The Cathedral Versus The Congregation

In any place and time, there will be a dominant set of sociopolitical precepts. Pre-World War I Europe, for example, was largely united under the precepts of patriotic nationalism, Christian ethics, constitutional monarchy, and a nobility inculcated with the constraints and virtues subsumed by noblesse oblige. That the nations of the Old World remained in fierce competition with one another, politically and economically, despite their common precepts arose partly from the precepts themselves, and partly from the nature of Man.

Patriotic nationalism, which implies adamant resistance to ideological and cultural mongrelization, was the critical ingredient in that mix. Consider, for example, Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Stranger," of which the last verse is particularly powerful:

This was my father's belief,
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf--
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

Modern left-liberals view those lines, sneer, and mutter "xenophobia in verse," but then, given what passes for poetry and rational thought about international mobility today, that's all one could expect of a modern left-liberal. Yet during those years after the Congress of Vienna, while the United States was slowly gaining its footing and rising to international significance, Europe was the powerhouse of the world. There were few advances in science, technology, industry, or human thought that originated outside Europe -- and none that Europe failed to adopt and develop further.

Takuan Seiyo's recent essay, which Col. Bunny cites just below, points toward a resurgence of the pre-WWI European attitude toward immigration. The First World nations that have absorbed so many Third Worlders, especially those from Islamic hellholes where preachments of hatred toward Dar al-Harb are impassioned, unceasing, and ubiquitous, have suffered severely thereby. The apostles of Transnational Progressivism are fighting fiercely to tamp down those rising neonationalist sentiments...and losing.

And that is a very good thing.

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Though Baron Bodissey's most recent article casts light upon the phenomenon of neonationalism from a different direction, it illuminates the same ideological contest:

I ran into the Dark Enlightenment a while back, and spent some time poking around among the various sites. Its proponents are also known as “Neoreactionaries”, which is an appealing term in itself. Among their characteristics are a distaste for modern politics and culture, skepticism about democracy, and an affinity for venerable and organically-formed traditions.

The culture they oppose is often labeled “The Cathedral”. It is the behemoth of progressive modernity that compels compliance through both incentives and punishments. On occasion I’ve called the same monster “The Empire”, in sardonic reference to the old Jefferson Airplane song “Greasy Man” ["Greasy Heart," from the Crown Of Creation album -- FWP]....

But whatever name it goes by, it is the trans-national engine of Political Correctness and Multiculturalism. It is lavishly funded, relentlessly promoted, and enforced by coercion when necessary. It is pushed by Western governments, the media, the Academy, major corporations, the central banks, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, the United Nations, and numerous deep-pocketed private foundations. Its primary purpose — sometimes stated clearly but more often covert — is to usher in a New World Order of “global governance”. When that glorious Utopia arrives, only the government and billions of atomized individuals will remain. All other mediating institutions will have been vacuumed up by the omnipotent State.

Meaningful dissent against the Cathedral is not permitted, not even among ostensible “conservatives”. Just ask John Derbyshire. Or Jason Richwine.

The greatest punishments are reserved for any deviation from orthodoxy on race and ethnicity. National Review dutifully excommunicates any race-heretics from its cramped crypt in the cellar of the Cathedral. But other topics are also frowned upon, such as skepticism about global warming. Or home-schooling. Or the gold standard — dissidents on fiat money are laughed out of the nave and down the front steps.

If mockery fails as a deterrent, then more stringent persuasions are brought to bear, running from denial of funding through loss of employment to lawsuits and prosecution. The Cathedral will not be gainsaid.

The Dark Enlightenment fails to heed such strictures, and takes exception to the doctrines of the Cathedral.

Please, please read the whole thing. [Apropos of which, Gates of Vienna has been on my blogroll half of forever for very good reasons. Smart readers will make it part of their daily surf.]

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The paradigm of power that prevailed just after the treaties comprising The Peace of Westphalia was often called the alliance of Throne and Altar. That referred to the scheme called cuius regio eius religio, under which the political sovereign was conceded the privilege of establishing a state-preferred religion. The reverse of that coin was that the religious establishment so favored was obliged -- sometimes compelled -- to function as a timber of support for state policy. The terrible power of such an arrangement -- adding fear of damnation to the range of disincentives for resisting or differing with the State -- was obvious enough to America's Founding Fathers that they explicitly forbade such a thing in the newborn United States.

However, the Founders did not anticipate the rise of an equally pernicious power of a nominally secular sort: the "Cathedral" to which Baron Bodissey refers in the cited article. The clergy of Transnational Progressivists and cultural relativists proclaims a secular gospel more stringent than any previous formulation. It seeks to apply ever stronger measures of discouragement and dissuasion to the rising neonationalism of Americans who cleave to traditional American beliefs and virtues.

Consider this attempt by the Dishonorable Charles Schumer (D, NY) to paint the neonationalism that energizes TEA Party opposition to open borders as racism:

"Yes, things have changed. White Anglo-Saxon men are not exclusively running the country anymore," he said Thursday. "President Obama lost the white male vote 35 to 62 percent yet he recaptured the presidency – by 5 million votes and a resounding electoral college margin."

Schumer said the changing demographics also "[explain] why so many on the right vehemently opposed the Senate immigration bill."

"In a pre-tea party world, the Senate immigration bill would have been welcomed by House Republicans," he said. "However, the tea party rank and file know it's a different America. It looks different; it prays different; it works different. This is unsettling and angering to some."

Schumer's claim contains not one substantiable fact. It's merely a set of allegations about the attitudes of those who disagree with him about "immigration reform" (i.e., amnesty for illegal aliens]. However, we can easily infer Schumer's venom toward his opponents -- and his willingness to descend to any depth to smear us. Nor is he the only prominent politician to say such things.

To these old eyes, it appears that the Throne is eager to promote the Cathedral as the new, unquestionable, unopposable established religion of these United States. Whether it has any prospect of doing so, de jure or de facto, remains to be seen.

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None of the above is news to anyone who pays adequate attention to national politics. What's significant is not some qualitative change in the national discourse, but the rapid intensification of the Cathedral's efforts to suppress all expressions of dissent from its creed. That the effort is failing points not to weakness in its masters' determination nor to any flaw in their tactics, but rather to their inability to get Americans to ignore the reality around them:

• Vanishing entry-level jobs and plummeting wages for them.
• Social fragmentation, especially the proliferation of exclaves.
• Rising crime rates in regions heavily populated by recent immigrants.
• Political pandering toward those immigrants, despite their separatism and particularism.
• Unwillingness of American public institutions to assert American values, norms, or customs.

