sharks" by responding to their accusations...assisted, of course, by your humble servant's powers of comment moderation. If enough of us were to grasp this, such charges would eventually fade away completely for lack of effect...yet another "obvious" point it pains me to have to make.

Keep the faith.

Of Laws And Men Part 5: Why Natural Law?

There are some subjects that can't be boiled down to ten easy lessons, or a couple of thousand words. Natural Law is one such, which is why I've maundered over the topic at such length. I was resolved not to write further about it until I'd arrived at a compact statement about the why of Natural Law: that is, why I consider it a real thing worthy of extended thought.

Surprise! Here I am with exactly that. I hope you've all had enough coffee for what follows.

---

A comment I posted to the previous essay in this series proved to be the key to the matter:

One of the most intriguing questions in epistemology is at what point it begins to become valid to say "law" where we previously said "trend." The former has an imperative connotation while the latter does not, yet both are about patterns that hint at cause-and-effect relationships, which is what all quests for knowledge are ultimately about.

Since Natural Law, if it exists, is self-enforcing by definition, the best test of its existence lies in the consistency (or lack thereof) of consequences for ignoring or violating it.

Now, as Tom Kratman has noted, we cannot infer the existence of a self-enforcing Natural Law from individual cases:

The problem therein, though, Fran, is that the escape of miscreants from justice, widely seen and widely known, literally demoralizes that grand sweep of population, such that it becomes every man for himself...except for the decent ones who rise above that with, "every man for his own family."

Individualized justice of the sort a code of laws and a system of jurisprudence seeks has the unfortunate properties of being:

1. Fallible;
2. Corruptible.

There's no way to create a justice system that lacks those properties. That's not an argument for failing to try, of course; it merely notes the specific threats against which such a system must be buttressed, always in cognizance that there's no perfect barrier against such things.

Tom's observation about "the escape of miscreants from justice" is absolutely correct -- for certain magnitudes of such escapes. A given society will possess a threshold percentage of errors and corruptions at which the good folks will lose faith in the justice system. Sadly, that percentage is unknowable before it's been exceeded. If and when it is exceeded, Tom's statement of the consequences:

...it becomes every man for himself...except for the decent ones who rise above that with, "every man for his own family."

...operates with great destructive power.

This isn't a new observation, of course:

"The tale of my interrupted trial will spread through the galaxy. Frustration of my plans to lighten the disaster will convince people that the future holds no promise to them. Already they recall the lives of their grandfathers with envy. They will see that political revolutions and trade stagnations will increase. The feeling will pervade the galaxy that only what a man can grasp for himself at that moment will be of any account. Ambitious men will not wait and unscrupulous men will not hang back. By their every action they will hasten the decay of the worlds."

You might feel free to dismiss my opinions, but dare you dismiss those of Hari Seldon?

---

A justice system of some sort is inevitable. Indeed, the vigilance committees of the 19th Century West, so badly maligned by orthodox historians, were scrupulous about formalizing and regularizing their operations, to the point where they rose to command far more public trust than the "official" ones. But an injustice system operating under the guise of justice will provoke the very processes Tom (and Hari Seldon) foresaw.

The perception of intolerable injustice operates on societies through Natural Law.

There are two paths, categorically speaking, that a society can take when it has lost faith in its justice system -- that is, in its State:

• It can Balkanize;
• It can replace the State through a political revolution.

(Balkanization can be a precursor to the "every man for himself" and "every man for his family" atomizations that can occur if the smaller, breakaway units cannot win the trust of those who dwell in them.)

Our allegiance to the abstract principles of justice we in the West have followed since the Enlightenment is conditional upon their observance by the State. When the State loses our faith, it takes that allegiance with it, and one of the two paths becomes inevitable. Note that this does not always occasion the actual fall of the State; indeed, it often manifests itself in subtle yet critical ways, such as the expansion of the "underground economy" and the pervasive unwillingness among private persons to cooperate with the police or the courts in any way.

Natural Law dictates this outcome, because it is our nature as men to seek to survive and prosper. A State -- an institution that possesses the privilege of the pre-indemnified use of force against persons and property -- that perpetrates injustice undermines the conditions required for survival and prosperity, and therefore contradicts human nature.

When the most powerful entity among us is seen as a source of injustice, we abandon the notion of public justice disinterestedly administered by public servants and revert to the law of the jungle. It's all the same whether we overthrow Leviathan or "go underground."

---

Natural Law, as I observed in the previous essay, operates on societies, and over broad sweeps of time. It arises from human nature: the ways in which we are all alike. It cannot and does not "address" individual cases, for as individuals we are all different -- which is part of the "problem."

There are those who dispute the assertion that Man, or any other species, has an enduring nature. They point to outliers -- coma patients; severe idiots; the insane -- and ask what those cases imply for the notion of human nature. The argument is not to be dismissed out of hand. The only way to determine whether human nature is real and important is to observe Man's societies over long intervals, and compare their evolution to the patterns suggested by the Natural Law thesis:

• Do societies in which the public system of justice earns and retains the trust of the people tend to cohere and prosper?
• Do societies in which the public system of "justice" is actually a front for corruption and privilege tend to fragment under individuals' and families' desires to survive and prosper?

For this, at least, is indisputable:

If a species has a nature, it will be governed, in aggregate, by conformant Natural Laws.

To reach either conclusion requires extensive study and reflection, to which I now leave you all.

The Thin End Of The Wedge

If you're not familiar with the name Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, he's the "filmmaker" who produced the YouTube video "Innocence of Muslims," on which the Obama Administration blamed the riots in Cairo and the lethal assault on the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. He was arrested by the FBI and incarcerated for "parole violations" immediately afterward, and remains in jail to this day.

Columnist Rich Lowry has produced the ideal denunciation of this miscarriage of justice:

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula deserves a place in American history. He is the first person in this country jailed for violating Islamic anti-blasphemy laws.

You won’t find that anywhere in the charges against him, of course. As a practical matter, though, everyone knows that Nakoula wouldn’t be in jail today if he hadn’t produced a video crudely lampooning the prophet Muhammad.

