Conversations

CSO: Have you ever heard of a famous chef from Canada?
FWP: No, but it's you who follow the "food news," not I.

CSO: Maybe it's because they don't have a cuisine.^[1]
FWP: Sweetie, Canada is basically known for being a country full of very nice, very polite people. They export a couple of actors and singers now and then, but that's about it.

CSO: Oh? Then what was the deal with that Vancouver-Calgary brawl the other night?
FWP: Hey, every country needs a safety valve. Theirs is the hockey brawl.

CSO: That's how they let off steam, huh?
FWP: Yup. If it weren't for that, they'd be at war with every other country on Earth. Just think of the pressure: all those decades of perfect, uninterrupted politeness.

CSO: Yeah. That would make me want to kill somebody.
FWP: For sure.

[1: We were told this in 1995, by a Canadian: the concierge on duty at Toronto's Royal Crown Hotel. A very polite young gentleman, and entirely unarmed...as far as I could tell.]

Predictable Outcomes Dept.

When a politician discovers that he's rhetorically "stepped on his dick," his reaction is guaranteed to be either or both of the following:

• Claim he was misinterpreted (alternately, "taken out of context");
• Counterattack the motives of those he managed to outrage.

Andrew Cuomo, the leftist princeling currently governor of New York, recently donned an imaginary miter and pontificated to "his" state:

You have a schism within the Republican Party. … They’re searching to define their soul, that’s what’s going on. Is the Republican party in this state a moderate party or is it an extreme conservative party? That’s what they’re trying to figure out. It’s a mirror of what’s going on in Washington. The gridlock in Washington is less about Democrats and Republicans. It’s more about extreme Republicans versus moderate Republicans.

…You’re seeing that play out in New York. … The Republican Party candidates are running against the SAFE Act — it was voted for by moderate Republicans who run the Senate! Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.

If they’re moderate Republicans like in the Senate right now, who control the Senate — moderate Republicans have a place in their state. George Pataki was governor of this state as a moderate Republican; but not what you’re hearing from them on the far right.”

That looks pretty definite to me. What about you, Gentle Reader? If you're not a New York resident, would Cuomo's remarks as quoted above make you feel that you'd be welcomed here? As for this libertarian-conservative / pro-life / pro-Second Amendment / pro-traditional marriage commentator, well, I'd like to tell you about my reaction, but there are laws about that sort of thing.

Apparently, there was more backblast than Cuomo expected. Quite a lot of it arrived as comments to the cited article and others that covered the governor's edict of disdain. But as Doug Ross has noted, the Right gave him both barrels, from:

• The New York Post;
• Opposing Views;
• National Review Online;
• LifeNews;
• and The Blaze;

...among others, and Cuomo decided he had to back away from the clear meaning of his words, while laying down a verbal claymore for his foes:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration penned an open letter to The New York Post on Sunday, two days after the governor's comments on "extreme Republicans" were heavily criticized by conservatives... The letter -- posted to the governor's website Sunday afternoon -- claims the Post "distorted Governor Cuomo's words" by claiming Cuomo told conservative Republicans to "leave New York."

..."When you listen to the complete interview, it is clear that the Governor was engaged in a discussion on political campaigns and responding to a question about fundraising for his own campaign," the letter reads. "He was talking strictly about the two parties and political candidates, and making an observation that far right candidates cannot win statewide elections in the New York because their political philosophy is not a reflection of the state’s electorate."

"Far right!" The pejorative the Left applies to Americans who believe that the Constitution means what its text says, rather than what some overfed blowhard with no achievements outside of politics thinks it means. The denigration it applies to Americans who cherish human life and want to see it protected by the law. The sneer it awards to Americans who value the nation's tradition of citizen armament, and the control that tradition enforces upon the ambitions and actions of...why, of men like Andrew Cuomo.

Politicians like Cuomo and his unlamented father are a New York disease. They, like predators of all types and times, positioned themselves where the prey is fattest. In state politics, the prime hunting grounds are where they've always been: California, Illinois, and New York. The concentration of left-liberals and government dependents in the immense cities that dominate those states gives panderer-tyrants like Cuomo an edge that makes them very difficult to defeat.

There will shortly be an exodus from New York. We who are at or near retirement age are highly unlikely to remain in this vulpine state for our final years. We'll take our pensions and savings to some state friendlier to their retention. Our offspring, except for those who secure themselves a job in state government or one of its outcroppings, are highly likely to choose a locale less financially rapacious, regulation-strangled, and gun-hostile than New York as the place to develop their careers.

It's already happened to California. New York is only a little behind the crest of the wave. Remember that you read it here first.

It Was A Long Time Ago...

...and it involved mainly veterans of World War II...
...and somehow, I doubt that Tom Cantrell looked that much like G. W. Bailey...
...but this is more or less how the Battle of Athens, 1946, took place:

Something to think about in between bouts of complaining about our emerging national tyranny,

Propaganda And Education

The powers, drawbacks, and limitations of the American educational "system" have been one of the livelier topics among the Internet Commentariat in recent weeks. Part of that stems from Professor Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds's recent book on the "new school" (which, by the way, isn't his only emission on schooling). But at least as much arises from the ever more common observation that "higher" education, in particular, is proving to be a negative-return investment at a time when altogether too many young persons are dubious about their futures.

One aspect of the discussion I find distressing is the emphasis on the connection (or lack thereof) between a college education and "jobs" or "careers." A great deal of the criticism of American education stems from the weak correlation between one's acquisition of a college degree and one's subsequent occupational attainment. There appears to be a widely held assumption, explicit more often than not, that a college education's primary purpose is to ready those who pass through it to perform economically.

In historical terms, that's a very recent emphasis. And there's a very good chance that it's at the heart of what's "wrong" with American higher education.

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Prior to World War II, it was generally assumed that college was for personal and intellectual development -- a passage among scholars from which the young adult could gain acquaintance with "the best that has been thought and said" (Matthew Arnold). There were a few "technical" schools that awarded college-style degrees, but these were widely regarded as colleges in form more than in substance. The model to which all higher education aspired was the "Great Books" approach of the University of Chicago under its presiding genius, Robert Maynard Hutchins.

The colloquially named "GI Bill" of 1944 appears to have been the start of the refocusing of college education on occupational outcomes. That few colleges or universities were oriented in that fashion didn't trouble FDR or his "Brain Trust" in the slightest, but then, few matters of fact ever did. The New Dealers knew that the huge mass of veterans returning at the conclusion of the war would have a dislocating effect. That mass repatriation threatened their economic program, which had "revitalized" the nation's economy by stripping the labor force of 12 million young men and shipping them off to Europe and the Pacific. (Compare this to their farm strategy of forbidding or destroying production to raise the prices of dairy and agricultural goods.) Clearly, something had to be done to postpone the foreseeable impact of the returnees on employment and wages.

Deflecting the returning GIs into non-employment channels was the only imaginable course. Higher education looked good for two reasons:

• It consumes four or more years, giving the New Dealers time to think up something else;
• Graduates are unlikely to enter the agricultural and industrial trades that buttressed the New Deal politically.

So the Administration began a propaganda campaign about the economic advantages of a college degree. They highlighted the economic distinction between college graduates and those not so blessed, implying that a college education would open the doors to richer economic vistas. But men with college degrees tended to have higher personal incomes and net wealth than those without mainly because they came from wealthy families. Their time in college was intended to prepare them for the sort of society they would enter as fledgling captains of industry, mainly by meeting and becoming well acquainted with the scions of other wealthy families.

Classic watch-the-cart-pull-the-horse political sleight of hand.

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The American economy in our time has proved unable to absorb as many college graduates as our colleges and universities are turning out. This is partly because of the economy's overall weakness, of course, but it also stems from the disinclination of a young adult with a degree to "work with his hands:" i.e., to enter the labor force as a tradesman, a factory hand, or some other variety of manual laborer. The college experience prejudices the graduate against "menial" labor in several obvious ways and in one not-so-obvious one: the cost of four or more years earning a degree can seldom be defrayed on a blue-collar income.

