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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

---

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.

---

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?

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

Benghazi

If the scattered, early reports can be believed, the Obama Administration is attempting to prevent whistleblowers and survivors of the Benghazi massacre from telling their side of the story:

At least four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers, or are in the process of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the Benghazi attacks to Congress, Fox News has learned.

Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official and Republican counsel to the Senate intelligence committee, is now representing one of the State Department employees. She told Fox News her client and some of the others, who consider themselves whistleblowers, have been threatened by unnamed Obama administration officials.

“I’m not talking generally, I’m talking specifically about Benghazi – that people have been threatened,” Toensing said in an interview Monday. “And not just the State Department. People have been threatened at the CIA.”...

“It’s frightening and they’re doing some very despicable threats to people,” she said. “Not ‘We’re going to kill you,’ or not ‘We’re going to prosecute you tomorrow,’ but they’re taking career people and making them well aware that their careers will be over [if they cooperate with congressional investigators].”

It's inevitable that in our contemporary everything-is-political milieu, this will be derided by Administration insiders and cheerleaders as merely a ploy to weaken the Obama White House. Indeed, the attempt has already begun. But the more trickles out about the Benghazi affair, the less savory it becomes:

Why did Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans die in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012? We now know that President Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-CIA Director David Petraeus were likely behind a mishandled gun-trafficking program that ended up arming the radical jihadist rebels who stormed the U.S. consulate and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya on that fateful day.

Our CIA is still playing the role of vetting which Syrian rebel groups will obtain arms including machine guns, ammunition, and rocket-propelled grenades. While Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are directly purchasing the weaponry, the Obama administration is aiding the Arab governments in shopping for these arms and transferring them from Libya, to Turkey, and finally into Syria.

Unfortunately the CIA has “vetted” shady intermediaries (including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood) and shady recipients of thousands of tons worth of military equipment and millions of rounds of ammo. Consequently, weapons have fallen into the wrong hands. In the case of Benghazi, anti-tank weapons appear to have landed in the hands of terrorists.

It's understandable, albeit despicable, that the Administration would want that teensy fact to be kept under wraps. Unfortunately for these guardians of their own reputations, the truth is leaking out about what could have been done to save Ambassador Stevens and the others, but wasn't. A transcript follows:

BAIER: The administration has insisted there was no help for the Americans under assault in Libya, none that could arrive in time to change the outcome in Benghazi. Tonight is the first of three exclusive reports charging that claim is just not true.

Because the Special Operator in this piece is fearful of reprisal, we have agreed to conceal his identity. Correspondent Adam Housley has the story.

HOUSLEY: Many Americans are asking indeed, I asked myself. How could this happen? In the seven months since the Benghazi attacks on 9/11, information from the administration has been incomplete at best.

Details and time lines provided by the State Department, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been contradictory and failed to answer many questions.

In December, a State Department review concluded: There simply was not enough time for U.S. military forces to have made a difference: Having said that, it is not reasonable nor feasible to forces at the ready to respond to protect every high risk post in the world.

But members of the military who are monitoring events in Benghazi disagree.

Only a few dozen people in the world know what happened that night and Fox News spoke exclusively with a Special Operator who watched the events unfold and has debriefed those who are part of the response.

SO: I know for a fact that C-110, the UCOM SIF was doing a training exercise not in the region of northern Africa but in Europe. They had the ability to react and respond.

HOUSLEY: The C-110 is a command in extremis force... a 40-man SPECOPS force capable of rapid response and deployment, specifically trained for incidents like the attack in Benghazi. That night, they were training in Croatia just three and a half hours away.

SO: We had the ability to load out, get on birds, and fly there at a minimum stage. C-110 had the ability to be there, in my opinion, in four to six hours from their European theater to react.

HOUSLEY: They would have been there before the second attack.

SO: They would have been there before the second attack. They would have been there at a minimum to provide a quick reaction force that could facilitate their exfill out of the problem situation. Nobody knew how it was going to develop. And you hear a whole bunch of people and a whole bunch of advisors say hey, we wouldn't have sent them there because the security was unknown situation.

HOUSLEY: No one knew that?

SO: If it's an unknown situation, at a minimum you send forces there to facilitate the exfill or medical injuries. We could have sent a C-130 to Benghazi to provide medical evacuation for the injured.