Alone among all the nations of the world, the United States of America has this statement in its chartering document:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have extended that statement to apply to all forms of expression and have imposed it upon state and local governments as well as on our federal Congress. So what's Nakoula Nakoula doing in jail?

The "filmmaker" has been lambasted from many directions as a lowlife, a slanderer, an incompetent, and so forth. So what? He's as entitled to the protections of the First Amendment as anyone else within American jurisdiction. But he's not enjoying any such protections at the moment.

Some years ago, dissident historian David Irving came out as a Holocaust denier: that is, one who disputes the generally accepted history of the Nazi slaughters of European Jews. The German government prosecuted Irving for his dissent, which he dared to express in several publications, and eventually succeeded in penalizing him for it with a substantial fine. Similarly, the French government successfully prosecuted academic Robert Faurisson for Holocaust denial. Such things have never occurred in the United States...until Nakoula Nakoula.

We have a few rather prominent Holocaust deniers here in the U.S. Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton come to mind at once.

Make no mistake: Irving and Faurisson are sons-of-bitches. (Yes, so are Farrakhan and Sharpton.) I'd cross the street to avoid them. I'd never endorse their odious views. Nor do I consider Nakoula Nakoula an icon of truth or fine filmmaking. But what did these men do that deserved criminal prosecution or punishment?

Does the "shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theater" exception apply to videos or other odious publications?

The judges on the post-World War II Nuremberg tribunals thought so. They sentenced Julius Streicher, editor-publisher of the Nazi rag Der Sturmer, to death by hanging, even though he'd never laid a finger on anyone. Their rationale was that by advocating and approving the Nazi regime's activities, he'd made himself culpable in their atrocities against Europe's Jews, much as one who commissions an assassin-for-hire is culpable in any homicides that ensue.

The rationale strikes me as thin. Nearly all Americans would agree that Streicher was a vile person of odious beliefs, but when you put the proposition to us in the abstract:

Should an individual be criminally liable for advocating or approving atrocious deeds?
How about for an opinion offensive to some recognized group or demographic?
How about for saying something the government would prefer not be said?

...we're likely to think it over a while, no matter how we answer.

We have a tangential situation developing today, illuminated by a man with whom I disagree about virtually everything:

I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors. The one thing that did surprise me is his attack on civil liberties. They go well beyond anything I would have anticipated, and they don't seem easy to explain. In many ways the worst is what you mention, Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project. That's an Obama initiative and it's a very serious attack on civil liberties. He doesn't gain anything from it – he doesn't get any political mileage out of it. In fact, most people don't even know about it, but what it does is extend the concept of "material assistance to terror" to speech.

The case in question was a law group that was giving legal advice to groups on the terrorist list, which in itself has no moral or legal justification; it's an abomination. But if you look at the way it's been used, it becomes even more abhorrent (Nelson Mandela was on it until a couple of years ago.) And the wording of the colloquy is broad enough that it could very well mean that if, say, you meet with someone in a terrorist group and advise them to turn to nonviolent means, then that's material assistance to terrorism. I've met with people who are on the list and will continue to do so, and Obama wants to criminalize that, which is a plain attack on freedom of speech. I just don't understand why he's doing it.

(Courtesy of Bayou Renaissance Man)

Chomsky, while he's no beacon of freedom, occasionally says something respectable, though one might have to swallow hard to admit it. A few years ago, he came out in defense of the above-mentioned Robert Faurisson, not because he agreed with Faurisson, but because he thinks that a government should claim the power to "define historical truth and punish deviations from it" is fascism, plain and simple. I find that I must agree.

Defending the rights of sons-of-bitches is one of the hardest things to do...and one of the most important, because that's where a would-be tyrant always plants the thin end of the wedge.

Think it over -- and remember Martin Niemoller as you ponder it.

Quickies: Is The Child The Mere Creature Of The State?

I cannot over-praise Stephen Baskerville's remarkable book Taken Into Custody, about the governmental usurpation of parental (especially paternal) rights to one's children. You can't read it without feeling something icy slither down your spine. Quite a number of incidents confirm Baskerville's thesis that this destruction of family privacy is a deliberate step in an ongoing campaign to bring an end to what remains of freedom in these United States.

Here's the latest prominent case in point:

Alex and Anna Nikolayev of Sacramento, Calif., want only the best for their five-month-old son, Sammy. They’re particularly sensitive to the infant’s health because he has a heart murmur and will likely need surgery. The couple’s troubles began last month when they took Sammy to Sutter Memorial Hospital in Sacramento with symptoms of flu.

Mrs. Nikolayev watched as her son received intravenous antibiotics. She didn’t like what she saw, and asked questions. A nurse told her that she didn’t know why the intravenous antibiotics were prescribed. The Nikolayevs then took the boy to another hospital, operated by Kaiser Permanente, where doctors said the infant was actually in good health. Doctors said they had no concerns about the parents taking the child home.

Someone, presumably someone at Sutter Memorial Hospital, didn’t like losing a patient and prospective payment, and called the state Child Protective Services, which, accompanied by police, paid a warrantless visit to the family the next morning. “I’m going to grab your baby, and don’t resist, and don’t fight me, OK?” one of the policemen told Mrs. Nikolayev. The conversation was recorded on video.

The editorialist who wrote the above-linked column makes some monitory observations about the relationship between ObamaCare and this incident. He might well be correct, but even in the absence of that anti-Constitutional monstrosity, is it not clear that "child protective services" are operating outside all constraints -- that they have effectively infinite and unreviewable power to invade family matters on their own initiative?

There have been some very high-profile cases of abuse of power by such agencies. The one that comes to mind at once concerns "Alicia W.," a young girl in San Diego who had been the victim of a sexual attack that CPS investigators resolved to blame on her father, though similar attacks had occurred nearby -- even after their perpetrator was caught. Cases of a similar nature involving alleged abuses by day-care facilities, such as the case that sent wholly innocent Gerald Amirault to prison for 18 years, are abundant.

