Liberty's Torch

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Sex: Some Thoughts

This will be an unusual sort of “assorted” piece: one with a unifying theme. I trust you’ll allow me my little innovation.

In case you haven’t noticed, sex is now one of the most heavily politicized subjects in the history of the United States. Both the “doing” and the “being” are now political subjects – with right and wrong answers for each, according to which major political family one mentions. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a very bad thing.

Feminism has completely slipped its cams, as we can see from Robert Stacy McCain’s ongoing coverage of their various lunacies. However, this is partially counterbalanced by a strange resurgence of revulsion toward sex among some sectors of the Right, as if one extreme were somehow evoking the other.

Few palliatives would do as much to lower our national blood pressure as the complete depoliticization of sex – i.e., returning it to something parents educate their kids about, and the rest of us fumble with in private. But as sex has been a major recruitment tool for the Left since the advent of oral contraception, that’s unlikely to happen within the lifetimes of Americans now living.

Sexual repression is an important tool of Islamic jihadism:

     We know the recipe for creating a psychopath: You take their normal sexual interests and you pervert them by telling them what is normal is sick and wicked.
     You confuse them sexually, and then all that sexual energy, diverted from its normal healthy channels, seeks another outlet for expression.
     Tell men that women are dirty, filthy whores created by Satan to mislead them and you'll create men who are attracted to the innocence of 13 year old girls. (And 13 year old boys.)
     Psychic energy, like all other energy, can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be changed from one form to another.

This is an important insight, though not an absolutely new one:

     'Haven't you gotten it through your head yet that the whole "pariah" notion is this tyranny's scapegoat mechanism that every tyranny requires?'
     'Yes, but—'
     'Shut up. Take sex away from people. Make it forbidden, evil, limit it to ritualistic breeding. Force it to back up into suppressed sadism. Then hand the people a scapegoat to hate. Let them kill a scapegoat occasionally for cathartic release. The mechanism is ages old. Tyrants used it centuries before the word "psychology" was ever invented. It works, too.'

There’s so much sublimated aggression in the sex act that the conversion of sexual energy into actual violence is a one-step process – really, no trouble at all. But we wouldn’t have expected anything complex from a gaggle of seventh-century savages.

Marriage, the most important social institution of all time, has its origin in the concept of sexual responsibility: i.e., responsibility for one’s dependents, both acquired and begotten. The man assumed responsibility for his wife and his children by her; the woman assumed responsibility for the nurturing of the children and was abjured against producing children by a man other than her husband. In a sense, the marital contract was the birth of the idea that one is responsible for the consequences of one’s actions. Inversely, the contract proclaimed that one cannot rightly be held responsible for something he did not do.

Much of Western moral and ethical thought descends directly from the responsibility ethic embedded in the traditional marital contract...which is probably why the Left has been hostile toward marriage throughout its history and seeks to degrade it to meaninglessness with “same-sex marriage.”

Sex and love are separate phenomena. The relationships that intertwine them don’t magically transform one into the other.

Sex is a biological function. We’re designed to want it, to seek sex partners and enjoy their bodies. However, men and women differ markedly in the incentives buried in our genes and psyches. Men have an innate incentive to “scatter the seed,” whereas women have a natural inclination toward securing a protector-provider by offering sex in recompense. This cannot change without radically altering the natures of the sexes.

Love is an emotional response to another person one deems worthy of a deep commitment. It elevates the well-being of the other to a plane equal to one’s own. Clearly there can be sex without love, and love without sex. But less clear is how and when humans learned to love. (I doubt we needed to “learn” sex, other than its reproductive consequences.) It’s hard for me to imagine love among nonsentients, however charming their instinctual behaviors toward their young often appear.

The motif I employed in this novel notwithstanding, I remain firmly convinced that the unit of two – the monogamous heterosexual marriage – is the unit best suited to human beings. The responsibilities involved are perfectly clear, whereas larger groups tend to exhibit all sorts of murky ambiguities, with concomitant instabilities of loyalty and affection. “Big Love” is merely a misspelling of “Unreliable Commitments.”

That having been said, there are cases about which I am uncertain. If the Old Testament is trustworthy on this subject, God did allow polygamy to the Hebrews while they wandered in the desert seeking Israel. However, much of the Old Testament is not trustworthy – a collage of morally edifying stories and allegories rather than a factual history of the Jewish people – so on this, my “jury” remains undecided. In particular, should the human lifespan be extended to hundreds or thousands of years, it is unclear whether traditional monogamous heterosexual marriage would survive. But perhaps that won’t come to pass, which would render the subject moot.

To close, allow me a small joke:

     “Where ya been, Garth?
     “Sunday meetin’.
     “Oh. What did the preacher talk about?”
     “Grace.”
     “Well? What did he say?”
     “He’s for it.”

I feel the same way about sex. But remember to take appropriate precautions:

Your partner should be a member of the opposite sex – a willing member.
Do not consume garlic, beans, or a large quantity of beer beforehand;
Do not begin until you have obtained privacy for yourselves. (Yes, that includes foreplay.)
Make certain the area is free of weapons, fragile objects, and dangerous detritus.
Most critically: if your partner is a new acquaintance, say her name to yourself several times before beginning.

That is all.

(P.S.: Under no circumstances say, “I’ve never done it that way before!” You won’t be believed.)

Monday, June 15, 2015

Wastrels In High Places

If the title of this piece seems vaguely familiar, you might be thinking of this old favorite, from which I shall now borrow:

     We have created -- and institutionalized -- incentives for fraud and penalties for honesty and candor. Not just for men of science; for virtually every trade and walk of life. For many men, the touchstone of ethical judgment is no longer "Is it right?" It's "Can I get away with it?"
     We have destroyed the bedrock of freedom: our ability to trust....
     We have lived, collectively, as wastrels. We have consumed much and produced little. Especially, we've consumed the trust and good will of our fellows, with our conniving, our chiseling, and our gaming the laws and the courts in search of personal or provincial advantage. That can only go on for so long before Hobbes's "war of each against all" must resume.

But a descent into venality is seldom uniform in depth or in pace. There will always be some who move faster and go deeper than others. We call them the political class.

In some of the more fanciful romances of ancient Britain, the fall of King Uther, father to legendary Arthur, was foredoomed by his deceits. He had squandered the trust of the nobles upon whom his reign depended. When an opportunity arose to put an end to him, they took it, and the rest is (Arthurian) history. The pattern repeated itself with King John and King Charles I Stuart, albeit with variations.

So it is when men lack trust in their monarch. (Of course, it hardly helped that back then, one attained a throne mainly by killing off all the other aspirants.) A king has specific responsibilities. His rule will be tolerated only for as long as he meets them without unduly burdening the nobility and the common folk. If he shirks his responsibilities, or betrays them, his fall is inevitable, for no man can maintain himself in a position of absolute authority by his own hand.

This is equally the case in a republic such as the United States. However, owing to the distribution of authorities and responsibilities among our political class, its loss of trust is a more involute development, and its fall a thing of exquisite complexity.

