Nothing says 'landslide win' like 25,000 troops guarding your inauguration and a wall around your offices. Nothing.Comment by Zorch on "McConnell Sparks GOP-Split Talk, Claims 'Mob Was Fed Lies...Provoked By Trump.'" By Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge, 1/20/21.
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Pearls of expression.
UPDATE - Bill Gates Wins RL Farmville Game, And WE LOSE!
Guess he got addicted to that Facebook Farmville app and decided to win IRL.
Also, just noticed that today - 1/20/2021 - is a palindrome.
After I finally, really woke today (I went back to be after I posted this) I started to actually think about the aim of this takeover of land.
Gates will partner with the Big Food Companies, getting a good-sized foothold in the marketplace. Not a monopoly, but near.
SUDDENLY, a virus will be discovered, that is a DANGER to the food supply. It will be carried by seeds - EXCEPT for the seeds of a single hybrid! Which will be available, at first, from a single company (or, perhaps, SEVERAL of the largest companies).
Strictly because of this EMERGENCY, the government of Biden-Harris - VERY RELUCTANTLY - will be forced to OUTLAW use of any other variety for these plants. Violators will be fined, and - if they CHOOSE to use UNAPPROVED SEEDS (the heirloom kind that can be saved and re-used) - THEIR FARMS will be forfeited to COMPLIANT NON-KULAKS.
TPTB MAY carve out an exception for a few groups (the Amish and others), but probably not. They will likely be forced to stop using the heritage techniques of their community, and become dependent on the public.
Protesters will be met with force (WHAT a surprise!). It will be illegal to have a garden that uses non-approved seeds. If resistance in a group (perhaps those White Supremacists?) is great, ANY garden activity will become illegal.
Problem solved. No more unapproved sources of food.
Or, for that matter, pot. The USA will start importing from Mexico, only the finest hybrid-seed pot. That will eliminate a source of income for Non-Party dissidents.
I haven't figure out just how they are going to shut down home distilling/brewing, but - considering that the products are made with substances derived from seeds - I imagine they will figure out a way.
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
Thieves’ Guilds
If you’ve read any of David Eddings’s fantasies, you might have encountered the concept expressed by the title of this piece. And if you’re moderately well educated, you’re aware of the principal function of a guild. That gives Eddings’s notion a particularly piquant irony.
Medieval occupational guilds existed to protect their members from occupational competitors. They often possessed a de facto legal privilege to use force to do so. That made them extensions of the State: a status for which they often paid a heavy fee to the “official” rulers.
Today we don’t have guilds of that sort. Instead we have licensure: The State plays arbiter over who can offer what services to whom, and extracts a fee from those it permits to operate. In effect, it steals one of the peaceable man’s rights – the right to earn a living as best he can – and sells it back to him...or not. Over the century behind us, licensure has expanded to cover more than 1100 different occupations.
Very few significant occupations remain unaddressed by licensure. However, there is one unlicensed occupation of massive significance...the most lucrative of all.
No one needs a license to run for elective office. Whether it’s local, state, or federal, the requirements for assuming an elective office are spelled out in plain English in the relevant Constitution or charter. Normally, they reduce to three:
- The candidate must be at least X years old.
- He must be a citizen of the United States (to become president, a “natural born” citizen).
- He must reside in the relevant locality (and in some cases, must have done so for a minimum interval).
A candidate who attains elective office can begin to steal at once.
What’s that you say? A public office is a public trust? Such offices should be occupied solely by men of unquestionably high character? I can’t disagree. But all too often, it turns out to be exactly the other way around.
Consider the percentage of our federal legislators that are exceedingly rich men. Many of them didn’t become rich until they were elected to Congress. And despite Honore de Balzac’s fervent declaration, while it isn’t quite true that “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime,” you could bet on it without going against the odds.
The principal attraction of political office is power. However, more often than not those who acquire such power will use it to benefit themselves and their families materially. The corruptocrat who will be inaugurated into a stolen office tomorrow at Noon is only the most prominent example before us. His political mentor, who is likely to use him as a puppet, was himself no slouch in that business.
