Quickies: A Tragedy Of Sorts

     This one comes by way of the celebrant at this morning’s Mass:

     Three Jewish couples had made it a practice to have breakfast with one another after Saturday synagogue, to share their faith and keep in touch with one another. As it happens, a year earlier all three had sent their eldest sons to Israel to study for the rabbinate. On the day of our story, their conversation was strangely subdued.

     After a few minutes had passed, one couple announced without preliminary that they had just learned that their son in Israel had met a Catholic priest, had been baptized, and was now a Catholic. The other couples immediately became alert. In turn, they admitted that the same thing had happed to their sons, and that they too had found out that very morning.

     The coincidence of these three tragic events was too striking to comprehend, so they took it to their rabbi. After hearing the three, strangely similar stories, he said to them, “Join me in prayer, that we might ask God for an explanation of these tragedies.” So they knelt, and joined hands, and the rabbi intoned for them, “O Master of the World, my friends have all suffered identically: all three of their sons, whom they sent to Israel, have been baptized and are now Christians! Please, Lord of us all, if it is Your will, explain to them, and to me, why this has happened.” And having so spoken, he bowed his head.

     Whereupon the clouds above them parted, and the heavens gave forth with a voice of thunder:

     “What do you think happened to My Son?”

     (tee hee)

Quickies: It’s True! It’s True!

     Remember this observation by Mark Steyn?

     Many Americans are beginning to pick up the strange vibe that, for Barack Obama, governing America is “an interesting sociological experiment,” too. He would doubtless agree that the United States is “the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.” But he doesn’t, not really: It is hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to. That’s not to say he’s un-American or anti-American, but merely that he’s beyond all that. Way beyond. He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job — that it’s really too small for him and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along.

     It appears that the era’s greatest commentator nailed it before anyone else:

     Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly is planning payback for President Obama’s dismissing Mr. Netanyahu’s objections to the Iran nuclear deal last year. Mr. Netanyahu is said to be rallying moderate Arabs to thwart Mr. Obama’s bid to become the Secretary-General of the United Nations after he leaves the White House next year.

     Mr. Obama has already discussed the issue with Republican, Democratic and Jewish officials in the United States, according to Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Jarida.

     Mr. Netanyahu recently is said to have gotten wind of Obama’s plans which he calls the Obama Project. “Wasn’t eight years of having Obama in office enough?” Mr. Netanyahu is quoted in the Kuwaiti daily as telling associates. “Eight years during which he ignored Israel? And now he wants to be in a position that is liable to cause us hardships in the international arena.”

     We can leave aside Israel’s current troubles. With Obama at the helm of the United Nations, that despicable body is likely to work actively for Israel’s annihilation.

     As Mr. Spock would say, “Fascinating.”

     A QUICK UPDATE: Traditionally, the U.N.'s Secretary-General was supposed to come from a non-aligned nation: i.e., a nation not deemed part of either the American or the Soviet bloc. That exclusion appears to have ended with the elevation of Ban Ki-moon of South Korea, an American ally and client state. Would Obama as the Secretary-General of the United Nations justify stripping The Won of his American citizenship? If not, would we finally have an adequate reason for the U.S. to withdraw from the U.N.? Inquiring minds want to know!

The Engine Of Contemporary Collectivism

     The brilliant and indispensable Chris Muir provides the ignition for today’s tirade:

     He’s right, you know. White, heterosexual men are now the officially despised class of the Western world. even though we are the builders and defenders of the Christian-Enlightenment order and all that flourishes within it. Members of all other blocs feel either entitled to disparage and demean us, or obliged not to speak in our defense. Ironically, even some of us participate, in acts of self-denunciation.

     Yes, it’s bad. Worse than bad, as one of the consequences has been the adoption of a “tolerance” that urges us to tolerate the intolerable. What else do the preponderant reactions to the atrocious behavior of Muslims in Europe signify? What else could it mean when high government officials react to Muslims’ brutalization of European women not by encouraging European men to rise to their defense, but by advising women to cover up, travel in groups, and stay away from public places?

     Anyone with three functioning brain cells can see that this is insupportable. The marginalization and demonization of the defenders of Western civilization will doom that civilization. Progress will be displaced by riot and destruction. Public order will be smashed to flinders. Indeed, these things are already taking place. How, then, did it get to this point?

     Perhaps you already know.

---

     Some time ago, a dear friend penned a series of essays condemning broadcast journalism. Among his most powerful points was that that industry is a creature of the government. Without the intrusion into journalism of the Federal Communications Commission, the powers of broadcast journalism – indeed, the broadcast networks as a whole – would never have come to exist.

     Among my habitual points is that bigness gravitates to bigness: that huge organizations will tend to cluster, and more often than not to ally with one another, despite a superficial appearance of competition. In the case of the broadcast networks, the matter is more than obvious, as the networks must please the federal government to retain their licenses. That naturally results in promoting the ideas and viewpoints Washington likes and suppressing those it dislikes.

     Every government on Earth, no matter how constituted, is a collectivizing force. Thus, its creatures will tend to be collectivizing forces as well, for their parent will not tolerate a great divergence from its will.

---

     It is in the nature of any centrally controlled entity with a broad scope, whether broad geographically, economically, or demographically, that it will promulgate and promote a kind of uniformity among those it affects. Japan provides an extreme example: the huge zaibatsu corporations exert enormous influence over the thinking and behavior of the near-uniform Japanese people. When some idea or practice gains a foothold among them, it spreads at great speed to become a universal fad. Though Westerners are more diverse in many ways than the Japanese, our own large conglomerates, especially those in the business of spreading news and ideas, have comparable influence over what’s commonly called “conventional wisdom.”

     The idea-propagating industry in all its manifestations has been a principal target of the Left:

• The broadcast networks;
• The newspapers;
• The publishing industry;
• The visual media;

     ...have all fallen under the sway of “liberal” / “progressive” assumptions and thought. As that mindset is inherently collectivist, the ideas thus propagated have swerved a hundred eighty degrees from the individualist propositions at the foundation of Christian-Enlightenment civilization to a Marxism not of economic classes but of oppressed and oppressor groups.

     (The attempt to spread “classic,” economics-based Marxism in the West has been indifferently successful; Europe bought partway into it, but America never did. Here, the entering wedges were racism and the early exclusion of women from the vote. The emphasis on oppression and groups derived for it, followed naturally.)

     If you’ve ever wondered about the hostility the major media players have demonstrated toward individualist thought expressed on the World Wide Web, right-leaning talk radio, or upstart Fox News, you have your answer.

---

     The inescapable conclusion is that American collectivism, manifest through the Left’s various gospels of:

• Race;
• Ethnicity;
• Sex;
• Sexual orientation;

     ...is almost entirely the product of the Left-dominated idea propagating industries. Recent flare-ups in the ideological battle between individualism and collectivism, for example in the “Sad Puppies” contretemps over the Hugo Awards, only illustrate the ferocity with which the Left defends what it sees as both its bastion and its indispensable tool.

