Introduction

First, I must say that I am surprised and pleased to be offered an opportunity to post here. I won’t do Fran the disservice of excessive hyperbole and say I sympathize with St. Peter. It more closely resembles the shock that an itinerant preacher may receive when the local pastor applauds his speech, then wordlessly gives him keys to the rectory.

I will try to confine my concerns to a more political nature, and, I guess, as an introduction, discuss myself as a political animal.  Had you asked me ten years ago, I would have told you I wasn’t one. But my deeds belied my words, and also my doxology. I talked like a relativist and acted-- more like an observant pragmatist motivated toward Higher Things.

 Because politics is ultimately about what you do, and why. What I said was more akin to the propaganda in the air all around me. I think it started out as protective coloration-- and in a rash, despairing instant I threw away what I knew to be true in favor of what I wanted to be true.

I was given further 'freedom' in this direction by the gentle assistance of a certain behavioral psychologist, who’s duties included interrogating enemy combatants during Desert Storm.  He taught me that I could not trust my perceptions, therefore I could not trust my conclusions, no matter how ineffably logical they were. I will admit I was a bright and stubborn young teen in his care-- but I had little training in defending myself against those who truly wanted to destroy my essence in  favor of curing religion.  After all, I thought he only wanted to help me.

And people wonder why I so loved the heavy, verbose  Russian authors in those days. Indeed-- I was hardly aware of the reason myself.  My most beloved favorite was two-fold: Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky and The First Circle by Solzhenitsyn. I still liked the idea that the world had an inexorable order in it whether we acknowledged it or not. I still liked that people believed in Justice-- and had a clear conception of it, and not watered down, half-mumbled niceties that made you feel good inside.   I especially loved Dostoevsky’s ability to lay  Nietzsche bare as a howling narcissist shaking an ordinary, mortal fist at the unfairness of it all.  And to think he was polite and sympathetic to do so in the guise of the arrogant but ultimately likable Raskolnikov.

Nope, this is not a literary commentary either. But I did not have much exposure to politics as a child. One of my earliest exposures to thus  was when my father bought a VCR to record a black economics professor give a talk on 60 Minutes.  These days, that doesn’t seem like much. But in those days, a VCR cost upwards of  $2,000. And that was in early eighties money, meaning far more than a week’s pay.  Some of you might recognize the timing, as the time that Thomas Sowell talked to the world about the errors inherent in price controls for housing in New York City.

So my dad tinkered for hours getting that VCR set up, fine tuning the thing by hand and what have you. Fortunately,  he did that the day before. I wasn’t sure what an economist would say that would be so important-- so ignorant was I of the power of money in those days.  But dad refused to explain, and invited me to watch, instead.

It turns out, that even if I did not remember the principles he discussed, Sowell conveyed a character that riveted itself in my mind, and indeed haunted me all my life.  And I’m not talking about characters in a novel, but character as in the shape of one. I mean as in those fine virtues that no one talks about anymore (save some few cranks in odd corners on the internet).

You see, he wasn’t without controversy in those days. They weren’t content with dismissing Sowell with a few well turned racial slurs.  Indeed, he faced down at least three different journalists on that show who tried to unseat him, tried a wide array of argument, insult and false flattery to assault that calm and sure knowledge that indeed those price controls did aggregate the poverty and homelessness problems in NYC. They tried everything, but his logic was unassailable. I vividly remember that after the last male journalist was red-faced, sweating, and practically reduced to tears by Sowell’s calm and gracious demeanor,  there was a blip in the service, and static.  The static was hypnotic as I absorbed the results. You did not see such vicious fireworks in the average interview in those days.

Soon, after a little tag letting you know your television still worked,  a new face appeared in the interview room.  She was blond, preppy, thoughtful, and actually started asking him intelligent questions. She left off trying to refute him, and gave at least a half-hearted attempt to understand him.  I was blown away by the results. Sowell not only carefully unfolded his fine garment of an argument, but Walters shone as a reporter by being a credible witness. It had gone from one of the worst to one of the best interviews I have personally ever seen.  That was probably the interview that made Barbara Walter’s career.

Because it wasn’t his argument that impressed my young mind. It was the fact that he had tolerated the insult, the rudeness, the hypocrisy, the fury, the panic, and the hatred-- and only returned a loving concern coupled with a determination to deliver truth.  And when offered the opportunity, he took it without remonstrance or complaint. You could believe what he said because he held firm with gracious calm.  That opened the gates in my heart to actually hear the argument-- but it took a fair number of repetitions of this to truly see what was true and what wasn't.  It is too easy to fall into the trap of safely thinking what you'd like to see to put up with the hardship of living up to your principals-- until you realize that your life has an expiration date.

It is always that firm and solid ground that I longed for even in the depths of the best and worst indulgences that the culture has to offer.   Whatever I said, I longed for peace, not only of heart, but of the knowledge that North would stay North, and South would not leave it’s moorings.  But to see the glory of God in front of me, I had to wander the desert for "40 years", whining and complaining about how the Almighty was leading me around in circles. For I did not hold anything that was true enough to follow with a whole heart.

“So, fine,” you say, “now we know why you are a conservative, and why you are a Catholic. Tell us why you believe in Freedom!”

It’s simple. Because with Freedom you can choose to be conservative or not, you can choose to Love, or not.  Without Natural Law, you can’t define Freedom. Without rock-solid definitions and a definable (and defensible) Truth, the word freedom is just a word- a symbol- or a sweet nothing. Those decisions only have meaning if you are truly free.  There is a third side of this triangular foundation-- that's Love, and without it, life is just more toil and hardship-- a useless sacrifice to vanity.  The trouble is, you can't nail down Love without God.

Ultimately, I think that's why Heinlein got Love wrong. He had a fine definition that sounded suspiciously like the religious one, but it went dangerously off the rails because there was no absolute reference to hold it in place. So the principles lead me to Freedom, but it was the delivery-- the demonstration of Love, that led me to truth.  The Love part just proof that the veritably true, and based on something you can use in your own life.  Something worth more valuable than even life itself-- so it shows that even fairy tales held Truth and taught Truth, just as all things that are true.

The point of these stories  and the repetitive axiomatic thinking is to show how one late-comer to Liberty was won. I will grant you that it was not the arguments that did it, but a perception of Truth as evidenced by a particular set of behaviors. No, it is not as simple as just being nice. It was having a set of ideas with the grace of supporters willing to endure great hardship-- and the preponderance of evidence in the face of ever-shifting circumstances.  Everywhere I looked-- from the Constitution, to various commentators, to the Bible, seemed to support this idea of Freedom and hold a consistent definition of Liberty-- even if the knuckleheads in power, or men with MSW degrees did not seem to agree.


I decided eventually that Love was possibly worth making mistakes and relying on my perceptions anyway. I mean-- it was either that or a Thorazine drip. And the people in my life deserved to be loved as they had loved me. And trying to gain knowledge of the world by a fuzzy feel-good consensus Just. Doesn't. Work. Even that annoying relative you can't stand deserves better.

It is easy to be disillusioned by a Democrat. For me, that happened in the Clinton Administration-- and probably before.  (To be fair, it also points to the date I was disillusioned by the Republicans, too.)
The problem is to be Romanced by Truth, when the Truth is hard, and doesn't seem to give dividends until you have already reaped it's benefits.  Which is, for me why the definition of Love is so important, and cannot (I'm sorry) be separated from politics as such.

Because most of the Left and the Great Undecided desperately want principles. They just don't know what they are, how to get them, or why they should bother. And yelling at them won't always help. I have certainly had a wake up call from a friend or a relative who informs me of my bad behavior-- but generally you have to know that you did wrong in the first place for it to have a salutary effect.  They have to know why that it is right and proper to have a right and a wrong in the first place.

Love should be more than sex or being nice, Truth should be more than (even verified) data, and Freedom should be more than license.  Because they are, whether we like it or not.  Life is better, if more difficult, when you know that. For one thing, living has value, even being a person with a small imprint has meaning.

That is why (in more ways than one) I am here today.

FYI: I should be clear that when I use Truth with the capital "T" I am not referring specifically to the Gospel. It certainly includes that, but I mean also that Freedom was a gift granted to us, and from there all that follows out of Natural Law.  From Natural Law, the Constitution is easily seen as an outline to a superior form of government, and from there everything else flows like water.

A Maxim, The Law, And The State Of The Nation

It might well be that the greatest blessing to have recently descended upon these United States is l'affaire Gregory: the exculpation, by prosecutorial discretion alone, of pseudo-journalist and tendentious Washington twit David Gregory for openly and flagrantly breaking a D.C. law that's been used to incarcerate other, entirely blameless persons. That little development has made it painfully, undeniably clear that the rule of law as it's generally understood -- i.e., that the law is above all persons and makes no exceptions for an "elite," however conceived or defined -- no longer applies in our nation.

But that doesn't capture the full, horrific absurdity of the thing. Hearken to David French's assessment:

Of course prosecuting Mr. Gregory would have been sad and — on many levels — absurd, but so is the law under which he would have been prosecuted. In fact, if absurdity were a defense to prosecutions or other adverse legal actions, an enormous swathe of our regulatory state would be swept away.

Can we even speak of the rule of law as a meaningful concept when we combine an explosive regulatory state with near-absolute prosecutorial discretion? As many others have noted, the regulatory state makes ever-more conduct — even benign conduct — unlawful, while absolute discretion grants the prosecutor the right of the King’s pardon. Overlay that legal reality with a stark red/blue divide, and the situation is ripe for the most base forms of political and personal favoritism.

