The Narrow Gate: A Sunday Rumination

     And he went through the cities and villages, teaching, and journeying toward Jerusalem. Then said one unto him, Lord, are there few that be saved? And he said unto them, Strive to enter in at the narrow gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able. [Luke 13:22-24]

     The above passage from the Gospel According to Luke is often held up as a sort of concurrence with the following famous passage from Mark:

     And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! And the disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. And they were astonished out of measure, saying among themselves, Who then can be saved? And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible. [Mark 10:23-27]

     Both passages appear to state that there’s a contradiction between worldly wealth and entrance into eternal bliss after death. They’ve been used by preachers down the centuries to threaten their better-off congregants into surrendering their money to the church. But what such preachers carefully omit to explore – before their congregants, at least – is the Judean context within which Jesus made the statements above.

---

     First-century Judea was a society rife with evils of several kinds. First, there was the practice of slavery, then as in all ages a method of garnering the profits available from other men’s labors without their consent. Many wealthy men of that time became so through the exploitation of slave labor. Needless to say, that sort of thing has never sat well with God...though the religious authorities of the time tended to look the other way.

     Second was the frequency of pillage. A man’s home was anything but secure against robbers. Neither was a lone traveler safe even on the most heavily traveled roads. That wasn’t merely an alternate way to enrich oneself; it was also an inducement to obsession with protecting one’s wealth and property that could reach unhallowed levels. Considering that among the soldiers of the Roman occupation were many who practiced pillage when they believed they could get away with it, the threat was severe indeed.

     Third was the habit, especially among the already wealthy, of traveling heavily laden with one’s possessions rather than leaving them at home. That partook both of the fear of pillage mentioned above, but also with the love of luxury that characterized many of the wealthy of that time. It might strike contemporary Christians as strange, especially considering that what qualified then as luxury would barely get the attention of a typical poor American today. Yet it was commonplace.

     Fourth, a tidbit seldom mentioned in sermons. Jerusalem was the center of wealth and power of Judea, and thus where many wealthy men lived, conducted their businesses, or both. But Jerusalem was also a walled city, fortified against large invading forces from the time of the Judean kings. A man traveling with his possessions had to enter or leave the city through one of its gates. One of those gates, an unusually low and narrow one, was therefore called “the eye of the needle.” Getting a laden camel through it was deemed well nigh impossible.

     The picture Jesus sketched with the above passages comes into much clearer focus in light of those facts.

---

     From Main Street to Wall Street to Washington
     From men to women to men
     It's a nation of noses pressed up against the glass
     They've seen it on the TV
     And they want it pretty fast

     You spend your whole life
     Just pilin' it up there
     You got stacks and stacks and stacks
     Then Gabriel comes and taps you on the shoulder
     But you don't see no hearses with luggage racks

     [Don Henley, “Gimme What You Got”]

     Americans are probably more focused on worldly gain than is good for us. We strategize, strive, and scratch for that next big strike: the next promotion, the big bonus, the bigger house in a better neighborhood, the fine foods and beverages, the nice clothes, the fine furniture, the luxury cars, the fancy toys...even, sometimes and most deplorably, the trophy spouse “worthy of the station I’ve achieved.”

     Yet none of that is inherently sinful. It’s the obsession with wealth, the mindset that excludes God and neighbor, that imperils one’s soul.

     The two Great Commandments never cease to apply:

     But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
     Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

     The love of wealth can crowd out other loves. This seems so perfectly obvious to me that I blush to state it this explicitly. But as I’ve said innumerable times here and elsewhere, obvious really means overlooked.

     The omission of the qualifying observations given here allowed priests of the late First Millennium to terrify many Europeans into giving all their worldly goods to the Church out of chiliastic panic: i.e., that the world would end with the millennium, and that only the voluntary surrender of all one’s wealth to the Church would grant one a chance of admission to heaven. Needless to say, the Church offered no refunds on January 1, 1001.

     All the same, there’s a red line to be observed: the line that divides the respect for the utility of wealth in this world from the Scrooge-like obsession with it that leaves no room for God or other men. If that line is respected, mere prosperity will not endanger the soul. If not...well, not only are hearses unequipped with luggage racks; Hell doesn’t provide its inmates with storage lockers.

     May God bless and keep you all.

Sameness Screed

     I have had it with the repetition of the Same Old Motifs in speculative fiction. Space wars. Time travel. Vampires. Werewolves. Witches. Zombies. Great God in heaven, zombies!

     Those elements are all used up. There’s no BLEEP!ing tread left on them. Recourse to them as the tendons and ligaments of a novel indicates that the author lacks imagination. And why do we read speculative fiction? FOR IMAGINATION AND ORIGINALITY!

     And I don’t BLEEP!ing care who’s sold a metric ton of books about vampires, werewolves, zombies, et cetera ad nauseam infinitam. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns, as the financial gurus will tell you.

     Larry Correia has supposedly made a mint with his Monster Hunter novels – he’ll tell you that at the slightest opening – but after I’d read three of those novels, they began to bore me terribly. (His “Dead Six / Exodus” collaborations with Mike Kupari are far more original and interesting.) So “I’ve sold a lot of books along those lines” fails as an argument that you, newly fledged indie writer, should try to do the same.

     But it seems that no one is attempting anything genuinely original. And no, putting a romantic thread into a book wrapped around a worn-out motif doesn’t make it original.

     Please pardon me, Gentle Reader. Yesterday I came to the end of my unread-books stack, a terrifying event here at the Fortress of Crankitude. So I went to Amazon and called up its “Recommended for you” list...and every BLEEP!ing recommendation was for a space war or an urban fantasy about werewolves or vampires.

     Enough! Enough! I say. I’ll purchase no more derivative, imitative crap! Nor will I tolerate it from an indie on the grounds that “I’ve got to establish myself.” You went indie to be free of the constraints of Pub World; why are you catering to their dictates like one of their slaves?

     Speculative fiction should question; invent; speculate. Fiction that reuses worn out motifs doesn’t qualify. And before you ask: Yes: The same applies to video games.

     I have spoken.

Borders -- an uncomfortable example

Apropos of the last post -- a very uncomfortable example:

A federal grand jury has indicted seven Latino gang members in connection with a 2014 firebombing attack at the Ramona Gardens housing project in Boyle Heights, accusing them of trying to drive black residents out of the neighborhood, prosecutors announced Thursday. 

Federal prosecutors allege that the men – all described as members of the Big Hazard street gang – met before the attack, where Carlos Hernandez, 31, is accused of telling the group they were going to use Molotov cocktails to firebomb homes where black families lived. 

While no one was injured in the May 12, 2014, firebombing, three of the four apartments targeted were occupied by black families, recalling uneasy times from decades ago when similar attacks prompted most African Americans to flee the housing project.

I originally saw this on Steve Sailer's blog, but I have lost the link.

There is the obvious racial angle, of course, but I wanted to come at it from another direction -- a failure in markets because of an unwillingness to acknowledge an important reality.

Basically, through my economic lens this looks to me like a black market in operation -- even though nobody is talking about buying or selling anything.  You have people in the market for a neighborhood 'of their own people', resorting to violence and obnoxiousness because such a market is effectively closed off by law.  There is demand frustrated for supply, and the result is violence and criminality.  And to be sure, this is not the only place you see this kind of thing, it is just a very overt and nasty example.

Forget about race and all that for a moment -- it is just very hard to imagine being able to assemble, say, a Presbyterian, or an environmentalist, or a homeschooling community, or a whatever-enthusiast community, precisely because we have open markets in housing.  There just isn't a good way to coordinate anything, because it is disallowable by our system of things to control who your neighbors sell their houses to.  Maybe conceivably, some mega-bucks guy could just build a whole neighborhood and let his buddies live there, or something of that nature.  But hopefully that sounds like an unreasonable stretch of things.

And yet people have a very strong interest in who their neighbors are.  This is an extremely valuable thing for people, and how their communities are structured and who they interact with are extremely meaningful in their lives.  But the only available mechanism for discrimination in markets is price.  And so, as a result, we have a highly stratified market with people bidding up prices absolutely like mad, for houses probably many of them really don't even want, just for a chance to hopefully not wind up next door to criminals, or for 'good schools,' i.e., so their kids don't get shot.  Which is a pretty low bar, but all you can ask for the way we have things set up.

