Liberty's Torch

Sunday, March 4, 2018

Quickies: Remember

For some time now, the education establishment of the United States has been influenced heavily from within by Weather Underground leader Bill Ayres. If you remember Larry Grathwohl, who entered the Weather Underground as a paid FBI informant, you might remember this bit of his testimony:

(Applause to Mike Hendrix for the memory refresher.)

Ayres remains a Communist: a sworn enemy of the United States and its market economy. Recently, one of Alex Jones’s InfoWars representatives caught up with Ayres and asked him, point-blank, about that bit if testimony – and whatever you might think of Jones and InfoWars, what follows is a recording:

Does it look to you as if Ayres is willing to discuss his past – the bombings, the murders, the street violence, or the Weather Underground’s plan to “re-educate” millions of peaceable Americans – and to murder as many millions as necessary to thwart a “counter-revolution?”

Do you remember, on the fateful day of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the front page of the New York Times carrying a photo of Bill Ayres standing on an American flag?

Do you remember Barack Hussein Obama straining to disavow any connection to Ayres – “just a guy around the neighborhood” — although they had worked together in the Annenberg Challenge, and later served together on the Woods Fund board, and although their wives had worked at the same law firm, and although the kickoff party for Obama’s first political campaign had occurred in Ayres’s living room?

And do you remember, during the 2008 presidential campaign, how passively the media accepted Obama’s claim that he had no connection to Ayres or his convictions?

Keep those tidbits in mind as you endure the media’s unending assaults on President Donald J. Trump.

Saturday, March 3, 2018

Quickies: Politics, Personal Fortunes, And The Deep State

It’s been the pattern since LBJ at least that a man can enter federal office living paycheck to paycheck and a few years later he’ll be wealthy. Recent cases are legion. They’re responsible for a large fraction of the cynicism Americans feel about government, politics, and the political class.

Clearly, the old saw that “Caesar’s wife must be above even the hint of scandal” is no longer applied to federal politicians or their kin. The FBI, which is the principal anti-corruption arm of the Justice Department, has not investigated the huge fortunes made by politicians in quite some time...but that might be changing:

The Deep State has many arrows in its quiver, but among those proven most effective, attacking a target’s relatives is its favorite. That’s how it got Michael Milken to confess to six felonies he never committed, in the process accepting ten years’ imprisonment, a $650 million fine, and barring him from the equities market for life. Jared and Ivanka being the most visible and popular of the Trump progeny, the Deep State might regard them as excellent targets of opportunity, “low hanging fruit.”

The Trump Organization is now being operated by Trump’s children and their spouses. Does it strike anyone as unlikely that they would continue to wheel and deal, now that Donald Senior is occupied with other duties? Does it strike anyone as somehow seedy that successful fashion mogul Ivanka Trump should continue to extend her lines and their popularity?

Might it be possible to raise a row about this? Given that no FBI agent has even peeked at Nancy Pelosi’s huge fortune, or the wealth amassed by Harry Reid? Or would that be entirely too unseemly for the “conservative media” and its NeverTrumper barons and baronets?

Puff Adders

The more you look, the more you see. -- Robert M. Pirsig

The Left has capitalized on one of the most unworthy of emotions, which appears to dominate the minds of men who should surely know better: the men who set the policies of large corporations.

Delta Airlines’ recent experience with left-wing pressures provides an excellent example. After the Parkland, Florida massacre, Leftist agitators decided to revive their persecution of the National Rifle Association. They found that Delta, like many other large companies, attempts to attract customers by offering discounts to members of popular affinity organizations. The NRA was one of those groups. A few Leftists harangued Delta into canceling that discount, threatening a boycott and a campaign of vilification against the airline should it fail to comply.

Why did Delta fold? We are encouraged to believe that it was because Delta’s corporate management feared the consequences of what the Left had threatened. But was there anything to fear, in actuality? What objective successes have Left-wing boycott / hate campaigns had in punishing their targets?

I don’t know. I don’t even know how to research the matter. And I’d bet the rent money that those corporate managers don’t know either. Their fear of “losing customers” was sufficient to emasculate them.

Of course, that assumes that losing customers is what they feared.

Among commentators on such things, another possibility has been raised: that what corporate CEOs who fold to the Left’s threats really fear is losing the good opinion of persons of “their sort:” i.e., other highly placed persons in business and finance, movers and shakers who direct the affairs of their firms. A case can be made for this. Even in the highest circles of commerce, people still prefer to do business with others they like and respect. Therefore, if a CEO were to lose the good opinion of others with whom he hopes to make large deals, it’s possible that they would “stop taking his calls.” Most major corporations depend on inter-corporate arrangements and deficit finance to keep their companies healthy, which makes this plausible.

Yet there are few enough really big businesses that those who negotiate purchase and finance agreements among them are unlikely to let their personal biases intrude into such deals. The company whose CEO allows his personal opinions to affect the bottom line in those arrangements is likely to suffer for it. That effect seems more to be feared than the fear that Company A will be harmed by any association with Company B which the Left has targeted. Once again, reliable information about such things, especially as affected by political activism, is hard to get.

There have been a few visible effects of political activism and corporate faux pas. The best current example is the National Football League, whose managers badly misestimated the effect of allowing its players to denigrate the national anthem. Indeed, the NFL’s loss of viewership and aftermarket revenue has been great enough to endanger it as an enterprise. Contemporary Hollywood provides another example: its leftward swerve correlates strongly with a sharp reduction in movie-going and the retail purchase of movie DVDs, though technological developments have played a part as well.

Overall, it’s hard to say with confidence that threats of boycotts and adverse publicity are anything for a major company to fear.

I think it more likely than not that left-wing activism against targeted corporations is an attempt to frighten that’s not backed up by an objective capability to do harm to its target. The evidence for any true capability to inflict harm on the Left’s targets is scant and unconvincing. Yet the Left has garnered a fair amount of obeisance, obsequious compliance, and public forelock-tugging from the companies it’s targeted. There’s information in there.