Yet the skilled trades are precisely where the economy lacks sufficient participants. Who among us has not quailed at the sight of a plumber's or electrician's invoice? No, they don't get rich even at the rates we experience today; they're not busy enough for that. But skilled tradesmen do well enough to support themselves and their families in acceptable comfort. More, as they tend to be self-employed, few of them worry about "being let go."

Factory hands, in those fields that still employ them, are also doing well compared to college graduates. They earn adequately, though their estate isn't as enviable as that of the skilled tradesman. They do face the possibility of obsolescence due to automation, but those threats can often be kept at bay by collaborating with the automaters: contriving to augment the impact of automation with human input and collaboration. Many employers prefer this approach to automation, and not merely for its impact on "the bottom line."

No one is doing any such thing for the costly-to-employ college graduate.

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My last point for this morning is a sad one, which is regarded with distaste by most commentators on the subject: Not everyone can benefit intellectually from a college education.

It's non-controversial among cognitive scientists that innate aptitude for abstractions and abstract reasoning is non-uniformly distributed among humans. The foofaurauw over The Bell Curve was entirely a matter of outraged political correctness. No one wants to admit that half of us, at the very least, are dimbulbs to whom the higher reaches of thought will remain forever inaccessible; it strikes us as "unkind." Yet what greater unkindness could there be than guaranteeing the benefits of an advanced education to someone who lacks the mental horsepower required to grasp and exploit it? This is cruelty disguised as compassion: a rather frequent visitor to the mental landscape of the Left.

Every government intervention in education at any level has implicitly denied the inherent intellectual inequality of persons. The consequences have been dire: an educational elite corrupted by political forces, millions of misdirected young persons, massive personal and public debts, and a sense of having been betrayed that's become pandemic among American youth. But then, politicians don't do things for our benefit, but for theirs.

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If American higher education is to regain its luster, it must shed its pretense of universality. But its propagandists, and those whose fortunes have been built upon the lie that "college is for everyone," will be very hard to dissuade.

Authoritations

The more I think about...well, everything, the more overwhelming becomes the realization that it's all of a piece: a single process operating to create unambiguous battle lines so the serious shooting can begin.

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Allow me to start by citing an exceptionally insightful piece from Ace of Spades. Please read it all. The conclusion is what lit my boiler this fine morning. Set it aside; we'll come back to it soon enough.

Virtually everyone is touched at some point by the arrogance of an expert. I have to saw one in half about once a month, but for a reason tangential to Ace's analysis: their readiness to assert "expertise" in fields other than their own. Arthur Herzog skewered this tendency in his 1973 classic The B.S. Factor:

The thirst for answers in a difficult world has brought about the rise of Anything (or Everything) Authorities. The Anything Authority is one whose credentials in one field are taken as valid for others -- sometimes many others....

The trouble with an Anything Authority is not that he takes a position or works for a cause, but that he seldom seems to apply the same standards of research and documentation to the field in which he is not an expert as he would to his own....

Psychiatrists are a special breed of Anything Authorities because their field is anything (or almost) in the first place....

When an Anything Authority becomes successful, he joins the Permanent Rotating Panel Show and appears on television programs, which pay him....the Anything Authority must never be stuck for an answer. Glibness helps, and so does the fact that many emcees do not know the hard questions to ask.

If the above passage has you thinking of Fox News regular Dr. Charles Krauthammer, you're not alone.

The progression is plain:

1. Acquisition of a credential of some kind, often an academic one.
2. Practice in one's field.
3. Acquisition of notoriety in consequence of some publicized event.
4. Interest in one's thinking from persons other than one's fellow specialists.
5. Increasing boldness, in part due to sustained attention from laymen and journalists.
6. Ascent to Anything Authority status.
7. Television gigs and book tours.

The strong relationship between the Anything Authority and major figures in national politics follows automatically.

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It might not be perfectly obvious (a break from tradition here at Liberty's Torch), but any man who bids for a high political office must present himself to the public as a sort of Anything Authority: i.e., one who "has the answers" to a wide range of questions concerning the issues most prominent in political discourse. As distasteful as it sounds, arrogance is therefore a qualification for office. He who lacks the glibness and certitude required will be dismissed by a large fraction of the voting public. Seldom does the less glib, less arrogant of two candidates prevail in an electoral showdown.

And of course, that glibness and arrogance carries over to one's tenure in office. Here's a perfectly lovely example from Andrew Cuomo, currently the governor of New York:

You have a schism within the Republican Party. … They’re searching to define their soul, that’s what’s going on. Is the Republican party in this state a moderate party or is it an extreme conservative party? That’s what they’re trying to figure out. It’s a mirror of what’s going on in Washington. The gridlock in Washington is less about Democrats and Republicans. It’s more about extreme Republicans versus moderate Republicans.

…You’re seeing that play out in New York. … The Republican Party candidates are running against the SAFE Act — it was voted for by moderate Republicans who run the Senate! Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.

If they’re moderate Republicans like in the Senate right now, who control the Senate — moderate Republicans have a place in their state. George Pataki was governor of this state as a moderate Republican; but not what you’re hearing from them on the far right.”

Yes, you read it correctly: Cuomo, a Democrat, has taken it upon himself to tell the Republican Party of New York whom it may and may not have as members. Indeed, he's told those of us New Yorkers who disagree with him that we don't belong in "his" state! We once heard this sort of thing from Big Daddy Mario, who also treated the state as his personal fiefdom. Clearly, the apple fell very close to the tree.

What's ultimately most important is the reflexive acceptance of this sort of pol-speak: Cuomo II, whose background before attaining public office is notably lacking in any sort of accomplishment, has not been backhanded across the chops for his arrogance by any figure of note on the Right. In part, that's out of distaste for the possibility of reprisal, but in equal or greater part it's because the practice of presenting oneself as an unquestionable Anything Authority has become established for officials at the gubernatorial level and above.

The "expert" no longer needs to have demonstrated "expertise" of any sort; all he needs to do is win an election.

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The practice of promoting themselves as Anything Authorities compels politicians to become vengeful toward anyone who suggests that there are flaws in their reasoning, evidence, candor, or veracity:

After Benghazi on 9/11/2012, the Obama administration tried very hard to discourage Fox News Channel from reporting on it. The effort was obstruction – pure and simple.

They tried to prevent the truth from coming out and the Administration tried just about everything to discourage Fox from investigating and reporting.

All the American people wanted, and all I ever wanted, was just the facts – why did 4 Americans die? What happened?

Please read the entire article. Greta Van Susteren, an accomplished and painfully thorough journalist, is one of the very few persons anywhere in the media who has aggressively prosecuted the investigation of the Benghazi attack. The Obama Administration perceived -- correctly -- that her efforts were a danger to their "narrative." Administration operatives did everything possible within the law to inhibit her and her staffers from continuing onward. Given the viciousness the Obamunists have displayed to date, the mind recoils from what might have happened to her and hers, were the United States not steeped in a tradition of press freedom that reaches back to John Peter Zenger.

Be warned: Pressure has mounted, always from the Left, to classify ever more varieties of expression as "hate speech," and therefore not protected by the First Amendment. The Democrats want to study "Internet hate speech," no doubt with an eye toward making it legally actionable as a "proximate cause" for violence. Such an effort will inevitably expand to embrace reportage and opinion writing that dissents from the "official line."

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Let's return to the conclusion of Ace's essay:

Laymen know that "all professions are a conspiracy against the laity."

And laymen also know something else: In a democracy, the common citizen must decided upon the course of the nation, whether the citizenry is right or wrong about it.

The layman resents the never-ending agitation for a "democracy" in which all important decisions are made by a Council of Experts (generally government bureaucrats and academic gadflies with their own very serious bias issues) and then simply announced to the public.

In all these ways, the layman suspects he is being bullied into taking a position he does not favor by the invocation of the word "expert," and not just bullied-- often, he feels like he is being straight-up conned.