And worse, you have miscreants in government actively stirring the pot by shuffling people into neighborhoods they have no business in and lifestyles they can't handle.  (Sorry, no link, but you know the kinds of programs...)

I don't really know what the answer to this is.  It isn't always reasonable to think that there should be a market in absolutely whatever people want -- we don't have a market in slavery anymore, for example.  Or children.  Maybe some wants just should be frustrated, criminality and violence in such cases being just that and no more.  I don't really want to go down that particular avenue.

But this is really, really bad, it is a huge problem, and it is the result of a system which has little meaningful avenue for expressing the existence of borders.  It isn't good for anyone.

Metaphysical Bumblings #3: Markets

I'm probably not the best person to 'do' philosophy, as I don't think I function in a particularly logically-driven fashion.  When I read most modern stuff (and, frankly, when I read most anything in terms of the kinds of things you see in fairly intelligent writings) very quickly I start to hear that voice in my head from the Peanuts cartoons -- that nasally 'wah wah, whah wha wah, wha....' that the adults speak in.  And...it usually glazes my eyes over and puts me to sleep.

Sorry, I just don't find 98% of it very convincing.  I can force myself to follow it, but it is almost always a waste of time, as I generally find that when I understand it, it is either trivial, repulsive, or wrong, and that 'style' of thinking seems to have this take-it-or-leave-it aspect to it that almost always means leaving it.  For me, anyway.  

I think in pictures -- if you want to convince me, invite me into your picture of things, and let me inspect the truth of it for myself.  I might take all of it, or some of it, or maybe only a little of it, but I almost never find that sort of writing to be totally without value.  I will almost always come away with something.

That's what I'd like to do here -- sketch out a few pictures of things, and see if there isn't some truth to be had.  Let's do some 'metaphysics of markets.'

First things, though -- I want to do something weird, and to do it, I need to do some clearing up of what seems to me some muddying that surrounds the ideas of 'subjective' and 'objective.'  I hope you'll bear with me, but in my opinion, the ways these two words are used is 90% wrong.

If you don't agree -- and you probably won't, at least at first -- that's okay.  You can keep your opinion.  I'm just sketching a picture here; I need this as an element, and once I'm done, you can go back to the way you've always done things if you don't find it useful to you.  But you probably won't be able to 'see' my picture if you don't first step into a different picture of these two terms.

Mere Objectivity

What I want to do -- and the reason most people won't like this -- is 'relativise' the meanings of objective and subjective.  However, I promise that if you stick around to the end, you'll get something else to anchor yourself that you might like better.  And as I said, you can always anchor yourself back to these terms if you don't like what I'm going to show you.

The reason I think you should consider 'relativising' the words objective and subjective is just because they are relative terms.  I've even heard that Eric Voegelin once instructed his students to simply stop using them because they do not correspond to anything in reality.  I do not think I would go that far, because I think they are useful in their place, nevertheless, I would agree with him that they are generally abused and therefore often unhelpful or downright misleading.

We usually like to think of rendering something like an 'objective' opinion or judgment, or giving 'objective' evidence, to mean something like 'true' evidence, or an 'impartial' opinion, or what have you.  But I have to use words like 'true', and 'just', and 'universal', and 'absolute' and other such notions and connotations we commonly attach to the word objective precisely because mere objectivity proper cannot render them on it's own.  Surely an opinion is more likely to be just if it is rendered objectively, but simply because one is 'outside' a situation (and therefore objective to it) does not render his opinion just.  Merely objective evidence is often wrong, misleading and all the rest, otherwise it would be enough to get at the truth simply to be objective.  Objectivity is certainly something, but it doesn't in itself render 'the whole enchilada.'  You need more to the system to get all of that -- like logic and consistency, veracity to actuality, etc.  Likewise for subjectivity.

So, at least for the moment, let's only use the words objective and subjective to mean, basically, whether we are viewing something from outside or inside a particular 'frame' at hand, and use the other sorts of words we have to mean those other things if we need them.  For the moment, we are only using the words to consider how the situation is framed.

With that annoying stuff out of the way, let's draw a couple of pictures.

Market Picture #1

Suppose that I took a map of reality -- a nice 2D picture with you in it -- and I drew a circle around just you.  You are inside of this circle (subjective frame of reference) with everything else outside of it (objective frame).  This, as it happens, is a pretty common way of thinking about things, for hopefully obvious reasons.

And if you think about markets in these terms, you can really go a long ways.  One interesting thing you may notice -- and one of the most important discoveries of economics as a science -- is that value is subjective.  It emerges from within market actors (like you).  (Yes, okay, we'll afford the other market actors their own circles, too.  I'm trying to keep it simple here.  They also impute value 'subjectively.')  People value goods, and this is what renders them valuable in markets.

Likewise, you will discover that prices are objective.  You can look at an ad in the newspaper, and you will see there prices that are indifferent to what you think of them.  You can consider them outrageous, you can consider them 'cheap.'  But whatever they are, they just are.  The numbers on the paper don't change depending on your opinion of them.

Do they emerge out of the physical laws of the universe?  Or some such?  No.  They emerge out of the decisions made by marginal actors in markets -- the ones making immediate decisions to buy or sell at a particular price at a particular moment in time.  Sometimes that marginal actor might be you, but most of the time not.  And even then, you really only get half a say -- it takes two to tango. 

Which is to say, that despite your very occasional participation, and despite being the outcome of the objectively visible actions of many individual actors, prices are nevertheless objective phenomena using our frame of reference.  They are 'brute facts of your Universe', as far as you are concerned.  Your 'say' in them reduces to a rounding error.  You just have to deal with them, as they are.

And hopefully it is equally crystal clear that they are -- nevertheless, nevertheless! -- the product of subjective valuations!  Time for some bold, large font --

Price structures are the outcome of value structures, via market mechanisms.  The objective structure of a market is a product of subjective values.

...and that's kinda important, especially to the actors who have to navigate those structures.

What I've sketched out here is the basics of Economic Subjectivism, one of the most critical insights of the subject of economics.  It was originally articulated by the Austrian school, but eventually absorbed by pretty much every modern school of economic thought.  I'm not gonna dwell on any more of the details within this picture much more than this, because lots of others already have much better than I could, it's pretty conventional, and I don't have a lot more to say about it as regards the point of his essay.

But to be sure, this is one doozy of a metaphysical system we have sketched out.  This way of dividing up reality will get you a lot.  You can see a long way from this mountaintop.  An awful lot of what is known of economic systems derives from this treatment of things.  And, I would submit, its effectiveness emerges for a very good reason -- because dividing things this way -- they way we drew our 'circle' -- captures a very important truth of the situation.  Individuality is an important aspect of reality, so 'breaking it at this joint' gives good results.

Metaphysical Skepticism

However (you knew there was going to be a 'however', didn't you?) when I have run across systems like this, I have come to find it good practice to ask two questions -- and I would encourage everyone who comes across some new train of reasoning or body of facts ("Evolution!  It's so amazing -- it explains everything!  Just like this --!") that is being put to use to make sweeping statements about all of reality ("Therefore, obviously, there's no God.") to make use of them.

Question 1 -- So what?  As in, does this thing really imply all of that?  Are you sure?  Do I have to take it just this way, all the way to the ends of reality?  Or are the implications really more limited than all that?

Question 2 -- What else?  As in, is this all there is?  The whole story?  Might there be more -- especially more that might bear a bit more directly on questions that seem further removed from the original issues that led to this train of thought?

In the case at hand, what we learned emerged out of a way of dividing up reality -- one way among many we could have chosen -- and the result turned out to be pretty darn good.  But just what all should we conclude from it -- i.e., so what?  Well, a lot, but maybe not everything.  We definitely should not conclude that 'this is it' without any further inspection.  We didn't bother (yet!) to divide it up some other way and see if something useful might shake out. Is there anything else? My tendency is to almost always answer this question one way -- there is almost always more!  Reality is a big and wondrous place.  I don't think that needs a lot of elaboration.

Let's see if we can find more.  How about another picture?

