Tidbits For Tuesday

     I’m substantially under the weather just now. In particular, I lack the energy for one of my trademarked interminable tirades. So have a few brief citations of news and opinion from (hopefully) less afflicted sources.

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1. An Elucidation.

     Like me, Ace sometimes goes on at length. I enjoy it when he does; we have a lot in common, both politically and stylistically. But we should also appreciate those instances when he performs a concise and penetrating encapsulation of a major phenomenon:

     [T]he left makes the following two demands:

1. That the left shall define what is categorically, without-exception, no-wiggle-room forbidden to say.
2. That the left shall also decide who shall have the benefit of exceptions to these rules they've imposed on all of us, which allegedly have no exceptions or wiggle-room in them.

     Your demands have been considered and your demands have been rejected.

     The significance will not be lost on any attentive observer of contemporary American culture and politics. Neither should Ace’s follow-on prescription:

     The people most responsible for imposing this Reign of Terror on the rest of us should be the first to suffer the penalties for Wrongspeech they demand in others. They should not be immune to their own fucking rules.

     Go fuck yourselves in the heart with a knife.

     Indeed. Mega-indeed.

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2. Nazis? Where?

     This recent emission from Sarah Hoyt about why the Left “needs Nazis” is an important psychological analysis of Leftist rhetoric. The bit that struck me most pungently is her climax:

     What is going on is that, taught in schools or not, the knowledge that communism/socialism is a disaster has permeated our collective subconscious. And the idiots still pushing it are bitter, horrible people who want camps and executions…for their opponents. The fact that they’re convinced there’d be paradise once we’re gone does not excuse them. A hundred million broken eggs and not a single omelet.

     So they must resurrect the ghost of the Nazis because it’s the only regime ugly enough to justify their othering of us, and their wanting to kill us.

     They look through the hatred in their eyes and see the ghosts of Nazis on our side. But it is their side that keeps those ghosts alive, as justification for what they want to do to us.

     Nazis don’t exist, except in the hearts of socialists, who need them desperately to excuse the mass murders they intend to commit.

     Remember Bill Ayres’s declaration that “the revolution” would have to kill about 25 million of us. He meant it. Never imagine that he didn’t. Indeed, he was looking forward to it. But we’re the Nazis.

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3. Need More Nazis? We’ve Got ‘Em!

     Lecturer Neema Parvini has produced a longish but excellent article that segues nicely from Sarah Hoyt’s piece above:

     Of all the stunningly awful attempts to explain away the reasons why the 2016 US Presidential election did not produce the result that the elites wanted, perhaps the worst – and certainly one of the most persistent – has been the claim that Donald J. Trump is a would-be Hitler leading his Nazi followers to power. Almost two years after Trump’s victory, plans have now been announced to once again adapt Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to the screen but this time with “Trump hanging over it.” So as well as being the embodiment of evil, does President Trump also have an Orwellian Big Brother stranglehold on the media?...

     George Orwell once said that the “English intelligentsia…can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism…So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” Having experienced the reality of totalitarianism first-hand, Orwell knew all too well the ways in which people far removed from it employ “soothing phrases” to disguise more sinister ends.

     Parvini makes a devastating case that the Left’s major tactic is linguistic. His article is a gem from start to finish. Please read it all.

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4. The Height Of Hubris.

     When the Democrats are in power in Washington, they have neither time nor patience for any Republican’s ideas or observations. When the Democrats are out of power...they make “non-negotiable demands:”

     Senate Democrats told President Trump on Monday that they won’t accept a deal to lift sanctions on North Korea unless the country completely and permanently eliminates its nuclear and missile testing program.

     "Sanctions relief by the U.S. and our allies should be dependent on dismantlement and removal of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J. wrote in a letter to Trump. "Any deal that explicitly or implicitly gives North Korea sanctions relief for anything other than the verifiable performance of its obligations to dismantle its nuclear and missile arsenal is a bad deal."

     They also said the deal must also result in the "complete and verifiable denuclearization of North Korea," an end to North Korea's ballistic missile tests, and "robust compliance inspections." Any deal that doesn't meet these requirements could be blocked by Congress, they warned.

     "We believe that Congress therefore has an important role to play in working with the administration to support your efforts and to shape U.S. policy toward North Korea," they wrote. "However, we also believe that Congress must act as a check on any agreement that does not live up to these principles by imposing tougher sanctions and oversight."

     Can’t you just smell the fear sweat dripping from these clowns, the sheer panic? Their beloved Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Hussein Obama produced the current situation with their unilateral concessions, their acceptance of the unacceptable, and their fiddling and faddling. Now President Trump has the North Korean bull by the horns, openly making the Democrats’ icons look like the incompetent fools they were and are, and they want a piece of his triumph! They want to be included in the photos. They can’t allow that he, the “boor businessman” who has no right to his office, has succeeded where they failed.

     If I were advising President Trump, I’d counsel him to exclude them from the affair as completely and rigidly as their zeroes heroes excluded Republican participation. And yes, Schadenfreude goes nicely with Cheerios^® and Dannon’s^® coffee yogurt.

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     That’s all for the moment, Gentle Readers. If I can get through my chores without bursting a blood vessel, I might have more later. Until then, be well.

Quickies: Two Meanings Of “Narrow”

     The just announced Supreme Court decision in favor of Masterpiece Cakes / Jack Phillips, who had been pilloried for refusing to bake a special cake for a same-sex wedding, has been described as “narrow” despite having seven out of nine votes in the majority. That’s because there are two meanings for “narrow” when used to describe an appellate court action.

     We often hear SCOTUS decisions called “narrow” when the majority prevails by a single vote: e.g., a 5-to-4 decision. That’s a valid use of the term. Indeed, when a court decision is narrow in that sense, it can often prefigure decisions qualifying its impact and application, perhaps even a decision overturning it in years to come. Such decisions are the sort often determined by the political balance on the Court – specifically, which presidents nominated how many of the Justices – which makes them grist for the political forecasters’ mills.

     But the second meaning of “narrow” when applied to an appellate court decision is the one pertinent to the Masterpiece Cakes decision. That pertains when the majority opinion is written in such a fashion that it applies precedentally only to few cases out of a great many that would seem to share the most important features. From what I’ve read, Jack Phillips prevailed because of such an opinion: one that addresses very specific circumstances that would only apply to cases very much like his. To get another case through that “narrow” circumstantial and contextual window will require a great similarity to Phillips’s case.

     I’m still waiting for a same-sex couple to ask a Muslim baker to produce a special cake for their wedding.

The Expanding Theater Of Political Warfare

     About ten days ago, Kurt Schlichter wrote thus:

     [T]he terrifying truth is that liberals and their Never Trump enablers actually think this kind of tyranny is a good thing. You see, they think Normal Americans are so transcendently awful (and, even more importantly, that the elite’s power [is] so precious) that all is fair in order to stifle their opponents’ collective voice.

     Considerably before that, Robert Conquest formulated his Second Law of Politics:

     Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

     About three weeks ago, I wrote thus:

     It’s most significant that the Amanda Green article about Larry Correia’s disinvitation from the Origins Gamers Convention is titled “It’s Time to Fight Back.” Yes, it most certainly is. But fighting back means more than merely repelling an assault. It requires the will to counterattack, to make the attacker pay a huge, disproportionate price for his insult. To this point, we in the Right have hardly even defended ourselves, much less mounted the sort of counterattacks that would have been appropriate.

     It takes more than the willingness to write baleful blog posts. And yes, I’m aware that that’s what this is. I’ve written it because it’s all that I, a lifelong recluse, can do. I can only hope that event organizers – perhaps those for DragonCon and similar gatherings – will hear the clarion.

     At the time, DragonCon appeared not to be colonized nor infiltrated by aspiring SJW tyrants. But just three days ago, Francis Turner noted that DragonCon has come under SJW attack. I can’t usefully excerpt his piece; please click over and read it for yourself.

     They’re not going to leave us alone.

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     My Gentle Readers already know me for a crank. (There’s a reason I was appointed Curmudgeon Emeritus to the World Wide Web.) Cranks are best left alone; they respond to being prodded in...unfortunate ways. The reason, of course, is that being left alone – i.e., not being prodded, prompted, nudged, or otherwise interfered with – is what a crank most values. For this reason cranks avoid clubs, groups, crowds, professional associations, and gatherings of their relatives, especially the impecunious ones.