I actually do respect knowledge and expertise. And I do think it is a lamentable thing that this nation now holds such things in lesser respect than they once did.

But the self-declared experts must also take some of the blame for this state of affairs.

You only get to lie to someone so many times before he stops listening to you entirely.

And you don't need to be an expert to know that.

Exactly. It is in the nature of expertise that it must admit to both its fallibility and its limits. The "expert" who postures as though he cannot be wrong will sooner or later come to grief -- often by the actions of competitors in his field. When an "expert" assumes the mantle of an Anything Authority, his need to protect his reputation as such climbs to the heights. The pinnacle is occupied by public officials: Anything Authorities who become political authorities. At that altitude, their pose of unbounded expertise, if not shielded by credible threats of vengeance, self-ruptures almost immediately. It only takes one egregious mistake, and most officials make that many in their oaths of office.

The rest is an exercise for the reader.

American ineffectualism.

The greatest economic, political and societal collapse in recorded history is unfolding and has been doing so ever since the final denouement of partially sound money occurred at Bretton Woods II in August 1971 – thereby allowing governments, the financial systems and elites to substitute money printed out of thin air and politically correct/corrupt legislation for sound economic policies. This process has been unfolding for 40 years and is nearing its demise.

Is there a political leader, apart from, oh, Ron Paul, who expresses any kind of urgency on this point?

Is it accurate, even? It can't be that inaccurate if we know that

• the U.S. is now just a market heavily dependent on Chinese manufacturing and our number one U.S. retailer is nothing but a marketing outlet for Chinese goods;
• our president has disdain for the nation that elected him;
• he seems more enamored of the Cloward-Piven strategy to generate economic collapse than of the basics of revitalizing the economy;
• he makes war on coal and obstructs the Keystone XL Pipeline and oil exploration on public lands;
• he and the Congress are oblivious to our having the highest corporate tax rate in the world, which drives business from our shores;
• we have a $16T debt increasing horrifically even now plus massive unfunded liabilities for Medicare and Social Security;
• we print money at an astronomical rate, punish saving, and reward debt;
• we have a huge hostile, parasitic, rejectionist minority to whom we have naively handed powerful legal tools of extortion and solidifying unearned privilege;
• we have police SWAT teams in full body armor responding to situations that Barney Fife could have handled with a chat on the front porch;
• we have a news media establishment that pedals lies and fairy tales about our culture and the historical experience of people the world around;
• we have wide open borders inviting self-immigrating, third-world foreigners to dine at our table gratis;
• we cheapen our precious citizenship;
• Supreme Court justices disdain the Constitution; and
• we have massive unemployment that is resolutely denied by the federal government.

Inter bleeding alia.

Where are the voices of realism among the leadership? Do the MSM even honestly report the nature of our problems, let alone support voices offering solutions other than the "solutions" of the current health care catastrophe, class warfare, and crony capitalism, if not outright socialist revolution?

We're not even a nation any longer, just "a cool place to work," as a writer in Chronicles put it years ago. To the extent that we still exhibit vestigial characteristics of a vibrant, functioning nation, we simply are failing to deal with the problem of fiscal profligacy and a failed civil rights movement. Fiscal and social chaos is upon us but the nation's chief executive frets over "inequality," the policies of the president of Syria, and the arms requirements of his bestial al Qaida opponents.

Not that events in Syria aren't of compelling interest to the people of Oklahoma. Don't hang that absurdity on me.

What we see before us today is the highest and best expression of our national political life. That's essentially the epiphany that some alcoholics in AA meetings recount after detailing the minute details of the utter collapse of their family, their mental health, and their careers: to wit, "And my best thinking got me there."

Well, our "best" thinking got us where we are today, along with weakness, craven cowardice, and intellectual and moral failure that surely make our ancestors hang their heads in shame.

Lincoln thought that God might require that the sword would exact retribution for every drop of blood from the overseer's lash. Well, we'll soon see in our own time what mental flabbiness, worship of unbridled government by the most educated, ignorance of history and human nature, waging class warfare, and disdain for economic fundamentals exact.

"2014 Outlook: Pandora's Box." By tedbits, Zero Hedge, 1/17/14.

Cowardly killing machines.

Sean Penn, at the behest of his new girlfriend:

“The highest bidder gets every single one of my [65] guns put in the hands of this iconic artist and sculptor … Koons will decommission [and] render inactive all of my cowardly killing machines,” he said.

The pussyfication of American elite culture proceeds at flank speed.

"Anderson Cooper spends $1.4M on Jeff Koons sculpture made from Sean Penn’s gun collection." By Jessica Chasmar, The Washington Times, 1/14/14 (link removed)("[and]" edit by author).

Pens And Phones

By now, I'm certain that all my Gentle Readers have heard about Barack Hussein Obama's "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone" speech. The Won might have been trying to lay a marker alongside the late Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech; however, his prospects for a similar degree of acclaim seem remote. Nevertheless, this seems a good time to review the actual, as opposed to the notional, powers of the president of the United States. Obama might be well advised to read the following his very own self, as he seems not to have grasped them.

SECTION 2.

The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.

He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.

The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.

SECTION 3.

He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States. [Article II, Sections 2 and 3]

Couldn't be made any clearer, could it? And it doesn't say a word about making or changing the law by executive order.

Too many people, especially young Americans miseducated by our government-run school system, believe otherwise. But then, they've been told that the Constitution, our "supreme Law of the Land," is actually a blueprint for the oppression of the plebes by the patricians, written by white male slaveholders who were concerned exclusively with their own power and perquisites.

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I've said it before, but it seems to require endless repetition: A presidential executive order only binds the employees of the executive branch. Moreover, an executive order that contravenes a law legislated and passed by Congress, or any other substantive provision of the Constitution, is an impeachable offense.

The citation of "high crimes and misdemeanors" as grounds for impeachment has several times been interpreted by fully competent authorities to include presidential traductions of the legislated law. The first impeachment, of President Andrew Johnson, was founded upon exactly such an event: Johnson's defiance of a bill that forbade the Administration to expend any sum exceeding $25,000 without prior and explicit Congressional approval.

How many legislated laws, several of which were signed by Obama himself, has The Won attempted to set aside, whether by executive order or simply refusing to enforce them? After he started announcing "changes" to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, I lost count. As for the behavior of his attorney-general, surely comment is not required.

This supposed "constitutional law lecturer" has complete and open contempt for the document that created and defined the office he holds. Worse, he clearly thinks he can get away with his dictatorial usurpations of power -- and if the pusillanimity of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives, which has "the sole power of impeachment" (Article I, Section 2), is any indication, he's probably right.

Sent any money to the GOP lately?

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"My remarks concern Dame Clytie. I notice that she has been elected to an office which derives directly from the Charter, with duties and responsibilities defined by the Charter, including unqualified defense of the Conservancy against all enemies and interlopers. If Dame Clytie demeans or diminishes or in any way seeks to invalidate the Charter, she has instantly removed herself from office. She cannot have it both ways. Either she defends the Charter in whole and in part or she is instantly expelled from office. Unless I misunderstand her, she has already made her choice, and is now no more Warden than I am." [Jack Vance, Araminta Station]

The GOP caucus in the House did impeach Bill Clinton, on perjury and obstruction-of-justice charges for which the evidence was overwhelming. Partisan politics had already become so absolute that despite the evidence, not one Senate Democrat voted for conviction. Many believe that there would be a similar partisan refusal to vote to convict Obama, even though his refusal to "take care that the Laws be faithfully executed" is beyond all denial...and they're probably right.

Oaths of office seem not to matter much to elected officials these days. We've had federal legislators say openly that they "don't give a damn about the Constitution," and that the "necessary and proper" clause grants Congress unlimited power. Today they decline to exercise their responsibility for removing a criminal from the Oval Office. The implications are as clear as the Constitution itself.

But an elected official who has openly refused to conform to the Constitutionally defined powers and responsibilities of his office is a traitor. He has abrogated his oath of office and betrayed his constituents. He is subject to the full and impartial weight of the law...or should be.

