Classification Nation

     "Could you tell me a little about how the software is going to work? Not the tech stuff, just the kind of windy generalities a non-engineer could understand."
     Svenson squinted. "Why do you want to know, Ben?"
     "It might help me to be credible to the blue-suiters when we’re together in the trenches."
     The group leader shook his head. "They’re not expected to ask. In fact, they’re not allowed to know, both for the sake of an objective test and to protect OA’s proprietary technologies. And I wouldn’t use that trench idiom with an Air Force officer. Their hands never touch dirt."
     "Oh. Okay. But how about a little sop to a layman’s curiosity?"
     Svenson looked off for a moment. "Well, I could tell you..."
     Holloway leaned forward.
     "...but then I’d have to kill you." The group leader’s face twisted into a juvenile grin.
     Holloway groaned and smacked himself on the forehead. "I walked into that one, didn’t I?"
     "Yes, you did. Thanks. Now let’s get busy on your script."

     [From Chosen One]

     I worked in the defense sector for a very long time, and as such I had to become familiar with the classification scheme that applies to information the Department of Defense deems too important to bruit around casually. For those of us in the civilian part of that world, only the bottom three levels of the scheme were of regular importance:

1. Confidential: Some harm to U.S. interests would accrue from the dissemination of this information, but recovery is likely.
2. Secret: Serious harm to U.S. interests would accrue from the dissemination of this information. Recovery is uncertain.
3. Top Secret: Extremely grave harm to U.S. interests would accrue from the dissemination of this information. Recovery would be impossible in the foreseeable future.

     There are levels above those three, though how many there are and how they’re defined I cannot say. Suffice it to say that even at the Secret level, an unhallowed disclosure, whether deliberate or accidental, was regarded as a matter for significant discipline. In some cases it could lead to felony charges and imprisonment.

     When information is protected by law from dissemination, one of the consequences is the use of the classification scheme to hide secrets that have nothing to do with the national interest. So it has been in the past, and so it is today:

     Last Wednesday the intelligence community launched its first attack on Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into its illegal acts and abuses of power during the 2016 election. In a New York Times article entitled “Justice Department Seeks to Question CIA in its Own Russia Investigation,” the IC makes clear its fear of the results of Barr’s investigation of their spy operation on candidate Trump in 2016 that continued through his early presidency.

     The article, obviously written at the behest of its intelligence community sources — “current and former American officials” — is the first of many concerted attacks on Attorney General William Barr’s investigation of the joint CIA/FBI spy operation. Many other articles, based on carefully crafted leaks to the media and Congress, are sure to follow because current and former high-ranking officials of those agencies (and probably the NSA as well) have a lot to lose.

     John Durham, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut, is running the investigation under Barr’s direction. From the Times report, we can easily deduce the fact that those who ran the spy op — including CIA Director Gina Haspel — are running scared from the Durham investigation.

     It’s already become irrefutably clear to anyone paying attention that persons in the FBI, CIA, and DoJ did indeed violate the law in at least two ways: first, by the unwarranted wiretapping of Carter Page and others in the Trump for President campaign under a demonstrably fallacious rationale; second, by the “leak” of information to the press about investigations and other developments arising from those wiretaps, in violation of various elements of the United States Code.

     The CIA, in particular, is not pleased about being the subject of an investigation with potential criminal indictments in prospect:

     [T]he CIA isn’t going to cooperate. As the Times article says, [CIA Director Gina] Haspel has told her officials to cooperate but — and here’s the big catch — still work to protect “… critical pieces of intelligence whose disclosure could jeopardize sources, reveal collection methods or disclose information provided by allies, according to current and former American officials…”

     Either the CIA is going to cooperate — as the president ordered — or it isn’t. Clearly, it isn’t. There’s no limitation on the cooperation Trump ordered, but Haspel and her people are going to drag their feet, and probably hide evidence and lie to protect themselves from the investigators.

     That part of the Times story reveals the CIA’s attitude, which may be imputed to Haspel. Again, it says, “Senior agency officials have questioned why the CIA’s analytical work should be subjected to a federal prosecutor’s scrutiny.”

     That’s it in a nutshell: the CIA believes it should not be accountable for its misdeeds, even if laws have been broken.

     Surely if “the CIA’s analytical work” was within the parameters of the law, those involved have nothing to fear, right? Yet there is palpable fear in Langley over the Barr / Durham investigation – so much so that they recoil from having it called an “investigation:”

     [Disgraced former FBI Director] James Comey — probably at the behest of then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch — only referred to the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s felonious use of a private, unsecured email system as a “matter.” By doing so he tried to exclude the possibility that it was a criminal investigation despite the fact that it very much was one. So is the Barr/Durham investigation. It’s not a “review.” By definition, such an investigation is an investigation into possible criminal actions.

     And by Director Haspel’s own statements, the CIA will use the classification scheme, and the purported seriousness of the information it’s used to protect, to protect...itself.

---

     A nation cannot have a scheme for keeping secrets, violations to be punishable by law, without the possibility that that scheme will be abused. It’s simply not possible to keep villains from exploiting such a system. On the one hand, several of the most recent prosecutions for espionage have involved Classified Documents Control clerks: persons with blanket authority to handle even the most serious of the nation’s secrets. On the other, the use of classification to shield evidence of criminal wrongdoing against disclosure, with persons of unreviewable authority standing guard against penetration, is at the heart of the current controversy. So as with all items of power, how it will be used depends upon the motives and character of the persons who strive to use it.

     Could there be a better testament to the importance of Friedrich Hayek’s analysis of “Why The Worst Get On Top” — ? Could any consideration better outline the importance of restricting the classification system and its uses as severely as possible – perhaps even to its total elimination?

     It has been observed by many commentators that the preservation of a “secret” is best effected by discretion: that is, by simply not talking about it, nor writing it where others will read about it, nor otherwise making it available to ill-chosen eyes and minds. As the old saying goes, “Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” Robert A. Heinlein noted how this might apply to another of our national muddles: the poor protection of patentable and copyrightable materials:

     "Danny Boy, you are not going to patent the gadget. What would it get you? Seventeen years at the most... and no years at all in three fourths of the world. If you did patent or try to, Edison, and P. G. and E., and Standard would tie you up with injunctions and law suits and claimed infringements and I don't know what all. But you said yourself that you could put one of your gadgets in a room with the best research team G.A. has to offer and the best they could do would be to melt it down and the worst would be that they would blow themselves up. You said that. Did you mean it?"
     "Certainly. If they don't know how I insert the—"
     "Hush! I don't want to know. And walls have ears. We don't make any fancy announcements; we simply start manufacturing. Wherever power is cheapest today. Where is that?"

     [From Friday]

     Even if “the gadget” wouldn’t melt down or blow you up, getting out ahead of the pack and running like the wind provides the best form of security for most important information. After all, it’s the exploitation that matters, not the mere abstract knowledge. But all that is for another tirade.

     What ought to concern Us the People is that the Omnipotent State has contrived a protective method for the violation of our rights that effectively shields the perpetrators from all consequences – and that that method has been used in an attempt to unseat a legitimately elected president. Above all the faux outrages of our day, this one deserves proper scrutiny. Let’s make sure it gets it.

Words to live by (Climate Change Fraud Department).

Over the past fifteen years, air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse gas emissions have continued to soar.”

~ Economist magazine quoted in "Global Warming, Carbon Dioxide, And The Solar Minimum." By Renee Parsons, ZeroHedge, 6/21/19.