     Because of my cranky preferences, until I first began to follow contemporary political intercourse I would not have imagined that there’s an exact opposite to the crank: i.e., someone whose whole reason for living is to poke, prod, and generally puncture the tranquility of others. But there is. They’re known as “social-justice warriors,” or SJWs for brevity. And they won’t exempt anyone from their harangues.

     Neither will they permit us who differ with them, or who have other things than politics on our minds (on occasion, at least) a forum for the mutual enjoyment of a shared interest. Francis Turner’s piece illustrates that to perfection.

     The irony, considering how they harp on “safe spaces” for every sort of deviance from normality or rationality, is of cosmic magnitude.

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     Tyranny cannot be firmly fastened upon a people accustomed to saying and doing what they please. The whole point of a tyranny is to suppress such sayings and doings. For many decades the Constitutional guarantees seemed to protect Americans from tyranny by emphasizing, as part of “the supreme Law of the Land,” that an American’s rights to say and do what he pleases are not to be infringed, abridged, or otherwise trodden upon by any level of government.

     But an aspiring tyrant – an intelligent one, at least – won’t try to excise those rights at a single snip. He’ll take the approach Mark Steyn illuminated in America Alone:

     If it were just terrorists bombing buildings and public transit, it would be easier; even the feeblest Eurowimp jurisdiction is obliged to act when the street is piled with corpses. But there's an old technique well understood by the smarter bullies. If you want to break a man, don't attack him head on, don't brutalize him; pain and torture can awaken a stubborn resistance in all but the weakest. But just make him slightly uncomfortable, disrupt his life at the margin, and he'll look for the easiest path to re-normalization. There are fellows rampaging through the streets because of some cartoons? Why, surely the most painless solution would be if we all agreed not to publish such cartoons.

     Steyn was speaking of Islamic terrorism, of course, but the tactic generalizes to any and every sort of incursion upon one’s rights to say and do as he pleases. To disrupt our lives at the margins is exactly what SJWs strive to do:

• By harassing us when and where we gather;
• By harassing us when we express ourselves;
• By harassing those who employ us for doing so;
• By harassing those who would assist us in finding one another.

     The SJW Left has made those tactics its principal tools. Harassment capitalizes on the commonplace distaste we have for confrontation. He who dislikes confrontation and fears that it may portend more can be bullied that way. Restaurateurs, publishers, media companies, colleges and universities, employers, and organizers of events intended to turn a profit tend to be pusillanimous in the face of such harassment. They give in as if by reflex.

     In this connection, we are strangely fortunate that “AntiFa” has gone from chosen to employ open violence. Clearly, violence must be met with greater violence; the organizers of conservative, libertarian, and free-speech gatherings are now aware of this. The SJW harassers have the more viable long-term approach.

     And they are using it to degrade and destroy virtually all of social life.

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     We cannot abide this. Freedom cannot endure it. We must fight – and there is only one way to fight: no holds barred. Mere deflection will not suffice. We must punish our harassers so severely that they become permanently unable to harass or threaten us further:

• We must be utterly intolerant of SJW interference in our pursuits.
• We must rigidly exclude anyone who exhibits SJW opinions or behavior from our circles.
• Anyone who forms an organization of any sort, or who has authority within such an organization, must apply Conquest’s Second Law without exception.
• Harassment must be met with extreme counteraction. This is critical as regards attempts to silence and exclude us. Businesses, publishers, and organizers who fold in the face of SJW harassment and threats must suffer loss of profit and prestige greater than they feared they would suffer from the SJWs’ displeasure.
• Violence must be met with greater violence.

     If you value your freedom to say and do what you like – especially if what you like involves gathering with like-minded others – you are a front-line combatant.

     Take it seriously.

The Individual Soul

For many people, the term "soul" is outdated. If you're a sort-of believer, a 'spiritual' person, you may think of the word as a representation of one's brain - the individual consciousness.

The soul is probably best thought of as the essence of who you are. Your body may (OK, will) change, your brain will undergo changes - learning, processing, deterioration, and - eventually - death.

But, the soul remains.

Those who cannot accept the concept of an individuality within, that exists separately from the body and mind, see no reason not to look forward to the coming Hivemind.

I'm currently writing another story, this one about the consequences of changing a society to accommodate techno-needs, and the emotional and spiritual changes that follow.

Star Trek fans (the original) saw this explored in several episodes. This showed societies with predictably undesirable outcomes.

You Are What You Eat: A Sunday Rumination

     Today Catholics celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi: The Body and Blood of Christ. These are gifts He gave us at the Last Supper, in fulfillment of the promise He made to His followers:

     Amen, amen I say unto you: He that believeth in me, hath everlasting life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the desert, and are dead. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven; that if any man eat of it, he may not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever; and the bread that I will give, is my flesh, for the life of the world.
     The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying: How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen I say unto you: Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me, and I in him. As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father; so he that eateth me, the same also shall live by me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead. He that eateth this bread, shall live for ever. These things he said, teaching in the synagogue, in Capharnaum.

     [The Gospel According to John, 6:47-60]

     There are several ways to interpret this passage. The literal one fails on two counts. First, the body and blood of Jesus of Nazareth, living or dead, were not consumed by anyone, but rather were transported out of this realm and into heaven at His Ascension. Second, stipulated that the consecration of the Eucharist does transubstantiate the host into Christ’s flesh, the bodies of those who partake of it nevertheless die ordinary fleshly deaths. So the literal interpretation can’t be correct.

     But the interpretation founded on the story of the Last Supper:

     And whilst they were eating, Jesus took bread; and blessing, broke, and gave to them, and said: Take ye. This is my body. And having taken the chalice, giving thanks, he gave it to them. And they all drank of it. And he said to them: This is my blood of the new testament, which shall be shed for many. Amen I say to you, that I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day when I shall drink it new in the kingdom of God.

     [The Gospel According to Mark, 14:22-26]

     ...makes metaphorical sense. The host, once transubstantiated by an ordained priest, provides the sustenance – the fuel, if you will – that makes it possible for a soul to rise to eternal life in heaven.

     For Catholics, “you are what you eat” reaches its fullest meaning in the Eucharist.

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     For some years now I’ve reposted this essay, which first appeared at Eternity Road in May 2005, on Corpus Christi Sunday. I won’t be doing that today. It’s a good piece, but my Gentle Readers can always surf to it if they so desire.

     For today I have a different angle, foreshadowed by the previous segment. We who believe want to become ever closer to God, particularly in His Second Person. We pursue that goal through prayer and the sacraments, most particularly the Eucharist. We who remain under the veil of time have no way to approach Divinity more closely than we do through the Eucharist.

     Yet while we live we remain frail, fallible, and temptable. In other words, we remain sinners, at least potentially so. We are surrounded by temptations to abuse one another, or to disparage God and faith in His goodness. The Eucharist strengthens us against those temptations. Its protection isn’t impenetrable – how could it be, given the freedom of our wills? — and it doesn’t last terribly long. Like a vaccination for tetanus, regular renewal is recommended.

     But it costs nothing. It asks only acceptance – the acceptance that it truly is the body of Christ, not in form but in substance, and that through it one is put briefly into communion with Him – and sincere gratitude for the gift. If those conditions are met, it provides and sustains spiritual strength, just as a proper diet provides and sustains physical strength.

     The body demands that one regularly eat temporal meals for sustenance. It uses that sustenance to build new flesh and blood. Similarly, the soul demands renewed sustenance from the Eucharist. It takes that sustenance and builds new spiritual muscle with which to face the cares and trials every Christian must know.

     You are what you eat: body and soul.

     May God bless and keep you all.