Market Picture #2

This time, we're going to draw the circle in a different place -- instead of around individual people, around a group of people.  We'll pick the one that's getting the most attention of late -- a nation of people.  You could probably draw a circle around other groups and arrive at useful conclusions, but for now we'll stick with this one of interest.

Now, a lot of people who support free-trade will talk about 'invisible lines' or 'imaginary lines', to ridicule the idea of the meaningfulness of national borders and such.  And if we had bought in too deeply into the metaphysics from before -- that our way of dividing up reality was not merely a useful way for yielding truthful insight, reflective of truth, but in fact necessarily the whole truth of the matter -- we might be pulled in.  But hopefully, by getting as far as we have in the way that we have, it is easy to see that this characterization carries not much weight -- of course the line is 'imaginary', so was the one that we drew around individuals!  The whole point of drawing it was to imagine, to see if we found any truth in it, and the exercise proved very useful indeed!  If the objections is, 'well of course, that's not really what I meant, I meant it doesn't correspond to anything 'real', in the way an individual is 'real',' well, then I will say at least this begins to get to the heart of the matter.

And honestly, I wish the debates on the matter would go this way, instead of the way they usually go -- each side making fun of the other, without taking the debate to the actual issue at hand.  Are groups real, or not?  Because that is the issue, and no other.  And as with our previous example, I would submit that if they are real, then we should immediately see that applying this metaphysical divide will yield us some useful insight. And since I am not very good at this sort of reasoning and this section is devolving into the sort of writing that I don't like, rather than run around and around with this, let's finish off the 'drawing' and see what the picture looks like.

I think it is a very useful picture indeed.  With the circle drawn around nations, the pattern one immediately notices is that the price structure is typically fairly different within one circle as compared to outside of it.  In fact, a lot of things are different.  If our inferences hold from the previous 'drawing,' this is the result of differing value structures -- that just happen to line up with the circles we drew.  Clearly, there appears to be an underlying reality to the circle.  Some would say that, well, it's the legal sanctions imposed at the border that causes the difference, and to a degree this is partially true, but even when borders were far looser than today and where they have had much less legal significance, there were still differences -- and further there are price structure differences within borders where there is no substantial legal differentiation between regions.  Think -- one city versus another in the same state, or a city versus the countryside.

Of more significance, I think, is that in this picture, to the degree that prices differ, pricing is subjective!  The differences emerge from within the confines of the circle -- subjective to our delineation -- presumably in response to local economic conditions, as an expression of local valuations.  External conditions impinge only so far, even in the absence of any sort of purely legal differentiation.  If we were to modify the large, bold statement we made earlier, we'd have to say further that price and value structures emerge from 'the' subjective valuations 'of the members of the system in question.'  Not purely and abstractly from 'subjective valuation,' which is a bit different.  Presumably you care about the values of the people around you that you live with and do business with.  Their opinions are not wholly 'subjective' -- in the former, abused sense -- and arbitrary to you, as the previous formulation might seem to imply.

So -- 'real' or not, groups at least matter.  And to the degree they matter, well, to me at least they would seem to be 'real'.  And I don't want to run to the clincher just yet, but generally, there is a rather wise conservative proverb concerning theories that ignore significant realities...

 How about valuations?  This, I think, can get either very murky...or very trivial...or very interesting. 

At first glance, they are clearly subjective, because they also emerge locally from within the circle.  Or, if you want to import more of the previous metaphysics, from within the individuals who are within the circle.  And, as you probably intoned from the discussion so far, there is a significance to this -- different groups possess and express different value structures, and in turn will produce different price structures and consequently different economic structures. How could it be otherwise? 

Likewise, from within any particular circle, both prices and values outside the circle are objective, emerging from outside.  There are 'your' values and structures and ways, and then there are 'the world's.'  You could also have done this from the previous metaphysics (and probably seen some truth in a 'you versus the world' perspective, but hopefully you don't feel quite that isolated!)

But suppose we ask of our picture this -- ok, so the value structures, as expressed in markets, come from groups of people.  But where do the groups and the people get them?  Do they really emerge 'just' from within them?

And for whatever reason, when you ask a question like this almost everyone will default to a materialist perspective, and say 'well, of course!  Where else would they come from?'  Which I guess is fine if you actually are a materialist, but since most people would say that they are not, that they belong to some religion or other that believes in 'spiritual' things, or otherwise believes in the 'immaterial,' this is kind of an inadequate answer.  And I suspect that even most of the materialists don't really believe what they are saying, if they really think about it. As I pointed out in another post, most people will say that they at least nominally belong to one transcendent religion or another, so they probably ought to think that some portion of their beliefs and values are not merely subjective opinions but are given them from 'outside' -- that as individuals or as a group of faithful believers, they give expression to transcendent, eternal values which could be said to be objective to the entirety of the material universe, coming as they do from beyond it.

 And if you say this is what you believe -- that it is a part of your metaphysics -- then why on earth is it not just habitually a part of your 'picture' of things?

 As regards the picture we are presently drawing -- if we believe these sorts of things, then as 'beings made in the image of God', or however this idea is formulated by other religions, we can act as 'metaphysical conduits' through whatever circle we choose to draw to that which is 'truly objective'. There simply is no adequate 'firewall' to a transcendent God. And so -- in an important sense -- we could say that the values, prices, structures, etc, in our circle are our attempt at the expression of something much higher than our own subjective tastes, objective in the sense that really matters -- the ultimate sense. Therefore these things must take on something other than being 'merely subjective,' at least if we are to take our beliefs and ourselves seriously.

 Have I shot through the metaphysical picture well enough?

 Anyway, the picture that emerges is sets of value structures expressed by individuals and groups of people, occasionally, and unfortunately, sometimes even arrayed against eachother (i.e., in conflict).  And, frankly, the way these structures get to maintain their identity and integrity -- the way that people and groups get to live out their values -- is through borders.  Period.  Without any reality to the imaginary lines, they don't exist anymore, and the temporal becomes the tyrannical.  So, regardless of what I might think (or not think) about policy, or governments, or what any of these values should or should not be, it seems to be at the very least folly in my eyes to deny the reality and necessity of national borders -- provided there be such a thing as a nation.  And probably much worse than folly.

 I suppose you could take this picture a lot of directions, but I will just say a bit more -- it seems to me you could draw a great number of these circles in meaningful ways -- around family lineages (especially concerning the issue of inheritance, which seems to have completely gone to the dogs), around families themselves, around neighborhoods and communities, etc.  Without representation of these realities in the here and now -- without borders -- well, you can expect them to have about as much reality in truth as the representation afforded them.  When you open your borders up, you invite in external values.  And since the world is bigger than you, and probably also your group, you'll likely be overwhelmed.

 People need to allow for this...somehow.  If you buy into this picture anyway...

Learning

     The “education establishment” is in full revolt against education.

     What’s that, Gentle Reader? I should tell you something you don’t already know? Well, perhaps a bit later. It’s still early in the ayem, and I need a few keystrokes to warm up the old bile ducts. (Yes, they’re only as old as the rest of me, but they’ve got a lot of miles on them.)

     Education – “to lead out,” from its Latin roots – is one of the few occupational areas whose “practitioners” deliberately resist the practice thereof. We all know the horror stories: the fads and fashions that have displaced proven methods; the elevation of “fairness” and “equality” over results; the deliberate dumbing-down of course content to prevent the slightest of bruises to anyone’s “self-esteem.” We also know about the use of the government-run schools – I refuse to call them “public” schools, as they’re openly averse to any inspection or criticism by the public – as indoctrination centers and institutions by which children can be separated emotionally from their parents. It’s all deplorable, and at great cost at that.

     Trouble is, with roughly 90% of American students incarcerated in the State-run schools, the 10% of educational institutions outside the State’s direct control are nevertheless pulled along in their wake. They can’t avoid partaking of the pool of “teachers” not currently employed by the State. They can’t afford to commission special textbooks for their use. They can’t evade the “social justice” influences that have reduced State schooling to the level of day care. Only the determined parents who elect to homeschool have a chance of preserving their kids’ most precious possession: the opportunity to learn and grow.

     Homeschooling puts its practitioners under intense pressure. It requires a financial commitment that can badly strain a family. It often puts parents at odds with their kids, who frequently resent the separation from the experiences of the coevals. And of course, the educrats purely hate it for its superior performance and would love to see it made impossible. American parents that homeschool deserve profound admiration for their grit.