When they who supposedly make the law set themselves above it -- when they seize powers never granted by the document that created their offices and refuse to discharge the responsibilities that document charges them with -- what is the law? More critically, upon whose shoulders does its enforcement rest?

There is no pen, and no phone, by which the ultimate responsibility for upholding the laws of the Republic can be shifted from the shoulders upon which it rests: ours.

Think about it.

Obama Admin. conclusion of Assad chemical attack questionable.

The insurgent Obama Puppet Government (OPG) in Washington, D.C., claims the Assad government in Syria launched a chemical attack on its own civilians, which claim was made in order to rush to war in Syria to topple Pres. Assad.

However, a professor at M.I.T. and a former U.N. weapons inspector cast doubt on the OPG version.^[1]

Basically:

• Distance from Syrian government positions to site of sarin nerve gas release – 6 miles.
• Range of sarin gas rocket – 2 miles.

Conclusion: the gas attack came from "rebel"-controlled or contested areas (i.e., areas contested or controlled by deranged, al Qaida, fanatical nutcases, A/K/A "our allies") within two miles of the points of gas release.

The Obama Occupation Administration analysis relies on two back azimuths from crater analysis of U.N. inspectors intersecting at a likely Syrian artillery position within a government-controlled area, one that was no less than 5 miles from the nearest gas release site.

Also, the Obama Administration claim that impact point of chemical rocket was visible from a reconnaissance satellite is questionable. The payload of a gas rocket is apparently unlike that of a conventional high explosive (HE) round such as a mortar round. A gas canister only needs to be opened enough by a charge to allow the gas to escape and spread. (Could a stronger charge also neutralize the gas?) A charge is not needed to spread the payload mechanically like a phosphorous round. With an HE round, a powerful charge is used to shatter the steel warhead and spread the resulting shrapnel as forcefully and as far as possible. The difference in the amount of explosive charge needed in a shrapnel-spraying warhead and a chemical warhead is substantial. In the former, the blast and shrapnel do indeed disturb the soil at the point of impact substantially. In the latter case, hardly at all I suspect. Satellite detection doubtful.

Whether it makes sense for Assad forces to have set up at no less than six places in contested areas to release gas in areas with non-combatants depends on tactical considerations.

For example, how easy it would be to carry the warheads to those sites in a highly-contested combat zone and how easy would it be to transport six launchers (with a total of 11 warheads) to those six sites and return them safely to friendly areas. The warhead presumably used weighs something like 105 lbs. and the rocket motor, fin assembly and shaft (or tube) would be 82 inches in length, assuming the shaft is inserted all the way into the warhead. If the weight of the rocket motor, etc., is 70 lbs. that's a lot of weight if the device is carried as one piece and two hefty and awkward pieces of equipment to carry about in a combat area, not to mention the warhead's being highly dangerous to any crew members. Crew members would have to be highly trained to deal with such dangerous warheads. I have no idea what the launcher would look like. A simple tray or tube might suffice but the simpler the device the greater the hazard to the crew from misfires or wild rounds.

These considerations apply equally to government and "rebel" forces. Knowing who controlled what areas and what freedom of movement would have been enjoyed by either faction would perhaps clarify which side could more easily have deployed the gas. Certainly, the heavier and more complex the launcher, the more fragile the warhead, the greater the weight of the weapon, the more unwieldy the weapon for man transport, the more unreliable the weapon, the more cumbersome the crew protective clothing, the more distant the base area from the launch points (six miles from the nearest government-controlled area in one case), and the more ferocious the fighting, then the less likely it seems to me that Assad would have employed the gas from a contested area.

To the contrary, if the rockets could have been launched from armored vehicles.

The strategic issues seem to favor Assad. What advantage at all could he have gained from such clumsy and indiscriminate weapon? The "rebels," however, might have considered these rockets precision weapons in view of Obama's ridiculous "red line." Just the thing to energize a clueless – but not guileless – American (putative).

CONCLUSION: To the extent that the OPG analysis concluded the Syrian artillery piece inside government-controlled territory was the source of the gas rockets, anything generated by the OPG is highly suspect and needs to be taken with a grain of salt, especially when served up with a steaming side helping of "Responsibility to Protect," which doctrine^[2] jams the needle way into the barf zone on the political hypocrisy meter.

Notes
^[1] "Weapons Inspectors: Syrian Chemical Weapons Fired from REBEL-HELD Territory." Submitted by George Washington, Zero Hedge, 1/16/14.
^[2] N/A in Benghazi or along U.S.-Mexican border.

Quickies: Clarity Dept.

Apologies, Gentle Reader. I'm forced by circumstances to make do with another quickie today.

There's a great deal of Sturm und Drang in the air over cuts to the pension payments to military veterans. That does sound cruel, inasmuch as so many less worthy federal expenditures increase irresistibly from year to year. But in Washington-speak, a "cut" isn't always a cut.

I've been unable to find out whether the abovementioned cuts are:

• Absolute reductions in the number of dollars per month veterans will receive in their pension checks; i.e., cuts of a sort every family in America would understand them; or:
• Reductions to previously planned increases in those pension payments; i.e., "cuts" the way the Democrats usually use the word.

If the cuts are of the former sort, they're deplorable, even contemptible. Those who engineered them into the proposed budget deserve all the opprobrium they're getting and more. But it they're of the latter sort, they're a bit like an employee not getting a raise he was hoping for and had come to expect. It would have been nice had he received the raise. Perhaps he deserved it on the merits. But did he have a defensible claim to it as a matter of right?

I sincerely mean it: I don't know which of the above possibilities is a correct description of these cuts. If there's anyone out there who's reliably, verifiably better informed on this subject than I, please chime in.

As I said at the top of this piece, I have to toddle off rather quickly this morning, so I can't go on too much further. But reflect on this, if you please: My uncertainty here stems from our political elite's habitual use of words to mean something other than We the People understand them to mean. The objective facts on this subject have proved elusive to me. That justifies my skepticism about this particular contretemps, at least in my eyes -- and this is an issue on which the Right just might be committing the besetting linguistic sin of the Left.

We need our clarity back. Without it, we'll never win our country back.

Quickies: Around The Web

I have a "day from Hell" scheduled -- they usually occur on Wednesdays, come to think of it -- so allow me a quick spin around some articles of particular interest:

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1. So, you want $15 an hour, do you?

Elevations of the minimum wage inevitably cause a shrinkage of employment. Automation often plays a part:

Fast food doesn’t have to have a negative connotation anymore. With our technology, a restaurant can offer gourmet quality burgers at fast food prices.

Our alpha machine frees up all of the hamburger line cooks in a restaurant.

It does everything employees can do except better....

The remaining employees at the fast-food place might get $15 per hour, but they'd be best advised to watch their demands from now on.

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2. You get what someone else pays for.

Neo-neocon sees the figure in the ObamaCare marble:

[T]he fact that enrollees are older than expected—and therefore much more likely to make claims and reduce insurance companies’ profit margins—is okay because government will take up the slack. And by “government” we mean, of course, the taxpayer. And by “taxpayer” we mean, of course, predominantly the wealthy, although the middle class will pay as well in many circumstances....

So Obamacare giveth to the insurance companies and then it taketh away. And then it giveth back again, in a sort of shell game. A significant amount of the revenue that insurance companies get from Obamacare is from the government subsidizing those who might not otherwise buy insurance, and a significant amount of the money the government gets in order to go about subsidizing those people is from taxes paid by insurance companies, which are then given back to the insurance companies in the form of customer subsidies for low-income policyholders, and then…well, you get the idea.

Money, as Thomas T. Thomas noted in First Citizen, is "inherently non-fluid:" some of it "sticks to the walls" of any conduit it passes through. Alternately:

    Ashford asked, "What about lawyers?"
    Lawrence started to answer, but Magruder intervened. "No lawyers, Johnny. What do lawyers specialize in?"
    Ashford shrugged. "Getting their scumbag clients off?"
    "Nope. Law school teaches 'em one thing above all others: Find where the money is coming from, where it's going to, get square between 'em, and catch as much as you can."