Merely as a sample of what passes for political talk today, consider the following:

     [JAKE] TAPPER: “First I want to ask you about this breaking news in Washington D.C. today and about Secretary Clinton’s position on the President’s trade bill. In a 2012 speech in Australia, Clinton who was a big proponent of the Pacific Partnership bill said quote, “It sets the gold standard in trade agreements to open free transparent fair trade. The kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field.” It sounds to me like she is a big supporter of it but as a candidate she said nothing about it.”
     [KAREN] FINNEY: “Well, but what you just read, that was from 2012 and we are now in 2015 and this deal has gone back and forth between the House and the Senate and then it sounds like we are going back and forth again another couple of times so that is part of why as you played earlier on your show, Hillary has made it very clear that she has her two kind of standards. Any trade deal has to meet those two tests and she has voted for trade agreements that she thought were good and she has voted against those that she thought were bad.”
     TAPPER: “Okay so she opposes this one?”
     FINNEY: “Well, no, that is why she has said that though that she really believes what’s really important from a policy perspective, not the political conversation, she really believes that the final language is really what is important. Because we can talk about currency manipulation but how do we get there? How do we accomplish that?”
     TAPPER: “But Karen I am talking about policy because Democrats in the House and Senate have now voted on this. This is an issue that every single Democrat who has announced that they are running for the presidency has taken a position on except for the one who helped push it and did she even help write it? I believe she helped write it.”
     FINNEY: “I can’t speak to that because I wasn’t at the State Department. But again I just go back to the bigger picture and that is what she has really been focused on. And I hear what you are saying and I know that there are people who, you know, they have things that they want her to say about this but she and, you know, you played her own words. This is how she has laid out her position on this issue in terms of does it protect American workers, does it keep America safe, what is the final language? I mean again you have seen the ping-pong back and forth…”

Remarkable, eh? A presidential candidate, one of the co-authors of an enormous bill the contents of which have been concealed from the public while Congress deliberates over it, has refused to take a specific position on whether that bill should be passed. Why? Because she doesn't want to come down on the "wrong side:" i.e., the losing side.

If the polls can be believed, the general public is heavily against this bill -- now colloquially referred to as "ObamaTrade" -- because of its secret nature. When a government starts to make laws in secret, it forfeits the trust of the people. Why are you keeping secret what you plan to do to us? What you plan to take from us? Is this not a government of the people? These are perfectly sensible questions...but not questions prominent politicians ever want to face.

It doesn't help that "ObamaTrade" is heavily supported by Barack Hussein Obama, whom no one trusts any longer, or that former vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan, himself in poor odor with Americans, has openly said “By the way, TPA—it’s declassified and made public once it’s agreed to.”

The GOP's Congressional caucuses' collaboration with the least trusted president in history in making secret law has drained all the remaining trust from the political class. The polls have told us that as well.

In all probability, the demise of the American political class will not take place through a violent revolution. It's more likely to develop as a rolling disaffiliation from government and governmental emissions: a tide of rejectionism in which growing numbers of Americans simply resolve to ignore Washington, and possibly the state and county capitals as well. There isn't enough enforcement power in the world to reverse such a tide. King Canute had a better chance with the coastal waters of Denmark.

That wouldn't produce a "new America," or an "America reborn." It would Balkanize the country into dozens, perhaps hundreds, of smaller polities. The cohesion of those polities might be at the expense of peaceful relations with others. Given the fractionation of American commerce and culture into pockets dominated by sectionalism and ethnic concentrations, that would seem the most probable course. Should it be the outcome, we'll have incurred it by standing idly by and allowing our political class to behave as it has these past hundred years.

The political class has no one to blame outside itself. Politicians' descent into habitual evasion, dissimulation, and deceit has squandered the public trust, tarring their number indelibly. Many of them are aware of this. Some hope to reverse it as it pertains to themselves; others hope merely to outlast it, to "ride the tiger" of popular disenchantment hoping to wear it out.

If the fates of Kings Uther, John, and Charles I Stuart are any indication, their hopes are overwhelmingly likely to be dashed. Unfortunately, their fall could take the country with them.

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
    Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
    We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
    Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
    Within a dream.
     [Ernest Dowson]

Not for nothing the Colonel's appellation of "lunatic country."

“The Danes are disregarded as right-wing extremists along with other countries which don’t opt for a Swedish–style immigration policy.”
True! A few years back (maybe 2009), I actually followed the editorials in DN (largest “serious” daily newspaper) during the whole year, just to see how many countries they would condemn as “right wing” or racist. As I recalled, they got every single one in the EU plus some others!

These people really think that they are knights in shining armor, fighting nazis and fascists that are all around them. They have no problem regarding all of Europe as “extremists” and them selves as “normal”.
In a sane place, they would be under treatment, but in Sweden, they are in control!
Finally, they have manged to put a fresh spin on the term democracy. Normally, it means that the population replaces the political parties they don’t like. In Sweden, the political parties instead replaces the population!

Comment by utlandssvensk on "Sweden heading in a more multicultural direction." Swedish Surveyor, 6/8/15.

Sunday, June 14, 2015

Not Feeling Well

Your pardons, Gentle Readers. I’m feeling very unwell and must take the day off from Liberty’s Torch. Tune in again tomorrow. Until then, be well.

Saturday, June 13, 2015

The New Segregationists Yet Again: Public Facilities

There are so many ways to approach the intractable problems that pertain to “public property” that I could write for ten years about nothing else. However, events in McKinney, Texas, coupled to similar developments in and around various American cities, have brought one especially troubling aspect of the matter to the forefront of my attention.

Pour yourself another cup of coffee, Gentle Reader. I’m feeling particularly circumlocuitous today.

Imagine for a moment that you’re the baron over a medieval fief. The responsibility that comes with that position includes keeping the peace in your realm. Believe it or not, most medieval nobles took that job seriously, and did what they could to suppress violence and predation within their domains. Sometimes, they had to get creative to do so.

Now imagine that your region is beset by marauding robber-knights: men who have acquired mounts, weapons, and armor, and are using them to plunder your common folk. You could, of course, mobilize the knights sworn to your service and send them out a-hunting. That might work...but it would involve bloodshed, significant costs, and probable collateral damage to the lands and properties around you. So you hunt for a more agreeable approach while you keep that sort of direct confrontation in reserve.

You could attempt to entice the robber-knights into your service, putting them nominally under your authority and that of your captains. Again, that might ameliorate matters...but it’s unlikely that all would accept your service, and very likely that among those who do accept it there would be some who would simply go on as they’d begun – except that they would also have “the color of law” at their backs. As that would blacken your reputation, and possibly even invite intervention by your liege lord the king, you reject that approach categorically.

But wait...what’s this? The local prelate has just announced a fresh Crusade! Splendid! That provides a new possibility: you could export the troublemakers as part of the Crusade army. Yes, there would be costs, but any bloodshed would take place outside your demesne. Nor would any odium for their deeds attach to you...at least, not directly enough to matter. Capital! So you have the prelate’s announcement trumpeted far and wide, add financial resources of your own to the Crusade fund, and watch as the marauders, their minds alight with the prospect of a salary for bringing plunder and rape to a foreign land, form up to board ships bound for the Holy Land.

That was a significant part of the dynamic that powered the later Crusades, particularly the ones of the 14th Century. The nobles of France and Italy, while some of them did join the expeditions along with groups of their loyal retainers, were assiduous about exporting their troublemakers in this fashion. As a regional peacekeeping measure, it worked fairly well.

Imagine how it would work if applied here in the United States. Of course, we’d have to identify the predators and entice them to go a-hunting elsewhere. We’d also have to choose an “elsewhere” to which they’d be sent. However, the cries of “racism” that would result would cause political tremors of serious magnitude. Worse, if we were to use the armed forces as the vehicle for this, there would be international blowback from it, possibly far more serious than any national gains in peace and prosperity would justify. Given the amorality of our political class, those considerations are probably why they haven’t yet tried it.

That doesn’t mean that others aren’t trying something comparable.

A public facility is, by definition, one intended for use by the public, albeit upon conditions. There might be a residency requirement. There might be a fee to be paid, which would go to the maintenance of the facility. There might be conditions of deportment to be observed; indeed, there almost certainly would be. Meet those conditions and you gain admittance.

