The Cry Of The Left: “Eat Your Neighbors!”

First, a snippet from one of my books:

    Patrick Wolzman mounted the dais and addressed the crowd.
    “Things have been fairly quiet around here lately,” he said. “Quiet enough that you might be wondering why I called this meeting. It’s simple enough, really. Has anyone else been following developments at Morelon House?”
    Barton started. Althea came to full alert. The crowd murmured uneasily.
    Wolzman nodded. “I thought not. I have, for several reasons. The Morelons have turned their mansion into a fortress. They’ve mounted big guns at all points of the compass. Laser cannons like the ones here.” He waved at the Spacehawk laser turrets. “It got me wondering why, and about what else they might have planned for the near future.”
    His gaze fell directly upon Barton. “I see the Morelon patriarch has graced us with his presence. Perhaps he’d care to join me up here and explain the actions of his clan, which many of us might deem provocative.”
    Barton growled “Hold hard, Al,” moved to the front of the gathering, and hoisted himself onto the dais with some difficulty. He glared at Wolzman with unconcealed anger.
    “Refresh my memory, Patrick,” he said in his sweetest tones. “Your clan is in the weapons business, is it not?”
    Wolzman nodded warily.
    “Have you had a downturn in business lately?”
    “Not noticeably, no.”
    “Well, what moves you to question the desire of Clan Morelon to develop some weapons of its own? You don’t mean to claim a monopoly over the trade, do you?”
    In the perimeter lights around the battery, Wolzman’s face darkened visibly. Yet glimmering behind the mask of anger was a well-concealed smile of satisfaction.
    “Monopolies are why we’re here, Bart,” he said. “Just now, Clan Morelon wields a trio of them. And a few of us here and a few not so nearby are getting just a wee bit worried at the trend.”
    Barton frowned. “We have no monopolies. Everything we sell is available from other sources.”
    Wolzman produced a smile of triumph. He turned to face the crowd.
    “Who here gets his power from a source other than a Morelon fusion plant? Please raise a hand.”
    No one did so. Wolzman nodded. “And what clan, whether or not it’s represented here, possesses ground-to-orbit capability and an outpost on the Relic? Please! Don’t all answer at once.”
    The uneasy rustling from the crowd became more pronounced.
    “Monopolies,” Wolzman said. “Not engineered by the destruction of your competition, I’ll grant that. But complete enough that if you wanted to ruin any of us, for any reason, you have the wherewithal, either by cutting off our electrical power or by bombarding us from sperosynchronous orbit.”
    —Don’t interfere, Al.
    It’s hard.
    —I know. Don’t.
    “What would make anyone think we plan any such thing?” Barton was maintaining his composure with an all too visible effort. “We’re merely using technology to provide electrical power—a product, I might add, that derives completely from my kinswoman’s massive investments and embrace of enormous personal risks to achieve that bastion on the Relic, where she did the research that produced it.” He waved at Althea, who had moved to the front of the crowd. “There she is, Patrick. Will you castigate her for her industry, her bravery, or both?”
    “Neither,” Wolzman said. “I’m castigating you and your clan, for not sharing her breakthroughs with the community at large.”
    Barton snorted. “And what ethical principle would compel us to do that? Oh, by the way, I’m still waiting to hear about our third monopoly. You did say ‘trio,’ didn’t you?”
    Wolzman nodded. “I did. Show the crowd your left arm.”
    Barton stared at him in incredulity. “Are you serious?”
    “Please, Bart.”
    He skinned back his sleeve.
    The arm was essentially regrown. It hadn’t yet developed to a mature girth or muscle tone; that would take time, nutrition, and a long course of steadily intensifying exercise. Nevertheless, it was complete, all the way to a hand with fingers and a nail at the end of each.
    “A brand new appendage, ladies and gentlemen,” Wolzman purred. “For those of you unaware of it, Bart lost that arm in combat with forces to which my clan was allied. Forces that came together for the same reasons I’ve asked you here this evening: to break the Morelon stranglehold on facilities that no single clan should command. Facilities that simple justice demands they be shared with all of Hope.
    “There’s the third of them, Bart. With the adoption of Claire Albermayer—”
    “It’s Claire Morelon now, Patrick,” Barton spat.
    Wolzman nodded. “As you wish. With that adoption, Clan Morelon has acquired the power of bodily regeneration. The ability to replace any lost or damaged body part, as long as the victim remains alive. Do you plan to share that with the rest of us, Bart?”
    Althea had reached battle readiness. She restrained herself from leaping onto the dais by the narrowest of margins.
    “It will be commercialized,” Barton said.
    “Oh?” Wolzman snorted. “How generous! What you’ve received as a gift from your adoptee, we will have to pay for! Shall we bow to your majestic beneficence now, or would you prefer to have our obeisance choreographed?”

[From Freedom’s Fury, the third volume of my Spooner Federation trilogy.]

Hope, a world populated by the descendants of anarchists who fled Earth before the genocidal wrath of the States, has grown prosperous and well populated...well populated enough that some have arisen who envy their fellows’ superior achievements and seek power over them. They tried, earlier in the series, to take what they wanted by force, but failed. (That’s the reason Clan Morelon fortified its two mansions as described above.) In the above, we see one of their leading lights trying the other perennial tactic of the Left: inducing neighbors to distrust one another.

Eowyn of the excellent Fellowship of the Minds notes a smaller-scale example of the tactic:

Use of snitches seems instinctive to the Left....

B. Christopher Agee reports for Western Journalism, Dec. 4, 2014, that in response to a shooting incident last week in downtown Austin, Police Chief Acevedo held a press conference to emphasize the shooting could have been prevented had someone reported the gunman’s behavior to law enforcement before his rampage.

Saying that he stays awake at nights worrying about “these homegrown extremists that are lone wolves, that are mad at the world, that are angry,” Acevedo encouraged Austin residents to report to authorities anyone “who’s a gun enthusiast or is armed with these types of firearms and they’re showing any type of propensity for hatred.”

The police chief said: “It’s important for us as Americans to know our neighbors, to know our families. Tell somebody if you know somebody that is acting pecu—with a lot of hatred toward any particular group.”

Couching his instruction with the caveat that turning in a friend or family member for owning guns “doesn’t mean that we’re going to take them to jail,” Acevedo noted that “we might want to vet these people.”

By my lights, Acevedo’s words, if they were reported accurately in the above, constitute adequate grounds for removing him from his position and barring him from ever again occupying a position of public trust. But Austin, despite being the capital of gun-friendly Texas, is rather far to the left politically, so I doubt that any such thing will occur. However, it’s Eowyn’s first sentence that’s most thematic:

Use of snitches seems instinctive to the Left.

Not only is it reflexive on their part; it’s also highly revealing. Totalitarians of all stripes are aware that they can never command sufficient police power to impose their will on a whole nation, unless their subjects actively participate in the process of oppression.

But in a free, peaceful, prosperous commonwealth, that’s a very difficult thing to do ab initio. It requires an emotional infrastructure that must be carefully designed and laid down.

It requires a pervasive atmosphere of fear.

---

Among the Left’s recent losses of more than transient importance has been its loss of two tactics of longstanding importance: racism-shouting and “women’s issues.” Note how badly candidates who leaned on those traditional pillars were beaten in the recent elections. The implication seems obvious: it’s no longer sufficient for the Left to accuse conservative or libertarian candidates of wanting to oppress Negroes and / or women. Yet those tactics have been instrumental in its rise to political power and to its grip on what it still possesses. Therefore, it must seek new weapons to take the place of those it has unintentionally blunted.

The Left’s gropings appear to have landed on an approach no man of good will would have expected: accusations of sexual predation. Consider the following stories:

• Lena Dunham’s claim that she was raped “by a College Republican.”
• Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s whole-cloth fantasy about a gang-rape at a University of Virginia frat house.
• Danmell Ndonye’s claim to have been raped at Hofstra University.
• This case, which the hard-left Sacramento Bee appears to have scrubbed from its online edition.

Each of these “rapes” was used by the Left as a tool for encouraging women to fear men – especially for young women to fear young men. If that doesn’t have you thinking about Rupert’s cri de coeur, check your pulse: you may have died and not noticed.