[From On Broken Wings]

And governments are always top-heavy with lawyers.

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3. For every engineer, there is an equal but opposite engineer.

...which is why Marc Faber and I prefer gold and silver to Bitcoin:

"I prefer physical gold and silver, platinum to bitcoin. Bitcoin can have a lot of competition. Gold, silver, platinum -- they have no competition. How do you value a bitcoin? I can value gold to some extent and compare say gold to the quantity of money that is floating around the world, to the wealth increase, and to the monetary base increase, to the credit increase, and so forth and so on, and to the production costs. So I have an idea of where gold should be. I'm not sure because prices overshoot. How do you value Netflix? Is it overpriced or underpriced? Is Tesla overpriced, underpriced?"

Bitcoin, for all the column-inches it's received, is a human artifact -- and a digital one, at that. Someone will eventually reverse-engineer and counterfeit it. Barring the development of fully controllable nuclear fusion reactors, that won't happen to the precious metals...and should that day ever come, all our troubles will be over for other, happier reasons.

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4. Mask slippages dept.

You can count absolutely on the pro-totalitarianism bias of any and every left-liberal. Former New York Times editor Bill Keller is no exception:

Lisa Bonchek Adams is currently hospitalized and being treated for Stage IV breast cancer. Since her diagnosis in October of 2012 at the age of 37, this mother of three has been blogging and tweeting about what she has been through mentally, personally, physically, and medically. For a chilling and revealing reason, former New York Times editor Bill Keller has a big problem with this....

On the pages of the Sunday Times Keller reveals a monstrous philosophy that in so many ways is revealing of the elite left as a whole -- especially as it pertains to ObamaCare. In so many words, Keller just can't bring himself to understand why Adams doesn't give up her fight and die. In his mind, her death is inevitable and all she's doing is spending a lot of money that could be better spent elsewhere:

In October 2012 I wrote about my father-in-law’s death from cancer in a British hospital. There, more routinely than in the United States, patients are offered the option of being unplugged from everything except pain killers and allowed to slip peacefully from life. His death seemed to me a humane and honorable alternative to the frantic medical trench warfare that often makes an expensive misery of death in America.

Among doctors here, there is a growing appreciation of palliative care that favors the quality of the remaining life rather than endless “heroic measures” that may or may not prolong life but assure the final days are clamorous, tense and painful. (And they often leave survivors bankrupt.) What Britain and other countries know, and my country is learning, is that every cancer need not be Verdun, a war of attrition waged regardless of the cost or the casualties. It seemed to me, and still does, that there is something enviable about going gently. One intriguing lung cancer study even suggests that patients given early palliative care instead of the most aggressive chemotherapy not only have a better quality of life, they actually live a bit longer.

This put me in mind of a "debate" some years back:

For John Harris, saving a life and delaying its end is one and the same.

Using this logic, Harris, a bioethicist at the University of Manchester in England, figures that scientists have a moral duty to extend the human life span as far as it will go, even if it means creating beings that live forever.

"When you save a life, you are simply postponing death to another point," Harris told LiveScience. "Thus, we are committed to extending life indefinitely if we can, for the same reasons that we are committed to life-saving."

But the loss of a child and the passing of an elderly person are not the same thing at all, says Daniel Callahan, a bioethicist at the Hastings Center in New York. The first is premature, while the latter comes, hopefully, at the end of a well-lived life.

"The death of an elderly person is sad, because we lose them and they lose us, but it's not tragic," Callahan said. "One can't say this is a deranged universe to live in because people die of old age."

"Bioethicist" Callahan has on several occasions argued against life-extension and other gerontological research, on the grounds that it "discriminates against the less fortunate." If there's an ethical principle behind condemning Smith to an avertible death because Jones can't afford the treatments he needs or wants, I must confess that I can't find it.

Left-liberals are closeted totalitarians, indistinguishable from the Nazis in their readiness to sacrifice every right and every virtue to "the needs of the State." Keller and Callahan are overt about it. Many others are not, and will pretend to be offended if you brace them about it. That doesn't change the underlying dynamic: "Everything within the State, nothing outside the State."

Bear always in mind that totalitarians want power over all things, including life itself, for its own sake:

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power....The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"

Don't turn your back on one, especially in these days of ObamaCare.

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5. The New Segregationists: A Conscience Qualm

This comes a bit late to do much good to the longsuffering people of Great Britain, but it's welcome anyway:

In January 2014, Nick Robinson, the political editor of the British Broadcasting Corporation, said they had made a “terrible mistake” over their coverage of immigration for years. He admitted that they had censored legitimate concerns amid fear they could trigger racism. Robinson said BBC figures in charge during the 1990s and 2000s believed an open debate over immigration would “unleash some terrible side of the British public.” “They feared having a conversation about immigration.” One-sided reports meant that viewer’s concerns about the negative effects of mass immigration had not been addressed by the state broadcaster.

This is an open and frank admission of media bias and censorship. Unfortunately, there is every reason to believe that the same problem exists in other countries, too.

Please read the whole article, which is one of Fjordman's most important. I've been hammering this point for years. Perhaps the admission by their British cousin will evoke similar candor from America's media barons...but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it, if I were you.

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That's the news for today, Gentle Reader. And now, back to our Swedish movie.

Controversial.

However, Uhrskov Jensen in his 2012 book Indvandringens pris (“The Price of Immigration”) showed the huge costs in monetary terms of today’s immigration. It’s not just about Muslim immigration, although that is an extreme case due to the increased threat of terrorism and other issues, but essentially all mass immigration from backward non-European societies to developed Western countries. We see similar patterns with Mexicans in the USA, for instance. Basically, with Third World immigration come Third World problems: rising crime, rising corruption, lower trust and higher welfare costs combined with reduced competitiveness.^[1]

Apparently, this as-night-follows-day observation is a "controversial" view in enlightened circles -- who never have to deal with the negative aspects of mass illegal immigration, mind you. Only schlubs have to endure those, preferably without complaint. As in STFU.

"Controversial" actually means, of course, "true."

For example, these statements are "controversial":

• the Obama "birth certificate" posted on the White House web site is a forgery, 
• Obama's mentor was a card-carrying communist, 
• Valerie Jarrett's grandfather and father-in-law were communists, 
• Obama started his political career in the living room of two communist terrorists, 
• the people have lost control of the federal government, 
• the Supreme Court ignores the Constitution when it feels like it, 
• multiculturalism is a con, 
• Barack Hussein Obama labors to create dependency not jobs, 
• leftists are utterly indifferent to the record of communist tyranny,
• Che Guevara was a psychopathic killer,
• the necessity of "comprehensive" immigration reform is a monstrous lie, and 
• the "civil rights revolution" is an utter failure.

You can think of others.

Notes
^[1] "Terrorism, Mass Murder, and Media Bias." By Fjordman, Gates of Vienna, 1/15/14 (emphasis added).

The Mind Killer: Thoughts On Fear

First, some quotes:

No power is strong enough if it labors under the weight of fear. [Marcus Tullius Cicero]

Fear always springs from ignorance! [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it...The basest of all things is to be afraid. [William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance speech]

Fear is an acid which is pumped into one's atmosphere. It causes mental, moral and spiritual asphyxiation, and sometimes death; death to all energy and growth. [Horace Fletcher]

Fear is like fire: if controlled, it will help you; if uncontrolled, it will rise up and destroy you. [John F. Milburn]

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. [Bertrand Russell]

Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. (He is also a fool.) [Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love]

---

Some years ago, when I was crafting a handful of unusual protagonists for a novel about an unusual family, I had occasion for an extended reflection upon fear. Among the emotions, it alone is "wholly horrible" [C. S. Lewis]. Yet it is one of the two motivators critical to the mentality required for survival. Maslow's Hierarchy should make that obvious. But there's that word again...the one that really means overlooked.