Imagine yourself to be a town supervisor or county executive contemplating a proposal for a new public facility, perhaps a public swimming pool. The idea is superficially attractive, especially since it would tap state or federal funds while still providing a pretext for new taxes and fees. Demographics now come into play. What sort of populace would use the facility? Is that populace inclined toward public discipline or public disorder? Should corrective measures be necessary – e.g., the invocation of the police to quell a disturbance – would the consequences be likely to affect you adversely? Would there be negative media coverage, perhaps even big-ticket lawsuits? Where would the balance fall between “public good” – i.e., favorable reactions toward you for creating the facility – and unintended, undesired consequences, of which there are guaranteed to be some?

If you have an unruly, troublemaking demographic to deal with, you might prefer that a neighboring town or county build the facility. You could then export your troublemakers to that neighbor and let him deal with the consequences. This is a particularly attractive approach if the history of public facilities in your domain is marred by high costs, disorder, and violence. (It’s also attractive if your neighbor is a political thorn in your flesh.)

Political decisions about facilities such as swimming pools open to the public often turn on exactly those considerations.

No doubt the thought processes delineated above sound venal. They are venal; that’s politics in the “democratic” era. They’re also quite commonplace among a political elite whose members are generally without moral scruples and deem themselves to be above law and justice. The only thing that countervails them is public sentiment. That’s why politicians labor ceaselessly to gain control over the media, and why the Internet is such a threat to their little ways.

Public facilities sited in predominantly black neighborhoods have a very poor history. They tend to deteriorate much faster than similar facilities in white neighborhoods. That gives rise to demands for external funding for replacement and repair (and cries of “racism” from idiots). It also gives rise to informal “emigration:” the unruly ones who trashed the facility tend to seek out other, nearby neighborhoods whose facilities are well maintained.

I don’t need to describe what happens thereafter, do I, Gentle Reader? Colin Flaherty has already done an excellent job of it. The black intruders are usually treated as victims of “racism,” sometimes at the hands of “racist police.” The media’s coverage is consistently slanted against the predominantly white communities that experience the consequences. The Chicago Tribune’s recent diatribe on the “sad, racist history” of public swimming pools is a typical case.

And those who continue to get their news from the Main Stream Media swallow it hook, line, and sinker, while an objective reporter who merely presents the facts, sometimes with historical foundations that suggest the causes of such disturbances, is treated as Public Enemy #1.

In April 2007, when I wrote that the media are deeply complicit in race-based troubles in modern America:

Journalists who downplay or conceal inter-racial crimes out of the mistaken notion that they're helping to avert further hostility are either deluded or hopelessly stupid. By furthering the conviction among private citizens that we're being lied to, they advance the concomitant conviction that "the other," about whose deeds we're being denied full and accurate reports, really is someone to be feared...someone to be located and destroyed, or cast out of our midst, for our own safety's sake.
Thus, whatever their conscious motives and intentions, politically correct journalists who spike stories about horrific crimes by black perpetrators are the new segregationists. It is their decisions about which stories should be emphasized and which ones must be buried that will persuade white Americans that their black neighbors cannot be trusted and must be expelled from the body politic.

...I was as yet unaware of the full dimensions of the plague of racial violence, always black-on-white, that had erupted in our large cities. It was some time before I learned even the outlines thereof. It was not a pleasant experience.

To what extent are white liberals, invincibly resistant to admitting that such violence emerges from black racism, complicit in the problem? To what extent does:

Their denial of the racial aspects of the “knockout game;”
Their acceptance of clearly biased media coverage of racial incidents;
Their kowtowing toward “black spokesmen” such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton;
Their refusal to allow that American blacks have the primary responsibility for the problem, owing to rampant black illegitimacy, black welfare dependency, and lax discipline of young blacks;

...exacerbate the increasing resentment of American whites and Orientals over being blamed for racial clashes such as McKinney?

And to what extent is the intensifying reluctance of white voters to approve the construction of public recreational facilities and private gathering places such as enclosed shopping malls due to white neighborhoods’ awareness of the proximity of large, mobile black communities?

Think it over.

Why is this difficult?

“Multiculturalism means the coexistence of Islam, Asian religions and Christianity. We will do everything to spare Hungary from that,” [Hungary's prime minister] said in an interview with the daily newspaper Napi Gazdasag. “We welcome non-Christian investors, artists, scientists; but we don’t want to mix on a mass scale.”
[Viktor] Orban, whose governing Fidesz party was losing ground in the polls to the far-right [?], anti-immigrant Jobbik party, had clashed with European counterparts over his isolationist views. At the European Parliament in mid-May, he criticized as “bordering on insanity” EU proposals for migrant quotas drafted in response to thousands of deaths among asylum-seekers trying to reach Europe across the Mediterranean in increasing numbers.^[1]

An isolationist is apparently someone who doesn't think public spaces in his country should be used as latrines and for whom the prospect of Mogadishu am Danube is unappealing. I suppose the WWII Red Army was composed of isolationists as they're said to have resisted the German invasion with consider energy and unimaginable sacrifice.

By way of contrast, Western people in the main wet their pants at the thought of being submerged in a tidal wave of foreigners. With joy, of course, not out of fear.

Our work is done.

What else can one say but that we are a weak, vagified, maudlin, brain-dead, contemptible civilization?
Notes
^[1] “MULTICULTI ENDING.” By Chris Brand, IQ & PC, 6/9/15.

Friday, June 12, 2015

Semantic Encroachments Dept.

Yes, yes, Fran is on the warpath about the meanings of words again. Rather, in the case at hand, the meaning of a word: one I’d like to see used properly and honored as it deserves.

The word is free.

The scrofulous Abbie Hoffman, who thought himself a massively clever fellow, once said:

“America: the land of the free. Free means you don’t pay, doesn’t it?

...thereby revealing his Marxism to those who had failed to notice it before that. But of course, “free” doesn’t mean “you don’t pay,” except in a sharply delimited set of cases: those cases in which someone offers you something without demanding a price for it.

Poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish once wrote:

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.

...which comes much nearer the mark, but still omits an important qualification. That qualification is under attack as we speak.

Have a gander at a recent obscenity from the Housing and Urban Development Department:

     The Obama administration is moving forward with regulations designed to help diversify America’s wealthier neighborhoods, drawing fire from critics who decry the proposal as executive overreach in search of an “unrealistic utopia.”
     A final Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rule due out this month is aimed at ending decades of deep-rooted segregation around the country.
     The regulations would use grant money as an incentive for communities to build affordable housing in more affluent areas while also taking steps to upgrade poorer areas with better schools, parks, libraries, grocery stores and transportation routes as part of a gentrification of those communities.
     “HUD is working with communities across the country to fulfill the promise of equal opportunity for all,” a HUD spokeswoman said. “The proposed policy seeks to break down barriers to access to opportunity in communities supported by HUD funds.”

“Barriers to access to opportunity.” Sound evil, don’t they? But in fact, the “barriers” which HUD proposes to “break down” are property values. With the exception of inheritance, one doesn’t get into a high-value neighborhood without paying the price of the property therein...and one doesn’t stay in such a neighborhood without continuously meeting the price of remaining there: property taxes, water and electrical rates, the prices charged by local vendors and artisans, and so forth. So what HUD is proposing is the use of federal funds to compel high-value neighborhoods to accept so-called “affordable housing” developments.

When I was a young sprat, we called them “the projects”...and for the sake of our well being, we stayed well clear of them.