Pervasive mutual fear is the most fertile of all soils in which to germinate a totalitarian State.

---

Only by turning us against one another can the Left succeed in completing its campaign to extinguish all traces of freedom.

We already live under a cloud of fear, but at this time it’s principally fear of government. So many organs of government at all levels have been revealed as predacious exploiters of power and privilege that Americans’ trust in government has sunk to an all-time low. No one believes any longer in the restraining effects of the Constitution or the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. No one grants any agent of the State the presumption of benevolence. And no one with three functioning brain cells willingly allows a uniformed “law enforcement officer” into his home...especially not those of us with dogs.

I find myself wondering if there’s a wandering planetoid in our future...or perhaps, given the ESA’s recent achievements, a habitable comet.

---

The situation is grave, and becoming graver as we speak.The IRS has embraced its role as Censor of the Right to a degree even I could not have predicted. Other of the “alphabet agencies” are striving with all their power to suppress American enterprise, that the Left’s gains in reducing so many of us to dependence on State handouts not be reversed. And of course, we have the rampant use of militarized local police forces and their unConstitutional use of “civil asset forfeiture” to fund their operations and keep us all cowering behind our curtains.

Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley has several times spoken of a “tipping point,” passing which could put an end to any remaining semblance of Constitutional government. If we haven’t yet passed such a point, we’re surely teetering at the edge of it today.

Food for thought.

(Cross-posted at League of Outlaw Bloggers.)

Elephant in the living room.

In the great fiscal scheme of things, October 22, 1981 seems like only yesterday. That’s the day the US public debt crossed the $1 trillion mark for the first time. It had taken the nation 74,984 days to get there (205 years). What prompts this reflection is that just a few days ago the national debt breached the $18 trillion mark; and the last trillion was added in hardly 365 days.

It's difficult to say anything that captures the suicidal political choices, the egregious short-term political maneuvering, the political cowardice, the political opportunism, or the cynicism that made this amazing increase in our debt possible.

Charles Dickens' Mr. Micawber offers the advice to David Copperfield, "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen, nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

The reason for that misery is having to swallow one's pride, abandon one's status as an independent man, and visibly assume the position of supplicant before another human being. To request a small loan is as humiliating as to request a large one. The request reveals to one intended creditor that one has been weak and improvident but the man in need must still make his humiliating request.

What humiliation of the Nation is implicit in such an enormous debt? What Chinese, Japanese, German, or Saudi rings have our leading lights been forced to kiss?

In the same way, the crystal clear scheme of the Constitution has been gradually subverted. A Supreme Court decision here, another there. A Congressional usurpation here and a presidential ukase there. In living memory, the federal government has become every bit a monstrosity as the debt itself, which is nothing more than an indicator of the extent of the subornation that elegant Supreme Court obfuscation and sophistry have enabled, celebrated, and concealed.

The American soft tyranny has been funded and philosophically validated. Liberty in the U.S. has been eroded rather than smashed in one blow, all with little complaint from the majority of the voters.

The essence of communist regimes has always been dictatorship, secret police, torture, execution, economic ruin, and exaltation of the lie that slavery is freedom, poverty is plenty, and theft is justice. Yet the electorate of brave and free citizens, privileged and coddled like no others in history, was content to twice elect a man who started his political career in the living room of two communist terrorists.

That is what is called "eternal vigilance."

I've mentioned Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "pitiless crowbar of events" several times here. He merely echoed Ben Franklin who said, "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other." And we're all going to matriculate in that school whether we like it or not.

Only Yesterday—-How The Federal Debt Went From $1 Trillion To $18 Trillion in 33 Years." By David Stockman, Contra Corner, 12/5/14.

The Last Of The Harbingers Of Doom...

...comes when we cease to breed:

"My generation of boys is f**ked," says Rupert, a young German video game enthusiast I've been getting to know over the past few months. "Marriage is dead. Divorce means you're screwed for life. Women have given up on monogamy, which makes them uninteresting to us for any serious relationship or raising a family. That's just the way it is. Even if we take the risk, chances are the kids won't be ours. In France, we even have to pay for the kids a wife has through adulterous affairs.

"In school, boys are screwed over time and again. Schools are engineered for women. In the US, they force-feed boys Ritalin like Skittles to shut them up. And while girls are favoured to fulfil quotas, men are slipping into distant second place.

"Nobody in my generation believes they're going to get a meaningful retirement. We have a third or a quarter of the wealth previous generations had, and everyone's fleeing to higher education to stave off unemployment and poverty because there are no jobs.

"All that wouldn't be so bad if we could at least dull the pain with girls. But we're treated like paedophiles and potential rapists just for showing interest. My generation are the beautiful ones, " he sighs, referring to a 1960s experiment on mice that supposedly predicted a grim future for the human race.

After overpopulation ran out of control, the female mice in John Calhoun's "mouse universe" experiment stopped breeding, and the male mice withdrew from the company of others entirely, eating, sleeping, feeding and grooming themselves but doing little else. They had shiny coats, but empty lives.

"The parallels are astounding," says Rupert.

Overpopulation has little to do with it. Nor is Rupert, a young German, a member of the population I have uppermost in mind. Please read the rest of the article and return here forthwith.

---

The Calhoun “Mouse experiments” alluded to by Rupert and cited above were designed to explore the consequences of overpopulation, but the consequences Calhoun observed need not be tied exclusively to that cause. Human beings respond to ideas and perceptions quite as strongly as mice respond to a lack of space or food...and there are some very pernicious ideas in the social atmosphere in our time.

Unless you’ve spent the last thirty years in a medically induced coma, you’re surely aware of the phenomenon called metrosexuality. The implications for traditional masculinity, male participation in the forward motion of American society, and male-female relations were disturbing from the first. However, it might prove to have been a transitional stage to something more ominous yet: spornosexuality, the complete descent of male consciousness into self-worship and self-indulgence, divorced from any perception of need or desire for the female.

It’s possible – barely – to view spornosexuality as a perverse hypertrophy of masculinity. Indeed, some of its characteristics, such as the immersion in fitness and sports, appear quintessentially masculine. But it omits all the other defining characteristics of masculinity as we have known it since the Cro-Magnons. In particular, it lacks the value of heroic courage, the desire to excel and to rise to leadership, and the drive to win a mate and reproduce. It is wholly self-absorbed, lacking all need or desire for the admiration of others...especially not that of women.

Viewed thus, spornosexuality seems a closer approach to narcissistic solipsism – an expensively groomed sort of eremitism – than to any variety of masculinity as its long been understood. One thing it is most assuredly not: a path that promises the continuation of our society beyond the present generation.

---

Metrosexuality, spornosexuality, and the widening gulf between the sexes generally are not the consequences of overpopulation. Indeed, the reproduction rate of the First World has fallen so low that several nations are disappearing as we watch: they’re “going out of business,” not due to lack of “customers” but to lack of “workers.” Nor is this a recent development; its inception can be traced back at least five decades. This leads to some fascinating correlations and investigations.

In America, the traditional masculine ideal was encapsulated in the manly virtues: in essence, the cardinal Christian virtues:

• Prudence,
• Justice,
• Temperance,
• Fortitude,

...unified around a clearly conceived standard of right and wrong, plus the courage required to uphold that standard when it’s challenged in word or deed. As I wrote in the cited essay:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every last atom of this set of desiderata has been under attack, by radical feminists, enemies of Christianity, haters of patriotism, pseudo-peaceniks, and others, for a minimum of fifty years.

The attacks have never commanded the active allegiance of a majority of Americans. Yet they have gained an enormous amount of “silent deference:” the reluctance to challenge their promoters, usually out of fear of the consequences. They’ve established a powerful bastion in the law and in popular culture. And in the minds of our impressionable young, they have largely succeeded in demonizing masculinity of the traditional sort.

But everything that exists exists as something specific. A thing cannot be devoid of all characteristics and identity. That applies to us male “things,” as well. So if our young men are being successfully deflected from the traditional masculine ideal, they will perforce replace it with some other ideal – and if among the driving force displacing traditional masculinity is an agglomeration of female lies, contempt, and legal hazards, the replacement ideal will naturally reduce the importance of women and their potential as mates well below other considerations...possibly to zero.