     There are lessons to be drawn here:

• The broadcast networks’ products are far more likely than not to grate against the sensibilities of an individualist-minded American.
• The products of major media companies, whether in print or electronic form, will continue to be collectivist in their assumptions, whether or not those assumptions are made explicit.
• The government-controlled educational “system” has as its first priority the inculcation of collectivism (and subordination of the individual to the State) in minds under its sway.
• The recent attack on video gaming for emphasizing enjoyment over “social justice” ideas, is no accident and will intensify over the near term.
• Government at all levels will side with the “social-justice warriors,” albeit not necessarily overtly, regardless of whether under the dominance of Democrats or Republicans.

     Consider that a checklist of things to be avoided by the prudent adult, and as far as possible deflected in favor of wholesome alternatives by the parents of minor children.

Lost but making great time.

So, what is all this Nothing-ness about? ‘My view’, says Scruton, ‘is that what’s underlying all of this is a kind of nihilistic vision that masks itself as a moving toward the enlightened future, but never pauses to describe what that society will be like. It simply loses itself in negatives about the existing things – institutional relations like marriage, for instance – but never asks itself if those existing things are actually part of what human beings are. Always in Zizek there’s an assumption of the right to dismiss them as standing in the way of something else, but that something else turns out to be Nothing.’^[1]

Ecstasy.

The title of this piece is the punch line to the apocryphal story of the WWII American bomber crew in the Pacific. Queried as to its location, the pilot replied, "We're lost but making great time." Thus, the destroyer of the left race to their Shangrila of destruction. They are dead set against Western civilization, capitalism, patriarchy, marriage, the military, white political dominance, and the rule of law. On that they are total agreement. What matters is being against white society. However, they have zero concern for what happens on Day 1 after the Glorious Revolution.

Our ultra-left destroyers are lost and, worse, lost in direct proportion to the stridency and arrogance of their moral posturing and to the impenetrability of their manifestos. Rape culture? White privilege? Offensive speech?

Say what?

It's all about pulling down the hated now and NO other consideration applies. Not even decency. When the grandeur of their indignation and the thrill of the arsonists and the mobs dies down, when the AntiFa thugs are handed police uniforms at last, all that's left is charred ruins and nothing more. A wasteland.

Leftism victorious.
Notes
^[1] "Roger Scruton: ‘These left thinkers have destroyed the intellectual life.’" By Mick Hume, Spiked, December 2015 (italics in original, other emphasis added).

Xenophilia.

Maybe it is not sane to act hostile to every foreigner one encounters, but the opposite is also not healthy.

Comment by johnnightwrites on "Goodbye Sweden." Sweden Report, 6/2/15.

Quickies: Entertainment, Not Politics

     Jennifer Lawrence has returned the talent, vitality, and girl-next-door charm to Hollywood that it once derived from Audrey Hepburn, Meg Ryan, and Sandra Bullock. Her movies Winter’s Bone, Silver Linings Playbook, and of course the X-Men and Hunger Games series have made her the most sought-after actress in the world today.

     That made it particularly sad to learn that she’s vilified both Christians and Republicans:

     Lawrence's comment on Christians came during an exchange about Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis, the conservative Christian who was famously jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples on account of her deeply held religious beliefs. Lawrence, a native Kentuckian, described Davis as "the woman who makes me embarrassed I'm from Kentucky" and said that all the crosses carried by her Christian supporters "may as well be pitchforks."

     "Don’t even say her name in this house," Lawrence told the fashion magazine. "All those people holding their crucifixes, which may as well be pitchforks, thinking they’re fighting the good fight. I grew up in Kentucky. I know how they are."

     The star didn't have a much better opinion about the Republicans. Though she said she was actually raised a Republican, she said she can't get behind a political party that's anti-women.

     "I was raised a Republican, but I just can’t imagine supporting a party that doesn’t support women’s basic rights," said Lawrence.

     "It’s 2015 and gay people can get married and we think that we’ve come so far, so, yay! But have we? I don’t want to stay quiet about that stuff," she added.

     Well, she’s a young woman. Though talented, she doesn’t know much, and she comes from an environment where evangelical Christians might be a bit more forward about their convictions than is advisable for good neighbor relations. Along with that, it appears she’s bought into the Democrats’ “war on women” canard. Perhaps she’ll learn better as she continues to mature, though Hollywood tends to discourage stepping out of its left-liberal cocoon.

     But that’s not germane to her acting talent, or the quality of her movies. So it doubly saddened me to see the comment thread in this review of Joy immediately turn into a wrangle about Lawrence’s politics and her opinions about Christianity.

     Ace at AoSHQ once noted that it’s conservatives, not liberals, who are constantly talking politics. Though that’s a natural reaction to our treatment by the media and the political Establishment, it actually impedes our principal objective, which is to remove politics from as many areas of life as possible.

     When entertainers – people whose political opinions are no more valuable than yours or mine and quite probably less so – spout off as Jennifer Lawrence has, it would be better to ignore them. They’re entertainers. In all probability they know less than anyone else whose political or social opinions get any circulation. Would you take stock market tips from John Irving? Would you adopt George Lucas’s exercise routine? If you found yourself in need of child-rearing advice, would you go to Beyonce? If not, why worry about their politics?

     They’re entertainers, folks. They’re not geostrategists, military planners, or candidates for Pope. Just enjoy their movies, their music, and their novels. (But buy and read all of mine first. Twice. And get copies for your relatives, friends, and all your neighbors. Makes a fine Christmas gift!)

The Smoking FBI

     You thought you have it rough? It’s getting so a corrupt politician can’t hide anything any more:

     The latest batch of emails released from Hillary Clinton's personal account from her tenure as secretary of state includes 66 messages deemed classified at some level, the State Department said early Friday.

     In one email, Clinton even seemed to coach a top adviser on how to send secure information outside secure channels....

     Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, has repeatedly maintained that she did not send or receive classified material on her personal account. The State Department claims none of the emails now marked classified were labeled as such at the time they were sent.

     However, one email thread from June 2011 appears to include Clinton telling her top adviser Jake Sullivan to send secure information through insecure means.

     In response to Clinton's request for a set of since-redacted talking points, Sullivan writes, "They say they've had issues sending secure fax. They're working on it." Clinton responds "If they can't, turn into nonpaper [with] no identifying heading and send nonsecure."

     Gentle Reader, it cannot be put more clearly than this: Hillary Clinton instructed a subordinate to violate the National Security Act. In the email cited above, she convicted herself of that offense. In attempting to deny access to her stored emails to the government, she compounded the offense with the deliberate destruction of evidence. In lying to Congress about it, she committed perjury. If she were anyone else, she’d be looking at trading her pantsuits for an orange jumpsuit.

     But she’s not anyone else. She’s the Democrats’ Anointed One, preselected to take the torch from Obama and continue the program of destroying Americans’ freedom. So the question before us is clear: Will Clinton suffer any penalty at all for her egregious lawbreaking?

     Her risks are considerable:

     The Federal Bureau of Investigation will recommend that the Justice Department bring criminal charges against Hillary Clinton and various of her aides, and soon. The evidence consists of materials that the Bureau has gathered in the course of its months-long investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s personal server. The recommendations will come very soon.