The folks who live in “affordable housing” are there because they can’t afford better. Their incomes and savings are less than what’s required to live in Bedford, or Beverly Hills. Therefore, they cannot “choose” to live in those exceedingly affluent neighborhoods, or in many others of similar opulence. Does that make them “unfree?”

For a somewhat less controversial version of the question, consider another consumer durable: the automobile. He who lives in “affordable housing” is highly unlikely to be able to afford a Bentley Continental GT or a Mercedes S550, no matter how many of them can be seen on the roads of Bedford and Beverly Hills. He cannot “choose” to drive one of those cars. Does that make him “unfree?”

Or consider the sort of choices one makes for one’s dinner table. I cannot afford to dine on Wagyu beef, or have Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee at breakfast. Therefore, I cannot “choose” those things. Does that make me “unfree?”

Take all the time you like over it.

I once stated the case for individual freedom as follows:

Man must be free because nothing else can be.

This seems irrefutable to me. No good or service is unlimited in quantity or accessibility. Therefore, all goods and services will have a price – and he who cannot or will not meet that price cannot “choose” them. But that has no bearing on individual freedom: MacLeish’s “right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.” If Smith cannot create the alternative he’d like best, that does not give him the right to compel Jones to create it for him. That would be a violation of Jones’s equal freedom.

In our day, Smith goes to The Omnipotent State for that service, on the grounds that he should be “free” to live wherever he wants. And the Omnipotent State, which is always happy to oblige such demands, leaps into the fray with “affordable housing” imposed on a neighborhood against its residents’ preferences and with funds taken from them and other taxpayers by force.

Gives a whole new meaning to “the pursuit of happiness,” doesn’t it?

As even a casual guest of Liberty’s Torch can easily see, I lack all “compassion” for “the poor.” In point of fact, I’m sick of hearing about them. When someone attempts to rub them in my face, my immediate response is either “How poor are they, and why?” or exceedingly profane. I must confess that I find the shocked face that usually produces somewhat gratifying.

I’ve been acquainted with persons who were really poor: unable to obtain their next meal without the intervention of charity, divine providence, or a favorable outcome to a bet. That’s not what “poor” means in America today. America’s “poor” are the best fed, best sheltered, and best housed “poor” in the history of Mankind. Moreover, all the opportunities of American society are open to them, if they can muster the price. In many (not all) cases, the price is effort, or thrift, or the sacrifice of one’s indulgences, or all three. Why, then, do they remain “poor?” Are they not as “free to choose” as you or I?

Don’t be alarmed, Gentle Reader. It’s just a Friday morning rant, a brief cleansing of the bile ducts before Mass. You see, I’m a Catholic, and lately the prelates of my church have been harping on “our duty to the poor”...without taking notice of their actual material condition or the things the Omnipotent State does to keep them “poor.” Apparently there’s no room in certain clerics’ heads for the concepts of work, thrift, self-denial, and the self-respect that once declined offers of charity – especially government-modulated “charity” – as a poison to the soul of a free man determined to remain free.

Let each have freedom to do all that he wills provided that he infringes not the equal freedom of any other. – Herbert Spencer

Thursday, June 11, 2015

Today’s Feminist Outrage-Meter-Pinner

Ace has the story:

     Nobel Prize winning scientist says he's not keen on women in the laboratories.
     Nobel prize winner Sir Tim Hunt has an issue with female scientists -- they're too distracting romantically and they cry when criticised.
     Hunt, 72, an English biochemist who admitted he has a reputation for being a 'chauvinist', reportedly told the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul, South Korea:
     "Let me tell you about my trouble with girls... three things happen when they are in the lab... You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry."

Please read the Telegraph article Ace cites. The reactions of the feminists – both sexes – who immediately went into High Dudgeon^TM over Dr. Hunt’s opinion, are the point of what follows. Ace’s take on their reactions is classic:

     This guy is a Nobel prize winner. I assume he's not insane. So when he claims these things have happened, I tend to assume that these things have actually happened, not that he is a psychopathic liar who makes things up because he Loves Rape....
     Argue with him, rebut him, point out that his frame of reference (emotional simplicity) is not the same as women's, and that he should not assume his frame of reference is the objectively correct one just because of the happenstance that he happens to have been born male.
     But this whole shrieking jag? The whole Women Shrieking the Same Shrieks and gnashing their teeth thing, every third day?
     Doesn't that tend to support his "retrograde" notions about feminine emotionality, rather than rebutting them?

Gentle Reader, that is How It’s Done.

I’ve worked in the sciences and, of course, in engineering. Both environments included a few women. Emphasis on “a few:” women are not drawn to the STEM fields, for reasons we needn’t address this morning. Such environments can be successful, if certain conditions apply:

Everyone involved is at least 60 years old; or:
All the women are married to linebackers, wrestlers, or Navy SEALs; or:
98% or more of the work is actually performed by individuals working in isolation.

You see, what Dr. Hunt said is accurate. Let’s take his observations in reverse order.

Women are far more sensitive to criticism than men. I’ve encountered only one woman, the most intelligent woman I know, who can stand to hear a man tell her that she’s made a mistake. To get a woman to take a critical look at her own actions requires so great a load of pre-exculpation and emotional padding that for practical purposes, it’s not worthwhile. It’s far easier simply to fix her mistakes for her and say nothing about them, then or afterward.

Women of the susceptible age range (0 to about ten years after menopause) do fall in love with men they work alongside – if the man treats the woman exactly as she desires to be treated, which is a requirement for averting the torrents of female tears of which Dr. Hunt spoke. Not many men are willing or able to do this, as we’re not nearly as emotional and are far more tolerant of criticism. We tend to assume that what we would find appropriate and acceptable really is appropriate and acceptable. Women disagree. Everything must be sugar-coated to spare their feelings...and a man who treats them that way, assuming he doesn’t look like Quasimodo or smell like a Staten Island landfill in July at high noon, almost automatically becomes a fantasy-romance object.

Finally, men in the STEM fields don’t have a lot of female presence in their lives. The natural consequence is an amplification of the significance of those they do have around them. The tendency to attempt romantic involvements with them follows as a matter of course.

But facts have never mattered to an aggrieved feminist.

Here are a few more facts:

Women are not men;
Men are not women;
Neither can be made into the other.

Henry Higgins’s plaint is as pointless as the “Women Shrieking the Same Shrieks” Ace cites. The sexes are optimized for different things, as a result of many millennia of evolutionary pressures. To demand that they react to the same things in the same ways is fatuous.

Today, far more men understand and accept la difference than women. Feminists reject it categorically, even militantly. Indeed, they want to have the cake and eat it, too: they demand not only that women be regarded as absolute equals to men in all things, but that they be treated as infinitely fragile creatures to whom even the slightest disagreement might prove fatal. The contradiction involved troubles them not at all.

Needless to say, this is not on. American men are steadily withdrawing from women in every way: economically, socially, and romantically. Women find this unacceptable, but it will continue to worsen until they accept that they’re women and not men, with all that implies.

One way in which American men are not withdrawing from women is sexually...but this is hardly something to be celebrated, for the mode of interaction is increasingly depersonalized: he wants access to her body and nothing else about her. This Neanderthalization of male-female relations is sending large ripples through American society. Deceit and abuse of intimacy are, if not the norm, increasing in frequency, especially among younger Americans to whom every encounter with the opposite sex takes place in a demilitarized zone, a place where no one can set up housekeeping.

All generalizations are inaccurate, including this one. There are women who are sensible about the ways in which women differ from men, and who take no offense at being treated as women. There are also men who sincerely strain, against the evidence and their innate inclinations, to treat women as if they were men. But these aren’t the ones under discussion this fine June morning.

