For Israel And The Jewish People Worldwide

[I have nothing original to say this morning, but the plight of Israel, now under unprecedented pressure to permit the Palestinian irredentists to have a “state” carved from Israel’s territory, moved me to post the following. It’s a copy of an article written by Spanish writer Sebastian Vilar Rodriguez and published in a Spanish newspaper on Jan. 15, 2008.]

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REMEMBER AS YOU READ - THIS WAS IN A SPANISH NEWSPAPER

Date: Tue. 15 January 2008 14:30

ALL EUROPEAN LIFE DIED IN AUSCHWITZ

By Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez

I walked down the street in Barcelona , and suddenly discovered a terrible truth - Europe died in Auschwitz . We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, and talent. We destroyed the Chosen People, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world.

The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world.

These are the people we burned.

And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism, and lack of tolerance, crime, and poverty, due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride.

They have blown up our trains and turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime. Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts.

And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition.

We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs.

What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.

***

A lot of Americans have become so insulated from reality that they imagine America can suffer defeat without any inconvenience to them.

Absolutely No Profiling! Pause a moment, reflect back, and take the

following multiple choice test.

These events are actual events from history. They really happened! Do you remember?

HERE'S THE TEST

1. 1968, Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed by:
   1. Superman
   2. Jay Leno
   3. Harry Potter
   4. A Muslim male extremist between the ages of 17 and 40
2. In 1972 at the Munich Olympics, athletes were kidnapped and massacred by:
   1. Olga Corbett
   2. Sitting Bull
   3. Arnold Schwarzenegger
   4. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
3. In 1979, the U.S. embassy in Iran was taken over by:
   1. Lost Norwegians
   2. Elvis
   3. A tour bus full of 80-year-old women
   4. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
4. During the 1980s a number of Americans were kidnapped in Lebanon by:
   1. John Dillinger
   2. The King of Sweden
   3. The Boy Scouts
   4. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
5. In 1983 the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by:
   1. A pizza delivery boy
   2. Pee Wee Herman
   3. Geraldo Rivera
   4. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
6. In 1985 the cruise ship Achille Lauro was hijacked and a 70-year-old American passenger was murdered and thrown overboard in his wheelchair by:
   1. The Smurfs
   2. Davey Jones
   3. The Little Mermaid
   4. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
7. In 1985 TWA flight 847 was hijacked at Athens and a U.S. Navy diver trying to rescue passengers was murdered by:
   1. Captain Kidd
   2. Charles Lindberg
   3. Mother Teresa
   4. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
8. In 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed by:
   1. Scooby Doo
   2. The Tooth Fairy
   3. The Sundance Kid
   4. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
9. In 1993 the World Trade Center was bombed the first time by:
   1. Richard Simmons
   2. Grandma Moses
   3. Michael Jordan
   4. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
10. In 1998 the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by:
    1. Mr. Rogers
    2. Hillary Clinton, to distract attention from Wild Bill's women problems
    3. The World Wrestling Federation
    4. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
11. On 9/11/01, four airliners were hijacke
12. Two were used as missiles to take out the World Trade Center . Of the remaining two, one crashed into the U.S. Pentagon and the other was diverted and crashed by the passengers. Thousands of people were killed by:
    1. Bugs Bunny, Wiley E. Coyote, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd
    2. The Supreme Court of Florida
    3. Mr Bean
    4. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
13. In 2002 the United States fought a war in Afghanistan against:
    1. Enron
    2. The Lutheran Church
    3. The NFL
    4. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
14. In 2002 reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered by:
    1. Bonnie and Clyde
    2. Captain Kangaroo
    3. Billy Graham
    4. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40
15. And now we can add: In 2009, 31 people wounded and 13 American Soldiers murdered on base at Fort Hood by a Major who was known as...
    1. You guessed it - A Muslim male extremist between the age of 17 and 40.

No, I really don't see a pattern here to justify profiling. Do you? So, to ensure we Americans/Canadians never offend anyone, particularly fanatic’s intent on killing us, airport security screeners will no longer be allowed to profile certain people. They must conduct random searches of 80-year-old women, little kids, airline pilots with proper identification, secret agents who are members of the President's security detail, 85-year old Congressmen with metal hips, and Medal of Honor winner and former Governor Joe Foss, but leave Muslim males between the ages 17 and 40 alone lest they be guilty of profiling.

Let's send this to as many people as we can so that the Nancy Pelosis, Gloria Allreds, and other dunder-headed attorneys, along with Federal Justices who want to thwart common sense, feel ashamed of themselves - if they have any such sense.

We can not allow the socialist transformation being brought on by the current administration to continue. Look at what it has done to Europe.

We all must stand together before it's too late and everything America stands for is lost.

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000. That is ONE BILLION TWO HUNDRED MILLION, or 20% of the world's population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:
1988 - Najib Mahfooz

Peace:
1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
1990 - Elias James Corey
1994 - Yaser Arafat:
1999 - Ahmed Zewai

Economics:
(zero)

Physics:
(zero)

Medicine:
1960 - Peter Brian Medawar
1998 - Ferid Mourad

TOTAL: 7 SEVEN

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000. That is FOURTEEN MILLION, or about 0.02% of the world's population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:
1910 - Paul Heyse
1927 - Henri Bergson
1958 - Boris Pasternak
1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 - Nelly Sachs
1976 - Saul Bellow
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 - Elias Canetti
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1991 - Nadine Gordimer World

Peace:
1911 - Alfred Fried
1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser
1968 - Rene Cassin
1973 - Henry Kissinger
1978 - Menachem Begin
1986 - Elie Wiesel
1994 - Shimon Peres
1994 - Yitzhak Rabin

Physics:
1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
1906 - Henri Moissan
1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
1910 - Otto Wallach
1915 - Richard Willstaetter
1918 - Fritz Haber
1921 - Albert Einstein
1922 - Niels Bohr
1925 - James Franck
1925 - Gustav Hertz
1943 - Gustav Stern
1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
1952 - Felix Bloch
1954 - Max Born
1958 - Igor Tamm
1959 - Emilio Segre
1960 - Donald Glaser
1961 - Robert Hofstadter
1961 - Melvin Calvin
1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman
1965 - Julian Schwinger
1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
1971 - Dennis Gabor
1972 - William Howard Stein
1973 - Brian David Josephson
1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
1976 - Burton Richter
1977 - Ilya Prigogine
1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
1978 - Peter L Kapitza
1979 - Stephen Weinberg
1979 - Sheldon Glashow
1979 - Herbert Charles Brown
1980 - Paul Berg
1980 - Walter Gilbert
1981 - Roald Hoffmann
1982 - Aaron Klug
1985 - Albert Hauptman
1985 - Jerome Karle
1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach
1988 - Robert Huber
1988 - Leon Lederman
1988 - Melvin Schwartz
1988 - Jack Steinberger
1989 - Sidney Altman
1990 - Jerome Friedman
1992 - Rudolph Marcus
1995 - Martin Perl
2000 - Alan J. Heeger

Economics:
1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971 - Simon Kuznets
1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow
1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
1976 - Milton Friedman
1978 - Herbert Simon
1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 - Franco Modigliani
1987 - Robert M. Solow
1990 - Harry Markowitz
1990 - Merton Miller
1992 - Gary Becker
1993 - Robert Fogel

Medicine:
1908 - Elie Metchnikoff
1908 - Paul Erlich
1914 - Robert Barany
1922 - Otto Meyerhof
1930 - Karl Landsteiner
1931 - Otto Warburg
1936 - Otto Loewi
1944 - Joseph Erlanger
1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser
1945 - Ernst Boris Chain
1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller
1950 - Tadeus Reichstein
1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman
1953 - Hans Krebs
1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann
1958 - Joshua Lederberg
1959 - Arthur Kornberg
1964 - Konrad Bloch
1965 - Francois Jacob
1965 - Andre Lwoff
1967 - George Wald
1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg
1969 - Salvador Luria
1970 - Julius Axelrod
1970 - Sir Bernard Katz
1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman
1975 - Howard Martin Temin
1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg
1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow
1978 - Daniel Nathans
1980 - Baruj Benacerraf
1984 - Cesar Milstein
1985 - Michael Stuart Brown
1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein
1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
1988 - Gertrude Elion
1989 - Harold Varmus
1991 - Erwin Neher
1991 - Bert Sakmann
1993 - Richard J. Roberts
1993 - Phillip Sharp
1994 - Alfred Gilman
1995 - Edward D. Lewis
1996- Lu RoseIacovino

TOTAL: 129!

The Jews are NOT promoting the brain-washing of children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non-Muslims. The Jews don't hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, or blow themselves up in German restaurants. There is NOT one single Jew who has destroyed a church. There is NOT a single Jew who protests by killing people.

The Jews don't traffic slaves, nor have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.

Perhaps the world's Muslims should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems.

Muslims must ask what they can do for humankind before they demand that humankind respects them.

Regardless of your feelings about the crisis between Israel and the Palestinians and Arab neighbors, even if you believe there is more culpability on Israel's part, the following two sentences really say it all:

"If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel." Benjamin Netanyahu

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That article reached me as an email, the text of which appears below:

General Eisenhower Warned Us.