It puts me in mind of the puff adder, which hisses at one threateningly before it strikes. The salient fact here is that the puff adder’s hiss is a defensive measure. It’s deployed to frighten a creature the puff adder fears. If the “target” should back away, the hiss has obviated the puff adder’s need to deploy its objective defensive capability: its venom. As a venomous snake regenerates its supply of venom slowly, that helps the puff adder to conserve its weaponry for use against other nearby threats.

The puff adder’s venom is potent. It can kill a man, though there are antivenins available which, if administered promptly, will neutralize it. In that regard, the puff adder may have more objective ability to harm than does the Left through its boycotts and vilification campaigns. But while the puff adder is a well studied and understood creature, to this point insufficient attention has been given to the Left’s true capacity to inflict commercial harm on organizations it targets. This is a knowledge deficit we should eliminate.

The relentless U.S. opposition to ISIS.

From an interesting account of the deal between the Coalition, the SDF, and ISIS allowing ISIS fighters and their families to flee Raqqah:

Along the route, many people we spoke to said they heard coalition aircraft, sometimes drones, following the convoy.
From the cab of his truck, Abu Fawzi watched as a coalition warplane flew overhead, dropping illumination flares, which lit up the convoy and the road ahead.
When the last of the convoy were about to cross, a US jet flew very low and deployed flares to light up the area. IS fighters [were very scared].”^[1]

Notes
^[1] "Raqqa’s dirty secret." By Quentin Sommerville and Riam Dalati, BBC, 11/13/17.

Friday, March 2, 2018

More nonsense about E. Ghouta.

The latest U.S. MSM propaganda offensive is focused on E. Ghouta in Syria. The idea that the Syrian government should be able to wage war on jihadis inside Syria and take back the territory occupied by them is implicitly some kind of war crime. The National Interest article by Daniel R. DePetris drips with the familiar neocon, never-Trumper, Deep State, MSM, liberal, RINO, globalist lies of Syrian government use of sarin gas and indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas:

Mosul: Pinpoint Coalition air strike.

The Ghouta region, a short thirty-minute drive from the presidential palace, is the only major area near Damascus left in rebel hands. Every other suburb has been cleared out by the regime through a combination of indiscriminate aerial bombardment, chemical-weapons attacks and siege warfare. Ghouta itself has been surrounded by pro-government forces since 2013, the year Assad’s troops fired a volley of ground-to-ground, sarin-tipped missiles in the dead of night, killing upwards of 1,400 people, according to U.S. intelligence community assessments. A minuscule amount of food gets in, the sick and seriously injured are blocked from going to hospitals, and medical supplies are stopped at the government’s lines. All the while, airstrikes and bombings continue to target everything in sight: markets, homes, hospitals, rescue workers, ambulances, and even people stepping out of their basement shelters for a breath of air.^[1]

Now there’s a lucrative target category – people stepping our of their basement shelters for a breath of air.

While there is not a dry hanky in Media Land over Eastern Ghouta the realities of urban warfare, esp. against the jihadi enemy, are simply ghastly. Snipers can focus on individual targets with actual faces and unmistakable military involvement. Fighter bombers and indirect fire weapons cannot. They are blunt weapons dependent on pilot skill or skill of the forward observer. Even observers close to the action cannot know who or what is in the jungle of closely-packed civilian residences where, let it be said, the jihadis are not shy about establishing firing positions, passageways, tunnels, and headquarters.

The righteous coalition battles to retake Mosul and Raggah caused terrible devastation. Mosul may have involved 40,000 civilian dead^[2] but there was no outcry for coalition forces to desist. Yet, it is Assad whom DePetris tendentiously condemns.

To his credit he points out many reasons why the U.S. should not undertake to use military force against Assad but he publishes idiotic views on the reality of urban warfare. He does not mention how jihadis in Aleppo targeted civilians trying to flee areas controlled by them and how they have used civilians as hostages and human shields. Nor does DePetris mention that government forces have dropped leaflets on E. Ghouta to advise civilians where there are safe passage points out of the fighting.

Nor does he mention that jihadis make a practice of locating supply dumps and headquarters inside schools and hospitals to try to discourage government attacks. And, he treats the issue of chemical weapon use by Assad’s forces as a given, which is most certainly it is not. There are multiple instances of jihadi theater designed to indict Assad on chemical weapons usage and other aspects of the war. Prior deception therefore casts doubt on current and recent excesses. Prof. Postol’s analysis of the 2013 E. Ghouta chemical incident disposes of the “Assad did it” position on its technical merits.

The comments on DePetris’s article on Yahoo are entertaining. The skepticism about the need for U.S. involvement is gratifying. But make no mistake. The U.S. is smarting from its failure to prevail in getting rid of Assad. It then turned its attention to supporting the Kurds to dismember Syria. Now it seems the coalition sees that spinning lies about E. Ghouta may be yet another opportunity to get rid of “Assad the Butcher.” Assad and the Syrian Arab Army as unique instigators of the horrors of urban warfare . . . coming soon to a theater near you.

Notes
^[1] "Should America Use Force to Stop Assad from Demolishing Ghouta?" By Daniel R. DePetris, Yahoo, 2/28/18.
^[2] "The massacre of Mosul: 40,000 feared dead in battle to take back city from Isis as scale of civilian casualties revealed." By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, 7/19/17.

Whore at a Sunday school picnic.

I republish this post from January of last year to try to keep in the forefront of our minds the indisputable fact that, whatever America is today, it is not a constitutional republic and it is not in any way responsive to the will of the people. A recent post of mine elegantly makes that point. What we have is, instead, a monstrosity that would revolt the Founders (as they would be revolted by us for meekly surrendering our birthright).

What we have now is a massive central government controlled by people whose power and nation-destroying agenda will not ever be honestly discussed in the MSM. Chilton Williamson's take below on “the raw mental and political will” to effect the destruction of the republic of 1791 should be on everybody’s refrigerator door.