Reality is the Ace of trumps. Politicians are the only species of creature that denies this. However, they do succeed in roping in those who are easily intimidated by slanders, those without adequate confidence in their own ways, and those who think with their wishes rather than their heads. Apparently, that's a sufficient mass to gain a frightening degree of traction for their mongrelization agenda.

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The game is not yet lost. Other aspects might be, especially in formal politics, but on the subject of Americanism among private Americans, the "Dark Enlightenment," which I think of as the Congregation, has a tactic that's all but invincible: passive noncompliance. Our beloved InstaPundit discourses on two related applications of this idea:

So, despite all the federal laws on the books [i.e., the federal criminalization of marijuana], Colorado has de facto nullified them, and started a process that may very well snowball, all without directly attacking the federal laws, or the federal government, at all. Meanwhile, millions of Americans may be in the process of effectively killing Obamacare simply by staying home.

As we struggle, mostly in vain, to rein in the metastasizing power of a federal government that has grown out of control, perhaps Irish Democracy offers a solution. Sometimes it seems like that's the only kind of democracy that's likely to make a difference.

The only thing the Throne can do with the passively noncompliant in sufficient numbers is kill them...and that tends not to work out for the Throne:

    “Get walking and bring us two full plates.”
    “I won’t,” said Matt, firming his jaw and ignoring the gun.
    Gleed thumbed the safety catch which moved with an audible click.
    “It’s touchy now. It’d go off at a sneeze. Start moving.”
    “I won’t,” insisted Matt.
    Gleed disgustedly shoved the weapon back into his pocket. “I was only kidding you. It isn’t energized.”
    “Wouldn’t have made the slightest difference if it had been,” Matt assured. “I serve no Antigands, and that’s that!”
    “Suppose I’d gone haywire and blown you in half?”
    “How could I have served you then?” he inquired. “A dead person is of no use to anyone. Time you Antigands learned a little logic.”

[Eric Frank Russell, "And Then There Were None"]

Food for thought.

The sappy, contemptible West.

The Strength-in-Diversity meme is based on the dispando ad absurdum principle -- expansion onto the absurd. Because a little diversity is good for you, a 58% majority of sub-90 IQ colonizers from 180 Third World countries is good for you too.^[1]

Contemptible why? Because no border in any Western country is closed to aliens who choose of their own volition to cross it. The official, in-place, fully operative policy of every Western government (with possible slight deviation by Australia?) is to permit unlimited third-world immigration that will result in the racial and cultural extinguishment of their own peoples. And so hideous Islamic culture and law -- the antithesis of everything that the West tried to become -- are inevitable so long as Westerners act like jellyfish where their own legitimate rights are concerned.

Where are the Muslim Nobel prizes, Muslim symphonies, Muslim medical advances, Muslim novels, Muslim films, and Muslim art? What do gypsies have to offer any Western country? What do Nigerians, Jamaicans, and Mexicans have to offer that is of such value that we shower welfare inducements on them and hand out the gift of our precious citizenship like candy on Halloween? Why do we need drug-resistant TB, bedbugs, animal sacrifice, and

Just our own special way of saying, "@#$% you!"

contemptible superstitions? In the U.S., the A#1, official, approved, gold-plated answer -- tirelessly repeated by maroons and liars stretching to the horizon -- is that "We are a nation of immigrants."

And that is why -- notwithstanding the distortion in that statement -- we are hell bent on throwing that nation on the trash heap. If one immigrant is good, then, 1,000,000 new illegal aliens every year to suck up welfare, compete with American workers, and sustain vicious gangs are a blessing from God Himself. Only a tree-dwelling, grub-eating, flea-bitten, deviant, Tea Bagger, gun nut, fundamentalist spawn of Satan would dare say otherwise.

Now, for a reality check, go to China or Japan and tell the governments there that they have a duty to suffering mankind annually to admit 1,000,000 guizi or gaijin. If 1,000,000 would-be aliens set out from their home countries, that by itself establishes their moral right to go to whatever place in the world in which, in their sole discretion, it suits them to live. To wit, your country. They left. The right exists. Chinese and Japanese duty.

Tell that to the Chinese, say. Whatever else they are – corrupt commie bastards itching to take on the American military, for example -- they are not so dumb as to fall for that line of complete @#$$#%$*. But Westerners lap that up like it's free-range ambrosia.

You, the citizen, know that that idea's absurd but the U.S. government will tell you it makes perfect sense. That we are helpless when illegal aliens end up in our midst and that we have no option -- none! -- but to enact Comprehensive Amnesty Reform. And Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, John McCain, Jeb Bush, John Boehner, and Bob Goodlatte will positively wet their pants to be the first to tell you to your face.

Notes
^[1] "The Bee and the Lamb (Part 1)." By Takuan Seiyo, New English Review, 11/11.

On Privacy

I hadn't intended to write about this, but it seems to have risen to the top of the public agenda.

The activities of the NSA aren't the only things that have privacy-rights advocates' hair standing on end. The recent, extremely disturbing case of the harassment of John Filippidis by Maryland police must concern any Second Amendment aficionado. And Peter Grant notes that there are private firms collecting and aggregating publicly available data on Americans to sell as a marketing tool. All in all, it's a bad time to be a devotee of peace, quiet, and personal privacy.

The problem isn't that these things are illegal, but that they're not. Worse, in the case of the private marketing companies, no imaginable law could correct the problem without utterly destroying what remains of freedom in these United States.

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We release information about ourselves into the public domain with every step we take.

Smith, walking on a public street, is broadcasting his whereabouts to anyone who cares to take note. Should he enter a shop for a commercial transaction, anyone who recognizes him can quite legally record what he's purchased, and when, and from whom. (We don't need to discuss Smith's use of a credit card, do we?) If he gets into a vehicle and drives away, the make and model of the vehicle, its license plate, and its direction and speed are all easily determined. Plausible inferences about where he's going and when he'll get there are easy to draw.

Smith's interactions with regulated utilities and "common carriers" are recorded as a matter of course. They must be, both by law and for routine purposes of billing and maintenance. That includes gas companies, electric power companies, telephone companies, Internet service providers, and in many locales a number of other firms. Such companies must comply to retain some critical legal privilege, for example the privilege of stringing wires along public roads that nevertheless remain their property.