Experienced: A Teaser

     [As I’ve received a fair number of inquiries about what fiction project I’m at work on, I’ve decided to post a “teaser.” The novel under construction, Experienced, is a sequel of sorts to Innocents. It also back-references an important plot element in The Sledgehammer Concerto. So if you’re unfamiliar with those books, what follows might confuse you. -- FWP]

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Late afternoon Friday, April 20, 2029

     Rachel MacLachlan had powered down all her apparatus, had dismissed her staff, and was preparing to go home for the weekend. The appearance of a camera crew at the front door of her Grand Street clinic took her completely by surprise.
     “Yes, gentlemen?”
     The man carrying the microphone moved to one side and edged into the lobby of the MacLachlan Clinic for Desire Dysfunction. She turned automatically to remain facing him. He smiled and thrust the mike directly at her as his cameraman angled his camera to get an optimal shot of their exchange.
     “Dr. Rachel MacLachlan?”
     “I am.”
     “I’m Dennis Addison of the Onteora Register. This is Phil Wolsey, my cameraman. If you have a few minutes, we’d love to talk to you about your clinic, the work it does, and how you foresee your therapy being used in the immediate future.”
     Rachel was momentarily confused.
     “Why is my clinic suddenly a subject of interest, Mr. Addison? It’s been operating for several months already. We haven’t even had a visit from the county building code inspectors.”
     Addison smiled in that practiced way the professional interviewer uses to deflect a question he’d prefer not to answer. “I’m subject to the whims and vagaries of my editorial staff, Doctor. I seldom get to choose the topics I’m assigned to cover. But if you could indulge us for a few minutes, we might be able to get you some valuable publicity. You do charge for your therapies, don’t you?”
     “Yes...”
     “Then a story that would announce them to a mass audience and praise them for their efficacy would be to your advantage, wouldn’t it?” The fixed smile never wavered. “For example, it’s been suggested that your technique could relieve impulses such as homosexuality and gender dysphoria. Imagine how many new clients that announcement could bring you, to say nothing of how many young people struggling with such desires might benefit.”
     Rachel forced herself to remain calm.
     This is a setup. He’s the reporter that tried to torpedo Sumner by attacking his bodyguard. But he’s already got me on camera. If I give him the bum’s rush, he’ll use it to excite public suspicion that I’m doing something nefarious. That would make an even juicier story than whatever he might get by interviewing me.
     She strove to rationalize admitting the reporter and his cameraman to the clinic. She tried her best to see it as publicity for a highly positive development that no one, regardless of his agenda, could possibly criticize. She assured herself that she could control the direction of the interview, could skirt any loaded questions, could deflect any hostile imputations. She told herself that the gains, both to her and to potential clients, would heavily outweigh any negative consequences.
     The mind of Rachel MacLachlan operated at an extraordinary speed. She spent less than half a second addressing and analyzing all the For arguments before she smiled and said “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Addison, but I have no interest in becoming a subject of the media’s scrutiny.”
     She herded Addison and his cameraman out the door and closed it in their faces.

#

     “This is a dream come true!”
     Holly Martinowski had been about to autograph the copy of Unashamed the speaker handed her when the petite young woman’s effulgent praise burst forth. She looked up with a pleased smile.
     “Thank you, dear. It’s frightfully pleasant to meet fans like you, here in the States.” She winked. “Until I arrived and met a few of you, I had no idea I was being read here.”
     The young woman grimaced comically. “Are you kidding? You have a million readers here. And for what it’s worth, I think Unashamed is going to get you a million more.”
     The line behind the speaker extended to the front doors of the bookstore, and Holly had only until six P.M. for her signing. Yet she was piqued by the comment. “Why is that, dear?”
     “Heidi,” the young woman said. “The first transgender protagonist ever to appear in a best seller.” She giggled. “A lot of us have been waiting for a major novelist to feature one of us.”
     That brought Holly’s eyebrows up. “You’re transgender?”
     The girl nodded. “You couldn’t tell, could you?”
     Holly regarded her with full attention.
     The young woman was short and delicately built. Neither her face nor her hands betrayed her genetic masculinity. She was dressed in a figure-flattering skirt suit and high-heeled pumps. Her makeup was perfect for the daylight hours. Whether the makeup concealed the remnants of a man’s facial hair, Holly could not say.
     “I had no idea.” On impulse, Holly rose and extended her hand. The young woman took it. “What’s your name, dear?”
     “Irene O'Carroll.”
     Holly turned to the flyleaf of the young woman’s copy of Unashamed, wrote For Irene, with love, Holly Martins in her best hand, and closed the cover. “Well, Irene,” she murmured, “if you can wait until I’ve cleared what remains of this line, we can have dinner together. Would you like that?”
     “You bet!” The girl’s expression became nova bright. She stepped out of the line. Holly handed her book back to her.
     “Mustn’t forget this, dear.”
     “Not ever!”

#

     Amanda Hallstrom had never before faced an unsolicited applicant for admission to Athene Academy. For nineteen years, every one of Athene’s enrollees had been scouted by its field agents and encouraged to apply. Yet she’d known it would happen some day. Still, she’d expected that that day would not come until the college had publicly proclaimed the special, entirely non-academic qualification Athene demanded of its students...and of course, that the applicant would be aware of it.
     She certainly hadn’t expected that the first applicant to arrive unheralded would be a young man.
     Daniel Loring was as bright, as articulate, and as self-possessed as any teenager of Amanda’s acquaintance. His trim good looks were well set off by the white broadcloth dress shirt, brown slacks, and navy blue blazer he wore. His brown oxfords gleamed with fresh polish. His pleasant smile suggested neither anxiety nor arrogance.
     “Mr. Loring,” she said in a carefully neutral tone, “from what you’ve told me of your grades and other involvements, there must be dozens of fine schools eager to have you. Surely you’ve received the usual flurry of promotional packets from colleges better known than Athene?”
     Loring nodded. “Yes, I have. Nearly a hundred of them this past year.”
     That’s no surprise. “Well, what, pray tell, brought you to our doorstep?”
     “I only recently learned of Athene, from three of your students. I was surprised to find a baccalaureate-granting school situated in Onteora County that I’d never heard of. A school with no website and not one mention Google could find, at that.” Loring’s smile grew fractionally brighter. “I’d been looking for a good one that would allow me to stay close to home.”
     “And SUC Onteora didn’t meet your requirements?”
     He shook his head. “They don’t have the best faculty for what I intend to study.”
     “Which is...?”
     “Mathematics.”
     Oh dear.
     “Would you mind telling me which of our students you met, and where?”
     Loring’s brow wrinkled briefly. He shrugged. “Wednesday evening at the Foxwood Library. Ching-nien Chen, Sue Perrine, and Sofia Kozlovski.”
     The chess club. “Did you become well acquainted with them?”
     “Moderately so.” He crossed his legs. “We played some chess and chatted for a bit about math and colleges. When the talk turned to Athene I became intrigued.”
     “What was it that particularly caught your interest?”
     “The small size. The standards. The strong emphasis on the sciences.” He grinned. “It certainly didn’t hurt to encounter three lovely young ladies who are all so intelligent, charming, and skilled at the chessboard.” He uncrossed his legs and sat forward. “May I have a look at the rest of the facilities?”
     “Mr. Loring...”
     Amanda’s distress must have shown in her body language. Loring’s expression darkened.
     “Is there some qualification I lack, Dean Hallstrom?”
     He doesn’t expect to be turned away. Probably he’s never failed to qualify for anything before this.
     There’s no evading it.
     “Mr. Loring, all our students are young women.”
     Loring’s expression went from suspicion to shock.
     “Athene is a one-sex school?” he said. “I thought they were against the law.”
     “Not quite, Mr. Loring. For a college to accept only one sex is still legal, as long as it doesn’t accept state or federal funds. To keep Athene within the letter of the law, our students must be able to pay for their educations without any such funding. Any student who comes here must agree to that beforehand. That way we can remain single-sex, which is a requirement of our endowment.”
     Loring sat silent and motionless for a long moment.
     He’s probably never been turned down for anything before. It must come as a blow, especially as he’s apparently serious about staying in Onteora.
     “That’s...disappointing,” he said at last.
     Amanda nodded. “I can imagine. And believe me when I say that from your academic record, your extra-curricular activities, and your exemplary manners, if you met our other requirements we’d love to have you here. But I’m sure you can see—”
     “Yes, of course.” He rose and held out a hand. She rose and took it. “Thank you for your time, Dean Hallstrom.”
     He closed the door of her office gently behind him.