Why is there no outcry against the anti-Constitutional "child welfare" system and the unbridled "family courts" that enable it to run roughshod over American families? Is it perhaps that there is one, but it's too faint to hear?

Thoughts?

The Vindication Of The Lawgiver

They thought he was joking.
His English countrymen assumed he was "having them on."
Surely Nature could tolerate no such thing as Parkinson's Law.

But reality has repeatedly borne him out:

Vast masses of statistical evidence have been collected and it is from a study of this data that Parkinson's Law has been deduced. space will not allow of detailed analysis but the reader will be interested to know that research began in the Navy Estimates. These were chosen because the Admiralty's responsibilities are more easily measurable than those of, say, the Board of Trade. The question is merely one of numbers and tonnage. Here are some typical figures. The strength of the Navy in 1914 could be shown as 146,000 officers and men, 3,249 dockyard officials and clerks, and 57,000 dockyard workmen. By 1928 there were only 100,000 officers and men and only 62,439 workmen, but the dockyard officials and clerks by then numbered 4,558. As for warships, the strength in 1928 was a mere fraction of what it had been in 1914 -- fewer than 20 capital ships in commission as compared with 62. Over the same period the Admiralty officials had increased in number from 2,000 to 3,569, providing (as was remarked) "a magnificent navy on land."

Indeed. A genius sees more widely and more clearly than a lesser mind -- and a courageous genius draws the appropriate inferences and reports them to all who will hear. But why this topic today? Simply this:

Not long ago, the Navy forced out 3,000 mid-career sailors. Military budget cuts have scrapped air shows, delayed deployments, and threatened civilian contractors with two-week furloughs. Craig Quigley, a retired rear admiral who heads the Hampton Roads Military and Federal Facilities Alliance, says the cuts — while not as bad as first feared — will ripple past the local bases....

“You’re not going to buy the new car, you’re going to fix up the old one. You might cancel the family vacation. You are going to have to adjust your own household finances to accommodate 14 days without pay,” he said. “If you are a small business with only a handful of employees, you might not survive.”

At the same time, the Pentagon has added admirals and generals. There are now nearly a thousand. Many of those top officers are surrounded with entourages including chauffeurs, chefs and executive aids. Top flag officers have private jets always at the ready. They live in sometimes palatial homes and frequently travel in motorcades. Former Democratic Senator Jim Webb asked the Pentagon why the Air Force has more four-star generals than the Army, even though the Army has almost twice the manpower. Across all service branches, [Virginia Democratic Senator Mark] Warner said, the number of people at the bottom has shrunk while the number of generals and admirals has swelled.

Investigations have shown some in power misuse these perks. General Wiliam “Kip” Ward was demoted for using his staff and military vehicles to take his wife shopping, to spas and on vacations in $700-a-night suites, all at taxpayer expense.

“If you’re a four-star, and you’ve got a G-5 aircraft waiting for your private use, or governmental use, 24/7, that doesn’t make sense to me,” Warner said. “That all adds up, and it just sends the wrong signal, when we are cutting back on the number of troops, and soldiers, sailors and airmen, yet we are increasing the number of generals and flag officers.”

My, my.

It is no longer possible to be derisive of Parkinson's Law, nor to dismiss it as a humorous but not seriously meant observation. The damned thing works. Parkinson himself pursued innumerable cases of the Law in operation, but his gentle chiding and avuncular tone allowed many who ought to have had better sense to claim that his Law was merely a coincidence, like the correlation between the volume of the Caribbean rum trade and the salaries of Protestant ministers in New England.

It is not so, and never has been.
Every institution acquires an internal dynamic of survival and growth.
Such a dynamic will cater, first and foremost, to the interests of the institution's masters.
The masters of any governmental or similar institution will be those who exercise its highest level of authority and disposition.

I shall leave the exploration of the curious harmony between Parkinson's Law and the Dilbert Principle as an exercise -- just an invigorating hike through the intellectual woods -- for my Gentle Readers.

Battlespaces Part 2: Benghazi

The atrocity at Benghazi, Libya on September 11 of last year, which had the potential -- sadly, unexploited -- to sweep Obama from office, is the current hot news topic because of the three "whistleblowers" who are about to testify before Congress. One of those three, Gregory Hicks, was the deputy chief of mission for the U.S. in Libya, the number-2 man in the Benghazi consulate. That makes him a particularly threatening witness for the Democrats, who are desperate to preserve both the Obama regime and the presidential prospects of Hillary Clinton. Thus, it stands to reason that the Obamunists are anxious to detoxify Hicks's testimony.

Trouble is, Hicks's station, reputation, and service record command respect and credibility. You can't simply mount a smear campaign against such a man. You have to be more adroit and indirect than that. Given the urgency of the thing, what the following video depicts is about all the Obamunists could possibly do.

First, note the absolute colorlessness of press secretary Jim Carney's diction. It's particularly notable when contrasted to the dynamism and character of Ari Fleischer and the late Tony Snow. It is, however, well matched to the message he wants to lodge in the minds of his audience.

Second, note the parade of nominal authorities Carney cites in favor of the Administration's preferred position: all of high station, none associated with any shady or even questionable doings. They (of course) concur that the Administration did everything possible during the hours of the attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Third, note that Carney does not refer even indirectly to Consul Hicks. Hicks is not a presence to Carney; he's not even alluded to. The parade of authorities Carney does mention, being persons of presumed high repute and stainless service, imply by Hicks's absence from the list that the consul is of no particular note or stature. Carney thus delegitimizes Hicks as a witness simply by excluding him.

Sometimes that's the best you can do -- but it's more effective than you might think. Consider how the Main Stream Media routinely exclude stories that "cross-cut The Narrative" from their coverage, thus protecting the collection of attitudes and assumptions they seek to sustain in the reading / viewing public.