It is a life-changing thought that the elites of America despise the Constitution and the experiment that it brought forth. They are indifferent to or tragically ignorant of the terrible price paid by millions in the last blood-soaked century. Our precious personal liberty is nothing more than a dirty Kleenex tissue to them. Their insufferable arrogance is driving us to the brink of tyranny and collapse.

************************ From January 12, 2017:

Whore not pictured.

I hate to be a similarly out-of-place citizen in the polity now known as the nation that is indispensable, exceptional, and qualified as no other to lead and inspire lesser breeds around the world. I really do. But, I have just been wondering about this Obamacare thing.

But first, a detour through the spidery labyrinths of our much discussed Constitution whose original structure has for the last 80 years or so begun to resemble today's photos of modern Aleppo.

A mere majority of our Supreme Court justices has for a good long time taken to interpreting the Constitution as though it were a "living Constitution," something just there to provide a launching pad for fanciful ideas that have entered Their Enlightened Consciousnesses. That expansive and imaginative approach to what the Constitution says is, shall I say it, complete crap.

A better understanding can be acquired by internalizing this excellent passage in Chilton Williamson's review of Rethinking the American Union for the Twenty-First Century:

As Kent Masterson Brown (“Secession: A Constitutional Remedy That Protects Fundamental Liberties”) 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.^[1]

This brilliantly frames the fundamental issue of our Republic, namely, Does the Constitution mean (a) what it says or (b) what five excellent, caring, leftist^[2] members of the Supreme Court say it means?

If the meaning of the Constitution is determined in accordance with the approach in (b) then we get what we see today – a made up, floundering country that is controlled by a massive federal government populated by officials and politicians egged on by a massive, sycophantic media monopoly who are simply unreachable by the ostensibly sovereign people, or, possibly reachable only with the investment of enormous sums of money, time, effort, and expertise. The lottery has better odds of a satisfactory outcome and what we're left with is a giant middle finger salute to representative government, courtesy of treasonous progressives, the most beautiful and deserving of our people.

The fact of Obamacare is but one of thousands of crushing, asinine initiatives undertaken by the federal government. Obamacare's complexity and expense are stunning as can be seen and inferred from this chart prepared to illustrate the whole tedious structure:

So, my question is, Where does it say in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution that the U.S. government has any power to legislate anything relating to health care (outside of health care for the armed forces)?

Answer: there is no such power in that Section and it is a tragedy to see Ryan and every violator of his or her oath to support and defend the Constitution pretend that there is any need for them to come up with a replacement for Obamacare. Mr. Trump is similarly set on an unconstitutional course.

So why are these fools acting like it's their sacred duty to "do something" about health care at the federal level? I and a few other citizens raise this issue but the ones with contempt for the Constitution swan about like princes living princely lives off of the public dime.

Who's out of place?

Notes
^[1] "The Long March Through the Constitution." By Chilton Williamson Jr., Chronicles Magazine, 5/1/14 (subscription required)(emphasis added).
^[2] "Like many other progressives of his day, [Louis] Brandeis was tired of outmoded 18th century conceptions of liberty." – Richard A. Epstein quote in Conservapedia. "Outmoded" as defined by Brandeis. Simple as pie. You agree, of course.

Thursday, March 1, 2018

An Answer to the Broward County Students

There's a meme going around that needs to be addressed. Namely, that many of the Colonial Leaders of the Revolution were very young, therefore, we need to take advice from students that went to the same school as the victims.

Here's my answer.

General Intelligence And Its Sociopolitical Implications

There has never been a subject more vilified by the Left than that of intelligence measurement. The idea sends the typical Leftist into convulsions. Should you allow intelligence testing, or the concept of generalizable intelligence on which it’s based, the slightest credence, he’s apt to denounce you as, in the idiom of a friend, “everything but white.” Clearly, it’s a subject that deserves more attention than it’s received in recent years.

The ugly little fact that the Left hates worst is the strong positive correlation between IQ and life achievement. It constitutes a refutation of their mantras about universal equality and dignity. Yet throughout the decades over which intelligence tests have been conducted, that correlation has never failed.

It makes a perverse kind of sense. When your aim is to reduce everyone to serfdom, admitting to actual, objectively measurable differences among persons is poison to your agenda. But facts, as John Adams once said, are stubborn things. The measurable, replicable nature of general intelligence is just one of those things.

Time was – i.e., before we all became mortally afraid of ever offending anyone – these were the accepted terms for various ranges of IQ:

160 and above: Genius
140-159: Near Genius
120-139: Highly Gifted
110-119: Bright or Superior
90-109: Normal
80-89: Dull
70-79: Deficient
50-69: Moron
20-49: Imbecile
0-19: Idiot

The distribution of persons into those categories was approximately “normal:” i.e., it followed the Bell Curve, with an axis of symmetry at approximately 100. For decades, the standard deviation has remained about 15 points on the Revised Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test. Thus, as is usual with a normal distribution:

About 68.3% of persons will fall into the band between 85 and 115;
About 95.5% of persons will fall into the band between 70 and 130;
About 99.7% of persons will fall into the band between 55 and 145;
Those below 55 or above 145 are no more than 0.3% of the total.

It was also accepted that persons in the categories of Moron, Imbecile, and Idiot were essentially ineducable. Of course, that was when we understood that education differs qualitatively from training. Some could be trained to perform certain repetitive tasks. However, useful reasoning – i.e., the use of abstractions and inference to reach conclusions – was not to be expected of them.

Over the decades, studies of races, ethnic groups, and occupations have yielded interesting information about other aspects of the intelligence distribution. These, too, have bad news for the egalitarians and coercive utopianists of the Left.

One might “reasonably” expect that the most demanding of the scientific fields – mathematics and the physical sciences – would be dominated by persons in the highest IQ bands: say, 145 and above. Yet the correlation is not that strong. Indeed, persons in the 130-144 range participate in those fields in very significant numbers. There are also researchers and scholars in those fields from the 115-129 range, though they’re proportionately fewer. It would seem that above a certain IQ level, the ability to work effectively with the abstractions that characterize those fields is not materially increased.