#

     Daniel Loring ambled semiconsciously out of Amanda Hallstrom’s office toward the double doors of Athene Academy’s main building. The guard on duty had to remind him to return his visitor’s badge as he departed. He unlocked his Lexus and seated himself behind the wheel, but instead of starting the engine he pulled his cell phone from a jacket pocket and composed a text message to his father.
     They won’t take me, Dad.
     Arthur Loring’s reply was immediate.
     —What’s the problem? Not enough recommendations?
     It’s an all-girls school.
     —Thought they were illegal.
     Seems not, as long as it doesn’t take govt $$.
     —Damn. I know you wanted to stay home. There’s still the SUC.
     Pitiful math dept.
     —That bad?
     Trust me. It’s Athene or I leave home. Maybe Cornell wouldn’t be so bad.
     —Let me think about this.
     Love you.
     —Same.
     He disconnected, pocketed his phone, reached for the ignition, and paused.
     Should I call Ching-nien?
     The Chinese girl was the most appealing young woman he’d met in years. Her prodigious intellect was matched by her amiability and grace. She’d confirmed a reciprocal interest in him by offering him her cell phone number. The warmth in her eyes and her lingering grip on his hand when he conceded their game underscored the message.
     She did encourage me to stay in touch. It couldn’t have been all about chess. Her schoolmates are plenty good enough to keep her busy.
     I didn’t tell her that I was thinking of applying to Athene, though. What would she think of that?
     Doesn’t matter. I want to see her again. Not necessarily over the board.
     He started the engine and headed for home.

#

     Arthur Loring returned his cell phone to his pocket, planted his elbows on his desk, and hunched forward in thought.
     One of Loring’s most frequently expressed sentiments was that a man can have anything he wants if he’s willing to work for it. It had served him well in business. It had also cost him a wife, but he tried not to dwell on that. He preferred to live in the present, enjoying the prosperity he’d earned with his gift for salesmanship. It had allowed him to retire a millionaire at age fifty, still healthy and vigorous enough to enjoy most of the pleasures of youth. He included in them the pleasures of young women.
     Now and then it chafed him that at age eighteen his only child was so reluctant to enjoy such pleasures along with him. It wasn’t that Daniel was shy or introverted...or, God help us all, homosexual. Rather, he didn’t seem to give women much priority. Mathematics, chess, American and English literature, and other entirely intellectual pursuits got nearly all of his time.
     Daniel was about to graduate at the top of his class without ever having gone on a date. It had drawn the notice of several of Arthur’s tomcatting companions. He’d managed to conceal his displeasure over it by shifting the subject to Daniel’s academic achievements. His drinking and wenching buddies, conscious of the mediocrity of their sons’ school records, usually fell silent.
     It made the matter of Athene Academy a sore point for him. An all-girls college so late in the Twenty-First Century should stand out as the aberration it was. The sexes had been schooling together from kindergarten through graduate school for nearly a century. Governments had made it ever more difficult for a school of any level to exclude either sex. Yet Daniel had stumbled upon one quite by accident. His discovery of Athene’s single-sex requirement had stunned them both.
     Daniel had been lavish in his praise of the three Athene students he’d met at the library. He’d complimented not just their skill over the chessboard, but their beauty and sociability as well. It had given Arthur hope that his son might at last be ready to break out of his shell, perhaps bring a “friend” or two home. Join the ranks of actual men.
     Becoming the first male enrollee of a previously all-girls school certainly wouldn’t hurt his chances.
     Arthur had not yet admitted to himself that part of his hope was that if Daniel were to acquire such a “friend,” it might result in a “friend” or two for Arthur, as well. It cost an older man a lot of effort and a fair amount of money to attract the interest of a nubile young club-goer. It had begun to seem to Arthur that he was overpaying for the attentions he received.
     He resolved to look into what it would take to crack Athene open. The goal immediately coalesced into an absolute. He, noted the time, pulled his phone from his pocket once more, and dialed his attorney.
     It would be best if he could do it legally, but if not, Arthur didn’t intend to accept defeat. It was what he wanted. He’d always had to work for what he wanted, and he’d always succeeded sooner or later. This would be no different.
     For Daniel’s sake, of course.

==<O>==

     [Copyright (C) 2018 Francis W. Porretto]

What Becomes The Thinker Part 2: History Is A Mystery

     This brief essay of a few days ago has drawn some feedback of a sort I didn’t expect. As it appears I left a few people wondering “what are you driving at, Fran?” I’ve decided to extend and amplify it.

---

     The great quest of the serious thinker is for reliable knowledge, specifically about why things happen. One who focuses on social, economic, and political systems will be especially concerned with the causal mechanisms that govern them. There are innumerable pockets of history that seem to bear on those mechanisms. Some of them offer insights of importance. However, it’s important to keep mindful of the Bertrand Russell quote from the previous piece, and never be perfectly sure about one’s inferences.

     I recall, in high school, being taught that the French Revolution of 1789 was a reaction to the tyranny of the French aristocracy, which was supported by the nation’s Catholic clergy. My world history textbook said so in black and white. It was only many years later that I encountered divergent assessments of that time and place, and so began to wonder “what was really going on” in pre-revolutionary France.

     It didn’t take long for me to conclude that I would never know.

     Historians who’ve written about the French Revolution and its genesis are all over the motivational map about it. There are some who maintain the aristocratic-tyranny thesis. There are others who attribute the rising to “a peak in the satisfactions curve:” i.e., that the conditions of the common Frenchman had been getting steadily better, but then ceased to do so, causing “a revolution of rising expectations.” There are still others who believe that a proletarian reaction against the Church’s grip on French education – at that time, wholly a Churchly undertaking – was the main reason. The Marxist historians have their thesis that the Revolution was the product of “the contradictions of capitalism.” No doubt there are still others.

     The interested Gentle Reader can find all of these notions on the shelves at his local library. He’s welcome to do his own research and form his own conclusions. What he can’t do is fire up his Acme Industries Time Machine (beep beep), go back to pre-Revolutionary France, and assess the ground state conditions and the motives of the French people for himself. Neither can I nor anyone else alive today.

     All we have are the records written in that era, which are inherently partial and of varying quality, and the histories that have been written about it. None of these things are inherently 100% trustworthy; the biases, blinders, and incomplete knowledge of those who composed them guarantee that.

     Events past and gone become shrouded in mystery. Did it really happen? is a question that has no hard-and-fast answer unless you witnessed it with your own eyes and ears...and even then, there’s the possibility of illusion, hallucination, and misremembrance. It follows – at least, it should – that if what happened is somewhat uncertain, then why it happened is at least as uncertain.

     And there is absolutely no help for it.

---

     I dislike this subject. Indeed, I resent it. I have a need to know that shatters the measuring instruments. The inability to be perfectly certain of anything past and gone frustrates me greatly.

     An example: Some years ago there was a great foofaurauw over the emissions of two historians – David Irving, an Englishman, and Robert Faurisson, a Frenchman – who disputed the most common accounts and records of the Nazi program to exterminate European Jewry, a.k.a. the Holocaust. Those men cast doubt on the official accounts, despite their volume and overall consistency. Both suffered legal penalties because of it.

     I do not share Irving’s and Faurisson’s beliefs about the Holocaust. But I dislike the idea that a man can be punished by the force of law for holding a dissident opinion. even about something as horrific as the Holocaust. Indeed, it might be the only time I’ve ever agreed with Noam Chomsky, who argued, along with others, that Faurisson’s civil rights entitled him to speak and write what he believed.

     To grant credence to Holocaust denialism requires that one entertain doubts about a lot of the evidence. It’s a mighty stretch to doubt all the concentration camp survivors, the physical relics of the camps themselves, the Third Reich’s meticulous records of the exterminations, and so forth. But Irving and Faurisson did express such doubts. Were they sincere in doing so? Who knows? My Acme Industries Mind Reading Machine is on the fritz, if you’ll pardon the choice of words.

     Moreover, the further back in history the Holocaust recedes, the easier it will be for some dissident to doubt the evidence that remains. Only they who witnessed the events of the time can be at all certain what occurred...and they, too, are disappearing into history. Those of us who have “derived certainty” by virtue of the testimonies and accounts contemporaneous with the Holocaust will never be as authoritative as those who witnessed it, or in some cases experienced it.

---

     The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. – L. P. Hartley

     The clinching argument for not allowing oneself to be cocksure about anything is, of course, how easy it is to be wrong yet certain, and how many great thinkers have been so.