Such a demasculinized generation will never reproduce. It only takes one such generation to engineer the extinction of a nation.

---

Senescence begins when growth ends -- “Lansing’s Law”

The above formulation originated, to the best of my knowledge, in James Blish’s novel They Shall Have Stars. Nevertheless, gerontologists use the cessation of growth as a reliable indication of the onset of senescence. It’s more empirical than theoretical, based on the lack of any observation of the reverse transition – i.e., the resumption of growth after a period of plateauing or decline.

“Lansing’s Law” appears to hold true for societies as well as for living organisms.

Mark Steyn’s marvelous book America Alone presents us with a stark survey of the First World societies whose reproduction rates have fallen below “replacement rate:” 2.1 live births per woman. Not one of them can be said to be healthy and vital. All are practicing the management of national decline. Some are frantically straining to shore up luxuriant welfare states by importing population from other lands. Others are merely doing what they must: centralizing their essential resources and services, the better to conserve what they require to sustain their shrinking, steadily aging populations.

Every nation in Western Europe is in this situation. So is Japan. A survey of the attitudes of young men in those nations suggests that, like Rupert, they have turned away from masculinity as older Americans understood and honored it. If American youth were to do the same...what then?

There are reasons to believe that America’s young men are doing the same. Metrosexuality and spornosexuality are our warning bells, for those inclined to listen.

---

It approaches tautology to note that you cannot induce a people to breed for the sake of future generations. A people that has ceased to breed has lost interest in future generations, and in the future as such. If the young men of the First World have fallen into that abyss, only they can right themselves...but current conditions and present trends continuing, the likelihood is small.

What, then, must we do? Aside from pray, of course?

(Cross-posted at League Of Outlaw Bloggers.)

Law, Lethality, And The Watchmen: A Problem Of Processes And Principles

“It is capricious to treat similar things differently.” – Associate Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart.
“It is capricious to treat different things the same.” – Associate Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart.

Now and then, it seems that only a complete outsider can bring order and rationality out of the chaos and emotion rampant in a set of publicly inflammatory incidents...or a pair of them.

These past few months we’ve watched the unfolding of two partly similar, partly dissimilar cases of civilians dying at police hands: that of Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, and that of Eric Garner of New York City. The foofaurauw over those two cases has risen to deafening levels, such that quite a lot of persons are turning off their televisions rather than be bombarded by any more of it.

The cases are similar in that:

• A large black civilian died at a white policeman’s hands in each of them.
• In both cases, the police involved have been accused of an illegal use of deadly force.
• In both cases, black racialist mouthpieces have incited “protests” – i.e., riots – over the incidents.
• In both cases, a grand jury has returned a verdict of “no true bill:” i.e., it has declined to indict the cop(s).

The cases differ in that:

• Officer Darren Wilson had attempted to question Michael Brown in connection with an extremely recent petty theft involving the violent intimidation of a store clerk; Eric Garner’s arrest was over the sale of untaxed cigarettes on a Staten Island thoroughfare.
• In the Brown shooting, the evidence strongly demonstrates that decedent Brown physically attacked Officer Wilson, at one point trying to wrest Wilson’s gun from his hand; in the Garner case, four New York City policemen brought about Garner’s death with a chokehold in the course of arresting him.
• There is no video evidence of the Brown / Wilson confrontation; there is video evidence of the Garner arrest.
• Ferguson, Missouri is a predominantly black city; Staten Island is overwhelmingly white working-class, with a large population of New York City police and firemen.

It’s been said that a white cop will never be tried for killing a black man, particularly a black “youth.” It’s also been said that a Staten Island jury would never dare to indict or convict a New York City cop, regardless of the facts of the matter. Yet the matter goes beyond sentiment, including racially oriented sentiments and biases, into a realm only one commentator has even brushed against to this point:

[Garner’s] initial crime: Selling “looseys” — individual cigarettes — in violation of NYC tax law. When you pass a law, however trivial, you are providing an opportunity for police to use lethal force.

Ace’s brief analysis follows from that:

Did Eric Garner deserve to die? No. The crime that began all this was selling "Loosies," single cigarettes out of the pack, in defiance of the state tobacco tax laws and all the other nonsense laws they throw on people about only selling things in their original packaging. Minor shit. Nonsense.

And yet, he defied police orders when they attempted to arrest them. When they tried to cuff him, he defied them again, pulling his arms away. He decided, as a Jury of One, that the law was silly and he would not be being arrested today.

I can't entirely blame him for feeling that way, but I know that if the police attempt to arrest you for a law which you are in fact breaking, even if you think it's a minor harassing sort of law, you do not have the right to resist arrest.

What followed is what follows in all resisting-arrest cases: some escalating violence as the police attempt to physically impose their will on the noncompliant suspect.

Some number of such situations will result in the death of the suspect.

The initial problem – i.e., that the law in question defines an offense that many of us, perhaps even all of us, believe to be absurd, even fundamentally unjust – is beyond our reach except by recourse to a process that has proved capricious, intractable, and maddeningly frustrating. Once it’s in place, its very existence opens the door to violent police / civilian confrontations in the process of investigation and / or arrest. As Ace has noted, some percent of those confrontations will result in serious, perhaps fatal harm to someone.

The next problem is that of principle: the principle of proportionality.

It’s the case, de facto if not de jure, that a near to indefeasible presumption of “lawful action in the performance of public duty” is conferred upon a policeman accused of an unreasonable or disproportionate use of force. It takes irrefutable evidence, multiply confirmed, to get that presumption set aside. Granted that the “blue wall of silence” is often a factor in such cases, an accused cop can always claim that in the situation he faced as it unfolded, the only way he could see to discharge his duty was the approach he took, and that any other cop placed in that situation would have reacted in the same fashion. Yet when the offense in question appears trivial and non-violent, onlookers will want to know why deadly force is permitted in the enforcement of such a law.

However, the law makes no distinctions among varieties of penal offenses. All arrests occur under the presumption that the arrestee is legally required to submit to the justice system without resistance. Moreover, if the law were to attempt a categorical distinction – say, between misdemeanors and felonies, or between non-violent and violent crimes, such that potentially lethal force may only be employed in an arrest for the latter sort of crime – it would result in the perpetrators of the former sort being legally permitted (and often effectively able) to resist arrest, perhaps by killing the arresting officer. Think about it.

Glenn Reynolds’s take on this problem:

That’s why I favor fewer laws, not more.

...is my own...yet as long as there is government, there will be laws that criminalize non-violent offenses such as tax evasion and entering the U.S. illegally. Absent the total privatization of all judicial and penal processes – i.e., anarchism – there isn’t much that can be done about it.

What we are left with is an inherently imperfect and imperfectible arrangement in which Juvenal’s question Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? is ultimately unanswerable. Trust the police unquestioningly? Unacceptable. Hold them accountable for never injuring a civilian who hasn’t yet been convicted of a violent crime? Unworkable. No position between those poles can be defined to a degree of specificity that would eliminate all possibility that someone, uniformed or otherwise, will get away with murder.

Life as fallible men trapped under the veil of time is like that.

(Cross-posted at League of Outlaw Bloggers.)

Simple Arithmetic

Back in the Seventies, there was a sporadic feature in Analog science-fiction magazine titled “Probability Zero!” Each segment of that series featured an “impending calamity” that actually had no significant chance of occurring...yet the piece would be written in the panic-style common to the doom-shouters of every era. There’s No Time To Waste!! The Governments Of The World Must Act At Once!! On their face they were humorously intended, but behind the laughs loomed a larger point about the readiness of so many persons to accept crisis-mongering if it comes with even a shred of pseudo-logical cover.

The one I have in mind this morning is “The Population Implosion.” The rationale behind that piece, which purported to demonstrate that the human race is shrinking toward extinction, was that since each of us requires two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, et seq to exist at all, the number of persons in each generation can only be half of the previous one at most. Why, pretty soon we’ll be down to just one of us...and what then, Gentle Reader?