It is a matter of history that when the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps, he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead.

He did this because he said in words to this effect:

"Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened."

Recently the UK debated whether to remove 'The Holocaust' from its school curriculum because it 'offends' the Muslim population, which claims it never, occurred. It is not removed as yet. However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.

It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended.

This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the, 6 million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians, and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, raped, burned, starved, beaten, experimented on and humiliated while the German people looked the other way.

Now more than ever, with Iran, among others, claiming the Holocaust to be a myth, it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.

This e-mail is intended to reach 400 million people. Be a link in the memorial chain and help distribute this around the world.

How many years will it be before the attack on the World Trade Center 'NEVER HAPPENED,' because it offends some Muslim in the United States?

Do not just delete this message. It will take only a minute to pass this along.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen. -Ralph W. Emerson

Double Standards Dept.

Have a gander at this column by Paris Lees, which I found via our beloved Instapundit:

I'm sick of being told that being sexual is bad. That being sexualized is bad, gauche and unpalatable. "When was the last time you heard a man describe a woman with an adjective that wasn't dripping in sexual innuendos and defaming premises?" Author Lauren Martin asked in her op-ed for Daily Elite earlier this year, which has now had over 694,000 shares on social media, including the other day on my Facebook feed. "When was the last time you heard a man describe a woman as beautiful?"

Erm, I don't know. Yesterday?

I know plenty of guys who lovingly refer to their lovers as beautiful. And smart. And sexy. And every other complex thing that made them fall in love with them. Of course, some men do describe women in rude, reductive ways. But that doesn't mean that every time a man describes a woman as sexy that it's a bad thing, or, indeed, that men never appreciate women for their beauty. [Emphasis added by FWP.]

Yet another attempt, albeit a subtle one, to establish women’s feelings as the standard for whether men are misbehaving. Do please read the rest; as scattershot and replete with falsehoods as it is, it’s representative of a considerable community of sentiment, both here and across the Atlantic.

Meanwhile, I’ll be revving up my spleen.

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The past sixty years have altered relations between the sexes in too many ways to list here, but the matter of sexual allure is, if not foremost among them, damned near the top of the stack. Like it or not, our media, both print and electronic, unabashedly promote sexualized images of both sexes. Such images intensify and popularize specific conceptions of what makes one “desirable” to a member of the opposite sex. Whole industries have risen to meet the demands for personal enhancement that those images have evoked. There’s one hell of a lot of money involved, as any man who’s ever accompanied his Significant Other into Nordstrom’s, Sephora, or Victoria’s Secret will readily attest.

(A brief, relevant tangent: According to an online retailer, boobularity correlates strongly with spendularity. Whether this was a carefully controlled study that takes into account such things as bust enhancement surgery, foam and gel bra inserts, and push-up bras, or the result of a survey whose respondents were trusted to report their own tittiliciousness and spending patterns honestly, is unclear from the article. As always, your mileage may vary.)

In all probability, the alterations will persist indefinitely. I have no serious problems with that. “Male and female created He them” (Genesis 5:2), and I’m sure He had His reasons. Sex isn’t something we can force into the shadows, nor would a sane person want to do so. It’s a reason for men and women to glory in themselves and one another, especially in this era, when there’s such a wide range of products and treatments available for enhancing one’s physical appeal. Such problems as are objectively identifiable arise from three sources:

1. Abusive sexual behavior (e.g., rape, molestation, sexual irresponsibility, sexual fraud);
2. Treatment of another person as solely a body to be exploited, nothing more;
3. Demands for special privileges on the basis of gender.

Likely we can all agree on the first category. Only the crudest rakes and sluts will disagree about category #2. Category #3 is where the action is today...and this commentator, at least, isn’t moaning “don’t stop.”

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Do you enjoy sex? I do. (At least, I think I did; the memories have grown a bit indistinct.) I also enjoy the sight of a woman who’s gone to the trouble and expense to make herself alluring. It’s a perker-upper, especially if the woman in question is honest with herself and others about her willingness to do so.

But my Rage-O-Meter pins and emits sparks when a woman who has obviously taken such trouble then demands that men behave as if they haven’t noticed. Form-fitting and skin-baring clothing, alluring perfumes, provocative makeup, and a saucy saunter are shouts of Notice Me! Notice My Body! Under such conditions, the only imaginable insult would consist of refusing to notice...yet a fair number of women react in the opposite fashion.

What could this be but a subtle display of sexual sadism? Calling it “feminism” is merely an attempt to evade the issue. Feminism is properly about equality of the sexes before the law, for the sexes are not equal in any other sense. Especially, they are unequal in their ability to stir one another’s libidos.

Most of the women who label themselves “feminists” today are uninterested in equality of the sexes before the law, the only morally acceptable goal of a women’s movement. They want special privileges and protections from the law – protections that reach all the way to a guarantee that they will never, ever be offended, no matter what reactions they provoke or how much offense they give. That they should be offended by the knowledge that the average woman is of mediocre appearance and allure – “average” and “mediocre” are synonyms, after all – is unsurprising, as the great majority of them are no better than average and resent the necessity to resort to artifice to make themselves attractive enough to “score.”

Remember always that “the squeal goes with the pig:” You cannot accept sexualized dress, conduct, or banter about the opposite sex without also accepting that each sex will view the other, at least some of the time, through a sexual lens. I find that acceptable; most self-styled “feminists,” who are in truth merely mouthpieces that demand special, highly unequal privileges for women, do not.

In short: Do you want to be an openly, uninhibitedly sexual creature? To emphasize your sexual attractions to the world with your clothing, makeup, and conduct? To indulge freely in the pleasures of the flesh? Fine; be and do as you like. But be prepared to accept the consequences. In particular, don’t thereafter take offense at being viewed, and judged by others, on that basis. Your pretense of high dudgeon will receive no shrift whatsoever from any self-respecting man...or woman.

Fundamental Corruptions

First, one of Bill Whittle’s most striking videos:

For those Gentle Readers who prefer text – I do, most of the time – here’s Whittle’s haymaker:

This smiling, normal-looking woman is Ann Ravel. She heads the FEC — the Federal Elections Commission. She’s a Democrat in a Democratic administration pursuing the Democratic party’s goal of intimidating, jailing and otherwise harassing their political opponents, who are mean because they don’t like being told what to do, or to think — the way nice people do. So she has been ordered to weaponize the government against unregulated speech — we don’t call it “free speech” any more because that term is archaic and also probably racist.

It’s not like she doesn’t want to! As a typical progressive Democrat, Ann Ravel has two overriding psychological needs:

First, regulate everything. How on earth with people like Ann Ravel and, for that matter, the President of the United States, ever be able to feel secure when the American people are just running around starting businesses willy-nilly, or irresponsibly making internet videos that don’t conform to the Official Truth, or reading news stories — “news stories!” — on places like Fox or the Drudge Report.

No, the idea of something being unregulated — like, say, the internet — is anathema to these control freaks, so the chance to regulate something — anything — is good to go right out of the gate.

Even better: Ann Ravel not only wants to regulate the internet, she wants to target those regulations against conservatives on the internet.

And here’s Mac Slavo’s comment on the matter:

As Whittle highlighted in the video above, government officials are working to discredit anything that is not part of the mainstream narrative.

They’ll use the Federal Elections Committee to shut down any free political thought. They’ll use the IRS and the threat of prison to intimidate organizations and individuals that don’t tow the party line.

But they aren’t just targeting the organizers or those who produce content and videos that run counter to their ideals. They’re coming after the people as a whole. Your social network pages, forum comments, emails, and phone calls are being monitored .

Moreover, there is clear evidence according to a Department of Homeland Security insider that the very communities where people get together to share ideas are being targeted en masse by paid disinformation agents whose sole purpose is to destroy the credibility of the message through targeted web site takedowns and direct attacks against their users.

Then, you will see the internet being regulated in a manner that will serve only the agenda of this administration. Either right before or during these events, so-called citizen journalists will be particularly vulnerable. Watch for a serious crackdown of bloggers, online news publications and websites, but not in the way that will be immediately obvious.

The ‘plumbers team’ have coordinated their efforts with Internet Service Providers to identify the people like you and others who publish their information on web sites.

At first they will cite violations of terms of service. Then, they will select a few ‘troublemakers’ and identify them for criminal prosecution. Others will experience hacking and other electronic attacks. And during all of that, there will be the Obama team flooding the internet with misinformation and disinformation. In fact, that is already taking place.

The attacks are coming from all sides – this is asymmetric warfare against the American people.

Time was, the above sentiments would have been dismissed as “conspiracy talk.” I would have been among those dismissing it. No longer. Ask Dinesh D’Souza and Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. Ask the CEO of Gibson Guitars. Ask Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. And ponder this as well: Might any of the “SWATtings” aimed at conservative commentators and luminaries have been ordered by commanders fully aware of their malevolent genesis?

Think it over.

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“The people, sir, are a great beast.” – Fisher Ames

“Never tease an old dog. He might have one bite left.” – Robert A. Heinlein

The recent elections have evoked the usual calls from the Left for “compromise” and “collegiality.” I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that we’d never have heard those pleas had the Left carried the field. I’m equally sure that you don’t need to be reminded that to the Left, “compromise” means “let’s do it my way.”