Allow me to recount a tale from an old book: Quentin Reynolds’s book Courtroom, a legal biography of the great defense lawyer Samuel Leibowitz, who later became a judge in the Brooklyn courts. The segment I have in mind concerns the murder trial of one Joseph Scutellaro, a building contractor who operated in the 1930s and 1940s in Hoboken, New Jersey. At that time, political power in Hoboken was tightly gripped by the McFeeley family, described by Reynolds as follows:
The McFeeley family represented the Hague machine in Hoboken. The McFeeley family? Well, there was Mayor Bernard J. McFeeley; his brother, Police Chief Edward J. McFeeley; Police Captain Bernard McFeeley Jr.; Police Lieutenant Dennis McFeeley; James McFeeley, contractor; and David and Joseph McFeeley of the Hoboken Law Department.
Broadly, in that period you had to have the good will of the McFeeleys to get anywhere or do anything of even modest consequence in Hoboken. The demonstration:
Joseph Scutellaro, a small, dark, intense-eyed man, also lived in the city of Hoboken. He and his father operated a small building concern. They were prosperous in a modest way and their future seemed assured. Then father and son made a grave mistake. Frank Barletta, a member of the City Commission, broke with the McFeeley machine and ran as a Republican. Both Joseph and his father campaigned for Barletta. But Barletta lost and so did everyone active in his campaign. Suddenly the Scutellaros found that they couldn’t get any contracts. If they did manage to pick up a small job here and there, the people engaging their services found they couldn’t obtain the necessary building permits at City Hall. Finally not a single vestige of a once-prosperous business remained. No other contractor would hire either of them.
The story gets worse from there. Without going into details, the Scutellaros were even denied public relief. Poormaster Harry Barck, a loyal cog in the McFeeley machine, simply refused to disburse it to them despite repeated applications. In consequence the whole Scutellaro family, which included two minor children, neared death by starvation. When Scutellaro appealed personally to Barck, the Poormaster suggested that Scutellaro’s wife become a prostitute.
The tale doesn’t end there. Joseph Scutellaro was arrested and tried for the murder of Poormaster Harry Barck. Despite Leibowitz’s efforts, he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to two years in prison. What became of his family is unrecorded.
Sometimes it seems the world is wholly made of irony. As its substance is at least one-third nickel-iron amalgam, what remains is hardly an obstacle.
These past four years, we have enjoyed the tenure of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. Trump is one of two presidents in the past century to attain that office without having held any other elective or appointive public office; the other was Dwight D. Eisenhower. He’s also the first man in at least a century to leave that office a poorer man than when he arrived in it.
Trump campaigned as a political outsider, one who would “drain the swamp” that the federal government had become. He strove mightily to do so, and despite considerable opposition from the swamp-dwellers and their political protectors, he achieved a great deal. But he never had the allegiance of the political Establishment: the men and women who deemed federal power to be theirs by right. Given his outsider status, he could not have imagined that they would approve of him...and they did not.
We have witnessed the Establishmentarian rejection of Trump and all he represents. The silent acquiescence of a great part of the Republican elite to the theft of the presidency makes clear that while there is no “official” licensure for elective office, the unofficial mechanisms of Washington were incensed by his rise and determined to see him fall.
Trump ran for president knowing that it would be so. He knew that he, his whole family, and every element of his many enterprises would come under attack. He knew that should he win, the attacks would escalate to previously unimagined heights. He accepted that that would be the price.
But the price might not have been levied in full quite yet. The Establishment doesn’t merely want to see Trump removed from office; it also wants to prevent, in perpetuity, any other outsider candidate from doing what Trump did: The privilege of stealing from the public must be reserved to us and us alone! The most effective way to deter non-Establishment candidates for high office is to present them with the prospect of paying an exorbitant price.
What the thieves’ guild we call the political Establishment has in mind for Trump, his family, and his business interests once he’s departed the White House can easily be imagined, in magnitude if not in all its details. Pray for him.
Clarity is achieved.
The left has never tried to solve any problem, only capitalize on them. After all, they are trying to destroy the country as founded, not fix it. They aren't going to start now.Comment by RexSeven on "Now, The Left Owns It All." By Pat Buchanan, ZeroHedge, 1/19/21.
Pears of expression.
Liberals who implored us to understand the grievances of the rioters, looters and arsonists last summer have become sudden converts to the church of law and order."Now, The Left Owns It All." By Pat Buchanan, ZeroHedge, 1/19/21 (emphasis removed).Elites who had condoned the smashing of statues and monuments to Columbus, Washington, Jefferson and Jackson as a needed cleansing of our hateful history have declared themselves sickened that Trumpists would desecrate the temple of democracy.