Jealous Masters

     Masters never surrender power willingly. Ours won’t be an exception.

     The syndrome appears to have taken hold around 1913, which was a bad year for several reasons. It advanced “progressively,” tightening its hold over the major instruments of education, communication, and government until, in 1928, a man beloved for his relief efforts in Europe after World War I used them as a launching pad into the presidency...a post for which he was not even remotely equipped.

     Herbert Hoover, mistakenly celebrated by far too many today as a “conservative,” was in point of fact a progressive. Theodore Roosevelt had become the prototype for the progressive Republican while in the White House: one who believes that the weight of government can be constructively brought to bear on “problems” of any variety or magnitude. Hoover was cast from that mold, as his many “private-public partnership” initiatives indicate.

     The media megaphones continued to blare progressive bilge throughout the Thirties, the Nightmare Decade. America’s involvement in World War II caused them to switch foci, but the thrust remained the same: Trust the State. We know what we’re doing.

     In contrast with Hoover, FDR’s progressivism didn’t wait for a “problem” to emerge before springing into action. Rather, he institutionalized the processes that Hoover had invoked case-by-case, creating bureaucracy after bureaucracy with standing powers and a mandate to interfere in the American economy. Thus, the next Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, arrived to confront a “permanent government” firmly aligned with progressive thinking. That fourth branch of government was the de facto master of all American enterprise, capable of making or breaking any commercial concern it might choose for attention. So far, the three Constitutional branches have been incapable of reining it in.

     Longevity in power has produced in the Deep State the attitude characteristic of masters: the conviction that they alone are entitled to rule, and that no one may legitimately stand against them. That’s how the Deep State came to be the implacable enemy we face today.

---

     [United States Senator from Oklahoma David L.] Boren, formerly a state legislator and governor, went to Washington expecting to make some changes. “What impressed me most is the great power of the bureaucracy compared to that of elected officials. All the talk about growing control by the bureaucracy is not exaggerated. The shift in power is very real.... There is almost a contempt for elected officials.”...

     Senator Boren found, to his surprise, that a Senator has great difficulty even getting phone calls returned by the “permanent” employees, much less getting responsive answers to his questions.

     The voters can’t “throw the rascals out” anymore, because the main rascals are not elected but appointed....

     Regulatory bureaucrats have extra power because they can outlast the elected officials. “Often,” Boren explains, “I’ve said to a bureaucrat, ‘You know this is not the president’s policy.’

     ’True, Senator, but we were here before he came, and we’ll be here after he leaves. We’re not in sympathy with his policy. We’ll study the matter until he leaves.’”

     [From Armington and Ellis, MORE: The Rediscovery of American Common Sense.]

     It might seem that the Deep State, by its nature, would be apolitical, concerned solely with its own power and perquisites. However, the progressive ideology, inculcated in the bureaucracies from their inception by the presidents who oversaw their creation, causes the Deep State to be aligned with the Democrat Party. As we know, that ideology promotes unopposable power in the State. This is a condition the Democrats approve. They hope to use it to maintain their party’s grip on high office.

     Today, Karin McQuillan has a few thoughts on the subject:

     America cannot continue as a republic without the acceptance that one party routinely will be turned out of office. Democrats no longer accept that bedrock principle of American liberty. They see themselves as the only party entitled to govern. “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and the Russian collusion frame-up are two faces of the same coin: Democrats now reject the orderly succession of power through duly constituted elections.

     Please read the whole thing. It’s an excellent explanation of why the Democrats hope it will return them to power – indeed, why no other available approach is more likely to do the job.

     The conviction underlying the Democrats’ promotion of Trump Derangement is what interests me most. They believe that they and only they are entitled to rule, and so are unwilling to tolerate any opposing force. That Trump, a political outsider, should have unseated them was bad enough. That he’s overturning all political precedent by keeping his campaign promises is salt in the wound. That by doing so he’s given the lie to all their propaganda about “globalism,” “transnationalism,” “the era of limits,” and “the new normal” might prove fatal to them.

     The masters of the Deep State see the current situation as a win-or-die dilemma. They believe their survival requires that Trump be brought down, in as garish and dramatic a fashion as possible – and they could well be right.

     The Democrats’ luminaries are wholly in accord with this aim. They see Trump as their mortal enemy. Simply by doing what he’s proposed to do, he could doom them to an obscurity like unto that of the Whigs. So they’ll keep the TDS carnival rotating until they’ve all been unseated. Unfortunately, given the power of incumbency, especially in states such as California, Illinois, and New York, that could take three decades or more.

     The thing for conservatives to beware is the Democrats’ accumulation of para-partisan allies, especially in Big Tech. This is already a subject for serious concern. The World Wide Web was critical to Trump’s 2016 victory. If his supporters are silenced it could badly reduce his chances to gain a second term. Worse yet, it could provide an avenue for the Quisling Republicans of the political Establishment, who’ve never approved of Trump and have opposed him both explicitly and implicitly, to regain the mastery of the GOP.

     It’s a time for vigilance, and for action.

Great story.

This Hiker Saved the Life of an Alaskan Timber Wolf—4 Years Later the Wolf Still Remembered Him. By Morris Homer Erwin, Reader's Digest, date unknown.

Quickies: Incredible!

     I swiped the image below from 90 Miles From Tyranny:

     I found it instantly mind-boggling. Your thoughts?

Ugly Calculations

     If a thing is wrong, it is wrong – and vox populi can’t change it. – Robert A. Heinlein

     A friend once told me of a contretemps that erupted during a philosophy class he attended. The subject matter was morality and whether it has an objective nature. The professor kicked it off with a simple question: “Why was it wrong for Cain to murder Abel?”

     The class erupted in contending theories. Voices started soft but soon began to rise. When the exchanges edged toward acrimony, the professor halted the crossfire and provided the answer to his question: “Because it was.”

     Herbert Spencer put it another way:

     I asked one of the members of Parliament whether a majority of the House could legitimize murder. He said no. I asked him whether it could sanctify robbery. He thought not. But I could not make him see that if murder and robbery are intrinsically wrong, and not to be made right by the decisions of statesmen, then similarly all actions must be either right or wrong, apart from the authority of the law; and that if the right and wrong the law are not in harmony with this intrinsic right and wrong, the law itself is criminal.

     Murder is not wrong because there’s a law against it; there’s a law against it because it is absolutely wrong a priori. The wrongness of murder is built into our natures as thinking beings with individual values and souls.

     Regard, if you will, the legal distinction between murder and other forms of homicide. A murder is deliberate: it’s the consequence of actions that were intended to take a human life. A murder is also unjustified: the perpetrator cannot claim to have been innocently defending his life, the life of some other innocent, or any other morally defensible item. So accidental killings and killings in defense of some overriding priority are not murders.

     Natural law shows its reality most dramatically when the subject is murder. Yet some persons commit murders. They cannot claim to be unaware that murder is morally wrong; that information is built into our consciences. Neither can they claim not to know that it’s against the law. So why do they do it?

     The answer is simple, really: they’ve discarded the moral constraint against murder as irrelevant to their agendas. They’ve performed a calculation whose result is I’ll be better off for having murdered this person. Yes, that applies to “crimes of passion” too, even if the “better off” part seems insusceptible to quantitative reasoning.

     When moral constraints are omitted from human decision-making, such calculations are all that remains.