Fisher Ames’s “great beast” has awakened in anger. The electorate isn’t thrilled with the Republicans – God knows the GOP hasn’t exactly over-performed in recent years – but it knows who’s been raping it most recently, and by a hefty majority it’s said that it wants them out of power. So what now?

From the Right, the signals are mixed. There are indications that the Republican Establishment is alive to the danger to its perquisites should it continue to ignore its Constitutional duties and denigrate the conservative base. Yet there are also indications that several GOP kingmakers intend to proceed with “business as usual:” i.e., a slightly more leisurely march into the totalitarian abyss, so the power-brokers themselves won’t be displaced from their perches. The predominant trend won’t become definite for some months.

From the Left, there’s a sense of panic and the “last chance:” “If we don’t act now, we’ll lose our last chance to make America into another Euro-communist state!” The lineaments of their reaction can be seen in Obama’s drive for amnesty for illegal aliens and for the rigid regulation of carbon dioxide emissions in the name of “global warming,” both of which are being cheered on by his left-liberal base. (He really did mean it when he spoke of “fundamentally transforming” the U.S., you know.) Given that it will be only two years more before the Democrats must again face the electorate and a substantial probability that the next president will be Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, or Scott Walker, their panic has a rational basis.

But there are problems for the kakistocrats on both sides of the aisle. Their names? Why, Gentle Readers, how could you need to ask? They’re your names...and mine.

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“Too many people know too much.” – Old slogan

We know too much. Far too much to please the political elite. Worse, we’ve begun to act on our knowledge.

In an analogically comparable situation, Garet Garrett wrote as follows:

Now regard the credit reservoir as a lake fed by thousands of little community springs, and at the same time assume the point of view of a government hostile to the capitalistic system of free private enterprise. You see at once that the lake is your frustration. Why? Because so long as the people have the lake and control their own capital and can do with it as they please the government's power of enterprise will be limited, and limited either for want of capital or by the fact that private enterprise can compete with it.

So you will want to get rid of the lake. But will you attack the lake itself? No; because even if you should pump it dry, even if you should break down the retaining hills and spill it empty, still it would appear again, either there or in another place, provided the springs continued to flow. But if you can divert the water of the springs—if you can divert it from the lake controlled by the people to one controlled by the government, then the people's lake will dry up and the power of enterprise will pass to government.

Garrett’s subject in the above passage was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Social Security scam. Yet the pattern is equally applicable to the dissemination of information. When information, particularly news about important current events, flows freely along multiple conduits easily accessed by any private citizen, the “lake of public knowledge” is kept full and fresh. The political class cannot easily get away with much. The “springs” in this analogy are the information carrying conduits of today, with the Internet most prominent among them. The “lake” is the ultimate enemy, but the Left’s crosshairs are on plugging or diverting the “springs.”

To have a fighting chance of totalitarianizing America from their current disfavored position, the Obamunists must seize control -- absolute control, for nothing less will serve them – over the Internet.

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In light of the above, anything you hear from a political source about “net neutrality,” “illegal in-kind campaign contributions,” or other denigrations of the free and open Internet should be regarded as hostile propaganda, aimed at destroying the Right’s bastions in the last medium open to the free exchange of ideas. Any suggestion that Internet communications, whether textual or by audio or video, should be regulated must be resisted fiercely. This must be our last stand, for once we have been separated from one another, our effective capacity to resist further encroachments on our remaining liberty will dwindle to nothing.

It will be more difficult to defend the few non-Internet bastions for conservative views. There are too many legal and quasi-legal avenues by which the political class can attack and harass them. It approaches certainty that the Obamunists will mount a fresh assault on cable narrowcasters such as FOX News. That battle might need to be fought in the courts.

The more insidious attacks mounted by discreditors and “trolls” are also part of this campaign, and must be combated relentlessly. If you’re a blog proprietor, don’t be afraid to “censor” such villainy. Resist the suggestion that you “owe” the totalitarians a place to spew their deceits. Be forthright in asserting your privileges.

The Left has lost the battle over private ownership of firearms. Its grip on American education is slipping as we speak. The fight over communications freedom is its “Battle of the Bulge,” its win-or-die engagement. Let’s make it “die.”

Quote Of The Day

“In this administration, a surfeit of words is used to cover a deficit of meaning.” -- Paul Greenberg

Gorgeous.

The Anti-Transparent Administration

Remember when Barack Hussein Obama promised us “the most transparent administration in history” -- ? Remember when he vowed to set a new ethical standard for Washington? Unless my memory has deceived me, he made those promises major components of his 2008 campaign for the presidency. Apparently, quite a lot of voters either believed them, or failed to disbelieve them sufficiently to deny him the Oval Office.

Doug Ross, from whom much goodness flows, today provides us with Sharyl Attkisson’s revealing look at “the most transparent administration in history:”

Someone is attempting to harass and intimidate media personalities that are very critical of Barack Obama and his administration. Whoever is doing this has extremely advanced technical capabilities. As you will see below, there is very strong anecdotal evidence that federal agents are involved. But these agents would never commit such actions on their own. It seems clear that they are getting orders from someone above them. Of course Barack Obama (or any of his top lieutenants) would never come out and publicly admit that Gestapo tactics are being used against media personalities on Obama’s rumored “enemies list”, but that appears to be precisely what is happening. Hopefully by shining a light on these activities it will cause those that are doing these things to cease and desist. And it is very important to point out that what is being done to these media personalities is illegal. Anyone that is involved in harassing media personalities because of what they are saying is violating federal law and is in danger of going to prison for a very, very long time.

Later in this article, I want to share with you the shocking harassment and intimidation that Rick Wiles of TruNews has been enduring lately. But first, let’s review what has happened to former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson. She was an award-winning journalist for more than thirty years, but that didn’t stop the Obama administration from systematically harassing her. In her new book entitled Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington, she makes some extremely startling claims. She believes that the harassment and intimidation that she experienced were the direct result of her determination to get to the truth about Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the green energy scandals and Obamacare.

Please read the whole thing—and if the prospect of spending more than $13 on an eBook doesn’t offend you, read Attkisson’s book as well.

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“Transparency.” “Open government.” “Reaching across the aisle.” “Representing the whole people.” These and other shibboleths of American politics have a common meaning: he who invokes them suggests that he–possibly he alone—can and will rise above political considerations in conducting the affairs of government. He means for his audience to take him as one who will practice unflagging candor. More, he implies that he’s willing to consider ideas from every source, regardless of political alignment or ideological orientation—that he would judge a proposal on its merits alone, rather than whether it serves some personal or partisan end.

Has that ever been less true about an administration than the one we endure today?

No less an authority than the late, great Cyril Northcote Parkinson has told us “Do not say, ‘Trust me. Rely on my word.’ Only politicians say that.” He had a point to make that’s infinitely worth repeating:

Before awarding your trust,
Demand performance.
He who asks you to “trust me”
is unlikely to be trustworthy.

Surely the visible aspects of ObamaCare alone, given the several promises openly broken by Obama and his caucuses in Congress, would nail that to the wall. But we have even more evidence than we need:

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass… Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.” Jonathan Gruber, University of Pennsylvania in October, 2013.

Longtime favorite Deb Heine is unsparing about the will-to-deceive involved here:

As the media circles the wagons around Jonathan Gruber, Obama and ObamaCare, it’s really important to remember one key thing. They – like the people they’re trying to protect – think their audience is stupid. Media Matters, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, think that their readers’ confirmation bias makes them easy to fool, aka- stupid....

Gruber went to the Regime’s propaganda arm MSNBC to explain his comments and apologize for the confusion on Tuesday afternoon during an on-air interview with Ronan Farrow.

“The comments in the video were made at an academic conference,” Gruber said. “I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately and I regret having made those comments.”

Although Gruber apologized for the language he used, Gruber said that the larger point he was trying to make centered on the political pressures that shaped the law. He added that those pressures “led to an incomplete law with some typos.”

The typos would later lead to “speak-os” as evidenced in the American Commitment video Gruber vs Gruber.

---

It’s been clear for far too long that the American political class holds us of the hoi polloi in utter contempt—that in their eyes, we’re merely “sheep to be shorn.” If we judge by the demonstrated hostility of the Obamunists to the press, by the several cases in which imposed (and unlawful) secrecy measures are all that stands between the Administration and multiple fatal scandals demanding impeachment, and by the barefaced admissions of such pillars of the regime as Jonathan Gruber, their skill at deceiving us was once greater than it is today. This suggests that remedial measures are now possible.

We hold the means in our hands: the World Wide Web’s ability to preserve the evidence against all possibility of later effacement or denial.

No one can say with assurance how such an accumulation of the evidence will play out, long term. That it must occur—that those of us who write for the general public must each take a hand and press the case until our readers can no longer stand to read about it—seems beyond dispute. And of course, every attempt by the political class to establish political control over the Internet must be resisted with unprecedented ferocity and vigor.