Of course it’s nonsense. Even a child can see through it. Yet far older and more intelligent persons are regularly seduced by equally simple arithmetic, for an equally simple reason.

The reason, as Thomas Sowell and others have pointed out, is extrapolation in the absence of comprehension.

Consider the temperature of your neighborhood on a spring morning at, say, midnight. At noon, the temperature is virtually guaranteed to be higher, perhaps twenty or thirty Fahrenheit degrees higher. Would it be valid to extrapolate that trend forward by another twelve hours? By twelve hundred hours? Doesn’t it lead to inevitable calamity, specifically the roasting to death of everyone on Earth?

We can see this to be an absurd extrapolation because we grasp the reason for that midnight-to-noon temperature increase: the rotation of the Earth. Your neighborhood has rotated out of the Earth’s sun-shadow and exposed it to sunlight. Over the next twelve hours it will rotate back into the sun-shadow. The process is clear; the extrapolation is faulty because it doesn’t take it into account.

The simple-arithmetic method of forecasting has produced other absurdities as well. Consider “peak oil.” The very persons who in the Seventies predicted the imminent exhaustion of world oil supplies founded their crisis-mongering on simple arithmetic. The proven reserves at that time equaled about thirty years’ global oil consumption. Therefore, in thirty years the oil would all have been used up. Q.E.D., right? Right?

Of course not. Note that those folks are all silent today. Except for the ones who’ve “moved on” to other “crises” and those who are currently lamenting the supply-driven decline in fossil-fuel prices as a blow to their schemes for totalitarian control of the world economy, that is.

---

The poster-boy for simple-arithmetic forecasts is Thomas Malthus, he who endeavored to scare us into believing that the “geometric” increase of the world population would soon starve us all to death. Malthus was misled by his static views of both Mankind and technology. He made no allowance for the influence of industrialization and urbanization on birth rates, and even less for the possibility of massive improvements in food production technology. He admitted to those mistakes in a Second Essay on the Principle of Population, which isn’t nearly as well known as the first one. Yet the population-bomb doom-shouters of the Seventies repeated Malthus’s early mistakes virtually without deviation. Even as bright a man as Isaac Asimov was seduced by their pseudo-logic, which merely confirms Einstein’s observation that no one is so smart that he’s immune to gross blunders.

Robert M. Pirsig, best known for his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, recounts therein a similar mistake by his early, pre-electroshock-therapy self, to whom he refers in the book as “Phaedrus.” Phaedrus was misled into the belief that scientific method – indeed, rationality itself – is inherently defeated by the infinite number of possible observations one can make and hypotheses one can form. That ignores the mind’s ability to filter irrelevancies and the efficacy of Occam’s Razor at winnowing through the possible explanations for the phenomenon under consideration. Yes, “the more you look, the more you see,” but that doesn’t mean that everything you see is therefore relevant to the specific mechanism you’ve set out to explain.

Phaedrus / Pirsig was rather young when he made his admittedly life-altering mistake, so perhaps we should cut him some slack. Then again, he did get a massive bestseller and international fame out of it, so perhaps it needn’t be very much slack after all. And he did piss in his own cornflakes with Lila, which lost him – deservedly – most of the admiration his earlier book had earned.

There’s a moral in there, somewhere.

---

If it sounds to you as if I’m about to say something like “Leave the simple arithmetic to the simpletons,” you’re not completely off base. Simple arithmetic is exactly that: simple. It attains its greatest relevance in simple situations. How many cookies are there in the jar? If you eat one per day, how long will they last you? That sort of simple arithmetic works – if we insist on the proviso that no one add cookies to the jar between your visits to it. It’s the failure to contemplate the possibility of such additional mechanisms that causes the forecaster’s problems.

The phrases that belong in all such proposed extrapolations are “Current trends continuing” and “All else being held constant.” Economists know this; the honest ones say it frequently and openly. But not all persons who award themselves the sobriquet of “economist” are honest.

BUT!

Some simple arithmetic can go a long way toward explaining matters that others would prefer that we not understand. For example, consider the current, extremely long (by historical American standards) average period most unemployed Americans of working age remain in that condition. Granted that the economy hasn’t been good, though its condition varies regionally. Granted also that other factors, such as the explosion of financial burdens and legal hazards statutorily laid on employers, have something to do with the reduced pace of business expansion and consequent hiring. But there’s also an arithmetic component:

1. Food stamps are available virtually for the asking;
2. Unemployment insurance pays benefits for more weeks than ever before;
3. It’s easier and safer to work “off the books” – i.e., without it becoming known to officialdom – than ever before;
4. The difference in de facto income between persons in the “working class” economic segment and those exploiting conditions 1, 2, and 3 has been shrinking, and is now smaller in real terms than ever before.

Arithmetic of that sort reminds us of something quite a lot of activist types would rather we’d forbear to consider: people work to improve their lot in life. If work’s ability to improve one’s standard of living should decline, so will its appeal to potential workers. And thus shall it ever be.

Pretty simple, eh?

(Cross-posted at League of Outlaw Bloggers.)

It’s On: No Longer Just My Mad Notion

Think ol’ Curmudgeon Emeritus Fran has gone a bit overboard about the race war he considers to be in motion? Well, have you considered the opinions of this state senator? Have you asked for the sentiments of the Bosnian-Americans of St. Louis, Missouri? And what about this charming fellow:

Do his opinions carry any weight?

I don’t think it’s safe to laugh all of that off, Gentle Reader. Do you?

---

We approach a critical mass.

You cannot repeatedly dispense the most inflammatory, divisive imaginable rhetoric at a demographic without inflaming that group to violence. Indeed, the relentless exhortations to hatred of whites by blacks has reached such an intensity – now reinforced and amplified by subtle encouragements from the White House itself! – that the greatest wonder of the current situation is that white neighborhoods nationwide are not yet under open, armed attack by mobs of angry blacks.

Wait a moment. Let me check that. They’re not, are they? I mean, given the propensity of the Main Stream Media for reflexively suppressing such news... but no. Surely I would have heard about it some other way. The sound of gunfire travels very well.

American whites approach their own, far less well publicized critical mass. Many, especially in racially mixed regions of the country, are making ready: stuffing their pantries to bursting, checking the guns and laying in stocks of ammunition, and quietly conferring with their neighbors to ensure that their communities are prepared to react effectively should the chaos come their way. But should that occur, don’t bet on whites simply defending their homes and neighborhoods from the assault and then going back to their peaceable ways.

Will these critical masses form? They can still be headed off. Whether the steps necessary to avert calamity will be taken is uncertain. Indications to this point suggest that they won’t be:

• No public figure has yet demanded a stern response to the disorder.
• The National Guard has been deployed only after-the-fact, and to trivial effect.
• Firm suppressive measures (e.g., water cannons) have not been employed against embryonic riots.
• Police have actually tried to disperse – even arrest – armed private-citizen guardians of potential targets.
• The racial patterns in “knockout game” attacks, recent events such as the murder of Zemir Begic, and violent crime generally continue to be suppressed.

A plague of civil disorder can only be quelled by harsh measures. Indeed, they must be so harsh that even a slight possibility of being subjected to one will outweigh the pleasures of violence and the potential gains from looting. If such measures are not undertaken and applied remorselessly, the violence and looting will continue and increase, in obedience to their own internal dynamic. Race riots are not an exception to this rule.

Draw your own conclusions.

---

We met on the beach amid rumours of war
Your head in your hand, what you saw you won't say
As the newspapers flew in the wind.
I can see you're one of that kind
Who carry around a time bomb in their mind, no one knows
When you'll slip the pin.

Rumours of war...rumours of war.

I see that your dress is torn at the edge
You are lost, intense, like a man on a ledge, waiting to jump
As the waves break over the shore.
You say there's a storm that can't be delayed
And lately it seems to be coming this way, you can hear it break
Like the slam of a door.

Rumours of war...rumours of war.

You tell me, just look all around
At the past and the present, the cross and the crescent
The signs and the planets are lining up like before.
There are souls on fire in the day and the night
On the left and the right, in the black and the white
You can see it burn in the eyes of the rich and the poor.