Then there are Smith's interactions with governments and governmental bodies. Every time he pays a tax bill, or uses a public library, or communicates with any person who works for a government in any capacity, he cedes information about himself and his activities into the public domain. Very few such interactions are governed by a statute. In some cases, the publication of the resulting information is required by law: for example, the ownership data, lien status, and tax data about a parcel of land.

Unless Smith resolves to remain behind his own locked front door, never communicating nor interacting with anyone else in any way, he can do nothing about this.

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I wrote at Eternity Road, nine years ago:

What is privacy? An informal definition would be the privilege of "keeping yourself to yourself": that is, restricting others' access to you, to your property, and to information about those things to only those whom you approved. But access to you and your property is covered by another, better grounded right: the right of a legitimate owner to the control and disposition of his property. It's the informational component of the privacy claim that causes the problems.

If there's something about you that you don't want known, and you have a "right" to control the dissemination of that information, how do you exercise your "right" once someone has learned the critical fact? Murder? Lobotomy? Hypnosis? A voodoo curse? If you elect to have an interaction with some other person, and he refuses to agree to keep silent about it, how would you enforce your "right" to privacy and still have the interaction?

As your Curmudgeon has previously written, rights are those claims that can be simultaneously asserted without generating clashes that can only be resolved by a recourse to force (the "test of arms"). As we can see, privacy claims don't satisfy that criterion.

Those observations and inferences remain as valid as they were in 2004.

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It's ridiculous to blather about whether this is good or bad. It simply is. There's nothing to be done about it. The measures individuals can take to limit their exposure are relatively few:

• Pay cash at all times.
• Don't buy real estate.
• Don't have children.
• Stay out of the hospital.
• Communicate face-to-face only.
• Be discreet about your relationships.
• For the love of God, don't apply for a license for anything!
• Stay home as much as possible.
• If you must go out, walk.
• Cultivate taciturnity.

Those are very severe restrictions, particularly in this age of the Internet. Most Americans could go no more than five minutes without violating one of them.

Don't imagine for a moment that laws could do anything for you beyond what you can do for yourself. Private companies are already subject to the weight of the law, and the law often mandates the very activities privacy-seekers deplore, for reasons that are persuasive if not conclusive. Governments? Please, I've already hurt myself once this week from laughing too hard.

The value of studiously collected information, meticulously organized for aggregation and reference, has simply grown too large for any force to countervail it.

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As I've already said, it doesn't matter whether you regard this as good or bad. You can do no more about it than you can about the strong nuclear force...assuming you don't own a really big collider, and that, my friend, would put you on one hell of a lot of lists. These are the times we live in. If they try men's souls, well, men's souls exist to be tried, among other things. In earlier, less technologically ramified eras, the trials were simpler and more visible. We who appreciate electronic communication, automobiles, and indoor plumbing wouldn't much enjoy those times.

Making one's peace with it is, to some extent, the only way forward.

Our debt to Christianity.

Only in the last hundred years have scholars come to realize the true and immense impact of the monastic orders, particularly the Benedictines, upon the development of European civilization. It has been noted by more than one writer that one can scarcely find a single endeavor in the advancement of civilization during Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in which the monks did not play a central role. It is well-known, of course, that they preserved the literary inheritance of the ancient world (much more completely, in fact, than was previously realized), yet they did much more. According to one scholar, they gave “the whole of Europe … a network of model factories, centers for breeding livestock, centers of scholarship, spiritual fervor, the art of living … readiness for social action – in a word … advanced civilization that emerged from the chaotic waves of surrounding barbarity. Without any doubt, Saint Benedict was the Father of Europe. The Benedictines,

Tintern Abbey

his children, were the Fathers of European civilization.”(Reginald Gregoire, Leo Moulin, and Raymond Oursel, The Monastic Realm, Rizzoli, New York, 1985, p. 277.)

We could fill volumes enumerating the achievements of the Benedictines. . . .

By the end of the tenth century we find that monasteries all over Europe were in possession of enormous libraries stacked with the works of the classical authors, and that knowledge of Greek and even Hebrew was widespread. This is important, because it illustrates the continuity between this period and the world of Late Antiquity, and calls into serious question the entire concept of the Dark Age. It shows too that Christian Europe did not need to depend upon other societies and cultures (such as the Islamic) to reacquaint it with letters. . . .

* * * *

The evidence then, taken together, would seem to show that Christianity had an enormous transformative and revitalizing power. As explain in my new book, The Impact of Islam, the opposite is true of that religious tradition.^[1]

However, in true post-modern fashion, some stunted and benighted souls can only get "patriarchy" and "control of our bodies" out of this.

Epic fail that, but it proceeds apace even as we speak. Tip of the spear thinking in our unmajestic time.

Notes
^[1] "How Christianity Civilized Barbarian Europe in Just One Hundred Years." By Emmet Scott, New English Review, 1/14. See also Paul Austin Murphy on the thinness of Islamic "science" and "philosophy." Some "debt" we owe Muslims.

Scattered Thoughts

Hey, it's been a scattered week. This is just the finishing stroke.

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The combined Cuomo / De Blasio / Schumer anti-conservative rants of the past few days have apparently galvanized a backlash against those...persons. Inasmuch as they're a trio of conceited, power-mad assholes, they're unlikely to back away from their statements. That's actually a good thing: now they know that they're being very closely watched. The evidence already available that they "meant it" won't need a lot of augmentation to spur a general revolt.

Got your rope ready and your lamppost picked out?

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People have been emailing me for several days now, pleading with me to leave New York "before they get you, Fran." Thank you, my distant friends. I'm more flattered than I can say. Who am I, to be the focus of so many people's worries? But on the larger subject: yes, smart people are either leaving the deep-blue states for more hospitable climes or are making plans to do so as soon as it becomes practical. The political elites in those states are going to reap the whirlwind in short order.

Myself, I'm looking at a particularly attractive district in Panama.

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A recent post at NC Renegade warmed the cockles of my spiny little heart:

Def: Anarchy: a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority (1)

Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies…
Rivers and seas boiling …
Forty years of darkness !
Earthquakes, volcanoes …
The dead rising from the grave !
Human sacrifice,
Dogs and cats living together …
Mass hysteria. (2)

That is what many people envision when they hear the word Anarchy; but not all people …

Please read the whole thing, including the citations at the end. Generally, when I'm cited as an authority, it's for my work in real-time software engineering, so this is rather unusual.