HOUSLEY: Our source says many connected to Benghazi feel threatened and are afraid to talk. So far confidential sources have fed some information but nobody has come forward publicly on camera until now.

SO: The problem is, you have got guys, in my position you have got guys in Special Operations community who are -- still active and still involved. And they would be decapitated if they came forward with information that could affect high level commanders.

HOUSLEY: Despite the concern, our confidential source says the community feels there was a betrayal. All the way to the top. And that people on the ground in Benghazi were left to fend for themselves.

SO: I don't blame them for not coming forward, you know. It's something that is a risky, especially in a profession to say anything about anything in the realm of politics or that deals with policy.

HOUSLEY: Our source provides insight into how the U.S. government and military reacted from the moment the attack began through the immediate hours after ambassador Chris Stevens went missing. What they were told to do and what not to do as Stephens, Diplomatic Officer Sean Smith and former Special Operations members Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed.

SO: There is a lot of responsibility and onus that needs to be taken up and accounted for.

HOUSLEY: The attack began on September 11th, 2012 at a diplomatic compound in Benghazi and culminated roughly seven hours later at a second location, a CIA annex about one mile away.

While the official responses from Washington have been that the assets could not have made it from Benghazi in time that killed Woods and Doherty, there were at least two military units that could have made it in time including the one training in Croatia.

SO: Besides those guys who went in on their own, we had two more assets that could have been there. Two more assets that could have been on the ground. It's frustrating, upsetting especially being in the community. The hardest thing to deal with in any kind of, you know, dangerous scenario or gun fight, is, you know, we always look to each other to help each other and that's how we get through situations. It's not about the assets overhead. It's about the guys on the ground.

HOUSLEY: He also says as the attack began there were at least 15 Special Forces and highly skilled State Department security staff available in the capital Tripoli who were not dispatched even though they were trained as a quick response force.

Meantime, a group of American reinforcements also in Tripoli, which included the CIA's global response agent Glen Doherty and seven others took matters into their own hands. This is a little known fact which contradicts the State Department's report. The team commandeered a small jet and flew to Benghazi while still under fire. Doherty would eventually be killed on the roof along with his friend Tyrone Woods.

SO: These men deserve the highest medal of honor for their action. If it wasn't for that decision we would be looking at different situation. 20-plus hostages... captured by AQ or you would be looking at a lot of dead Americans dead in Benghazi.

HOUSLEY: We have heard some of these same details from a number of our other sources who have not yet come on camera. Some of our British sources on the ground that night confirmed. Tomorrow, more of our exclusive interview including the hunt for those responsible or the lack of a hunt.

[Transcript courtesy of Doug Ross @ Journal.]

If the above-interviewed Special Operator is telling the truth, the Obama Administration made a policy decision to sacrifice four American lives, including that of an ambassador, to cover up its own wrongdoing. I can't think of an uglier episode in American foreign policy history, unless it was the Alger Hiss / Harry Dexter White orchestrated surrender of Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta in 1945.

This sort of knockoff reportage is uncharacteristic of Liberty's Torch, which is principally an opinion-editorial site. However, an outrage such as this demands the attention of every thinking American, for which reason the usual bloviation is suspended for this morning in favor of...well, outrage.

We must know what happened, and why.
We must know who authorized what and who forbade what.
We must hold anyone in the chain of command responsible for his decisions.

What, then, must we do?

Knowledge, Faith, And Zealotry

Mark Butterworth's piece just below got me thinking about the difficulties involved in distinguishing claims of knowledge from statements of opinion, such that we can distinguish what may be known from what can only be believed or disbelieved. It's a good topic for a quiet Monday morning, all of whose "news" seems to be about the recent White House Correspondents' Dinner.

As with so many other questions over which men dispute, the key to the puzzle is linguistic: the accurate and appropriate use of words.

---

Whenever we claim knowledge, we must provide all the following:

1. A compact yet definite statement of what we claim to know;
2. A sufficiently well-defined context to which our knowledge applies;
3. One or more predictions, whether explicit or implicit, that flow from our knowledge.

The first of these should require no explanation. No one can get by with a statement such as "I know everything." Knowledge must be expressed in definite statements that address real-world conditions and the events that occur within them.