     Strictly speaking, even personal witness is subject to a modicum of uncertainty. Memories shift and fade; they suffer admixture from the “if onlies” and the “might have beens.” To be absolutely, unalterably certain is, if not an error, a point of vulnerability. All of us make mistakes, even in remembrance. When the subject is something that occurred long ago, it’s the part of a reasonable man, no matter how certain he might be that his version is the correct one, to allow that “it might have been otherwise.”

Woodrow Trump and the main target.

A couple of pithy quotes:

Much like Woodrow Wilson, who won re-election on the promise to keep America out of war, so, too, did Donald Trump. And just like Wilson, no sooner had Trump won the election than he began beating the drums of war. Wilson took the U.S. into the First World War. Trump is making all of the overtures of taking us into the Third World War.

It is more than obvious that Trump is itching for a war with Iran and Syria.^[1]

And:

As of now, we are observing a kind of a stand-still in Syria, filled mostly with local events that are more tactical in nature. This includes the liquidation of militant enclaves in Eastern Ghouta, East Qalamoun, Yarmouk, and Al-Rastan. This pause is most likely taken to allow for preparations ahead of the next phase of this war, in which Iran will become the main target of a large coalition of Israel, GCC states and a number of other Arab states, and quite possibly Turkey.^[2]

Notes
^[1] "Congress Says 'No' To War With Iran." By Chuck Baldwin, 5/31/18.
^[2] "Iran is Fighting Tooth and Nail for Its Positions in Iraq and Syria." By Petr Lvov, Near Eastern Outlook, 5/30/18.

Lindsey and Donald will be unhappy.

With almost no announcement or media attention, the U.S. Congress a week ago Tuesday voted unanimously to pass the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act that included an amendment prohibiting President Trump from attacking Iran.^[1]

The vote was unanimous if you can believe that. And it’s beyond odd that there’s been no media focus on this.

This might be the very first time since 2001 and 2003, that Congress has shown the guts to start reclaiming its constitutional authority regarding the dissemination of war.

At the present moment, however, American troops occupy and operate in Syria pursuant to authority for the U.S. to wage war in Iraq 15 years ago. That’s like telling Wal Mart that you bought a set of snow tires 15 years ago and the permission they gave to remove them from the store authorizes you to remove a $2,000 4K flat-screen TV today.

Notes
^[1] "Congress Says 'No' To War With Iran." By Chuck Baldwin, 5/31/18.
^[2] Id.

Thales, Bandit, And The “No-Kill” Animal Shelter

     [The following tale is exceptionally tragic – and enraging. My friend Thales related it to me yesterday. He’s given me permission to repost it here. -- FWP]

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     I debated whether or not to post this for some time, now. I’m sure we’re going to take our share of shit for all this, but the story has to be told.

     4 years ago, we adopted Bandit, a little lab puppy, from the local Humane Society on Armenia Ave (3607 N Armenia Ave, Tampa, FL 33607). He was a hyper dog – never did really grow out of it – and very stubborn with training. But he was also very loving, attentive, and you could tell he WANTED to obey, to please. We loved him a lot.

     Unfortunately, as our firstborn Jacob entered his toddler phase, we discovered that Bandit was not good with little kids. Whereas our other dog, Duncan, would generally tolerate toddler foolishness, or at worst grumble a bit and leave the room, Bandit was confrontational. He had a right to whatever he was doing, to his toys, to his space, and the toddler better listen. Understandable, mind you, as toddlers are exhausting to parents too. But it was also unacceptable. We had a number of close calls with snapping.

     After a while, it became clear we could not train this behavior out of him. It was ingrained. We began to look for a new home for him. We posted a bunch of stuff on social media, contacted a number of rescues and agencies, and put the word out at the Vet office Jenny works at. After a few months, there were no takers, and we suffered another very close call.

     It was time to consider more drastic options. We called a local no-kill shelter – the very Humane Society shelter we adopted him from, in fact. We discussed the situation with them, and Jenny dropped him off at their intake center on Tuesday. She brought with her all of his history and papers (she is meticulous about that sort of thing) and explained that he would make a very good companion for adults, or for older children, but that he was just not tolerant enough of small children. They were understanding and reassuring – he would get a second chance.

     That night, we realized that we had forgotten to bring his favorite toy with him, and so the next morning I grabbed his toy and drove down to the shelter on my lunch break from work. I got a very strange runaround when I showed up. First, the front desk told me that they could not give me any info on Bandit and suggested I should call the intake center myself, or go directly to the intake center. So I went down, explained why I was there, and waited. I waited a long time and got a number of strange looks. Something was clearly very wrong. Whatever. I loved this dog, and he should at least be able to keep his favorite toy, right?

     Eventually, a woman came and explained that he had been put down shortly after we dropped him off.

     Naturally, this was a tremendous shock. We did not bring him to this shelter just to see him killed within the hour. The worker’s excuse was that they did not know his history, where he came from, his temperament, etc... I call bullshit on this. Jenny arrived with a mountain of paperwork, and he came from THEIR shelter originally. Then the worker tried to tell me that he bit someone, something that I found extremely unlikely (naturally, they did not produce the person supposedly bitten). He was a very loving dog, and unless you were doing something you shouldn’t (which, unfortunately, our toddler DID do some of the time – hence the problem), he was a perfectly good dog.

     I left profoundly angry and confused. Jenny, naturally, did not take it well.

     Jenny left a scathing review on their site, confused that they would just betray our trust and kill him like that – and not even contact us. This was especially confusing to her given that she emailed them after she dropped Bandit off, expressing that if there were ANY problems, we would come back, pick him back up, and take him someplace else, or try something else.

     Yesterday, Jenny got a call from their director of operations. They claimed to have had IT problems, and that they did not get her email until today. Furthermore, she provided a THIRD story about what happened, this one at least admitting some fault.

     Her version of events was that the intake lady had been lazy about paperwork, and not followed protocol, which is to have the dog acclimate to the new (scary!) environment for a few days before messing with him, and that a worker had attempted to enter his holding area, and that Bandit had lunged at the worker. That part I can almost believe, given that Bandit loved to jump up on people and lick them (that was something we never could quite train him out of). That was not an attack. The director claimed to have video footage, but naturally she did not see fit to share the footage with us. She did, however, at least admit that the rest of the footage showed Bandit as a friendly, happy, sociable dog. The person who put him down did so flippantly and too quickly – again, against protocol – and was supposedly fired, with the intake person demoted and/or removed from duty as well.

     Meanwhile, I cannot help but suspect that had I never showed up the next day trying to give him his favorite toy, they never would have told us any of this. And, furthermore, their donations are highly dependent upon their nature as a “no-kill” shelter. They say on their site that they are no kill for “space or resources.” So what I think happened is this. They DO kill for space/resources, but spin it as something else. When they get a dog via intake that they suspect will be difficult to adopt out, an excuse is manufactured, and the dog is quietly put down. Can’t have it be known that they are really a kill shelter – and, worse, they don’t even give the dog a few weeks, like kill shelters usually do. They just cart off the hard-to-adopt ones and quietly kill them.

     To be fair, that’s just a theory. And maybe my cynicism has gotten worse with age and I’m totally off base. Whatever the case, we trusted them to help us find a home for Bandit, and they just killed him about as fast as humanly possible instead. I feel violated and wronged. I was lied to multiple times. Three separate stories, and a lot of run around and bullshit excuses.

     Instead of finding a new family – one without toddlers – he’s dead, and I’m furious.

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     [Any Western Floridians reading this should take heed. -- FWP]

Cleaning up the Mess Caused by the Obama Letter

College drinking is a major problem on many campuses.

Drunken 'hook-ups' are a standard feature on many of those same campuses.

Rape is not. Yes, it does occur.

But voluntarily drinking to the point of voluntarily engaging in sex with people that you later say, "What was I thinking?" is NOT rape.

It is a massive error in judgement. Bad judgement in drinking so much in such a short time, that subsequent actions are not a reflection of your reasoned, core values.

Not rape.

As long as both were drinking/chemically impaired, the blame is on BOTH of them. No greater guilt to the one that has a Y chromosome.

Understand, I'm not talking about those rare cases when someone was deliberately made incapable of functioning, by someone who stayed sober enough to have control over his/her actions. Those incident are different.

I'm talking about the more common cases when a woman (almost always a woman) voluntarily drinks, then engages in sex with someone.

Then, cries rape after the fact. Sometimes, LONG after the fact.

Here's a link to one of those cases, in which the campus harpies were so determined to produce a guilty verdict that a young man was put through the wringer THREE times.