Consul Hicks will, of course, have his "day in court" when he testifies before Congress. But don't expect the Administration or its media palace guards to grant Hicks's testimony more than an offhand, mildly contemptuous mention. It's far more likely that we'll hear paeans to the various authorities who support the Administration's contention that there was nothing it could have done to preserve the lives of Stevens and the other three victims of the -- now clearly al-Qaeda orchestrated -- attack on the Benghazi consulate. It's guaranteed that if anything discreditable to a contrarian witness can be unearthed, even so much as a failure to recycle his bottles and cans, it will become front-page / above-the-fold news.

The facts are against Obama and his henchmen.
The Constitutional powers and duties of the president are plain.
Obama and Clinton are as culpable in the deaths of Stevens et alii as their murderers.

Expect lots more table-pounding in the days to come.

Battlespaces

"To see, you must have vision." -- Gregory Benford, Timescape

In the era of the Continuous Campaign, wherein the politicking never stops, the astute observer must learn to probe behind the specifics of "issues" and "personalities" for the underlying strategic conceptions being employed. For there is no kind of politics that's not informed with some broad vision; there is no political tactic that lacks roots in a vision of the political battlespace and the dynamics that dominate it.

In any sort of contest, tactics that cohere to a strategic vision will prevail over those that do not...if the vision itself be an accurate one.

---

Have a gander at a few recent headlines:

• We can only save ourselves from kidnappers at the NRA
• Obama to College Students: ‘Reject These Voices’ That Warn of Big Government & Tyranny
• Dan Savage Wishes Cancer on Sarah Palin
• Gov. Bill Richardson on Ted Cruz: "He should Not be defined as a Hispanic; He demeans the office."

Read the stories at the links, if you have the stomach for it. Note the common theme. Then ask yourself, "Why does the Left strive to delegitimize those who speak for the Right, if the Left has a set of rational arguments for its positions?"

The immediate conclusion must be that the Left's strategists consider this tactic practically superior to all others. That conclusion, all by itself, is an important one that deserves independent reflection. But behind it lies another of even greater import, which comes most plainly into view when one realizes that the next electoral battle is still seventeen months away:

The Right is winning all the premier policy arguments of the day on grounds of better logical substance and greater evidentiary support.

An old trial-lawyer's maxim has much point: "When the law is against you, pound the facts. When the facts are against you, pound the law. When both are against you, pound the table."

The Left cannot compete with the Right on logical grounds, nor can it muster evidence in support of its theses. Therefore it must "pound the table:" it must deflect the public's attention from both evidence and logic to make room for whatever other assets it can bring to bear. But to do so without addressing the Right's arguments and evidence requires that those "pounding the facts and the law" be delegitimized in the eyes of those who might otherwise attend to them.

---

A delegitimization attack, aimed at dissuading open-minded Americans from listening to the target, will proceed on either or both of two grounds: personality and / or character.

Anyone who didn't sleep through the 2008 presidential campaign remembers the torrent of assaults the Left poured onto Sarah Palin, at that time the wildly popular governor of Alaska. To listen to their allegations, she was the embodiment of everything unworthy: stupid, provincial, superstitious, inexperienced, hypocritical, corrupt, an unfaithful spouse, and a fraudster who claimed to have borne a child that was actually that of her daughter Bristol. It probably had the desired effect, at least sufficiently so to dampen the enthusiasm that the GOP's nomination of Governor Palin as its vice-presidential candidate had elicited.

Today's rising conservative stars are currently headlined by Ted Cruz, junior United States Senator from Texas. Senator Cruz is coming in for treatment similar to that Governor Palin received, as we can see from the remarks of the odious Bill Richardson, failed former governor of one of the easiest-to-govern states of the Union. The one and only reason for this is that Cruz has been spectacularly effective at what the Left fears most: demonstrating that its standard-bearers cannot argue on logical or evidentiary grounds. Add Cruz's Hispanic heritage and his personal charisma, and you have today's version of Governor Palin -- who, as we can see from the above, remains a formidable force in conservative politics, whom the Left, for all its efforts, has not succeeded in bringing down.

Palin and Cruz are individual standouts on the Right. There are institutional ones as well. Most recently the National Rifle Association has distinguished itself, by rallying its members to the fight against anti-Constitutional gun control bills submitted to the Senate. And just as Palin and Cruz are being assailed with an eye to delegitimizing them, so also is the NRA, as the vicious editorial by Dave Perry linked above makes clear.

Should the Left's assaults succeed in their aim, further arguments advanced by the spokesmen and allied institutions of the Right named above will be rejected without consideration by the uncommitted public. "She's a witless chillbilly lunatic." "He has a hidden agenda." "They're in the pay of the big gun makers." It's the Left's version of "Consider the source"...though here, "the source" is intelligent, accomplished, of sterling character, and dedicated to an important, Constitutionally recognized right.

---

He who has wearied of political involvement is often the victim of enervation by delegitimization-attack propaganda. He might know the propaganda for exactly what it is: a tissue of lies and slanders. He simply can't bear to hear it any longer. No matter how ardently he'd like to know who's right, what's best, what's worked and what hasn't, the rhetorical temperature of political discourse has risen too high for him. He's withdrawn to preserve his sanity.

The Right cannot and must not employ the Left's tactic...but it can leap to the meta-argument and put the Left's covert reasons for its campaigns of delegitimization on full, garish display.

It's all about the political battlespace: specifically, who is recognized as a legitimate contestant there, and what tactics are deemed permissible. The Left is straining to corrupt the "laws of war" as they pertain to that battlespace...or failing that, to deflect the public's attention from it and move it to a cruder, scandal-sheet-like domain in which no lapse of conduct or taste is ruled out of bounds.

Take heed, and alert those around you.

Why Are We Here?

"Plaaaaaassssstic...assssshoooooles." -- George Carlin

No, no, I don't mean it that way. I mean, why are we here at Liberty’s Torch?

It's Saturday, as if you couldn’t tell.