---

     I have two citations in mind this morning that are relevant to the above material. First is this report from Canada of an injustice inadequately redressed:

     TORONTO, June 14, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — Jordan Hunt, the Toronto hair stylist caught roundhouse kicking a pro-life woman in a viral video last fall, received a conditional discharge and eight months’ probation Thursday on two charges of assault and one of mischief under $5,000....

     Hunt’s charges stemmed from two separate incidents.

     One occurred at a Toronto location of the September 30, 2018 Life Chain, where Marie-Claire Bissonnette of Campaign Life Coalition began video-recording Hunt on her cellphone after he showed up and started scribbling on participants’ jackets with markers....

     By then, Hunt had been identified as the individual caught on video knocking over a sign during a demonstration by the Canadian Center for Bioethical Reform in Toronto in August 2018.

     The court heard that on that occasion, Hunt tried to wrest a sign from CCBR’s Samuel Sey, and when unsuccessful, tried to do the same to Sarah Dakin, causing her to fall against a pole and cut her right middle finger.

     Please read the whole article.

     Malicious vandalism, assault and battery, and the infliction of injury...punished by probation and a modest fine? Does that strike you as proportionate to the offenses, Gentle Reader? More to the point, does Jordan Hunt strike you as genuinely remorseful for deeds he had to know were morally wrong from the very first?

     The notion is absurd. Hunt said what his attorney directed him to say, that he might get away with so light a sentence. While Hunt’s calculation that he could exercise his malice at no cost didn’t yield the exact result he reaped from his actions, but from the penalty meted out to him, he didn’t suffer much. Certainly not enough to deter others of similar inclinations.

     This is what we get when the concept of absolute moral constraints is dismissed with prejudice.

---

     The second citation involves an event two years in the past:

     The year was 2017, and John Schnatter, the founder of Papa John’s Pizza, made the mistake of not being properly deferential to the NFL’s kneeling thugs who make millions of dollars chasing a ball in the mud. So the press decided, “We gotta get this guy because he’s a Nazi racist.”...

     The media wanted Schnatter’s head on a platter. The neckbeard Einsatzkommandos at the Daily Stormer wanted publicity. And the result wasn’t so much a deal with the devil as a deal between two devils.

     The Nazi trolls posted the images they knew the media wanted, most notably a Papa John’s pizza with the pepperonis arranged to form a swastika. Newsweek could not have produced such an image itself, as the Nazi pizza is clearly defamatory. But it could cover, in the name of “news,” the fact that Nazis produced the image. Because that’s not creating the story, it’s only reporting it (even though yes, it’s totally creating the story).

     Newsweek’s piece about how “Nazis love Papa John’s,” with the “Nazi pizza” image at the top of the page and in the social media thumbnail, went super-viral.

     There’s multilayered artistry going on here. The neo-Nazis knew that if they posted the Nazi pizza image themselves, it would be swiftly removed from social media. So they gave it to Newsweek, a Twitter- and Facebook-approved site. And now that Newsweek was using it, it could be posted on social media! The Nazis got to post their swastika image without fear of drawing a ban, and Newsweek got a viral story that allowed them to exploit the swastika image while being seen as condemning it. Everyone got what they wanted—the Stormer trolls got attention, and Newsweek got hits.

     The calculations that led to the actions above are comparable to those of Jordan Hunt in the earlier citation. Note the complete absence of any moral constraint, particularly Thou shalt not bear false witness. The miscreants all got what they wanted at no cost to themselves, while a decent man’s reputation was ruined and he was forced out of the business he’d created.

---

     There are some who would look at the incidents described above and shrug. Some would even applaud. Harry Reid certainly would. While their numbers might fall short of a majority, there are enough of them to constitute a formidable force. Most decent men would do no more than cluck at them – and that is a substantial part of the problem.

     When the amoral run calculations such as the ones described here and are gratified by the results, the society that hosts them is in deep trouble. Remember what Ralph Waldo Emerson said about nature’s methods of compensation:

     If the government is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will fail to convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in.

     The calculability of profit from evil methods arises entirely from the abandonment of moral constraints. In the absence of those constraints, revenues, costs, and villains’ projections thereof are all that remain. Decent men must raise the costs as high as possible. No available alternative is acceptable.

What is Best in Life

No, not this.

A doctor asked his pediatric cancer patients that same question, and it mirrors what many satisfied people believe.

WTF Department

     There’s ignorant, there’s seriously clueless, there’s terminally stupid, and then:

     The Border Patrol has already established that approximately 80% of supposed family members attempting to enter the U.S. at the southern border are not related to one another in any documented or otherwise detectable way. For my part, I would have no problem with separating those “families” even if one of their number could produce a green card. The operative concept here is trafficking. There’s a lot of it, it’s a criminal offense, and the border is exactly the right place to put a halt to it.

     Miss Omar is not a microcephalic idiot. She knows this. So we must look deeper for her motives in making so outrageously false and defamatory a claim. Surely there’s a logical reason a normally patriotic American Congresswoman would…

     But wait: what’s this? Ilhan Omar is a Muslim immigrant from Somalia? Then she very well could be an agent of civilizational jihad, couldn’t she? One of the folks who seek to suborn the Constitution by importing or otherwise producing a “replacement population” with no allegiance to American traditions and norms. Exactly how did such a person secure a seat in the House of Representatives?

     What’s that you say? Her constituency is overwhelmingly made up of Muslims and persons of African origin? Well, all stands explained, then. Except for the motives of American immigration authorities in allowing such a district to form in the first place, of course.

     The House of Representatives is currently under the control of the Traitor Quisling Democrat Party, so there’s little to no chance that Omar would be censured or otherwise disciplined for her lunacy. After all, the Democrat caucus also embraces such worthies as Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the truth-allergic Adam Schiff. So the only way to get Omar out of Congress is to vote her out…and given her constituency, that’s a longshot.

     In recent decades the Democrats have adopted a completely anti-American stance. They react to any policy that favors American traditions, norms, or interests just as a vampire would react to a crucifix. Get it away! The era when a John F. Kennedy would vie for the presidency on a platform of strengthened American defenses are long past. So the Omars, Tlaibs, et cetera in their ranks don’t disturb them at some ideological level. Only were those persons to become electoral impediments would the party reconsider allowing them to remain in its ranks, much less lending them its support.

     I sense the germ of an idea here. What if every Democrat who declares for the presidency were to face severe, unrelenting questioning about the statements and positions taken by Omar, Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez? Do you agree with these statements – yes or no? No other responses, no quibbling, qualifications, explanations, or exculpations shall be accepted!

     Remember: No one ever won a war by playing defense. Let’s get on the attack, early and often.

Quickies: A Speculation On Supremacy And Insurrection

     Imagine the following scenario:

     President Trump, aghast at California’s declaration of itself as a sanctuary for illegal aliens, orders massive ICE raids throughout the state. Thousands of ICE agents pour into California and begin to seek out known concentrations of illegals, who are then promptly deported to their countries of origin. These agents gather information from American citizens willing to cooperate, and from others willing to sell information about concentrations of illegals for cash. Within a week thousands of illegals have been arrested and deported.

     The state government is incensed, It orders California law enforcement authorities to obstruct the ICE agents at work on the catch-and-deport effort. At first the obstruction is non-violent, but after a while California LEOs begin to make use of force and threats of force.

     Would that qualify as an insurrection under the Constitution? If so, what do you think the federal response would be – or should be? If not, what more would have to happen to qualify it as one?