---

I’ve lost my ability to believe that a government, however constituted, can be compelled long-term to remain within any imaginable set of bounds. The American experiment in constitutionalism was a brave and noble attempt. Nevertheless, it has failed. It took many years before its cracks were revealed, but it did fail. I can think of no way to form and constrain a government that hasn’t been tried and found wanting.

As Shakespeare has told us, the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves. We aren’t stupid—a stupid species with our abilities would have destroyed itself long ago—but we are deceivable. Our propensity for wishful thinking appears to be ineradicable. The implication is that even anarchism—the absolute abjuration of the notion of “legitimate authority”—is unstable, as I’ve tried to depict here. Politically speaking, our doom is to keep trying...and failing.

Oldsters: it’s time either to revolt or to relax. Youngsters: brace yourselves, ‘cause you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

The Nadir Of Statism

These past few years have seen statist encroachments into every area of American life. One of the least appreciated of these is Michelle Obama’s attempt to dictate our diets, particularly our children's diets. Were there more federal force or dollars behind that effort, perhaps we’d take it as seriously as it deserves. Yet it’s worth a moment to reflect that at one time, meddling with our food supply stood at the heart of federal policy. There’s nothing to prevent Washington from revisiting that era with a somewhat different orientation...say, one that prioritizes limiting the fiscal damage done by ObamaCare.

But wait: what have we here?

How we produce and consume food has a bigger impact on Americans’ well-being than any other human activity. The food industry is the largest sector of our economy; food touches everything from our health to the environment, climate change, economic inequality and the federal budget. Yet we have no food policy — no plan or agreed-upon principles — for managing American agriculture or the food system as a whole.

That must change.

The food system and the diet it’s created have caused incalculable damage to the health of our people and our land, water and air. If a foreign power were to do such harm, we’d regard it as a threat to national security, if not an act of war, and the government would formulate a comprehensive plan and marshal resources to combat it. (The administration even named an Ebola czar to respond to a disease that threatens few Americans.) So when hundreds of thousands of annual deaths are preventable — as the deaths from the chronic diseases linked to the modern American way of eating surely are — preventing those needless deaths is a national priority.

A national food policy would do that, by investing resources to guarantee that:

• All Americans have access to healthful food;
• Farm policies are designed to support our public health and environmental objectives;
• Our food supply is free of toxic bacteria, chemicals and drugs;
• Production and marketing of our food are done transparently;
• The food industry pays a fair wage to those it employs;
• Food marketing sets children up for healthful lives by instilling in them a habit of eating real food;
• Animals are treated with compassion and attention to their well-being;
• The food system’s carbon footprint is reduced, and the amount of carbon sequestered on farmland is increased;
• The food system is sufficiently resilient to withstand the effects of climate change.

Only those with a vested interest in the status quo would argue against creating public policies with these goals.

This is one of those once rare but increasingly frequent moments when words fail me. The authors of this vile piece are actually proposing that the federal government be given the power to dictate what foods should be available to us, and in what quantities. Have they no sense of the terrors a government with control over its subjects’ food supply could inflict? Have they not considered, as the United States is the “breadbasket” to much of the world, the harms such a policy could wreak internationally? Are they utterly without an appreciation for the terrible danger that flows from giving an innately coercive, inherently vicious institution supreme power over the supports of life?

From the brief bios at the start of the piece, it would seem that they’re fully aware of all of that...and none of it troubles them:

Mark Bittman, an opinion columnist and food writer for the New York Times, is the author of “How to Cook Everything Fast.” Michael Pollan, who teaches journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” Ricardo Salvador is a senior scientist and director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Olivier De Schutter, a professor of international human rights law at the Catholic University of Louvain, was the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food from 2008 to 2014.

By the way, does anyone else remember a certain Albert Gore Jr? I think he once made a movie:

It’s time for a national policy on food. Brilliant essay in today’s Washington Post: http://t.co/bvGjpej5wN — Al Gore (@algore) November 9, 2014

This is it, Gentle Reader. We’ve reached the nadir of statism, the complete subjection of all other sentiments to the Left’s true and eternal priority: Government Uber Alles.

---

I could rant a dozen different ways about the above-quoted column. None of the others matter as much as this: that it was printed at all. The authors are bald-faced about their desire to control the most intimate decisions Americans (and many unacknowledged others) make every day of our lives. More, they don’t trouble to conceal the tentacles their agenda extends into other aspects of American society; indeed, they trumpet them as positive features of their proposal. Yet the editors of the Washington Post were untroubled by the piece, and granted it space in their publication, in these waning days of the New York Times arguably the most important organ of print journalism in the Western world.

Time was, even the most thoroughgoing totalitarian felt he had to conceal his power lust and give lip service to freedom. Time was, an editor at an American news organ would recoil from including so openly totalitarian a pitch in its pages. Time was, even the most completely washed-up has-been of American politics, seething with envy over having been displaced from the halls of power by disdained others and determined to wrest back a shred of relevance, would have known better than to endorse such a noxious prescription.

Time was.

It’s difficult to interpret this development, even with the current context for assistance. The most hopeful possibility is that the Left, to which the authors (and the editorial staff of the Post) clearly belong, have become desperate after the elections of a week ago, and are “pushing all their chips to the center of the table.” The most troubling possibility is that after decade upon decade of gradualism ever trending toward totalitarianism, the United States is largely ready to become a new Soviet Union under a “democratic” facade...if given the “right” rationale for submitting to such a regime.

I’ll leave the last word to our beloved Majesty, Emperor Misha:

Really now. The Washington Compost should just go ahead and change its name to “Volkischer Beobachter” already.

Or, given the sign of the times, perhaps they should start helping Obola digging a hole for his bunker.

He’ll be needing it soon.

Assorted

Sheesh. It’s not enough that I have to kill a seemingly inexhaustible supply of Solarii. Now I have to kill Oni, too! The supernatural immortal guardians of the Sun Queen that feast on human flesh! Truly, a video gamer’s work is never done.

But hey, it’s Monday. Have a few tidbits from my morning rounds.

---

First, it seems that the Left’s worshippers of pseudo-science are frothing at the mouth over last Tuesday’s elections:

• Congratulations, Voters. You Just Made This Climate Denier the Most Powerful Senator on the Environment
• Republicans, Meet Science
• Just Write Off America For The Next Few Years

...all of which makes the following video, admittedly more than a year old, both relevant and funny:

Allow yourself to laugh at these pompous asses who claim knowledge and authority no actual scientist would ever presume to claim.

---

Second, we have a delicious irony about that Holy Grail of “renewable energy,” solar power:

No doubt most readers know of the $2.2 billion Ivanpah solar plant, a huge project in the Mojave Desert which is easily visible from many planes flying in the Los Angeles – Las Vegas vicinity. It has been controversial from even before its start — it required relocating large numbers of desert tortoises — and since startup for the birds it has killed and the menace it poses to aviation. Oh, and to the climate also; ironically, Ivanpah requires natural gas to operate, and 60 percent more of that than originally estimated, producing greenhouse gases that (per Mann and co.) menace the planet....

Unfortunately for Google and NRG, Ivanpah only produces a quarter of the power it was supposed to. Since Ivanpah isn’t producing enough electricity to meet payments on its loan, Google and NRG quietly asked the Department of Energy for a $540 million federal grant to pay down their $1.6 Billion federal loan. Oh, and to get an extension on loan payments until the ARRA tax credits arrive.

The sheer temerity of the request is almost outweighed by the unintended humor of their explanation for the failure of their project: the Sun isn’t shining as much as they thought it would. But I think they’re barking up the wrong tree: rather than ask for your money so they don’t have to use their money, they should ask the guy who said he would make the oceans recede, to order the Sun to stop slacking — rudely continuing to shine as it has for five billion years — and brighten up for Google, NRG, and Obama’s legacy.

Of course, the prospect of having to bail out yet another federal renewable-energy boondoggle isn’t all that delicious, but perhaps the new majorities in Congress can prevent it.

---

Third up is Doug Ross’s pictorial interpretation of a Trevor Loudon speech:

I like it. Not only might it work very well electorally, the picture puts the right people in the right places for maximum effectiveness. The prospect of John Bolton telling the Islamic world “prithee, go intercourse thyself” is particularly appealing.

---

Fourth, in the course of talking about hanging on to whatever truth one can, Sarah Hoyt tells a most instructive tale about a bad man with a single redeeming habit:

There is a story I was told as a child — those not raised in Catholicism, please bear with me — of a man who was a murderer, a thief, a blasphemer, and who died. As he was plunging into hell, a chain caught him by the leg and held him up. He noticed the chain had beads and, looking up, heard a voice say they were the beads of the rosary. You see, even though he didn’t believe, in the rosary or in religion at all, he prayed it every night, because his mother had asked him to. And that single virtue had saved him.

Tales like that do more for the Catholic faith than any amount of indoctrination.

---

Fifth and last, with regard to the Sarah Hoyt essay linked above – please read it in its entirety; it’s especially valuable – I’d like to resurrect a bit of something I wrote years ago:

In the ideological clashes of today, the attention of the greater mass of Americans is focused on secondary matters. Arguments over national defense, tax rates, social policy directions, regulatory structures, and so forth continue to rage, but with less prospect of being satisfactorily settled than ever before...because a critical pinion for all argument of any sort has been undermined near to collapse.