---

Blogging has gone from being the new, exciting method for sharing the significant events of one's day with a circle of intimates, to a proven technology by which total nonentities can vent their spleen onto the World Wide Web for the dubious edification of others, and finally to a hoary old fetish for sexagenarians -- get your mind out of the gutter; that means sixty-year-olds -- who haven't the agility to keep up with Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Surely once the sexagenarians become septuagenarians unable to find their glasses without their minders' help, and presently deteriorate to octogenarians whose walkers prevent them from reaching the keyboard, blogging will cease to command an audience.

Well, all things must pass, as that noted sage George Harrison has told us. But blogging hasn't, and somehow I don't think it will, at least not soon. It's too convenient, and too flexible. At any rate, this sexagenarian finds it irresistible.

We who write here are of several ages, dispositions, and stations in life. We share certain general attitudes, of course, as is usual at most group blogs, though we come at our subject matter from individualized angles. However, none of us can claim an absolutely unique set of perspectives, insights, or opinions. None of us can honestly say to himself, "If I weren't saying these things, in this fashion, no one else would be doing so." So why do we continue on?

It's a question that's been on my mind for a few weeks:

• It's not because there's money in it;
• It's not because we have no other outlets for self-expression;
• It's not because we have much influence over the thinking of others;
• It's not much of an excuse for holding off the wives and kids for an hour a day;
• And it's a really lousy technique for meeting girls.

So why, then?

Whoops! Coffee cup's empty. Back in a flash.

---

The Web is an open forum, much like Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. (Or perhaps like the "prophets' corner" in Life of Brian.) It's a place to say what you like, about whatever grabs you...and equally, a place where others who seek persons of similar views might find you to be a kindred soul, courtesy of Google or some other search engine.

Because no one can compel anyone to attend to his Web blather, those who choose to do so are likely to be persons of similar bent, who may reasonably be assumed to take a serious interest in whatever one has chosen to write about. Potential friends and / or allies. People you can drink with in comradely comfort. This is especially the case with regular commenters, arguably the best indication of whether the writer is regularly and consistently "making sense" to anyone.

Do our readers need us? Possibly. They enjoy us, almost certainly. But it's far more certain that we who blog need them. It's probably the central reason we spend our time this way.

---

As an indie fiction writer, I know something about the need to be read. No writer pours hundreds or thousands of hours into the creation of a compelling fiction for the sheer pleasure of the exercise. No writer consigns a completed book to "the trunk" with a smile on his face. And no writer, looking back on a novel that failed to gain an audience, says, "Well, it was worth it for the voyage of self-discovery."

Writing is not speaking. It's not conversation. Stylistic classifications to one side, it is not and cannot be "casual." It's an attempt to weave words into a net that will contain a thought, or a set of thoughts, of importance sufficient to justify the effort. That's the case whether one is writing fiction, or opinion, or exposition, or a daily journal.

Robert A. Heinlein, in the Postscript to his early collection Revolt in 2100, claimed that he wrote "to buy groceries." In The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, he made a flippant comment about the "need to write," and alluded to terrible consequences should that need be forcibly suppressed. Yet paragraph after paragraph, at the risk of alienating a goodly part of his (potential) audience, Heinlein gave the lie to his own claims by expressing and exemplifying some of the boldest and starkest sociopolitical opinions any fictioneer has ever advanced. No doubt his bank balance benefited from his book sales, but he never became wealthy; he did become known as science fiction's equivalent of Ayn Rand.

Everyone who writes is motivated, at some level, by the sense that his chosen subjects, and his insights into them, are important, deserving of more attention than he alone can give them. Were it otherwise, we'd all be standing on our Acme Portable Podia at some version of Speakers' Corner, bloviating into the wind, without any concern for how many listeners we might have...or for whether anyone hears us at all.

---

It takes a monumental degree of arrogance to think that one has any significant prospect of changing the world through his writing. This is especially the case with blogging, where every voice raised must compete with many millions of others, some in passionate opposition to oneself. Most of us don't kid ourselves about it, but we write anyway. Indeed, we put a fair amount of time and effort into it.

We do it, in the main, because we hope to find you, the reader.

We need the sense of having kindred spirits around us. We yearn to believe that we're not alone in our priorities nor in our passion for them. Many of us have tried the fleshly world -- the realm in which actual living bodies mill about, speaking and doing and occasionally connecting -- and have found it wanting, at least for our purposes. You can take that as an indication of personal failure, if you like; I see it as a preference for methods with a better chance of success.

One way or another, the only meaning our words have emanates from you who read them, take them seriously, and return for more.

Persuasion specialist Michael Emerling once said that the import of any communication lies in the response of the hearer. As true as that is, a stronger statement is possible: Without a hearer, no communication can occur.

We who blog are here because of our need to communicate.
You who read us are instrumental in meeting that need.
We could not do it without you.
Thank you, most sincerely.

All my best,
Fran

There Will Be No Reprieve

First, to those who wrote to ask: Yes, I will produce an exegesis of Natural Law in the not too distant future. It's a topic of enormous importance, and very few people have given it any thought at all. The "professional philosophers" are all asleep at the wheel, and theologians tend not to be consistent logicians, so the job (as usual) has fallen to me. Rest assured, I'll do it properly.

But not today.

---

Three items that appeared in my morning news sweep suggest that the pressure on Americans to disarm will not relent:

• Florida Sheriff: Report Neighbors Who Don't Like Government
• ERIC HOLDER TO KANSAS: We Will Ignore the Bill of Rights and State Laws to Enforce Federal Gun Grabs
• Dingy Harry’s Verbal Diarrhea Continues to Appall – Now He’s Calling Tea Partiers The Real Anarchists

Please read those three articles in their entirety. They presage a new front in the Left's war on private armament: a combination of rationales and approaches, intended to delegitimize opposition as dangerously psychotic, illegal under (unConstitutional) federal law, and inherently anti-government. No one of those three contentions stretches quite...far...enough to allow the Obamunists to cross the chasm of Second Amendment rights and reach their goal of a disarmed and helpless populace. The combination, however, might just bridge the gulf.