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Sales of Freedom's Fury have been slow so far. It could use more promotion than the little I'm able to give it. (Hint, hint!) Even so, an old sin has come back to haunt me: the short story "The Last Ambassadors," which I wrote well before I finished Which Art In Hope. Those who've read and enjoyed the latest Spooner Federation novel, which I'd intended to be the conclusion of that story arc, are displeased that I didn't fold in Althea's journey to Earth, which was the original point of her drive to become a starfarer. And so, the demands are mounting for a fourth novel in that series. Trilogies with fourth segments have a certain charm -- Douglas Adams, call your office! -- but other readers are demanding other books as well, most especially a novel founded on "The Warm Lands." Please bear with me; I'm writing as fast as I can.

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Apropos of nothing, if you have a taste for fortified wines, I can heartily recommend Sandeman's Tawny Port. I recently encountered the "down-market" edition -- about $18 for a 750 milliliter bottle -- and I find it very much to my liking. However, for those of you with deep pockets, there's also a 20-year-reserve variety. I'm unsure my plebeian palate could tell the difference, but I haven't yet had the opportunity to test it.

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Metro New York is once again caught in a "polar vortex," with the accompanying low temperatures and gusty winds. A couple of my neighbors have discovered first-hand, through burst pipes, dead car batteries, and close brushes with frostbite, that those ten or fifteen degrees' difference between our usual winter temperatures and our current ones really do matter. For my part, I've been staying out of the weather as much as possible, but it's intensified my desire to relocate to some warmer part of the world. (See above)

It's a good idea to keep close to those you love during severe weather -- and I don't mean just to share body heat. As I've written about living patterns in continental New York, there are lessons about that sort of winter weather we downstate types could stand to learn:

    January was harsh; February was harsher still. The snow flew continuously, on bitter, piercing winds propelled by the inexhaustible energies of the Great Lakes. Temperatures dropped to record or near-record lows several times. Blocked roads were more common than open ones. Power outages were frequent. Central New Yorkers endured it as they'd done for ages: husbanding their energies, traveling little, planning few ventures, and keeping their loved ones within eyeshot whenever they could.
    It was a way of enduring winter the Cro-Magnons would have recognized, apart from the lack of caves.

[From On Broken Wings]

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I have an unusually busy day before me, so I'll close here. I'll be back to the political blather tomorrow...or maybe Monday. Stay warm, stay dry, and stay safe.

All my best,
Fran

Heartless Republican scum.

It was 16 years ago when CFTC Chairwoman Brooksley Born warned about the dangers of unregulated, opaque derivatives and fought a brutal and lonely battle against the largest banks. Her goal was to do nothing more than have access to information, to study the depth of the risk exposure . . . . Ms. Born lost this principled battle. Time tested protections of regulated derivatives management that had served the country so well for more than 70 years . . . were dismantled when US President Bill Clinton signed into law the Commodity Modernization Act of 2000.

* * * *

These new “laws” did not establish any new guidance but only served the purpose of unwinding previous laws. A key result was allowing the largest banks to literally operate without restriction or supervision. . . . The groundwork laid in the mid and late 1990s to let the banks write derivative insurance contracts without restriction or oversight [manifested] itself in 2007 and 2008 as the unregulated derivatives collapsed the world economy, which has yet to properly recover.

This would be the "Republican" deregulation of financial markets that leftists love to crow about.

I salute Brooksley Born, someone who showed integrity.

Notes
^[1] "At Davos: Paul Singer To Warn Of Derivatives Catastrophe." By Mark Melin, ValueWalk, 1/17/14.

Like OJ's quest.

Simply superb commentary:

"Hollywood’s Muslim Lies." By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Mag, 1/24/14.

Writing On The Wall Dept.

"If you're not yet paranoid, you haven't been paying attention." -- Originator unknown

No scrying is necessary to discern the pattern in these stories:

• New York State is attacking conservative activist James O'Keefe
• The IRS is going after the Friends Of Abe
• Conservative author and producer Dinesh D'Souza indicted for campaign finance violations
• Chuck Schumer wants to silence the TEA Party
• "John Doe" subpoenas and gag orders ruled abusive in Wisconsin
• Bill De Blasio left the Upper East Side snowbound on purpose
• De Blasio echoes Andrew Cuomo's "get out" message to conservatives

Do they make a pattern to you, Gentle Reader?

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"The State...is merely an organized band of predators with a veneer of legitimacy derived either from tradition or from a manufactured appearance of the consent of its subjects." -- Which Art In Hope

Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they have been resisted with either words or blows, or with both. -- Frederic Douglass

The Founding Fathers, as is well known to anyone educated before 1970, distrusted democracy as they understood it: unrestricted majority rule. They saw it as the source of innumerable evils, especially the "tyranny of the majority:" the use of a preponderance in numbers to deprive those in the minority of their rights, especially their rights to their honestly acquired property. The structure they gave the Republic in the Constitution was intended to dilute the power inherent in a majority, that sober reflection and respect for rights might prevail over the passions that can arise from anger and avarice.

Unfortunately, they didn't address a related problem: the tyrannous impulses that can animate a faction which, though it has lost majority support, is still in power and intends to remain there indefinitely.

The United States has apparently had enough of Barack Hussein Obama and his sort. His legislative agenda has frozen solid, and will probably remain so. His foreign-policy stance has been revealed as a fatuous failure, a triumph of wishes over objectivity. His approval / disapproval ratings are at historic lows for a president at this point in an eight-year tenure. The term "lame duck" applies well to him, despite the ten months yet to elapse before the midterm elections.

But Obama doesn't like being balked. There's that "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone" stuff to think about. He's likely to try a lot of rule-by-decree. Republicans on Capitol Hill and nominal conservatives on the Supreme Court appear disinclined to take exception.

To make government-by-ukase work, Obama and his allies, of which there are many at both the federal and the state levels, must suppress dissent and intimidate opponents. The stories linked in the previous section provide examples of the suppressive tactics that have already been put in play. No doubt there are others yet to be deployed.