There is no Last Graf. The problems that stem from what’s increasingly a live-fire war between the sexes cannot be “solved.” The war will continue until American women accept, en masse, that they are women, that men will never see them as anything else, and that attempts to bludgeon men into treating them as if they were men, even with the force of law, will only result in misery for all concerned.

Some preliminary thoughts on Jeb and Carly.

I just don't see how Bush wins the nomination. The only Republicans who are going to bother to vote in the primaries are sick to the point of nausea of squishy, inarticulate girly-man Republicans. I rather like Carly, myself: no girly-man, she.

~ Ed Sherling.^[1]

Au Contraire, [it's not that voters just don't want another Bush;] he sucks. I didn't like him when he was governor of my native state, but he did do a reasonably good job as governor. However, his Mexican wife has turned him against America and I won't vote for him. Ted Cruz is our guy with Walker as my second choice and Carly Fiorina as VP or--maybe the top of the ticket. I like her better every day.

~ Amanda Trebiano.^[2]

These comments were chosen completely at random and do not in any way mirror the thinking of this writer.

Notes
^[1] Comment on "Jeb Bush Shocked That He Is Not Already President." By Emily Zanotti, The Spectacle Blog, The American Spectator, 6/11/15.
^[2] Id.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Quickies: A Piercing Video

If this video is any indication, parts of Europe are waking up to what their political class is doing to them. God grant that it’s not too late.

The New Segregationists Yet Again: The McKinney Foofaurauw

The media have made race the single most important factor in law enforcement. Media coverage of the Michael Brown upheaval, the death of Eric Garner, the Freddie Gray riots, and many similar cases has produced a state of affairs in which law-abiding Americans are unprotected, de facto, against mobs of unruly and violent Negroes who choose to invade their lives and properties.

This should come as no surprise to any Gentle Reader. Incentives matter, and the media have changed the incentives with their coverage. In covering a disturbance or a riot, seemingly the only thing that matters to the media is race. In the cases enumerated above, a Negro was dead at the hands of the police. The media framed the event as a case of racial bigotry – whites’ bigotry toward blacks, of course – and the professional racialists leaped on the opportunity to foment disorder with their customary alacrity.

Thus today, the police are increasingly fearful for their careers should they have to intervene in a situation heavily populated by Negroes. The media-fueled race-war Narrative trumps all other considerations even when no lives have been lost and no violence has occurred. The uproar over events in McKinney, Texas merely adds a data point to the graph.

Conservative Treehouse provides the full McKinney story:

     The woman who organized the event in McKinney, Texas is named Tatiana Rhodes (or Tatyana Rhodes). She is approximately 19-years-old; however, she retains a fake id and has began scrubbing most of her social media accounts, so her exact age is undetermined. Update: confirmed profile DOB 04/02/1995, so Tatiana Rhodes is 20.
     Tatiana had been promoting a party via twitter under the hashtag name “Dime Piece Cookout” for approximately a month. She planned the event at a sub-division called “Craig Ranch” in McKinney Texas.
     Tatiana (pictured below left) lives in the sub-division with her mother Lashana Burkes (pictured right). Both appear to be natives of Chicago....
     The Craig Ranch subdivision has a neighborhood park and a gated pool and clubhouse for residents. The pool and clubhouse is gated and a scan card is needed to gain access. (You an explore via google earth here)
     The subdivision has a Homeowners Association (HOA) which regulates and controls the activities in/around the HOA swimming pool and clubhouse and has strict rules for use thereof.
     ....Neither Tatiana Rhodes nor her mother sought permission to use the pool or clubhouse area as part of the event. However, Tatiana hired a DJ and promoted the event to include a pool party...

The following was posted to Facebook by Michael Cory Quattrin, a resident of “Craig Ranch,” in the aftermath of the media’s predictably tendentious, race-centered coverage:

A DJ setup in a public space next to the private pool in our neighborhood on Friday and played loud explicit (F-bomb) music for multiple hours....The teenagers (both black and white) were being brought into our neighborhood by the carload....The teens began fighting with each other and pushing their way into our private pool. Some were jumping our fence. The security guard was accosted when he tried to stop the beginnings of this mob scene. Some residesnts who live around the park/pool area tried to come out and settle things down. The teens started yelling racial slurs at our neighbors and started assaulting people and property (throwing bottles at cars and attacking a mother at the pool with 3 young children). The first officer on the scene was by himself, At that time the party had grown to a large, aggressive crowd. As the officer arrived, many teens started running through our neighborhood. Many of the teens were being very aggressive and yelling at the officers as more arrived....

Now ask yourself what other outcome the “Dime Piece Cookout,” which was swarmed under by a huge group of unruly black teens and young adults, could possibly have produced. But Mr. Quattrin has a bit more to say:

The news media has refused to hear the neighborhood’s side of this story. The video being distributed is only a very small segment of what happened. This information being distributed by the media and others is extremely distorted and in some cases outright lies.
PLEASE HELP US STOP THE BROADCASTING OF THIS IGNORANCE. The media is trying to make it look like our neighborhood is a white’s only, racist area....The unfortunate result is that our neighbors are now being threatened. We have also had cars and property in and around the park vandalized this weekend. Unfortunately, the press and social media are trying to enflame the situation.

Surprised?

The media face incentives of their own, of course. Their editorial staffs continue to be dominated by Leftist ideology, but ideology doesn’t free them of the need for “eyeballs:” readership or viewership, the quintessential asset that sells advertising space. Therefore, they continually seek effective means to induce readership and viewership...and a tactic that will do that while conforming to their ideologically required Narrative is favored above all others.

So they perpetuate the myth of white racism against blacks: the great, unending narrative of Caucasians oppressing “people of color.” It refuses to be quenched because the media, which find it exceedingly useful both commercially and ideologically, are determined to keep it going.

When I wrote the initial “New Segregationist” pieces, the dynamic of the situation struck me as perfectly clear. Yet it remains unclear to a huge majority of well-meaning whites. Worse, there appears to be no way to induce the media to stop fanning the flames. They want a racial bonfire, as widespread and as hot as possible. They expect it to sell papers and air time. And it will...for a while.

Remus’s wildly popular “Frankly My Dear” piece strikes a chord with so many Gentle Readers because it verbalizes the impulse behind gated communities, the steady blackening of coastal cities, and all the other phenomena grouped under “white flight:”

If you insist on acting like thugs,
We’ll simply distance ourselves from you.

But thugs need victims. It’s a matter of “self-esteem.” And so, like the homing missile in Yar’s Revenge, the thugs will pursue the peaceable wherever the latter might seek refuge. And the media, desperate for as many “eyeballs” as it can collect as their hegemony over news dissemination decays, will pursue us along with them.

Rock and a hard place.

Once again for the math challenged dreamers.
Interest payments on the national debt at Zero is running about 270 billion
at a mere 1 percent this becomes a 550 billion
at 2 percent 1.1 trillion a year with a tax base of about 3.1 trillion or 33% of Govt Income just to pay interest.

Comment by cowdiddly on "Peter Schiff Warns This May Be The First Bubble To Burst Without A Pin." By Peter Schiff, 6/10/15.

Given the arithmetic, cowdiddly implies it's unlikely that rates will be raised. Apparently that might threaten the Treason Class, that class of people who thought there would never be any tomorrow, only party, party, party.

Alas, a zero interest rate creates major distortions: misallocation of capital, asset bubbles, and punishment of savers.

What to do? What to do?

It's a clean sweep in all areas of life seems to me. But all those smart people who think they can control reality have to be right. What are common sense, history, custom, and tradition when smart people can call the shots?