Neither is it the case that persons with very high IQ scores will necessarily be attracted to those scientifically demanding fields. One of the brightest people I know – IQ well over 160 – labored for many years in law enforcement. Another, equally bright, has made a fortune as a marketing consultant. Human affinities and desires matter, too.

Conversely, persons on the lower end of the distribution won’t necessarily be helpless in an advanced technological society. There will always be rote, repetitive tasks for which persons lacking in intelligence can be trained – and in which they can be happy. Contrary to much propaganda, not all of us aspire to be counted among the stars. Many are content to be useful and self-supporting, if they’re recognized and treated as such by those around them. Indeed, that was one of the critical concluding messages of Herrnstein and Murray’s treatise The Bell Curve. It’s been confirmed by experience of many kinds.

The above assertions, all of which are well confirmed by endless studies, have been denigrated and condemned by the Left. They cross-cut the Left’s core principle: i.e., that systematic coercive interference in men’s lives and fortunes is essential for general happiness and social harmony.

Patterns of inequality that recur over large stretches of time carry messages for us of the present. They suggest underlying causes, though, as I’ve written before, every effect has more than one cause.

This is particularly striking when one looks at patterns of inequality of achievement among the nations. For example, the nations of Africa have lagged well behind the nations of Europe and North America in social, economic, and political advancement for many decades. Contrary to the claims of professional inciters of interracial hatred, those peoples’ ancestors did not achieve levels of civilization comparable to those of Europe prior to the arrival of the European colonialists. The European incursions lifted Kenya, Algeria, and South Africa, among others, well above their previous conditions. Over the years since the retreat of the colonial powers, those nations have ceased to advance at their previous rate...if at all.

It’s perilous to pin oneself to a specific, unicausal explanation of such patterns. Even if a researcher succeeds in isolating a “main driver” for a given inequality, there are bound to be minor contributing factors that ought not to be dismissed. His ideological opponents will promote those contributors for the sake of attacking him.

What’s uniquely painful about contemporary discourse is the Left’s penchant for ad hominem attacks and imputations that target anyone who even mentions a pattern of inequality. Let the inequality correlate with intelligence measurements, and the attacks become vicious beyond all bounds. Sometimes they involve actual violence. The experiences of psychometrician Arthur Jensen should stand as a warning to us all.

A final observation: Information is difference: the contrast some group of people, things, or events makes with others, while exhibiting consistency within the group. Only differences can convey information. What, then, is the probable fate of a society that will not allow even the mention of differences: among men, among the races, among the sexes, or among the nations? Can it hope for a future as good as immobile stagnation? Or is a steady descent into squalor and chaos more likely?

Food for thought.

An Explanation of WHY Trump Drives the Elite CRAZY!

Here, at the link.

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

New Post

At Right As Usual.

Facebook Is At It Again

Facebook has prevented me from posting under the “Louis Redmond” identity or the groups that identity maintains. It appears that they’re purging persons in the Right once more.

Typical, eh?

Cowards With Badges?

Time was, Americans took pride in what we called “the forces of order.” The police were prominent in that group of public servants. We believed that they existed to protect the rest of us. We understood their jobs to include the obligation to accept risks, including mortal risks, under certain circumstances. We believed that they understood that as well. And perhaps it really was so.

It doesn’t seem to be that way today. Indeed, police actions in recent years suggest exactly the opposite: that police forces are characterized by an aversion to risk that the rest of us would deride as cowardice.

Everyone is risk averse to some degree. No one accepts any and every risk he confronts without consideration of its upside and downside. Certain occupations are kind to the extremely risk averse. Others are not.

The rash of reports about police not venturing into active-shooter confrontations, police shooting unarmed and unresisting citizens, police shooting dogs, and police intimidation of nominally peaceable citizens suggests that some of our cops are more risk averse (and less respectful of Americans’ individual rights) than the occupation should tolerate. Certainly the situation is worse for Americans in regions where the police are frequently active.

A number of commentators have opined that the typical citizen is better off not involving himself with the police to any degree. You say your house was burglarized? Let the insurance company handle it. Your car was stolen out of your driveway? Same advice. You were mugged on the street? Same advice, with the addendum that you should rethink your choice of neighborhoods to walk through.

Every interaction with anyone carries some degree of risk. An interaction with a policeman is no different, except that the policeman is far more likely to be armed. To depend on the police to protect you and your property, when Supreme Court decisions have held that there is no such obligation, is foolish. If the general level of risk aversion among police is truly rising, it’s even more foolish.

But is it unfair to view policemen generally as cowards with badges?

Institutional dynamics, whether in the private or the public sector, are bound by certain laws of valuation akin to Gresham’s Law of monies and currencies:

"When a government overvalues one type of money and undervalues another, the undervalued money will leave the country or disappear from circulation into hoards, while the overvalued money will flood into circulation." It is commonly stated as: "Bad money drives out good".

In point of fact, Gresham’s Law operates in any institution in which two items – and they may be persons — are valued equally by the institution despite differences in their operational value. For example, if Smith and Jones, two employees with equivalent responsibilities, are equally valued by their employer – i.e., in salary, perquisites, prestige, and opportunities for promotion – while Smith consistently outperforms Jones, Smith becomes likely either to leave the company or to reduce his performance to Jones’s level. This dynamic can be seen in operation in many places. Owing to the irresistible power of the SNAFU Principle, it’s the bane of large companies with many levels of management.

Police departments are not immune to these dynamics.

Over time, older policemen retire or die and are replaced by younger ones. If the departing policemen exhibited less risk aversion than their replacements, the dynamics discussed above will result in an ever more risk averse police force. Whether that is happening now is a subject for serious study.

The possibility has been discussed, at Western Rifle Shooters that police are taught today that “the most important thing is to go home safe.” If this is true, and there is anecdotal evidence to support it, then the emergence of extremely risk averse police – e.g., the sort who stood down during the Parkland, Florida school massacre – is only natural. I have no countervailing evidence. Whether there is an opposed effort in progress in police academies is hard to determine.