I see a tyranny of the minority taking shape. No matter how I squint, I find it difficult to see anything else. A tyranny of that sort is unstable. Under the pressure of the dynamic of power-seeking and the swelling resentments of the oppressed, it will devolve into either a self-perpetuating oligarchy or a violent revolution. Sometimes the former outcome is only a precursor to the latter.

How are your civil-disorder and economic-upheaval preparations looking just now?

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"When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by different workmen...and when we see those timbers joined together, and see that they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few...in such a case we find it impossible not to believe that...all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft, drawn up before the first blow was struck."— Abraham Lincoln, deducing from objective evidence the blueprint of a political plot to save the institution of slavery. [From Garet Garrett's essay "The Revolution Was"]

When the writing on the wall is as bold and unambiguous as it's become in recent weeks, there's little excuse for not bracing oneself against what's likely to come. The minority in power won't give up easily. Adverse action by Congress won't daunt it. Adverse rulings from federal courts won't dissuade it. Massive public demonstrations are more likely than not merely to harden its resolve and intensify its suppressive measures.

Historically, a regime bent upon securing its power in perpetuity would mount an initiative to disarm and disperse its subjects, in the name of "public safety." Confiscation of privately owned firearms on any quasi-plausible pretext. Heavily armed and armored patrols on city streets. Curfews and ordinances against unlicensed public gatherings of more than a handful of persons. You know, the way the Feds guaranteed the safety of Bostonians.

The window of opportunity in which Americans could still defang our vampiric overlords is steadily closing. If we repose our hopes in the midterm elections, it's likely to slam shut on our fingers. Remember how adept the Left is at electoral fraud and voter intimidation.

Read Clark's article at Popehat one more time. Ponder his assessment of our circumstances, and his diagnosis of the "connected / not connected" divide. You don't have to endorse the remedy he advocates. Can anyone sincerely believe, given all that's transpired and all that impends, that "the system" as it stands can be reformed by written criticism, public protests, and elections?

But if not those things, then what? The minoritarians who ride roughshod over us control all the most intimidating mechanisms and instruments of force. Absent a nationwide uprising, forcibly evicting them from their perches seems next to impossible -- and revolution is a dangerous game; it nearly always eventuates in more oppression, not less, albeit at the hands of a different set of masters.

The regime atop the Soviet Union fell because it had lost confidence in itself. Accordingly, the Russians were able to displace that tyranny without a great deal of bloodshed; their former masters were half-relieved at no longer having the responsibility for correcting the debacle the USSR's economy had become. Do we have any comparable prospect?

Please forgive me if I've frightened you, Gentle Reader. Fear is contagious, and this morning I find that I'm rather frightened myself.

Turning point.

An unmistakable rejection of the past two thousand years is visible everywhere.

"An air of revolution ." By Tiberge, GalliaWatch, 1/23/14.

Life, Humanity, Freedom Of Speech, And Other Matters Of Little Or No Importance

Yes, there are still a few differences between the Democrat and the Republican Parties. To the Democrats, abortion is "health care:"

Thousands of pro-life activists donned scarves, gloves and knit hats Wednesday to brave the blowing snow and arctic temperatures on the Mall as the 41st March for Life was punctuated by an unusually blunt exchange between the Republican and Democratic Party leaders that signaled a shifting fight for female voters.

Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz opened the barrage, accusing her GOP counterpart, Reince Priebus, of rallying “against women’s rights” and assailing Republicans for spending “more time fighting to restrict the rights of women to make their own health care choices.”

Moreover, they don't want to hear any backtalk:

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.

And:

Today, as we reflect on the 41st anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, we recommit ourselves to the decision’s guiding principle: that every woman should be able to make her own choices about her body and her health. We reaffirm our steadfast commitment to protecting a woman’s access to safe, affordable health care and her constitutional right to privacy, including the right to reproductive freedom. And we resolve to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies, support maternal and child health, and continue to build safe and healthy communities for all our children. Because this is a country where everyone deserves the same freedom and opportunities to fulfill their dreams. [ Barack Hussein Obama ]

Abortion is "health care?" Really? "For whom?" I hear you ask. Certainly not for the baby whose life is about to be snuffed out. It's pretty dubious for the unwilling mother-to-be, too; a great many such live with negative consequences, physical, emotional, or both, for the rest of their lives. To a non-Democrat, the matter admits of deeper, more compassionate consideration:

With a message coordinated with the march, Mr. Priebus and his Republican charges shot back at the Democratic efforts to paint the GOP as extreme and unfriendly to women.

“I attended the March for Life to show both my personal and the Republican Party’s respect for life and to celebrate adoption,” Mr. Priebus told The Washington Times. “As a party, we believe life is a gift worth protecting, and the march is an important cause.”

As it happens, the March was well attended despite the snow, the bitter cold, and the disapproval of the Left:

Last year's March was estimated at 500,000 attendees. I haven't yet located an estimate of yesterday's attendance, but it seems certain to have reached six figures, at least.

Did tens of thousands of Americans, many of them young women, brave extreme weather to demonstrate "against women's rights?" Are they really opposed to "health care?" Or is something else in progress that the Democrats and their handmaidens in the Main Stream Media would prefer not to discuss?

A good question.

---

T. L. Davis has been knocking them out of the park lately. Yesterday's emission was no exception:

The Marxist obsession with death is striking. There is a blood lust to it. When they describe it, it is always as some form of ultimate good. Whether in the form of euthanasia, or abortion, or Obamacare death panels, they are always getting rid of those that don't fit into their humanistic, Godless society.

It is social planning that ultimately puts the figurative gun to the head of millions of citizens. We have all seen the pictures of the holocaust. The Jews were "wrecking" the ability of Germany to economically recover from World War I. The political opponents of Stalin were "wrecking" the benefits of communism by failing to produce enough for the people. Obamacare will eventually find that old people "selfishly" requiring too many services and not contributing to the treasury will be "wrecking" the health care system. Marxism always comes with an enemy, even when those enemies are as inoffensive as unborn children, the mentally handicapped or the elderly.

The underlying sense of it all is that being human is subjective with bureaucrats making the distinction. The most important aspect of Marxism is the bureaucracy for this very reason. There are accounts of the average Russian believing that if "Stalin knew what was going on, he would be furious and put a stop to it." Stalin depended on the bureaucracy to protect his narcissistic image. Sound familiar?