Like they care.

Does the [Wall Street] Journal regard this gutting of the greatest industrial base the world had ever seen, which gave America an independence no republic had ever known, an acceptable price of its New World Order?^[1]

Madness seems to be the order of the day. Why should anyone fret over the destruction of the American economy? Least of all one of the premier business and "conservative" newspapers in the country?

Notes
^[1] "Is It Really All Our Fault?" By Patrick J. Buchanan, Patrick J. Buchanan - Official Website, 5/19/15.

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

The Coverage Of What’s Being Labeled “L’Affaire Jenner”

...puts one of the saddest, most pitiable things any man has ever chosen to have done to himself on a par with such trivialities as Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon, ISIS’s campaign of extermination of non-Muslims, Vladimir Putin’s determination to recreate the USSR, and China’s steady development of an amphibious assault capability sufficient to overwhelm Taiwan.

And now I have Gentle Readers emailing me about l’affaire Jenner. Wanting to know where I stand on this supremely important subject. Asking why I’ve been silent about it for so long. The most...interesting email I’ve received to date included this deathless phrase: “Why the reticence, Fran? Does your Catholicism pain you in your freedom organs, or is it the other way around?”

Well! As if I’ve ever exhibited any reluctance to offer an entirely unsolicited and baldly offensive opinion about anything. I have one, and you’ll receive it anon. But on a subject of such world-shaking gravity, I prefer to open with the thoughts of an authority with whom no one can dispute:

     The priest gazed out the west-facing window for a long moment. “I want to say a few words about...mutilation,” he said. “Something that’s slowly becoming commonplace, but which the Church cannot and will not approve. There’ve been some high-profile cases of it recently, haven’t there, Hank?”
     Hallstrom nodded. “I can think of two, a model and a famous athlete.”
     “I had the same two in mind.” Father Ray rose from his armchair and ran his hands down his trim, muscular frame. “I am a combination of two things: what God has given me, and what I’ve done to develop it. The first of these is immutable. God decreed it. His will in the matter cannot be countervailed. The second is merely the consequence of my decision to make the most of that gift—to develop my body in a direction natural to it with proper exercise and dietary discipline. As that does not in any way cross-cut God’s gift, or whatever element of his plan resides in me, my use of his gift is entirely acceptable.”
     He resumed his seat. “Mutilation is not. These pitiable souls who insist that they were ‘born into the wrong body’ are badly damaged, mentally and emotionally. My heart aches for them, each and every one. They desperately need treatment, counseling, acceptance, and the charity appropriate to those whose minds are diseased. But instead we have a media praising the self-mutilators for ‘courage’ and ‘heroism,’ when what they mostly need is to have it sandblasted into their skulls that what God does is well done, that He does not make junk.”

The reason you can’t dispute him, of course, is that Father Ray – more specifically, Father Raymond F. Altomare, who became the pastor of Our Lady of the Pines Parish in Onteora County, New York upon the passing of the greatly beloved Father Heinrich Schliemann, and who served as a critical spiritual advisor to Stephen Graham Sumner during the latter’s campaign for the presidency – is a fictional character. Nevertheless, he is entirely correct. (Yes, you’ll get to read the story that features the above passage; it’s just not quite ready yet. And no, it’s not about a troubled soul who seeks a sex change.)

Health is not a matter of opinion. One is healthy to the extent that one’s bodily elements do what they’re designed to do, without crippling or lethal undesired side effects. It’s acceptable for one who is somewhat unhealthy to seek redress of that which ails him, which in some cases might involve surgical methods. It’s acceptable for one who is more healthy than not to work to increase his health, or his fitness, by various measures. But he who is healthy, yet looks at himself and says “this is not what I’m supposed to be,” and invokes surgery to alter himself into something other than God intended, is insane. As Father Ray says above, he needs “treatment, counseling, acceptance, and the charity appropriate to those whose minds are diseased.”

It’s quite possible that Bruce Jenner has been driven insane by the foofaurauw that has erupted around his kinda-sorta family (i.e., the Kardashians). Nevertheless! His act – and this applies to anyone who seeks gender-reassignment surgery – marks him as someone in desperate need of mental and emotional assistance.

Some years ago, science-fiction writer John Varley wrote a series of stories in which sex changes and other bodily transformations are normal, even customary “options” indulged by the long-lived members of his fictional societies. Quite a number of readers found the idea appealing. Either this suggests that there are more lunatics running around loose than we normally imagine, or it illustrates the depths of fantasy of which the human mind is capable.

The human creature is, broadly speaking, of two parts: a “who” and a “what.” Your “who” is the product of your individual choices and their consequences, which depend on your context, capabilities, and character. Your “what” is graven into your genes. It was determined at conception. If you insist upon denying it, you will thereafter find yourself, in the common parlance, in a world of hurt.

Bruce Jenner, once the foremost athlete in the world, has chosen to enter that world. I doubt he’ll be spared the consequences.

The baleful influence of the West.

Apologists for exploitation claim that the rich are richer because they are smarter. But the stupidity of the rich is everywhere visible. The greedy fools have destroyed their domestic US market. Really, how stupid can you be? How do Americans buy when they are forced by offshoring out of well paid manufacturing and software engineering jobs into being waitresses, bartenders, retail clerks and part-time Walmart workers in order that corporate bottom lines improve? . . .
The belief spread by Wall Street and “shareholder advocates” that corporations only have responsibility to their owners and managers has destroyed the American economy.
By locating production offshore, corporations have destroyed the incomes that supported the American consumer market. . . .
Americans are already dispossessed of their livelihoods and careers and their pensions are next. Wherever we look, the fate of populations under Western influence [is] the same. The Ukrainians are exploited, the Greeks, the British, the Americans.
Wherever the West has an imprint, the populations are exploited. Exploitation of the many for the few is the Hallmark of the West, a decrepit, corrupt, and collapsing entity.^[1]

Mr. Roberts' point about exploitation of the people of the West rings true. I'm not altogether comfortable with the exploitation angle or with the idea that businesses should have a social mission. Plenty of businesses do contribute to their communities. Big business is another question entirely. I still remember the Bank of America guy back during the Cold War who said they didn't give a damn about what communists do so long as they pay their bills. On the exploitation and corporate citizenship angles, however, it's instructive to ask if Western nations and big business wanted to exploit their citizens and wanted to destroy the livelihoods of their own citizens, what exactly would they do differently from what they are doing now?

Perspective is obtained.

I think Mr. Roberts' focus is a bit too narrow. For example, the stupidity of treating the economy as a cornucopia never requiring inputs or maintenance explains a lot of the recklessness we see on economic matters. A big issue ancillary to that, of course, the stupendous and reckless levels of spending and debt. Note, too, the hubris of the supposedly educated class who seem never to doubt complex systems can be "managed" in a fashion superior to the chaotic, but disciplining, free market.

Where is there any discipline in the West? One can detect the faint glimmerings of it as the central bankers frantically move funds from one account to the other, print money out of thin air, and prepare to steal money from individual bank deposits requiring them to "bail in." But that discipline is being forced on them by circumstances they refused to acknowledge. It most certainly isn't coming from within.