The pinion of which I speak is the concept of objective truth.

It's hard for most people to grasp that objective truth is a conception, rather than something self-evident. Yet furious philosophical battles have been fought over it. The negative side has never conceded defeat. They've advanced reason after reason to doubt the existence of objective reality. As each one is destroyed, they shift to another. In a sense, their proposition is its own strongest weapon, for they respond rather frequently to even the most obvious points by saying, "No, that's your truth" -- an implicit claim that it's the not the observation but the observer's willingness to accept it that really matters.

John Q. Public has heard little of this, of course; it's mostly fought in the ivory towers, and in the publications that cater to professional intellectuals. All the same, it matters to him more than he's able to appreciate.

Truth is an evaluation: a judgment that some proposition corresponds to objective reality sufficiently for men to rely upon it. The weakening of the concept of truth cuts an opening through which baldly counterfactual propositions can be thrust into serious discourse. Smith might say that proposition X is disprovable, or that it contradicts common observations of the world; Jones counters that X suits him fine, for he has dismissed the disprovers as "partisan" and prefers his own observations to those of Smith. Unless the two agree on standards for relevant evidence, pertinent reasoning, and common verification -- in other words, standards for what can be accepted as sufficiently true -- their argument over X will never end.

An interest group that has "put its back against the wall" as regards its central interest, and is unwilling to concede the battle regardless of the evidence and logic raised against its claims, will obfuscate, attack the motives of its opponents, and attempt to misdirect their attention with irrelevancies. When all of these have failed, its last-ditch defense is to attack the concept of truth. Once that has been undermined, the group can't be defeated. It can stay on the ideological battlefield indefinitely, preserving the possibility of victory through attrition or fatigue among its opponents.

Given recent developments, it’s more important than ever before that we not let them get away with it.

That’s all for now, Gentle Reader. Have a nice day.

Means And Ends: A Rumination Through Fiction

For this morning, a brief story about morality through teleology.

---

     “But surely,” she said, “the context is what determines the rightness or wrongness of a deed. Even the Church concedes that, isn’t it so?”
     He nodded warily. “There are such cases, though I’m not certain that there’s a context that could justify some deeds. Genocide, for example.”
     She waved it aside. “That’s an extreme case. I’m thinking of more mundane decisions. Do you ever wonder about resource exhaustion? What with the population of the Earth now at seven billion—”
     He held up a hand. “Stop right there. I can see the course this conversation will take.”
     She shook her head, determined to press onward. “This is serious enough to merit even your consideration. Imagine a time a century or two from now, when the population of the world has reached twenty billion...thirty billion...God alone knows how many people. All near to starvation, all ready to kill and die for the last hunk of rotten meat or stale bread. All huddling together for warmth, with the fossil fuels gone and no replacements in sight. Facing the extinction of the human race should even a few more of us be born to stress what little remains to sustain us. With every wise man, every authority on Earth in agreement that more human beings is the one thing we cannot afford, wouldn’t you say that in that context abortion would be morally justified?”
     He smiled wanly and shook his head. “Absolutely not.”
     “Good God,” she cried, exasperated to her limits, “why not?”
     “Tell me, Sue,” he said, “how often have you been wrong?”
     “Huh? I’m not—”
     “How often have the ‘wise men’ of our race been wrong? How many times have they championed error even when the refutation was right before their eyes? How many times have they insisted that there must be an explanation, that God Himself has decreed what they believe to be the...the gospel truth?” He winced against the pain of her scenario and pressed a hand to his forehead, desperate to be anywhere but where he stood.
     Her mouth fell open, but she did not speak.
     “Context can only exempt a deed from the moral law when it involves making or defending justice,” he said. “It’s licit to steal your rightful property back from the thief who stole it from you. It’s licit to deceive a man to deflect him from doing unmerited harm to another. And it’s licit to kill one who has forfeited his right to life by killing an innocent. But none of those contexts apply to a baby in the womb. That is an innocent life, whose taking nothing can justify.”
     “Are you saying,” she whispered, “that to allow that baby to be born even if it would doom everyone else on Earth to death by starvation would be an act of justice? That the rest of us would have earned such a fate?”
     “I’m saying,” he continued on wearily, “that however many billions of us there were could not hold that baby responsible for their condition. Regardless of whether our fates hung on his extinction. Nothing else. Besides,” he said, “what if all those ‘wise men’ and ‘authorities’ proved to be wrong? What would you say to that baby and his mother then?”
     She gaped silently at him, emptied of words at last. He nodded and walked on.

---

May God bless and keep you all.

Libertarianism in a nutshell.

Too often, public libertarianism is reduced to a cartoonish state by overcompensating on liberty and leaving unconsidered other important concerns.

Comment by Jason on "Amateur Hour: Why I'm Leaving Young Voices." By Pamela Stubbart, This Field Is Required, 8/7/14.

Quickies: The Left And Proportion

A fascinating look at the sort of “selective high dudgeon” Mr. Goska cites in the article linked in my previous post is available from this article:

The latest video [embedded above] to have caught the attention of the ranks of the constantly offended is one in which a young woman is filmed walking through areas of Manhattan. The video, filmed over a ten hour period includes various examples of men saying things ranging from "Hey, how you doin'?" to "Have a nice evening, darling". At the end of the video we are told that if we want to help those who have been affected, we should donate to "Hollaback!"

Curious as to how one helps traumatised women such as the one videoed, who apparently had endured aural and mental torture, I wondered what such money would be going towards. As expected, donations do not go towards providing counselling to women who, after receiving unsolicited comments, are plunged into PTSD nor sadly is the money funnelled into large billboards and public service announcements telling young women to get over themselves and ignore it.

Instead, Hollaback! wants a "culture shift" where unsolicited greetings are seen as taboo, and tells us that catcalling is "sexual assault" and "gender-based violence", which doesn't leave many terms to describe more serious offences. If a builder shouting, "Nice legs, love," is committing an act of sexual assault and "gender-based violence," then was Rotherham a gender Holocaust?

Despite (or perhaps as a response to) the hilarious identity politics mess it got itself into due to most of the perpetrators of these "assaults" being black or Hispanic, Hollaback!, with the sort of multicultural sensitivity which comes as standard with hand-wringing campaigns, hastens to tell us catcalling is "not a cultural thing" and that all forms of "gender-based violence" follow along the same lines no matter what the country.

Truly, it’s impossible to be a Leftist and possess a sense of proportion...or humor. (Oh, but do please remember: It’s not an unborn child; it’s just “a blob of tissue.”)

Quickies: The Impact Of Character

There is no substitute for character, and there is no rule about where you’ll find it. -- Louis Nizer

Today will be put mainly to fiction (and killing Solarii), so allow me to heartily recommend this excellent article at FrontPage Magazine. Have a small taste:

How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying “Eat the Rich.” To me it wasn’t a metaphor.

I voted Republican in the last presidential election.

Please read the whole thing. Then reflect for a moment on your own circles, especially – if you’re unfortunate enough to have one – your circle of politically like-minded associates. Do you regard them as individuals of strong character? If so, did that have any influence on your own choice of political positions? If not, what makes their politics attractive enough to make them worth your time and energy?

Just a morsel of food for thought. I’ll try to put something else up later today.

Our best thinking.

Right now, JPMorgan Chase has more than 67 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives but it only has 2.5 trillion dollars in assets.

Right now, Citibank has nearly 60 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives but it only has 1.9 trillion dollars in assets.

Right now, Goldman Sachs has more than 54 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives but it has less than a trillion dollars in assets.

Right now, Bank of America has more than 54 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives but it only has 2.2 trillion dollars in assets.

Right now, Morgan Stanley has more than 44 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives but it has less than a trillion dollars in assets.

Most people have absolutely no idea how incredibly vulnerable our financial system really is.

Alcoholics at AA meetings will occasionally recount how they were low-bottom drunks and lost job, family, and self respect. Then they'll add, "And my best thinking got me there."

Some very smart people have gotten us to this point, which I've hitherto variously described as one characterized by utter delusional thinking or lies stretching out to the horizon on all points of the compass.

Earnestly discussing the abrogation of the Constitution, the metastatic growth of the federal government, or the perils of multiculturalism seems not to ignite the awakening of a great many citizens. A collapse of the major banks following the collapse of the derivative scam will be more instructive.

Notes
^[1]  "Most People Cannot Even Imagine That An Economic Collapse Is Coming." By Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse, 11/2/14.

Goodbye to the Age of Acquarius.

This essentially means that the state’s economic apparatus is now all about stimulus, all of the time. In fact, the state’s central banking branch has gotten so deep into ritualized Keynesian governance that it’s essentially attempting to micro-manage vast accumulations of GDP—-about $17 trillion each in the US and Europe—-on a monthly basis.That’s entirely what the meeting statements and post-meeting press conferences are all about.

Yet this is absurd. The information flow in a $17 trillion economy is far too vast to be digested and assessed by the 12 mortal members of the FOMC, and their policy control instrument—-the bludgeon of interest rate manipulations—- could not possibly shape its short-run course in any event. That’s especially true since the macro-economy is not a closed system, but one open to every manner of complicating and countervailing influence from trade, capital flows and financial impulses in a $80 trillion global economy.