     The charges will consist of some of the following:

1. Improper disclosure or retention of classified information.
2. Destruction of government records.
3. Lying to federal agents.
4. Lying under oath.
5. Obstruction of justice.

     All the counts are familiar to those of us who have followed the Clintons for a quarter of a century, but, as one source familiar with the FBI’s investigation told me, the evidence has now reached a “critical mass.”

     But she is the Anointed One, whose nomination as the Democrats’ 2016 presidential candidate was decreed when she resigned as Secretary of State. Will the powers that be permit her to be indicted?

     It’s not the FBI that indicts a person on federal charges; it’s the Department of Justice, currently headed by Loretta Lynch. Lynch, successor to the odious Eric Holder, was put in place to defend the Obama Administration and the Democrat Party generally. Were she to fail in that mission, her patrons would not look kindly upon her. In light of what’s happened to others who’ve declined to carry the Clintons’ water or hide their dirty laundry, I wouldn’t sell her any life insurance.

     R. Emmett Tyrrell lays out a possible consequence of a decision not to indict:

     [S]uch is the gravity of the charges and the consequences of neglecting them that they cannot be ignored. If they are ignored, people familiar with the investigation say, it will be impossible to prosecute future defendants being charged with the mishandling of classified information. Said Joseph DiGenova, a former U.S. attorney, “The intelligence community will not stand for that. They will fight for indictment and they are already in the process of gearing themselves to basically revolt if [the Attorney General] refuses to bring charges.” FBI Director James Comey has reportedly said he will resign if the Bureau’s recommendations for charges are ignored.

     A revolt by the FBI and the larger intelligence community against the Obama Administration would be unprecedented. Yet it is not unimaginable. While its agents and administrators aren’t all angels, the FBI continues to be a service that takes its watchwords – “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity” – seriously. As for the intelligence agencies, they’re aware that to excuse so exalted a violator of the information security laws would nullify them for all practical purposes. America would cease to have any secrets.

     There’s a great deal wrong with the information security laws – I’ve long argued that their procedural dictates actually make a spy’s job somewhat easier than it would otherwise be – but they are laws of the United States, duly passed by Congress and signed by presidents. Barack Hussein Obama might consider himself above all federal law – he plainly considers himself above the Constitution – but as dim as he is, he must have some sense of how allowing Hillary Clinton to get away with her lawbreaking would impact him. No, he’d never face any charges personally, but his “legacy” would be permanently stained, perhaps worse than the scandals of the Clinton Administration tainted its record.

     It’s too soon to predict the electoral impact of a Clinton prosecution. Recall that when Spiro Agnew realized that he could not withstand a public trial for his corruption as governor of Maryland, he resigned quietly from the vice-presidency and cut a deal with the prosecuting authorities. The country didn’t hear a single syllable about his lawbreaking until that deal was signed, sealed, and delivered. Something similar might happen in the Clinton scandal...and it just might give rise to the strangest candidacy in American history, as there’s no provision in the Constitution that bars a convicted felon from seeking the presidency.

     But would it be worse for Clinton to evade prosecution? Before you answer, think about the immense appearance fees she, her husband, and their daughter have raked in these past few years – admittedly, often as under-the-table payments for favorable decisions from the State Department.

     Indictment or no indictment, this affair, coupled to the Benghazi atrocities and the re-emergence of Bill Clinton’s many sex scandals, has energized many who are normally (and sensibly) indifferent to politics. Perhaps the most delicious aspect is that Barack Hussein Obama must face not being the focus of national or international attention a whole year earlier than he’d hoped. Truly, a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Jim Kunstler on Syria.

But unlike the USA, Russia doesn’t have ambivalent intentions where ISIS is concerned. We’ve pretended that any old freelance gang opposing Assad is our friend. Russia’s aims are pretty straightforward: prop up Assad, rescue whatever governing institutions remain in Syria, and smash ISIS. In exchange they get a warm-water naval base on the Mediterranean. That’s supposed to be an existential threat to the USA.

. . . Sadly, the US can’t seem to formulate a strategy that doesn’t make things worse for people in the region or for the US homeland (or for our allies in Europe, plagued by refugees they cannot comfortably absorb and the awful threat of terror events).

I expect in 2016 that Obama’s policy will be to just get out of the way of Putin and see what happens. He doesn’t have much left in the kit-bag for now. The worst thing to come out of this for Obama, really, is if Putin can succeed in pacifying Syria, America’s leaders will look bad — incompetent and foolish — which is the actual case, of course.^[1]

Hitler

Mr. Kunstler couldn't keep from unburdening himself of the low characterization of the "demi-fascist" Marine Le Pen as "a female Hitler." She is not the one turning France into a third-world garbage dump. She is not the one calling for the French to extinguish themselves. That is the ardent desire of Nocolas "Duty of Metissage" Sarkozy. But . . . Sarkozy is "not as crazy" as Le Pen.

Point of fact, I've yet to see in her anything but a woman with an impressive intellect, courage, keen political instincts, and a refusal to accept leftist manipulation.

Kunstler doesn't stop there. Trump is "Hitler without the brains and charm" and much more that Kunstler doesn't like. Just not quality people.

So, unfortunately, clarity on Syria doesn't necessarily transfer to other areas. Sometimes I wish Kunstler'd stick to his fascination with "peak oil."

Notes
^[1] "Pretend to the Bitter End. Forecast 2016." By James Howard Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation, 1/4/16.

Qualifications: A Bifurcated Tirade

     In recent years, there’s been quite a lot of loose talk about the rules concerning birthright citizenship. Both Barack Hussein Obama and John McCain came under fire through that subject in 2008. Though as far as I know, it’s never been litigated to a conclusion, the Federal Elections Commission has consistently held that a baby born to a U.S. citizen, wherever in the world that might occur, is a natural-born U.S. citizen himself. Whether that was the Founding Fathers’ original understanding, I have no idea.

     The subject is once again under discussion this year, specifically with regard to the presidential candidacy of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Cruz was born in Canada, to a mother who was a U.S. citizen. Therefore, under the holdings of the century past, he is deemed a natural-born citizen himself, even though he was also awarded Canadian citizenship based upon his place of birth. As the sole qualifications for the presidency are age, residence, and natural-born citizenship, that would appear to put the matter to rest...though you may rest assured that Cruz’s competitors – and his Democrat opponent, should he gain the nomination – will do their utmost to use it against him.

     This matter of what constitutes natural-born citizenship is part of the gateway through which presidential aspirants must pass, contenders will attempt to wield it to their advantage whenever an opponent looks vulnerable to it. However, it’s entirely a legal wrangle, and thus subject to determination by legally constituted authorities. I have no doubt that at some future time the matter will be laid permanently to rest, probably by a Supreme Court ruling. Until that time should arrive, there will be fusillades over it.

     Certain other questions are more easily disposed of.

---

     Recently longtime favorite Ragin’ Dave got into a tussle with a self-styled “pro-abortion Catholic:”

     Got into an argument with a supposed Catholic on Twitter.