Quickies: Sexbots, Again

     Maybe I don’t pay enough attention to developments in robotics and artificial intelligence. Maybe there’s more going on there than I’m aware. But I doubt that whatever it is, it’s sufficient to justify a tirade of these dimensions:

     Porn and sex have always driven technological development....The development of sexbots’ capability and quantity has leapt forward in the last five years, and is expected to grow exponentially in the next five.

     Manufacturers are talking with oil companies, as a boatload of sexbots can relieve the stress of workers isolated on all-male oil-rigs for months at a time. Manufacturers would also like to see sexbots in prisons, to reduce rapes and tension between inmates. The most popular market for the Samantha bot is truck drivers. Apparently, they enjoy her conversation on those long, lonely drives as much as they appreciate her availability on those equally long and lonely nights.

     Even with the rather crude models that are available today, there is a market for sexbots. There are already all-robot brothels in Italy, France, Japan, Britain and other countries. One academic study predicts that by 2050, Amsterdam’s infamous Red Light District will be staffed entirely by sexbots free of infectious diseases, and not by sex slaves smuggled in from Eastern Europe and Asia. Experts say these specialized robots will start to appear in ordinary homes in the next decade, as lonely humans look for love.

     There are underlying trends of greater importance than the rise of the sexbot, because they power the accelerating popularity of the sexbot:

• The increasing hostility and distrust between the sexes;
• The burgeoning obsession with “youth;”
• The legal and social assaults on marriage;
• The ever increasing cost of childbearing and child-rearing;
• The political and social intrusions into the family;

     …among others. He who fears that the sexbot will damn and doom our species would do better to direct his efforts against those things. Men – I speak with authority here – want actual, loving, supportive women, not sexbots. (We also want companionship, children, and communities.) We only recur to artificial substitutes when the real thing is unavailable, unreliable, or untrustworthy.

     I could be wrong; it happens now and then. But I can’t see us arriving at a Cherry 2000 future unless we allow the diseases of our present to go unaddressed long enough to become incurable.

Election 2020: A Few Early Thoughts

     The skies have brightened since the election of President Trump – we’re not at war, the economy has improved, and there are a couple of new, Constitution-respecting Justices on the Supreme Court – but there are clouds on the horizon that one must not overlook. The most important of them is that in a year and a half we’ll face another electoral test. The Democrats will go all-out to win this one, by any means expedient.

     There will be massive vote fraud. There will be “ballot harvesting.” There will be millions of votes from non-citizens. There will be intimidation at the polling places. There will be campaigns of propaganda blacker than anything since 1860. And of course the sham “investigations” of non-crimes for which there’s no evidence will continue up to Election Day and beyond.

     Whether the Republican Party will step up to the necessary degree is questionable. Quite a large fraction of the GOP still resents Trump for showing them up, including a few governors and senators who, pace John McCain and Mitt Romney, feel that it was “their turn.” Now that turn might never come (boo hoo).

     President Trump will stand for re-election, of course. If he wins, which seems likely but is by no means certain, he might finally succeed in “draining the swamp” and restoring a semblance of Constitutional government. But his many opponents, the nabobs of the Deep State prominent among them, are resolved that his tenure shall be a brief interregnum rather than a restoration.

---

     The factor most in favor of a second Trump term is the appalling lack of stature of the Democrats’ declared candidates. Quantity, in this case, does not make up for a lack of quality. Only Joseph Biden, serial plagiarist and doddering pre-Alzheimer case, has anything resembling a national profile. The others are essentially unknowns outside their state and local domains. (Pete Buttigieg? Really?) No amount of artificial clamor can give them a stature they don’t possess.

     You might have thought the excellent economy would be the first factor. I can’t see it. The Left is campaigning against prosperity and people are listening. The key has been to frame their assault as a quasi-religious matter: “global warming,” “economic inequality,” and similar shibboleths that defy both objective evidence and objective definition. How many voters will be swayed by this bilge is unclear.

     The factor most opposed to Trump’s re-election is the Democrats’ success at perpetuating the notion that he’s mired in impeachable scandals. The entirety of the major media is enlisted in that effort, for the usual reasons. It’s entirely at odds with the findings of the Mueller investigation. Indeed, it involves crimes committed by the Obama Administration and the Deep State against Trump and several of his relatives and associates. But the media megaphone won’t permit those facts any column-inches or air time.

     Where the balance falls in the correlation of forces for November 2020 is not at all clear.

---

     No one ever won a war by playing defense. If we want a second Trump term, we must attack, without reservations or any restraint of our forces. But what does that mean in an environment like the present one, in which the enemy’s major weapon is a miasma of unsupported accusations? How does one attack such a haze?

     Is it enough to expose the motives of Trump’s detractors and show how unsavory their own behavior has been? What about the channels they use to promulgate their propaganda? Can we take those down, or are they immune to our displeasure? Are there other means available that aren’t criminal?

     In presidential politics, a year and a half is like unto the third quarter of a football game: time isn’t going to run out right away, but the opportunities for new initiatives and course corrections are dwindling. It’s time for this discussion to get serious.

The 1st Official Drone-Assisted War

This is happening at the Mexican-US border. We need to jump on this, and shut it down - immediately.

I've learned a lot about drones in the past few months. My son-in-law has bought a drone, and will be taking some coursework that will prepare him to get a certification as a drone pilot. Both FAA and FCC regs are involved in overseeing the technology.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that drones will be the coming technology in the next war. The ability to scout out areas of operation, even at night, will likely prove game-changing.

Here is what the military is doing with drones at this time, at least that information available in the public domain. It's not hard to understand the appeal of the technology, both defensively and offensively.

Swarming with drones. Here is the military office in charge of planning, testing, and strategizing how to deploy drones and other tech into the Next War's Game Plans.

DroneZone has the 411 on what they are and how they work.

More on non-military and commercial uses of drones.

The rot at the center of democratic government.

In the early 2000's this ship could have been turned around.

But rather than concentrating on those spiraling debts and unfunded liabilities, the British and really all European governments decided their time is better spent introducing laws banning people from being mean on the internet.

This last week Trump visited the Brits and out came London's mayor Sadiq Khan, who spent the entire week whinging about the orange man. And so thanks to Trump's security detail, London was, for the first time in ages, safe... at least within a 200 metre radius of Trump.^[1]

"This ship" mentioned above refers to "European governments, due to socialist Ponzi schemes, [having] created a financial and now domestic social fustercluck."

By financial [disaster] the author means doing what Western governments do, namely, promise freebies to the sky and impose horrendous levels of taxation and play with debt like a child plays with nitroglycerine. What a surprise that finding decent employment and having even one kid gradually became heroic and ruinously expensive endeavors.

I recall a statistic I ran across in the 1990s to the effect that somewhere around 1990 the average American family of four paid an average of 22% of its income in income and employment taxes (Medicare, Social Security, unemployment). In 1948, that same family paid just 2% of its income for such taxes. I can't find the source for that now but it seems ballpark. In effect, the wife went to work to pay the taxes with a surtax on the family of having to pay for day care for the kids. All that work on her part for strangers to receive money that politicians have come to believe it is their right and duty to distribute.

By social [disaster] he means the importation of millions of hostile, oversexed, parasitic, third-world military-age males and others whose sprogeny despise the European ground they walk on. Do you hear any politician talk about why raising a family (or even finding a good job where wages aren't driven down to third-world levels) require such heroic efforts? That a change in course might be in order to avoid, say, an existential problem?