Had it been antifa or BLM that carried out the invasion, not one statue would have been left standing in Statuary Hall, and we would have been instructed that it was slaves who had, after all, built the Capitol building.
Monday, January 18, 2021
Remembering remembering MLK
No, that's not a typo; one of my strongest memories concerning MLK is about the memorial service that was held at UT. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of students sitting on the ground in front of the Tower to listen to the speakers, and I was in the middle of that crowd.
When a speaker announced, "We are ALL guilty of Martin Luther King's death," I stood up and made my way out of the audience.
For years I felt modestly proud that I had stood up to groupthink and collective guilt. But recently I've been thinking that the important part of that memory is: Nobody else walked out.
My generation has not served freedom well.
May I Suggest a Course in Alphabetizing?
It's the kind of skill they used to teach in those classes on Office Procedures - how to file things so they don't get lost.
Evidently, the guys at the DOJ did NOT take those classes.
Perhaps the folks at Sesame Street might add those to its offerings on Letters of the Alphabet.
Here's a link to the full Alphabet, in order, just for those who are Challenged in that skill. With cute little Muppets to help them remember.
Amateur Radio Warning
ARRL - the American Radio Relay League, the organization that generally interacts with the FCC regarding radio communications between amateurs. has posted a warning regarding use of radio communications to commit crimes (defined by whom?), and that any such use will be followed by prosecution, fines, confiscation of equipment, etc.
This would be a Duh! No Brainer moment, except for the fact that the federal government, in its Deep State arms, tends to smear a wide range of legally-protected communications as seditious, criminal, and Not-To-Be-Engaged-In. The message is dated 1/17/221.
Just wanted to give everyone a heads-up, given that we had discussed permissible communications alternatives on this blog. I don't believe that I ever suggested using them in a crime of any kind. Just as an alternative way to keep in communication with loved ones/neighbors, in the event of a communications blackout.
FWIW - no, of course, you should be using them for legal purposes. Having said that, I really don't see a problem for the licensed amateur. The radios aren't controlled items; anyone can buy one, without having to show a license.
Yet.
Dangerous Ideas
If you write in the speculative genres—fantasy, horror, and science fiction—you might be there to play with ideas. Those are places where such play is far more acceptable than in mainstream fiction. It was the lure of such ideas, and the possibilities that follow from them, that led me to concentrate on those genres.
But some ideas are more dangerous than others. Sometimes the danger isn’t apparent to the writer until someone else—an “alpha” reader, perhaps—calls it to his attention.
It’s more complicated than it appears. A particular idea might not be dangerous to everyone. Rather, it might threaten only those readers with specific convictions. So a story released to a general audience might be wildly applauded by some for its “daring,” while other readers condemn it as an abomination and its creator as a villain.
Here's another complication: what we currently call “political correctness.” If a writer dares to offend the convictions of the PC enforcers, shortly thereafter he’ll know of their displeasure. Displeasure? They’ll call the wrath of the Furies down on his head. They’ll call him, in the charming idiom of an old friend, everything but white. And they’ll do whatever they can to prevent his tale from being read by others.
Ironically—hellishly so—what’s “politically correct” changes over time. A century ago it was unacceptable to say that you approve of intermarriage between the races. If you’ve read The Great Gatsby, you’re already aware of this. Today it’s the exact opposite, as are many other ironclad dogmas from the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.
So there are many dangerous ideas floating about, depending on your target reader and his ability to tolerate departures from what he already believes or “knows.” Writers who plan to publish through a conventional publishing house must be aware of the degree of danger they’ll be allowed. Indies have a somewhat different row to hoe. Indeed, we might be indies precisely for the freedom to write dangerously...perhaps even to offend.
Who has a dangerous idea or two percolating in his head at the moment? What kind of reader would deem it unacceptably offensive to what “everybody knows”—and what kind of reader would welcome it as a breath of fresh air in a stultifying, closed-minded intellectual environment?
Sunday, January 17, 2021
It will pass like a dream.
My title for this is a line out of the song below which more aptly suits my mood these days.
"Many are the ways of man but the will of the Lord will prevail" is also a thought made for troubled spirits. As is "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding." Then there's the story of Icarus.
Not exactly Enlightenment fare.
Such perspectives are a useful fallback view and excellent reminders of the truth of the maxim "Just because you can doesn't mean you should." Reason and experience are now obviously mere background noise in the West and we can take to heart Napoleon's idea that one should never interfere with one's opponent when he's making a mistake. If our enemies want to inject political crack in their veins it's not as though they haven't been warned. So we shall see how this all plays in Bozeman and Pascagoula.