French has pinned one of the most egregious, inexcusable features of our current regime:

The great majority of the "rules" that are imposed on Americans with the force of law are not "laws" in the proper sense.

They're "regulations."
Rules composed by unelected bureaucrats.
Bureaucrats whose names we're forbidden to learn.
Many of whom are issued firearms and wear them daily.
Whose jobs are protected by Civil Service rules any union would envy.

I've searched the Constitution of the United States from end to end and back again, and in only two places does it use the word "regulate:" the Coinage Clause and the Interstate Commerce Clause. That word has given birth to millions of "regulations" with the force of law, by the imposition of which nameless, faceless persons -- persons against whom private citizens have no recourse -- can enforce draconian penalties on defenseless Americans for conduct that harms no man even in its most extended implications.

Either this is absolutely indefensible or I woke up in the wrong universe this morning.

---

But wait: there's more! The luxuriance of these unlegislated laws "passed" by unelected un-legislators is compounded to an infinite degree by a circumstance for which few of us spare even an occasional thought: It doesn't matter whether we know anything at all about those "laws." At neither the state nor the federal level is any effort is made to inform the private citizenry about their issuance. Even so, we're considered bound by them, subject to their force, and exposed to punishment for violating them.

Oftentimes, we only learn about some such "law" at the moment we violate it. A fortunate few discover their vulnerability "just in the nick of time:" by asking permission to develop a recently purchased plot of land, for example. Never mind that the notion that an American must obsequiously ask permission, like a serf in a feudal realm, to do something that harms no one with an item of his own, honorably acquired property is itself execrable, a clear violation of the natural law of property and the rights pertaining to it. That's merely insult added to injury: a deadly insult atop the mortal injury to the concept of individuals' rights.

In this connection, there's an old maxim that serves our masters in good stead:

Ignorance Of The Law
Is No Excuse

I have no idea how old that maxim is. It originated long before America. Probably it was coined in Europe, when Europe could still be non-sardonically called Christendom. It didn't hang in the air, unsupported and self-justifying. It arose from a fundamental understanding of the proper role of the law: an understanding we of the Twenty-First Century have largely forgotten, but might, in the aftermath of l'affaire Gregory and the indefensible responses of politicos to the Newtown atrocity, at last succeed in recovering.

---

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 of the law are not in harmony with this intrinsic right and wrong, the law itself is criminal. [Herbert Spencer, The Proper Sphere Of Government]

Nevertheless, in the inexplicable universal votings and debatings of these Ages, an idea or rather a dumb presumption to the contrary has gone idly abroad, and at this day, over extensive tracts of the world, poor human beings are to be found, whose practical belief it is that if we "vote" this or that, so this or that will thenceforth be. Practically men have come to imagine that the Laws of this Universe, like the laws of constitutional countries, are decided by voting. It is an idle fancy. The Laws of this Universe, of which if the Laws of England are not an exact transcript, they should passionately study to become such, are fixed by the everlasting congruity of things, and are not fixable or changeable by voting! [Author unknown, cited by Herbert Spencer in The Proper Sphere Of Government]

Herbert Spencer was at one time the most popular writer in the English-speaking world. His uniquely lucid and eloquent expositions upon natural law, the moral-ethical bounds of legislated law, and the overall proper demesne of the State enlightened and uplifted millions of readers -- so much so that in his dissent in Lochner v. New York, Associate Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes felt compelled to write that "[t]he Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics." (So much for persons who look to Holmes as a champion of freedom.) As we can see from the two citations above, Spencer was unbending on the principle that legislated law that goes beyond the bounds of the natural law is unjust and pointless.

But Spencer was a man of Victorian England, a Christian nation that promulgated a standard of personal conduct and social propriety that became a model for Western Civilization. Yes. that standard was frequently violated by those with the wherewithal to get away with it; nevertheless, no one dared to claim that the standard itself was wrong, or pointless, because some persons chose not to observe it. Even the worst of Victorian sinners insisted upon the sincere inculcation of that standard in the education of his children.

Victorian England was the leading light of European Christendom. Those were the decades when England was the policeman of the oceans and the banker to the world -- when an Englishman's promise was generally deemed as trustworthy as any statement made on Earth.

The courts of Victorian England were world-renowned for probity and justice. No Victorian was permitted to claim that the law ought not to apply to him by virtue of his station, or because he was unaware of it. But the Victorians knew what Spencer had articulated to the rest of the world: to be just, a legislated law must conform to the natural law.

If legislated law conforms straitly to the natural law, then it follows that ignorance of the law really is no excuse: because any adult can deduce the law's requirements from basic moral principles every Christian child is expected to learn by heart:

• Thou shalt not murder.
• Thou shalt not steal.
• Thou shalt not commit adultery.
• Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
• Thou shalt not covet.

Murder, as Spencer has told us, is not wrong because it's against the law; it's against the law because it's wrong, and not all the peregrinations of rhetoric can make it right. But equally, property rights are not rights because the law concedes them; the law must concede them because they're written into the laws of the universe as expressed in the nature of Man. No degree of demosthenic expostulation can justify theft, fraud, or any other interference in a man's peaceful use of his honestly acquired property -- including such interferences as politicians are disposed to commit.

---

No man of our time can know the law to its full extent. Even lawyers disclaim such acquaintance with the law, which is why they specialize, often quite narrowly, in this or that aspect of the law and the practices it demands. Nor are the demands and constraints of the law, or the profusion of regulations imposed upon us with the force of law, deducible from basic moral principles as the Victorians knew them.

How, then, can it be just to penalize a man for not being aware that if his backyard is damp three days out of three hundred sixty-five, it's a federally protected "wetland" with which he is forbidden to interfere? To punish him for not knowing that a raccoon is a legally protected "fur-bearing animal" that he may not kill even at hazard to his family? Or to incarcerate him for bringing a rifle or an ammunition magazine into some state where the laws forbid anyone but its myrmidons to possess those items?

How is the innocent ignorance of a law -- a brutal, unfounded, exception-riddled, discretionarily-applied "law" made by persons who will pay no costs for its effects upon the unaware and innocent others -- not a perfect excuse?

---

Ironies, as usual, abound. In appreciation of the predictable political responses to the Newtown atrocity, Americans have gone on an armament-buying spree...yet Barack Hussein Obama claims the NRA is to blame for exciting fear. Though they all know full well that no so-called assault rifle fired even one round at Newtown, power-mongering politicians have nevertheless descended with their full fury on such weapons -- defined according to cosmetic rather than functional characteristics! -- in an effort to demonize them and vilify those of us who own them. And though David Gregory was fully aware of the laws of the District of Columbia -- indeed, he and his producers had asked the D.C. police to exempt him from prosecution for using one as a TV prop, and had been refused! -- he went willfully ahead and violated them anyway, and will receive no penalty for doing so, though D.C. has wielded those laws against utterly innocent others who've been bankrupted, imprisoned, or both.

Perhaps Obama is correct.
Perhaps America isn't a Christian nation.
A Christian nation would rise in righteous wrath against a regime that dared perpetrate such injustices.
Indeed, it would have done so long before this.
And it may do so yet.

Pray.

Penalties

At long last, a Republican Congressman is showing some cojones:

Texas Republican Rep. Steve Stockman threatened Monday afternoon that he would file articles of impeachment against President Barack Obama if he institutes gun control measures with an executive order.

Stockman warned that such executive orders would be “unconstitutional” and “infringe on our constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms.”...

“If the president is allowed to suspend constitutional rights on his own personal whims, our free republic has effectively ceased to exist,” he said.

Bravo, Congressman Stockman! But once the applause dies down, it will be time for further reflection:

• What are the odds that a majority of the House would vote to impeach Obama?
• Assuming impeachment, what are the odds that two-thirds of the Senate would vote to convict him?
• Assuming conviction, Obama would become one of the most privileged creatures on Earth, enjoying:
  • A lifelong pension and "office expenses" allotment;
  • Full-time Secret Service protection;
  • A library dedicated to him;
  • Preferential treatment of innumerable kinds (cf. Bill Clinton).

Not a bad deal for a would-be destroyer of the fundamental contract of the Republic, eh?

---

"Take him out and shoot him." -- General Dreedle

Legend has it that when Hammurabi set forth upon the creation of the world's first written legal code, he endeavored to couch each "law" in terms that would admit of broad subsequent interpretation, to give him the greatest possible latitude to exercise his personal judgment -- and his personal biases. Perhaps it's true; perhaps it isn't. But of this we may be sure: persons who seek power want power, and as much of it as possible. Once they rise to power, they become ever more impatient of any constraints upon them.

There's no such ambiguity in the Constitution of the United States. It's as lucid a document as statecraft has ever produced. It's not perfect, mind you; it's just the pinnacle of the art of law-writing as the art stands today. Never mind the poorly atomized BS that sprays continuously from federal courts about "penumbras," "emanations," and "implied powers."

But there's one thing it does lack, and that lack has become ever more conspicuously significant in the years immediately behind us: a schedule of penalties for its violation by an official who has violated its terms:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding. [Article VI, paragraph 2]

A federal official who attempts to exert a power not granted to his office by the Constitution has broken the Supreme Law of the Land. He is a lawbreaker, and of the most serious sort. Why doesn't he face any sort of punishment for his deed if he's convicted? Why doesn't he, at the very least, forfeit the "honors and emoluments" that pertain to his office? Yet there is no provision for such forfeiture, much less for any further penalty.