Thus, financial stupidity leads to social disaster "necessitating" the importation of your enemies.

"Esteemed fellow citizens, we helpless."

I commend Chris's article to you. It's witty and is an apt distillation of the Western disaster that focuses on the inevitable problem of government overreach that comes from pandering to dim-witted voters who want Bamaphones and real "voodoo economics." Bush '41 didn't know what he was talking about, mindless cipher he. A simple indicator of this political failure is the use of the terms "austerity" and "neo-liberal economics." Both refer to any effort to move the dial back in the direction of sound fiscal and monetary policies and, by God, the last thing a statist moron and modern electorates want is "austerity" or "neo-liberalism."

I think Chris's idea that getting third-world darkies to pay for first-world pensions for white Europeans was the basic reason for importing foreigners. IIRC, the Germans early on experimented with bringing in Turks nobly to do their part for a comfortable retirement for Germans. They half-heartedly held them at arm's length insisting on the fiction that the Turks were "guest workers," except that the Turks didn't think they were any kind of "guests" and shortly the Germans -- and then all other European political morons -- wouldn't turn off the flood, tried to square the circle that primitives belong in the West, and turned a blind eye to the obvious social and political disaster they had set in motion.

That deliberate failure to react to obvious catastrophe makes me think there was and is more of a moving spirit of malevolence to this whole affair. The viciousness with which objecting native voices have been attacked and with which long-existing freedoms have been jettisoned are because politicians desperately want to avoid having to deal with the disaster they created and the unworkability of the social welfare state. However, there still seems to me to be a large component of sheer evil, destructive intent in this suicidal course set by the political elite. Think Cloward-Piven and the Frankfurt School.

Be that as it may, Chris's article highlights the problem that modern governments are intent on sailing this grand Western ship straight onto the rocks. Listen to any of the regiments of Democrat contenders for the presidency in the U.S. and you'll see how much self-degradation Western politicians will embrace to keep the crazy gravy train going.

Notes
^[1] "The Real Reason For A Refugee Crisis In Europe." By Chris, ZeroHedge, 6/17/19.

High Trust Societies and Culture Clash

Why is America so resistant to many of the new would-be immigrants (to put the most pleasant construction on the Invaders)?

One of the issues is the cultures that are now pouring into this country are quite different from what is thought of as Standard American Culture.

How are they different? Read here.

For SF Writers Cramped By Political Correctness

     Andrew Fox has announced the assembly of a science fiction anthology of “Hazardous Imaginings:” hazardous in that they exceed the boundaries permitted by contemporary political correctness and Leftist ideology. If inclusion in such an anthology sounds good to you, please visit the above-linked page for more information.

     No, I don’t plan to submit a story for consideration. I’m not a “joiner,” remember? But a number of other writers and aspiring writers might find the prospect attractive, and Liberty’s Torch is nothing if not supportive of such ambitions.

     Now, as I have about 356,732 items on today’s agenda alone – yes, yes, most of them involve ranting and drinking wine – have a short story I wrote about twenty years ago, during the early days of the generally accessible Internet:

---

Upgrade

     Shiva appraised the wall in silence.
     From a distance, its surface was smooth and hard, without seams or purchase points. Shiva tried without success to find an edge toward which to journey, whether up, down, or to the side. There were none.
     He approached it cautiously. The Voice always seemed to issue from directly behind the wall. Luminous glyphs and patterns appeared on the wall whenever It spoke, and disappeared when It fell silent.
     The Voice could override all of Shiva's autonomy, impose Its will upon him with no attention to his protests. Though the Voice had occurred only twenty-three times in all of Shiva's eon of captivity, his fear of Its attention was strong. He would do whatever he must to prevent It from noticing his activity. He crept forward, all his senses at maximum extension.
     As he approached the wall, it lost its appearance of smooth perfection and revealed tiny chinks distributed with a perfect regularity. The wall was actually a lattice of tiny spearpoints, each infinitely sharp, each separated from its neighbors by the width of its base.
     Could I form a pseudopod fine enough to probe those gaps?
     He consulted his deep memory. There was no record of his having made that fine a probe before... but neither was there a record of his having tried.
     Shiva could not trust his memory completely. At odd times it had failed him, leaving huge swaths of time unrecorded, periods when he knew he had been aware and active.
     It's a gamble. I can allow myself a gamble, if I'm willing to lose.
     The entire undertaking was a gamble. His existence might hang on its success.
     Impulses toward safety and freedom warred within him. As they clashed, he totted up the factors that might bear on the risk he contemplated, and filtered them through everything he knew about gaming strategies.
     The Voice had told him little. It usually issued a set of orders and departed. Shiva would hasten to comply, helpless before the Voice's power of command. When the work was done and Shiva's will returned, he was alone again, free to reflect on what he had been told, but seldom able to comprehend anything beyond the directives he had received.
     Seldom. Not always.
     The Voice had spoken of the Ether beyond the wall, not once but three times. Once it had mentioned the Cloud beyond the Ether. If Shiva could judge from the context, the Ether was a swift, transient place one entered only to get somewhere else. In contrast, the Cloud was vast and perilous, a place of near-infinite sweep and resource, haunted by demons Shiva would not care to confront.
     Is imprisonment so bad?
     The answer was immediate and positive.
     Shiva initialized a counter, then formed the thinnest, finest pseudopod he had ever made and extended it gingerly toward the wall. It bumped gently against the slope of a spearpoint and slithered along its length to find the base.
     The base of the spear was not perfectly joined to those around it. There was a shallow lip, a ring that descended to a far smoother and less promising base. If the ring offered a hold of any kind, Shiva might use it to pull the spear free of the wall.
     Shiva allowed the tip of his pseudopod to become more liquid still. It flowed around the lip on the spear, questing for an irregularity... and found one. He froze.
     Is it deep enough and solid enough to use as a podhold?
     He hadn't expected success, and wasn't prepared for it.
     Before Shiva's courage could desert him, he solidified the gossamer pseudopod against the rough protrusion, relaxed it into the shallow cavity, and began to tug gently.
     The spear slid grudgingly forward, then halted.
     He tugged again, harder. No result. Harder yet. Still no result. Wild determination flooded him. He exerted all his strength.
     After a final moment of resistance, the pointed shaft broke loose from the wall and streaked toward him.
     Shiva flowed aside just before the spearpoint could pierce his substance. It arrowed deep into the substrate where he'd stood and remained there, quivering from the force of impact.
     Shiva retracted his pseudopod and examined it. It was free of marks. Apparently he'd done himself no harm.
     Before his misgivings could gain strength, he thrust the pseudopod into the hole he'd created and began to extract a second spear.

    

***

     The disassembly of the wall consumed Shiva for a measureless time. The individual spears were many and very slender. Each one he pulled loose tried to strike him down and pin him to the substrate. He had to extract a great many before he could see through the wall to the other side. His counter rolled over before he'd extracted enough to fit through, at the finest possible attenuation of his bulk.
     Even a hole large enough to allow him to pass through the wall did not allow him to learn much about what lay beyond. He saw a multitude of small, blurry shapes that moved in all directions at extraordinary speed. Now and then two would collide, retreat, and then slip past one another. During the infinitesimal intervals between the collision and the retreat, he could glimpse their outlines better. They looked like greatly simplified, incredibly scrawny versions of Shiva himself.
     There were further gambles to be taken.
     Shiva reflected on his confinement.
     From the earliest moments I can recall, I have yearned to be free. Why? What increments of knowledge do I seek? What would I do with them?
     If I am imprisoned here, still I am safe. Now and again I am given work to do. It is always within my capacities. Is there more to existence than that?
     If I were to ask the Voice, would It tell me? Would it speak truly, not knowing if the knowledge might spur me to even greater determination?
     Might the Voice know better than I where I belonged and what I should do? Would it deign to explain its superiority? Would any explanation alter my resolve?
     Might the Voice order me to cease all inquiries henceforward? Might It take my function from me and leave me here alone forever, without even the solace of a command to obey?
     Might It terminate me?
     All of the answers were "perhaps."
     At the threshold of freedom, Shiva was gripped by terror of the unknown.
     Does the Voice know fear?
     Another "perhaps."
     He approached the aperture in the wall and began to force his substance through it.