This list of America's ills hardly begins to describe the full nature of the disaster that our political leaders have created (with our enthusiastic support, or course):

reckless, nation-killing spending;
reckless military adventures abroad;
the hollowing out of middle America;
fanatical globalism;
financialization;
revolutionary overhaul of 1/7th of the economy by a law unread by the politicians who enacted it;
debasement of the currency (in 2013 4.3% of its value in 1913);
a corrupt Department of Justice;
secret trade deals that compromise sovereignty;
trade deals that favor foreigners and harm Americans;
importation of uneducated, hostile foreigners as wage competitors and welfare parasites;
propagation of lies about "comprehensive immigration reform," amnesty, and asylum seekers;
"refugee" resettlements against the wishes of affected communities and away from elite areas;
flooding white communities with the black underclass through Section 8 housing vouchers;
debasement of citizenship;
punishing corporate tax rates;
punishing regulation of business and private citizens;
attacks on the family, religion, and culture;
evisceration of the Constitution;
Republicans too timid to impeach a president and judges acting outside of their constitutional authority;
and a mendacious and partisan press.

The idea that Western nations are led by an elite who beyond a shadow of a doubt have the best interests of their people at heart is just ludicrous. Unasked for and unwanted mass immigration is the most disgraceful betrayal of us all, and vile and greasy lies are broadcast to justify it.

Fabulously wealthy individuals with all the presidential hopefuls in their pockets will demand and pay for the most ridiculous campaign lies, and voters will lap up any and all mendacious campaign flummery like it's @#$#% ambrosia, of course. The widespread apathy and abdication of citizenship on the part of voters must always be kept in mind, whatever the failings of the supposed leaders.

Bottom line: Mr. Roberts' idea that exploitation (or recklessness) are the essence of Western influence is sobering and can't be discarded out of hand.

It was not always thus, I think. Anyone who remembers the 1950s and early 1960s knows what it feels like to live in a sane society. Elvis Presley's gyrations were hidden from the viewers of the Ed Sullivan Show and an energetic and wildly creative rock and roll music contained no mention of bitches, hos, and bus'in' caps in anybody.

Now, in our graceless, early 21st-century America the political lie is an art form and freaks, guttersnipes and traitors are at the pinnacle of power. Intestinal intercourse is a sacrament. And the people have been abandoned.

Notes
^[1] "Ukrainians Dispossessed, Americans are next." By Paul Craig Roberts, guest post at The Burning Platform, 6/5/15 (emphasis added). Original at Paul Craig Roberts.

Monday, June 8, 2015

“Don’t Enter Reality Without It!”

I refer, of course, to the magnificent, fantastic, utterly indispensable:

Get Out Of Reality Free Card!

It simply must exist! How else could we explain phenomena such as these:

     Remember Lilly the Human Train Wreck, the mentally ill feminist Tumblr blogger who filed a federal complaint against her university? She did not like being quoted on my blog:
     Check it out. He “wrote an article” on me. He victim blames me the entire time. He hates that I am bi. He thinks I’m insane since I have mental illnesses. We need to get him off the internet. https://twitter.com/rsmccain This is his twitter. Please report him for harassing me!!! And report other abusive things he says to or about other people.

     I’m “harassing” her? By quoting her?

Apparently, in the worldview of those who believe their words should carry no undesired consequences, being quoted is a felony. It should either be impossible, or should occasion severe punishment for the violator. But that’s not all the Card is good for:

     ONE late summer afternoon when I was 17, I went with my mother to the local bank, a long-defunct institution whose name I cannot remember, to apply for my first student loan. My mother co-signed. When we finished, the banker, a balding man in his late 50s, congratulated us, as if I had just won some kind of award rather than signed away my young life.
     By the end of my sophomore year at a small private liberal arts college, my mother and I had taken out a second loan, my father had declared bankruptcy and my parents had divorced. My mother could no longer afford the tuition that the student loans weren’t covering. I transferred to a state college in New Jersey, closer to home.
     Years later, I found myself confronted with a choice that too many people have had to and will have to face. I could give up what had become my vocation (in my case, being a writer) and take a job that I didn’t want in order to repay the huge debt I had accumulated in college and graduate school. Or I could take what I had been led to believe was both the morally and legally reprehensible step of defaulting on my student loans, which was the only way I could survive without wasting my life in a job that had nothing to do with my particular usefulness to society.
     I chose life. That is to say, I defaulted on my student loans....
     Am I a deadbeat? In the eyes of the law I am. Indifferent to the claim that repaying student loans is the road to character? Yes. Blind to the reality of countless numbers of people struggling to repay their debts, no matter their circumstances, many worse than mine? My heart goes out to them. To my mind, they have learned to live with a social arrangement that is legal, but not moral.
     Maybe the problem was that I had reached beyond my lower-middle-class origins and taken out loans to attend a small private college to begin with. Maybe I should have stayed at a store called The Wild Pair, where I once had a nice stable job selling shoes after dropping out of the state college because I thought I deserved better, and naïvely tried to turn myself into a professional reader and writer on my own, without a college degree. I’d probably be district manager by now.
     Or maybe, after going back to school, I should have gone into finance, or some other lucrative career. Self-disgust and lifelong unhappiness, destroying a precious young life — all this is a small price to pay for meeting your student loan obligations.

So the Card will absolve one from freely chosen material obligations too! Where can one apply for this marvel of modern life?

Yes, you may well shudder.

The remarkable thing about the above stories isn’t the whining demand to be excused from the foreseeable consequences of one’s freely chosen course. There’ve always been deadbeats, and a fair number of them whiners. No, what’s significant here is the aggressive counter-moralism: the strident proclamations that the laws of cause and effect woven into the very fabric of reality are somehow wrong.

Whence cometh such notions? Who has been telling these...persons that what they want, no matter how absurd, is theirs by right, without let, hindrance, or consequences? More urgent still, who will discipline them for their follies? Will some sensible relative or friend take “Lilly” aside and tell her: “Look, you ninny, when you post statements on a public website, they’re susceptible to being quoted, and there’s nothing you can do about it” -- ? Will Lee Siegel, the author of the second quoted piece, be held to account, whether for his act of passive burglary by refusing to repay a freely contracted loan, or for denouncing the mechanism that allowed him to acquire a college degree?

Commentators such as I, Stacy McCain, and Linda of Right As Usual can sift the ordure of modern life for such items so you can employ your time to better effect. We can point to the inevitable consequences of tolerating such scurrilities and plead with you to take appropriate action. We can’t do much more than that.

The Card is the problem. A staggering number of pseudo-adults are waving it in our faces and demanding that we honor it...and owing to their well-intentioned but misguided acceptance of the contemporary conception of “tolerance,” quite a number of persons who should know better are doing so.

Don’t kid yourself. The Card is seductive. If you were offered one, with a credible guarantee, perhaps backed by the force of the federal government, that it would be honored, you’d be tempted at the very least.

Seemingly consequence-free freebies are like that.

I have a personal story for you. It concerns a young woman of my acquaintance for whom I’ve come to have the highest respect. Let’s call her Jane.

Jane works as a therapeutic masseuse. Her trade is very hard on her physically. She’s good at it – I can attest to her skills personally – but it causes her quite a lot of pain, owing to injuries she sustained some years ago. Yet she perseveres, because she, her husband (another therapist), and their young son badly want to own a home, a difficult hill to climb here on Long Island. They’ve been living with her in-laws while straining to save enough money for an adequate down payment.

Jane has become quite valuable to me; her skills assuage several of my chronic pains. I only found out about her sufferings quite recently, and indirectly at that. When I discovered them I dithered over changing masseuses, but realized that that would achieve nothing. Jane’s services are in high demand, so some other old crank in a decaying body would take the slot I’d vacated.

However, I have significant financial resources, and I wanted to do something to ease Jane’s burden. So I offered to help her with the down payment on a house.

She thanked me but declined the offer. “I have to do this myself” was all she said. I dropped the subject at once, and I think it was well that I did.