Of one thing we may be sure: A highly risk averse police force is more dangerous to law-abiding citizens than to criminals. Criminals are comfortable with violence, and the police know it. The typical private citizen is not comfortable with violence...and the police know that too. Given that a desire to wield authority is a common characteristic of persons who enter law enforcement, that would have serious implications for relations between cops and private citizens, and for much else besides.

Gun grabbers.

Gun control advocates are not in the business of saving lives; they are in the business of exploiting death. They want something entirely different from what they claim they want.

"Gun control." By Sultan Knish, 2/20/18.

Hat tip: Woodpile Report. Remus has an excellent take on the Broward County school shootings. Sheriff Israel does not fare well.

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Crisis: The Agar Of Leviathan

You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before. – Rahm Emanuel

Crisis-mongering has a long history:

     If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.
     With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.
     [Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933]

The underlying idea being promoted is unpalatable in its raw form: “You can’t help yourselves. I can help you. Just surrender your rights to me, and all will be well.” If it were presented that way, very few Americans would go for it. We’ve been too deeply steeped in the traditions of limited government and individual rights.

Wait, what did I just say? If that’s so, then how has the federal government grown so large over the century past? Is it possible that when convinced that a crisis is upon us, we’re just as susceptible to the siren call of dictatorship as the people of any other land?

Maybe so:

“Even the iron hand of a national dictator is preferable to a paralytic stroke.” – Alf Landon, governor of Kansas and 1936 candidate for President, in a letter to newly elected president Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933
“If this nation ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now.” – David Reed, United States Senator of Pennsylvania, on the floor of the Senate, 1933

Those two gentlemen were Republicans. One of them ran against FDR in 1936. Ponder that in your spare moments.

Francis Turner at L'Ombre de l'Olivier notes – and makes absolutely plain – the most disturbing pattern ever to intrude on American political discourse:

     Step 1: Something must be done.
     Step 2: This is something.
     Step 3: Therefore we must do this.

Let that sink in for a moment. Doesn’t every call for gun control over the past hundred years conform perfectly to it? Doesn’t the current drive to ban “assault weapons,” afloat on the blood of the victims in Parkland, Florida, conform perfectly? What does it suggest about the attitude of the gun-controllers – people-controllers, really – toward the American electorate? And what does it suggest, given that the Democrats propose the same anti-freedom strokes after each and every “crisis,” about the true, covert motives of the American Left?

It’s time we drew the moral.

I’ve done this before, but now is a good time to repeat it: I cannot recommend Professor Robert Higgs’s superb book Crisis and Leviathan highly enough. The amount of information and insight Higgs compresses into a reasonably compact treatment, written for the intelligent layman, is simply stunning. To the best of my knowledge, no other scholar has approached the thesis Higgs advances – i.e., that the general perception of a crisis creates the best possible grounds for the expansion of State power – in an organized fashion. Yet once presented with Higgs’s lucidity, it becomes, if you’ll pardon the choice of terms, too obvious to be overlooked afterward.

Crises as promoted by politicians and their handmaidens are seldom real. That is, they seldom threaten as greatly or as widely as the promoters would have you believe. But with the media as assistants, they can often convince enough persons to believe...and the media loves nothing better than a crisis. Crises sell column-inches and air time. Indeed, they're even better for circulation than sex crimes.

Some years ago, a phrase appeared in our political lexicon that achieved considerable resonance: compassion fatigue. Americans, we were told, had grown tired from being harangued about feeling sorry for every group the Left chose to promote as “oppressed” or “underprivileged.” That might have been the case, but it didn’t cause an appreciable reduction in Americans’ charitable action, and none at all in the size, extent, and expense of the welfare state. Though I hoped otherwise, no reductions in government-modulated welfarism occurred.

Perhaps it’s time to start promoting the concept of crisis fatigue: the reaction to being overburdened with shouts that “something must be done.” It has a sound psychological basis: a man overloaded with fear ceases to act on his fears; he becomes enervate. Further attempts to flog him with the lash of crisis have no effect...at least, none that would repay the effort. Might it be possible to elicit a degree of crisis fatigue deliberately, by a shift in rhetoric? If the effort were successful, might we provoke, at long last, Arthur Herzog’s recommended remedy for political overreach: the mass yawn?

Food for thought.

The next propaganda wave in Syria.

You can hear the propaganda engines wind up like a jet rolling to take off. This time it’s E. Ghouta in Syria that is the locus of brutal, Assadian, dictatorial, ophthalmological perfidy. Is there no end to the evil wrought by this man?

Jihadi scum are holding the civilian population hostage, at least those who aren’t their family members. Leaflets have been dropped over the area to advise civilians where safe passage out is guaranteed by the government. Those who don’t leave want to stay or are being held against their will as human shields. Don’t expect any of this to be covered by the Western press. Nor will that press tell you how the jihadis operate out of hospitals and schools. It’s win-win if the Syrians and Russians don’t bomb them and fuel for the jihadi propaganda engine if they do.

The terrorists in Ghouta won’t surrender because they are pinning their hopes on the West to help them out.^[1]

There’s good reason for them to entertain such hopes.

Never forget. The jihadi animals are there and armed and dangerous because of American, Saudi, and Qatari money, arms, equipment, and supplies. The reason there is a jihadi enclave in Damascus is because of the connivance of Western and Gulf animals. The Russians and Syrian Arab Army are going to do something about that enclave to win the war that has been waged against Syria. But sure as shootin’ it’s going to be all Assad all the time. How dare he fight back. How dare he seek and accept help from his own allies.

But watch for the breast beating about E. Ghouta:

When questions were asked, the answer was always the same – civilian casualties are unavoidable in war. But if that’s true, then why has the spotlight been turned on the operation in Eastern Ghouta, which is being described as a human tragedy, while the civilian casualties inflicted during the US-led operations in the Iraqi towns of Ramadi, Fallujah, Mosul, and Raqqa received quite different coverage in the Western media? Huge numbers of civilian casualties have been described as “collateral damage” and the unfortunate, yet inevitable, side effect ofurban warfare. This double standard could not be more blatant.^[2]

More from Eva Bartlett on fake E. Ghouta humanitarian “concern.”