Mind you, the bridge won't be composed of Constitutionally solid members. The Left is hoping to induce us to fear one another more than we fear an overweening, unbounded State. Leftist strategists are aware that they can't get 100% of us to cower behind locked doors, terrified of our neighbors' rifles and shotguns. But they don't need unanimity, or even a majority; a substantial, sufficiently vocal minority, animated by something like Sandy Hook, that holds together long enough to ram through some enabling legislation, would serve their purposes adequately.

The Obamunists' divide-to-rule uber-strategy will be employed to its fullest:

• Whites will be persuaded to fear armed Negroes, Hispanics, and other minorities;
• Minorities will be persuaded to fear armed whites;
• Members of "mainstream" religions will be persuaded to fear "cults;"
• Members of "cults" will be persuaded to fear everyone else;
• Women will be persuaded that they cannot trust armed men;
• Men will be persuaded that they cannot trust women, armed or otherwise;
• Liberals will be persuaded that conservatives are about to lock, load, and "purge" them;
• Conservatives will be persuaded (perhaps accurately) that the hour has come to take back America by force of arms.

Will it work? Unclear. But the Left will definitely strain to its utmost to inculcate us with as much fear of one another as it can evoke. Programs such as the one in Palm Beach will become commonplace. Low motives other than fear will play their part.

If significant federal or state anti-gun legislation should be passed and signed, we might yet see the ultimate anti-Second Amendment obscenity:

• The confiscation of Smith's firearms at a local police force's sole discretion,
• On the affirmation of Jones, who hates Smith, that Smith made a remark about hating his wife, or Jones, or another neighbor, or the government,
• And a bounty paid to Jones per firearm thus confiscated.

Let that possibility sink in for a moment while I fetch more coffee.

---

A program designed to induce and exploit fear isn't necessarily defeasible by any counter-program. Smith could strive with all his might to persuade Jones that Jones has nothing to fear from him, entirely without result, for Jones could always say to himself, "That's what he wants me to believe." Similarly, a broad effort to expose the motives behind a fear campaign would only be effective if Americans could be induced to fear the State more than they fear one another: given the rising proportion of the populace that literally lives on State handouts, a chancy matter at best.

In this as in so many other things, it will pay to be proactive:

• Be on the best possible terms with your family members and neighbors;
• Be candid about what firearms you own and why you own them;
• Try to involve those around you in the shooting sports, so they'll become comfortable being around weapons;
• When the time is right, talk about the importance of an armed populace, and the terrors that have been visited upon those who foolishly decided to trust in the benevolence of the State.

We are under siege by forces determined to disarm us.
Their recent setbacks have only redoubled their determination to prevail.
Should they succeed, their success will be irreversible without widespread bloodshed.

There will be no reprieve.

Of Laws And Men Part 4: The Enforcers

One of the shibboleth phrases often heard in discussions of the American system of government is that it's "a government of laws, not of men."

Granted that that was the intention. I have no doubt that the Founding Fathers were sincere about it, having experienced the "long train of abuses" that issued from King George III's attempt to place his own decrees above all other law. But like most human intentions, in practice its fulfillment is only asymptotically approachable.

Unlike the Natural Law, man-made laws are not self-enforcing. To have impact, they must be actively enforced by men. Those who are found to have violated them must be subjected to the penalties they prescribe. Should that process be insufficiently reliable, the law will become an instrument of injustice.

Frederic Bastiat desired, most ardently, that law be merely the codification of natural justice:

The mission of the law is not to oppress persons and plunder them of their property, even though the law may be acting in a philanthropic spirit. Its mission is to protect persons and property.

Furthermore, it must not be said that the law may be philanthropic if, in the process, it refrains from oppressing persons and plundering them of their property; this would be a contradiction. The law cannot avoid having an effect upon persons and property; and if the law acts in any manner except to protect them, its actions then necessarily violate the liberty of persons and their right to own property.

The law is justice — simple and clear, precise and bounded. Every eye can see it, and every mind can grasp it; for justice is measurable, immutable, and unchangeable. Justice is neither more than this nor less than this. If you exceed this proper limit — if you attempt to make the law religious, fraternal, equalizing, philanthropic, industrial, literary, or artistic — you will then be lost in an uncharted territory, in vagueness and uncertainty, in a forced utopia or, even worse, in a multitude of utopias, each striving to seize the law and impose it upon you. This is true because fraternity and philanthropy, unlike justice, do not have precise limits. Once started, where will you stop? And where will the law stop itself?

But even if the man-made law should conform perfectly to the standard of natural justice, what use will it be if its enforcers have a different agenda?

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In his early series of essays "The Proper Sphere Of Government," Herbert Spencer quoted an unnamed observer of English law and legislation to devastating effect:

Nevertheless, in the inexplicable universal votings and debatings of these Ages, an idea or rather a dumb presumption to the contrary has gone idly abroad, and at this day, over extensive tracts of the world, poor human beings are to be found, whose practical belief it is that if we "vote" this or that, so this or that will thenceforth be. Practically men have come to imagine that the Laws of this Universe, like the laws of constitutional countries, are decided by voting. It is an idle fancy. The Laws of this Universe, of which if the Laws of England are not an exact transcript, they should passionately study to become such, are fixed by the everlasting congruity of things, and are not fixable or changeable by voting!

As accurate as that assessment is, it fails to address the critical function of enforcement. Spencer and the unnamed speaker were men of the Victorian Era, in which there was a general presumption of honesty and decency among public men. That presumption, while surely not 100% correct, was probably more correct than it would be at any prior or subsequent time in history. The great classical liberals of the era -- William Gladstone; Auberon Herbert; Richard Cobden; John Bright; Thomas Babington Macauley; Herbert Spencer himself -- did their utmost to bring the laws of England into accord with "the everlasting congruity of things." They came very close indeed. But as Hayek would tell us decades later, the growth dynamic of government guaranteed that the enforcement of the laws would diverge from the ideals they expressed. And so it was.

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Nearly a decade ago, I wrote:

Responsibility is the acceptance of the consequences for one's decisions and actions, whether those consequences were accurately foreseen or not. It's the concomitant of freedom, the price one must pay for the possession of decision-making power. One's willingness to accept his proper responsibilities is exactly equivalent to his willingness to pay for his purchases....