The second requirement is actually a consequence of the first. A definite statement is a statement that addresses specific real-world conditions, not some completely unbounded, context-free domain. That's what it means to define, which is merely the English version of the Latin word "to limit."

The third requirement is also integral to any claim of knowledge: it must be testable, and the only possible test is prediction. Given the required context, do the predictions implied by the claim come true? If so, the claim becomes credible; if not, it can and must be dismissed.

Let's look at a couple of statements of knowledge as exercises. First up:

The sum of even numbers will be an even number.

We could test this one all day, creating column after column of even numbers and adding them up. We would never arrive at an odd sum, except by error. Indeed, as everything it refers to is an abstract object within a completely defined and enclosed artificial system, this statement is provable under the laws of that system (mathematics). It constitutes positive knowledge.

Our second trial will be more interesting:

An unsupported object will fall toward the Earth's center.

Hmmm. This one is very weakly supplied with specifics. What sort of "object?" And from where do we start? If a cloud of helium is chosen for our test object, the statement will fail. If we suspend a piece of pumice in water, the pumice will float, for yet another failure. Yet many other cases -- i.e., heavier-than-air objects left unsupported within Earth's atmosphere -- yield the predicted results. So the context for this statement must be refined, at the minimum, to embrace only those objects in those conditions.

Our third trial is the most important of all:

God notes each sparrow that falls.

This statement is not testable, for two reasons above all others:

• We have no agreed-upon identity for God;
• Even the most common conceptions of God put His actions outside verification.

Because the statement is not testable, the person who makes it is barred from claiming knowledge, regardless of how fervently he believes it.

---

The three test cases above are examples of three sorts of human conviction:

• Mathematics;
• Science;
• Faith.

Mathematical knowledge -- i.e., a statement pertinent solely to objects within a well-defined formal system -- is the only sort that can be proved conclusively. This is possible specifically because such systems are completely abstract. Though they are sometimes applied to real-world conditions and events, they are capable of being divorced from external reality and manipulated in isolation. Thus, mathematical knowledge is atemporal.

Scientific knowledge -- i.e., a statement pertinent to objects in the physical realm, which have properties that are separable from any abstractions uttered about them -- cannot be proved conclusively, because the range of test cases for any such statement is infinite. However, a claim of scientific knowledge can be disproved: all it takes is one test case that fails to produce the predicted consequences. A series of hundreds or thousands of successfully tested predictions does not prove the claim; it merely allows us to build up confidence in it. Scientific knowledge, being about things that happen in observable reality, is inherently temporal.

Articles of faith are untestable propositions. They involve inherently undelimitable contexts, or contexts within which human powers of observation are nil. Thus, they can neither be proved nor disproved. They ought not to be classified as claims of knowledge...which does not render them uninteresting or irrelevant to the real world.

People don't argue about propositions in mathematics. Scientists sometimes argue over their conflicting claims, but once those claims become testable and are tested, argument will yield to experimental results. The propositional domain that occasions the most argument, despite the inherent impossibility of proving or disproving anything therein, is that of faith.

---

He who takes up a cause of any sort will naturally be concerned to spread the underlying convictions to as many other persons as he can. But the convictions behind a cause have a particular place in the partition of claims: nearly all of them are articles of faith.

Convictions about politics and economics are especially important in this regard. The contexts within which statements about these things are made are seldom perfectly well defined. Worse, they're seldom perfectly reproducible. These difficulties make it effectively impossible to prove or disprove such statements. We who have strong political or economic convictions must never imagine that those convictions are permanently beyond disproof. That makes it impossible to argue conclusively that those who reject them are wrong.

Here we come to the distinction between the advocate and the zealot.

He who argues for a proposition beyond proof and disproof can only demonstrate its logical coherence and cite examples of where it has had beneficial effects. He cannot eliminate all doubt about it without providing that perfect definition of context mentioned above. Worse, even causally clear statements about politics or economics can be challenged with a one-word rejoinder: "When?" Politico-economic predictions seldom come with time thresholds -- i.e., the specific time after the stimulus is applied that the predicted effects will manifest -- which frees the skeptic to retain his skepticism about how much we really know.

The advocate will concede all this. He'll be aware of the nature of knowledge and the difficulty of predictions that involve inherently uncontrollable contexts. The zealot will not. He will insist that he's absolutely right despite all counter-arguments. In his frustration, he's likely to resort to distasteful non-arguments, including attacks upon the intelligence and character of those who reject his thesis.