1. First, with the actual police, who investigated, and declined to press charges.
2. Then, with the Campus Rape Tribunal.
3. Then, when the young man - AGAIN - was found not guilty, appealed the verdict. And, SOMEHOW managed to fail to notify him in time to prevent the abuse of the system. In his absence, they found him guilty of rape. And, ruined both his education and his career.

Preconditions For And Implications Of The Rule Of Law

     There’s been an awful lot of yammering about “the rule of law” in recent weeks. Most of it has come from commentators who either don’t know what that august phrase means or secretly dislike the whole concept. In consequence, we’ve had a lot of Sturm und Drang with approximately no penetration of the actual state of legal affairs in these United States. But when the semantic noise rises to pain-threshold levels, the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch know they can rely on one voice to raise it fifty decibels higher to cut through the confusion and restore logic, reason, and order: your old Curmudgeon.

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     Grab a voice recorder, put on your rain slicker and Wellies, go out to the street, and ask a hundred passers-by what “the rule of law” means. Record their answers to that one question; don’t add further inquiries in a vain attempt to clarify whatever nonsense they spout. Go ahead; I’ll wait.

     What’s that? You didn’t? It’s too hot, or too cold, or too damp or dry? Shame, shame. All right: I’ll ask you, then: What is “the rule of law?” And I, being a privileged party here, will ask a second question: Who told you that?

     The usual interpretation of “the rule of law” is that “the law rules:” that is, that the preferences and opinions of men in positions of authority are subordinate to the dictates of the law as written. It sounds good, but in practice it cannot be attained, for a simple reason: the laws must be enforced by men. That gives the enforcers discretion about when to apply the law.

     I’ve written before about prosecutorial discretion and the hash it makes out of our legal order:

     The right of trial by jury says, in so many words, that you cannot be punished by State decree. You can only be punished by the judgment and with the consent of your peers. But a State that cannot inflict punishment upon its subjects without their explicit consent is not a State in the original sense of the word: an organization that commands the pre-indemnified use of force, whether initiated or in response.

     The statists that rule this once free country have made a mockery of those guarantees. They’ve done it with “prosecutorial discretion,” with laundry-list charges and “plea bargaining,” with the silencing of the right of jury nullification, and perhaps worst of all with administrative laws created and imposed by unaccountable bureaucrats, entirely outside the Constitutional requirements on the law.

     We permitted it. We were told it was “necessary,” that the usual processes of legislation and judicial operation were “inefficient,” “unsuited to our complex modern era.” And we swallowed it whole. The ghost of William Pitt must have wept at the sight. Yet people ask me why I study the skies each night, hoping for a convenient planetoid.

     But prosecutors are only a single link in the enforcement chain. Before them come the police, who choose whether or not to act on some seeming violation of the law. After the prosecutors come the judges, who possess an almost unbounded power to dismiss any legal action that comes before them. For a law to be enforced requires the collaboration of all three...along with a common, undisputed understanding of what the law addresses and forbids or requires.

     Clearly the preferences and opinions of men cannot be extricated from this morass.

---

     As bad as the above is, there’s still worse obstructing the conviction that “the law rules:” the laws often contradict one another.

     The most common case of this problem arises from violations of the individual rights set forth in the Bill of Rights, most notably the Fourth and Fifth Amendments:

     Article IV:
     The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

     Article V:
     No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

     Inasmuch as the Constitution as amended is “the supreme Law of the Land,” by which “the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby,” then any law that:

1. Contradicts its terms; or:
2. Sets aside one of its guarantees; or:
3. Requires the violation of its constraints to be enforced;

     ...is perforce invalid, and cannot be legally enforced. Yet we endure numerous laws that are enforced at the expense of our supposedly guaranteed rights. The Constitutional requirements for a valid search warrant are routinely shrugged aside. The destruction and disorder inflicted even by a search performed under a valid warrant are seldom repaired or compensated. Similarly, the police often take property from wholly innocent persons and never return it to them, with no compensation offered.

     Many are the laws that could never be enforced without violating the Amendments mentioned above. Start with the drug laws and the laws against prostitution and gambling, and proceed from there. Add the enforcers’ discretion as already discussed, and what happens to the idea that “the law rules,” rather than the preferences and opinions of men in positions of power?

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     Two subjects of recent interest pertain to the question of whether America is a nation in which “the law rules.” First comes President Trump’s pardon of Dinesh D’Souza. Second is disgraced former governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich’s argument for a pardon. The first case illustrates how an individual’s rights must be violated to prosecute him under a bad law. The second case addresses the discretion the enforcers possess concerning whom to pursue under a given law. Both are worth your time to ponder.

     Concerning the D’Souza matter, the campaign finance law is impossible to enforce other than selectively, which violates the equal-protection guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment. This compounds the damage it does to freedom of expression.

     To enforce the campaign finance law evenhandedly would require the continuous monitoring of virtually all financial transactions and all related communications. How else would the authorities be able even to surmise that Smith's gift of $X to Jones was made in expectation that Jones would donate it to Davis's campaign? That degree of governmental intrusiveness exceeds anything decent Americans would tolerate for any reason.

     It is stunningly ironic that the very politicians screaming to "get the money out of politics" are excepted from the law, so that they can spend unlimited amounts of their own money -- and is it their own money, in every case? -- on their own campaigns. This is an example of a kind of law Americans should not tolerate: one that creates two castes: We the hoi polloi and They the Privileged Elite. Royal families and aristocracies that wear ermine robes may be easier to recognize, but they're no more pernicious.

     In the matter of Blagojevich’s conviction for his attempt to “sell” the U.S. Senate seat vacated when Barack Hussein Obama was installed as president, it is true that many other politicians have done essentially what he did, more or less in plain sight, and have faced no legal consequences for it. But here, time and changes in our surrounding environment matter critically. Blagojevich committed his offense in 2009. Had he done so in 1989, he might have escaped legal consequences. In 2009, his misdeed could be noised all over the world in mere minutes — and it was.

     As a rule, members of the political class dislike to see one another prosecuted. It gives them all the uneasy feeling that they could be next. So when a politico commits a non-violent felony, as long as word of the deed doesn’t get outside their protected and protective circle, they’re more likely to hush it up than to allow it to become a matter for the courts. The common, non-office-holding citizen is less likely to go along with that.

     Pre-Internet, shielding an officeholder from the consequences of his crimes was usually achievable, which might help to explain why the Clintons got away with so much during Bill’s time as governor and as president. Today, a pol can’t afford to wipe his nose wrong in sight or hearing of others, proximate or remote. The Net sees all, knows all, and tells everybody.

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     Some legal scholars will tell you that “the rule of law” is an aspiration rather than a constraint that can be strictly observed. They’ll argue that “we must have” certain laws, even if their enforcement inherently violates individual rights or Constitutional guarantees. In the usual case, they decline to address any further objections.

     But that word “must” is a good companion to my other favorite word, “should.” The use of “must” implies that the consequences of not having the law under discussion would be intolerable. That, of course, is a judgment that We the hoi polloi are supposed to accept without objection.

     It becomes ever clearer that “the rule of law,” as our grade school civics classes taught it to us, is a phantasm. Its preconditions are unmet. Its implications contradict our understanding of more fundamental laws about right, wrong, and reality. And with that I yield the floor to my Gentle Readers.

Not a civil war.

Such is the superficial understanding of the U.S., Israeli, Turkish, Jordanian, Saudi, Qatari, French, British, German, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, Spanish, and Star Wars Federation war on Syria that it’s blithely asserted even now that there war there is a “civil war.” Even four years ago the U.S. State Department was reporting on foreign involvement Syria:

Ironically, prior US government official threat assessment studies seem to be in agreement that Damascus has fundamentally faced a largely al-Qaeda fueled foreign terrorist insurgency over these past years of war.

The US State Department’s own 2014 Country Report on Terrorism confirms that the rate of foreign terrorist entry into Syria over the past years has been unprecedented among any conflict in history:

“The rate of foreign terrorist fighter travel to Syria — totaling more than 16,000 foreign terrorist fighters from more than 90 countries as of late December — exceeded the rate of foreign terrorist fighters who traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, or Somalia at any point in the last 20 years.”

And these figures were merely from the 2014 report, and likely reflect lower estimated numbers than the reality.