Is it consistent with the conception of the Constitution as "the Supreme Law of the Land" that an official whose office is derived from Constitutional authority, but who acts to violate it, should pass from his office unchastised? Not even required to forfeit the privileges that came with the office whose trust he betrayed?

Were Barack Hussein Obama to be ejected from the White House by a Senatorial conviction, for having attempted to violate Americans' rights under the Second Amendment, or for having attempted to usurp Congress's power over revenues and appropriations, would it be acceptable that he retain the perquisites of a former president of the United States?

---

"Public Office is a Public Trust" -- presidential campaign slogan of Grover Cleveland

The years after the American Civil War (a.k.a. the War Between The States, the Late Unpleasantness, etc.) were rife with political corruption, for many reasons. The corruption reached all the way to the top of the federal government, particularly during the presidential terms of Ulysses S. Grant. Yet few federal officials were punished for their transgressions under any law. The notion that a penalty other than eviction from office should apply to official malfeasance had not yet been entertained.

Because the Civil War was followed by a long period of Republican Party hegemony, the many corruption scandals tainted not both the reputations of the officials involved and that of the GOP. Indeed, one of the reasons Grover Cleveland managed to reach the presidency, first Democrat to do so since the War, was his absolutely unstained and unquestioned reputation for honesty and integrity. Republicans who attained the Oval Office after Cleveland didn't help their party's cause very much; the overreaches of Theodore Roosevelt's two terms, the scandals of the Harding years, and the ineptitude of the Hoover Administration were responsible in some measure for the tenacious grip on power exerted by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

A society that lacks official mechanisms by which to punish lawbreakers will often invent informal ones, ranging from ostracism to vigilantism. But former presidents are difficult to reach with any measure harsher than disapprobation, to say the least. Indeed, it gives one cause to wonder about the wisdom of lifetime Secret Service protection for such persons.

---

“I so, I get so tired of that trite saying,” he said. “That’s the problem. You say that why are we going to infringe on the second amendment? Well, we already do.” -- Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno

Here you have an elected official openly admitting to violating the Supreme Law of the Land. He shows no particular hesitation about it, nor any slightest degree of embarrassment. He knows full well what he's saying entitles him to public odium and more...but he does not fear it. A Democrat in Chicago, Illinois comes as close to political untouchability as any creature can get.

How much more clearly unjust could a circumstance be? Yet it's guaranteed that nothing more unpleasant than being diselected, if even that, will happen to any politician who supports anti-Constitutional legislation or executive action.

Moreno is a lowly municipal official. Yet he wields considerable power; consider his actions toward Chick-Fil-A. Is it acceptable for a man raised to political authority to escape all penalty for violations of the Supreme Law, from which any power he might wield is ultimately derived? Considering that we now routinely violate the double-jeopardy provision of the Fifth Amendment by exposing accused persons to indictment both under a state penal law, and then under federal law for the same action (cf. O.J. Simpson) for "violating the civil rights" of his victim, how can it be just that elected officials routinely escape all penalty for violating Americans' rights guaranteed by the Constitution?

And what "penalty" can the nation impose on Barack Hussein Obama for blatantly attempting the very same thing?

The Death Of Legitimacy

[The following essay first appeared at Eternity Road on July 29, 2009. In light of the Obama Administration’s multiple attempts to usurp powers far beyond anything authorized in the Constitution, it’s critical that Americans understand the difference between legality and legitimacy -- and why the federal government has lost all trace of the latter. -- FWP]

---

No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are of equal consequence, and it would be difficult for a person to choose between them.

The nature of law is to maintain justice. This is so much the case that, in the minds of the people, law and justice are one and the same thing. There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are "just" because law makes them so.

The above passage is from The Law, a tract written in 1850 by French economist and statesman Frederic Bastiat. That little book is as relevant to the United States of 2009 as it was to France of 159 years ago. The quote above goes to the heart of our political problem.

A writer of somewhat more recent vintage, Esteemed Co-Conspirator Mark Alger, has applied Bastiat's formulation most pointedly, to wit:

• The federal government of the United States derives its legitimate authority from the Constitution;
• But that government has disregarded the Constitution's constraints on its authority and activities for about a century;
• Therefore, the federal government is illegitimate.
• But a nation without a legitimate government is in a state of anarchy;
• Therefore, the United States is in a state of anarchy.

(As we mathematical types like to say, quod erat demonstrandum.)

Legitimacy as a political concept appears to have been killed off. Consider: The fundamental premise of American government, as Mark states in the post below, is that our governments have only those powers and authorities We the People explicitly grant them. Sovereignty resides in the private citizen, not the State; if We the People have not legitimized some exercise of power by explicit constitutional grant, it's illegitimate. So: Where in the Constitution was Congress granted the power to legislate on health care, or on carbon dioxide emissions? Where in the Constitution was Congress, or any part of the federal government, granted the power to nationalize large private corporations, or any other item of private property, without an eminent-domain condemnation proceeding? Where in the Constitution was Congress granted the power to delegate its lawmaking authority to unelected bureaucrats, shielded from public outrage by anonymity and Civil Service protections?

(He who points to the phrase "general welfare" had better have his body armor on; James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, said explicitly that that phrase was confined in application to the seventeen enumerated powers. Besides, if Congress can legitimately legislate on who must buy health insurance, and of what sort, and at what price, as a matter of the "general welfare," what could possibly lie beyond its authority? What powers are denied to it, and why?)

Your Curmudgeon has asked those questions of many a left-liberal, and he's never received a courteous answer. The overwhelmingly most common response has been foam-flecked denunciation. The prevalent attitude among persons who approve of the situation is "Go ahead, try to do something about it." In other words, all that matters is the power to impose one's will.

The constitutional federated republic once known as the United States of America no longer exists. The consensus on legitimate authority that gave birth to it has been discarded. In its geographic place is a realm ruled by force and fear.

Anarchy is, indeed, the consequence of the death of legitimacy.

***

For something like a century, Americans have labored under a misconception about "democracy." Specifically, far too many of us consider the United States a democracy, in which whatever proposed prescriptions or proscriptions can command majority support are therefore legitimately made into laws. The felony is compounded by our system of representation by elected officials, for that makes it possible to conceal from ourselves the moral identity between untrammeled majoritarianism and lynch-mob rule.

The United States was never intended to be a democracy. It uses quasi-democratic electoral mechanisms to select its officeholders; that is all. But those officeholders do not acquire thereby any special powers beyond what the federal Constitution, or the lesser charters subordinate to it, might grant them.

The democratic fallacy has its worst effects at the top of the pyramid: the presidency. The Constitution specifies the powers of the president quite narrowly:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.

But by the exploitation of the democratic fallacy, and by the implication that the president, the only officeholder subjected to a nationwide vote, is therefore the best representative of the will of the American people, the president has been elevated to a sort of monarch. The president routinely involves himself in legislation, often submitting bills to Congress directly or through a proxy. He stumps the country for this or that law or measure, often commandeering television time to pitch his views to us. He pretends that foreign policy, down to the minutest details of America's interactions with other nations, belongs in his hands alone. He postures as if his installation in the Oval Office somehow legitimizes whatever he might happen to do.

As of 1951, the president has arrogated the power to take America to war without Congressional authorization.

The complaints about a "unitary executive" that arose from the Left during George W. Bush's terms of office aren't being heard today. That irony hasn't yet registered widely enough. Even if it had, it would pale in comparison to the phenomenon of the unlimited executive, free to impose its will on anyone and anything inside the United States and quite a lot outside it, that we endure today.

And all of it, and all the excesses of our legislatures and courts at every level of government, derives from the democratic fallacy: the notion that the assent of 50% plus one can legitimize anything it pleases.

***

The phrase "legitimate authority" has appeared in these pages before. In practical terms, it's always meant "what the subjects have gotten used to from their rulers." But that interpretation of the phrase clashes irresolubly with the constitutional traditions of these United States.

It's morally mandatory that we be candid about our premises. We cannot logically maintain that the Constitution is the source of all legitimate authority, and that the federal government can exceed the powers granted it by the Constitution yet remain legitimate. The first position compels us to abjure Washington and all its works -- in the words of Ol' Remus, to "run -- not walk -- from any avoidable association with it." The second tacitly accepts a Regime of Force Majeure, in which whoever has the most firepower gets to do as he pleases, the rest of us have to grin and bear it, and questions of legitimacy are ruled permanently out of order. In other words, an anarchy.

We must choose one position or the other. Whichever we choose will imply what sort of nation this will be in the decades to come.

Which roll of the dice would you like?

I know of NO police officer in the United States who has a personal interest in providing protection to me. To him, protecting me is just part of his job description. However conscientious he may be in carrying out his duty to protect the general public from attack, the bottom line is that his primary role in any attack on me will be to lay out yellow crime scene tape, count spent shell casings, interview witnesses, and try to catch the scum who injured me or killed me.

Period.

If I had had a concealed carry permit when I was a college professor, I can assure you that not ONE of my lovely students would have been killed by some genetic mistake masquerading as a human being. And now, if anyone wants to take me on personally, I will make it ruinously expensive for him to try to injure me or those I love.

And I will take care of business long before the first police siren is heard in the distance.

And I've only just written about the "self defense from criminals" aspect of my Second Amendment rights. As Mr. Ventura makes clear, the Second Amendment is not about my right to go duck hunting. And just who do these people think they are that I should disarmed and be a sitting duck for scum who laugh at gun laws?