In the meantime we can enjoy the perspective of some of our friends who are woke as to different realities.
The title of the song is "My native land in the sky."
"Auditing" the Election
No they did NOT audit the election - they didn't even make a pretence of doing so.
Larry Correia, an actual accountant who has seen many audits, explains it all to you. I can't possibly do his explanation justice, so just follow the link.
And, for those who are on the So-Shall Media sites, put a link or two there. Maybe his words will make a dent in the Rampant Stupidity of the Left and Their Allies (I WISH!).
As for the rest of us, enjoy the last relatively calm weekend before The Deluge of Hate and Stupid that will follow. Oil your guns. Plan your garden. Inventory your provisions. Buy those critical parts that will keep your homestead running in a prolonged siege.
And don't forget to download all books/information you want to keep, should you lose the internet or some parts of it. Having a Kindle is good (for me, with a weak wrist, it has been a blessing). But, as the long-ago incident with 1984 being removed by Amazon - a paid-for book that was legally bought - proved, you really DON'T own an e-book. You just have the use of it on their platform, IF they deem it acceptable.
Where possible, get a hard copy of anything essential. Make sure that you download for offline reading, if you can (some of the licenses allow this). There are some programs that are said to do it for you, but the links I've clicked on seem (mostly) to be dead. Here's one that is said to work (I haven't tested it yet). Let me know of your experience in the comments, if you have tried it.
Fears
Many fear. Few are entirely aware of why.
Three things determine all human action:
- Desires,
- Fears,
- Beliefs.
These are the motivators. They and they alone animate all our decisions and subsequent actions. They are pre-logical: that is, they form the bedrock of human existence from which reasoning of any sort must begin.
But the motivators themselves proceed from a still deeper source: our perception of objective reality, which C. S. Lewis called the Tao:
The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. 'In ritual', say the Analects, 'it is harmony with Nature that is prized.' The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being 'true'.
This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as 'the Tao'.
But if the Tao comprises all of objective reality, then it contains more than just what we seek, enjoy, and strive to preserve. What we fear emerges from the Tao, as well. For objective reality is not benevolently disposed toward Man in all its forms and aspects. One of its variable, not-always-benevolent aspects is Man himself.
These days, there is much to fear. Usurpers have captured the federal government of these United States. Their intentions, as far as we can know them, amount to shredding the Constitution de facto and ruling by force alone. Naked power lust undergirds everything they do and have done. Anyone who dares to criticize them is their blood enemy, whom they will destroy if they can.
But there is this as well: they fear us:
In the days leading up to the Biden inaugural, the nation’s capital has been turned into an occupied military zone like Baghdad. Armed troops authorized to use lethal force are manning checkpoints to enter and leave downtown Washington, D.C. Green Zone and Red Zone perimeters have been established. Several bridges into the city from neighboring Virginia are scheduled to be closed next week for the inaugural.
Quoth William Jacobson:
You don’t need 25,000 armed National Guard troops to protect an inauguration, and you certainly don’t need that and more to protect a mostly virtual inauguration.
Garrisoning the city in advance of a “mostly virtual inauguration” certainly seems like a fear-driven action. But fear of what?
There are some possibilities. One is that this is a deliberate overreaction as a show of force to deter anyone even thinking about causing a problem. In a rational world, given the Capitol Hill riot, that would be an obvious explanation.But this massive military show of force smacks of protecting against a threat that has not yet been disclosed publicly. They seem to be planning against a military mutiny. That’s how it feels.
Festung Washington, indeed.
When your nation’s capital is transformed from a relatively ordinary urban zone to a walled, fortified citadel, you no longer live in anything resembling a representative republic. We may justifiably fear what they have in mind – and history speaks eloquently of what tyrants do with the power they seize. This garrisoning of Washington screams that the Usurpers fear the very people they claim the authority to rule.
We can use that.
Keeping the Usurpers in a state of fear might help to impede their plans. Festung Washington, though established to exclude us, can also be used to confine them. After all, they and their bureaucrats can’t go everywhere surrounded by a military guard. There simply aren’t enough soldiers to do so. American patriots are ubiquitous – and we constitute a soldiery of our own.
So we must keep the Usurpers in fear. We must repeat mercilessly that we know the 2020 election was stolen. We must publicize the evidence of their crimes at every opportunity. We must emphasize that we intend to resist their ukases.