Still, the Keynesian policy apparatchiks have not even an inkling that they are attempting the impossible or that their patter about objectives, forecasts and policy actions have gotten downright moronic.^[1]

As a certified shade tree mechanic I not infrequently venture into projects on my beloved 25-year-old Honda, which is a machine of a certain complexity. With the help of a decent manuals and a little beer it's sometimes possible to bird dog problems in a satisfying way, especially when I realize that my efforts have left a decent amount of my money where it belongs – in my pocket. Admittedly, I would have more confidence had I attended Bailey Tech at some point in my meandering career but it is still possible to figure out problems as a rank amateur.

The point of saying this is that even with more knowledge, I would have my work cut out for me, especially where electronic components are possibly at fault or there might be an accursed short to chase down. Mr. Stockman puts his finger on the problem with "managing" a national economy when the complexity of the systems involved is several orders of magnitude worse. Cliff Notes version: It can't be done. Even a simple electrical problem in a single automobile with relatively ancient fuel injection technology is daunting and time consuming, whoever is chasing it down.

Thus, it's all the more reason to watch with some dismay as Janet Yellin speaks with glibness and confidence of how this economic lever will be pulled and such and such level of employment will hopefully result with this or that "desirable" target rate of inflation in her sight reticle. (That would be the "desirable" inflation rate envisioned by her predecessors that has caused the dollar to lose 97% of its purchasing power since 1913 in case your were wondering.)

Modern man has been intoxicated for well over a century with the idea that sufficiently smart and educated people can competently manage the affairs of other people. It's a delusion fast proving to be a disaster as statist busybodies find they are running out of options when economies stall under the regulatory and tax loads imposed, massive borrowing is necessary merely to pay the interest on existing debt, and existing debt can't be paid off but merely rolled over. The fiscal flexibility and cushion available to such as FDR and Lydon Johnson are no more. And the noxious seeds that they planted are now the mighty oaks that are about to fall across our path.

An old cartoon had an army sergeant remarking to his buddy while they were out on the town: "Just look at all those people walking around unsupervised." It's an approach that mystified the sergeant and terrifies the statists and their parasites. Liberty was once prized by our elites but now takes a back seat to sophomoric social, political, and economic tinkering by people who have no idea at all of their human limitations. And we all get to go down with them, worst luck.

Notes
^[1] "Ritual Incantation -- The Economic Gibberish Of The Keynesian Apparatchiks." By David Stockman, Contra Corner, 11/7/14.

T Plus Three: Hope Yielding Self-Deception

Three days is an important time interval in sociometry. Among other things, it’s the interval between the emergence of a significant ideon – i.e., a cluster of mutually interlocked assertions or presumptions with significant implications – and the maximization of the social reaction to that ideon. In other words, three days after the ideon “hits” is when its amplitude within the relevant social space will be the greatest.

Three days ago, the United States experienced a “wave” election, in which a significant fraction of the most conspicuous component of our ruling class was replaced, supposedly by its ideological opposite. If we treat this matter strictly, the three-day interval would elapse some time this evening: at the time at which it was incontrovertible that control of Capitol Hill had passed from Democrat to Republican majorities.

The social space relevant to the election would be politically engaged Americans: i.e., those who continue to regard electoral politics as an important determinant of important matters. That’s far from being all of us; it’s probably more like 20% to 30% of American adults. Still, that’s a significant fraction of the nation, which commands a great deal of wealth, social standing, and capacity to influence the behavior of others.

By this evening, the expectations of that fraction will be primed for whatever comes next. If the Republican Party’s power-brokers have any sense for the sociodynamics involved, tonight will be when its most prominent faces – Mitch McConnell and John Boehner – will announce relatively detailed intentions for the Congressional term to come.

Let’s imagine that such an announcement of a Republican agenda will be made. What are the next, most critical questions to address?

Pour yourself another cuppa, Gentle Reader. This is where the rubber really meets the road.

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In Shadow Of A Sword, the capstone of my “Realm of Essences” trilogy, I had idealized Presidential contender Stephen Graham Sumner make the following campaign pitch:

    “If you elect me president, I will put an end to every federal activity not explicitly authorized by the Constitution of the United States. I will shut down as much of the federal government as that requires, consistent with my duties as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and chief enforcer of federal law.
    “This crowd is large enough that some of you probably work for the federal government. Nearly five million Americans do. Be sure you’re willing to take the risk that your job might not be really essential before you go into the booth and pull the lever next to my name.
    “If I can swing enough of Congress behind me, I will put an end to federal borrowing. I will put an end to the reign of unelected regulators. And whether Congress likes it or not, I will insist that the Tenth Amendment—the one that says that the powers not delegated to the United States are reserved to the states or the people—be observed strictly and explicitly.
    “You should think about that. Some of you will need new ways to earn a living. Some of you will lose subsidies or programs that have helped you to pay your way through life. All I can promise you in return is that from that point forward, you will know what federal law demands of you, and you won’t be expected to read the United States Code to know it. But that’s where my promises to you end.
    “It will be your job to discipline your state and local governments. They’ve raped you in their turn, often by conning you with the same lies and empty promises you’ve heard from politicians at the federal level. But unless they violate a constitutional restriction on their powers, I can’t help you with that.”
    He pointed a finger into the mass of the crowd. “You must call them to account. You must hold them liable. And some of you must put down the tools of your trades, possibly trades you love and have practiced for many years, and go on campaign, as I have done, to replace them.” He paused, gathered all his forces, and leaned close over the microphone. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”

Shadow Of A Sword is, of course, fiction. No one on either side of the political divide has made a promise resembling Sumner’s since Grover Cleveland at least. Nor should we expect any representative of either major party to announce such an agenda any time soon. Still, let’s follow the train of thought of a single, reasonably intelligent person in the crowd listening to Sumner that day. What questions would be uppermost in his thoughts?

1. Is the candidate sincere?
2. Is his agenda feasible?

In reality, an American adult would greet a statement of intentions like Sumner’s with pronounced cynicism: the “yeah, sure, that’s what you say now” reaction of one who has “heard it all before.” Our politics has been rife with insincerity and duplicity for a century at least. Such a pattern makes a radical departure a chancy thing to expect, even though the longer a trend continues, the more suspect it becomes.

But let’s stipulate that our imagined listener deems the candidate sincere. What about the feasibility of his agenda; how likely is it that even a freshly elected, wildly popular President of the United States, installed in the Oval Office by a huge majority, could bring it off?

Large institutions are like large masses; they have large inertia. The federal government of the United States is the largest such institution in the world. Even were we to exclude consideration of the dynamics of power-seeking – i.e., that men pursue power specifically because that’s the thing they want most – it would still strain credulity to accept that the candidate could and would carry out his plan. It would take a will of steel and unprecedented political muscle to achieve so much without recourse to arms.

Ann Barnhardt states the case for this in her most recent offering.

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We mustn’t expect McConnell and Boehner to propose anything nearly as dramatic as Sumner’s intended program, of course. They’re power-seekers too. In all likelihood, they hope to use their increased leverage to exploit federal power to benefit themselves and their favored constituencies, rather than to begin a return to Constitutionally limited government. Indeed, there are vanishingly few persons in politics from whom a pledge such as Sumner’s would be regarded as sincere.

”Put not your trust in princes,” saith the Psalmist. That should include elected princes.

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Regardless of whether the GOP’s top men will announce a plan of attack on Obamunism this evening or in the near future, the results of the midterm elections have stimulated certain hopes and expectations:

The American people sent an unmistakable message to Washington: Voters expect Republicans in Congress to listen and fight for the conservative agenda they ran on.

As little as I like to burst anyone’s soap bubble, there’s a considerable degree of naivety in those twenty-five words:

• The “message” is entirely in the mind of the speaker;
• What voters “expect” is beyond anyone’s ability to know;
• In the main, “Republicans in Congress” ran solely opposition to the Obama regime; they certainly didn’t articulate firm conservative principles or a firm conservative agenda.
• Even if we omit consideration of the above, how plausible is it that a Congress that remains 96% as it was before the midterms will deviate significantly from its previous behavior?

We can warn the incoming Congress all we like; indeed, we can shout at it till the whole nation is blue in the face. Given the dynamics of power-seeking, what can we reasonably expect from it? Unfortunately, the most plausible outcome is all too clear:

Approximately nothing will change.

The Affordable Care Act will not be repealed.
Illegal aliens will spread their exclaves over America.
Tax rates and the deductions structure will change little, if at all.
There will be no significant changes in the regulatory environment;
The IRS will get away scot free with its suppression of conservative activism.
The enviro-Nazis at the EPA will continue to obstruct natural resource exploitation.
The Justice Department will continue to maneuver to suppress lawful commerce in firearms.
No one will be prosecuted for the felonies committed by federal agencies over the past six years.
The enveloping political environment of posturing and reciprocal denunciation will continue unaltered.

Believe anything else at your own emotional peril.

T Plus Two: What Has Not Changed

It was predictable. Indeed, it was inevitable.