Words Fail Me Dept.

I cannot believe anyone could be as stupid as the woman featured in this short video clip:

Stupid enough to have 15 children out of wedlock
Stupid enough to become engaged to a felon
And stupid enough to claim that "somebody has to pay for mah fifteen kids."

And people accuse me of heartlessness.

Of Lead And Brass And Other Precious Metals

A few of my Gentle Readers have written to ask why I reposted the article below, which is more than four years old and on the surface seems relevant mainly to the presidential election of 2008. To those and others similarly uncertain about my intent, I submit the following from yesterday's news:

Irvin Nathan, the attorney general for the District of Columbia, announced Friday that he will not press charges against NBC News’ David Gregory nor any employee of the broadcast network for violating the city’s gun laws. Violation of the city's firearms laws carry a maximum $1,000 fine and one year in jail.

Mr. Nathan wrote to an attorney representing Mr. Gregory and NBC News, Lee Levine of Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz, LLP, that, “OAG has made this determination, despite the clarity of the violation of this important law, because under all of the circumstances here a prosecution would not promote public safety in the District of Columbia nor serve the best interests of the people of the District to whom this office owes its trust.”

In the three-page letter, Mr. Nathan also wrote that “no specific intent is required for this violation, and ignorance of the law or even confusion about it is no defense. We therefore did not rely in making our judgment on the feeble and unsatisfactory efforts that NBC made to determine whether or not it was lawful to possess, display and broadcast this large capacity magazine as a means of fostering the public policy debate.”

[From The Washington Times]

Let that sink in for a moment while my blood-pressure medicine does its work.

---

Not long ago, I wrote:

The first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution reads:

1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

In part, that clause restates the Fifth Amendment's due process guarantee, but it goes beyond that to reinforce a key Constitutional idea: The law must apply uniformly to all persons. A law that applies only to particular persons, or to some category thereof, is Constitutionally invalid under a simple reading of this clause.

We don't take that notion seriously anymore. At least, not if we go by recent history.

• How is a private citizen to enjoy the "equal protection of the law" when the law grants bailout funds, or special loan guarantees, to specific corporations?
• How is a private citizen to enjoy the "equal protection of the law" when the law imposes special taxes, or preferential tax treatment, upon particular industries?
• And how is a private citizen to enjoy the "equal protection of the law" when an administrator in the executive branch awards waivers -- exemptions from obedience of the law -- to particular organizations?

We tend not to think about those practices, though they've become prevalent in the past half-century. Perhaps if an executive-branch administrator were to award some citizen an exemption from the law that forbids murder, or perhaps kidnapping (since that's a federal offense), our ears would prick up more readily.

In his novel Caliphate, Tom Kratman observes that the presidential pardon power could easily be wielded as a power to execute without trial, simply by issuing pardons to anyone who might draw a bead on some presidentially disliked figure. As macabre as the suggestion seems, Colonel Kratman is exactly correct. The president would have to wave aside the supposedly established procedure for issuing pardons, and the traditional conditions on which pardons are granted, but that's been done before: by Gerald Ford, in preemptively pardoning Richard Nixon for unspecified offenses, and by Bill Clinton, at the end of his term of office, as payoffs to various of his supporters, friends, and mistresses.

We've sidled up to that state of affairs with the David Gregory matter:

• Gregory, a "journalist," asked for permission to break D.C.'s firearms laws;
• That permission was denied, but Gregory proceeded anyway;
• There was an outcry from many persons -- not "journalists," mind you -- about the violation, in which it was noted that non-"journalists" would surely have been prosecuted for Gregory's actions;
• D.C.'s attorney-general went through the motions of an investigation, but (predictably) declined to prosecute, as indicated above.

We're expected to swallow this as if it had no other implications. Meanwhile, there's a federal initiative taking shape to outlaw high-capacity magazines nationwide.

Let that sink in for a moment while my second cup of coffee kicks in.

---

Among my assets is an unusually retentive memory. I have nearly complete memory, in considerable detail, of my past fifty years, including nearly every newsworthy event that came to my attention over that span. It's the main reason I can bore you with quotes and citations from here, there, and everywhere. (It's not utterly perfect, which is the main reason I have a private library of nearly 13,000 books, the precise element of which I need at any given moment I can never find.) It's a great blessing for someone with too many opinions and a need to write about them.

So I can remember affairs such as the "long hot summer" of 1965, when major cities used the threat of massive rioting by their Negro populations as a rationale to institute harsh gun-control regimes. I can remember the Johnson Administration's flirtation with new gun-control initiatives after Martin Luther King was assassinated. I can remember the renewed cries for gun control after the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and John Lennon. I can remember John Hinckley's attempt on the life of Ronald Reagan, with the Brady Campaign as its most enduring legacy. I can remember the terror evoked by the "Son of Sam" and "Zodiac" episodes. I can remember Colin Ferguson's rampage on the LIRR, with Carolyn McCarthy's elevation to Congress on the "strength" of her husband's death.

In every case, the vultures have circled gleefully above the corpses, shrieking new demands for the disarming of law-abiding citizens. In every case, the measures they demanded had approximately nothing to do with the atrocity to which they linked them. And in every case, the propaganda arm of the political Left -- the entertainment and "news" media -- was firmly on the vultures' side.

Just as David Gregory is, today. David Gregory, who knowingly and blatantly violated the laws of the District of Columbia, but will face no penalty for it. David Gregory, who's too useful a flackster for the Left to be sacrificed to the notion of "the equal protection of the laws."

Got any emotional room left for the significance of those developments, or are you already "outraged out?"

---

It's lately been my pattern to respond to the question:

"But why do you need an assault rifle?"

...with the simple rejoinder:

"To protect myself against you and folks who think like you."

Though the full implications of my answer are often lost in the elicited outrage -- I've really come to enjoy outraging statists of all varieties -- they remain the most important element thereof.

Each of us has a God-given right to his life, his liberty, and his honestly acquired property -- and a right shorn of the means of defense is no right at all.

Some muddle-headed, vaguely anti-gun types can come to understand this, and, given time, will come around. But many anti-gunners already do -- and it's why they oppose the right to keep and bear arms. They want private citizens to be defenseless...dependent upon the "good will" of the State. Simplifies the silencing of adverse opinion and the redistribution of wealth, don't y'know.

You had better understand this, Gentle Reader. Your right to the acquisition of weaponry has nothing to do with hunting. At least, I fear deer and such a lot less than I do the minions of the Omnipotent State. I hope you feel the same.

---

Of course, the Left knows that we in the Right who've thought the matter through are fully aware of all the above. They know they can't effectively argue for total citizen disarmament at a stroke. So they resort to "salami tactics." They try to pare away thin slices of our rights, on supposedly "reasonable" or "prudential" grounds. They pose spurious, irrelevant objections phrased as rhetorical questions:

"But what about nuclear weapons? There have to be some limits, don't there?"

In the annals of political discourse, there is no greater viciousness than the use of such rhetoric to advance a wholly unrelated agenda. Yet many pro-freedom types are unequipped to cope with that thrust. In recognition of that reality, I reprint the following, which first appeared at Eternity Road on March 24, 2005:

The concept of ownership -- that status that confers rights over the thing owned -- has a small number of prerequisites:

1. The thing owned must have been acquired either by:
   • homesteading: That is, it was previously owned by no one, and the owner gathered it in by his own action or the action of a contracted agent;
   • trade: That is, it was previously legitimately owned by another, who parted with it voluntarily in exchange for some other consideration, or none.
2. The thing owned must be held apart from the common: That is, the owner must sustain his claim of ownership by assertion, use, and the maintenance of the thing in an "improved" state.
3. The thing owned must be within one's adequate control: That is, one must be able to make reasonable guarantees that neither its possession nor its use will infringe upon the rights of any innocent party.

Failure of any of the above conditions nullifies a property claim. For example, having acquired a plot of land, Smith might permit it to deteriorate to the point that it can no longer be distinguished from an unowned field. That would nullify Smith's claims through the agency of neglect. Alternatively, he might pollute it in such a fashion as to pollute his neighbors' lands as well. That would nullify his claims through the agency of inadequate control. Either of these would warrant a fresh homesteading of the field, or seizing the field from him on the grounds of a clear and present danger.

If the language sounds familiar, that's because it's well embedded in Anglo-American legal practice for about three centuries now.

Adequate control is also the logic behind assessing a claim of damage against an owner for what his property did without his knowledge. For example, if Smith were to buy gasoline -- an ordinary sort of transaction -- and store it in his garage, he would become liable for any damage that gasoline might inflict on others. If he were to park his car on a hill, and the car's parking brake were to fail and send it careening into a crowd, he would be liable for the deaths, injuries, and property damage that ensued. And if he were to acquire radioactives, which then poisoned his neighbors or made their homes uninhabitable, he would be liable for those crimes as well.

By acquiring an item, the owner assumes responsibility for whatever that item might inflict upon unconsenting others. Alfred Bester's classic short story "Fondly Fahrenheit" is a neat dramatization of this principle.

Since a nuclear weapon imposes massive hazards upon everyone in the area in which it is stored, and since by its nature it cannot be used in a fashion guaranteed to affect only some targeted aggressor, a private party that acquired one would fail the test of adequate control. Even governments, which are theoretically capable of securing such devices and guaranteeing that they won't be used against their own citizens, have to meet very stringent tests to be allowed to possess them. The key issue is the "mass destruction" characteristic. It would justify the decision of one's neighbors to seize the offending item and destroy it, to put an end to the hazards it imposes on unconsenting others.