Only a moment's thought is required to see that the allocation of each man's proper responsibilities to him and to no one else is the essence of justice....

Another major component in character is temperance, colloquially better known as self-control. We all have desires and appetites. They vary in strength, both among individuals and within any one individual over the term of his life, but we all have them. They determine much of what we do, and nearly all of the pleasure we take from living. The precise term for a man with no desires is "corpse." But there are two possible relations between a man and his desires: either he is their master, or they are his. The former relation is that of the continent, decent man, who can be trusted with one's reputation, money or spouse. The latter is that of the dissolute glutton, unable to restrain himself in the presence of something he wants, no matter what the consequences of reaching for it will be....

When the future is unclear, our desires and fears will rise to take command of our thoughts. In seeking some good, we'll tend to underestimate the costs and minimize the prospect of negative side effects. In avoiding some bad, we'll tend to magnify the damage it would do and omit consideration of the gains that might be had from it. This is natural. It accounts for many of the worst decisions in history. Ask Adolf Hitler.

The man of strong character projects conservatively, mindful of his fallibility. He downplays the reward to be had from some attractive course and compels himself to focus on the costs and risks. He swallows the necessity of necessary pains, costs, or labors, and looks for ways to turn them to his advantage. He seeks the counsel of others who've "been there," and tries to use their knowledge even if it points in an unpalatable direction. In other words, he exercises prudence.

Finally, we have the complementary virtues of perseverance and courage. Of perseverance, C. S. Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters:

You see, it is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness we create in their lives, and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it -- all this provide admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition.

And of courage:

We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, the Enemy permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame....In peace we can make many of them ignore good and evil entirely; in danger, the issue is forced upon them in a guise to which even we cannot blind them....

This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy's motives for creating a dangerous world -- a world in which moral issues really come to the point. He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.

It's not for me to expand on summations so piercingly perfect. Suffice it to say that the combination of courage and perseverance, which men once called fortitude, is the virtue whose measure is most easily detected in a man, and whose insufficiency most quickly evokes contempt.

Prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude have been called the cardinal virtues. They are the foundation for all other virtues; without them, a man is but a bundle of appetites and fears, unable to grasp an argument for resisting them or deferring their demands.

Can anyone sincerely say that our public men are paragons of those virtues? There might be a few in our legislatures who possess them, but what of our executives -- our enforcers? What would our polity be like if those who enforce the laws were fully supplied with them?

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Though George W. Bush advanced a number of policies with which I disagreed strongly, I admired him nevertheless. He was open and sincere about his convictions, though they fell short of the kind of principles I would have preferred. More, he hewed to them with greater consistency than any other public man of his time. Indeed, he saw that as his main political asset. In his 2004 campaign for re-election, he was often heard to tell crowds, "With me, you know what you're getting." And indeed, we did.

One particular Bushism rings particularly clear:

"I know who I am. If you're the president, you don't have time to figure out who you are. I think it's unfair to the American people to sit in that Oval Office and try to find your inner soul."

Indeed. If you're busy trying to "find your inner soul" -- or worse, attempting to fabricate one out of rhetoric and ostentatious posturing -- you can hardly concern yourself much with the law, its justice or the lack thereof, or its proper enforcement.

The executive branch of the federal government is currently overrun by persons without character -- persons who react to the cardinal virtues the way Dracula would react to a crucifix.. The way they treat their role as the enforcers of the law is confirmation of the criticality of that function. No matter what laws or repeals of laws Congress emits, with our current crop of enforcers, the net effect will be negative.

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Recently, I had a brief exchange with writer Tom Kratman about Natural Law. He dismisses the notion as insubstantial. He noted that there are many instances in which the perpetrator of injustice, even grotesque injustice, is not punished within his lifetime. And so it is, for man-made justice, the sort that operates in this world, is not merely fallible but corruptible, and many a miscreant escapes temporal justice by corrupting its enforcers.

But Natural Law deals with populations rather than with individuals. It operates over broad sweeps of time. It conditions the survival of the human species, rather than the profit and well-being of particular persons. That's why we add man-made laws to those written into our natures by God.

We desire that consequences be particularized to those who particularly deserve them. We seek individualized justice, to supplement the species-developmental justice enforced by our natures. And so we create governments, and corpora of laws, and executives to enforce them.

And so we are dismayed when, as the growth dynamic of governments guarantees, "The Worst Get On Top" -- when men of weak character rise to displace men of strong character from the levers of power. And so we are brought to grief and ruin when men of evil intent displace the characterless in their turn...when, as Ayn Rand warned us, "the murderer wins over the pickpocket."

And so we are led astray by our desire to keep ourselves above the mess -- to subcontract the administration and maintenance of justice to specialists who'll make it their sole responsibility.

And so we are betrayed by our own wishful thinking -- our belief that there can ever be such a thing as a completely reliable, completely self-cleansing "government of laws, not of men."

Accommodationism On Parade

I've written on many occasions about the dominant dynamic of politics:

• That politics is about the pursuit of power over others;
• That persons who seek power for its own sake will have an edge over all other breeds of politician;
• That over time, political institutions will develop "filters" that will screen out, either ab initio or by ostracism and disillusion, those whose goal is other than the maximization of the institution's power and perquisites.

Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek's famous The Road To Serfdom, in the chapter titled "Why The Worst Get On Top," followed that dynamic to its inevitable zenith: the elevation of ruthless, totalitarian dictators such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao to supreme power over their nations. In other works, Hayek developed theses about how to countervail that progression. None of those ideas receives the respect of ruling classes in our time, as if any Gentle Reader of Liberty's Torch should need to be told.

The indispensable prerequisite of totalitarian rule is the elimination of all possibility of popular resistance to the regime. Thus, in all such evolutions, we see the removal of the citizen's right to own weapons before the regime exerts its tightest grip. For that reason among many, many others, Americans are well advised to hold fast to the right to keep and bear arms, to exercise it vigorously, and to instruct their children in the importance of maintaining and using it despite all opposition.