There is no conceptual or ethical space between what Davis refers to as "Marxists" and those aligned with the American Left. To a leftist, all subjects, including the most private and intimate, are political: "The personal is political" is their slogan, after all. That includes mammalian taxonomy: a human life is what they say it is.

It has to be that way for them to carry out their program:

Bone marrow stem cell transplants save the lives of thousands each year and have been performed for more than four decades. The medical therapies developed from stem cell research (SCR) have produced successful results far beyond our expectations.

With all this scientific success and with more than 15,000 patients benefiting from SCR each year, why are some people apoplectic? The answer is both simple and perplexing. The scientific breakthroughs and the medical therapies have all come from adult stem cells and none as yet have come from embryonic stem cells. Rather than welcoming the results and pursuing support for what works, there are paradoxically increasing demands for the recognition and funding of embryonic SCR.

A dangerous combination of political and social ideology is determined to make embryonic SCR succeed. The problem is an apparent obsession with destroying human life to provide medical therapies. Looking from the outside, one might imagine that embryonic SCR supporters are advocating a pagan ritual of human sacrifice to treat disease?

[...snip...]

As Lynde Langdon reported in "Miracle cells" (World, February 5, 2005):

The National Institutes of Health has shunned her grant applications three times. In one grant review, a fellow scientist commented that her stem cells come from tissue inside umbilical cords, not days-old embryos. ‘We already have a good source of stem cells,’ the grant reviewer wrote, ‘Why do we need another?'

Ms. Langdon further writes:

The NIH . . . has funded only 30 projects involving stem cells from umbilical cords. In contrast, it has funded 634 projects involving embryonic stem cells.

As I wrote at Eternity Road nine years ago:

The "why" of it is simple enough. It's an item on a checklist:

• Abortion without restrictions.
• Assisted suicide.
• Involuntary euthanasia of those deemed untreatable or having "no quality of life."
• Compulsory surrender of the organs of the deceased for transplantation.
• Creation of embryos for research and therapeutic purposes.
• Government-enforced "triage" to conserve medical and financial resources.
• Compulsory acceptance of specified therapies.
• Procreation licenses.
• Government eugenics programs:
  • At first, as subsidies to couples with favored genetic characteristics;
  • Later, as compulsory donations of gametes for use in government-supervised breeding programs.
• Conscription for military purposes.
• Conscription for non-military purposes.

The overarching theme of all these measures, about half of which are already in place in various Western countries, is that human life has no intrinsic value and bears no intrinsic rights. By corollary, the individual's life does not belong to him, but to the State. The deliberate creation of human embryos in government-funded research centers, despite the revulsion it evokes from more than half the population of this country, is directly in line with this campaign. It's apparently the number-one goal of the pro-death forces at this time, despite lack of any indication of scientific or medical utility.

If we are the property of the State, then we have no rights of any kind. Property cannot have rights, for the quintessential characteristic of an item of property is its owner's right to dispose of it however he pleases. That includes the right to destroy it.

Think about it.

---

Despite the Main Stream Media's determination to suppress the trend, the American people are steadily trending toward the legal restriction of abortion. It would appear that the Left's attempt to conflate abortion with "health care" has run out of gas. Demographic factors might play a significant role: pro-life women out-reproduce pro-choice women by a considerable margin. Also, the country is aging, and people do become more conservative as they age. But there's also a moral awakening in progress: a slow but steady return to what the Left would call "reactionary values," including the valuation of human life as a sacred gift.

There's only one way the Left can counter such trends: they must be shouted down, vilified, and made to seem the attitudes of monsters. Indeed, they must be denied the right to speak at all. Here's the Left's gospel on the subject, from Herbert Marcuse himself:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: ... it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word....

Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and 'philosophies' can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the 'marketplace of ideas' is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the 'end of ideology', the false consciousness has become the general consciousness--from the government down to its last objects. The small and powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which grant constitutional powers to those who oppress these minorities....

[1968 Postscript:] As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for 'the other side', I maintain that there are issues where either there is no 'other side' in any more than a formalistic sense, or where 'the other side' is demonstrably 'regressive' and impedes possible improvement of the human condition.

The above was written in 1965 and 1968. Dismiss it if you please. I cannot.

Kleptocracy.

The leadership in China has managed to create a propaganda bubble of epic proportions: Chinese leaders are supposed to have a long-term view that puts the West to shame.

Alas, the secret view of China's leadership is considerably shorter-term: U.S. dollars in Swiss bank accounts, real estate in Vancouver, San Francisco, New York City, London, Geneva, etc. and whatever other assets can be scooped up with looted billions.

Corruption isn't just abstract: Much of China's building boom will not last a generation, much less a long-term timeline. This toppled tower is an apt metaphor for China's financialized crony-capitalist credit bubble and its shoddy corruption-riddled construction: [photo of tall apartment building that has fallen on its side].

All this, mind you, from communists whose predecessors killed millions telling us everything they did was for the people, the people.

Until recent years, wasn't our own country relatively free of this kind of corruption? Wasn't there something in our basic moral structure that at least kept this sort of skimming down to a dull roar? I dunno. LBJ entered Congress a man of modest means, did he not? Yet he became rich in Washington. Not on his salary, you can be sure. Harry Reid apparently acquired property in Nevada, transferred it to a silent partner, and then got legislation passed that increased the value of that property, at least according to the Rush Limbaugh gag commercial. Hillary made something like $99,000 out of an initial $1,000 trading commodities and magically managed to time some of her trades at within in millimeters of the top or the bottom of the day's trading.

Corruption will always be with us wherever there are government favors to be given out, and the more laws and regulations that restrict business the higher the price that business will pay for special legislative treatment. Still, things seemed more regular here in the U.S. In legal practice, I found the courts to be fair and the judges attentive to the requirements of the law. They were class acts, though one did cause some amusement one day when his toupee threatened to become airborne when the A/C blew across it. Still a good guy, natch. I can't imagine any of them being on the take.

I still think there's something there. Something in the remnant of the culture. The numbers of people living off the taxpayers' dime portends something bad, however. That's a different type of corruption we've seen since the New Deal struck a match to that tinder.

"Two Powder Kegs Ready to Blow: China & India." By Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds, 1/23/14.

So there.