There are persons who argue that the same logic can be used to justify banning private ownership of machine guns and conventional explosives. Admittedly, this is a gray zone, though military experience suggests that light automatic weapons and grenade-scale explosives can be used in a targeted fashion. However, the principle is the important matter here: to maintain ownership of a thing, one must be able to distinguish it from the common, and must guarantee adequate control over it and all its effects upon others. Such guarantees simply cannot be made about a nuclear weapon, a bioweapon, a tank of nerve gas, or any other weapon of mass destruction.

In deciding the gray-zone issues such as full-auto weapons and small quantities of explosives, legislatures and courts must respect the fundamental principles outlined here. Otherwise there can be no coherent, defensible concept of private property -- and isn't the defense of private property, including one's life, what the ownership of weapons is all about?

If you intend to speak for the right to keep and bear arms, be sure you grasp and can express the principles enunciated above.

---

All the above having been said, it has begun to seem as if the time for argument is past. It has begun to seem as if the Omnipotent State and its cheerleaders are going to move against our right to keep and bear arms regardless of any and all arguments or counter-pressure. It has begun to seem as if we will soon face the following scenario:

Tomorrow, without warning, a deputy sheriff -- an armed "officer of the law" -- will appear at your door with a clipboard and demand that you surrender your guns to him. He knows accurately how many guns you have, and what types they are. It shouldn't be hard to imagine this, since de facto registration of firearms has been in place for some years now. Why else would you be required to show proof of identity when buying a rifle? (Don't bother to argue that the government "has to" destroy all such lists. I wasn't born yesterday, and if you're reading this column, neither were you.) How will you react?

If you're unwilling to defy that deputy sheriff, you will be disarmed. If he really, truly knows what guns you have, you can't merely say, "Sorry, none today," and expect him to depart in peace. If you plan to resist, it must be with force.

That's right. You'd have to answer your door armed and ready at all times. You'd have to "draw on" an armed "officer of the law," who's likely to have his hand on the butt of his sidearm as he rings your doorbell.

Not good odds, are they?

If you want to head off that scenario, which seems less than likely at the moment but is becoming more likely with every atrocity the Left manages to capitalize on, you'll have to go on offense. You'll have to declare your willingness to resist the politicians who'd send that deputy sheriff to your doorstep -- with force.

James Yeager has the right of it. The political elite must be put on notice that millions of Americans are with him -- and that there's more than enough rope, and more than enough lampposts, to accommodate all of them.

No, you won't have to march on Washington. It's perfectly acceptable to drive, fly, or take Amtrak.

---

If all this seems a trifle overwrought, perhaps your memory isn't as good as mine.
I can draw the graph.
I remember the Left's "reactions" to the atrocities of the fifty years behind us.
I can see the crescendo in the efforts of the anti-gunners.
I can see the swelling eagerness of the political elite to move against us.

Freedom stands multiply endangered. Not by foreign enemies, this time, but by "our" elected officials and the "journalists" and celebrities who promote their agenda. If it doesn't redden your vision that nearly all such are protected by armed guards at all times -- hey, remember Ted Kennedy and the Uzi his bodyguard carried? -- check your pulse; you may have died and not noticed.

Edmund Burke had some choice words for situations like this.
Inventory your "precious metals." Make ready your means of "spending" them.
The hour for their "investment" is almost upon us.

May God forever guard and guide these United States of America.

The Nobles And The Commoners

[This piece first appeared at Eternity Road on September 4, 2008. Considering the amount of hand-wringing going on about "who is to lead the GOP" in 2013 and beyond -- and the utter lack of reflection about who is really supposed to be sovereign in the United States -- it struck me as pertinent. -- FWP]

---

There is no greater divide in human society than that between those who think themselves innately superior, and those who do not.

If America suffers from any chronic sociological malady, it would be that an unacceptable number of persons are convinced that politics is the proper and exclusive preserve of professional politicians. The Founding Fathers knew better; indeed, their original design for the executive branch was aimed at thwarting the sort of factionalization that gives rise to a professional political class. Unfortunately, we were barely out of our national embryohood before aspiring power-mongers had undone the greater part of what they had achieved. See the Twelfth Amendment for the details.

In his early Hugo Award-winning novel Double Star, Robert A. Heinlein depicted a solar constitutional monarchy in which, strictly for form's sake, an incoming prime minister was required to submit his cabinet to the Emperor for approval. Of course, the monarch was not permitted to refuse the PM his choices, but it did give that worthy the opportunity to advise the soon-to-be head of state on some of the implications of his selections. A smart PM took the Emperor and his advice seriously; after all, being a hereditary occupant of a powerless throne, he was the only person involved in statecraft who had no inherent axe to grind over the course of the future.

Here we see the sole acceptable role a traditional hereditary aristocracy can play in a free society: as a conservator of well-proven values and virtues empowered to do nothing but talk about them. America, the most aggressively anti-aristocratic nation in the history of the world, has no equivalent to Heinlein's conception, but it might be better if she did. Quite a lot of politicians currently in circulation are unable to grasp their proper relation to the nation they govern. The emergence of a genuine aristocrat, a king by right in contrast to the sort of creature that preens himself for hanging on to public office for a decade or two, would make it plain.

Unfortunately, rightful monarchs -- persons entitled by their intrinsic merit to wield real power -- are very rare. In part, that's because kingship has nothing to do with wielding authority. It's about putting oneself on the line for justice. That's a mindset that can neither be bred nor trained; it arises from inclinations and conditions no one knows how to produce reliably. (See this novel for a fictional depiction of your Curmudgeon's meaning.) Given our inability to find or produce kings as we need them, we fall back on democracy.

Which brings us -- no doubt you were expecting this -- to the ongoing campaign for president and vice-president of these United States.

Three of the four contenders for our two national offices are members of the federal political Establishment, the American analogue to a traditional aristocracy. Consider:

• While in office, a federal politician is entitled to generous, if not limitless, use of federal monies and privileges for his own purposes.
• Once elected to federal office, a politician almost never leaves that status in any other way than death or retirement.
• Federal politicians maintain their stature primarily by "constituent service:" that is, rendering favors, owing to the power of office, to persons in the districts they represent. Those favors might involve money, non-monetary subventions, or permissions that have proved hard to obtain. This is not materially different from "king's grace:" the exertion of a monarch's power to set aside the law for the benefit of a favored subject.
• A federal politician is capable of wielding the power of the State against virtually anyone who dares to oppose him. Not all do, of course, but the possibility is always there, and anyone who thinks to take on a sitting federal executive or legislator has to be braced for the possibility.
• Federal politicians are invariably treated like aristocrats by our modern-day "heralds" and "bards:" the gentlemen of the press, and the enduring national broadcast media.

John McCain, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden have all evinced the aristocratic attitude, As political insiders of the highest echelon, they could hardly be expected to behave otherwise. The fourth contestant in this year's power lottery, Sarah Palin, is of another kind -- and the national media have been unsparing about her lowly status.

What the media, and Palin's detractors generally, fail to grasp is that her middle-Americanness is what makes her so supremely energizing to the electorate. With every slander, with every rumor, the media and the Left actually increase Governor Palin's appeal to the American voter.

To call them "clueless" would be an insult to the honestly dimwitted. Consider the following whine from Sam Harris, a deep-dyed snob who disdains the 90% of the human race whose unverifiable, unfalsifiable convictions about the supernatural diverge from his unverifiable, unfalsifiable convictions about the supernatural:

Americans have an unhealthy desire to see average people promoted to positions of great authority. No one wants an average neurosurgeon or even an average carpenter, but when it comes time to vest a man or woman with more power and responsibility than any person has held in human history, Americans say they want a regular guy, someone just like themselves. President Bush kept his edge on the “Who would you like to have a beer with?” poll question in 2004, and won re-election.

This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages — and loses — both necessary and unnecessary wars.

McCain has so little respect for the presidency of the United States that he is willing to put the girl next door (soon, too, to be a grandma) into office beside him. He has so little respect for the average American voter that he thinks this reckless and cynical ploy will work.

(Your Curmudgeon was certain from his incredibly contemptuous books, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, that Harris was a left-liberal. It's nice to know that some giveaways really can be relied upon.)

The crux of the 2008 presidential campaign was at one point thought to be about credible distance from the policies of the Bush Administration. While that conceit reigned, it appeared that Barack Obama held an indefeasible edge. But recently, the fulcrum was revealed to be elsewhere. Where, exactly, was unclear, but it had become plain Obama's substanceless harping upon generic "change" wasn't strumming voters' heartstrings as effectively as he'd hoped. John McCain, the most liberal Republican sitting in the United States Senate, didn't appear to be a significant obstacle to Obama's quest for the presidency; yet, Obama could not achieve a decisive-looking lead against the Old Guard Republican from Arizona.

With the emergence of Sarah Palin -- the "girl next door" Sam Harris has derided -- the entire picture has changed. Republican conservatives are energized, and the preponderance of non-aligned voters are leaning in the GOP's direction.

Your Curmudgeon is heartened, too -- not because he has a high opinion of John McCain's record, but because McCain's selection of Palin suggests that he realizes where his own political shortcomings lie. Still, there are a number of things to bear in mind about this new correlation of political forces:

• Many a voter who goes to the polls this November will be voting against -- and an "against" voter is seldom concerned with the lower half of the ticket.
• The national offices, while important, can be rendered impotent by voters' decisions about the Senate and the House of Representatives.
• Should the McCain / Palin ticket carry the day, liberal-centrist John McCain, not conservative Sarah Palin, will be President of the United States. The vice-presidency is a Constitutionally weak office. Only if McCain decides, out of internal impulses or good counsel, to take heed of his VP's opinions will she exert a conservative force on the new Administration.