Rumours of war...rumours of war.

[Alasdair Ian Stewart]

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. Justice is not postponed...Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty.

[Ralph Waldo Emerson, Compensation]

If you’ve never seen me mention the vigilance committees of the latter Nineteenth-Century West, here’s your chance to acquaint yourself with them. They formed in response to public perceptions that the “authorities” were unable to do their proper jobs or were uninterested in doing them. Though they’ve been given a bad rap by sententious historians eager to ingratiate themselves with political power, they appear to have functioned at least as well as any “public” system of justice has ever functioned.

The vigilance committees were usually stimulated by breakdowns in the public peace far milder than an epidemic of race riots. Granted that I speak here of the pre-statehood West, whose population tended to be far more individualistic and assertive than the contemporary American populace; all the same, there is a tipping point somewhere. We might not determine its location without passing through it, after which all the theoretical questions will once again be matters for the historians.

---

It’s an unfortunate but irrefutable fact that the sole generally satisfactory agency for maintaining order within a cohesive demographic, whether the unifying factor is race or anything else, is that demographic’s own, internalized set of morals and ethics. If the demographic fails to enforce those morals and ethics upon those who flout them, there will be a corrective response from outside the demographic. If the demographic goes further, by not merely refusing to discipline its lawbreakers but affirmatively shielding them from correction, a violent us-versus-them confrontation becomes inevitable.

Of one thing we may be sure: every debt is paid. The social debt currently accruing, owing to blacks’ unwillingness to silence the racialist hucksters inciting violence and to discipline their own unruly elements (or to have others discipline them), will be paid. The sole questions are who will pay it, and when.

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Res nolunt diu male administrari. Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will not convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in.

[Ralph Waldo Emerson, Compensation]

Verbum sat sapienti.

(Cross-posted at League Of Outlaw Bloggers.)

A decline in courage.

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable, as well as intellectually and even morally worn [justified] it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.^[1]

Cultural enrichment.

Terms like "multicultural," "diversity," "undocumented," "compassion," "justice," "legacy of slavery," "structural racism," "white privilege," "microaggression," "religion," "equality," "living constitution," "fair share," "capitalism," "public service," "choice," "nationalism," "racism," "affirmative action," "poverty," "amnesty," "vibrant," "public schools," "nation of immigrants," "entitlements," "welfare," "man-caused disaster," "workplace violence," "refugee," "anchor baby," "LGBTPDQ," and "quantitative easing," for example, all . . . all . . . involve a deliberate failure to address a multitude of other relevant aspects of the problem in question, aspects that entail considerations of responsibility, upholding standards, legitimate ethnic and racial interests, saying no, exclusion, alienage, unmitigated gall, demagoguery, treason, surrender, depravity, weakness, contempt for the law of the land, regression, obsequiousness, and the like.

Rather than confront our social, political, economic, and moral problems we define deviancy and weakness down and away. The very vocabulary of our national life represents cowardice. And lies.

Notes
^[1] "A World Split Apart." Commencement Address, Harvard University, June 8, 1978. By Alexander Solzhenitsyn, American Rhetoric. Online Speech Bank.

What book of account?

We now see that the [colonial] conquests proved to be short lived and precarious (and this, in turn, points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests). Relations with the former colonial world now have switched to the opposite extreme and the Western world often exhibits an excess of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns, will be sufficient for the West to clear this account.^[1]

In what book of account are the West's deeds recorded? Are the words "The West" or "white civilization" the only words in the left column of this book?

Apparently so. All the other angelic peoples of the world have no line items to record.

I doubt the great Solzhenitsyn would disagree that it should be book with many names and entries. I infer rather than he knows the former colonial lands will never be satisfied with less than whites' total self-abasement and surrender. Come to think of it, there are plenty of white Westerners who will never be satisfied with less than that. Did our ancestors have to contend with treason on such a vast scale from the most educated and intelligent?

Notes
^[1] "A World Split Apart." Commencement Address, Harvard University, June 8, 1978. By Alexander Solzhenitsyn, American Rhetoric. Online Speech Bank.

Picking at that same old scab.

Regarding Ferguson officer Darren Wilson killing Michael Brown in self defense:

Our Imperial President, his Attorney General, and the liberal/progressive media spin machine, however, couldn't leave it alone. Instead of reporting something along the lines of how unfortunate it was for a young man to die because of his stupid actions, they turned it into a race war.

Such is their ardent desire. To degrade themselves.

"Democrats Doing What They Do Best: Lynch Mobs." By W. Lewis Amselem, The DiploMad 2.0, 11/26/14.

Defenders of the West.

One Mark Simpson reminiscing over a visit to Britain's first men's style exhibition, “It’s a Man’s World”:

I’d seen the future, and it was moisturized.

"The New Mirror Men: From Metrosexual To Spornosexual." By Rebecca Burgess, The Federalist, 12/2/14.

An Embarrassment Of Riches

I hardly expected to wake up this morning:

1. Half a pound lighter than I was on Thanksgiving Day morning;
2. With so many articles to cite and write about.

And you, Gentle Reader, will be the ultimate beneficiary.

---

1. The Multiplicity Of Dividers.

Tom Maguire pens an interesting headline...and then fails to exploit it. The headline itself:

When Pundits Just Don't Get It, Part Forever

But the subsequent post fails to address why “pundits just don’t get it.” Maguire does make one pithy statement at the very end:

At the state and local level plenty of politicos from both sides of the aisle will ensure their fundraising success and continued power by promoting division rather than reconciliation. At the Presidential level only one of the strategies can succeed, but if the losing side is competitive and can envision success in the next cycle, the politics of division can continue for quite a while.

Isn’t it quite clear that “pundits,” and the media organs that employ them, have learned to emulate the politicos – that they, too, promote division as a tool for securing a loyal “base?” Once that’s recognized, doesn’t it become immediately clear that such a strategy is far more likely to be deliberate than accidental?

The syndrome isn’t confined to voices on the Left. Few op-ed writers with substantial followings haven’t “chosen a side” and resolved to promote and defend it regardless of all other considerations. And no matter which way your politics incline and which pundits you favor, that is not a good thing. But there I go, trying to talk sense again.

---

2. It’s On, The Continuing Saga.

Jerry Pournelle cites an interesting development:

At least one black leader, a State Senator, has declared that we are now in a race war, blacks and their sympathizers vs. everyone else. She has no authority to declare any such thing, and she certainly does not speak for anything like a majority of African Americans, nor, I suspect, for anything like a majority of liberal intellectuals, but it is an astonishing thing to say.

Actually, it’s only astonishing because it was said by an elected official. The truth of the matter has been plain for some time, though American Caucasians have been reluctant to confront it and to respond appropriately. However, Pournelle is as race-shy as most white opinion-mongers:

We are not in a race war, but there are similarities to a barbarian invasion. We have a barbarian culture within the United States. The most common cause of death of black males is to be killed by another black male. There are other sub cultures in which homicide is common. Generally the barbarian culture does not interact with the majority of the middle class, but in so-called ghetto areas American citizens cannot avoid interactions with the barbarian culture. They live there, and they can’t avoid it.

If it’s not a race war, why are nearly all the thugs Negroes, and why are other Negroes so protective of them? Moreover, Pournelle’s take on the distribution of the malady varies from mine. It’s most definitely escaped the urban ghettoes and penetrated the bastions of middle-class America, though it’s left its pretense of “poverty” behind. But Pournelle makes an important observation:

The cure for barbarians within the gates is to educate the barbarian children. Humans are not born civilized. They acquire civility by living in civilization, and they learn it as they grow up in it....American citizens act civilized because they are civilized, not from fear of apprehension and punishment.

Say rather that American citizens once acted civilized because they had been civilized at the earliest stages of their lives, whether by the schools or by their parents. But we’re not quite finished here:

But the way to civilize barbarians is to do it in the schools, from the earliest grades on: enforcement of discipline, being polite, respectful deference to authority – not cringing fear, but respectful deference. But those values have to be instilled, and enforced.

And how, given the Left’s near to absolute control of American education from kindergarten to graduate studies, are we to bring that about?