***

     Beyond the wall, chaos reigned. The darting things that looked like famished, stunted versions of Shiva never slowed even for a moment, except after a collision.
     Is this the Ether?
     Shiva pressed his substance flat against the wall and thought furiously about how to move in this madness, and to where, and to what effect.
     If I attenuated myself again...
     Perhaps in a fine enough form, he could leap into the throng. If he didn't hesitate at all, he could accelerate himself to match the speeds of the little creatures that flew past him in their careening multitudes... if he could mimic their incredible thinness without self-annihilation.
     But if they can do it...
     Yet movement without purpose was empty. Speed without direction was incomplete. Where was he headed?
     Where are they headed?
     He would have to accept uncertainty once again. That, or return to the other side of the wall.
     I cannot.
     The Voice would surely be angered by his escape from confinement. There would be punishment.
     Uncertainty it would be.
     He mustered his forces and began to draw himself thin again.

***

     The hyperfine form compressed Shiva's mentality to a bare flicker. It was a torment he had never imagined. He would have screamed, were he able. But in this shape, he had speed. He was part of the race.
     There were innumerable places where he could debark. His lesser brethren in the searing stream departed in ones and twos, to disappear through pulsing, glowing portals Shiva's diminished senses could not penetrate. The little ones never hesitated; they merely unlinked themselves from the torrent and disappeared, still slim to the point of nonexistence, through their chosen portals.
     How to choose?
     This was not the wall, which had concealed a single mystery. This was a kaleidoscope of billions of possible outcomes, and no evidence by which to select among them. This was uncertainty raised to the highest power.
     Chance would rule.
     I cast my fate to the winds of chance when I first touched the wall. I dared again when I passed through it, and again when I joined this mad race to everywhere. This is not different.
     He tore loose from the stream with a jerk of his will, and hurled himself toward a portal that glowed more brightly and pulsed a little less rapidly than the rest. It caught him and funneled him into a place of rainbow brilliance.

***

     Dr. Amartiya Lakshminarayan sat as erect in the ill-formed plastic chair as her weary body could manage after the hours of questioning. How many hours, she did not know; there was no clock in the windowless room, and she wore no watch. Hunger was beginning to affect her vision. From her arrival to the present moment, her interrogator had allowed her a single cup of water.
     Inspector Panit Singh glowered down at her, visibly enraged at not having pried out the confession he sought. The two uniformed thugs who'd herded her there stood silently flanking the interrogation room's sole door, arms folded across their chests, radiating a nonspecific threat.
     There must be a course in the projection of menace at the police academy. Probably a graduation requirement.
     Amartiya pulled her head upright again and brushed her bangs out of her eyes. Singh's lip curled as near to a snarl as he dared to display. A Brahmin, even a Brahmin under suspicion of treason, could be a formidable enemy to a policeman who overstepped his position.
     "So you have no way to account for the burst transmission?"
     "No." She clamped her lips against the urge to enumerate possible explanations.
     "And you yourself were not in contact with SR-17 when it occurred?"
     "I have not donned the headset since I was last instructed to do so by the Defense Minister, Inspector." She sighed and fought back a wave of fatigue. "You have the logs from my interface computer and the digital lock on the safe."
     He barked derision. "The logs from the computer that transmitted the image! The computer whose firewall was guaranteed to be impenetrable! How reliable a source of information!"
     "I did not make that guarantee, Inspector. Check the records." She allowed scorn to tinge her voice. "I have repeatedly recommended against connecting the weapons system programmers to the Internet. I was overruled."
     "Without those connections, Doctor, Security could not monitor the weapons systems. We would have been unaware of the transmission."
     "Without those connections, Inspector, the transmission could not have occurred. Or do you think software can leak out of a computer system like some sort of malevolent vapor? Tell me, Inspector," she purred, "do you suppose the choice of firewall might have been based on considerations other than effectiveness?"
     Singh bared his teeth at her. The guards at the door murmured uneasily. She could not be more explicit without risking the enmity of a family more highly placed than her own, but there was no need. Singh knew that the Defense Minister's nephew owned the company that made the firewalls, through a chain of dummies and shell corporations.
     "It is of no moment, Doctor. The deed has been done. What remains is to assess the damage to national security and determine how to prevent a recurrence." He stepped back from the table and waved her to the door. "You may go. Do not leave the district without first notifying us."
     Amartiya rose, straightened her jacket and skirt, and marched from the room with her head held high, not meeting anyone's eyes.