Jane would refuse the Card. No barrage of seductive offers, whether snail-mail, email, or telephonic, could persuade her to accept one. She has a visceral understanding of personal responsibility. For some that comes from an innate sense for the laws of reality. Many others learn it only by trial and painful error – the consequences of their bad decisions.

We need more Janes. We need to bludgeon the “Lillies” and the Lee Siegels with the consequences of their decisions until they shut up and slink away from sheer embarrassment...assuming they can feel that precious corrective to folly. With all levels of government actively colluding to give them a free ride at our expense, this will be difficult to say the least, but it’s morally imperative. Not to do so will empower them to seduce other susceptible young Americans into accepting the Card.

Take away their Cards. The rest will follow.

Building the earthly Kingdom.

[Walter] Rauschenbusch’s promotion of the “social gospel” aimed to turn Christians away from considerations of original sin, the baleful influence of Satan and temptations of evil, the failings of the human will, personal piety and prayer, and the gift of grace and redemption ultimately through Christ, and instead toward the overcoming of “social sin” and what he called “social salvation” and “the progressive regeneration of social life.” Rauschenbusch and prominent Protestants of his generation—including John Dewey, Herbert Croly, Jane Addams, and many other minor players in varied positions throughout society—helped to make Protestantism into a social and political project, even while taking it out of the churches. That process is what we call “secularization,” but it’s a deeply and distinctively religious and especially Protestant form of “secularism.”^[1]

Social justice warriors labor assiduously to create that "progressive regeneration of social life," though more accurately, they labor to "do something" to "improve" life on earth and are repelled at the idea that there is anything of value in the culture that can be regenerated.

People without the sense that the Lord gave a duck devise social and political schemes that "should" solve all our problems, yet they never take original sin or man's imperfect nature, if you will, into account. The slaughter, pain, and waste of 20th-century fascination with vaporous, revolutionary, social and political schemes are nothing to these dreamers, simply a necessary cost to be borne in the pursuit of the earthly Kingdom. If they note it all.

Murphy's Law, the Law of Unintended Consequences, human fallibility, and the iron laws of arithmetic are never elements in the catechism of the Holy Church of Secular Uplift. Rational pleas to take reality and experience into account are treated as heresy and viciously attacked. Secularism came to be anything but secular.

Notes
^[1] "A Secular Age? Liberalism is the latest form of Protestant religion, practiced from the academy to the culture wars." By Patrick J. Deneen The American Conservative, 9/3/14 (link added).

H/t: A conservative blog for peace.

Sunday, June 7, 2015

For Corpus Christi Sunday: Remissions Old And New

[This is a favorite of mine that first appeared on Corpus Christi Sunday of 2013. Among other things, it delineates some of my disagreements with Church teachings -- not theological doctrines, but notions about deliberately seeking pain, privation, and other sorts of pointless personal sacrifice in supposed expiation of sin, or, even more ridiculously, "to grow closer to God."

If I'm wrong about this, then my entire conception of why God designed Man's life as he did is wrong. Place your bets at the window. $2.00 minimum. -- FWP]

Today is the Feast of Corpus Christi, or as it's more commonly known, The Body and Blood of Christ. Inasmuch as the sentiments I expressed in this old piece remain relevant and (to me, at least) inspiring, I was tempted merely to repost it and have done for the day. But other thoughts have obtruded...thoughts I hope you'll find supplementary to that old Rumination on "the food chain."

The Book of Exodus laid a blood burden on the Jews:

The LORD said to Moses: “Thus you will say to the Israelites: ‘You yourselves have seen that I have spoken with you from heaven. You must not make alongside me gods of silver, nor make gods of gold for yourselves. You must make for me an altar made of earth, and you will sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and your peace offerings, your sheep and your cattle. In every place where I cause my name to be honored I will come to you and I will bless you. [Exodus 20:22-24 et seq.]

In that regard, the Judaic faith perpetuated the barbaric custom of blood sacrifice, which is (for me) an indication that not all the decrees of Exodus and Leviticus were true commands from God. As I set forth in the essay linked above, God did not intend to eat His people, so the blood sacrifices common among the pagans were unnecessary, perhaps even offensive to the true God. Indeed, they were firmly rooted in the older superstition of scapegoating: the belief that one could transfer one's sins to an animal, whose blood one could then shed in expiation for them.

Jesus Himself reproved the custom:

“Go and learn what this saying means: ‘I want mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” [Matthew 9:13]

The Book of Hebrews makes this even more explicit:

For the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sins. So when he came into the world, he said,
“Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me.
“Whole burnt offerings and sin-offerings you took no delight in.
“Then I said, ‘Here I am: I have come—it is written of me in the scroll of the book—to do your will, O God.’”[Hebrews 10:4-7]

For in Him there is, indeed, remission of sin without the shedding of blood.

Many Christians speak of Christ's New Covenant without much understanding of what the term implies. In the episode concerning the profiteers in the courtyard of the Temple at Jerusalem, He castigates those who would impose a blood burden upon Man in the name of submission to God:

He found in the temple courts those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers sitting at tables. So he made a whip of cords and drove them all out of the temple courts, with the sheep and the oxen. He scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold the doves he said, “Take these things away from here! Do not make my Father’s house a marketplace!” [John 2:14-16]

When He offered Himself in expiation for us all, He made it plain that there was no call for blood sacrifice...indeed, that there never had been any such obligation. It was the ultimate demonstration of the folly of blood sacrifice as the Jews had practiced it throughout the millennium before His Coming. For Christ's Passion was the ultimate shedding of blood: divine blood, to which the world can produce no equal.

The New Covenant is one with the Passion...and of course with the Resurrection, Christ's way of confirming His authority for so ambitious a claim.

Needless to say, the Jews decline to recognize Jesus as the Son of God. It's a requirement of the Judaic faith that they maintain that the Messiah has not yet come. However, they no longer follow the Mosaic blood-sacrifice custom, one of many ways in which Judaic thought has demonstrated growth of understanding.

Yet some Christians' understanding lags behind that of the Jews. Too many of us believe that we must suffer temporally to expiate our sins. Too many of us fail to grasp the extent of Divine mercy. And far too many of us are prone to pointing to some natural disaster -- some working-out of the inexorable laws of Nature as they operate under the veil of Time -- and hinting that those who suffered its ravages are somehow paying for their sins, or worse, for someone else's sins!

Man is forgiven his sins on a much more merciful basis than that.

One may owe material restitution for his crimes against others. Indeed, one whose crime is sufficiently grievous may owe his very life. But the remission of our sins is quite another matter. Jesus said so more than once:

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you then, although you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! [Matthew 7:7-11]

May God bless and keep you all.

Tempest fugit.

Leelywhite
I'm also at the stage of discarding things to clean up my life. Problem is, that which I valued greatly is now just junk. For instance, I have a large collection of Caruso's original records on 78 rpm shellac, including his first recording, made in 1900. But when I mention this to people, they say: "who's Caruso?"
As Solomon said "all things come to pass, and are then forgotten". Look what happened to Kodak, Polaroid, and, recently, Blockbuster movies. The only thing that never changes is human nature.
Michael North
I really liked Caruso in NYPD Blue; I didn't know he'd made records. What are records?

Comments on "A Dull Lancet." By Theodore Dalrymple, Taki’s Magazine, 6/7/15.

Saturday, June 6, 2015

DIY: Celebrate "D-Day" the Google way!

The following is an augmented screen-cap from this morning. (Note website thumbnail, bottom row, 2nd from right!)


Find a photo of my WWII-veteran father here.

I can't wait to see how Google honors the Islamic holy days of Ramadan.