---

3. Barbarism.

The redoubtable Mike Hendrix moves from Pournelle’s piece to other fascinating citations. Here are the ones that knocked me for a loop:

Bosnian immigrants respond in the comment section of this post (which, you’ll notice, is oh-so-careful not mention the race of the black savages who perpetrated the attack):

Ok, Bosnian businesses in St. Louis, it’s time to show who’s in charge. Let us chase the animals away from our neighborhood. No tolerance. None whatsoever. You mess with us? You mess with genocide victims? You don’t stand a chance. We will wipe you out! No EBT cards accepted at any Bosnian businesses from now on. Bevo Mill neighborhood is our land now. We will use our language and we will do as we see fit. All are welcome, yes, this is America, the land of many peoples, but we will not tolerate any more of this nonsense. If any suspicious African-American woman or man comes onto Bosnian businesses, you will most definitely be stopped and questioned. Every single last one of you. You will be questioned and you will have to answer to us. You will be interrogated. If you do not keep up your properties, you will be forced out. If you do not pull up your pants, we will pull them up for you. It is now time. We are cleaning up the south side. No tolerance.

Another:

That’s it. Five Bosnians now have been murdered by black men. That’s the last straw. No mercy for these animals. We will drive them out of the neighborhood. Our Bosnian economy is getting stronger. We will not speak English to them in our stores. We will not rent to them. It is over, folks, completely over. We have suffered genocide and we will not suffer it again. I am a person who is very considerate. I love Croatians, Serbians, etc. I have friends from everywhere. But for those who will destroy us, I will not be friends nor will I give them my business. We will drive them out. We Bosnians will drive these animals out. I hope the media will take note. Because we will discriminate.

In Tom Clancy’s first, blockbuster novel The Hunt For Red October, Clancy has Jack Ryan muse, en passant, over the possibility that it would take immigrants attracted to America by American ideals -- not by America’s opulent standard of living – to keep those ideals alive and well defended. Perhaps the Bosnian immigrants who penned the above comments are part of such a defensive cadre. We shall see.

---

4. The Rationalizers.

Fourth, have some observations and thoughts from the indefatigable Sara Noble:

“Demon” and “aggressive” are racist terms and whites don’t see black children “as worthy of being alive”. The problems affecting black society stem from slavery of their ancestors. All this is according to one liberal black writer and one has to wonder how many others believe exactly as she does.

Stacey Patton, in an article in The Washington Post last week, presented a bizarre piece to justify the violence and criminality we see in Ferguson and elsewhere.

Patton is a pretty, smart, accomplished black woman who made her own way out of dismal circumstances and came to the conclusion that slavery and white people are to blame for what ails poor black communities. Ferguson and Michael Brown serve as examples of police brutality and mistreatment of blacks in her mind.

Not once does she or anyone mention gangs and drugs when they discuss Ferguson but it is gangs that are destroying black communities.

Her premise is that whites, particularly white police officers, don’t see black children as children, they see them as threats. It is the reason they are disproportionately represented in prisons, it is the reason for much of their problems, according to Stacey Patton.

The reality is that absentee parents, drugs and gangs are destroying black youth.

Please read the whole thing.

---

5. Polymath.

The novel is taking longer to complete than I first thought it would, because the final segment, which (for the first time since I first embarked on a novel-length project) is intended to act as a bridge to a sequel. Making it sound for both purposes – i.e., as a story in its own right and as a segue piece – is costing me considerable effort.

Yes, there will be further novels and stories in the Onteora Canon. Christine D’Alessandro, Malcolm Loughlin, Kevin Conway, Todd Iverson, and Stephen Graham Sumner will all be back. I hope you’re happy about that.

And yes, I really, truly do intend to finish the novel based on “The Warm Lands.” Honest Injun.

Have a nice, non-fattening Cyber Monday.

(Cross-posted at League Of Outlaw Bloggers.)

Biding their time.

The question on everybody's lips.

It is the thesis of the immigrationists, that migrants cause the wealth of their host country. The example of the US, Canada, Australia is cited. This is based on a distortion. Those historic migrants brought skills in demand in the receiving country. Today’s entrants are often unemployable in a post-industrial society. At best, they can do things whose indigenous practitioners are redundant on the labor market. As a letter writer put it, if these masses are so useful, then why are they unemployed, unemployable and welfare dependent?

"Absurdities Called Public Affairs." By George Handlery, The Brussels Journal, 11/27/14.

The Political Christian: A Sunday Rumination

Last week, I vented about the inappropriateness of associating specific political positions with the Christian ethos:

There could hardly be anything more blasphemous than for a priest of Christ to state, from the pulpit, that Christians are under an obligation to support certain political parties or public policies. Yet we hear this sort of thing from far too many pulpits...and from far too many persons whose conception of Christ’s New Covenant is shallow, to say the least.

Yet there’s no denying that quite a lot of political blather flows from America’s pulpits. Much of it is collectivist, even Marxist, in orientation. Its advocates often make reference to the earliest Christians, who “held all things in common,” as if the emergency measures First-Century Christians adopted to safeguard their lives while they pursued the Great Commission in a lethally hostile era were equally applicable to us of Twenty-First-Century America.

One such as myself, whose politics falls well to the Right of center, will frequently be appalled by such preachments. Still worse would be to see huge numbers of Christians adopting them, as we in the Right know well the inevitable results of collectivism and dread to watch them at work in these United States.

But lay Christians can hardly charge our pulpits, eject the political preachers from them, and demand an immediate return to strict Gospel exegesis. It would cause talk, among other things. (I know it’s hard, but resist the temptation. I don’t want to have to bail you out of jail.) So what can we do?

Well, if memory serves, Jesus didn’t reserve the study or preaching of the Gospels to the Apostles alone.

---

It might be apocryphal, but a beautiful saying attributed to St. Francis of Assisi runs as follows:

“At all times, preach the Gospels.
When necessary, use words.”

Whether or not Francis of Assisi actually said any such thing, the wisdom of those words is plain, for people respond most reliably to a good example. Indeed, what is more clichéd than the condemnation of the sanctimonious hypocrite: he who publicly mouths pieties but privately wallows in vice? Mind you, hypocrisy is not the worst of sins, but to the extent it’s detectable and appears to go unpunished, it’s an important fuel for the degradation of a society. But the larger point is the important one here.

Many years ago, during the period when I was away from the Church, I chanced to spend an afternoon, under social circumstances, with a devoutly Christian extended family that glowed with joy. (That the paterfamilias was an entrepreneur in nuclear medicine probably had nothing to do with it.) Every member of the three generations present that day was quite literally beautiful, and a pure pleasure to have in one’s company. Though I never again saw any one of them, the occasion has remained vivid in my memory ever since.

I have no idea what their politics were. No political subject came up. Politics was entirely irrelevant to that gathering...nor, I suspect, was it relevant to that family at any other time. But neither did any religious subject come up. Apart from grace over a meal, not one of them said a single word about their common faith. If they preached their convictions on that day, it certainly wasn’t with words.

I couldn’t say whether those folks were extraordinary or important in any secular way. I didn’t get to know them well enough for that. Their happiness, as individuals and in aggregate, was dominant in my perception of them.

Return, if you will, to this piece, and reflect on the parallels.

---

It’s a well known phenomenon of politics that one’s chosen alignment often has much more to do with the sort of person one wants to associate with (and to appear to others) than with a reasoned set of conclusions about rights, justice, and public policy. The same might be true of religious convictions. The inverse seems beyond dispute; at least, I can’t imagine willingly adhering to a faith most of whose members strike me as vicious or personally repellent. (Also, it would account for the popularity of Islam in our prisons.)

The acceptance of a religion is a matter of personal commitment. It’s a voluntary adoption of certain beliefs and an associated code of conduct, not a license to compel others to conform to one’s preferences. The same is true of any other noncoercive system of belief or scheme for living. Thus, politics is utterly irrelevant to religious faith and ethics, and should be allowed no place in our preachments or our pulpits.