I won’t chastise you should you choose not to watch the video linked above. You’ve probably had quite enough of Obama already. But if you were unaware of the remarks he made yesterday in describing his reaction to the Republicans’ trouncing of his Democrat allies, it’s worth a couple of minutes of your time.

Reflect on both the content and the tone. Is that a man who acknowledges that his unasked-for gambit in nominal support of his co-partisans –that “My policies are on the ballot...every one of them” – has been definitively answered? That those policies have been judged by the electorate and repudiated?

Don’t all answer at once, now.

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Many years ago, I asked a psychologist friend to distinguish between psychopath and sociopath, words I’d often heard used interchangeably. The distinction she drew was memorable. The psychopath, she said, is emotionless. His inability to feel renders him unable to sympathize or empathize. Others’ emotions, whether pleasant or painful, are a blank to him. By contrast, she described the sociopath as conscienceless: a creature who cannot see others as moral agents. To him, others are either tools, or obstructions, or irrelevant. In practice, they tend to behave similarly, despite the varying geneses of their behavior.

My friend was an authority on the subject, having worked extensively with prison populations. I’ve used her distinction to assess many a public figure since then. Many fall into one or the other category, and some belong to both.

Barack Hussein Obama has often been described as a narcissist. That sort of self-worship is consistent with sociopathy, as the sociopath starts out regarding others as objects to be manipulated. Beyond that surface assessment lies an important implication: what to expect from the sociopath when his self-love is challenged by external developments.

The sociopath will feel frustration when others refuse to be manipulated to his liking. He will sometimes lash out against them. We can see a clear case of this in Obama’s famous “What the fuck was that?” reaction to Benjamin Netanyahu’s statements during their shared photo-op a couple of years ago. Clearly Obama could not assault the prime minister of Israel while the cameras were on them; still, restraining the impulse seems to have cost him some effort.

The Republican wave of Tuesday certainly challenged Obama’s self-love, to say nothing of the backblast against his attempt to manipulate, not only the electorate, but his co-partisans running for federal legislative offices.

Expect The Won – The Lost? – to act out more than once in the weeks to come.

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Obama is unable to alter his orientation in any non-trivial way. He cannot and will not admit to error. Indeed, he appears unable to accept anything but acquiescence – preferably married to adulation – from those around him. So when Chris Matthews declaims as follows:

"The fact that this President is getting advice from people that say, 'You're always right,' is the problem," Matthews opined. "He's got too many sycophants around him telling him, 'All you have to keep doing is what you’re doing.'"

...it’s not just another case of Matthews attempting to exculpate his idol Obama; it’s a dim perception, as through a glass darkly, of one of the giveaway behaviors of a sociopath in a position of power: he will not tolerate attendants who advise him counter to his preferences. Any who unwisely attempt to do so will be “thrown under the bus,” leaving the inner circle a gaggle of yes-men and sycophants.

Yet Democrat mouthpieces habitually upbraid conservatives for immuring ourselves in a “right-wing echo chamber.” It is to laugh.

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The period between now and January 3 is likely to be dangerous. Obama will not sit idle in the aftermath of Tuesday’s drubbing. He’s likely to get, if not the cooperation, at least the protection, of the outgoing Democrat caucus on Capitol Hill. They, too are frustrated...and some of them are no less sociopathic than Obama.

We’ve already heard about Obama’s planned executive actions on immigration. I cannot doubt that he has other shots in the locker. Some will be attempts to seal policies into place before the GOP has a means by which to stop them; others will be bait, temptations to being impeachment proceedings that, given the Main Stream Media’s determination to protect him, would probably rebound against the Republicans.

The key insight here is that Obama is about Obama the Supreme and will tolerate nothing else. A man who can’t even allow verbally that he’s been chastised will not act in a fashion that expresses that understanding. Indeed, the next several weeks might well see behavior more extreme than Obama has yet exhibited. Israel in particular had better look to its defenses.

Stay tuned.

T Plus One: What To Expect Next

Yes, the Republicans achieved greatly yesterday...electorally, at least. Yes, the United States Senate can no longer be used as a place where bills passed in the House go to die of neglect. Yes, Harry Reid will no longer have the catbird seat of Majority Leader from which to spout vicious denunciations of the Koch brothers, Rush Limbaugh, and whatever other conservative luminaries he chooses to defame. Yes, yes, yes.

That doesn’t mean the war has been definitively and permanently won. Far from it.

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The Senate’s six-tenths majority requirement for invoking cloture remains in effect for most issues; only presidential nominations to positions below the Supreme Court have been excepted. Therefore, the Democrats’ shrunken caucus – no less than 46 seats, by the most optimistic estimate – will remain able to block votes on GOP-favored bills. Whether that will become a blanket strategy remains to be seen, but I cannot doubt that we’ll see it at least a few times in the two years before the next elections. It’s the only way remaining to them to spare Obama from having to veto popular legislation.

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The Republicans’ legendary, long endured fear of the Main Stream Media doesn’t appear to have changed. Those media have already poured copious hot wrath upon...well, upon everyone and everything, really, for displacing the Democrats from control of the Senate and various “blue-state” governorships. More will follow, undoubtedly rising in intensity as the struggle for dominance of Washington intensifies. In addition, expect the media to focus more closely on state-level issues henceforward, with particular attention to those states where the Republicans have gained the governorship or majorities in the legislature. Media venom is endless, and while the barons of the media are vicious, they’re not stupid; they know very well where the next generation of federal officials will come from.

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Another interesting observation about the major media: Several of their more prominent voices are already suggesting, much as they did in 2000, that the GOP now has an obligation to compromise with the Democrats on issues such as immigration and taxation. I expect that theme to be trumpeted at ever greater volume from now until January 3, when the next Congressional seatings take place. Why, then, did the Democrats not have an obligation to compromise with the Republicans when they took control of Capitol Hill in 2006? Will anyone with a national audience pose that question? We shall see.

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Many conservatives fear that with the midterms behind them, the GOP Establishment will simply return to “business as usual:” earmarks, pork, and cheerful acquiescence to Big Government in all its venues and varieties. It’s a legitimate fear. If there’s a near-term countermeasure, it must involve “holding their feet to the fire.” Continuous pressure must be mounted upon particularly slippery legislators to conform to a broad conservative agenda:

• Border control;
• Tax rate reduction;
• Preservation of the dollar;
• Restoration of our military pre-eminence;
• Reassertion of our primacy on the seas and in space;
• Sharply reduced regulation of all industry and commerce;
• Revivification of our existing treaty alliances and reassurance of our allies;
• Proactive protection of American diplomatic and military installations outside the United States;
• Respect for federalism, individuals’ rights, and the Constitution’s constraints on government at all levels.

It won’t be easy. Freshly elected or re-elected legislators tend to go partially deaf in the period after a victory. But we can do it. After all, we outnumber them.

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Finally for the nonce, the Democrats, having lost majority support, will shift to alternate tactics.

When in the majority, Democrat power brokers are principally concerned with keeping their coalition together. That coalition is composed of a number of groups that don’t share many agenda items:

• Negroes and “black power” thugs;
• Welfare clients;
• “Gay rights” poofs.
• “Women’s rights” viragoes;
• “Immigrants’ rights” buffoons;
• Anti-gun rights activists;
• The environmental Mafia;
• Federal bureaucrats and Civil Service employees;
• Corporate beneficiaries;
• Communications and entertainment media;

...and others of lesser profiles. It should be obvious that oftentimes, pleasing one will displease another, if only because the funds available for redistribution are not infinite. However, when they’re in the minority, the Democrats can use those interest groups individually as political cat’s-paws. Each group can be moved to attack the Republicans as an enemy of the group’s narrow agenda. Those attacks can look and feel fearsome when aggregated.

Such pressure can be withstood, but in the past, the GOP has not been staunch about doing so. Will this turn of the carousel prove different? We shall see.

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From the above, it would appear that it’s not really time for an exuberant celebration. In truth, given the terrible political deterioration of the Republic, it could hardly be otherwise. So as I’ve said any number of times already: Keep your powder dry.

The Big Day

Glory be to God, it’s finally here...and barring an evil miracle, twenty-four hours from now it will be behind us.

Have you ever experienced as wearying a campaign season as this one? The relentless attack ads in the newspapers and the broadcast media, the endless phone calls and pleas for contributions, the door-ro-door visits from “ground game” workers...all together, it was enough to get me answering the door with a shotgun. I hate to be so negative about “democracy” – which the U.S. is not -- but now and then being tortured to death by paper cuts seemed a preferable fate.

The worst part is, of course, the “upper bound” on our expectations. In this supposed “wave” election, what’s the most we can rationally hope for?

1. Twenty-one of the 535 federal legislative mandarins might change from D to R: perhaps nine in the Senate twelve in the House of Representatives.
2. A few governors might be displaced; a few state legislatures might shift from Democrat to Republican control.
3. The “permanent government” – i.e., the millions of federal bureaucrats who possess, de facto, the unreviewable power to write law – will remain where they are and will continue to do pretty much as they please.
4. Barack Hussein Obama will continue in office for another two years, two months, and sixteen days.
5. In the realm of legislated law and foreign policy, very little -- approximately nothing – will change.