Notes
^[1] "Russia Blamed For The Eastern Ghouta Crisis: The West's Hypocrisy Knows No Bounds." By Peter Korzun, By Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge, 2/26/18.
^[2] Id. Formatting removed.

Monday, February 26, 2018

The Distaff Contingent

[As I’m feeling a bit cranky this morning, I thought I might revive one of my crankier pieces from the old Palace of Reason. The one I’ve chosen first appeared there on July 28, 2004. -- FWP]

This column is likely to piss a lot of people off. I wrote it while pretty well pissed off myself. Therefore, so as not to offend unduly, I'll issue an Early Warning:

DO NOT READ THIS COLUMN IF:

You are a militant feminist;
You are an abortion-rights fanatic;
You are enraged by the suggestion that there are significant differences between men and women;
You think differences in "representation" in a particular field are, of themselves, evidence of discrimination or oppression;
Your political priorities revolve around sex.

If you possess one or more of the above characteristics but read this column anyway, don't waste your time writing to upbraid me about it, as I'll simply ignore you.

Today at Fox News Online, is an article about the political desires of feminists and women generally. It's an interesting look into the sort of wishful thinking that demands cats that bark, Haagen-Dazs^®-quality ice cream that contains no calories, freedom of speech that doesn't extend to one's opponents, an infinitely generous welfare state that doesn't weaken the work ethic, wars that don't kill anyone or break anything -- in short, a perfect right to do and have whatever one can imagine without having to endure any nasty consequences.

The usual liars and idiots are out in force at the Democratic National Convention. For example, Senator Blanche Lincoln (D, AK) has accused the Bush Administration of setting back "women's reproductive rights" 30 years. Why? Because President Bush reinstated President Reagan's ban on United States Treasury funding to international "aid" organizations that promote abortion in other countries.

Hm? Does a "right" to do something include the "right" to have someone else pay for it? Doesn't that sound just the least little bit contrary to our understanding of responsibilities, property rights, and all-around justice? And when did the federal government of these United States become responsible for the "reproductive rights," however conceived, of women other than Americans?

If Senator Lincoln is sincere, she's an idiot; if she knows better, she's lying to advance her political agenda. Speaking only for myself, I'd prefer that neither idiots nor liars be represented among America's legislators.

From the same Fox News article:

"I don't think the feminist movement is over, particularly while [President] Bush is in office," said Becca Gerner, who with co-volunteer Judy Grant was handing out stickers and signs for NARAL: Pro-Choice America that read "Pro Kerry. Pro Edwards. Pro Choice."
"He's clearly not interested in women's issues," she added about Bush.

Oh? Which "women's issues" do you mean, Miss Gerner? The Taliban's executions of women who left their homes without male accompaniment or incompletely covered up? Odai and Qusai Hussein's rape rooms and nightly street-shopping for involuntary concubines? The prevalence of "honor killings" in Islamic countries and Palestinian terrorists' coercion of "dishonored" women into becoming suicide bombers? The use of rape as a weapon of war by the Sudanese militias?

Where does would-be-president John Kerry stand on these things? Would he act to oppose them, regardless of who stands in his way? Or would he insist on a United Nations endorsement before sending anything more than a strongly worded note?

But it's all froth anyway. Only one "women's issue" matters to the National Abortion Rights Action League, whose cachet has become so offensive to most Americans that it no longer spells out its real name. That issue is abortion on demand for all women everywhere, regardless of age, regardless of the stage of gestation or the state of the developing baby, regardless of the father's wishes, and at a taxpayer-defrayed cost. To claim the mantle of defender of women's rights, while supporting a presidential candidate who'd defer to other countries about mass rape and genocide and a vice-presidential running mate who made his fortune suing obstetricians out of business, is some sort of ultimate in deceitfulness for a cause, no matter what one might think of its justice.

If we go strictly by percentages, women are under-represented in politics. The percentages haven't changed dramatically in a long time. Given the frequent, strident claims that "women's issues" are slighted by male legislators and executives, it's worth asking: Why aren't there more women in political office?

This is a case of A Fact That Dare Not Speak Its Name. There are so few women in high office because:

Very few women contend for elective office in the first place;
Those that do offer themselves to the electorate tend to be shrill, monomaniacal, and generally unappealing.

Why don't more women present themselves as candidates for elective positions? Because women's drives and priorities differ from those of men. They're biologically predisposed toward pursuits that involve less aggression and less risk. This isn't something to be ashamed of. It's the result of eons of natural selection, a requirement for the survival of our race.

Women who do contend for elective office are frequently single-issue harridans. Their entire campaign focus is on one issue, usually either abortion rights or gun prohibition. Even if we discount the natural tendency of the single-issue fanatic to be boring and irritating, the single-issue harridan goes beyond the male norm by claiming moral superiority over her opponents, and quite frequently by coloring them as agents of evil simply because they disagree with her policy preferences. This is unpalatable to the majority of American voters of both sexes.

If women's representation percentage in high office is to improve, their politics must cease to revolve around their gonads.

There's a great irony here: it's men who are forever being accused of "thinking with the little head." Yet what other verdict could we pronounce upon the "women's rights" activists and groups when they drone monotonously and offensively on about the "right to choose" -- a "right" asserted at the price of the life of a developing baby, whose father is completely disenfranchised from the decision, and which is frequently exercised at the expense of the taxpayer?

Even if we discount their disregard for the plight of women in Islamic theocracies and other Third World hellholes, if "women's rights" groups were more involved with:

Getting women access to guns and other implements of self-defense;
Lowering income taxes, so that fewer couples would need two incomes and fewer children would be relegated to the physical hazards and emotional callousness of paid day care;
Ending the privilege of Child Welfare Services departments to break up a family on an anonymous hint of abuse by a hostile neighbor;
Promoting strict educational standards, objective grading, and performance-based rewards for "educators" in "public" schools;
Lowering property taxes and campaigning for school choice mechanisms that would allow mothers to move their children out of consistently dangerous or low-performing "public" schools;

...they'd become much more credible. They'd also become Republicans.