The zealot's error is mistaking faith for knowledge.

---

Many Gentle Readers will bridle at the above. We all have faith in certain propositions. Persons who are engaged in political or economic discourse are likely to be passionate about their particular faiths. But no degree of confidence in an idea, or emotional attachment to it, can transform faith into knowledge.

The central irony therein is that we who champion conservative, pro-freedom politico-economic ideas -- limited government, free markets, private arms rights, well-controlled borders, the privacy of the family, the sanctity of unborn life, and so forth -- are, on balance at least, far less likely to behave as zealots than those who oppose us. Leftists' inability to argue persuasively for their propositions evokes far more bad behavior from them than our spokesmen normally exhibit. There may be sin on both sides, but that doesn't mean the ledger of such things is balanced.

As Robert M. Pirsig noted in his classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, no one organizes marches or defames opponents over assertions that the Sun will rise in the east tomorrow. The moral in that observation should be impossible to miss.

The Manly Virtues

As usual at times when gutlessness and venality appear as a plague upon the land, there’s a lot of loose talk about "manliness" making the rounds. And as usual, the overwhelming majority of the gabbers haven't got the faintest idea what they're talking about.

Manliness isn't about size or brawn.
Being covered head to toe with hair doesn't signify manliness.
It has nothing to do with braggadocio, belligerence, or truculence.
Being obnoxious about your opinions makes you obnoxious, not manly.
Neither does preferring NASCAR to chess say anything about how manly you are.

Manliness is about the possession of the manly virtues.

Accordingly, I repost the following essay, which first appeared at the old Palace Of Reason in 1997.

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We hear a lot of loose talk about "environmental damage" and "endangered species" from the left-loonies and their pet interest groups, but when you look for what's actually disappeared from the American environment, two things rear up and poke you in the eye:

• Civility,
• Men.

Get into your time machine, go back fifty years [i.e., to 1950 -- FWP], and walk the streets of any of the great cities of this continent. They were safe. They were almost perfectly clean. People didn't jostle one another, hurl obscene imprecations at one another, deface the sides of buildings with moronic scrawling, or pollute the air with pain-threshold levels of their preferred "music." Men treated women with courtesy, respect, and a certain protective affection. Even the poor, of which, though they were less numerous than they are today, there was no shortage, were clean, self-reliant, self-respecting, and courteous.

The police would sort out those who couldn't meet the prevailing standards and would unceremoniously tell them to "keep moving," in which effort they were overwhelmingly reinforced by the non-uniformed public. If you wanted to surround yourself with degeneracy, you had to find the local Skid Row, the only place where such things were tolerated. It wasn't a big place, and the folks you found there permitted themselves no pride about their condition. No one indulged in nonsense notions about the "dignity" of the homeless, of welfare dependents, of drug addicts, of gang members, or any of today's mascot-groups for the coercive-compassion camp. As a result, government, which fattens on public perceptions of danger and disorder, was relatively small and unintrusive.

Were there some blemishes on this pretty picture? Yes, of course there were. There were still legal barriers against women entering the workforce in many states. There were still entailments on women's right to hold real property in a few places in the south and southwest. A residuum of racism encumbered the black population's efforts to raise its condition -- though in fairness it must be remembered that a popular movement largely composed of white people was already afoot, and just fourteen years later it swept all race-based legal restrictions into the dustbin of history. Government had swollen due to the unconstitutional New Deal and America's involvement in two foreign wars, and those who liked the result were working to swell it still further.

Still, in 1950, America was a place of nearly overpowering civility. In 2000...?

How did we lose it?

Ask a hundred opinion-mongers and you'll get a hundred different answers. Here's mine: We made it unacceptable to be a man, at least in public.

The word "man" in the above is, for a change, not to be interpreted generically. I don't mean "a member of the human species,"or even "a masculine human being." I mean a man, the sort that fathers used to try to raise their sons to be, even if Dad wasn't quite one himself, because he knew it was his duty, and because it was expected of him. In 1950, the chattering classes and their hangers-on were already at work trying to make the manly virtues into vices, and to promote their opposites in their place.

What is a man, and what does a youth need to learn to become one?