In other words, there's a lot more to keep one's eye on than just the presidential race.

Your Curmudgeon would like to believe that McCain will be at the least attentive to his VP's opinions. But then, he'd like to believe that posterity will be agog over his software achievements and his political writing for many generations to come, too. Conservatives' tasks are to get the McCain / Palin ticket elected, to reverse recent Republican fortunes in our federal legislature, and then to make certain elected Republicans behave like Republicans, rather than like indifferently honest persons who find themselves unattended in a high-line jewelry store when the lights go out...with the safe open.

Like it or not, in these latter days of the Republic, when we vote a man into federal office we gift him with powers unchecked by any other agency. We manufacture elected aristocrats. You can ruin a man by giving him that sort of power and privilege, and many have been ruined by it in the scope of your Curmudgeon's recollection. It will fall to us to ensure that whoever attains power in Washington remains conscious of his subservience to Us the People, regardless of the airs he will assume, or the plaudits and kowtows our Old Media will surely shower upon them all.

The rich harvest of the Great Society and the civil rights revolution.

This gentleman has embarked on a jihad against the white devil:^[1]

Caleb the Jihadi.

You can see the keen intelligence at work. Not to mention the soothing, pacifying doctrines of Islam. They work their wonders. It's an inspiration for the rest of us.

Presumably, according to some, this is all another sad manifestation of the "legacy of slavery." That seems a satisfactory explanation of all manner of black pathology. It's what I believe.

The three cardinal investigative principles:

1. Cherchez la femme.

2. Cui bono (switching languages here^[2]).

3. Legacy of slavery (switching to bull____^[3]).

Notes
^[1] "Chicago Man Threatens to Blow Up Bus in 'Jihad Against the White Devil'." By Daniel Greenfield, FrontPageMagazine.com, 1/9/13.
^[2] Celtic, if you must know.
^[3] The native language of some Americans.

A Call To Arms

Hearken to the voice of an actual, verifiable American:

Disclose.tv - Pack Your Bags by James Yeager, Tactical Response

Thank God:

1. That someone credible has dared to be that forthright;
2. That he did so in a very public venue.

---

The nation is on the brink of civil war. No one can know how such a conflagration would end, or who would still be standing, whether free or fettered. But we can all know this: No matter how many or how few we are, whether we win or lose, we will be the good guys...the free men.

You cannot enslave a free man.
The most you can do is kill him.
-- Robert A. Heinlein

Start composing your target lists. I have mine – and I doubt that any of them can run at 3,000 feet per second.

UPDATE: YouTube (gutless pussies) has taken down the video, so I've re-linked to the version at Disclose.TV.

Piers Morgan, Call Your Office

ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

Quickies: Establishmentarianism, American Style

I hadn't planned to post anything today, but this article at Reason’s "Hit and Run" section about the 2012 presidential campaign goosed me too imperatively to ignore:

Competing fact checkers were now pouncing on hyperbolic claims at GOP presidential debates. Bookstores were filling up with titles like The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality. Then on the eve of the Republican National Convention, Romney pollster Neil Newhouse taped a virtual “kick me” sign on the campaign by telling Politico, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”

Sure enough, the fact-checking establishment flipped its collective wig the very next day in response to the convention speech by vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan. “Paul Ryan Fails—the Truth,” was the headline employed by liberal blogger Jonathan Bernstein at The Washington Post. “Beyond factual dishonesty,” harrumphed New York Times editorial board member David Firestone. “As I listened to Paul Ryan,” political writer Melinda Henneberger wrote at the Post, “I couldn’t remember ever hearing an acceptance speech so rich in untrue un-facts.”

The "fact-checking establishment" did indeed go to town on Romney and Ryan -- and in virtually every instance, Romney or Ryan had spoken the exact truth, while the "fact checker" was in contravention of it. The cited article lists many such instances. If you were paying attention during the campaign, you probably heard about a lot of them.

But what's most significant about the above article is that wee phrase "fact-checking establishment." Ponder it for a moment.

The aim of an "establishment" in any field is to decree who may, and who may not, play in its game. Sometimes, the "establishment" arises spontaneously, from the coalescence of a number of highly regarded participants; sometimes, it's merely a brassy, self-nominated group that wants control over the activity. In either case, it will attempt to demand a position of authority over its field: the power to rule some "in" and others "out." Viewed from that perspective, "establishment" is really just a synonym for "union."

Which leads us to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask what is it; I'll put it in big print:

Isn't the notion of a "fact-checking establishment" inimical to the idea of objective truth, and therefore hostile to the checking of facts?

Food for thought.

More on Republican nothingness.

On Jan. 1, when the fiscal cliff bill reached the House, Speaker John Boehner should have held up all 48 pages of favors requested by the president on live television and called on the president to strip them from the bill.

"Time To Demand An End To Wasteful Federal Spending." By Betsy McCaughey, Investor's Business Daily, 1/8/13.

That he did not do.

To the same effect:

"Why the House GOP rejected the disaster relief bill." By Lawrence Auster, View from the Right, 1/7/13.

There's no fight in Republicans. McCain was a cipher who raised none of the obvious issues about Obama, his constitutional ineligibility being the main one and, oh, Obama's wanting to create a massive, unprecedented, unconstitutional federal civilian police force being another.

Romney had an intensity and energy about him but it wasn't an inner combativeness. He was hyper prepped for one particular debate and then reverted to type. A decent human being let it be said.

Did House Speaker Boehner make a coherent, short case for acting to avert the fiscal catastrophe looming over us? No. It was a completely missed opportunity to stake out Republican territory. Today, voters are none the wiser and Obama got to make the bogus take-away point of "fairness."

Towards a Rational Gun Policy

My apologies, but this post is inexcusably long.  My next one probably will be, too.  Click the 'Read More' link if you aren't yet sufficiently bored by the time you get to it, and for some unfathomable reason think you might want to finish the thing...


Gene Callahan has suggested (as has Fran) that any debate over proper gun policy would best be done rationally and without reference to emotional arguments. I concur, and though I am very much pro-gun, I would even extend it (as Gene suggests) to attempting a non-ideological argument to determine more exactly what a 'realistically ideal' policy would look like.

What do I mean by non-ideological and 'realistically ideal'? What I meant in the last several posts -- resisting the impulse to assert an abstraction of reality as reality itself, or to construct a set of rules which flow from a direct translation of the abstract even when it flies in the face of reality. By this, I certainly do not mean thinking as a political moderate, especially as I see the facts of the matter very much in favor of something close to present policies, though perhaps somewhat more lax.

WWPD?

To begin, I turn to a suggestion by Plato, which I think is eminently helpful, as would anyone who had spent a substantial amount of time wading through arguments attempting to divine (or obscure...) the 'original intent' of law.

Plato thought that an ideal law should consist of two parts -- a clear statement of the purpose of the law, followed by the concrete legal stricture itself. This structure makes very clear the intent and purpose of the law, so that any later reading and interpretation would be greatly facilitated and much less controversial, as would determining whether or not the law had been a plain failure in securing its purpose and needed to be altered or abolished.

Oh, had only the Framers followed this advice!

"Present Trends Continuing..."

The above is the most important phrase in all of politico-economic analysis. Without it, we who attempt to foretell America's future would have to remain silent.

Unfortunately, the supposition that "present trends" will continue as they are is one of the least likely notions ever to enter public discourse. Most of the reason for that is that a "trend" exists only in the mind of an observer with a specific time frame in mind. Such time frames tend to arise from the observer's preferences rather than from any objective standard.

And with that, a few thoughts about chaos and prediction.

---

A serviceable definition of a chaotic system is one in which the effects of a proposed perturbation cannot be bounded with confidence. For that reason, chaotic systems respond to perturbations in ways that defy short-range prediction. However, they are not immune to long-range predictions founded not on "trends" but on current conditions.

Indeed, the initial conditions imposed upon a chaotic system are the sole worthwhile predictors of where it might find itself at some later time.

The matter becomes recursively more interesting as we proceed. It's legitimate to view every instant in the life of a chaotic system as a set of "initial conditions" for its future evolution. This is nicely illustrated by the endlessly reproducing or "fractal" quality of the conditions we see in such systems.

The political and economic systems of a large nation constitute a mutually reinforcing chaotic system. Viewed over a sufficiently long time span, the observer can trace the recurrence of patterns in such a system. Given that, he can make reasonably confident predictions about the course the system will follow into the future...even if he has no slightest chance of telling you what its state will be five minutes from now.

---

A chaotic system under the influence of an unchanging force will reliably develop the dreaded malady called positive feedback. That is, the effects of the force at time t_n+1 will be amplified by the magnitude of its effects at time t_n, for all values of n up to the inevitable blow-off formation: the point at which the system destroys itself, or is transformed so radically as to constitute a completely new system subject to completely different dynamics and rules.

There are two primary examples of such a positive-feedback effect in American political economy today:

• The repeated application of a single politico-economic response -- federal deficit spending -- to the economy regardless of its current behavior.
• The steady usurpation of political authority and power "upward:" i.e.:
  1. From the governing bodies of smaller political units -- municipalities, counties, and states -- to the governing bodies of larger ones -- Washington;
  2. From the larger elements of governing bodies -- legislatures -- to the smaller ones -- courts and executives.