It might have repercussions, especially for those most vocal in the effort. But the game is now about who fears whom, and to what degree. If we can master our fears, we can exploit theirs.
The Roman imperial army was greatly feared by those whose lands the Empire colonized. Their motto, whether or not it was spoken openly, was Oderint dum metuant: “Let them hate us, as long as they fear us.” They made sure of it, by reliable methods.
American patriots should not care that the Usurpers hate us. That they should hate us who oppose them and want to see them cast down is only natural; you might say it’s embedded in the Tao. But hatred by itself is impotent. We should care that they fear us – and we should stoke their fears by the most reliable methods.
Give it some thought.
Saturday, January 16, 2021
National Discourse Chronicles 2021-01-16
Just now, things are looking bleak. If you feel the same, I’m sure you know your reasons. But they might not be the same as mine. My malaise is because we’re letting ourselves be atomized and bludgeoned into silence.
One of the oldest and most consistently intelligent of blogs in the Right is the venerable American Thinker. Its comments section has frequently been as informative and thoughtful as its articles. But that comments section is going away:
On January 14, American Thinker founder Thomas Lifson published a blog post about shutting down the comment section. An update to the post said it was either that or shut down the website. AT appears to be very worried about the comments they are getting. The blog post didn’t explain anything. It did say people who read AT are upset about the elimination of the comments, but it didn’t dissuade them.
From Lifson’s post announcing the change:
Because AT lacks the ability to monitor comments in real time, and because our position that comments are a forum, not something we publish, is being called into question, we can no longer publish comments.We take this action with a heavy heart.
As our Gentle Readers are surely aware, The Federalist did the same some time back, and for the same reason: certain sentiments being expressed in the comments were being used to attack it through “lawfare,” potentially leading to the destruction of the site.
Comments sections are becoming rare among Right-inclined sites for that reason.
Its support for finding and communicating with others of like mind has been one of the great benefits of the two-way World Wide Web. Comments sections have been a major component of that support. But one by one, they’re going away as Leftists seek them and threaten the site owners with expensive lawsuits and threats of other legal entanglements. The largest Right-inclined sites have been the first targets. When faced with the prospect of prolonged, very expensive legal actions, few are willing to stand their ground.
If you’ll give a few moments of your time to Breitbart’s “Great Purge” section, you’ll get a good sense for the evils abroad. Tellingly, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor says that claims that the election was stolen are not “protected free speech” — a position that, despite its absolute falsity, is being echoed by many other Leftists and Left-inclined sites.
It’s a sign of something that Pennsylvanians would elect such an arrogant idiot to the second-highest executive position in their state. Something not too good. But I digress.
This morning, John Hinderaker weighs in:
Democrats are making extraordinary efforts to suppress all discussion of whether Joe Biden actually won the 2020 presidential election. In fact, they go even farther: they want to suppress all discussion of the extent to which voter fraud occurred. That naturally makes me want to write about voter fraud, and who really won the election.First, this question: why are the Democrats so hysterical in their insistence that fraud not be mentioned? One reason is obvious. Joe Biden will take office under a cloud, since close to half of all Americans doubt that he really won the election. The Democrats want to stamp out such doubts to preserve Biden’s authority as president.
But there is a second reason that may be more important. The Democrats want the lax voting procedures that prevailed in 2020 to continue in the future. They know that efforts will be made in many states to improve ballot integrity, and they want those efforts to fail. By rendering all discussion of voter fraud out of bounds, they hope to forestall reforms that would make it harder for them to cheat, or enable cheating, in the future.
I’m sure Hinderaker’s assertions are accurate. Add to them another, which has been mentioned in discussions of other Left-promulgated lies:
When the truth is plain and open,
You can break him to harness
Through his own sense of humiliation.
It won’t stop with censorship of our convictions and opinions. It never does.
Brendan Eich could tell you about what happens to anyone the Left targets. He dared to donate to a California campaign to recognize marriage as applying solely to unions of one man and one woman. You can read about the scurrilous attacks on Eich for yourself. I’m not going to propagate the viciousness of activist homosexual Leftists determined to utterly destroy marriage and its defenders any further than that link.
As of today, Parler founder John Matze can tell a similar tale:
A new court filing on Friday from the legal team of Parler, an alternative social media platform favoured by conservatives in the US, has revealed that its CEO John Matze and his family are now in hiding after facing death threats and security breaches."Matze himself, as the CEO of the company Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to vilify, has had to leave his home and go into hiding with his family after receiving death threats and invasive personal security breaches," read the filing....