     I say supposed because this woman supported every Leftist meme you can think of, including abortion. Anyone who claims to be Catholic or pro-abortion is lying about one side or the other. You cannot be both Catholic, meaning you follow the Catechism of the Church, and pro-abortion. They contradict each other. They are mutually exclusive.

     There’s some inaccuracy in the above. The Catechism is not proclaimed as being uniformly binding: i.e., some parts of the Catechism are not taught as imperatively as others. The Church allows that outside the explicit proclamations of Jesus Christ, the individual’s conscience is the determinant. Consider this passage from Father Joseph Champlin’s What It Means To Be Catholic:

     Catholics believe that an individual's conscience is the ultimate determinant of what is wrong or right for that individual. Moreover, God will judge us according to the fidelity with which we have followed our conscience. Nevertheless, this conscience needs to be formed by objective standards of moral conduct. The Church provides us with just that -- moral norms based on Jesus's teachings, the inspired scriptures, centuries of tradition, and the laws of nature.

     These moral standards may seem at times to be inhibiting or restrictive. The fact is, that quite to the contrary, they release or liberate us. These norms both make us free, and lead us to the deep happiness that comes from following God's plan. Jesus underscored that point when he said: If you live according to my teachings, you are truly my disciples; then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." (John 8:31-32)

     “Objective standards of moral conduct” can only arise from two sources:

1. The teachings of Christ as expressed in the four canonical Gospels;
2. Our gradually unfolding understanding of natural law: i.e., the immutable laws God has written into the fabric of our temporal reality.

     There have been several occasions, mostly well in the past, on which the Church has decreed arbitrary standards, unsupported by either the Gospels or natural law. On those occasions it has gone ultra vires: beyond its proper sphere. This has had the unfortunate effect of alienating may Catholics from the Church, while it also opened an avenue of attack against Catholicism generally. The historically recent return of the Church to a Gospels-plus-Natural Law standard will eventually correct the problem, though the Church’s inherent reluctance to admit mistakes, a characteristic of all authority structures, will undoubtedly retard the process.

     On at least one point, there can be no rational dispute. In an episode is usually remembered as that of the “rich young man,” Jesus said:

     And, behold, one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. He saith unto him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. [Matthew 19:16-19]

     Note that in the above, Christ said most explicitly: Do not murder. To murder is to take a human life without just cause: to kill other than in self-defense or the defense of others. Therefore, if a creature is legitimately deemed human, to murder it is forbidden by unshakable proclamation by the Redeemer Himself.

     A baby in the womb is a human being. There is no conceivable argument against this that holds water under even light scrutiny. Therefore, abortion is murder, no matter how it’s rationalized, and no matter how antiseptically it’s treated by those who wish to obscure its nature.

     You cannot endorse murder yet credibly claim to be a Catholic, or for that matter any variety of Christian.

---

     There’s considerable confusion about one aspect of Catholic affiliation. I touched on it in a snippet from Chosen One:

     "What did you think of the movie?" Celeste pulled Louis's arm against her and walked closely alongside him.
     He shrugged. "I'm not big on tearjerkers. It was pretty decent entertainment, but I have a feeling they distorted the facts of his life a bit."
     "Whose? C. S. Lewis's?"
     He nodded. "I have a hard time matching the character in the movie with the things he wrote."
     "You've read his books?"
     "All of them."
     He unlocked the passenger door of his pickup truck and helped her into it. Even with his assistance, her stiletto heels made it a challenge.
     When they were in motion, she asked, "Do you have any favorite hobbies?"
     "Hm? No, I read a lot, that's about it."
     "So, how do you pass the time when you're not at work? Just reading?"
     He guided the truck through the gate of her townhouse complex, wheeled into a convenient parking place, and killed the engine. "Well, I do a few other things, but nothing you'd call exciting."
     I've got to know before this gets any more serious.
     Trying to sound casual and failing completely, she said, "Any causes?"
     He turned and looked at her without speaking, then let himself out of the truck and went around to her side to help her out. She took his arm again as they began the walk to her door.
     "If you were to take Route 231 through the city, turn south onto Fullerton Boulevard, and stay on it for about half a mile, you'd come to a light industrial area. On the southern edge there's a medical park, just a few one-story buildings that share a parking lot. Most Saturdays when the weather is good, you'd find me standing at the entrance with a sign that says 'Pregnant? Please talk to me first.' "
     Katie was right.
     "Operation Rescue, Louis?"
     He shook his head as they mounted the short flight of concrete steps that stood before her door. "No, I don't much care for that bunch. When they're there, I'm not. This is just me, and sometimes another fellow who feels the way I do."
     Instead of unlocking her door at once, she turned to face him. He stood with his hands clasped before him. She could read nothing from his face in the dim moonlight.
     "And how is that?"
     He looked down briefly. "That abortion is a horrible thing. That it should be a last resort, to save a mother's life, not a first to spare her some inconvenience. That most women who have abortions wouldn't, if they knew how they'd feel afterward." He said it calmly, no strain apparent.
     "Are you a Catholic by any chance, Louis?"
     He stood a little straighter. "Not by chance, Celeste. By mature choice, and by the grace of God."
     Something in the words flicked her on the raw. Scorn poured into her voice. "I see. And of course that 'grace' gives you the right to interfere in the mature choices of women you've never met?"
     His eyes flared wide. "I interfere in no one's choices, Miss Holmgren. I force myself on no one. I present information and alternatives. Sometimes it seems as if the rest of society is practically shoving women into abortion clinics, rushing them in with no chance to check other options or think about what they're doing. I don't block the doors. I stand beside them with an offer of assistance. If that be interference, make the most of it."
     He started away, then faced her again. "By the way, you might have the wrong idea about something else as well. I'm not opposed to abortion because I'm a Catholic. Being opposed to abortion is part of what qualifies me to be a Catholic. Give that a spin on your mental merry-go-round and see where it gets off. Thanks for your company this evening. I'll see you at the office next week."
     He strode off into the darkness before she could reclaim her voice.

     Louis Redmond, my readers’ favorite character by a longshot, has phrased the matter with exquisite precision. Opposition to abortion is not a consequence of becoming a Catholic; it’s one of the qualifications for becoming one. Without that qualification, you can call yourself whatever you like, but you are not a Catholic. You certainly can’t credibly claim to be a follower of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

     Ragin’ Dave’s argumentative adversary couldn’t handle having that thrown up to her:

     At that point, the woman called her friends into her little rage spiral, and they threw one massive, gigantic temper tantrum online. However, you can look up a person's bio on Twitter, and I noticed one thing.

     Not one single friend of hers joining in her rage spiral against me claimed to be Catholic. I saw atheist, agnostic, anti-theists and one Jew. But not one Catholic.

     Fancy that.

---

     I’ve ranted about the critical need for clarity of thought and speech innumerable times. At this point my Gentle Readers surely don’t need to read another such screed. However, the above should make it plain just how great is that need.