In her rejected column for USA Today from the Democratic National Convention, Ann Coulter notes that the "pretty girls" -- the women who have more to offer than strident slogans and a shrill demand for "the right to choose" regardless of all other considerations -- are overwhelmingly more often conservatives, who recoil in horror from the "women's rights" types. Even when they sympathize with some part of the activists' agenda, they'd rather be found dead in a ditch than be identified with an activist group, because they don't want to be associated with that degree of callousness, incivility, and general unattractiveness.

I would not be surprised if, in some not-too-distant year, "women's rights" activists were to demand political preferences through gerrymandering, as has been practiced to award "safe" legislative districts to black politicians. Given the prevalent characteristics of the class, it could be the only way they'll ever get their numbers up.

As matters stand, "women's rights" activists are on the verge of becoming irrelevant...and they did it to themselves.

Bad Russians.

Ray McGovern describes his first day on the job if he is ever appointed CIA director:

Nor am I inclined to take seriously former National Intelligence Director James Clapper’s stated views on the proclivity of Russians to be, well, just really bad people — like it’s in their genes. I plan to avail myself of the opportunity to discover whether intelligence analysts who labored under his “aegis” were infected by his quaint view of the Russians.
I shall ask any of the “handpicked” analysts who specialize in analysis of Russia (and, hopefully, there are at least a few): Do you share Clapper’s view, as he explained it to NBC’s Meet the Press on May 30, 2017, that Russians are “typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever”? I truly do not know what to expect by way of reply.^[1]

It’s a bit disquieting (he said by way of understatement) that a man such as Clapper was the most senior official in the U.S. intelligence community until recently. Just the sort of man you want advising the president on matters affecting Russia. Policy formulation based on laughable caricatures.

Notes
^[1] "My First Day as CIA Director." By Ray McGovern, Russia Insider, 2/26/18.

Correct application of U.S. principles.

The Russians should set up a fire base in Detroit to assist moderates there.^[1]

Principles identified from U.S. operations and available to other actors:

Send troops to any country in the world if you feel like it.
Support political factions of your choosing to bring down government not to your liking or to the liking of regional powers. In Detroit context, work with Canadian malcontents and pissed off Navahos.
Kill local civilians or troops if necessary.
If government troops must be killed, concoct "accident" explanation in advance.
Finesse departure date issue. If pressed, say departure is certain but that local “concerns” about new constitution and broad representation in government must be addressed first.
Amplify any local complaints to justify presence. "Police brutality," "patriarchy," and "neo-colonialism" work in any known culture or nation. "Roll back Iranian juggernaut" probably poor choice in Michigan, USA context.

Notes
^[1] Comment by General Fuster Cluck on "Pentagon: US Troops Will Stay In Syria 'As Long As We Need To.’" By Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge, 12/5/17.

Sunday, February 25, 2018

The Transfiguration: A Sunday Rumination

Although 2018 is a “Year B” / Gospel According to Mark year in the Catholic liturgical cycle, I’ll cite the passage from the Gospel According to Luke:

     And it came to pass about an eight days after these sayings, he took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray. And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering. And, behold, there talked with him two men, which were Moses and Elias: Who appeared in glory, and spake of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem.
     But Peter and they that were with him were heavy with sleep: and when they were awake, they saw his glory, and the two men that stood with him. And it came to pass, as they departed from him, Peter said unto Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here: and let us make three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias: not knowing what he said. While he thus spake, there came a cloud, and overshadowed them: and they feared as they entered into the cloud. And there came a voice out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son: hear him.
     And when the voice was past, Jesus was found alone. And they kept it close, and told no man in those days any of those things which they had seen. [Luke 9:28-36, King James Version]

As Jesus neared Jerusalem, where he was to be condemned, to suffer, and to die, the demonstrations of His Divinity became more pronounced. Yet the Transfiguration, the event that made it utterly clear, was reserved to His Apostles, and only to three thereof. Moreover, of the three Synoptic Gospels, only Luke makes any mention of what Christ, Moses, and Elijah were talking about:

... and spake of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem.

Moreover, according to Mark, Peter, James, and John were puzzled by His next words to them:

And as they came down from the mountain, he charged them that they should tell no man what things they had seen, till the Son of man were risen from the dead. And they kept that saying with themselves, questioning one with another what the rising from the dead should mean. [Mark 9:9-10]

Bear in mind that according to Mark, the following had occurred only a few days previously:

     And Jesus went out, and his disciples, into the towns of Caesarea Philippi: and by the way he asked his disciples, saying unto them, Whom do men say that I am? And they answered, John the Baptist: but some say, Elias; and others, One of the prophets.
     And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ.
     And he charged them that they should tell no man of him.
     And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he spake that saying openly. And Peter took him, and began to rebuke him.
     But when he had turned about and looked on his disciples, he rebuked Peter, saying, Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men. [Mark 8:27-33]

Even Peter, who was to be the first Bishop of Rome, would not accept what Christ must face. If it was so unthinkable to him, then how much more so to the other Apostles?

Some time ago I had several long discussions with other Christians about the Passion. Their position was that it was necessary for the Redemption of Mankind. I could never square that with the omnipotence of God. How could anything be “necessary” to an omnipotent Being? Surely He could redeem us all by simple ukase. To say the least, those discussions often became heightened.

In these latter years, I’ve come to wonder if the semantics of the thing might conceal a necessity not of God but of Man. In other words, was the necessity ours? Would we have believed in Him and accepted His New Covenant as authoritative if not for the Passion and the Resurrection? We humans have always wanted more evidence of religious propositions than we’ve been given. Perhaps only the Passion and Resurrection would suffice to ignite the Christian fire sufficiently that it might enflame the world.