But regardless of what some analysts have described as "Syria's 'endless insurgency' problem, we actually find ourselves in rare agreement with the Washington Post, that Assad "is most certainly 'here to stay' (it must have pained WaPo greatly to have to write those words). He has clearly long outlasted nearly each and every political leader in the West who once called for his ouster.^[1]

There are Chinese Uighurs in Idlib Governate and the U.S. has over 2,000 troops at various bases training and supporting non-Syrian Arab Government forces. The French have military bases in Syria. None of these are there at the request of the Syrian government. It’s been reported (1:47:37 mark of podcast) that tunnels into Syria existed before the start of this war indicating meticulous outside preparation for operations against Syria and giving the lie to the idea that this was all about a spontaneous uprising to throw off the shackles of a tyrannical regime.

Notes
^[1] "'Here To Stay' - Assad Declares It's The Americans Who Must Leave Syria." By Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge, 6/1/18 (formatting removed).

Is Engineering for Safety a BAD Idea?

Just read an article about safety engineering, and why, when designers try harder to incorporate safety features, people paradoxically act in less-safe ways.

It used to be that even daring kids had some limits to them. Oh, they might try to climb a tree that was too high, or tease a dog behind a fence. But, most often, even the most reckless kids had limits to their daring. They didn't deliberately tempt fate to the fatal, or near-fatal point.

Science is finding that risk-taking may have a genetic component.

However, the average kid had the ability to stop short of stupid. Sure, there were always the kids who played around the tracks, and died at a young age. There were the kids who fell from heights, and suffered severe injuries. And, as teens, those with the reckless gene would drive fast and engage in sex before marriage - with predictable results.

Shooting up schools? In my youth, just didn't happen. Despite the wide availability of guns in homes, that activity was unheard of. It took media to get that going. And, social media is a powerful goad to such over-the-top actions.

One researcher makes a point about risk.

Researchers who study risk-taking, particularly in the context of HIV infection, also struggle to find clear definitions. "You can't put shooting up with drugs and having sex with your husband in the same ballpark," says Mitch Katz, San Francisco's public health director. Many married people use no protection and society does not consider that risky, but if a partner injects drugs, a line gets crossed. "Early in the [AIDS] epidemic, one of the things we learned about women was that they were much more likely to become infected from their steady partners than their casual partners, because they were, from a medical standpoint, taking higher risks," he explains. But Katz does not necessarily put those people in the same category as high risk-takers, such as those who engage in backstreet racing or abuse alcohol.

The pill lead to a much higher level of risk for women. In the past, women with a greater tendency to take risks faced a greater chance of an unwanted pregnancy. Some married their partner. If they did not, very few kept those children. Most went away for a few months, after which time they returned, having learned a sad lesson. Welfare generally would NOT support them. If they kept their baby, they were on their own.

Even today, for women, the men they chose to associate with constitute one of their most important risk factors. If you chose a man who is a risk-taker, you have a much higher chance of being infected with diseases that can cause sterility, lifetime illness, or even death.

Even if a woman escapes that fate, the children that she bear may have a higher likelihood of engaging in similar risky behaviors. In the end, all of the actions for protecting people from the consequences of their actions might be increasing the percentage of risk-takers in our society.

Other findings from that article show that:

Bryan says that twin studies have revealed that impulsivity and high sensation-seeking run in families.

Now, THAT'S a surprise!

/sarc

Some call the consequences associated with risky behaviors "Natural Consequences". In other words, as my Daddy would have said, "You shouldn't oughta done that. Serves you right."

What Becomes The Thinker

     The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. – Bertrand Russell, Mortals And Others

     The famous allegory of “Plato’s Cave,” while its aim is fanciful and unattainable, does tell us something of importance:

     To do anything of consequence, thinking included, we must make certain assumptions. The first of these is the assumption that the evidence of our senses is trustworthy. Thinking – the use of data to formulate abstractions and reach further conclusions from the use of those abstractions – requires data. Moreover, the data must be reliable: an accurate report on some aspects of the objective state of reality.

     But our sense organs aren’t our only source of data, and a good thing, too. We include in our data stores:

• What we’ve been told by others;
• What we’ve read, or heard on some medium that conveys information;
• Earlier conclusions we’ve drawn, or that trusted sources have drawn and conveyed to us.

     To the extent that we employ data provided by those sources in our thinking, we tend to treat them as essentially equivalent to our sense impressions. But there’s a problem there: the statements and conclusions of others might not be reliable. It can take quite a lot of work to determine whether those others have conveyed accurate information to us...and whether they intended to do so in the first place.

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     Men believe in the professions as they believe in ghosts: because they want to believe in them. Fact-blindness – the most common sort of blindness – and the resolute lying of respectable men – keep up the illusion. – George Bernard Shaw, Dramatic Opinions and Essays

     “There are indeed, in the present corruption of mankind, many incitements to forsake truth: the need of palliating our own faults and the convenience of imposing on the ignorance or credulity of others so frequently occur; so many immediate evils are to be avoided, and so many present gratifications obtained, by craft and delusion, that very few of those who are much entangled in life have spirit and constancy sufficient to support them in the steady practice of open veracity.” – Samuel Johnson

     The gulf between accidental misinformation and deliberate disinformation is infinitely deep. It’s carved by motive: the desire of the person on the other end to inform or to deceive. Determining which of those motives is at work can be difficult approaching impossible.

     Many are the good-hearted and well-intentioned who innocently propagate falsehoods: usually, falsehoods originally pressed upon them by others. But the not-good-hearted and not-well-intentioned are out there as well. This makes it critically important that we create a division, in our minds at least, between what we’ve personally witnessed and what others have reported to us. We deem data from the former sources trustworthy ab initio, though illusions and hallucinations are possible. We must not grant 100% credence to the latter group.

     This is much on my mind because of an exchange I had just yesterday with someone I like and admire. I mentioned a historical figure, relatively minor as such figures are reckoned but nevertheless a player in an important event, who seemed to me to be an example of high character in a dark place and time. My interlocutor differed on the basis of sources he did not name. When I said that my own reading seemed to differ from his, he replied rather snippily that I should “contemplate the word ‘whitewash.’” I was somewhat taken aback, but in the interests of amity I pursued the subject no further.

     Now, this is an unimportant matter in the grand scheme of things. However, I consider myself extremely well read; at least, the 13,000 volumes steadily forcing me out of my own home should count for something. But my interlocutor has a good claim to that status too – and we differ on a point of historical interest to both of us. We have different sources for that point. Whose sources are closer to the objective facts?

     That question, not its answer, is the point of this essay.

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     Historians are human. They have their own biases and their own axes to grind. Some have the unholy habit of dismissing and discarding sources, including first-hand witnesses, whose accounts clash with their own preconceptions. Now and then, as with Michael Bellesiles, one such is discovered and discredited, but not always.

     It’s likely that some, at least, of what I’ve read and taken to be accurate history is false-to-fact. I do try to remember that when one reads a history, he’s not really looking and listening to the past, but rather absorbing an account written by another – quite possibly someone who has himself been misinformed or deceived. It would be well if everyone who writes op-ed for others’ consumption would keep that in mind.

     The Bertrand Russell quote at the head of this essay strikes me as transcendently important, even vital to the serious thinker. We must retain a measure of doubt about anything we have not personally witnessed. It’s an ethical obligation. Not to do so is to join the “cocksure,” and perhaps to take part in “the resolute lying of respectable men.” That’s a role I don’t want to play.

     Anyone can be wrong – and when he’s been misinformed or deceived, he surely will be, at least for a time. Keeping that firmly in mind is a great aid to the maintenance of modesty.

     Allow me to recommend yet again Jean-Francois Revel's masterpiece The Flight From Truth, one of the most important works of the Twentieth Century.

Free Fiction (Pre-Announcement)

     On June 8, 2018, my Onteora-Hollywood romance novel Love in the Time of Cinema will be free of charge at Amazon.

     Jana Tyrell, a world-famous yet lonely actress looking for "substance," spontaneously descends upon Tim Beaufort, an unsuspecting middle-aged engineer from Onteora County, NY. They discover to their mutual surprise that they belong together despite the differences in their ages, stations, and trades. It changes both their lives in ways neither could have anticipated.

     I’ll repost this announcement the morning of June 8.