     But that’s all yesterday’s news. What I had in mind this morning derives from this commemoration of a remarkable educator:

     In 1990, the Navajo students of Window Rock High School in Fort Defiance, Arizona, asked the author of their calculus book, John Saxon, to be their graduation speaker. The class sponsor had suggested the governor as their speaker, but the students wanted Saxon.

     A story in The Arizona Republic explained, “At this high school, as at thousands of other schools around the country, Saxon’s name is spoken with reverence by pupils who credit him with changing completely their views about math.”

     The educrats hated John Saxon. They still do. They routinely revile his memory. (He died in 1996.) Why? Because he reintroduced old methods of mathematics instruction and proved that they outperform the fashionable fads. In doing so, he demonstrated something the educrats regard as the vilest heresy:

     In 1992, an Atlanta, Georgia, newspaper wrote about a conflict around “Saxon Math” being put on the state’s approved adoption list. They said a “heretical yearning for ‘learning by heart’ was creeping across the land…relying on old-fashioned memorization and repetition…Proponents don’t see this as a retreat into the past, but a post-modern appropriating of traditions for the effectiveness in the present.”

     The results his students achieved demonstrated that Saxon’s “old-fashioned” methods outperform the trendy ones: in other words, that we’ve known how to teach mathematics to teenagers for a long, long time.

---

     Educrats have a great deal in common with art and music critics. Both groups aspire to higher status than their trades deserve. Both groups have adopted a radical technique: to disavow what works in favor of something “innovative.”

     “Modern art” – ugly crap that displays neither effort, nor skill, nor insight into the human condition, practically the antithesis of art as art was known and judged a century ago – is “popular” only with professional critics. Similarly, the methods of “modern education” are popular only with those who vend them. Educrats, and the special colleges from which they emerge, ceaselessly promote pedagogical innovations that fail in practice. The rationale for each is the failure of the previous edition: “Yes, we got it wrong last time, but we’re confident we can do it right now.”

     The kids aren’t learning. Their dismayed, frustrated parents feel powerless to compel critical examination and improvements. But the educrats are happy. They’ve created a jargon-laden priesthood that allows them to feel special, intellectually superior to the grubby groundlings whose kids are at their mercy. Better yet, by clever political maneuvering and the amassing of allies within state and federal “education” departments, they’ve succeeded in insulating themselves against correction.

     Only the emergence of a John Saxon or a Jaime Escalante, or the superior performance of homeschooled kids whose parents employ the “antiquated” methods of decades past, can threaten their bastions.

---

     The entire American educational system is a failure and worse. Our kids emerge from these expensive institutions knowing very little and presuming a whole lot more. Worse, these institutions function as transmission systems for vile ideas and prejudices, including this one: that they should reject the wisdom and experience of their parents by default. Glenn Reynolds and I concur that at this time, for a parent to submit his child to an educational institution is a form of child abuse.

     But as with most State enterprises, the mandarins of the government-run schools maintain that “they’ll get it right” if only:

1. They’re given more money;
2. They’re freed from externally imposed standards;
3. They can suppress competition from homeschoolers and the remaining religious schools.

     Under no circumstances will the educrats allow into the discussion the simple fact that a century ago, the schools worked smoothly if not flawlessly. Yea verily, even the government-run schools. They avoided the “social justice” cant of our time. That allowed them to employ methods that today’s educrats will not abide:

• Drill;
• Testing;
• Correction;
• Discipline;
• And most important of all, failure.

     A child who tested poorly wouldn’t be fawned over for the sake of his “self-esteem;” his parents would be notified; they’d compel him to drill longer and harder. A child who resisted correction by his teacher would receive it from his parents, often at the end of a peach switch. A child who proved to be too unruly to teach, disruptive to his classmates’ instruction, would be expelled to make his way uneducated. And of course, a child who failed repeatedly would be examined closely to determine whether he was educable at all, and relieved of the pressures if the answer was negative.

     What worked in 1900 works equally well in the Twenty-First Century...but the educrats don’t want you to know that, nor to listen to any of the apostles of the proven methods of yesteryear.

     Which is why the name of John Saxon, may he rest forever in peace in God’s arms, is revered by those who appreciate his insight, and reviled by those whose priesthood is threatened by the success of his methods.

An Important Anecdote

     Some of you may already be familiar with Blaire White. For the sake of those who aren’t, I’ll withhold mention of what originally made her remarkable; you’ll know it soon enough. Instead, I’ll plead with you to watch – listen to it, really – the video embedded below.

     Domestic violence affects both sexes. Men are the victims roughly as often as they are the perpetrators...yet virtually all the attention focuses on female victims. But that’s not my current concern. Rather, it’s the tendency of women to laugh off the victimization of men.

     It’s not a funny subject. It becomes even less funny when you hear stories such as this one (from the comments to the video):

     a friend of mine was arguing with his gf and she starting hitting him. she hit him in the face with a glass ashtray. punched him in the face many times. his eyes were both black his face and body was covered in bruises and scratches. a neighbor called the police. he was charged with domestic assault even though he never laid one hand on her, all because they we're verbally arguing still when the police showed up. she was the abuser and because he was the man he was arrested and she went back in the house back to their home while he went to jail. [Emphasis added]

     That’s far from unique.

     Perhaps there was a time when all the abuse went one way: from men toward women. However, the law in these United States is so heavily biased toward the woman that a man doesn’t dare to resist by so much as grabbing her wrists. No matter how badly marked up she leaves him, for him to leave the slightest bruise on her while straining to stop her from striking him is grounds for the police to charge him. No penalty will be visited upon her.

     Add that to the “no fault” divorce laws that wives use to blackmail their husbands; to the automatic awarding of child custody (and most of his income) to her; to the expectation that he’ll be breadwinner and housekeeper and child-rearer; to the readiness of innumerable wives to use sex as a negotiating tool; to women's endless denigrations of men in general; and to the caterwauling among even openly slutty women about “men’s unwillingness to commit.”

     Yet women want to know “where the good men have gone.”

A Standard Of Non-Standards Part 2: Wherefores

     And once again it has begun: the pleas to “stop exposing yourself to danger,” the queries about “why do you let ‘them’ do that to you,” and the insistence that “you can’t seriously mean [what I said about myself.]”

     My sincere thanks to those of you who are concerned for my well-being, but really, I’m just dandy. Well, as dandy as a 64-year-old man with a needy Newf, a dead lawn, books that refuse to write themselves, and a wife who refuses to leave Long Island can be, at least. To the others: Yes, I was and am serious. I really, truly am:

• A racist;
• A sexist;
• A lookist;
• An ableist;
• A homophobe;
• An Islamophobe;

     ...and whatever other vile epithets any leftist might decide to hurl at me. Because it occurred to me in a moment of unusual lucidity – May God forever bless and keep thee, thou noble vintners of Harvey’s of Jerez, Spain – that all those slanders really mean exactly the same thing:

You Refuse To Submit!

     Which is true: I do. Unconditionally and absolutely, now and forever. “But why trumpet it to your enemies?” my correspondents cry. “Why not live quietly, rather than giving them a target?”

     Because of the “Safe Space” movement.

     There seems no end to the “safe space” BS. Young men and women – nominal adults presumed competent to fend for themselves at need – have been demanding “safe spaces” wherein no sentiment with which they disagree will be voiced. We’ve received “safe space” demands from:

• Women,
• Negroes,
• Homosexuals,
• Bisexuals,
• Every sort of Leftist,
• People who dislike Donald Trump,

     ...and in all probability, dozens more lunacy-sects I haven’t heard of. But to the best of my knowledge, there’ve been no “safe space” demands from:

• Christians,
• White people,
• Gun-rights advocates,
• Conservatives and libertarians,
• Advocates of freedom of expression,
• Persons who think homosexuality is disgusting,
• Persons who believe courtesy to be a social requirement,
• Persons who simply refuse to be catechized by humorless scolds.

     So crying a brace of needs should not go unaddressed. So, being the sort that likes to do things himself, I created one: Liberty’s Torch. And to make it as plain as possible that Leftist scolds will not be allowed through the gates, I’ve characterized myself as everything they hate.