Those two forces are the only ones that have been consistent throughout American post-Constitutional history. They point toward a pair of blow-off formations:

• The invalidation of the dollar as an acceptable medium of exchange and the consequent dissolution of long-distance and long-duration trade.
• The collapse of the remaining vestiges of the Constitutional order (i.e., federalism; separation of powers among the branches of government; explicit rights-based constraints on government action) in favor of the ultimate consolidated State: a dictatorship.

That the overall system is chaotic -- perturbed in unpredictable ways by millions of individual decisions and actions -- merely means that short-range predictions will be unreliable. As long as federal deficit spending and the consolidation of power into fewer and fewer hands continue, the long-range prediction will remain reliable.

If a question remains about that long-range prediction, it's only how long we have left before the blow-offs.

---

It remains remotely possible that the constancy of federal deficit spending and consolidation of power can themselves be interrupted. However, the smart money is betting against that happy vision. Few persons conversant with history believe that any amount of pressure can sway "our elected representatives" from their current path; the evidence is solidly to the contrary. One peek at the course the Obama Administration has resolved upon, and the flaccidity of the 113th Congress in fencing with him, is enough to make one gloomy about our chances.

The longer those forces continue in effect, the larger loom the associated blow-offs.

By this logic, the prognostications of the most pessimistic pundits, such as Ann Barnhardt and Karl Denninger, are the most likely eventualities for the long term, with "long" being an ever shorter length of time. But for individuals' purposes, the proper focus is not on the large-scale "what's happening out there," but on how each of us should prepare himself and his family to meet those developments.

My prescriptions remain as they've been:

• Transfer as much of your wealth into physical assets as possible; emphasize gold and silver.
• Reduce -- if possible, eliminate -- your debts. (Yes, your mortgage(s) too. The fantasies of "tax planners" notwithstanding, there's no such thing as a "good" debt.)
• Create a stockpile of the necessities of life, sufficient to see you through a protracted disruption of regional and national commerce. (Other prognosticators suggest six months as the length of the disruption the prudent should prepare for.)
• Arm yourself and become proficient in the use of your weapons.
• Get onto the best possible terms with your neighbors; assure them that you'll "have their backs," and assure yourself that they'll have yours. Know whom you can trust, and even more important, whom you mustn't.
• Be candid about all the above steps, and the reasons for them, with your spouse and children.

"Brace for impact." -- Capt. Chesley L. Sullenberger

Attack Of The Fabulists

The Shing law forbids killing, but they killed knowledge, they burned books, and what may be worse, they falsified what was left. They slipped in the Lie, as always. We aren't sure of anything concerning the Age of the League; how many of the documents are forged? You must remember, you see, wherein the Shing are our enemy. It's easy enough to live one's whole life without ever seeing one of them -- knowingly....There is no trust in them, because there is no truth in them....It was the Lie that defeated all the races of the League and left us subject to the Shing. Remember that, Falk. Never believe the truth of anything the Enemy has said."

[Ursula K. LeGuin, City of Illusions]

All the great tyrants have known the power of the Lie. Only when their lies have been penetrated have their peoples risen against them...if their people retained the power to do so.

We who love freedom are currently laboring to resist the incursions of a would-be tyrant and his henchmen. Our Enemies have found that, on certain subjects, such as the right to keep and bear arms, the American people are disinclined to go along with their notions. So they've been lying to us: about their intentions; about the probable consequences of allowing them their wish; and about what's happened to other nations that have gone their way.

The Silicon Graybeard provides us with an excellent example:

My son emailed me this link to an article in the NYT in answer to the "more guns, less crime" view I express all the time. The article is called "More Guns = More Killing" and I don't recommend you read it, unless you want to find the holes in it. In true NYT fashion, they assert a lot of things as true just because they say so, or under appeal to authority. For example,

After a gruesome mass murder in 1996 provoked public outrage, Australia enacted stricter gun laws, including a 28-day waiting period before purchase and a ban on semiautomatic weapons. Before then, Australia had averaged one mass shooting a year. Since, rates of both homicide and suicide have dropped 50 percent, and there have been no mass killings, said Ms. Peters, who lobbied for the legislation.(emphasis added by me)

But we in the community know that's not true. The Brookings Institution said,

...homicides "continued a modest decline" since 1997. They concluded that the impact of the National Firearms Agreement was "relatively small," with the daily rate of firearms homicides declining 3.2%."

Suicides with firearms went down but suicides by other means went up.

And, of course, in England the results have been considerably worse. Handgun crime has doubled, and the UK now has more violent crime than South Africa, the US and most of the EU.

Similarly appealing to authority, the NYT says,

Scientific studies have consistently found that places with more guns have more violent deaths, both homicides and suicides. Women and children are more likely to die if there’s a gun in the house. The more guns in an area, the higher the local suicide rates. "Generally, if you live in a civilized society, more guns mean more death," said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. "There is no evidence that having more guns reduces crime. None at all." (emphasis added by me)

which pretty much conflicts with what we know about Switzerland, not to mention all of the excellent work done by John Lott and others here in the states.

The New York Times is the "house organ" of the American Left. It's provided many a service to the Obama Administration. That its writers should be inclined to lie in service to the Left's agenda should come as no surprise...except that far too many Americans still believe, despite everything that's transpired, that "the paper of record" would never dare to print a factual assertion that's untrue.

It is to laugh.

---

Americans tend to be trusting because we tend to be trustworthy. As I've written on other occasions, in the absence of countervailing evidence we tend to attribute the moral-ethical code and overall mental map we work from to those around us.

This is not good policy when assessing the statements of a power-monger.

What is there to say but "Beware!" -- ? The Obamunists are frightened by the growing possibility of open revolt. The many reports of massive vote fraud from the November elections, the farcical posturing about the Benghazi atrocity, the absurd Cabinet nominations, the Administration's refusal to enforce the immigration laws as written, the substantial year's-end decrease in Americans' take-home pay, demands by some Democrats for the curtailment of freedom of expression, and the open attack by the Democrats on the right to keep and bear arms have left many of us wondering whether the hour has come.

The Administration and its Congressional allies are aware of this, of course. They know that to make further incursions on Americans' freedom, they must defuse the burgeoning hostility before it metamorphoses into open resistance. But given their agenda, there's only one way to do that: they must lie to us, and convincingly, about virtually everything they've done and plan to do.

The Mainstream Media, being handmaidens to the Democrats and utterly in love with Barack Hussein Obama, will collaborate in that undertaking. Indeed, they'll function as the spearhead of the attack. They are America's "Shing."

"Put not your trust in princes," said Jesus of Nazareth. I'd go with that on general principles. Not only do we have ample evidence that "princes" have no great regard for the truth; the Son of God is a far more reliable Authority than the New York Times.

For The Feast Of The Epiphany

[The following piece first appeared at Eternity Road on January 6, 2008. -- FWP]

---

The ancient creed called Zoroastrianism predated the birth of Christ by about a millennium. Its founder, Zoroaster, laid down a small set of doctrines:

• There is one universal and transcendental God, Ahura Mazda, the one uncreated creator and to whom all worship is ultimately directed.
• Ahura Mazda's creation — evident as asha, truth and order — is the antithesis of chaos, evident as druj, falsehood and disorder. The resulting conflict involves the entire universe, including humanity, which has an active role to play in the conflict.
• Active participation in life through good thoughts, good words and good deeds is necessary to ensure happiness and to keep the chaos at bay. This active participation is a central element in Zoroaster's concept of free will, and Zoroastrianism rejects all forms of monasticism.
• Ahura Mazda will ultimately prevail, at which point the universe will undergo a cosmic renovation and time will end. In the final renovation, all of creation — even the souls of the dead that were initially banished to "darkness" — will be reunited in Ahura Mazda.
• In Zoroastrian tradition, the malevolent is represented by Angra Mainyu, the "Destructive Principle", while the benevolent is represented through Ahura Mazda's Spenta Mainyu, the instrument or "Bounteous Principle" of the act of creation. It is through Spenta Mainyu that Ahura Mazda is immanent in humankind, and through which the Creator interacts with the world. According to Zoroastrian cosmology, in articulating the Ahuna Vairya formula, Ahura Mazda made His ultimate triumph evident to Angra Mainyu.
• As expressions and aspects of Creation, Ahura Mazda emanated seven "sparks", the Amesha Spentas, "Bounteous Immortals" that are each the hypostasis and representative of one aspect of that Creation. These Amesha Spenta are in turn assisted by a league of lesser principles, the Yazatas, each "Worthy of Worship" and each again a hypostasis of a moral or physical aspect of creation.

I find nothing objectionable in the above, except that only God, by whatever name He might be known, is worthy of worship; the most a lesser being is entitled to is veneration. But the word "worship" has had many meanings and subtleties over the years, so I'm inclined to let it pass. More important than Zoroastrianism's harmless mythos is its ethos, which Zoroaster himself encapsulated in a unique and memorable command:

Speak truth and shoot the arrow straight.

Unlike the overwhelming majority of other pre-Christian creeds, Zoroastrianism was -- and is -- rational, humane, and life-loving rather than life-denying. It emphasized human free will, moral choice, and the need to defend truth and order against lies and chaos. These attributes made it the dominant religion of classical Persia and environs, though Zoroastrians' numbers are far reduced today.

(No, I haven't converted to Zoroastrianism. You can all relax.)