Bullet #5 is the ultimate verdict. Given the political dynamics of our time, there’s no real hope for even a modest return toward Constitutional government. The GOP’s snout is as deeply buried in the feeding trough as the Democrats’. Worse, the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill lacks the cojones to do the one thing that might retard the further destruction of the rule of law: impeach Obama. They fear what the Obamunite media would say about them more than the prospect of a presidential dictatorship.

I wouldn’t look to 2016 for salvation. Let’s postulate the very best plausible outcome imaginable from the election two years hence: strengthened GOP caucuses in both houses of Congress plus Rand Paul or Ted Cruz in the White House. What could we expect to change then? Once the Republican Party has firm control of Washington, it would confront the temptation to employ the power the Democrats have usurped for Republican ends and special interests. Should it succumb – and that’s the well established pattern of history, Gentle Reader – not even a President Paul or President Cruz could do much about it.

So why vote? Why contribute the merest sliver of your time and energy to this seemingly pointless process?

Three reasons:

• There remains yet a tiny chance that the GOP will not succumb to power-lust;
• State and local elections are the staging ground for future changes in the power elite;
• The results of initiative and referendum propositions at the state and local levels remain important influences on wider political perceptions.

All that having been said, my hope is just for a stretch of peace before the presidential campaigning begins. We can already see how viciously contested that race will be. We can already estimate the density of the ads, the contribution drives, and the phone calls. And I don’t know about you, Bubba, but I’m putting out claymores to deal with the next batch of door-to-door pollsters and campaign workers. (Remember to put the side that says “Front Toward Enemy” facing the street.) It’s bad enough that there’s a Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses right around the corner.

Whatever the outcome of the elections, the prescription for the common citizen who mostly wants to be left alone remains as it was:

• Keep your affairs, personal or economic, as private as possible.
• Cultivate the trust and good will of your neighbors.
• Practice your intermediate-range marksmanship.
• Make modest preparations for civil disorder.
• Transmit these notions to your family.

Above all, get right with God. “You know not the day nor the hour.” Elections shouldn’t have any bearing whatsoever on that...but strangely enough, for many, many people they do.

The Two-Party “System:” Principles Vs. Priorities

If you would like to know why the nation appears to tolerate the current, wholly unacceptable state of our politics, this Armstrong Williams column will prove a great help:

...the two-party system is an imperfect mechanism for governing in an environment that demands more political nuance than usual. Voters have not been able to get enough of what they want from either party without getting too much of what they don’t want from both.

There are too few alternatives outside the two-party system for both expressing voter concerns and making a difference in policy outcomes. The party that wins is usually too mortgaged to special interests and too saddled with the power dynamics to pay attention to its base. And the party in the minority is generally too focused and ideologically closed to garner a governing coalition.

Mind you, when Williams says “too few alternatives outside the two-party system,” he intends that the reader apply the qualifier from the paragraph above: alternatives that provide voters “enough of what they want without getting too much of what they don’t want.” Therein lies the trap of American Big Government, not even concealed from our eyes.

The trap is simple: Now that the federal government has burst its Constitutional constraints, each major party has latched onto a set of priorities that are contradicted by the other major party. Additionally, neither major party can satisfy the desire – the aggregate desire – of the majority of Americans, who would be happy just to be left alone in the peaceful enjoyment of what’s rightfully theirs. Not perfectly happy, perhaps – after all, there’s at least a little authoritarianism in all of us – but willing to settle for the result.

The Democrats claim to support certain freedoms – once upon a time the “civil liberties,” but these days, mainly those pertaining to sex – while arguing for deep encroachments upon others, especially freedom in the economic sphere. Conversely, the Republicans support economic freedom – to a greater degree than the Democrats, at least – while appearing to threaten the ones the Democrats champion. This poses the typical leave-me-alone voter a painful dilemma.

Leave-me-alone voter John Q. Public normally has one or a few priority issues. His vote will be steered by those priorities; that is, it will very likely go to the candidates put forth by the major party he deems more likely to agree with his priorities. He will instinctively resist the suggestion that he vote for a minor party candidate as a “waste” of his vote. After all, a candidate with no chance to win the election cannot help to defend the things he values. Worse, should the balloting narrowly favor the candidate of the major party he disprefers, he will know fear for his priorities and agony over whether the votes drawn off by the minor party candidate might have made the difference.

Thus, the “parties of principle,” for instance the Constitutional and Libertarian parties, are defeated by the very thing they oppose. Only a narrowly focused single-issue party such as the Right To Life Party can garner significant support, and that solely from those voters whose personal priorities are equally narrow and intense.

One approach a minor party can take for winning nominal electoral support is cross-endorsement of the major party candidates closest to its views. A voter can then support a major-party candidate by voting for him on the minor party’s line. However, most minor parties deem this unsatisfactory, for obvious reasons. In any case, it results in near-perfect dominance of elected offices by the major parties, which is the crux of America’s political problem.

We who prize freedom lack an effective method for chastising both major parties simultaneously. This will continue to be so until the current political system suffers a complete loss of the confidence of the American electorate...and the consequences of such a collapse would be terrible indeed.

Yet we cannot help wondering how we might best defend ourselves from governmental predation and intrusion. With the midterms a single day away, it’s a question on many good men’s minds.

More anon.

Quickies: A Dollop Of Schadenfreude

The title of this post features what’s probably the most important word borrowed from the agglutinative German language to English. Its root words would have it mean “shadow joy.” In application, it refers to the emotion of the envious man – the “successfully” envious man, who watched in joy as the target of his envy was laid low.

Plainly, Schadenfreude isn’t a emotion one should seek to experience...which doesn’t mean a middling decent person won’t feel a twinge of it now and then. This All Souls’ Day morning is such an occasion:

It used to be that both the Republican and Democratic parties included both liberals and conservatives. Since parties contained ideological multitudes, it was hard for them to be the basis of strong, personal identities. A liberal Democrat in New Jersey didn't have a lot in common with a conservative Democrat in Alabama. But now that's changed. The parties are sharply sorted by ideology. What were once fractious coalitions have become unified tribes.

You can see the rise in political identity in the surveys on marriage. As Cass Sunstein writes, "in 1960, 5 percent of Republicans and 4 percent of Democrats said that they would feel 'displeased' if their son or daughter married outside their political party. By 2010, those numbers had reached 49 percent and 33 percent."

This isn't a world in which we should be surprised that video games have been politicized. This is a world in which it was only a matter of time until video games were politicized. This is a world in which, sooner or later, most everything will get politicized.

So! This self-important twit, this strutting fool of little eloquence and less erudition, who has willingly aligned himself with a political community whose long-held, stridently proclaimed creed is that “The personal is political,” is displeased by that creed’s signal success! Might it be that he’s finally awakened to the true majority of sentiment in these United States: the great mass of decent, dignified Americans, found in every locale, every socioeconomic category, and every walk of life, whose own long-held, stridently proclaimed creed is “Mind your own business!” -- ?

After the chortles have died, what can or should one say to such a pompous ass? Beyond “You ought to have been more careful about what you asked for, moron,” that is?

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A quick swerve and I’ll be finished for today.

A writer whom I generally despise once noted that now and then one must write a “finger exercise” or two, if only to dampen the deplorable habit of writing with one’s fists. That’s the state I find myself in just now: furious beyond my ability to express myself – in an opinion piece, that is – in any form but a bellow of rage. Now, I’m aware that some of my Gentle Readers actually like essays written with the fists. As it happens, I occasionally munch on one or two myself, just for the leavening they provide my excessively sweet temperament.

(Careful, now. Remember to breathe. Too much of anything, even raucous laughter, is bad for you. Epictetus said it, I believe it, and that settles it.)

However, when my blood pressure begins to challenge my IQ for supremacy, it’s time for a retrenchment. This is especially the case just now, owing to the heightened pressures from the impending election and my personal circumstances. Accordingly, these past few days, when I’ve found myself at the keyboard with my fists pre-balled for fury, I’ve deliberately backed away. Friday was a pinnacle experience of that sort: not only was I consciously in a rage; my vision had gone red-hazed and I had to fight to unclench my teeth. So after posting this bit of trivia, I booked a ninety-minute rubdown from my favorite masseuse Corey (a.k.a. “Thumbs of Steel”) and resolved to think of nothing political until I’d managed to de-escalate from DEFCON 1.

“Unplugging” has been an infrequent event in my life. Still, I’m about to embark upon the Next To Last Great Adventure – retirement – and it would surely be better to cultivate a modicum of serenity before taking that step. Atop which, fury over things one cannot control is less than productive, is it not?

So expect fewer political pieces and a broader indulgence in my other interests henceforward, at least for a while. After all, if I don’t make room for fiction and killing Solarii, who will?

That’s all for today, Gentle Reader. Enjoy your Sunday.

Not loathsome?

If you're ever tempted to think that the GOP is, in the main, not loathsome, you should read Chuck Baldwin's excellent article below.

It's important to vote against the ultra leftist, sellout, anti-white, progressive Democrat trolls this one last time but, after we get the finger in the eye from the GOP sellouts and cowards after this election, which we will, it will be time to go full third party.

"Reince Priebus And Amnesty–'There You Go Again!'" By Chuck Baldwin, VDARE.com, 10/30/14.