For, by the logic of the opening paragraph, opposition there will surely be.

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A nation accustomed to freedom, which totalitarians have targeted for subjection, will not bend quickly or easily. Indeed, an attempt at using force to subjugate free men will be turned back upon itself most ruinously; it will be too obviously what it is. But a patient gradualist strategy, that endeavors to slice off thin layers of the public's freedom one at a time, can work terrors, given time.

Most recently, gradualism has been blatantly at work on our right to keep and bear arms: demands for background checks; legislated limitations on magazine capacity; attempts to reinstitute the fatuous "assault weapons ban" of 1994. Fortunately, the proponents of these measures tried a hybrid strategy: the combination of their supposedly "reasonable" demands with a tarantella on the graves of the Sandy Hook victims. That fatally undercut their arguments. After a sufficient number of persons noticed out loud that none of the measures demanded would have impeded homicidal maniac Adam Lanza in the slightest, all such proposals died an unlamented death.

But in politics, bad ideas are like super-vampires: it takes a stake through the heart to pin them down for long, and nothing will kill them off permanently. The Dishonorable Harry Reid has vowed to bring gun control back to center stage in Congress. Various hard-left legislators are slavering at the chance of a rematch. Perhaps all they're waiting for is another slaughter. We shall see.

What's uppermost on my mind today is the combination of the dynamic of political power with gradualist strategy, and how even persons who really ought to know better have begun to succumb to it.

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Hearken to longtime libertarian writer Claire Wolfe:

The other day, when I read the strange gun-control rant of Cato’s Robert Levy, the passage that struck me as most strange — most overwhelmingly, neon-bright, screaming-from-the-page strange — was this one:

Gun-rights advocates should use this interval to refine their priorities and support this measure [a revived Manchin-Toomey], with a few modest changes. If they don’t, they will be opening themselves to accusations from President Obama and others that they are merely obstructionists, zealots who will not agree to common-sense gun legislation.

I’ve probably read that passage 10 times and I cannot fathom why Levy wrote it. Can he sincerely believe that any gun-rights advocate on Planet Earth should worry that Obama will think we’re too uncompromising?

Obama is well-known as an intolerant man, an authoritarian who brooks no deviation at all from his party line. Even if for some crazy reason gun-rights advocates wanted to please him, the only way to do so would be to give up our advocacy entirely. Merely leaning in his direction for the sake of “common sense” would achieve nothing except to let him and his allies know we’re suckers who can be manipulated and bent.

But why would we even want to try please a man who is inimical to everything we love and value? Why does Robert Levy think we should want that? That’s just bizarre.

And who are these vague “others” we’re supposed to be trying to please? The high-school quarterback? The head of the Mean Girls clique? The school dean? Carolyn McCarthy? Frank Lautenberg?

Can you picture those folks ever being pleased with us? Can you picture them “respecting” us more if we tried to meet their standards? Ha!

Miss Wolfe has the right of it. Levy is arguing for an accommodationist stance, from gun-rights advocates who've never received an iota of respect from our adversaries, much less simple candor about their true agenda. Why, after all the money, effort, and strife we've put into defending our gun rights, should we accommodate our sworn enemies? What would it gain us? Certainly not their gratitude.

Yet there are persons in both houses of Congress, who claim to support the right to keep and bear arms, who have attacked other, sincere supporters for not accommodating the enemy:

Speaking of the recent debate over gun control, Cruz told the audience at a FreedomWorks summit in Texas that the issue “generated more heat” inside the party than any other in recent memory. There were several lunches, he revealed, where fellow Republicans confronted him and his allies “yelling at us at the top of their lungs.”

Along with Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), [Senator Ted] Cruz put out a letter threatening to filibuster Democratic gun legislation. Republican senators were upset, Cruz said, by town hall attendees demanding they join the effort.

“There are a lot of people who don’t like to be held accountable,” he said.

The Wall Street Journal attacked the group for letting President Obama blame Republicans for blocking gun control instead of moderate Democrats. Cruz said senators made a similar argument: “They said, ‘Listen, before you did this, the politics of it were great. The [Democrats] were the bad guys, the Republicans were the good guys. Now we all look like a bunch of squishes.’” He replied, Cruz told the crowd, “’Well, there is an alternative. You could just not be a bunch of squishes.’”

The above-named senators were staunchly against all the gun-control proposals laid before them, were unabashed about saying so -- and for their stand on principle they reaped the enmity of their fellow Republican senators, supposedly just as committed to protecting gun rights. Why?

Simply, because the majority of Congressional Republicans are more attached to their positions, powers, and perquisites than they are to any principle. They hope to remain where they are for a long time, and they fear that by not acceding to the Left's gradualist tactics, the Main Stream Media will charge them with being "not someone Democrats can work with."

Given the general recognition that the Democrats' true desire is the complete destruction of the right to keep and bear arms -- the Dishonorable Major Owens actually introduced a bill calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment some years ago -- why else would any Republican want to be thought of as "someone Democrats can work with" on this subject?

The willingness to accommodate one's sworn enemies is a dead giveaway to one's true priorities.

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Success reinforces the tactics employed. Whenever the Left manages to seduce the supposedly conservative Republican caucuses in Congress into a "compromise," it encourages the Left to try that gambit again...usually for "progressively" higher stakes. When the subject at controversy is an individual right, compromise destroys the right itself. It is not the final excisions which accomplish the destruction, but the initial ones, for they demote a right, an absolute natural possession of the individual, to a permission conditionally conceded by the State, which the State may qualify, restrict, or withdraw as it pleases.

Recognized, Constitutionally guaranteed individual rights are the sole barrier between the citizen and those who would enslave him. Make no mistake: they who would abridge your rights on grounds of "compelling government interest," "public safety," "for the children," or any other reason are would-be slavemasters. In their eyes, you and your fellow Americans are their rightful property, and they mean to have you.

Let the accommodationists in Congress know that you will not be sold at any price.