Two things qualify a masculine homo sapiens as a man:

• Knowledge of right and wrong, and the willingness to fight for the right;
• Knowledge of his own obligations, and the willingness to meet them.

A man must learn "where the line is": the line that separates behavior that must be tolerated from behavior that must not be. He must be willing -- personally willing -- to fight in defense of the former and against the latter, though it might expose him to risk and cost him injury or death. He must be ready to swallow his distaste and protect the rights even of persons he finds repulsive, if they have harmed no other human being.

A man must learn proportionality and restraint. Biology has optimized the male body for purposive aggression, sudden acceleration and focused violence. These are not things to be deployed in their 200-proof strength against trivial or unworthy targets. A man doesn't kill the bounder who steals his parking space, his business idea, or his wife. Even a punch in the nose is excessive for infractions like these.

A man must learn never to shirk a freely contracted obligation. If you've said you'll do it, you do it. No excuses. Conversely, if you have failed to meet an obligation, you must admit to it and try to do better next time.

A man must learn not to whine about disappointments, reversals, or the ways of women. Especially about the ways of women. They're not men -- thank God -- and we can't fairly hold them to manly standards.

A man must learn reverence in the presence of the numinous. The fact that each of us is a part of an infinitely greater whole manifests itself in innumerable ways. Learning to let it in, to cherish it, and to use it to buttress oneself in times of darkness is critical to attaining the endurance the world expects from a man.

Last and most important, a man must transmit the manly virtues to his male children.

But no one has said it better than the poet the political Left hates worst in all the world:

IF you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
    And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
    If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
    Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
    And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

(Rudyard Kipling)

A War By Other Means

For some time now, any reference to the many attempts, inside or outside the halls of power, to eject all manifestations of Christian affiliation, allegiance, and principles from public life has evoked a chorus of derision from the Left. Their usual theme song is that we're just imagining it: "How could there be a war on Christianity when three-quarters of the country is Christian?" At least, that's the tune I hear most often from those dismissive of the charge.

C. S. Lewis once remarked to the effect that the Devil's greatest triumphs have come from persuading people that he doesn't exist. So also with those who would strip us of our religious and philosophical foundations.

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HOT FLASH TO THE PEANUT GALLERY:
America is a Christian nation.
America has always been a Christian nation.
Should it cease to be a Christian nation, it will cease to be America.

Many persons react reflexively against those assertions. "That's exclusionary!" they bellow. "UnConstitutional! It omits all those wonderful Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Rastafarians, and atheists who've helped to make this country great! Why, it might even be illegal!"

Pardon my Belgian, but that's horseshit of the purest distillation. Even those who say such things know it.

America is not a Christian theocracy. America was founded on the Christian ethos, Christianity's code of acceptable behavior:

And, behold, one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. He saith unto him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. [Matthew 19:16-19]

Note that that does not include all the Hebraic prescriptions and proscriptions from Exodus and Leviticus, which is why I say America is a Christian, rather than a Judeo-Christian nation. Christ's preachments above have been written into our secular law. (Yes, including the parts about adultery and honoring one's parents, though they've proved unenforceable by secular means.) Exodus and Leviticus have not.

Now, for the terminally slow of comprehension: That does not mean that Jews, Buddhists, etc. are unwelcome in this nation; they merely have to conform to the ethos stated above, which binds us all. Muslims have a really hard time doing that, as recent events have indicated. Even so, if they can just grit their teeth and control themselves, the rest of us are bound by law and conscience to tolerate them.

Does anyone object to any of that? If so, make no sudden moves and keep your hands where I can see them.

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Militant atheists, incapable of tolerating religious belief of any sort, are prone to telling the most extravagant lies about Christianity and its key figures. For example, they like to claim that Hitler was a Christian, or that Pope Pius XII was secretly allied with him. It's nonsense, of course, but a lot of them get away with it even so. When refuted by one well educated in history, they fall back on nebulous all-purpose charges. For example, they'll complain that Christianity is "exclusionary," as if the Church should be a come-one-come-all gathering place like Facebook. That the Church proclaims certain doctrines "offends" them, though they're as free to disagree with those doctrines as anyone in America...some of whom self-identify as Christians, too.