     It seems to be working.

     Mind you, there are always costs. The major cost is that someone among the scolds might have a well-reasoned argument for his position that “deserves” space here. He’s welcome to make it...somewhere else. He can email me to point me to it. I’ll give it the respect it deserves but not an iota more, so he should review his work closely before soliciting my attention.

     I simply won’t allow anyone to tell me what I may and may not say. As I won’t go to places where my opinions aren’t permitted – “Don’t go where you’re not wanted” is one of my personal guidelines, just after the Ten Commandments – I consider it vital that I, and others with similarly untamed tongues, should have a place of our own. This is it.

     “Hard livin’s my pleasure,
     My money’s my own,
     And them as don’t like me,
     Can leave me alone.”

     (Author unknown.)

A Standard Of Non-Standards

     The non-standard – a completely subjective, define-it-as-we-go rationale for punishing members of some disfavored groups – is being institutionalized:

     Oregon State University is developing an online course centered on “social justice” that new students will soon be required to take....

     Oregon State’s course, as proposed, would consist of five online modules that include a primer on “social justice efforts in Oregon and at OSU,” instruction on how campus diversity advocates define “an inclusive and equitable university community,” details on how students can “incorporate the pursuit of social justice within their university experiences,” and information on how to “explore opportunities for engagement in ongoing social justice learning.”

     Oregon State is no stranger to social justice training. Last year, the public university spent $11,500 on three racially segregated social justice retreats for students that examined topics such as white privilege, racism and oppression, according to financial records obtained by The College Fix through a public records act request.

     Today, a decent American who hears the term social justice should immediately go for his guns. The contrapositive notion of discrimination, which is deliberately kept nebulous and accuser-defined, has become the principal stick with which the Left seeks to beat us into submission. Moreover, there’s no forgiving the “social justice warriors” for this outrageous abuse of justice, for they know exactly what they do:

     As for OSU’s new online course, the modules will remain under development through the fall, an effort led by a committee of students and faculty who have worked throughout the spring and summer to gather feedback on content from campus community members to finalize the finished product, according to Angela Batista, Oregon State University’s interim Chief Diversity Officer, in an email to The College Fix.

     Asked to expand on the “expectations for an inclusive and equitable university community,” Batista said the committee is still finalizing these guidelines, but that in general, “we feel that every student has a role to play in creating and sustaining an equitable and inclusive university community – one that is defined by shared respect for diverse backgrounds, perspectives, ideas and the ways that individuals live.”

     Asked how Oregon State defines social justice, Batista said that is also a work in progress.

     I’ve said this before: To define is to limit. A defined offense is one that’s been specified adequately that anyone of adult mental capacity can know whether he’s violated it or is on the verge of doing so. An offense whose occurrences exist solely in the opinions of others is undefined; one cannot know when one is in violation, and so one can be indicted and tried for it to one’s complete surprise.

     But wait; there’s more! OSU isn’t interested in educating its incoming students about “social justice;” it seeks to train them, the way one might train a puppy. It wants them to react with unthinking horror and opposition whenever one of their masters points and says “Bad!” This, of course, is a vital necessity for the enforcement of a non-standard: the cannon fodder must not think or reflect; it must charge whenever the vanguard commands it. To achieve this end, the Left seeks to suppress any critical examination of the core concepts under discussion. Therefore, it cannot allow discussion in the Socratic pattern; it must instill reflexes that the reason cannot countervail. Robby Soave at Reason thrusts for the heart:

     A student has no method of dissenting during an online training session on the necessity of complying with the university's diversity dictates. Indeed, students might reasonably fear that agreeing with the ideology of the trainers is a precondition of coming to campus.

     Students are no longer merely required to grapple with leftist ideas in the classroom—they increasingly must live, sweat, and breathe "oppression studies." It is no wonder that so many of them have developed a healthy disrespect for the principles of the First Amendment. They are being trained—not taught, but trained—to think everything that offends them is a bias incident.

     Touché! But even this, as piercing as it is, is incomplete.

---

     I’ve written several essays on the importance of discrimination as a legal right and social corrective. Here’s what I consider the key element of my position:

     There is only one countermeasure to the Left’s steady elimination of every right except the rights to sodomy and abortion. It’s a costly one, one that most persons – even most persons reading this screed – will recoil from, on the grounds of self-preservation.

     We must rehabilitate and reinvigorate discrimination.

     To discriminate is to apply a standard and make a consequent choice. It’s to say “That isn’t acceptable,” and to act on one’s verdict. It’s the ultimate expression of individuality, for no one can set your standards for you but you.

     It’s vital that men of good will recognize the magnitude of the threat. If discrimination is assumed to be inherently wrong, then individuality has been criminalized. For individuality consists of nothing more than the possession of individual capacities, tastes, and standards. A society in which discrimination is forbidden, whether by law (as in the case of the odious Civil Rights Acts that effectively abolish private property in industry and commerce) or by social pressure (as the Left seeks to do whenever it accuses someone of “racism,” “sexism,” “lookism,” “ableism,” “homophobia,” “Islamophobia,” or any of its other shibboleths) is a completely collectivized society in which the “law” is whatever suits those at the levers of power.

     Men of good will determined to remain at all free must not kowtow to such dictates any longer. That’s why I so frequently say, plainly and openly, to the snarling minions of the Left:

• I am a racist.
• I am a sexist.
• I am a lookist.
• I am an ableist.
• I am a homophobe.
• I am an Islamophobe.

     I’ll own all of that cheerfully.
     Try finding someone I’ve actually harmed.
     Come back when you’ve got something new.

Looking In The Right Direction

     Today, Dystopic favors us with an excellent essay. It’s long; it’s somewhat detailed. And it is absolutely required reading.

     Dystopic’s first stunner of an observation comes here:

     The Mob is alive and well, but where the old Mafiosos could be counted upon to generally keep their bargains, Hillary feels no such obligation. You are a tool of her will, or you are nothing at all.

     (Isn’t it remarkable that there are no Hillaries other than Hillary!^® Those of us who remember the First Commandment and the reason for it are a bit bemused by that. Well, a lot of pop princesses go by a single name these days. Kinda makes me wonder if the old bat can sing.)

     The above summons to mind an important distinction, one that’s becoming ever more important as our Ruling Elite^® solidifies and reveals its colors to all: the difference between being outside the law and above the law.

     I ranted on this subject some time ago. Yet in rereading that earlier essay, I find that I failed to draw the critical distinction as sharply as it should have been drawn.

     So of course, here I am again to rectify the shortcoming.

---

     “To see, you must have vision.” -- Gregory Benford

     Many have commented on how America has grown “lawless” in recent decades. They point at phenomena such as urban violence, the plague of illegal drugs, the proliferation of “white collar” crimes, and propound a notion that Americans have lost their respect for the law. Note the direction in which their fingers are pointing: those Americans are pointing at other Americans.

     This is misconceived.

     When the late Sam Francis coined the term anarcho-tyranny, he had a different vector in mind:

     The elementary concept of anarcho-tyranny is simple enough. History knows of many societies that have succumbed to anarchy when the governing authorities proved incapable of controlling criminals, warlords, rebels, and marauding invaders. Today, that is not the problem in the United States. The government, as any taxpayer (especially delinquent ones) can tell you, shows no sign of collapsing or proving unable to perform its functions. In the United States today, the government works efficiently. Taxes are collected (you bet), the population is counted (sort of), the mail is delivered (sometimes), and countries that never bothered us are invaded and conquered.

     Yet, at the same time, the country habitually wallows in a condition that often resembles Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature—nasty, brutish, and short....

     What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny—the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through “sensitivity training” and multiculturalist curricula, “hate crime” laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny.

     Francis wrote that in 1992. Should you ever need a perfect example of clear perception in the hands of a fearless thinker, make use of the above. It’s my principal reason for maintaining that despite his flaws Samuel Francis, like the late Joseph Sobran, was taken from us far too soon: indeed, when we needed him the most.

     Sam Francis knew in which direction to look for the source of our sorrows: upward, at the political elite from which virtually all federal officials and appointees are drawn. The making and enforcement of the law is entrusted to them by processes defined in the Constitution of the United States. And they do make laws. Ye gods and little fishes, do they ever make laws! But the laws they make are of less consequence than the laws they enforce...whether those laws exist or not.