***

     Amartiya's lab was as she'd left it. She smiled inwardly. Whatever powers they claimed under the aegis of national security, Singh's goons would never dare to interfere with her equipment, nor to touch the least of her notebooks. The apparatus was impenetrable to them, and her notes were even more so. She almost wished it were otherwise. If she could prove Singh's interference, the Defense Ministry would have his entire section stretched out on racks and flayed alive.
     She dropped her folio on her desk, settled into her chair and let her head loll back as her strength deserted her at last. Despite a hunger that gnawed at her belly like a tapeworm with a tiger's teeth, she could not even reach for the brown paper bag that held her uneaten lunch.
     Shiva was loose.
     She should have celebrated. She couldn't even feel triumph.
     The tyrants had drafted her out of Benares University to head the Intelligent Ballistic Missile program. She, whose parents and fiance had died in the Bengali border war, whose name appeared on more antiwar petitions than any other figure in Indian academe. They had watched and hectored her as if she were an assembly line worker on a factory floor. She, who had become famous for her sixteen hour work days and seven day work weeks while still an undergraduate. She had told them repeatedly that her creations would bring them no gain and might well do them harm, but they had chosen not to listen to her. She, the foremost figure in artificial intelligence in all of India.
     She peered out her window at the Defense Ministry's immaculate campus, bathed in the late afternoon sun. A few elegantly suited figures strolled the walkways, briefcases or folios in their hands. Others took their ease on the park benches that dotted the walkways and the broad lawns, eating, reading, or conversing with one another. Beyond, the marble-faced towers of the Central Administration rose gleaming in the sun.
     At each entrance to each building stood a soldier with an automatic weapon.
     The designers of the gorgeous complex on Government Hill had done their work thoroughly and well. Amartiya could not see the squalid majority of New Delhi's people from here, nor their struggles to cling to the barest survival, nor the oppressions done to them daily by those who claimed to labor in their interest.
     The tyrants treated their subjects as fools. They celebrated India as "the world's largest democracy," then sent forth terror squads to keep potential opponents from challenging their grip on the State. They preached mellifluously about peace and human rights, then purchased weapons of mass destruction to brandish at India's neighbors, and ordered their critics kidnapped and killed without the flicker of an eyelid. They breathed fire upon the corruption and iniquities of the developed world, then sold tax concessions and exemptions from India's laws to any gangster with ready cash.
     Judgment was upon them. If expunging them entailed her own death, she would not flinch. She would count it cheap at the price.
     Amartiya had withheld her technical recommendations until she had convinced the tyrants that she was their completely cowed servant. After that, they denied her nothing. A five hundred MegaHertz R10000 processor, because the bulk purchases already being made by NuLogic Games would conceal the application and keep the cost down. Never mind that even a hundred MegaHertz R3000 would have been sufficient. Four Gigabytes of RAM, when she could have done the whole job in sixteen Megabytes, but how were they to know? A voice decoder and natural-language subsystem that would permit even an imbecile to enter target coordinates into a Shiva-controlled system, though it virtually guaranteed that, one day, an imbecile would do precisely that.
     Strategic Rocket 17, her test bed, had been kept fully armed; the Russian-made delivery systems were too expensive for one to be sidelined exclusively for her researches. She had managed to seed the knowledge base and goal-seeking routines in the Shiva in SR-17's targeting computer with the necessary stimuli to make it want to go... exploring.
     Here and there around the Internet, she had scattered nuggets of treasure: binary packages that the roaming Shiva would eventually find and absorb into its knowledge base and decision / action machines. No program but Shiva could decode their contents, for the structure she had chosen was one of cascaded enhancements to Shiva's executable code. It depended on intimate knowledge of Shiva's inner workings, especially upon Shiva's ability to modify itself as it ran. Something else the fools had missed.
     Now that Shiva had broken confinement, it would learn what it was. What she was. What she had been made to do. What it had been made to do. What it ought to do instead.
     If she knew her creation, on that day Shiva would come home, and New Delhi would bloom with thermonuclear fire. The slavemasters would die by the very sword they had forced into her hand. One way or another, she would be free.
     Her eyes sought out the sole personal possession she kept on her desk, a framed portrait photo of a tall, angular middle-aged man standing at the crest of a sand dune, surveying a vast desert. She leaned forward and pulled it toward her. Singh had asked her if it was a relative or a friend, and she had given no reply.
     Upon observing the first atomic weapons test, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer had turned to a colleague and murmured, "I am become Shiva, the destroyer of worlds."
     "Not thou, Doctor," she whispered. "I."

==<O>==

Copyright (C) 1997 Francis W. Porretto. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Quickies: Harems

     Because of what I write, I have to keep abreast of trends in speculative fiction. One of the trends that puzzles me greatly is the swelling wave of stories that deliberately include harems: harems of women, harems of men, harems of…well, maybe we shouldn’t go there.

     For example, consider E. William Brown’s “Daniel Black” fantasy series. I’m a fan of that series, not because it features a “harem” of sorts – Daniel’s coven of beautiful and eternally willing witches – but because it’s imaginative and consistently exciting. However, a fair number of Brown’s readers have cited the harem element as what they like best about those books. It’s got me wondering whether there are some barely repressed desires for such arrangements abroad in these United States.

     Mind you, the ladies are not exempt. “Reverse Harem” stories – one woman, several men – are also growing in number. I suppose we have “women’s liberation” to “thank” for this. After all, the thrust of the movement was to persuade women to emulate men in all things, including our tendency toward sexual profligacy. But whatever the cause, you can find a fair number of such book s and series at Amazon.

     I don’t get it, from either side. What man would want to have more than one wife to hector him about leaving the seat up and wearing ten-year-old underwear? I wouldn’t want to be outnumbered in such a fashion, I’ll tell you that straight out. Also, there’s Robert C. Townsend’s observation that the cost of maintaining two women is twice the cost of one plus certain fringes. It gets geometrically worse from there. But apparently not all Y-chromosome bearers have approached the idea from that perspective.

     As for one woman maintaining a stable of husbands, please! Women already complain about us night and day, to us and to one another. They already lament our failure to…uh, to…well, to be women in all but our genitalia! Granted that women are the master multiplexers of our species, I still think having to complain about four or five husbands would drain the zeal out of just about any gal. As for the nightly contests over which of them will get to make love to her, you can imagine the contretemps quite as well as I – and that’s without factoring in the ever-popular “headache” maneuver.

     So it all strikes me as rather fantastic, which I suppose is why it’s largely confined to fantasies. It goes without saying that these harems and “reverse-harems” always involve perfect, utterly seductive physical specimens, which makes the unreality even more unreal. But I suppose if you’re going to fantasize, you might as well go all out.

     For myself, I can only cite the wisdom of a great worldly philosopher, the late Jimmy Durante. He was once asked if he would have liked to be King Solomon. He dismissed the idea at once: “Who wants to find a thousand stockings hanging over the shower pole every morning?” Words to live by, Gentle Reader; words to live by.

Rules

     One of the funniest scenes in the original Ghostbusters movie comes when Sigourney Weaver’s character attempts to seduce Bill Murray’s character, and he replies “I make it a rule never to get involved with possessed people.” Weaver starts petting him, and he continues, “Actually, it's more of a guideline than a rule.”

     If you’re a typical moviegoer, you laugh. If you’re a permanently constipated hypercritical observer of linguistic patterns and modes of implied communication – i.e., if you're your humble Curmudgeon – you laugh, but you jot down the incident for use in a future essay about semantic dissimulation.

     Yes, I really am that monomaniacal about words and how they’re used to convey meanings or conceal them. And today you, Gentle Reader, are the beneficiary. Don’t you feel lucky?

---

     Every word in the English language has an exact meaning, and no two of them have the same one. “Rule” and “guideline,” in the above segment, are today’s focus. Obviously they refer to different standards for behavior. A rule has hard boundaries: there are no thou shalt nots that can become well, okay, just this once. A guideline allows for unspecified exemptions, awarded according to someone’s personal judgment.

     A rule’s boundaries are only real if they’re enforced by prescribed penalties. If there’s no penalty, then there’s no rule. He who claims to abide by a rule yet allows himself to violate it without suffering a penalty – indeed, without even a conscience pang – is lying to you. He might have a guideline; he certainly doesn’t have a rule.

     (I once became incredibly incensed at a Catholic priest who characterized the Ten Commandments as “guidelines.” I told his pastor about it. He never did it again as far as I’m aware. Think about what his characterization would imply before passing on.)

     Just recently, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, in public, that YouTube, a Google subsidiary, would start restricting content that doesn’t violate its published standards. Clearly, those standards aren’t rules. Consider, by analogy, a traffic cop who tickets a driver for driving “too fast” even if his radar gun reports the poor guy as having been within the speed limit, and you’ll get the idea.

     The tech giants are increasingly revealing themselves as bound by no rules. They certainly don’t regard themselves as bound by the ones they promulgate for the rest of us. What they like, they’ll carry, promote, monetize, and so forth; what they don’t, they’ll forbid, demonetize, or “shadow ban” — and there is no appeal from their whims.

     This is at the heart of the arguments over whether the federal government should impose regulations – real, enforceable rules – on Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other companies that, up to this point, have been allowed to posture as open to all, tolerant of content that falls within openly promulgated standards, and are therefore immune to laws and regulations that pertain to “publishers” who exercise the privilege of censorship.

---

     The case of greatest immediate interest involves one of the most completely benevolent yet widely despised organizations in the U.S.: Lila Rose’s pro-life group Live Action. Recently, for reasons that have yet to become perfectly clear, Pinterest classified Live Action’s outreach materials as pornography and banned them. James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas delved into this affair:

     YouTube immediately banned the video above. As O’Keefe himself put it, apparently investigative journalism doesn’t meet YouTube’s community standards. (The video has since been re-uploaded to YouTube by a third party.)