     Millions find “gay marriage” completely reasonable.
     Millions claim that abortion is merely “a woman’s right to choose.”
     Millions believe that theft is quite all right, if the government does it for them.
     Millions willingly defame others, accusing them of every imaginable infamy, as long as it’s “in a good cause.”
     And millions upon millions of persons covet the possessions of others, scheme to steal them, and quite often succeed at it through the processes of the law.

     Whatever they might call themselves, they are not Catholics. They are not Christians of any sort. On this subject, the Savior has spoken.

Your quotidian quote for the day.

As often is the case, the grim reality behind the decline of our society is that it is mundane. There are no exotic causes; human weakness outweighed common sense, and then power was handed to the democratic herd which proceeded to ruin everything through its tendency to project wishful thinking over reality. When democracy seems like a good option, your society is already exhausted of energy and is merely looking for a compromise.

There is no complexity to this. Our society grew, it prospered, and then it faced disasters. The Mongol invasion. The Black Plague. But mostly, it faced its own prosperity. People no longer had to prove they knew what they were doing in reality. They only had to become popular enough that others would nod and say, sure, he’s a good fellow.

We need look no further than that. We succeeded, and as is the nature of success, we were challenged by others. While our best fought off the threats, our worst gathered and plotted. Then they had their revenge, and took over, and although it took them two centuries, by the 1990s they had control, and since then, they’ve run our society into the ground.

Instead, we should take responsibility for our past. We made a boo-boo. We accepted the equality of all people in lieu of demanding that people prove themselves through creativity, loyalty and real-world results. As a result, we were overrun by incompetents.

All of the people blaming The Jew&trade, The Rich^TM or other scapegoats are concealing this fundamental truth: we did this to ourselves by accepting equality as a notion. Even if we destroy all of those scapegoats, our problem remains. We have to fix the problem, or it ends us.

"We have no one to blame but ourselves." By Brett Stevens, Amerika, 1/8/16.

All aboard for the lowest common denominator!

Pluralism does not mean “E pluribus unum” (out of many, one) as conservatives surmise. Instead, it means that every group keeps its own standards so that it can maintain its own self-interest. This is the nature of pluralism: it is to agree to disagree, not to agree to work together toward anything, least of all the kind of pro-America Horatio Alger nonsense that conservatives usually babble in public.

* * * *

History as always shows us an answer, which usually involves the grim fact that it takes centuries to see the consequences of any act. Media establishments were amazed at how relaxed Caucasians are at becoming a minority in their own lands . . . .

* * * *

In reality, the American nativists were correct all along. Diversity of any form destroys our control over our destiny by destroying our identity. After that point, there is no unity, only a sense of living in a place for convenience. Pluralism breaks down into each person doing what they want except where obligated, a kind of “anarchy with grocery stores” plus the jobs to pay for those groceries and buy your way into a gated community apart from the 80% of your society that is now a multi-cultural war zone of urban decay.

In this way, diversity takes us to a lowest common denominator.

"White people do not understand diversity." By Brett Stevens, Amerika, 12/30/15.

The reality of U.S. foreign policy.

In 2013 these same Al-Qaeda linked Syrian rebels launched two sarin gas attacks. This was an attempt to frame Assad and muster international support for military intervention. Fortunately they were exposed by U.N. and Russian investigators and the push for airstrikes completely fell apart when Russia stepped in to broker a diplomatic solution.

The campaign for regime change in Syria, as in Libya has been presented in terms of human rights. Obviously this isn't the real motive.

In 2009, Qatar put forth a proposal to run a natural gas pipeline through Syria and Turkey to Europe. Assad however rejected this, and in 2011 he forged a pact with Iraq and Iran to run a pipeline eastward cutting Qatar and Saudi Arabia out of the loop completely. Not surprisingly Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been the most aggressive regional players in the push to topple the Syrian government.

But why would this pipeline dispute put Syria in Washington's cross hairs?^[1]

I don't want to quote too much from this excellent article. The above is only a small part of what is an insightful take on America's foreign policy. It's worth your time to read it all. It's a giant step up from the dishonest "Assad must go" fairy tale that we hear from Obama.

As an aside on Crimea, I've earlier remarked that the U.S. was remiss in failing to offer assurances to Russia respecting its naval base in Crimea. I thought that a significant omission that led directly to Russian's move to create its own assurances regarding the fate of their naval base when Victoria Nuland succeeded in destabilizing Ukraine. Well, read this article and you'll see, as I did, that it was no oversight that made for the omission of those assurances. The junior geostrategerists who play as statesmen and diplomats indeed intended for Russia to lose its base and for the Russians meekly to accept this loss with good grace, if not indifference.

These are times where we all need to look closely at what is happening in our countries now that it's obvious that we must contend with the Treason Class. Whatever game is afoot, world and national events have had nothing to do with multiculturalism or humanitarianism. Merkel knows damn well who is raping German women now and she knows damn well that the rapists are part of the million plus invaders she deliberately imported. She's already stated that multiculturalism is a failure but still she brought in the brown and black tide.

If humanitarianism were a consideration for Western leaders then no one would have stood by while over a half million Tutsis were murdered in Rwanda. Or while civilians die in, and refugees flow out of, Syria because of U.S., French, British, German, Saudi, Qatari, Turkish, and Israeli support for ISIS and various other scum fighting a war against the sovereign state of Syria.

And another thing. What's happening was decided upon without the least concern for the wishes or interests of the people of the West. Putin and Trump soar in popularity because it's obvious they are patriots. The rest serve interests that are, and must be, well camouflaged.

Notes
^[1] "The Geopolitics of World War III." By SCG, 9/11/14.

"Where Do Nazis Come From, Daddy?"

     [I've brought this back to the top of the stack because of the increasing shrillness coming from the fascist Left, as well as the increasing resistance to that community being displayed by good and sensible Americans. Among other things, backhanding Leftists with the absurdity, and the potential consequences, of their pretensions to omniscience rattles them terribly. They don't know how to respond. The moral? Don't give up. Stay staunch. Keep fighting! -- FWP]

---

     “Well, darling daughter,” he said through a half-regretful smile of remembrance, “it’s like this.”

     “A long time ago,” he said, “everyone understood that we can all make mistakes, that no one can be all-knowing, and that it’s a decent person’s responsibility, no matter how strongly he feels about something, to remember that he could be wrong. It was an important piece of a child’s education to learn that no matter how good he is at something, there’s almost certainly someone who’s better at it – and that it’s guaranteed that lots of other people are better than he is at lots of other things. You see, when you know that you could be wrong, you have to admit that other people could be right, so it would always be wrong to try to force someone else to accept your point of view. A young boy or girl who accepted those truths would normally grow up to be courteous to others, even others he thought were really, really wrong about something important.

     “Now, not every child really believed and accepted those truths, but so many did, and upheld them so firmly, that the children who didn’t believe them were compelled to act as if they believed them too. No one would let them get away with the kind of behavior that said otherwise. They didn’t like it – no one likes being compelled to hide his feelings – but they went along because the punishment for not going along was so much worse.