A great deal of the animus aimed at Christianity arises from its teachings about sexual fidelity and how Natural Law applies to sexual behavior. That's to be expected in a time in which the purpose of existence has been reduced to a quest for the Ultimate Orgasm. All the same, the Church has no temporal power, nor does it seek such. If Adam wants to shove his joystick up Steve's poop chute, no one will stop him...well, except maybe Steve. And those of us who disapprove of such caperings will feel equally free to do so.

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At my age, I suppose I should be used to idiots and bigots. God must love them too; after all, look at how many He made! But I get volcanically angry about it all when something like this comes along:

Only in Obama's world, where the truth about Islam and Jihad is banned, could such an outrageous insult to mainstream, peaceful religions be permitted by a US Army training instructor.

During the course of an Army Reserve Equal Opportunity training brief on extremism, Evangelical Christianity, Catholicism, ultra Orthodox Jews, and the Church of Latter Day Saints were listed among Al Qaeda, Hamas, the Ku Klux Klan, Sunni Muslims, and Nation of Islam as examples of religious extremism. Oddly enough, "Islamophobia" was also listed as a form of religious extremism, and the Westboro Baptist Church was excluded altogether by the instructor who apparently got her information from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Stating the obvious, Ron Crews, executive director of the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty said, “it is dishonorable for any U.S. military entity to allow this type of wrongheaded characterization.”

Nor is this out of the current pattern:

An Army officer assigned to a U.S. base says he tried to access SBC.net from his government computer but instead got a message that said the site was being blocked by “Team CONUS.” The message he received read:

“The site you have requested has been blocked by Team CONUS (C-TNOSC/RECERT-CONUS) due to hostile content.”

Team CONUS is the Department of Defense management and computer network overseer of the military’s Continental U.S. (CONUS) Theater Network Operations and Security Center (C-TNOSC) and Regional Computer Emergency Response Team (RCERT).

“So the Southern Baptist Convention is now considered hostile to the U.S. Army … It just corroborates the recent string of events highlighted by AFA,” the officer wrote in an email to American Family Association (AFA).

(Thank you, Debra Heine, for your exemplary service on this and many other subjects.)

Has "Team CONUS" blocked any Islamic sites, pray tell? Considering that the Koran openly commands Muslims to make war upon non-Muslims, and to use any and every means expedient to do us harm, there might be a teensy bit of logic in that. Yet somehow I doubt that any such blockings have occurred. By the way, who writes "Team CONUS's" marching orders, and under what rationale?

Frankly, given how successful militant atheist activists have been at getting courts to expel ever more harmless Christian displays from public places and events, anyone who doesn't think Christianity is under siege is either a villain or a fool. Never fear: you don't have to be a Christian, or embrace the Christian faith, to agree with me.

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War, Karl von Clausewitz wrote, is a continuation of politics by other means. When governments go from trading words to trading blows, they haven't changed their goals, only the means by which they pursue them. Thus, there's a degree of plausibility in regarding all intergovernmental exchanges as "low-intensity warfare."

My point, which I've been orbiting for more than a thousand words in my usual circuitous fashion, is that not everything a government "makes war on" is another government.

Governments, being wielders of force under a veneer of "legitimate authority," are naturally hostile to competing and countervailing influences. Time was, their response to religious authorities was to attempt to co-opt them into collaboration, creating a mutually reinforcing alliance of Throne and Altar. The American experiment reversed that course, explicitly forbidding "an establishment of religion." Madison was of the opinion that the multitude of religious sects in the new nation would cause them to act as a check upon one another, such that no sect could possibly achieve dominance over all the others. And for a time, it seemed that it would be so: though the great majority of Americans have always been Christians, the profusion of denominations, each with its own twist on Christ's Gospel, has compelled them to tolerate one another as cousins, if not brothers, in a single enveloping faith.

No one expected that a tiny band of infinitely sensitive, perpetually offended militant atheists, incapable of tolerating the visible or audible expression of any faith but their own, would rise to overturn that state of affairs. No one expected that a government bound within the Christian ethos by its own Constitution and the common law would ally itself with them.

No one expected that three-quarters of Americans would find themselves marginalized, labeled as "haters" and "bigots," for following the teachings of the Prince of Peace. Yet it is so.

And though it horrifies me to say so, those at the levers of power find these developments very much to their liking. Our political masters have joined forces with the militant atheists of our era. What our rulers cannot co-opt, they are resolved to destroy.

More anon.