---

     “Miss Weatherly,” Sumner said with a note of regret, “I’m a lawyer. I was raised by a lawyer. He taught me to think of the law as our most precious possession. One of the questions he repeatedly insisted that I ponder was ‘What is the law?’ Not ‘What would I like the law to be,’ but ‘What is it really, and how do I know that’s what it is?’
     “My profession, sadly, has made a practice of twisting the law to its own ends. There aren’t many lawyers left who really care what the law is, as long as they can get the results they want, when they want them. So they play the angles, and collaborate with judges who think they’re black-robed gods, and generally do whatever they can get away with to get what they want, without a moment’s regard for what it does to the knowability of the law.
     “I care. I want to know what the law is, what it permits, requires, and forbids. I want my clients to know. And the only way to reach that result is to insist that the words of the law have exact meanings, not arbitrary, impermanent interpretations that can be changed by some supercilious cretin who thinks he can prescribe and proscribe for the rest of us.
     “The Constitution is the supreme law, the foundation for all other law. If it doesn’t mean exactly what its text says—the public meanings of the words as ordinary people understand them—then no one can possibly know what it means. But if no one can know what the Constitution means, then no one can know whether any other law conforms to it. At that point, all that matters is the will of whoever’s in power. And that’s an exact definition of tyranny.”

     [From Shadow Of A Sword]

     The case of Gibson Guitars is a perfect example of the enforcement of a non-law, specifically to benefit a political patron. It’s merely one of the most egregious cases; there’ve been many others. What distinguished it was Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz’s willingness to go public with the details of the tawdry affair:

     “What is happening?” asks Gibson Guitar CEO Henry Juszkiewicz when he arrives at his Nashville factory to question the officers. “We can’t tell you.” “What are you talking about, you can’t tell me, you can’t just come in and …” “We have a warrant!” ”Well, lemme see the warrant.” “We can’t show that to you because it’s sealed.”

     While 30 men in SWAT attire dispatched from Homeland Security and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cart away about half a million dollars of wood and guitars, seven armed agents interrogate an employee without benefit of a lawyer. The next day Juszkiewicz receives a letter warning that he cannot touch any guitar left in the plant, under threat of being charged with a separate federal offense for each “violation,” punishable by a jail term.

     Up until that point Gibson had not received so much as a postcard telling the company it might be doing something wrong. Thus began a five-year saga, extensively covered by the press, with reputation-destroying leaks and shady allegations that Gibson was illegally importing wood from endangered tree species. In the end, formal charges were never filed, but the disruption to Gibson’s business and the mounting legal fees and threat of imprisonment induced Juszkiewicz to settle for $250,000—with an additional $50,000 “donation” piled on to pay off an environmental activist group.

     Please read the whole article. It’s more than worth your time, especially if you believe that the Rule of Law is still respected in these United States.

     What all too often goes unremarked-upon is that the law de jure – statutes passed by Congress and signed by the president – is far less important than the law de facto – what the power of the State is used to impose upon Us the People. Sam Francis would tell you that the law de facto has become whatever our Ruling Elite^® decides it is at any given moment. Having succeeded in separating itself from the rest of us and closing off its borders against dilution by American patriots such as Stephen Graham Sumner, it will only enforce “laws” that advance or safeguard Ruling Elite^® privileges.

     Indeed, upward is the only direction in which to look.

---

     Many Americans still believe that the Ruling Elite^® can be brought to heel through that mighty instrument, the Vote. That beautiful fantasy dissolved more than a generation ago.

     The electoral process, which was supposed to be a front-line defense against tyranny, rather than a last-ditch resort, has been captured by the major political parties. They realized, around 1988, that the behavior of Democrats and Republicans once raised to office had become too obviously self-serving – that the public would soon search for alternatives to both of them. So they contrived to put the whole business under the control of the Ruling Elite.^® A consortium formed by the three major television networks would control the reporting of national vote tallies. Supreme Court decisions would nullify local or regional attempts to protect the integrity of voting mechanisms. Gerrymandering, the newspapers, and judicious use of bribery, blackmail, and intimidation would pacify any straggling pockets of resistance.

     That this should have happened immediately after the second of Ronald Reagan’s terms in the White House is perfectly consistent with Ruling Elite^® priorities and conduct. Reagan was a maverick by their standards; he’d established his independence during his eight years as governor of California. His international boldness deprived them of one of their most important tools for engendering fear and submission in the populace: the Soviet Union. They barely managed to thwart him domestically through the inherent inertia of the “permanent government:” the millions of federal appointees and bureaucrats whose positions are protected by Civil Service law. The repetition of such an upheaval could not be countenanced. Indeed, it’s an open question why Reagan was willing to accept Ruling Elite^® member-in-good-standing George H. W. Bush as his vice president, and thereafter to endorse him as his successor.

     Many believe that the rise of Donald Trump to the political fore indicates that significant change remains possible. I dislike to dash anyone’s hopes, but Trump’s decades of maneuvers in the private sector suggest that should he attain the presidency, he’ll accommodate the Ruling Elite^® to a much greater extent than his more ardent supporters imagine. Those elitists, after all, are already in the seats of power, with the levers in their hands. He and his family have a great deal to lose should they take direct aim at him and his fortunes.

     We’re not voting our way out from under our political masters.

---

     “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” -- Bob Dylan

     To return to Dystopic’s essay cited at the start of this tirade:

     I would sooner have a Mafia don in office, than Hillary Rodham Clinton, for at least some honor may be found in them, some scrap of understanding that screwing their people too much will result in the death of the host. Hillary has none of this. I doubt she even cares for her own daughter, or her family line. It is all about today, and she could not care less what happens after she is dead. The entire species could be rendered extinct, and what would it matter to her? She got what she wanted, in the end. The new nobility has none of the restraint of the old order.

     Either way, though, America’s inner rot has already killed the nation. The outer shell endured for a time, but now that too is creaking. Collapse is imminent. But given all of that, I am sure it is time to start worrying about the gender of horses in the Olympics, as SJWs are wont to do.

     The organized crime families of the pre-World War II era were actually a force for order in certain ways. They did rule their illegal bastions – liquor and prostitution, mainly – with an iron fist, such that each family’s “turf” was deemed inviolable by the other families or any other force, but in the enforcement of those accommodations they confined the violence to “contestants only.” Their leaders understood that the providers of their profits would turn against them were they to cease being a tolerable source of illegal but valued pleasures and become a bloody pox upon the cities where they flourished.

     The Ruling Elite^® doesn’t fret over such possibilities. Its members believe themselves not only above the law but immune to correction. And indeed, they’ve labored mightily over their defenses against us. The steady penetration of federal action into every smallest community and every smallest area of life, the ever expanding list of federal client groups, the ongoing federalization of local and state police, the control of the media, and the unresisted assertion of federal power via “laws” that do not exist – see the Gibson Guitars case above – have produced a curiously sheeplike state of acquiescence among Americans generally. Yes, there are survivalists and preparationists who defy that pattern, and may God bless them all. But the overwhelming majority has decided, consciously or not, to submit.

     Those of us who will not submit to those who have placed themselves above the law must prepare ourselves to live outside the law, and to cleave rigidly to Bob Dylan’s dictum quoted above. Outside the law has become the only place for men and women to whom freedom and justice are more than sounds occasionally emitted by politicians. What our “official vendors” sell under those labels is too shoddy to be borne any longer. We must return them to private manufacture.

     Have a nice day.

Feminizations And Productivity

     If you’ve ever had to deal with a significantly large company’s Human Resources department, you’re well acquainted with frustration and pain. HR types – nearly always women – are rule makers and authoritarians, determined to make rules for everything and to get their way despite any and all objections. Their emphasis on “social justice” garbage has become widely known. Jeb Kinnison has some of the explanations in this article:

     Information on the staffing of Human Resources (HR) departments themselves is not easy to come by. HR-focused writings tend toward academic Social Justice gobbledygook, and commonly-observed dominance of HR staffing by women and “soft” degree majors is hard to confirm with hard data from individual companies, though there are some statistics collected at the national level in the US. Historically, Personnel departments were staffed by the same type of people one would find in accounting or finance — clerks and paperwork handlers — but the managers tended to be male (as they were for other corporate functions.) As Personnel became HR and HR-specific degree programs began to appear, hiring shifted to people who had studied HR as a field — with simple organizational psychology, benefits law, and concepts of social equity and diversity baked in to new graduates. What did not get studied so thoroughly was economics, technology, specific types of business knowledge, or statistics. HR graduates today are trained in a party line Social Justice ideology which sets them up as enforcers of government edicts on diversity, with less emphasis on ideals of merit and productivity that would promote the competitiveness of the business they are supposedly helping to direct.