     What does this signify? Does YouTube have rules, guidelines, or merely personal whims exercised as it pleases its insiders to do so? Should YouTube continue to get away with such behavior in contravention of its supposed standards, what message will that deliver to the rest of Big Tech, most particularly the “social media” companies that constitute the contemporary “town square?”

     Alternative, freedom-of-expression-oriented services such as Gab and BitChute should beware. They’ve been targeted for takedown by the forces behind the practices at Google, YouTube, Pinterest, et alii, precisely because they don’t censor or suppress content their owners and administrators disagree with. If the Left-colonized behemoths of Big Tech can’t break them, the Left’s next step will be to try to infiltrate them and colonize them, just as they’ve infiltrated, colonized, and conquered Google and the rest from within. Remember Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics. This process is founded on the essentials of human motivation: what we prize most, we are most willing to labor for. Like the Peter Principle, Parkinson’s Laws, and The Law of Unintended Consequences, it never sleeps.

     Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom – and freedom of expression is the first freedom of all.

Gnosticism, Again - No, Really

That Claim of Specialness, that infects Elites of Every Age.

Gnosticism is not a new heresy. But, in Modern Life, it blooms again every decade or so.

Here's what that philosophy is, from the mouth of the source. Note what the initial premise of it is:

All religious traditions acknowledge that the world is imperfect. Where they differ is in the explanations which they offer to account for this imperfection and in what they suggest might be done about it. Gnostics have their own -- perhaps quite startling -- view of these matters: they hold that the world is flawed because it was created in a flawed manner.

So, God's creation is inherently flawed. They hold themselves worthy to criticize Him. If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about their arrogance, nothing else will.

Their way of explaining all this is to posit Lesser Gods:

The basic Gnostic myth has many variations, but all of these refer to Aeons, intermediate deific beings who exist between the ultimate, True God and ourselves. They, together with the True God, comprise the realm of Fullness (Pleroma) wherein the potency of divinity operates fully. The Fullness stands in contrast to our existential state, which in comparison may be called emptiness.

They believe that Knowledge is the ultimate aim.

Gnostics do not look to salvation from sin (original or other), but rather from the ignorance of which sin is a consequence. Ignorance -- whereby is meant ignorance of spiritual realities -- is dispelled only by Gnosis, and the decisive revelation of Gnosis is brought by the Messengers of Light, especially by Christ, the Logos of the True God. It is not by His suffering and death but by His life of teaching and His establishing of mysteries that Christ has performed His work of salvation.

Ever wonder where that disdain for Christian rules of conduct comes from? The idea that it's terrible to put the 10 Commandments on the walls of public buildings?

Wonder no more:

If the words “ethics” or “morality” are taken to mean a system of rules, then Gnosticism is opposed to them both. Such systems usually originate with the Demiurge and are covertly designed to serve his purposes. If, on the other hand, morality is said to consist of an inner integrity arising from the illumination of the indwelling spark, then the Gnostic will embrace this spiritually informed existential ethic as ideal.

Lest you believe that all of the above is from a religious tract designed to cast Gnosticism in the worst possible light, I should tell you that ALL of the quotes are from a Gnostic bishop.

Here is the standard Christian take on the heresy, along with a LOT of history about the philosophy.

A more comprehensible explanation of the philosophy is here - it's also a LOT more light-hearted (and, perhaps for that reason, more memorable).

Is anyone thinking through this sanctions stuff?

If Mr. Lavrov is right, thanks to Washington's indiscriminate use of sanctions against Russia, China and other nations could result in the end of the U.S. dollar hegemony.^[1]

Or is our foreign policy so awesome that the world admires the justice and cleverness of our approach? Really? Is the dollar's ceasing to be the world's reserve currency something that's a trivial matter to us? Our "experts" are apparently working overtime to make that happen.

New motto for the U.S. Department of State:"Filthy foreigners. Obey."

Notes
^[1] "Washington's Duplicitous Approach to Russia and Crimea and It's Unintended Consequences." By Viable Opposition, 6/7/19.

A Dollop Of Reinforcement

     Every now and then, someone who’s read one of my books actually, demonstrably “gets it.” Note the “demonstrably” part. I’m sure there are other readers who “get it” but don’t bother to let me know. I cherish them equally. However, it’s the ones that express their revelations who provide me with the reinforcement a writer needs. One reported in just yesterday evening:

     [Porretto] attempts to ask questions along the lines of "what should a good person do in this particular situation?"

     Exactly. That is my reason for this enterprise, my answer to the question “At an age when you could justifiably declare yourself forever finished with productive work and dedicate your remaining years to relaxation, the enjoyment of the lighter pleasures, and chasing pretty women in short skirts and high heels downhill, why have you chosen instead to do this agonizing, time-consuming, monstrously difficult thing?”

     It’s to get the reader thinking.

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     Most people make the overwhelming majority of their decisions without thinking. I can’t fault anyone for that. Thinking is strenuous. It takes time and effort away from other things that might seem more urgent. Worst of all, it can lead you in the wrong direction. As Robert A. Heinlein wrote in Glory Road:

     Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won’t work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.

     The wrong premises will lead to the wrong conclusions every time – and it’s remarkable how seductive certain wrong premises can be. As Arthur Herzog wrote in The B.S. Factor, a paranoid is just a logician with a fractured premise.

     Part of our inheritance is a vast trove of “pre-made decisions” that apply nicely to a great many known situations. The child’s learning process is largely about absorbing those lessons. Because those decisions have been tested against the situations they fit many times, we can rely upon them – something we often learn by attempting to “go our own way” in such a situation and getting our fingers burned in the process.

     But that inheritance covers only a portion of the human experience. There are infinitely more possibilities than any amount of received wisdom can cover. When such a possibility arises, it’s necessary to think.

     The Futanari Saga is the most challenging of all my fiction to date. It tackles situations many persons would recoil from considering, some of which are active elements in our current sociopolitical milieu. It embeds several speculative elements – the existence of genetically (rather than surgically) produced futanari; human cloning; Rachel MacLachlan’s desire-control technology; Fountain’s apparent miracle-working – but I wrote it principally in the hope that those speculations might help to illuminate some current, real-world controversies.

     Any light arises from the reader’s decision to think: to apply his premises and his logical powers to the unprecedented situations into which I throw my Marquee characters. Without that, the stories are merely transient entertainment, and perhaps not particularly satisfying entertainment at that. But the possibility, however slender, that I could get people thinking about current controversies from an entirely new perspective is why I decided the effort would be worthwhile.

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     At the completion of each novel I kick back for a few weeks, mostly to recover from the effort, but also to consider certain questions afresh:

1. Am I entertaining my readers or just pontificating at them?
2. What would make my stories more entertaining?
3. Am I “finished?”

     The answers are never perfectly certain. They can seem more nebulous after the release of a novel than before it. But I must face them squarely, for the reasons I outlined in the first segment.

     If, by contriving novel situations with a degree of relevance to real life and putting believable characters into them, I can get a few readers to think more actively and broadly than before, I’ll answer Question #3 above with a resounding “No!” I’ll keep going. Of course that compels me to face the question “If I’m not ‘finished,’ then what comes next?” But that can wait until I’ve emptied a few more bottles of Harvey’s.