     “But one day there was a big war. It happened because some of the children who refused to believe that they could be wrong became politically powerful. They went to war to force their neighbors to give them stuff they wanted but didn’t deserve. The war was terrible. It went on a long time and killed a lot of young men. At the end, everybody was really tired. And some other children who didn’t believe that they could be wrong, and who liked to write and talk a lot, started saying and writing that it wasn’t because the children who started the war didn’t realize that they could be wrong. They said it was that everybody was wrong about everything – that the war had proved that there was nothing anyone could believe.”

     He paused as he shuddered afresh at his horror at learning how the mental disease that had been mislabeled skepticism had unraveled the whole of the civilized world. He reflected on his efforts to preserve his daughter’s innocence. How he’d fought to protect her from the juggernaut that had rumbled over the world! Yet forces far larger than he, and events beyond his power to control, had made all his struggles moot.

     “But a funny thing happened. It turns out that if you accept that everybody is wrong about everything, then it doesn’t matter what you believe. And that meant that it doesn’t matter what you do. Whether you’re good, respectful, and kind or mean, hateful, and brutal just doesn’t matter.”

     He drew a deep, shaky breath, let it out slowly, and did his best to smile at his daughter as he continued.

     “Anyway,” he said, “if it doesn’t matter what you do, then all that really matters is what you want and whether you have it. Lots and lots of people started to think that way. Then they started to live that way. They would do whatever it takes to get what they wanted, no matter what that did to other people. And things got bad. There was another war, even bigger than the first one, and then lots of little ones – so many little ones that there was never a time when people weren’t fighting. No one could feel safe any more. Yet no one could see what was happening, even though it was right in front of them.

     “You see, when people understand that they could be wrong, they leave other people alone, unless those others try to hurt them or steal from them. That’s what we mean by freedom. But once enough children had been raised to believe that everything everybody believes is wrong, lots of people who wanted things they didn’t have and couldn’t get felt it was okay to take them anyway. After all, who was going to tell them they shouldn’t? And for some of those people, what they wanted most was to force other people to think and live just like them.

     “You want to hear something funny, dear? Those people – the ones who wanted to force everybody else to think and live just like them – liked to say they were ‘fighting for freedom.’ Really! Of course, the kind of ‘freedom’ they wanted meant that no one else could be free. But that didn’t slow them down at all. They just kept fighting, and when they won they’d make the people they’d beaten say and do exactly what they commanded. Anyone who refused – who said he just wanted to be left alone – would be killed.

     “Anyway, it went on for a long, long time. More and more people were conquered, more and more people were killed, and the people doing the killing became more and more powerful. Eventually they came to our part of the world, and when they did, we didn’t recognize what they were doing in time to stop them. Maybe we couldn’t stop it. Maybe they had already become so powerful that nothing we could do would have made a difference. We’ll never know. But it all started with a few children refusing to believe that they could be wrong. Because that, darling daughter, is where Nazis come from.”

     He slipped a hand through the bars between their cages, tousled her hair, and won a brief smile from her. “And that is why you and I are going to die this morning.”

Quickies: Incredible Surprises Dept.

     I’ve said repeatedly that character trumps all, because a man of good character will recognize his mistakes, admit to them, and strive earnestly to correct them. But not everyone feels that way:

     The View’s Joy Behar on Tuesday insisted that, regardless of whether Bill Clinton raped a woman or Ted Kennedy drowned someone, she would vote for these liberal politicians. Behar and her fellow co-hosts were discussing how Clinton’s past would impact his wife. She justified, “Republicans have voted against the Violence Against Women Act. Now, that to me, is more important than anything that Bill Clinton did or didn't do because it's what [Hillary's] going to vote for.”

     This came after co-host Paula Faris reminded, “Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey. They say that he [Clinton] either exposed himself to them, raped them or groped them.” Behar conceded, “He is a dog. Let’s face it.” She later declared, “But I still will vote for Bill Clinton because he votes in my favor.”

     The message to left-leaning politicians, themselves normally devoid of character – how can you claim to have morals of any sort if you believe that it’s perfectly all right for Smith to steal from Jones as long as he does it through government? – is quite clear:

“Liberals” and “progressives” will let you get away with anything as long as you “vote in their favor.”

     Abuse of power? Check.
     Sexual assault? Check.
     Rape? Check.
     Murder by indirection? Check.
     Murder by decree? Check.

     It’s all just fine, as long as you keep the teats of the welfare state nice and fat and never, ever infringe on “abortion rights.” Oh, free birth control would be nice, too.

     Maybe it’s just leftish women. All their opinions come from their pudenda. After all, they protected a pro-abortion Republican Senator until they didn’t need him any longer.

     Half the human race gives every indication of being homicidally insane. Watch your step. Always go armed. And cross only at the crosswalk.

Quickies: “If This Goes On” Dept.

     As I wrote yesterday, government officials are far more interested in taking credit for good developments than in accepting the odium for bad ones:

     The cover-up of New Year’s Eve sex mobs of Arabic and North African migrants in Germany continues to grow.

     Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker said Wednesday that women should adopt a “code of conduct” to discourage men from committing sexual assault. Gangs of migrants went on a crime spree last Friday night, which overwhelmed police and left scores of women at their attackers’ mercy.

     The mayor suggested women keep “at arm’s length” from strangers, travel in groups, and to ask bystanders for help.

     “It is important to prevent such incidents from ever happening again,” Reker said, the Independent reported Wednesday.

     Reker’s comments appear to ignore the fact that victims, often traveling in groups, were systematically targeted by gangs.

     I added the emphasis.

     The German government is creating yet another incentive for young Muslim men to swarm over Europe: consequence-free gang rape. Add that to the economic and religious incentives. Watch the “refugee” figures from this point forward, and ask yourself plainly: What is the German government’s real agenda? And how much more will Germans take before they rise up and overthrow it?

     In The Guns of August, the late Barbara Tuchman wrote that given a choice between disorder and injustice, the German mentality prefers injustice. Let’s hope there’s a limit to how much injustice, concealed and coddled by the State itself, Germans are willing to swallow before they review that preference. Granted that the historical precedents are not encouraging.

Pearls of expression.

Gonzo3

Just look at the reaction a temporary ban on Mooslem immigration brought about from the left AND the right!

whoami

Just look at the reaction a temporary ban on Mooslem immigration brought about from the left AND the further left!

Gonzo

I stand corrected.

"Why Western Civilization Has Lost Its Self-Confidence." By Michael Patrick Leahy, Breitbart, 12/31/15.

Privileges And Immunities Part 2: The Most Privileged Group

     I was uncertain about extending the thoughts in this essay until I saw this report on events in Germany:

     MAINZ, Germany — Roving packs of men sexually assaulted dozens of women on New Year's Eve in western Germany's city of Cologne, officials said, describing the attacks as unprecedented....

     Police said the attackers — who struck in pairs and groups of up to 20 men — appeared to be part of a larger, 1,000-strong group that had gathered in one of the city's main plazas for New Year's celebrations.

     Cologne's police spokesman Thomas Held told NBC News that authorities had fielded around 90 complaints of pick-pocketing, groping and at least one of rape.

     Mass sexual assaults! In Germany! And who, oh please tell us who, might the perpetrators have been?