Among the reactions a military recruit must be conditioned to suppress is the fear-powered impulse to flee from combat. Combat is, after all, the reason he's there. To flee is to yield to the enemy. If you're going to do so reflexively, why bother to enlist? If an army is to do so at the first incoming fire, why bother to have an army?

Some armies, be it noted, have been unsuccessful at suppressing their soldiers' fear reaction. Some interesting stories, of Arab armies fleeing from numerically far smaller Israeli forces before battle was joined, came out of the Six-Day War.

Fear is the most important emotion of all in politics:

"The State is based on threat." [Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus!]

Governments are sustained almost entirely by the fear they engender in their subjects: fear of one another; fear of external enemies poised to strike; and fear of the government itself.

Yet a thing filled with such power is inherently useful, if it can be mastered and harnessed. "Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords," as Genly Ai says to Therem Harth rem ir Estraven in Ursula LeGuin's early masterpiece The Left Hand of Darkness. Estraven says, almost wonderingly, of Genly Ai that "He makes fear serve him." But Estraven finds illumination in that remark:

I would have let fear lead me around by the long way. Courage and reason are with him. What good seeking the safe course, on a journey such as this? There are senseless courses, which I shall not take; but there is no safe one.

As the perils to life, health, and material security mount around us, it becomes ever more urgent that we find ways to master and harness our fears: each of us, and all of us.

---

The old are often dominated by their fears and their responses to them. I speak from experience on this. Quite a lot of my energy, in these waning years, goes to buttressing myself and my loved ones against the threats I see, or fancy that I see. I'd imagine that's true of quite a lot of us older folks. If you've had five or six decades of pleasant existence on this ball of mud, you're easily led to thinking of security above all other things:

Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is “finding his place in it,” while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of really being at home on Earth, which is just what we want. You will notice that the young are generally less unwilling to die than the old. [C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters]

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

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

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[C]ourage 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. [C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters]

The beauty of courage, the way in which it evokes unconditional admiration from all but the meanest-souled, is the confirmation of the importance of that virtue -- and of the importance of the fear that must be overcome to exhibit it. Courage is the essential component of any realistic hero, for a hero is one who is willing to accept risk, or hardship, or sacrifice, for something larger than his self-interest. We're capable of detecting it even when it's not on immediate display:

"I'd not have guessed, Andrew. I'd not have thought you capable of it. When we met, when I first looked upon your face, I said to myself, 'if ever there's lived a man who knows not the taste of fear or failure, this is he, here he is before me.' " [Me, here]

But there is this: those "meanest-souled," knowing themselves to be the prisoners of their fears, are enraged by both courage and the admiration of courage. The recognition of that virtue in others inherently demeans them. He who has submitted to fear is unable to bear comparison with one who has mastered it. That's why the legions of the Left are relentless in condemning books and movies that portray genuine courage in action for wholesome ends. To him who has surrendered to fear, it is imperative that courage be snuffed out -- that no trace of it remain to garner the admiration of others.

That goes a long way toward explaining the tirades of condemnation toward movies such as Zero Dark Thirty and Lone Survivor, doesn't it?

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In the mood I'm in this morning, I could go on this way for thousands of words more, but I'll spare you. Anyway, one more quote, probably the best-known fictional statement about fear, from Frank Herbert's classic Dune:

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

Truly blessed is he who can do so...but how many can? Is it learnable? Or teachable? Or is it forged solely from impulse and experience?

Food for thought.

The Great Pyramid Of Cheese

[Charles Hill’s brief post on the Velveeta shortage has prompted me to repost the following highly educational article, which first appeared at Eternity Road on March 17, 2007. --FWP]

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On one evening not too long ago, a friend of mine, who has an extensive extended family, was dining with most of them. Included were several pre-teens. The bill of fare was, as is common in their not-particularly-pecunious household, macaroni and cheese.

One of the pre-teens commented on how different the entree tasted to him from "real" macaroni and cheese -- by which he meant, as pre-teens often do, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. He contrasted my friend's wife's dish unfavorably with the commercial preparation.

An uncle to the clan cleared his throat. "Kevin," he intoned, "you know I sell cheese, don't you?" The youngster nodded. "Well, it's about time you learned about the Great Pyramid of Cheese." And he told them all about it.

It seems that there are places where they make Cheese. The real stuff, straight from the milk, brimming with the odorific and oleaginous virtues that your narrator has found he cannot renounce. And it is good.

Most of it, anyway. Some wheels of cheese just don't turn out right. But they're not thrown away, oh, no. That would be wasteful. They're sold to factors from other shops, which take them in, and melt them down, and add oil, and chemicals, and further processing, and thereby produce... Cheese Food. Cheese Food is regulated by law to contain no more than 49% non-milk additives, and must not contain any but a specified list of preservatives and artificial flavor enhancers. There are people who eat Cheese Food by choice. There are others who are trying to help them.

But some batches of Cheese Food don't come out right either, and they're not thrown away, either. They're sold to factors from other shops, which take them in, and melt them down, and add oil, and chemicals, and further processing, and thereby produce... Process Pasteurized Cheese Food. PPCF is the step down from Cheese Food, and may contain up to 70% non-milk additives, plus a much wider range of flavor and color enhancers, and preservatives that guarantee that it will not spoil over the three months between your toddler's two demands for a grilled cheese sandwich right now, mom!

And not all of this is saleable, either, but (you guessed it) it's not thrown away just for that. The rejected barrels are sold to factors from other shops, which take them in, and melt them down, and add oil, and chemicals, and further processing, and thereby produce... Process Pasteurized Cheese Food Substance. PPCFS may contain up to 82% non-milk additives. The flavor and color are almost entirely chemically produced, and the preservatives in it are reputed to be stronger than formaldehyde. Velveeta was once PPCFS, but has moved up the pyramid to Level 3 (PPCF). Cheez Whiz is PPCFS. A number of people have drawn images of the Blessed Virgin on their basement walls with PPCFS from spray cans, and have made quite a lot of money.

But... that's right. Some of it doesn't meet the standards for retail-saleable PPCFS. The rejected barrels are sold to factors from other shops, which take them in, and melt them down, and add oil, and chemicals, and further processing, and thereby produce...

Well, it doesn't really have a name, and it doesn't need one, either, because all of it is consumed by a single company.

"And Kevin," the uncle rumbled, "would you like to guess what that company is?"

Little Kevin swallowed and shook his head.

"It's the Kraft Company, Kevin."

And I, who have set this tale down for you, have checked it in all particulars, and every word of it is true. And I'm told that little Kevin no longer asks for Kraft Macaroni And Cheese, either.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

These days, a lot of the worst national news is about the employment situation. David De Gerolamo points us to a bleak summary:

The number of working age Americans that do not have a job has increased by nearly 10 million since Barack Obama first entered the White House. In January 2009, the number of "officially unemployed" workers plus the number of Americans "not in the labor force" was sitting at a grand total of 92.6 million. Today, that number has risen to 102.2 million. That means that the number of working age Americans that are not working has grown by close to 10 million since Barack Obama first took office. So why does the "official unemployment rate" keep going down? Well, it is because the federal government has been pretending that millions upon millions of unemployed workers have "left the labor force" over the past few years and do not want to work anymore. The government says that another 347,000 workers "left the labor force" in December. That is nearly five times larger than the 74,000 jobs that were "created" by the U.S. economy last month. And it is important to note that more than half of those jobs were temporary jobs, and it takes well over 100,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth each month. So the unemployment rate should not have gone down. If anything, it should have gone up.

In fact, if the federal government was using an honest labor force participation rate, the official unemployment rate would be far higher than it is right now. Instead of 6.7 percent, it would be 11.5 percent, and it has stayed at about that level since the end of the last recession.

But "6.7 percent" makes Obama look so much better than "11.5 percent", don't you think?

The labor force participation rate is now at a 35 year low, and the only way that the federal government has been able to get the "unemployment rate" to go down is by removing hundreds of thousands of Americans out of the labor force every month.