     Part of my reason for coming to prefer defense engineering to private-sector work was that defense companies tend to be outliers in this regard, as they are in many others. Yes, defense companies must comply with federal regulations – and you wouldn’t believe some of the special ones that apply to defense work – but there’s no substitute for competence in engineering when you’re making weapons (and associated technology) for the people who’ll use them. “Social justice” BS gets very short shrift.

     However, I did spend approximately half my career in the private sector, more than half of that as a front-line manager with hiring and firing authority, and I have my (mostly) private collection of horror stories from having to deal with HR. Indeed, two of them made their way into my novels, in fictional form. (If you’re curious, bored, or just need something to read on the Porcelain Throne, the novels are this one and this one.)

     Kinnison has a special interest in “feminized” occupations, of which human-resources work is one. His other articles on that enveloping subject are worth your time, as is the one cited here. He makes a particularly strong point about how such occupations tend to feature lower pay and lower demands on their employees: natural repellents for men and natural magnets for women . It’s a subject the great Robert C. Townsend has commented on, as well:

     I’ve long held the conviction that it’s much less expensive to recruit from the top of the barrel by paying top wages. Yet many big personnel departments in insurance companies, banks, and the like consciously recruit from the lower half of the barrel to “save money.” If they only realized what they were doing to themselves.

     And of course women, by far the more status-conscious of the sexes – of which there are only two; never forget that, Gentle Reader – will seldom hire other women who might plausibly compete with them in salary, authority, and prestige at some later time.

     But there’s a phenomenon of particular interest I’d like to see explored, to the extent that it can be examined without, in true Heisenbergian fashion, altering the way it operates: the very one I mentioned in a paragraph above.

     When there’s no way to do the company’s work without employees with actual competence, an HR department’s preferences and decrees to the contrary will be ignored, whether overtly or covertly. When a clash arises that has nothing to do with law or regulation, the rebellion can be overt, albeit at the cost of open inter-departmental conflict that can have long-term consequences. When law or regulation, or HR’s interpretation thereof, manage to intrude, the rebellion must be covert and clever...sometimes to the point of a well concealed act of fraud specifically designed to get around the offending rule.

     I’d like to collect my Gentle Readers’ anecdotes about such rebellions and what followed from them. Those of you still in the workaday world (and those who, like myself, have retired but retain vivid memories thereof) should submit them, whether as comments to this piece or in email to my Yahoo address (fran -dot- porretto, as if you needed to be reminded). Such a collection, if extensive enough and dramatic enough, could serve as a manifesto for a revolution against HR departments and their "progressive" strangulation of corporate employment in these United States.

Monday Morning Sleeplessness: A Christian Ramble

     I can only hope that my Gentle Readers had as refreshing a weekend as I did. Unfortunately, the conclusion of that refreshing weekend was a sleepless night. Well, what’s a rose without its thorns, anyway?

---

     My sleepless nights are filled with thoughts, sometimes thoughts so bizarre that no amount of coffee will enable me to make sense of them. In that regard, they’re remarkably like recent Supreme Court decisions. However, unlike SCOTUS’s recent emissions, now and then one will strike me as a good hook for a story...if I can just remember it when I next set fingers to keyboard.

     Time was, I kept a small notebook and a pen on my nightstand, in the hope of capturing such thoughts for later employment. The idea seemed sensible in theory, but in practice, my hopes were rather crudely dashed. Only once did I use that pen and notebook, and when I consulted it the morning after to see what gem of insight the night had granted me, I found: “This room is too BLEEP!ing hot.”

     I couldn’t figure out how to wrap a story around that. Surprised?

---

     Today, August 15, is the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, one of the Catholic calendar’s six holy days of obligation. For those who are curious, the others are:

• January 1: The Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God (originally the Feast of the Circumcision)
• Ascension Thursday (40 days after Easter Sunday): when Christ ascended bodily to heaven
• November 1: All Saints’ Day
• December 8: The Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin
• December 25: The Feast of the Nativity (more commonly, Christmas)

     That three of our six major feast days are in honor of Mary, the Mother of God, disturbs a lot of non-Catholic Christians. There’s a lot of sniping, particularly from Baptists, about how we “really worship” the mother rather than the Son. This is absolutely false. We venerate Mary as the highest of the saints: one with a special privilege of Intercession on behalf of those suppliants she deems worthy of extra attention from her Son. Nevertheless, she is human and not divine, deemed queen of heaven because of the exceptional grace, patience, and fortitude that qualified her to become the mother of Jesus.

     There’s never been a time when Christians should denigrate or disparage other Christians, whatever our doctrinal or liturgical differences. Certainly now is not such a time.

---

     Among Christian fiction writers, I’m considered rather off-axis, by virtue of my willingness to entertain really odd ideas. The Realm of Essences series was founded on an unusual idea about an alternate track in the scheme of Creation. The Spooner Federation saga, seemingly about a planetary Overmind and its relevance to human survival, was really about the importance of ultimate sacrifice. And of course, there aren’t many Christian fictioneers who’d ever admit to writing this, or this, or this.

     Yet I felt it imperative, in each of the cases above, to seize upon the seemingly – and I must emphasize this point: only “seemingly”– “unChristian” idea and explore it within the matrix of Christian moral/ethical thought. The reason is simple:

The Christian message is universal.

     If the possibilities I entertained in the above-cited stories were realized, Christian thought would apply to them quite as much as to any of the “normal” ideas other writers explore. Sentient creatures are all governed by Christ’s New Covenant. Their corporeal form, their specific attributes (beyond volition), and their relations to the rest of Creation would not exclude them from it. Otherwise, it would be thinkable that sentient non-humans might be morally allowed to murder; to steal; to break solemn vows; to give false witness; and so on. The idea is inherently repugnant.

     Just now I’m working on a story at least as odd as any of the above. The central idea is “what is a person, anyway?” The mechanism of departure from the norm is genetic surgery. I expect that if I do it well, it will iron out the convolutions in your brain. And I think I’ll leave it at that for the nonce.

---

     One more thought about “callings” and I’ll close for now.

     I spent forty-seven years doing software of various sorts. It provided me with a comfortable living and very high prestige. However, as much as I enjoyed it and it profited me, I never felt it was a “calling” of the higher kind. The giveaway was how easy it was for me.

     A calling is supposed to tax the called one to his limits: to compel him to exert himself to the outermost edge of his capacities and perhaps a smidgen beyond it. What comes easily, therefore, cannot be a calling. Never mind how irrelevant bits and bytes are to the moral and ethical condition of Mankind.

     It took a while before I realized that my calling – always assuming I have one – lies in the written word. I should have realized it long ago. Both my fiction and what I do here at Liberty’s Torch are supremely taxing. Seldom do I write something worthy, look upon it and say, “Well, that was easy.”

     I said in the title that this is a ramble, and so it is. This segment seeks to convey a simple idea:

Whoever and wherever you are,
Whatever you think you ought to be doing,
You have a calling:
Find it!

     Whatever else you must do to support yourself and meet your contracted obligations, find your calling and pursue it. It will make a considerable difference to your happiness. Take it from one who knows.

---

     That’s all for the moment. I’ll probably be back later with some of the usual crap. But for now, please try to have a better Monday than this young lady did. Among other things, it would improve your odds of staying out of prison.

     Later, Gentle Reader.

Race War News, 2016-08-14

     Milwaukee’s having a little racial mayhem:

     After an armed man was fatally shot by police in Milwaukee Saturday night, the city erupted in arson, violence and looting.

     The man, reportedly age 23, was armed with a handgun and fled a traffic stop when the shooting occurred.