     Police on Monday had said the suspects appeared to be of "Arab or North African descent," sparking fears on social media they were among around 1 million asylum seekers who have flooded Germany this year. Held told NBC News that it was too early to tell if the suspects were recent arrivals.

     NBC News, at least, has learned to avert the hazards of:

• Providing no information at all about the attackers, and:
• Specifically mentioning that they were Muslim immigrants,

     ...so they “split the difference.” That’s not terribly surprising. But the events do bring into focus a group that possesses important – perhaps the most important – privileges and immunities, but which I forbore to mention in the earlier essay.

---

     The word privilege has a telling etymology: its Latin roots mean private law. A privileged person or group is treated as being governed by a legal code specific to that group, rather than the broader one that applies to the non-privileged. Obviously, for the privilege to be valuable, that special legal code must be more lenient than the broader one.

     The first essay noted several groups that enjoy such special treatment, de facto at least, in the United States. Muslims were one of those groups. In Europe, their special status derives from the special status of an even more privileged group: a group that is immunized against all penalties for its misdeeds, no matter how outrageous.

     Here’s the giveaway:

     German authorities were at pains to try to avoid any discussion of the background of a veritable army of assailants that preyed upon so many victims. Indeed, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas warned that the ethnicity of the criminals was irrelevant to their crime.

     “The rule of the law does not look at where someone comes from but what they did,” Mr. Maas told reporters in Berlin. “We will investigate what circles the perpetrators may have come from.”

     Aha! Let’s work this out together, shall we?

• Muslims are known to hold, as a tenet of their creed, that women are inferiors, ruled by their lusts, who must be governed by men at all times. From this flows the “uncovered meat” rule: that a woman who appears in public in anything but an abaya or burq’a is “asking for it.”
• Outrageous numbers of sexual assaults, all the way up to gang rape, have occurred in every concentration of Muslims outside the explicitly Islamic states. In nearly every case, the perpetrators have eventually been revealed as Muslims.
• The German government opened the country’s gates to approximately 1 million Muslim “refugees” in calendar year 2015.
• But the German Justice Minister has instructed Germans not to link “ethnicity” to this most recent rash of sexual assaults, even though it was apparently semi-organized and the perpetrators displayed “North African or Arab” appearances.

     Is Heiko Maas protecting the “refugees,” or is he protecting some other group – a group that was in Germany well before the “refugee crisis,” that’s legendary for taking credit for good events and evading the odium for bad ones? For averting all punitive consequences from its actions?

---

     The governing class in Europe is even more cohesive than ours in America. Its members enjoy nearly indefeasible tenure in their positions, and nearly always succeed in getting away with their crimes. The recent pillorying of Silvio Berlusconi of Italy was remarkable for its uniqueness; seldom is a European politician of any stature compelled to face a criminal trial. Note also that despite the mountain of evidence against him, Berlusconi eventually “walked.”

     At this time we have a similar farce playing out on the stage of the American presidential contest: Hillary Clinton, personally responsible for the disclosure of at least 1200 items of classified information via the use of a private email system, is far more likely than not to suffer absolutely no penalties for it. She’s a member of the governing elite by virtue of her terms as First Lady, United States Senator, and Secretary of State. Despite the great animosity felt toward her by many others in the governing class, including many in her own party, they will resist compelling her to stand trial for those violations of the National Security Act for a simple reason: it would whet the public’s appetite for blood from that class, which has abused it serially and seriously for decades without experiencing more bruises to minor players.

     The desire to wield power isn’t solely about the delights of power; it’s also about the immunities that come with being one of the governing elite.

---

     The State is that entity in a region that possesses the pre-indemnified privilege of coercing its subjects: i.e., the privilege of using force against private individuals and organizations while immunized against any penalty for it. The agents of the State are the beneficiaries of that privilege / immunity. In other words, if you want to “get away with it,” you should aspire to high office, and the higher the better; it will shield you against the consequences for nearly any subsequent misdeed.

     The American conception of a “rule of law” superior to any person’s birth or status offset that privilege / immunity of office for some time. However, its ability to penetrate the circles of the elite started to weaken early in the Twentieth Century, along with other aspects of our revolutionary, status-indifferent order. By the end of World War II, it had already become extremely difficult to hold even a former bureaucrat such as Alger Hiss responsible for provable espionage against the United States. (Hiss was never tried for his acts of espionage, but rather for perjuring himself before Congress.) By the time Bill Clinton ascended to the presidency, a president could commit virtually any odious act without suffering for it. The atrocities at Ruby Ridge and the mass slaughter at Waco suggest that even mass murder is insufficient to force the issue.

     Europe is learning how noxious the privileges and immunities of the governing class can be. Angel Merkel’s government openly welcomed the horde of Muslim “refugees” into Germany. The subsequent rash of crimes, especially crimes of sexual assault, were no coincidence; as I observed above, that’s always what happens when a significant number of Muslims is admitted to a Western, Christian-Enlightenment-based nation. Yet Mrs. Merkel is almost certain to escape all the odium for facilitating them. In this she’ll have the active cooperation and support of both the governing elite of Europe and of its courtier press, which is even more sycophantic toward the governing class than our own.

     But Barack Hussein Obama and his allegiants think America should strive to be more like Europe. In particular, he wants to admit tens of thousands of Muslim “refugees” to our shores. What do you think, Gentle Reader?

Domestic imperialism.

Chilton Williamson, Jr., now editor of Chronicles magazine wrote a great review of Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century (2012). Mr. Williamson is now the editor of Chronicles magazine in Rockford, Illinois, which publication I cannot recommend too highly as a source of literate, entertaining commentary on all matters political, historical, economical, and philosophical.

Williamson quotes Marshall DeRosa (“The Tenth Amendment Awakening, the Supreme Court Be Damned”) that “the transition from states’ rights to unitary nationalism, i.e., domestic imperialism, was the most significant development in American politics.” (Emphasis added.) That's an illuminating way of describing our wholesale stampede into the arms of progressives, Marxists, communists, fellow travelers, communist dupes, liberals, "conservatives," neo-cons, frustrated academics, Utopian feminist infantrymen, Hollywood and media social engineers, men who wear ear rings, and (other) ignorant, reckless, and mentally disturbed people everywhere.

Why bother with 58 state legislatures when you can purchase all the government power you want at the federal level? One-stop shopping for people who think you need help in spending your money, choosing your neighbors and your ideas, and deciding which foreign leaders needs a healthy dose of Obamanian arrogance. Das Reich am Potomac.

"Domestic imperialism" is also a term that aptly points out the hypocrisy of the far-left, anti-white zealots who infest us.^[1] They engage in all manner of conniption fits over Western imperialism as though white-on-black, white-on-brown, or white-on-yellow is the only kind of oppression and exploitation there is or ever was.^[2] If it's leftist whites doing the oppressing and exploiting, well then, what could be finer in Carolina, especially if it also accomplishes black and brown dreams of revenge and changing places with whites. One of these days those white leftists will figure out that part about "changing places" but for now it eludes them and the political symbiosis between the left and minority rejectionists thrives. Black lives matter!