Here's another view from economist Paul Craig Roberts:

The alleged recovery took a direct hit from Friday’s payroll jobs report. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy created 74,000 net new jobs in December.

Wholesale and retail trade accounted for 70,700 of these jobs or 95.5%. It is likely that the December wholesale and retail hires were temporary for the Christmas shopping season, which doesn’t seem to have been very exuberant, especially in light of Macy’s decision to close five stores and lay off 2,500 employees. It is a good bet that these December hires have already been laid off.

A job gain of 74,000, even if it is real, is about half of what is needed to keep the unemployment rate even with population growth. Yet the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the unemployment rate fell from 7.0% to 6.7%. Clearly, this decline in unemployment was not caused by the reported 74,000 jobs gain. The unemployment rate fell, because Americans unable to find jobs ceased looking for employment and, thereby, ceased to be counted as unemployed.

In America the unemployment rate is a deception just like everything else. The rate of American unemployment fell, because people can’t find jobs. The fewer the jobs, the lower the unemployment rate.

I noticed today that the financial media presstitutes were a bit hesitant to hype the drop in the rate of unemployment when there was no jobs growth to account for it. The Wall Street and bank economists did their best to disbelieve the jobs report as did some of the bought-and-paid-for academic economists. Too many interests have a stake in the non-existent recovery declared 4.5 years ago to be able to admit that it is not really there.

Given that the great majority of today's working-age Americans derive their incomes from wage employment by corporations, the bitterness in these authors' words is fully justified.

But it wasn't always that way.

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Historically, economic growth in the U.S. has been almost exclusively a phenomenon of small business. As new businesses formed and existing small businesses expanded, the economy developed and Americans became more prosperous. When that was well understood, the "unemployment rate" was regarded as a make-believe statistic. Can't get someone to hire you? Hire yourself! Do what you do well as your own boss, or perhaps in collaboration with others, and show the "mature" firms what they're missing.

The essential analytical distinction drawn there is the one between a job and work. "A job" is a contract, whether formal or informal, with someone who's agreed to pay you for your labor. "Work" is your labor itself -- the value-added that might or might not get you "a job."

Even if you can't get a job, you can always work. That should go without saying. Yet here I am saying it, in italics, no less, because the distinction has largely been lost.

But could you make your work support you? A good question, especially given the negative evidence of being unable to get a paying job. The answer depends:

1. On what you can do well;
2. On how many others can do it as well;
3. On what you want to charge for your labor;
4. On whether there are customers for it;
5. On any "barriers to entry."

This is Labor Micro-Economics 101. Unless you elect to pursue subsistence farming and can get access to a plot of land on which to do it, you must trade your labor and / or its products for the labor and / or products of others, normally through the intermediation of "a medium of exchange and a store of value" (i.e., money). To do that, you must satisfy all five of the conditions implied above:

1. You must have a capability that's of value to others;
2. You must not be the ten-billionth person to offer that capability in the marketplace;
3. You must not ask $5 million for a glass of fresh lemonade;
4. You must not attempt to sell chocolate-covered cotton;
5. You must be able to defeat or circumvent any obstructions to doing what you do commercially.

Even today, most "unemployed" Americans, whether or not they're counted in the "unemployment rate," can satisfy requirements 1 through 4. It's condition 5 that gives most of us fits.

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Among the foulest of all political conceits is the notion that government can "create jobs." There is no political mechanism by which that can be done. There is no office, high or low, that can put one single American to work. All governments can do is erect barriers to entry:

• Laws against certain types of commerce;
• Taxes that prevent the accumulation of capital to fund new enterprises and initiatives;
• Regulations that hobble "legal" businesses and confer advantages on the largest firms.

Of course, governments can also dismantle barriers to entry, but that's very rare. Those barriers are an important element of the extortionate dynamic of politics; see Peter Schweizer's book Extortion for a comprehensive treatment. Historically in America, barriers to entry have risen steadily, and over an ever widening field of commercial activity. For such a barrier to fall is quite rare, which is why, when a field is deregulated or otherwise freed of some governmentally imposed burden, it always makes headlines and evokes screams of anguish from the established firms it protected.

Barriers to entry are the impetus toward entry into the "underground economy:" the zone of commerce in which taxation, law, and regulation are disregarded. He who "goes underground" must often take substantial risks, especially if his kind of business is high on Washington's target list. In compensation, he can offer his products and services on a laissez faire / caveat emptor basis, in which all that matters is the judgment of the participants to any exchange. Many persons formally "no longer looking for work" have taken that route out of the hunt for above-ground employment.

Estimates of the fraction of the GDP attributable to the underground economy have ranged as high as 30%. Not all of it is due to prostitution and crack.

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His Infallibility, Barack Hussein Obama the First, has promised us "a year of action" on the economy. It's not the first time he's said something like that, of course. Still, every time he makes such a pronouncement I feel a trickle of cold sweat run down my spine. This, I fear, might be the year he actually does something -- and as I said above, governments can erect barriers to entry and nothing else.

Indeed, any politician touting a "jobs creation program" should be treated as the enemy of the economy and of the Constitution. It is neither within their Constitutional authority nor within their practical powers to "create jobs," and after two centuries and more of meddling with our livelihoods we should all know it. Yet the political value of a plausible "jobs bill" seems proof against all logic and hard sense.

It's high time for an awakening. No matter what the specifics of any "jobs bill" might be:

• Bureaucrats will get the jobs;
• Taxpayers will get the bill.

If we can't get them out of our way, let's get ourselves out of their sights.

Next Dem presidential candidate.

When Charles Woods, the father of Tyrone Woods, one of the Navy SEALS who died fighting in Benghazi, met with Hillary Clinton, she assured him that, “We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.” And they got him, officially on charges of violating parole, unofficially on charges of violently offending violent Muslims.

The woman whose policy had overthrown the Libyan government and then placed a barely defended diplomatic facility in the middle of a city of terrorists, did not promise the grieving father that his son’s killers would pay. She promised him that the man who offended his son’s killers would pay.

"The Innocence of Liberals." By Daniel Greenfield, Canada Free Press, 1/10/14.

H/t: "Gates of Vienna."

Lovings And Hatings

Love and hate are two terribly overloaded words. It’s possible to say:

1. I love my wife
2. I love my kids
3. I love my work
4. I love my car
5. I love Bach
6. I love the New York Rangers
7. I love cherry pie

...with some reasonable meaning adducible from each statement, but no use of love being even remotely similar to any other. The same applies to hate:

1. I hate my job
2. I hate my commute
3. I hate the jackass who just cut me off
4. I hate this BLEEP!ing dress code
5. I hate “rap music”
6. I hate the Boston Red Sox
7. I hate broccoli

...as anyone can see.

Yet these are two of the most important words in the lexicon of theology. That their meaning is frequently misconstrued adds to the tragedy. Consider the following Gospel passages:

"'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." [Matthew 22:37-40]

”You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for them that persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” [Matthew 5:43-45]

I tell you the solemn truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains by itself alone. But if it dies, it produces much grain. 12:25 The one who loves his life destroys it, and the one who hates his life in this world guards it for eternal life. [John 12:24-25]

...and also this famous passage from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans:

Owe no one anything, except to love one another, for the one who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, “Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not covet,” (and if there is any other commandment) are summed up in this, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. [Romans 13:8-10]

Clearly, the uses of love in the above passages have no erotic connotation. Neither do they speak of the sort of appetites for pleasures and beauties which we often express as love. (And need it be said, neither do they express a fan’s affinity for a favored team?) The uses of hate are similarly distant from the enumerated uses at the head of this article.

So what do they mean?

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I’m no theologian. I’ve never attended a seminary. I have no qualifications for scriptural exegesis. I’m not even a particularly good person. (“Average” is about the best I can aspire to.) I’m just an old guy who thinks about things. Sometimes I think about matters of faith and the spirit, and one of these little pieces pops out. If they entertain and / or edify you, Gentle Reader, that’s all well and good. However, if you deem them a species of misdirection, obfuscation, or conceit, you’re free to dismiss them unread. That is as it must be.