There’s this, too: Jesus was both fully divine and fully human. He was capable of feeling fear, pain, loss, and sorrow. His time in the Garden of Gethsemane makes it plain that He did not relish the fate in store for him:

     And they came to a place which was named Gethsemane: and he saith to his disciples, Sit ye here, while I shall pray.
     And he taketh with him Peter and James and John, and began to be sore amazed, and to be very heavy; And saith unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch.
     And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt.
     And he cometh, and findeth them sleeping, and saith unto Peter, Simon, sleepest thou? couldest not thou watch one hour? Watch ye and pray, lest ye enter into temptation. The spirit truly is ready, but the flesh is weak. [Mark 14:32-38]

This is a tremendously important passage, especially in combination with the ones above. Jesus feared to suffer and die. Even though He knew what He was, His human side quailed in terror from the agonies to come. No doubt those fears had been with Him for some time...which helps to explain the conversation He had with Moses and Elijah during His Transfiguration.

If the Passion was not necessary, as we understand the word, for God, perhaps it was necessary for Man. Certainly Christ didn’t go to Golgotha for His own sake. But being divine as well as human, He would have known that for Him to suffer and die, to rise from the dead, and to be seen again among the living would be an irrefutable demonstration of the authority He wielded. And ever obedient to His Father’s will, He went to His Passion to die and be Resurrected as had been foretold.

Religious charlatans are a well-known species. They differ in many ways, but they are united in one all-important characteristic: They do not give; they take. Indeed, they demand as much as they think they can get away with. Only he who gives, asking nothing for himself, should have any claim on the attention of a man of faith.

Jesus of Nazareth gave more than any mere mortal would have contemplated giving in his highest moments: His life, preceded by suffering of the greatest amount and intensity the torturers of His era were able to inflict. His Passion and Resurrection made it plain that He had not come for any purpose of His own, but to point the way for fallen Man.

We have several weeks more of Lent before us. The season, along with its culmination in the Passion and Resurrection, should be seen as indivisible. Pondered as a whole, its import rises above that of any single event narrated in the Gospels. We can see it for what it was: the greatest event in human history, the axis around which all of history will turn, until time is no more.

May God bless and keep you all.

The Syrian Revolution.

Yes, modern-day snipe hunting.

In reality, you could not locate a revolution in Syria using the Hubble space telescope — unless, that is, you are persuaded that groups such as Nusra and Jaysh al-Islam carry with them the hopes and dreams of the Arab Spring, along with the human heads they've been harvesting over the course of this conflict.
* * * *
The moral outrage of these champions of regime change is of course, and in time-honored fashion, selective — although no less egregious for all that. But making it even more contemptible is the fact they betray not one tincture of evidence of having learned any lessons from Iraq or Libya, previous and recent examples of regime change wars, resulting in both countries being pushed into the abyss of societal collapse and chaos, and out of which, in the case of Iraq, the monster of Salafi-jihadism emerged.^[1]

The idea of a Syrian revolution is as fatuous as the idea that there’s a “civil war” going on in Syria. What’s been afoot in Syria since 2011 is a putsch financed and organized by outside powers, the U.S. included, to bring down “the brutal dictator, Assad.” Clearly, Assad is popular and will easily prevail in any future election. By most accounts, life in Syria was decent and free of the sectarian enmity that that jihadis brought to the table.

Moreover, when does the descriptor "civil war" become laughable? After the first 30,000 foreign jihadis join the fray? In truth, I don't know what the total foreign fighter contingent is in Syria so that number's kind of vaporous at this point. I do seem to recall reading that there were several thousand of Uighurs in Idlib Governate alone and its undeniable that fanatics and fools have arrived from Britain, France, German, Sweden, Tunisia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia to name a few places of origin. So substantively, far from a civil war. In fact, Syria's a lot like the Spanish "civil war" of the 1930s. Every pathology adrift in the world was focused like the sun through a magnifying glass on an obscure conflict but behind it came the terrible evil of WWII. What Western official acts like he or she has the least understanding of the parallels at work here, let alone the terrible slaughter of WWI that, in one view, involved just drifting into war?

The eventual result of the “Arab Spring” in Egypt was a victory for the Muslim Brotherhood but it fortunately gave way to a saner arrangement. Trying to make the war of aggression on Syria seem like some kind of hunger of the people for relief from the mad dog ophthalmologist is rank dishonesty. Rank dishonesty being, let it be said, the U.S. stock in trade in Syria. A good example: the Coalition attack on the Syrian Arab Army near Deir ez-Zor that the U.S. claimed was a mistake. It wasn't.

Mr. Wray focuses on the aftermath that would exist in the event of a jihadi victory:

It does not require you to be a fulsome supporter of the Syrian government to recognize that the alternative of Nusra or Jaysh al-Islam in power in Damascus is one that does not bear thinking about.^[2]

A gift from Ms. Lindsey and Mad Dog McCain.

That's a bit in the category of damned by faint praise but it's good enough. As has been wisely observed, "The best is the enemy of the good." And "pretty damn good" is a fair description of Baathist Syria. Especially when you understand the doctrine of unintended (?) consequences, who can quibble with that characterization? It is indeed wonderful for the people who have been affected, especially if you consider the horrific war damage in Syria that would never have happened had not the U.S. and its Saudi and Qatari "allies" waged war on Syria.

The death and destruction is unquestionably our responsibility as we have been enthusiastic supporters of the attempt to bring down Assad. If we had devoted 1% of our efforts to supporting Assad, vaporizing ISIS and al-Nusraqaida, and cutting off Saudi and Qatari aid, the putsch attempt would have been over in a month.

What comes after these Western dabblings in regime change is treated cavalierly in Western chancelleries if it's not ignored completely. In one instance, Libya, the attitude displayed revealed a deeply diseased mind. And that was a very senior U.S. official indeed, one who was not acting on her own. The U.S. was clueless in Libya and it's clueless in Syria. Calling something a "revolution" doesn't hide the grim realities.

Notes
^[1] "Regime Change Propaganda on Syria Now in Overdrive.” By John Wight, Sputnik, 2/22/18.
^[2] Id.