There are two indisputable facts that cannot be forgotten. 1. We are ruled by a remote, arrogant and interchangeable political caste who do not properly represent us and who act in ways that run contrary to the best interests of the indigenous population. So yes, democracy is failing. 2. Mass immigration and multiculturalism have been hugely disruptive and destabilizing to our society and the notion that the indigenous British population has gained anything positive from having mass immigration from the 3rd world imposed on them is utterly absurd; and only the most deluded and intellectually dishonest ideologues would claim otherwise. It is not hateful or stupid to oppose mass immigration and multiculturalism, it is self-loathing, short-sighted and self-destructive to be in favour of them. No amount of sententious, intellectually dishonest bleating about ‘cultural enrichment’ will change that.

Jack Smith comment on "The 'neo-fascist' Dark Enlightenment is more sad than scary." By Tim Stanley, The Telegraph, 1/22/14.

H/t: Gates of Vienna..

Operation Bernanke.

The average American consumer met their Waterloo in 2008. Bernanke’s mission was to save bankers, billionaires and politicians. . . .

Bernanke and his financial elite owners have been able to rig the markets to give the appearance of normalcy, but they cannot rig the demographic time bomb that will cause the death and destruction of our illusory retail paradigm. . . .

* * * *

. . . The debt fueled orgy has run out of steam. All that is left is the largest mountain of debt in human history, a gutted and debt laden former middle class, and thousands of empty stores in future decaying ghost malls haunting the highways and byways of suburbia.

The implications of this long and winding road to ruin are far reaching. Store closings so far have only been a ripple compared to the tsunami coming to right size the industry for a future of declining spending. . . . Real estate developers will be going belly-up and the banking sector will be taking huge losses again. I’m sure the remaining taxpayers will gladly bailout Wall Street again.^[1]

And don't forget inflation-as-government theft policies have diminished the value of liquid assets at all times post-1913^[2] and continue to do so now at a rate that fedgov will not honestly report. Plus, extremely low interest rates have driven money out of savings accounts into the stock market, creating a government-induced bubble which will crash eventually, as all bubbles do. That would be bad in a strong economy, which ours isn't.

Therefore, large non-Wall Street investor losses on top of large-scale evaporation of retail economy and supporting elements are in our future. But Obama still talks about our "recovery" and we must conclude either this is what he and his superiors intend or they are in serious denial. (Cue Pee Wee Herman^[3] with fingers in ears saying, "La la la la la.")

Notes
^[1] "The Retail Death Rattle." By Jim Kunstler, The Burning Platform, 1/19/14.
^[2] One 1913 dollar is now worth five cents.
^[3] One of the greats.

Snow Day

It is 4:00 AM. The silence is perfect. I lie absolutely still in my bed, savoring it.

There are no cars rushing by. No stirring sounds of the neighborhood reluctantly wrenching itself awake. No bustle of any sort. Even my dogs seem mesmerized by the stillness of the morning. When the hum of the furnace sounds from my basement, it seems a profanation, a defilement of something too rare to be other than sacred.

I rise, don robe and slippers, and shuffle out to confront the morning.

Snow has blanketed all I can see. Mechanized movement is impossible. No business will be transacted today. Ambition and consumption have been put on hold. Long Island is closed.

I smile.

---

Days such as this are reminders of many things, and spurs to many more. No, I'm not talking about shovels, snowblowers, or nitroglycerin pills. Nature's enforcement of stillness rewrites our agendas. It compels us to revisit our priorities, if only briefly, and write postponed against the ones that usually stand at the top of the list. We take time for the "lesser" things, the rei domesticae that usually languish in preference for motion and action. We resurrect older patterns of life, with their lowered tempi of obligations and pleasures.

We can relax. Our habitual frenzies have been taken from us by force. We luxuriate in the suspension of our urgencies and the agita from them. There need be no guilt about it, for we have no choice.

We need days like this one.

---

The C.S.O. will be up soon. I know exactly what she'll do, after two cups of coffee and a quick review of the major news sites: She'll bake. Snow days send her to the oven as reliably as the salt-spreaders to the roads. When the house has filled up with cookies, cupcakes, and assorted pastries whose names I can never remember -- sorry, Yiddish isn't one of my competences -- she'll put on her snow boots and march up and down the block offering her creations to our neighbors.

Rufus and Sophie will spend much of the day romping around in the snow, and most of the rest of it being toweled off. Our cats will watch them from respectable indoor comfort.

I'll write and think. I'll "putter," casting about in leisurely fashion for the little jobs I too frequently walk past with a grimace and a grumble of "maybe later." Later on I'll build a fire and set up the potpourri crocks. I'll indulge in a few long thoughts, the sort that are inherently unfinished. I'll enjoy a little of that guilt-free relaxation, perhaps to an accompaniment of Schubert and Sandeman's Tawny Port.

And I'll smile.

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow.

Stereotypes.

Stereotypes don't arise from nothing at all, and they're unfair only to the exceptions . . . .

Uncle Remus, Yer Ol’ Woodpile Report, 1/13/14.

The Age of the Dummy.

In Book 4 of the "Politics, [Aristotle] lays it down that of "the diverging systems of government" (parekbasis), tyranny is the worst, oligarchy is somewhat better, and democracy is the most moderate or least worst. Regrettably, as our low-and-no information voters, subject to the extremophiles who dominate the culture, make alarmingly clear, democracy is no panacea. As James Lewis wryly puts it apropos the Progressivist power complex and its deluded victims, "Great power goes together with great stupidity." Later historians, if there are any, will probably describe the years we are living through now as the Age of the Dummy -- indeed, an age that has spawned those aptly named books "for Dummies," an era facile, ludicrous, puerile and moronic.

. . . The consequence of collective stupidity that causes political, social and economic collapse may be not reconstruction but archeology.

"The Reign of Collective Stupidity." By David Solway, American Thinker, 1/18/14.

The liberal as perpetual adolescent.

The failure of this country's foundational documents are not in their guarantee of rights and in their attempt to limit government, but in the presumption that citizens will always understand that rights have limits, carry responsibilities and that we must be held accountable for the free exercise of those rights. Liberalism is all about personal rights without responsibility, limits or accountability, in other word, perpetual adolescence as a political philosophy.

AndrewO comment on The Reign of Collective Stupidity." By David Solway, American Thinker, 1/18/14.

The accelerating regression to the norm.