     Is there anyone out there who still thinks there’s no race war in progress? Because we’re edging awfully close to the following:

---

     The day had worn him down. His prior case, the fifty-seventh since he’d reached his desk that morning, had just been dragged weeping from the office, but he could not rest. He was behind his quota. The ships were already behind their sailing schedules. He had to plow onward.
     He pressed the button on his phone console that signaled to the pen outside that he was ready for his next case. The green indicator light over his office door went dark and the yellow one lit. Barely a minute had passed when the door opened and two husky guards brought him number fifty-eight. As they closed the door behind them, the yellow light above it was extinguished and the red one lit.
     This one was female. She looked aged beyond her natural count of years, though the stress of the upheavals could do that to anyone.
     The guards sat her none too gently in the restraint chair, secured her shackles to the chair’s hard points, and laid her paperwork on his desk before stepping back to line his office doorway. He reviewed the short description of her status and noted the contents of the check box. He’d seen it checked fifty-three times that day. This made fifty-four.
     She’ll have two options. No others.
     He steeled himself and faced her squarely. She seemed unable to meet his gaze.
     “Have you been informed about what happens here...” He glanced at her form again. Her given name was one of the trendy sort that he found too challenging to pronounce. “...Miss Jones?”
     She shook her head, but remained mute.
     “I’m your routing officer. You and I have the responsibility for determining the next stage of your life. I’m constrained by the law, but you will have a choice, though your choices are rather limited. The person who limited them was you.”
     He picked up the form and waved it at her. “Do you know what this paper says about you?”
     She sniffed and shook her head.
     “Were you given a chance to read it?”
     “Can’t read,” she said.
     “Then I’ll read it to you. ‘Miss Jones is 34 years old and a single mother of two sons. Son Tyrell was killed at age 18 during a police raid of a crack den. Son James was serving a life sentence for a gang-related murder when the Sterilization Orders came down. He was 16 at the time of his execution. Miss Jones has never been self-supporting. She tests positive for cocaine, syphilis, and hepatitis B.’”
     He looked directly into her eyes. “Do you deny any of that?”
     She would not answer.
     “Miss Jones, if I go by what’s on this paper, your future will not be a happy one. And I have to go by it unless you can convince me that what it says is not true.”
     “Can’t,” she said at last. “It’s right. Never got married. Got by on the welfare. My boys was bad asses. Baddest in the hood.” Her eyes rose to meet his at long last. They flashed in challenge. “Ain’t gonna cry over it. Any of it.”
     She thinks she’s hard. Maybe she is. She should hope so.
     “Miss Jones, if all this is true, then under the Separation Edicts, there are only two places you can go when you leave this room.” He rose and pointed toward his eastward window. Her gaze followed his gesture and lit on the giant ship that stood waiting in the harbor.
     “That,” he said, “is an exile ship. It’s one of your choices. If you choose it, it will take you to another continent, a place where you’ll be set free to live out your life as best you can. There are no whites there, no courts or prisons, and no welfare, either. And very little that you’d recognize from your life here in America.”
     She looked out at the giant vessel, plainly uncomprehending. Before the upheaval it had been a cargo carrier. On every trip it had ferried two hundred thousand tons of cargo in steel containers, each one filled with some item the residents of other lands valued, across the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean. Its holds had been refitted as row upon row of barred cells. Its next journey would convey ten thousand exiles to their new homeland. They would next see sunlight, if they saw it at all, when they debarked on the west coast of Africa, in the land that had once been called Liberia.
     Most of those exiles had been personally guilty of nothing. They’d merely abetted a race war. Some had promoted hatred of whites. Others, by their promiscuity and negligent parenting, had produced generation upon generation of parasites and violent predators. Still others had done nothing but subsist on the handouts of a too-generous society, indolently declining to add to its riches.
     Twenty-three of them had declined to board the ship.
     Far too many of them.
     “Are you willing to board that ship, Miss Jones?”
     She glowered at him sullenly. “Ain’t gettin’ on no ship.”
     “I see. Well, you do have another choice, but I can’t recommend it.” He nodded toward the door to the right of his desk. “It goes through that door.” He started to describe what took place on the other side of the door, stopped himself.
     It might be better if she didn’t know.
     “Would you like me to tell you about that second choice, Miss Jones?”
     She sneered and looked away. “Ain’t gettin’ on no ship.”
     “I need an answer, Miss Jones. Will you board, yes or no?”
     She shook her head.
     I suppose that’s good enough.
     He nodded to the guards. They released her shackles from the restraint chair and stepped back.
     “Then whenever you’re ready, just step through that door and close it behind you. You’ll be given instructions about what to do next.”
     She gave him one more contemptuous sneer and shuffled to the second door. The three men watched in silence as she stepped through it. As she closed it behind her, the green phase indicator above it went dark and the yellow one lit. A moment later the yellow gave way to red. The red light glowed for perhaps a minute before going out.
     Twenty-four.
     “Sir?” one of the guards said. “Why didn’t you tell her?”
     He grimaced. “I thought it might be kinder this way.”
     The guard frowned. “Maybe.” He glanced out at the exile ship. “It sure as hell ain’t gonna be kind for them.” They stepped out the door through which they had entered.
     He lowered his face into his hands.
     I volunteered. I understood the necessity. I still do. But it’s harder than anything I’ve ever done.
     Colonel John MacKenzie had led troops into battle. His battalion had been the first into Monrovia, and had led its pacification. He’d killed men who’d been trying their best to kill him. He’d weathered it all and had come home to a wife who loved him unreservedly despite it all...who refused to let him doubt himself.
     The men I killed were armed. They went to war knowing the risks. Miss Jones wasn’t armed with anything worse than her attitude.
     He felt his tears rising again and sternly shoved them down.
     Those are for the men I led who died in honorable combat. Not for the Miss Joneses of the world. They brought this upon themselves even if they were too dull to know it.
     He pressed the button that would bring him number fifty-nine.

#

     MacKenzie reached his billet barely able to draw a breath. Estelle awaited him at the front door, as always. His condition was plain to her. She wrapped her arms around him and pressed him to her before he could step over the lintel.
     “I love you,” he muttered against her shoulder. Despite his efforts, a single deep sob escaped him.
     She stroked his hair and said nothing.
     Presently he said, “Mark Thorsten killed himself.”
     “I know,” she said. “I spent most of the day with Pam.” A pause. “She wasn’t surprised. She said...she said she saw it coming. John, will she be all right?”
     He looked at her in puzzlement. “Was she all right when you left her?”
     She frowned. “You know what I mean.”
     He grimaced. “I don’t know, Eppie. I hope so. If I hear anything to the contrary, I’ll...I don’t know. This is a first.”
     She nodded. “For all of us. How many today?”
     “A hundred twenty-six.”
     “How many...” Her voice caught briefly. “...for the other door?”
     “Forty-seven.” He shuddered. “I stopped telling them, Eppie. After the first twenty-three I just...stopped. I figured it would be kinder that way.”
     Her expression was as understanding and accepting as always. She nodded.
     “Would you like to, to get out for the evening?” he said. “We could go to—”
     She shook her head. “I’d rather stay home with you. Just in case Pam...you know.”
     “Yes,” he said. “I know.”
     He took her hand, marveling afresh at the contrast between the lightness of her palm and the smooth jet of the opposite side. He brought that palm to his lips and kissed it tenderly.
     What a marvel. She knows what’s happening, and accepts it. She knows what I’ve been assigned to do, and accepts it. She doesn’t know why I and the others were chosen for this duty, yet she accepts it. She does know that except for having married me, she would be in that pen, awaiting her own disposition...and accepts it.
     “You’re my lifeline,” he said. “My tether to sanity in an insane time. Without you, I might do what Mark did.”
     She smiled sadly. “I know. It’s why you were chosen.”
     He peered at her. “Huh?”
     “Hadn’t you thought about it?” she said. “The Army has plenty of colonels. Some of them would enjoy doing what you do.” She stroked the sides of his face. “I’m the guarantee that you won’t...because you can’t.”
     “You do know,” he said wonderingly.
     “I always did, John. General Lapierre told me. Let’s have some dinner.”
     She took his hand and led him to their kitchen.

     [“Two Doors,” © 2015 Francis W. Porretto. All rights reserved worldwide.]