"Although AWS's motion to seal focuses only on its own employees, Parler's employees have been similarly harassed and threatened...Parler's CEO, John Matze, Jr., reports in his declaration in support of Parler's TRO motion that many Parler employees are suffering harassment and hostility, fear for their safety and that of their families, and in some cases have fled their home state to escape persecution," the filing read.
Cross the Left and it will do everything in its power to destroy you utterly – after first attempting a 1984-style “reeducation” on you:
“We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotisms was ‘Thou shalt not.’ The command of the totalitarians was ‘Thou shalt.’ Our command is ‘Thou art.’ No one whom we bring to this place ever stands out against us. Everyone is washed clean.”
That is the Left’s ideal. That is the end for which they strive.
You may be aware that I’m in the process of going to a new host for Liberty’s Torch. While Blogger has been good to me, it’s a subsidiary of Google, and Google has already shown its hard-Left character. So I’m getting out while the getting is good...hopefully, to a host that won’t turn tail and run should the Left attack this blog and / or its commenters.
There must be places where we in the Right can congregate, can exchange opinions, and can discuss methods. It is my intention that Liberty’s Torch remain such a place, for as long as I’m alive to operate, maintain, and defend it. I hope others in the Right-leaning blogosphere (what remains of it) will do the same, but we shall see. And now, I must be off to other tasks.
Have a nice day.
Friday, January 15, 2021
Another Highly Instructive Graphic
If you’ve struggled to read Herbert Marcuse’s essay “Repressive Tolerance,” which is central to the assertions, beliefs, and methods of the Left, know that you’re not alone. Others have suffered equally. But thanks to Weasel Zippers, we have a Campbell’s Condensed version that anyone can grasp:
The Marcuse essay is deliberately written in the most obscure language possible. My belief is that this wasn’t just natural to Marcuse, but deliberate, to conceal the falsehoods and fallacies at the core of his thesis. After all, he claimed that:
The elimination of violence, and the reduction of suppression to the extent required for protecting man and animals from cruelty and aggression are preconditions for the creation of a humane society.
...right at the beginning of his essay. However, he proceeds thence to rationalize all sorts of violence and repression in pursuit of Leftist ideals:
The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger. Consequently, true pacification requires the withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture. Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and 'philosophies' can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the 'marketplace of ideas' is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the 'end of ideology', the false consciousness has become the general consciousness--from the government down to its last objects. The small and powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which grant constitutional powers to those who oppress these minorities. It should be evident by now that the exercise of civil rights by those who don't have them presupposes the withdrawal of civil rights from those who prevent their exercise, and that liberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters.
Note the invocation of Marx’s “false consciousness” notion. This asserts, in the simplest terms, that Americans are wrong to think that we know our own interests. Note also the “small and powerless minorities” gambit. Who are they, who “oppresses” them, and how? Blank-out. And of course, we have “an emergency,” so there’s no time to think – we must act now!
But wait: there’s more! Marcuse wrote his drivel in 1965, when mass media was tightly centralized and entirely one-way, and when individual Americans’ means of communication were restricted to the mails and the telephone call (apart from a small number of amateur radio enthusiasts). Can you imagine how horrified he would be by the Internet, its two-way nature, and the way it’s allowed millions of patriots to find and converse with one another? Can you imagine what he would rationalize as “necessary” in light of the present “emergency?”
Hold on to the above graphic. You’ll find it exceedingly useful in the weeks and months to come. Sadly, I can guarantee it.
The Guerrilla’s Tocsin
What’s that? You think the cautionary sentiments in the pieces you’ve read here are excessive, alarmist, hyperbolic? You say we should calm down? You’re sure “it can’t be all that bad?” Sorry, Gentle Reader. It’s war to the knife, and there are no non-combatants:
Roger Stone’s wife was attacked by a leftist goon while walking her dog in her neighborhood on Thursday.
Nydia Stone was attacked so viciously that she was hospitalized and will require surgery....
“It is true that Nydia Stone was attacked by a leftist on a bicycle in front of their home and that she was already convalescing from a very bad dog bite sustained the week before and reported Broward County animal control. This re-opened a gash in her knee which required a visit to the emergency room,” [spokesman Rev. Randy] Coggins said.