Still, I can’t help musing over the predominance of conservative political views among Americans who describe themselves as Christians. If those folks are as persuasive in their persons as that family I encountered so very long ago, it would go a long way toward explaining why the “red states” are also the bastions of American Christianity. We tend to gather with those we find admirable, whether or not our admiration is warranted. We tend to emulate those we deem successful, whatever our metrics for success. Even if we find it difficult to view persons who inspire others solely by example as preachers, it appears to be the style of evangelism best suited to the Christian ethos. If politics matters almost as much to you as your faith, and if it’s also the style of political evangelism best suited to the conservative / libertarian ethos, why not give it a try?

Hey, it might even work on that obnoxiously political priest whose sermons affect you like fingernails on a blackboard.

May God bless and keep you all.

The liberal prime directive.

In fact, total disengagement from all the non-Western world is necessary. I am one of those who are of the belief (I realize not a very large number) that the reason why the world has reached a crisis population of 6.5 billion—in which the vast majority are people from ethnic [backgrounds] that have absolutely no chance whatsoever to reform themselves into anything resembling a civilized being—is the century-long liberal fight to subsidize dysfunctionality.

Comment KE from Turkey by on "Separationism." By Lawrence Auster, View from the Right, 12/5/06.

Anchor baby madness.

Today, more than 20 percent of all children born in the United States are born to those who have entered the United States unlawfully, and who are, by any authentic definition of the 14th Amendment, NOT subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. because they are not citizens. Yet Barack Hussein Obama and his Socialist Bourgeoisie assert that the "anchor babies" of illegal immigrants are owed all the entitlements of an American citizen.

The near-term consequences of this fallacious assertion have dire implications for the future of Liberty, for the Rule of Law, and for the very survival of our nation. But this is consistent with Obama's "fundamental transformation" agenda to break the back of free enterprise, which is essential to liberty.

In 1776, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson proposed the national motto, "E pluribus unum" ("Out of many, one"), but that unity will not last much longer if we do not take dramatic action to restore the Rule of Law.^[1]

Only in the debased United States of America today, will courts contort themselves to dream up doctrines that enable

1. foreigners to claim a "right" to acquire citizenship by virtue of having been delivered 12 inches over the international boundaries of the U.S. and

2. their foreign parents to claim a right of family reunification with such bogus "citizens."

How to illustrate the absurdity of this? If I visit a house for sale during an "open house" do I have a right to come back later and demand a bedroom from the new owner for my home? Our black letter property laws permit the courts to deal effectively with such an absurd claim. Something more than mere presence enters into the calculations of sane people.

According to U.S. federal courts, however, foreigners can make just such a claim under our immigration "laws." Location of delivery equals U.S. passport and right to reside and vote. Wishes and intentions of foreigners trump interests of U.S. citizens.

Notes
^[1] "'Subject To the Jurisdiction of the United States' Means Babies Of Illegal Mothers Are Not Automatically U.S. Citizens." By Mark Alexander, Huffington Riposte, 8/26/10.

A Post-Black-Friday Nosegay

Had enough turkey yet, Gentle Reader? I haven’t. At least, that’s what the C.S.O. says.

(Note to self: For next wife, select one who wasn’t Chief Cook for the entire U.S. Army in some previous life.)

---

1. “The Business Of Business Is Business!”

Our beloved Instapundit today cites a passage from a recent novel -- something that needs to be said more often, even though it shouldn’t need to be said at all!

    He looked at me curiously. “What was your main objective, Skipper? Improve the ship’s reputation?”
    I shook my head. “You can’t improve reputation by focusing on reputation, Avery. You always earn it by your actions.” I stopped to think for a couple of heartbeats. “I almost didn’t take the berth because of the Agamemnon’s reputation on the docks, but once I was here, my main goal was simple. Make money.”
    He cocked his head to one side. “Isn’t that rather cold, skipper? Make money?”
    “Maybe,” I shrugged. “But it’s why we’re out here. It’s why the ship exists. We’re all out here because we make money. If we didn’t make a living at it, we couldn’t do it.”

Quoth Professor Reynolds: “I wish more people understood that basic point.” At first I responded by nodding, but then I got to thinking: What evidence exists to the effect that many people don’t understand it?

Well, for certain values of many, it’s beyond dispute. But is that fraction of the American populace significant in comparison to the rest?

It’s an interesting question, really. A century ago, when most Americans were either self-employed or worked in small, family-owned businesses, the don’t-understand-it fraction would have been minuscule. Even persons employed for wages by large corporations would have grasped it, simply because of the overarching commercial environment. The matter is more elusive today.

Superficially, an individual’s attitude can often be discerned from his casually offered opinions. Phrases such as “obscene profits” and “corporate greed,” and exhortations toward “living wages” and price controls would seem a dead giveaway. But such a person can usually be led to see how irrational such notions really are...at least, if he’s not of the “won’t-understand-it” tribe.

The won’t-understand-its are a separate and less tractable case. Usually, they have to be beaten across the chops by reality. Sometimes even that won’t suffice. Yet there’s worse: the Left’s leadership cadre, the ones who understand it very well but are determined to efface that understanding from their followers, because to grasp it would fatally undermine their power and prestige.

I had an exchange with such a villain just yesterday. He was the sort of devil who cites Scripture for his purposes: in this particular case, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “four freedoms,” only two of which are logically or ethically defensible. His basic argument was that “freedom from want” is just as valid as any other interpretation of freedom. When it became clear that he would not grapple with political freedom as a category that precludes State action to feed people, I left him to play with himself. Yet his is the sort of pseudo-argument that has animated those who have traditionally been the American Left’s cannon fodder: those who demand the unearned as a “right.”

They can often seem quite numerous when they take their bullhorns and spittle-flecked mugs to the streets, as for example in the current foofaurauw over “living wages” for retail clerks and fast-food workers. But how many of them are there, really?

---

2. The Left’s Hate Parade.

Liberal Logic 101 presents a highly illustrative piece today:

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of trying to attempt a polite discussion with your typical Liberal you’ll quickly find how full of hatred and venom they are. You can actually gauge how effective you are at defending your point of view, by how quickly they start calling you names. But their most intense hatred they reserve for a few people who they especially loathe.

Please read the rest. Note that the persons enumerated are all happy, successful, and admired by many Americans – essentially any American who’s also happy and successful. In other words, they’re admired by anyone who has grasped that his life and values are his own responsibility to act upon. But he who has taken his life into his own hands is not politically reachable with the Left’s indispensable tools: envy and hatred. If he’s outspoken about his convictions as well, that makes him a target the Left will strive to defame, degrade, and destroy. The more passionate and widely heard he is, the more effort the Left will give to bringing about his downfall.

In this connection, science fiction writer John C. Wright tells an important story:

There is an old Chinese legend of a golden scroll on which the secret of human happiness was written; and sages and warlords, merchant-princes and emperors sought the scroll with fervor. When found, they saw the secret of the scroll consisted of one ideogram printed over and over, an ideogram they could not read. However, there was a beggar girl who could read the mysterious word.

If you know that word, then you know the secret of human happiness.

The word is gratitude. Gratitude for one’s nature as a being of independent consciousness and volition. Gratitude for the ability to conceive of goals and ways to pursue them. Gratitude for the possession of an immortal soul and its equipage of conscience. Gratitude that even when times are darkest, as long as one lives and breathes one can still hope and work for better. Gratitude, in other words, for the gift of human life and freedom.

Gratitude is the Left’s most feared and despised enemy. He who has taken his life into his own hands cannot help but be grateful. He must be silenced at least, destroyed at best.

“The Fascists cannot argue, so they kill.” (Victor Marguerite) The Left has deliberately forsaken argument in favor of force, fraud, and intimidation because its arguments have all been defeated. The sort of street protests and pseudo-ethical shaming the Left employs today can all too easily give way to violence. Should that day come to America -- and by my reading of matters, it’s not far off -- make sure you're locked, loaded, zeroed in and ready to fight.

(Cross-posted at League Of Outlaw Bloggers.)