In the Western world, the Zoroastrians were the first practitioners of the pseudo-science we call astrology. They reposed a fair amount of confidence in it, for the creed had had its own prophets, beginning with Zoroaster himself, and among the prophecies were several tied to events foretold to happen in the night sky. The Zoroastrians therefore took great interest in the stars, and made careful records of occurrences therein, for comparison to the utterances of their prophets.

One of those prophecies involved the birth of God in mortal flesh.

The Magi of the Incarnation story were three esteemed nobles of Persia, wealthy in gold, wisdom, and the admiration of their societies. In contrast to the pattern prevalent among the nobilities of later times, these three, whose names have come down to us as Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, were deeply religious men whose involvement in the investigation of the Zoroastrian prophecies was sincere. When they spied the famous "star in the east" -- quite possibly a nova in Draco now known to have occurred at about that time -- they resolved to follow its trail, to find the divine infant and pay him homage.

I shan't retell the whole of the story. It's accessible to anyone reading this site, in both secular and liturgical versions. The most salient aspect of the story is that these three exalted nobles -- kings, in the most common accounts -- of a faraway land came to pay homage and present tokens of vassalage to a newborn infant.

Of course! What else would be appropriate, before a King of Kings?

***

I will pause here to draw an important distinction: "King of Kings" is not the same as "Emperor." "Emperor" is a title appropriate only to a conqueror; that's more or less what it means. Atop that, an emperor is not necessarily concerned with justice, whereas a king, of whatever altitude, is obliged to make it the center of his life:

    The saber gleamed in the muted light. I'd spent a lot of time and effort sharpening and polishing it.
     It was a plain weapon, not one you'd expect to see in the hand of a king. There was only the barest tracing on the faintly curved blade. The guard bell was a plain steel basket, without ornamentation. The hilt was a seven inch length of oak, darkened with age but firm to the touch. There was only a hint of a pommel, a slight swell of the hilt at its very end.
     "What is this?"
     "A sword. Your sword."
     A hint of alarm compressed his eyes. "What do you expect me to do with it?"
     I shrugged. "Whatever you think appropriate. But a king should have a sword. By the way," I said, "it was first worn by Louis the Ninth of France when he was the Dauphin, though he set it aside for a useless jeweled monstrosity when he ascended the throne."
     Time braked to a stop as confusion spun his thoughts.
     "I don't know how to use it," he murmured.
     "Easily fixed. I do."
     "But why, Malcolm?"
     I stepped back, turned a little away from those pleading eyes.
     "Like it or not, you're a king. You don't know what that means yet. You haven't a sense for the scope of it. But you must learn. Your life, and the lives of many others, will turn on how well you learn it." I paused and gathered my forces. "What is a king, Louis?"
     He stood there with the sword dangling from his hand. "A ruler. A leader. A warlord."
     "More. All of that, but more. The sword is an ancient symbol for justice. Back when the function of nobility was better understood, a king never sat his throne without his sword to hand. If he was to treat with the envoy of another king, it would be at his side. If he was to dispense justice, it would be across his knees. Why do you suppose that was, Louis?"
     He stood silent for a few seconds.
     "Symbolic of the force at his command, I guess."
     I shook my head gently.
     "Not just symbolic. A true king, whose throne belonged to him by more than the right of inheritance, led his own troops and slew malefactors by his own hand. The sword was a reminder of the privilege of wielding force, but it was there to be used as well."
     His hands clenched and unclenched in time to his thoughts. I knew what they had to be.
     "The age of kings is far behind us, Malcolm."
     "It never ended. Men worthy of the role became too few to maintain the institution."
     "And I'm...worthy?"
     If he wasn't, then no worthy man had ever lived, but I couldn't tell him that.
     "There's a gulf running through the world, Louis. On one side are the commoners, the little men who bear tools, tend their gardens, and keep the world running. On the other are the nobles, who see far and dare much, and sometimes risk all they have, that the realm be preserved and the commoner continue undisturbed in his portion. There's no shortage of either, except for the highest of the nobles, the men of unbreakable will and moral vision, for whom justice is a commitment deeper than life itself."
     His face had begun to twitch. He'd heard all he could stand to hear, and perhaps more. I decided to cap the pressure.
     "Kings have refused their crowns many times, Louis. You might do as much, though it would sadden me to see it. But you could break that sword over your knee, change your name, and run ten thousand miles to hide where no one could know you, and it wouldn't lessen what you are and were born to be." I gestured at the sword. "Keep it near you."

[From Chosen One.]

Note further: a mortal king cannot and does not define justice; he dispenses justice, according to principles drawn from a higher authority. The King of Kings, from whom the privilege and obligation to mete justice flows, is the definer. In the matter of Law, all lesser kings are His vassals.

The Magi conceded this explicitly with their gift of gold.

***

The pre-Christian era knew few, if any, rulers who claimed their jurisdiction solely on basis of might. Nearly all were approved and anointed by a priesthood. In that anointment lay their claim to be dispensers of true justice, for God would not allow a mortal to mete justice that departs from His Law. Let's leave aside the divergence between theory and practice for the moment; it was the logical connection between Divine Law and human-modulated justice that mattered to the people of those times.

But the King of Kings would need no clerical approval. Indeed, He would be the Priest of Priests: the Authority lesser priests would invoke in anointing lesser kings.

The Magi conceded this explicitly with their gift of frankincense.

***

We of the Twenty-First Century are largely unaware of the obligations which lay upon the kings of old. They were not, until the waning years of monarchy, sedentary creatures whose lives were a round of indulgences and propitiations. They were expected not merely to judge and pass sentence, but also to lead the armies of the realm when war was upon it. The king was expected to put himself at risk before any of his subjects. Among the reasons was this one: the loss of the king in battle was traditionally grounds for surrender, after which the enemy was forbidden by age-old custom to strike further blows.

The king, in this conception, was both the leader of his legions and a sacrifice for the safety of his subjects, should the need arise. He was expected to embrace the role wholeheartedly, and to lead from the front in full recognition of the worst of the possibilities. Not to do so was an admission that he was unfit for his throne:

    "We have talked," he said, "about all the strategies known to man for dealing with an armed enemy. We have talked about every aspect of deadly conflict. Every moment of every discussion we've had to date has been backlit by the consciousness of objectives and costs: attaining the one and constraining the other. And one of the first things we talked about was the importance of insuring that you don't overpay for what you seek."
     She kept silent and listened.
     "What if you can't, Christine? What if your objective can't be bought at an acceptable price?"
     She pressed her lips together, then said, "You abandon it."
     He smirked. "It's hard even to say it, I know. But reality is sometimes insensitive to a general's desires. On those occasions, you must learn how to walk away. And that, my dear, is an art form of its own."
     He straightened up. "Combat occurs within an envelope of conditions. A general doesn't control all those conditions. If he did, he'd never have to fight. Sometimes, those conditions are so stiff that he's compelled to fight whether he thinks it wise, or not."
     "What conditions can do that to you?"
     His mouth quirked. "Yes, what conditions indeed?"
     Oops. Here we go again. "Weather could do it."
     "How?"
     "By cutting off your lines of retreat in the face of an invasion."
     "Good. Another."
     "Economics. Once the economy of your country's been militarized, it runs at a net loss, so you might be forced to fight from an inferior position because you're running out of resources."
     "Excellent. One more."
     She thought hard. "Superior generalship on the other side?"
     He clucked in disapproval. "Does the opponent ever want you to fight?"
     "No, sorry. Let me think."
     He waited.
     Conditions. Conditions you can't control. Conditions that...control you.
     "Politics. The political leadership won't accept retreat or surrender until you've been so badly mangled that it's obvious even to an idiot."
     The man Louis Redmond had named the greatest warrior in history began to shudder. It took him some time to quell.
     "It's the general's worst nightmare," he whispered. "Kings used to lead their own armies. They used to lead the cavalry's charge. For a king to send an army to war and remain behind to warm his throne was simply not done. Those that tried it lost their thrones, and some lost their heads -- to their own people. It was a useful check on political and military rashness.
     "It hasn't been that way for a long time. Today armies go into the field exclusively at the orders of politicians who remain at home. And politicians are bred to believe that reality is entirely plastic to their wills."

[From On Broken Wings.]

But the King of Kings, intrinsically above all other authorities, would obviously be aware of this obligation. More, His sacrifice of Himself must perforce be for the salvation of the whole of the world -- indeed, the whole of the universe and every sentient creature in it. Nothing less could possibly justify it.

The Magi conceded this explicitly with their gift of myrrh.

***

Today, Christians celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany, called the Theophany by some eastern Christian sects, when the Magi prostrated themselves before the Christ Child and made their gifts of vassalage to him. A vassal is a noble sworn to fealty to a higher authority: a higher-ranking noble or a king. The obligations of the vassal are to enforce justice as promulgated by the vassal's liege, and to support and defend the liege's realm by force of arms as required. To the King of Kings, God made flesh in the miracle of the Incarnation, every temporal authority is properly a vassal, obliged to mete justice in accordance with the natural law and to defend the Liege's realm -- men of good will, wherever they may be -- against all enemies, whenever the need might arise. To do less is to be unworthy of a temporal throne, palace, official office, or seat in a legislature...to be unworthy of Him.

He took on the burdens of the flesh to confirm God's love for Man and to open the gates of salvation. He went to Calvary in testament to the authenticity of His Authority. The Magi knew, and in their pledge of fealty to Him, made plain that He had come not merely to succor Israel, but for the liberation of all Mankind.

May God bless and keep you all.