Josh Billings Was Right

     What’s that you say? Who the BLEEP! was Josh Billings? Why, none other than the man who first said this:

     “It’s better not to know so much than to know so many things that aren’t so.”

     I’ve heard that statement attributed to every historical figure from Ronald Reagan to Attila the Hun. You might have done so yourself. But you probably consider yourself educated.

     Here’s another one for you:

     “Nothing is more terrifying than ignorance in action.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

     I’ve heard that multiply misattributed, too. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, as I’m reasonably sure Goethe would agree. The sentiment is what counts...which makes the abysmal ignorance of so many arrogant “educated people” as ironic as it is terrifying.

     Charlie Martin provides a case for us today:

     I recently had a little argument that started with someone — no, I'm not going to say who, except to say a respected scientist who may have been in Boulder too long — announced that if people really knew how meat was produced, they'd think twice about eating it.

     That struck me both arrogant and odd. I grew up on a cattle ranch; later in life, I cut meat for money. I'm pretty clear on the process from bull covering cow, to bull calf, to steer, to feedlot, to abattoir, to butcher. So my immediate reaction was "heh, city folks."

     My second reaction, almost as immediate, was to be annoyed.

     The truth is that the people who actually do know from childhood how meat is produced are the least likely to have qualms about it. It's the people who grow up thinking meat comes from the meat factory on a styrofoam tray, already wrapped in cling film, who never thought about the connection between steer on the hoof and steak on the table.

     In one sense it’s merely a manifestation of the “coastal bubble:” the deep divide that separates the coastal-urban “elites” from “heartland America.” There is some crossover, but the divide is more real than not – and it manifests itself in important socioeconomic and political attitudes more vividly than in any other venue.

     I’m a product of the coasts. I’ve lived in New York State, and close to New York City, my whole life but for two years. However, owing to fortunate developments of which I will decline to speak, I’ve also had the advantage of exposure to the heartland. I’ve made use of it now and then in fiction:

     As usual, she was up before him, but this time he found her in the kitchen, coffee made and mugs steaming at their respective places. She looked up as he entered and smiled.
     It was the radiant smile of the morning before, when she’d shown him the first visible sign of the life she’d nurtured, but it was more. It compounded discovery, triumph, love, and peace into a single visible expression of joy. He could hardly believe he was its object.
     He sat at his place and stretched out his hands. She took them in hers.
     “What now?” he murmured.
     She shrugged. “Breakfast, a quick shower, then I guess I’ll weed and water.”
     “Come on!”
     She leered. “Got something else in mind?”
     “Kate!”
     “From where I’m sitting, everything’s great, Allan. What’s got you so wound up?”
     “I might have impregnated you last night!”
     “You think I’m not aware of that? Farm girl, remember? Oh, excuse me, farm woman. I know what semen is for, Allan. I’ve inseminated cows.” She looked off briefly. “Now that’s really grotty. The bull semen comes in this turkey baster thing. You have to wear these long lubricated gloves, because one hand goes all the way up the cow’s—”
     “Kate!”
     She giggled little-girl naughtily.

     That’s from “Farm Girl,” a novella in my collection Romance A La Mode. Kate is modeled on a young woman I had the great good fortune to know and love when I was a young man: a mathematical genius who came from the “tall corn” of Kansas. She had a pronounced Kansas accent – yes, there is such a thing – that immediately marked her as not from the coasts. I sometimes think she deliberately exaggerated it to provoke a reaction – a reaction she would quickly and humorously crush. She refused to allow anyone to make derogatory assumptions about her, her home state, or its people.

     The left-liberal “#Resist” nonsense is essentially a manifestation of the “those ignorant hicks” attitude Charlie Martin has fingered. These self-nominated “elites” have decided that the only reason we aren’t allowing them uninterrupted and unbounded power over the rest of us is that we’re too stupid to know that it would be for the best. So they’re striving to reverse the results of a wholly legitimate election with false accusations – indeed, with accusations they know to be false — on the grounds that “it’s for your own good”...buttressed, of course, by their underlying assumption that “the end justifies the means.”

     No lie is quite as pernicious as a lie about moral principles. It’s infinitely more so when one is lying to oneself.

     Self-exaltation is bad enough: the famous capital sin of vanity. But the reason vanity is a capital sin is because it has a capital nature: i.e., a productive nature. It produces the sort of behavior we see from the Democrats and the NeverTrump Republicans determined to impede and ultimately destroy the Trump Administration.

     But you can’t tell any of the “elites” that. They’ll sniff you aside, dismiss you as “one of them:” an uneducated and unsophisticated hick. You probably went to a state college, if you went to college at all.

     These folks consider their origins, intellects, educations, and connections to be a skeleton key to the corridors of power. They refuse to acknowledge the appropriate limitations of power, because folks “as smart as we are” should be under no limitations whatsoever. Yet they are baffled by how and why a majority of Americans could reject them and the hegemony to which they’re so obviously entitled.

     I could go on. Perhaps I will at another time.

A Day Late - But Worth It

An SF Memorial Day story - you need to read this.

Monocultures: An Observation

     I’m sure my Gentle Readers have heard quite enough about the lockstep liberalism of the major media, the dumbed-down puree that emerges from our schools and universities, and the brown-goo culture that dominates every one of the federal bureaucracies. These are well known monocultures: places where a single strain of convictions has succeeded in marginalizing (in some cases totally driving out) every other variety of belief or thought. In each case the dominant strain has also erected high, thick barriers against re-penetration by competing beliefs and agendas. The conquered turf seems impermeable by anything that might threaten its monopoly.

     But there is nothing without a weakness – and a monoculture, when its weakness is targeted by an adequately efficient competitor, tends to decay and collapse with startling swiftness.

     The American Right has fussed over the media, educational, and bureaucratic monocultures for decades without being able to do anything much about them. Some chinks appeared in their protections – homeschooling, online education, talk radio, the Internet – but the competitors have proved insufficiently efficient to bring down their opponents. Indeed, the defenders of the educational and media monocultures have succeeded somewhat in counter-infiltrating the competitors and weakening them before they could pose a significant threat. As for the bureaucratic monoculture, nothing has seriously threatened it.

     Until now.

     A monoculture’s defense mechanism is almost always a “grass roots” phenomenon. The “bottom-level” organisms deny invaders access to light, space, and nutrients through their sheer mass and solidity, preventing any incursion from making progress. Thus, the attacker has a logistical problem that can prove impossible to solve.

     In the case of the federal bureaucracies, the Right’s hopes have always been pinned on the election of conservative presidents who would direct their political appointees to reduce the ranks of the bureaucrats who nominally report to them. That approach ran full tilt into Civil Service job protections, the power of the public-employee unions, and the bureaucrats’ ability to infect the political appointees with a contrary agenda. In the usual case, the political appointees became as immovable in defense of “their” departments as the lowest-level bureaucrats therein. Presidents have discovered, to their sorrow, that such a “top-down” approach to thinning the bureaucracies were doomed from the start.

     Recently, President Trump took a different approach: he attacked the defense mechanisms themselves. He’s just simplified and eased the procedure for terminating a Civil Service employee, while federal court decisions have ruled against compulsory unionization and dues collection by withholding. The former move makes it possible both for political appointees to fire those under them who fail to cooperate; the latter creates inroads and protections for entrants not in sympathy with the monoculture, giving the appointees beachheads of support beneath them.

     However successful it might ultimately prove, it will take time for President Trump’s approach to reap results. Even so, the change in direction is a promising one. The increasingly shrill attacks on the Trump Administration from the media, the Democrats, and the rest of the Left suggest that at last they know real fear. Their most important bastion in federal power might finally have met an enemy it cannot easily deflect.

     We can hope.

The tightening screw – Part II.

Usually most of the focus in on the national debt, which is now 21 trillion dollars and rising, but when you total all forms of debt in our society together it comes to a grand total just short of 70 trillion dollars. Many people seem to believe that the debt imbalances that existed prior to the great financial crisis of 2008 have been solved, but that is not the case at all. We are living in the terminal phase of the greatest debt bubble in history, and with each passing day that mountain of debt just keeps on getting bigger and bigger.

"Why America Is Heading Straight Toward The Worst Debt Crisis In History." By Michael Snyder, ZeroHedge, 5/27/18 (formatting removed).