Black Friday

When Black Friday comes
I'll stand down by the door
And catch the grey men when they
Dive from the fourteenth floor
When Black Friday comes
I'll collect everything I'm owed
And before my friends find out
I'll be on the road
When Black Friday falls you know it's got to be
Don't let it fall on me

When Black Friday comes
I'll fly down to Muswellbrook
Gonna strike all the big red words
From my little black book
Gonna do just what I please
Gonna wear no socks and shoes
With nothing to do but feed
All the kangaroos
When Black Friday comes I'll be on that hill
You know I will

When Black Friday comes
I'm gonna dig myself a hole
Gonna lay down in it 'til
I satisfy my soul
Gonna let the world pass by me
The Archbishop's gonna sanctify me
And if he don't come across
I'm gonna let it roll
When Black Friday comes
I'm gonna stake my claim
I'll guess I'll change my name

[Becker & Fagan]

[“If Katy told you that, she lied.” -- Charles Hill]

Now, I don’t mean to tell you that you should adopt the above as your actual agenda, but it strikes me as preferable to what quite a lot of Americans will be doing today...those that aren’t doing it already, that is.

The annual Black Friday shopping frenzy wreaks enormous havoc on the body politic. The distortions to our fragile economy alone are in the quintillions of dollars...to say nothing of the congestion on major shopping roads, the damage to male-female relations, or the deleterious effects on our military, our police, our firemen, our paramedics, our hospitals and schools, our culinary institutes, our major fashion houses, our women’s shoe designers – no, Duyen, I wasn’t about to forget them – and the producers of the Real Housewives oeuvre. Why, if the Communists were really still in business, Black Friday would strike them as a perfect tactic to wield against us running dog lackeys of the International Banking Conspiracy.

(Say, you don’t think...naah, can’t be. Forget I said anything.)

The psychologists claim to be baffled that even now that the online retailers have gotten into the act, massive floods of Americans queue up for this annual spectacle. But then, most psychologists have the actual reasoning power of an overripe Durian. After all, which is the greatest of the Black Friday pleasures? The combat! Jostling, body-checking, and goods-wrestling with other shoppers, right? It can’t be the wares themselves; they’ve been available all year. Nor are the sale prices all that dramatic, with rare exceptions (e.g., Precious Moments figurines, Franklin Mint commemorative sets, Buicks). As for the recent adaptation of “tailgating” practices to the Thursday-night lines in front of the stores, haven’t you eaten enough already? Thanksgiving dinner was just a few hours ago, for Pete’s sake!

Only one conclusion is possible: Black Friday is the American equivalent of the British / South American soccer riot.

Every nation has its safety valve: the event, whether scheduled or spontaneous, that allows people to forsake the constraints of civilization for a spell and “let it all out.” Black Friday is the American version. The Ferguson riots just began a little early. Charles Manson would have gotten clean away with his little murder spree had he had the good sense to hold it on Black Friday, but he just isn’t that bright. (Granted, the Postal Service’s version runs 365 days a year, but that’s a special case.)

Be grateful for Black Friday, people. America has the largest, most powerful military establishment in the world. Think about it: were there no Black Friday, how many more invasions and bombings would our poor tired servicemen be commanded to undertake, just so the politicos could “get it out of their system?” (Yes, Virginia: politicians do live vicariously through others, absolutely and entirely. The last nationally prominent politician who had an actual personal life was Grover Cleveland, and look where it got him.)

But gratitude is not participation, nor need one lead to the other. You in particular, Gentle Reader, should leave the driving – and the carnage – to others. Stay home. There’s nothing out there that justifies the risk of life, limb, and solvency. There are few enough of you already, and anyway, look at all the neat stuff Amazon is discounting! Why, the Instant Deals alone...but I digress. (You don’t really need a second piano, Fran, now do you?)

(FLASH! Only minutes ago Jennifer Lawrence was seen walking down Rodeo Drive in full combat apparel, with a recurve bow, a full quiver, and an arrow nocked and ready. Most recently, she was reported to have Josh Hutcherson in her sights. The body count is already climbing toward five figures. Verbum sat sapienti.)

When Others Have Already Said It Ably...

...I feel no need and little incentive to repeat it in my own terms.

---

First up, the inimitable Fred Reed:

Two questions, methinks, arise from Ferguson's latest outburst. The first, political, is "Why does the country tolerate it?" The second, more anthropologically interesting, is "Why the eerie incapacity of underclass blacks to understand evidence, or law, or much of anything?" Of the countless explanations given for the poor performance and poor behavior of blacks in the US, one of them dares not speak its name: Low intelligence.

Yet it fits all the evidence. It explains why Africa never built cities, why it did not invent writing, why there was no African Fifth-Century Athens. It explains why Rhodesia, prosperous and an exporter of food when run by whites, fell immediately into hunger and barbarism when whites left. It explains the dysfunction of black societies from Africa to Haiti to Detroit. It explains why blacks invariably score far below whites and Asians on tests of IQ, on the SATs, GREs, on entrance and promotion exams for fire and police departments.

It explains the need for affirmative action and for departments of Black Studies in universities when black students can’t handle real courses. It explains why the gap in academic achievement never closes. It explains the criminality, the violence, the poor impulse control, the dependency on welfare, the unemployment, and the inability to integrate themselves into a high-tech society. It explains the constant scandals involving teachers in black schools giving students the answers on standardized tests.

Further, it explains why none of the programs intended to raise performance of blacks in the schools ever work. Head Start didn’t work. Integrated schools didn’t work, nor segregated schools, nor black schools with white teachers nor black schools with black teachers. Expensive laboratories and free computers didn't work. Schools run entirely by blacks with very high per-student expenditure (Washington, DC for example) didn’t work. There is no indication that anything at all will ever work. Low intelligence is the obvious explanation. There is precious little counterevidence.

---

Second, consider this from Sara Noble:

Time Magazine published an article by freelance writer Darlena Cunha. It provides a good trip through the liberal thought apparatus. It’s a frightening trip.

Cunha wrote an article about the Ferguson riots titled “Ferguson: In Defense of Rioting”. The violent protests that destroyed 25 businesses and put many in danger are, according to her, “part of the American experience.” Only the “mainstream” can enjoy the “luxury” of “peaceful protesting,” she says.

It’s a perfect example of how these new liberals think. They’re not your grandfather’s liberal.

Without considering the facts or the evidence, she said the “anger” in Ferguson was “inevitable” because a “police officer” shot “a young, unarmed black man in the streets.” She wrote “inevitable” as if the rioting is to be expected and she wrote “in the streets” as if Michael Brown was dragged into a gutter.

“Riots”, she states, “are a necessary part of the evolution of society.” People aren’t living in a “universal utopia” and they don’t have “basic human rights”.

---

Third, ponder this, from Lee Cary via Doug Ross:

On the morning after the Grand Jury No True Bill decision was announcement, it was clear that the policing authorities followed a planned, minimum-response strategy. They offered little resistance to looting and property destruction, perhaps in order to avoid bloodshed and media scrutiny.

The outcome: On the morning after, there were few, if any, reports of serious injuries. No media videos went viral showing police physically subduing looters. No ambulances were filmed loading bleeding rioters or police. Just the burned and broken evidence of an orgy of looting and property destruction....

When the welfare state begins to dial-down, and the value of EBT cards atrophy, some of those neighborhoods will burn at the hands of their own thug-teens. And policing authorizes will either be unwilling, or unable, to confront the lawlessness....

Meanwhile, the well-established, well-funded, social-activist organizations, many that have been active in Ferguson for months, hope to use Ferguson as a catapult to a sustained, new, civil rights movement. They are professional, crisis ambulance-chasers. The Ferguson looters are their cannon fodder. Wilding is a just one means to their social-transformation end.

---

Fourth and last, the great Thomas Sowell:

One of the reasons for being glad to be as old as I am is that I may be spared living to see a race war in America. Race wars are often wars in which nobody wins and everybody ends up much worse off than they were before.

Initial skirmishes in that race war have already begun and have in fact been going on for some years. But public officials pretend that it is not happening, and the mainstream media seldom publish it at all, except in ways that conceal what is really taking place.

---

What’s that? You didn’t come here to read a collage of quotes from other writers? You’re here for my peerless ranting? But Gentle Reader, haven’t we been here enough times already?

It’s on.

(Cross-posted at League of Outlaw Bloggers.)