The greatest minds such as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Montesquieu and Jefferson understood that man is evil and corrupt. Nowhere in history have we seen this Utopia that the socialist promote. Instead, Sparta and Athens destroyed each other through war, Alexander the Great and later the Romans enslaved and parts of Europe, Asia and the Middle East, European Kings and religious wars plagued Europe, the British Empire controlled much of the world and socialist have wrought death and misery on the USSR, Nazi Germany and Mao's China to today's North Korea.

The average moron on the street throughout history and today do not vote or promote fairness and virtue but instead steal and enslave one another for their own profit. All one need do is listen to barry or any of his hateful, malicious and envious followers and one instinctively knows that they are evil.

American Exceptionalism lasted in few places and for perhaps a century-and-a-half as Mises and Hayek discuss as classical liberalism. The bad news is that misery and poverty can prevail simply by the fundamental transformation of the liberty and prosperity to the historical norm of tyranny and slavery.

VonMisesJr comment on internet posting whose name and URL are lost in the mists of time.

Can't rush these things.

I read Diana West's book. It was a very interesting read and since then I have been reading about the history of the take over of Eastern Europe and of the Berlin Wall and of other related matters.

It is just fascinating that we see so little talk in popular history about communism. It was the struggle of almost half a century and yet almost nothing is said about it.

Tearlach61 comment on "'McCarthyism' by the Numbers." By M. Stanton Evans, Breitbart.com, 1/21/14.

Exclaves

[This disturbing piece from Daniel Greenfield has prompted me to repost the following, which first appeared at Eternity Road on March 15, 2006 -- FWP]

---

Your Curmudgeon has occasionally referred to tight-knit Islamic communities in majority non-Islamic nations as enclaves. This is in keeping with the dictionary definition of an enclave: an enclosed territory that is culturally distinct from the territory that surrounds it. But it might be self-deluding to do so -- not because those Islamic communities are anything but tight-knit and culturally distinct from non-Muslim neighborhoods, but because their full significance might go beyond the connotations of that term.

Chinatowns and Little Italys are typical enclaves in these United States. Such a district has a pronounced cultural flavor, evidenced in such things as restaurants and languages heard on the street, but the residents' attachment to their culture doesn't extend into the political realm. They have no interest in replicating the laws and political structures of China or Italy here in America. Culturally they're Chinese or Italian, but politically they're Americans. They'll happily tell you so.

Hearken to Robert Spencer's report on a conversation he had with an official from the Dutch Ministry of Integration:

Blakeman introduced me to an official of the Dutch Ministry of Integration, who spends her days in dialogue with Dutch imams and other Muslim leaders. We began a wide-ranging discussion about the nature of the jihad threat and the proper response to it. In the course of this I asked her how many Muslim leaders she encountered who were ready to lay aside attachment to the Sharia, accept the Dutch governmental and societal structure and the parameters of Dutch pluralism, and be willing to live in Dutch society as equals to, not superiors of, non-Muslims indefinitely. She told me that there were only very few, but insisted that we had to work with those few, and indeed had to place our faith and hope in them, for otherwise the future was impossibly bleak. I asked her if she had read the Qur’an. She told me no, she hadn’t, and wouldn’t, because she didn’t want to lose all hope -- and because whatever was in it, she still had to work to find some accord with the Muslim leaders, no matter what.

I urged her to ask the imams with whom she spoke questions that made their loyalties clear, insofar as they would answer them honestly. I urged her to ask them whether they would like to see Sharia implemented in the Netherlands at any time in the future, and whether they were working toward that end in any way, peaceful as well as violent. I asked her to ask them whether they would be content to live as equals with non-Muslims indefinitely in a Dutch pluralistic society, or whether they would ultimately hope to institute Islamic supremacy and the subjugation of non-Muslims.

She couldn’t ask them those questions, she told me. Such questions would immediately put their relationship on a confrontational plane, when cooperation was what they wanted, not confrontation. But, I sputtered, you’re not getting cooperation as it is. The confrontation is already upon us. What is to be gained by pretending that it isn’t happening?

Clearly, the Dutch official felt she could not ask Spencer's questions without so provoking the imams that all conversation would cease. Yet the answers to Spencer's questions are so obviously critical to all possibility of Muslim integration into pluralist Western societies that to declare them unspeakable is to concede ab initio the hopelessness of the integration effort.

If this is indeed the case -- and let there be no mistake; your Curmudgeon believes that it is -- then the proper way to regard an Islamic bastion within the Netherlands, or anywhere else in the West, is as an exclave: a portion of a country which is separated from the main part and surrounded by politically alien territory.

For a historical contrast that's both relevant and quite ironic, consider the Christian kingdom of Outremer, established in the Holy Land after the First Crusade. Outremer was an exclave of Christendom, an extension of Christian Europe. It was entirely surrounded by Islamic states, all of which were implacably hostile to it, and which, after some two hundred years, contrived its downfall.

Your Curmudgeon is unaware of any well-formed intention among the Christian nobles who ruled Outremer to expand the kingdom at the expense of the surrounding states. Their mission in the Middle East was to create a safe haven for the many Christians there, who were cruelly oppressed by Islam's lords, and safe passage for Christian pilgrims to the historic places of the Bible. Granting the barbaric nature of the wars they fought to that end, which were typical of the time, they succeeded in their aim.

Islamic exclaves in Western Europe have quite a different character: an expansionist character. Whether overtly or covertly, they seek to transform the countries that surround them into replicas of themselves. The admissions of the Dutch official narrated above are testimony to that.

Might this also be true of Islamic exclaves in the United States?

Islam is an explicitly political creed; Muslims are commanded to seek political dominion over all the lands of the Earth, and to contrive that Islam be the only religion practiced by anyone -- the only acceptable faith. Since it's among the teachings of Islam that it's acceptable to lie to "infidels" in the service of Islam, one cannot simply ask a Muslim whether he has this in mind and be satisfied with whatever he says.

It has long been the case that immigrants to these shores were seekers after freedom and opportunity. Indeed, the original Pilgrims came here specifically to escape religious oppression. Because emigration from one's birthplace and adjustment to a new home in America have been expensive and difficult for most of our history, the process has tended to filter out those whose motives were weak or venal. But given the conditions of our day, both technological and political, that filter might no longer be sufficient. The flood of illegal immigrants that passes our southern border is evidence in that direction, albeit not without some ambiguity.

How could we determine, with confidence, the long-range intentions of Muslims in North America? Were the verdict to be ominous, threatening to the future of the nation, what might we do about it within the framework of American Constitutional law?