Do you have a spouse, children, or a home, Gentle Reader?
If you know the term guerrilla warfare, you probably associate it with insurgencies that are too weak to confront their targets in open battle. Historically, that was the principal significance of the term. However, guerrilla tactics can be applied to any combat situation. They’re especially effective against an opponent that has a lot to defend and can’t defend all of it all the time.
Terrorism is a variant of guerrilla warfare. While the terrorist may have aims that go beyond simply defeating his opponent militarily, his tactics are parallel to those of the “conventional” guerrilla. The terrorist selects a target unlikely to be defended. He musters just enough force to do severe damage and strikes the target by surprise. If possible – it isn’t always – he gets away while his target is still reeling from the strike. The differences between the terrorist and the “conventional” guerrilla are motivational.
The attack on Nydia Stone qualifies as left-wing terrorism by guerrilla methods. The tactics were as described above. The motivation was and is to terrify major figures in the Right into silencing themselves.
Strategically, the Left seeks to destroy as many of us as it can, and to compel the rest to go into hiding. For the moment, at least, Leftists cannot do that openly, with the force of the law at their backs rather than against them. Until their strategists are certain that “law enforcement” will not act against them, they’ll rely upon stealth ambushes and vandalism.
Anyone in the Right with a significant profile could become a target.
As I’ve written before, no one has ever won a war by remaining on the defensive. When there are so many people and things to defend, the terrorist/guerrilla has a huge advantage over his opponent – especially if the defense, such as it may be, is centralized.
Centralized defense – defensive forces organized along conventional military or law-enforcement lines – will always lose to a diffuse, guerrilla-style threat. That’s the why of terrorism: it inflicts damage on the opponent without incurring open-warfare battles that would allow a centralized defense to use its forces effectively. Even if the damage is relatively slight, its emotional impact is significant. It imbues the opponent with the conviction that no one is safe.
The Left’s guerrilla tactics have been getting them what they want. Not only are they inflicting damage on the Right, at this time the media are more on their side than otherwise. Successful tactics tend to be emulated. Clearly, they must be countered, swiftly and devastatingly...but how?
The Israeli approach is to militarize the whole of the populace: “Every Israeli is a front-line soldier.” It’s a grim way to organize a society, but a small nation surrounded by a legion of blood enemies that seek its destruction has no alternatives. Israelis may not be “safe” in the customary sense, but they are armed, ready, and aware of the threats to them individually and nationally.
Abraham Lincoln spoke of something similar in his 1838 “Lyceum Address:”
At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?-- Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
The “nation of freemen” of which Lincoln spoke was a nation of armed men. In his day Americans understood that “to be free” means “to be armed.” Men habitually went about with a gun near to hand. They were not inherently violent, but they were prepared for violence. An attacker had to reckon with the high probability that he would lose his life in the attack. Moreover, the man who took it from him would be hailed as a hero who had done his community an important service.
Sad to say, things are no longer as they were in Lincoln’s time.
We speak all too easily of our rights. We lament what’s been done to them these past few decades. But a right cannot be maintained unless it is defended against those who would infringe, abridge, or destroy it. And too many Americans think that defending their rights – including their right to life – is someone else’s job. But it’s not that way and never has been.
If we wish to be free, we must once more become an armed society: one in which every able-bodied adult is presumed to be armed, ready to defend himself and others, at all times. Needless to say, our political class dislikes the idea. Armed men, jealous of their rights and aware of the threats to them, would have no truck with 99% of what the political class has done to us this century past. Besides, the attitude of dependency upon “law enforcement” to “protect us” is exceedingly useful to the Establishment. It conduces to the steady increase of the Establishment’s power over us.
Yes, there will be costs. But no one ever said that freedom comes for free, nor that it can be maintained at no cost. If you don’t think the costs are worth paying, ponder this:
My wife works for the Catholic Church. Recently, several of the nuns with whom she works have received anonymous threatening phone calls that ran something like this:
“We know you’re a Republican. Unless you change that, you won’t be voting any more.”
Such calls have been received by nuns in New York, Florida, and elsewhere. The tocsin is sounding loud and clear.
Have a nice day.
Mootness anyone?