But I do think about things. I have a particular love of language. I find the little quirks and mysteries that surround the language used in the New Testament particularly fascinating. The Redeemer’s uses of love and hate strike me as critical gates to understanding God’s desires for us in our mortal lives...gates that can be opened by humble reflection, but if viewed arrogantly or uncritically might remain forever closed.

Man is a bifurcated creature, at once the possessor of material and spiritual qualities. If the more important of our two natures is the spiritual side – and really, how could it not be, given that this life is temporary but the life to come is eternal? – then Christ’s uses of emotionally evocative language might best be interpreted as pertaining to the well-being of our souls and our attitudes toward the souls of others. That’s not to say it doesn’t have temporal significance as well, for you cannot split the temporal and material from the spiritual and eternal by any operation of which Man is capable. However, starting from spiritual side in our deliberations might lead to better comprehension of His teachings.

Thus, our question becomes: What might love and hate mean in the spiritual domain? The answer seems fairly obvious (always a red flag that suggests that we think again and harder):

• To “love your neighbor” is to desire that he be admitted to eternal bliss in the next life;
• ...whereas to “hate your enemy” would be to wish damnation – eternal separation from God – upon him.

Those meanings would transcend all other interpretations of the words.

Clearly, we are not commanded to “make love” to our neighbor. Among other things, it would be an exhausting sort of chore. Neither are we commanded to regard his interests in this life as equal in priority to our own. No scheme of economics would be practical under such a requirement. And so on, through the temporal overloadings of the word love. Similarly, few of us have felt the corrosive, all-consuming malevolence toward another person that would make us sincerely want him dead, much less damned. Human uses of the word hate are almost always overstatements of mild to moderate distaste. (Yes, that includes the hatred of broccoli.)

From the spiritual perspective, loving our neighbor seems a much clearer, more achievable goal. Similarly, the injunction against hating our enemies acquires clarity and obvious moral force.

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The brief discussion above is just one of my starting points for exploring the implications of Jesus’s commandments to mortal men. I am persuaded, as a postulate of further considerations, that He meant it when He said “My yoke is easy and my burden is light:”

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” [Matthew 11:28-30]

That, too, has its implications. The Redeemer would not have laid painfully stringent prescriptions or proscriptions upon us if He meant it. I choose to believe that He meant it just as it reads.

May God bless and keep you all.

Assorted

To promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of irritation-free tranquility to our Gentle Readers, your host has endeavored to certify that until absolutely unimpeachable developments should militate to the contrary, all posts at Liberty's Torch shall be 100% Chris Christie and George Washington Bridge Free.

No, no, don't applaud. Just throw money. I'll accept it.

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1. Conversations

We recently had a rather bland Chinese take-out dinner, the greater part of which has languished in our refrigerator these past few days. So:

FWP: Sweetie, what can we do to salvage the Chinese food?
CSO: I'll put some teriyaki sauce on it.

FWP: Oh no! You can't do that!
CSO: Why not?

FWP: Sweetie, teriyaki is a Japanese condiment! You can't put that on Chinese food!
CSO: But why not?

FWP: It would be a war crime!
CSO: Oh. Right. Well, I do have some hoisin sauce.

FWP: Better.

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2. Police Misconduct

There's plenty of it. Some of it is unimaginably violent, which has got quite a lot of us thinking very dark thoughts. But now and then it displays a childishly silly aspect:

Two whose Mercedes as taken for a joyride by cops after they were arrested have caught a huge break in court — thanks to the “shop and frisk” scandal.

A judge will toss evidence in the grand-larceny case against Rashad Lewis and Gregg Humphreys, after ruling police had no right to pull them over in the first place just because they were spotted leaving Barneys with armloads of shopping bags....

In a bizarre twist, two detectives took the Mercedes they were found in for a joy ride.

Records also show police vouchered Lewis’ Mercedes-Benz in “good” condition around the same time on the same night.

If making use of temporarily confiscated cars for pleasure jaunts is considered a "perk" of membership in the Blue Plague, I'd say it ought to be more widely publicized.

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3. "Going Galt," After A Fashion

Tyler Durden of ZeroHedge presents a pair of illuminating charts:

Now, this is unfortunate for the obvious reasons, but it also stimulates thought about one of the inherent vulnerabilities of left-wing pseudo-economics: it erodes the tax base, thereby impoverishing the State. The federal government can, of course, "create money" sufficient to cover its deficits, but the consequences of such deliberate currency degradation cannot be long forestalled. No quantity of fiat dollars can paper over the steady erosion of the national economy.

I would never "root" for economic deterioration...but this is one of the things that topples regimes. It destroyed the French post-Revolutionary government and brought Napoleon to power. It fatally destabilized Germany's Weimar Republic. It helped to end Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government over China. It ejected Juan Peron's fascist regime from power over Argentina. It was critical to the displacement of the Allende regime over Chile by that of Augusto Pinochet. And sufficiently prolonged, it could bring a similar revolution to these United States.

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4. Income Inequality And A Fabulous Pun

The Obamunist pivot to "income inequality" as its rallying cry -- hey, anything's more palatable to the regime than further discussion of ObamaCare, right? -- has already elicited some hollow-laugh rejoinders. The in-your-face opulence of the Obamas' lifestyle as First Couple has been roasted at too many sites to mention. (170 rounds of golf in only five years? There are PGA tour members who don't play that often!) But the very best thing to come out of the flap so far is this admirably concise squib from Doug Ross, highlighted by a terrific pun-moniker for The Won:

• Obama's $4 million Hawaii vacation.
• Michelle's $500k Hawaii extension.
• The multi-million dollar vaycay-cays to Africa
• The Spanish Riviera
• Her brother in Oregon
• Martha's Vineyard
• Broadway plays, playa
• Taxpayer-funded campaign trips on pretty much a weekly basis
• $1,000-a-plate dinners with rich entertainment f***s.
• Eight of the ten wealthiest counties in America surround D.C.

All on King Putt's watch.

Priceless.

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5. First-World Problems

The Lonely Libertarian cites one that afflicts a growing number of...well, of some of us:

Snicker if you must, but this is an issue for women who carry concealed, especially an inner pants or waistband holster. I, my very own self, have clunked my Sig on the potty when lowering my jeans. It's awkward, and there are definitely things you DON'T want to do. Like removing it and setting it on the toilet paper holder or hanging it by the trigger guard on the hook on the back of the door (I know this has happened, not by me).

Well, I can see that this would be an issue in a public restroom. But at home? Why not simply mount a "complimentary convenience holster" on the wall next to the Porcelain Throne? Also, the lady doesn't think "us dudes" suffer the problem in equal measure:

You dudes have it easy, well unless you have to poop, and then you're in the same boat.

Uh, no, dear, we don't "have it easy" -- at least not those of us with certain "old men's problems." But the weaker sex has always entertained certain illusions about "us dudes," for example that our work outside the home is an infinitely fulfilling round of mystical illuminations and clandestine trysts with attractive co-workers that's infinitely preferable to sitting at home eating bon-bons and redoing our nails while Sally Jessy or one of her inheritors babbles from the Idiot Box.

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6. Disallowed By Liberty's Torch Policy

I'm terribly sorry, Gentle Reader. I really really wanted to cite this roundup of under-reported scandals of the Obama Administration and other miscellaneous Democrats, but...well, I can't. You see, it leads off by mentioning He Who Has Already Received More Than Enough Coverage, and the river-spanning structure that's compelled every news organization in the Western Hemisphere to slather him all over its audience. So I just can't.

Endless apologies.

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7. Humor Is Where You Find It

Via Ace of Spades, we have this collection of exceptional test answers. No, they're not correct...strictly speaking, anyway. But they're good for quite a lot of hearty laughs. Enjoy!

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That's all for today, Gentle Reader. Now get out there and have a simply fabulous day. And remember: if you're one of the first hundred callers, we'll double your order! Pay only separate shipping and handling. Sorry, no C.O.D.s.