If you have some ridiculous plan to achieve world peace, perfect justice, or political, economic, and cultural suicide or otherwise to go 15 rounds with common sense its own self, well, what could be more lovely than a federal government 5,000 times its constitutional size that makes a mockery of any notion of representative government.

With the lunatic fringe who have such ludicrous goals in mind, consider then what Williamson writes which is, as we say, where the rubber meets the living Constitution:

As Kent Masterson Brown [a contributor to the book cited above] . . . suggests, the meaning of the Constitution in respect of the relationship between the central government and the states is so extravagantly clear that neither intellectual density nor even incompetence can explain how the compact theory [Madison, Jefferson] was gradually overwhelmed and defeated by the nationalist one [Hamilton, Webster, Lincoln]. It was raw mental and political will that did the trick, abetted by intellectual dishonesty, demagoguery, and sheer mendacity.^[3]

A great and horrible deformation of our national life has taken place and, like a boa constrictor, the coils of one dumb ass, confiscatory scheme after another have been wrapped around us till we can hardly breathe. I do not have to repeat here what you well know about the decline of middle class wages, the enthusiastic export of manufacturing jobs to a communist dictatorship, the creation and nurturing of a parasite class, the punishment of the productive, the pursuit of malinvestment, and, inter alia, the evil importation of foreigners to take American jobs and debase our culture. Good luck opposing any of that. Our congresspersons are eager to hear from us and their 599,999 other mooks constituents.

This doesn't seem to bother even one of the 58 state bar associations or a significant number of Republican congressmen and senators for whom a nation operating under a bastardized, post-constitutional, all-powerful, federal government is something to be celebrated even as they pay lip service to "representative government," "enumerated powers," and "the rule of law not of men." A mighty barf there, good buddy.

Only yesterday our putative president purported to issue one or more executive orders having to do with guns in private hands. As with the Dept. of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency, one can search the words of Article I, Section 8 with a powerful flashlight to find education, pollution, or private gun ownership as proper subjects for federal legislative control. If you can't find stuff in Section 8, anyone who tells you he can is a liar. How easy is that?

But . . . anyone challenging these or other federal power grabs will be in for a long and expensive ride through the federal courts in which judges, with the rare, brave exception, will ignore the plain meaning of the Constitution and exercise exactly "the intellectual dishonesty, demagoguery, and sheer mendacity" Brown and Williamson point out are the essence of the judicial and political destruction of the American constitutional republic.

Notes
^[1] An aside. Can I say "far-left" these days? The accepted political taxonomy from Fox News on down is "moderates" on one side and "far rightists" on the other, viz., "Nazis."

I prefer "far left," on the one hand, namely, communists, fascists, progressives, and anyone who believes using a government (or private) bullet or knife (or massive uncontrolled third-world immigration) to achieve political ends (preferably for resentful minorities) and "far right," on the other, namely, people who believe in limited government, rule of law, free speech, freedom of association, personal responsibility, and cheap, domestic beer. I'm not sure who's in the middle of my (hardly original) spectrum. I suppose it's people who believe that a little bit of theft from their more productive fellow citizens through the mechanism of elected legislatures is ok, even a "right." The Goldilockian mean. I benefit but know it's horribly bad news.
^[2] As, inter alia, Hottentots, other residents of Africa, Tibetans, Han Chinese, Vietnamese, Montagnards, Spaniards, Greeks, Hungarians, Serbs, the Philippinos, Koreans, Malayans, certain people of the Indian subcontinent, Russians, and various neighbors of the Lakota Sioux, Comanche, Iroquois, and Aztecs can attest.
^[3] "The Long March Through the Constitution." By Chilton Williamson Jr., Chronicles, 5/1/14 (bracketed text and emphasis added).

Science and the Shepherd

The topic -- Bill Nye “The Science Guy.”  Why Nye?   Frequent flyer miles.  I didn’t have enough miles with one particular airline for a plane ticket, so I used them for magazine subscriptions.  It was an interview with Nye in my “complimentary” Time magazine that inspired this column.  

Reading secular publications like Time reminds me something retired USMC Lt. Col. Oliver North said, “Every morning I get up and read two things, the Washington Post and the Bible, just so I can know what both sides are up to.” 

The article about Nye starts with this:  “Bill Nye The Science Guy follows Undeniable, his defense of evolution, with his new book, Unstoppable, a call to action on climate change.”  The first thing that grabbed my attention was the seeming misapplication of the titles.  I thought “denier” was a moniker reserved for climate change non-believers, not those who might believe that, “In the beginning, God…”  Moreover, if evolution has to be defended, how exactly is it undeniable?   

Perhaps the explanation to Nye’s evangelism for the theory of evolution is best understood in light of a piece about Paul Karl Feyerabend, a German renowned for his work on the Philosophy of Science.  

According to Feyerabend, new theories came to be accepted not because of their accord with scientific method, but because their supporters made use of any trick – rational, rhetorical or ribald – in order to advance their cause.  Without a fixed ideology, or the introduction of religious tendencies, the only approach which does not inhibit progress (using whichever definition one sees fit) is "anything goes": "'anything goes' is not a 'principle' I hold... but the terrified exclamation of a rationalist who takes a closer look at history."

The second thing in the interview that disturbed my Spidey-senses was Nye’s response to this question: “How do you make the average person understand science?”  Nye:  “You have to have learning objectives – things you want to get across.  You want to make a point:  Humans and dinosaurs did not live concurrently.  If you get the adjacent carbon dating of volcanic soil, that’s cool.  But what I want you to get is that ancient dinosaurs and humans did not live at the same time.  The rest is gravy.”   

I get that Nye has an ideology he wants to get across.  What through me for a loop was the need to dogmatically convince his intended target that, “Humans and dinosaurs did not live concurrently.”  Whether they did, or didn’t, has no bearing on whether or not Nye evolved from a monkey.

Nye’s book defending the “undeniable” gives an interesting summation of the unique position he contends human’s hold on the hierarchy of evolutionary development.  Nye says, “We are all so much alike, because we are all human.  But it goes deeper than that.  Every species you’ll encounter on Earth is, near as we can tell, chemically the same inside.  We are all descended from a common ancestor.  We are shaped by the same forces and factors that influence every other living thing, and yet we emerged as something unique.  Among the estimated 16 million species on Earth, we alone have the ability to comprehend the process that brought us here.” 

It is perhaps the height of haughtiness that Nye thinks he’s smarter than all the other animals.  I’m not sure how Nye can know with scientific certainty that we alone are the only species with, “the ability to comprehend the process that brought us here.”  The oldest book of the Bible (Job 12:7-10) has this to say about animals and their knowledge of the process, “But ask the animals, and they will teach you,  or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;  or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,  or let the fish in the sea inform you.  Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?  In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.”

I do agree with Mr. Nye on one point, we do have “the ability to comprehend the process that brought us here.”  I simply disagree with Mr. Nye on what that process is.

I’m quite content to be as smart as the sheep mentioned in Psalm 103, “Know that the Lord, He is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.”  

What Nye really needs is to know the Good Shepherd.