Despite his imitation of a cheese-eating surrender monkey on the matter of challenging corruptly-generated electoral vote certifications, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) correctly notes the distinction between a constitutionally prescribed impeachment proceding and a Maxine Waters-AOC mud wrestling contest:
Cotton, in his statement, emphasized his priority on “fidelity to the Constitution,” explaining that “the Founders designed the impeachment process as a way to remove officeholders from public office—not an inquest against private citizens.”[1]I'm reminded of Gene McCarthy's characterization of a Texas barbeque as an LBJ branding party that got out of hand. So with the various zealots, bed wetters, and spoil sports in the Congress who think that an impeachment that takes less time than a visit to the Bunny Ranch in Nevada (with the same general objective let it be said) will have a half life of ten years after January 20. Good luck with that, kiddies and I hope Ronald McDonald and Bozo file a class action against each one of you for sullying the clown brand.
The Supreme Court appears to adore technicalities such as "standing" and at least one other court in the land has discovered the hair trigger version of "laches" where if a litigant delays litigating an actual case or controversy for longer than a Nancy Pelosi Brazillian blowout (is that one word or two?) he, she, or it is SOL, to use a technical legal term that has come down to us from the time of King Arthur.
At least, the Court adores technicalities that disadvantage Donald Trump. Let's see how John Roberts handles the Art. I, Sect. 3 requirement that the Chief Justice shall quote unquote preside when the President of the United States is tried. If recent history is any guide John won't blink an eye over screwing Donald Trump by presiding over the trial of President Joe Biden. No, wait! It's so confusing.
As the issue of the propriety of any "conviction" will most assuredly end up in the courts were the supposedly disqualified Mr. Trump to come back in 2024 with guns blazing, his lawyers could raise the issue of "mootness" as addressed hitherto by the Supreme Court:
Cases may be rendered moot because of a change in the status of the parties or in the law, or because of an act of one of the parties that dissolves the controversy.[2]Annnyyyway, there just is no provision in the Constitution for the conviction of a private citizen, even one previously impeached while holding office. Clearly the Constitution contemplates trials only of serving officials as is evidenced by the plain language of Art. I, Sect. 3 that "Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification . . . ." Even disqualification (with the supposedly valid congressional precedent only of a simple majority for imposition) is possible only in cases of "Judgment in Cases of Impeachment." It's an understatement to say that it would be tortured interpretation of the Constitution that removal from office is moot as to someone no longer in office but that it would still be open season on said someone in perpetuity if, in the absence of a conviction, a majority of the senate felt like imposing disqualification the next time the sacred festival of Kwaanza rolls around.
Too, if Marbury v. Madison held that duly enacted legislation could not constitutionally expand the constitutionally-defined jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, then the attempt by a mere single chamber of the Congress to expand its jurisdiction to allow the conviction (and disqualification) of a private citizen must also fail.
So let us see how the Whores of Powertown proceed.
Notes
[1] "Tom Cotton: Senate ‘Lacks Constitutional Authority’ to Proceed with Impeachment After Trump Leaves Office." By Ashley Oliver, Breitbart, 1/13/21.
[2] "Mootness: An Explanation of the Justiciability Doctrine." By U/I attorney, Congressional Research Service, 2/7/07 (emphasis added).
Thursday, January 14, 2021
Something to Specifically AVOID on January 20
Look at the extent to which they are pulling out ALL the stops.
All channels carrying it - just like the Old Days, when, if the President wanted to address the nation, you HAD to watch it. No other alternatives.
Well, that is not happening in today's America. We have alternatives. Blogs, videos that are NOT Biden, Gab-ing - the list is wide.
Assuming that the alternatives are NOT unavailable, you can easily avoid that self-pleasuring show.
And, just in case, you might want to DOWNLOAD some alternative entertainment, that could be viewed OFFLINE - video, books, games. I'm not that certain that they won't try to block alternatives to the coronation of Our Glorious New Leaders.
Recapitulation
The Fortress is having its entire heating and hot water system replaced today, which will make it a cold, waterless, generally difficult period here. Moreover, the work is scheduled to begin early, just an hour or two from now. So rather than blather in my usual fashion, allow me to present a few links and two highly instructive graphics.
First, the links:
- Leftists always attempt to exterminate their opposition.
- The pre-criminalization of the President.
- This is who they are. This is what they do.
- American “liberals” are alone in their support for this.
- I’d ask him “what was your first clue?” but...
- The atomization of Americans continues.
- Sit down and shut up, Citizen.
All good stuff, and all highly relevant to our current situation. But what nails it down are these two graphics, which have appeared at several other sites – enough so that I can no longer remember from whom I stole them:
And:
Ponder it all. And do have a nice day.
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