The Boston Marathon Bombings

There have now been three "uncontrolled" explosions. The most recent was near the front of the JFK Memorial Library.

Ball bearings have been found near the explosion sites.

According to scattered reports, the Boston police already have a suspect in custody: A Saudi national, estimated to be about 20 years old, who was seen running away from the bombing area before the explosions occurred.

Terrorism. At least two fatalities. Many injuries, including the complete loss of limbs.

Is anyone still unconvinced that we cannot share a planet with these savages?

Oh, by the way, a CNN commentator has suggested that "right wing extremists" might have been behind the bombings.

Words fail me.

Reasonable Men

It's getting to be time to be unreasonable.

For example, Americans have long agreed that governments must have some degree of coercive taxing power if they're to function. We've long agreed that certain persons must not be allowed to have weapons, and that there are certain weapons no one outside our professional military should be allowed to have. And we've long agreed that governments must be conceded the power to ensure against certain hazards to public health, safety, and reliably trustworthy commerce. We were told that a "reasonable man" couldn't possibly object -- that such powers, placed in the hands of "reasonable men," would never be abused, and that if they were, the corrective action would be swift and definite. And indeed, it all seemed quite reasonable at the time.

In each of the above cases, and many others beyond my power to enumerate, we were had by our own "reasonableness."

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Writers on law and jurisprudence often refer to the "reasonable man" standard, a shorthand way of referring to what "everybody" would agree is "necessary and proper." The "reasonable man" standard doesn't make actual reference to reason -- i.e., the accumulation of facts over time and the application of deductive and inductive logic to them. It merely decorates the "everybody knows" pseudo-standard with the term "reasonable" in the hope of discouraging dissent.

No doubt you've encountered the term "proof beyond a reasonable doubt," which is supposed to apply in criminal trials. A thinking person would want to ponder that standard for a while. What, after all, constitutes "reasonable doubt?" Doubt of the defendant's guilt arises when there are one or more alternative explanations for the case put forward by the prosecution. But when does an alternative explanation for the commission of a crime cease to qualify as "reasonable?"

If counsel for the defense introduces evidence that other persons, known to have harbored a deep animus against the victim, were observed in the immediate area of the murder at the time of its commission, while the circumstantial evidence against the defendant remains inconclusive, a juror might find that he can reasonably doubt that the defendant was the murderer. On the other hand, if the circumstantial evidence is broad and trustworthy, while counsel for the defense contends that the victim was death-wished by a malevolent gel from Pluto that happened to be visiting Weehauken at the time, a juror -- even a science fiction aficionado -- should demand somewhat more substantiation, perhaps reportage of the gel's recent audience with the Pope. But between those two poles are positions where even "reasonable men" may disagree -- reasonably.

The "reasonable man" standard has proved acceptable for criminal justice, largely because juries seldom include persons willing to believe without evidence, or in contradiction to the patterns of behavior that characterize men's lives. But it goes horribly wrong when used as a prop for legislation.

---

It's one thing to point to egregious abuses and misuses of power; God knows, we've endured enough of them. It's quite another matter to establish -- beyond a reasonable doubt? -- that the "reasonable man" standard is the key to the lot of them. I'm not sure an airtight case can be made. However, someone has to attempt it, and I'm at Liberty's Torch to tackle exactly this sort of tough nut.

Marshall Fritz, founder and guiding light of the Advocates for Self-Government, attempted to cast light on one of our core fallacies with a presentation titled "Does Wrong Become Right if the Majority Approve?" That presentation focused on the moral barrier between theft and "legitimate" government seizure of private property (e.g., taxation). In one iteration of his talk, he asked specifically, "If N persons saying that it's right aren't enough, but N+1 would make it so, what's the value of N?" Needless to say, no one in the audience could solve the equation.

It's an undeniably brilliant approach to the question, to which the only possible rejoinder is a deflection to "reasonable man" criteria: "Everybody knows governments have to have the power to tax!" That what "everybody knows" has so often been proved false seldom persuades an adherent to the "reasonable man" standard.

With that, we turn to one of the topics concomitant with such conundrums: the misuse of words to promote a fallacious position.

---

Just as "reasonable" has been used to camouflage "everybody knows," the critical term "rights" has been redefined to include "needs," "desires," and worst of all, "permissions."

Contemporary political cant includes many pernicious uses of "rights:"

• The "right" to vote;
• The "right" to a job;
• The "right" to housing;
• The "right" to "health care;"
• The "right" to an "education;"
• The "right" to the approval of others;

...and still more. Yet none of the above are rights. The first assertion in the above list is no less absurd than the last. They've been shoved under the rhetorical cover available from the term "right" because it serves the agenda of the political Left.

The demonstration requires a firm insistence upon a strict definition of "rights." Such a definition must distinguish rights clearly from permissions, needs, and desires; if there is no distinction, there's no need for the highly charged, heavily laden term.

In this connection, a statement from the great Herbert Spencer is most apposite:

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

A right must be intrinsic to the moral order of the universe. It must conform to the innate moral understanding with which we are all equipped. In other words, a right cannot be a wrong. There must be a clear, unbreached demarcation between them.

The tale of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe's great exemplar of faith and perseverance in the face of intense personal trial, is highly relevant. While he was alone on his island, Crusoe could do whatever he was capable of doing with whatever he found around him. He could not demand food, clothing, shelter, medical care, or anything else be given him as his "right;" there was no one to whom to put such claims, which made it clear that they could not be morally mandatory. Indeed, he needn't concern himself with "rights" at all, for one cannot commit a wrong against inanimate objects and subhuman creatures. Only when Friday arrives upon the scene do rights make even a tenuous appearance, for Crusoe recognizes Friday as a human kinsman -- an entity capable of apprehending the moral order, and thus a possessor of whatever rights inhere therein.

But we have been so propagandized about rights, in particular about assertive pseudo-rights that require violence or the threat thereof to effectuate, that the distinction has been effaced...even though when we view and evaluate on an individual level, that distinction becomes crystal clear. And when we attempt to transpose our individual understanding about right and wrong to the actions of government entities, we're told, as if by reflex, that there are needs to be met, that it's always been this way, that we're arguing against what "everybody knows"...in short, that we have to be "reasonable."

---

The time has come for clarity, for an absolute insistence upon clarity, and for the rejection of the demand from our political shepherds that we submerge ourselves in the great pullulating flock of the unthinking and petulant. The time has come when firm meanings must be attached to the words we use, most especially our terms of public discourse. The time has come when he who dares to twist language to make it serve his power-lust must be dragged down from his perch and taught clarity with bastinado cruelty. The time has come that what "everybody knows," when put forth as an argument for intrusive, anti-Constitutional changes in law or policy, be rejected with extreme prejudice.

The time has come for the demise of the notion of "reasonable men."

Violence And Language Part 2: The Blood Trail

Yesterday's piece has evoked the usual hail of denunciations, as any Gentle Reader of Liberty's Torch could easily have predicted. But we haven't yet gotten to the fun part of this investigation, which makes me wonder if the moral relativists and multiculturalists have any outrage left. I suspect they'll need it.

---

The late Lawrence Auster once promulgated a generalization about "liberal societies" that neatly expresses the moral relativist / multicultural dynamic:

The worse any designated minority or alien group behaves in a liberal society, the bigger become the lies of Political Correctness in covering up for that group.

(Thanks to commenter dondiego at Crusader Rabbit for this link.) I know of no exceptions to this observation over the past fifty years. It should tell us clearly how to correct our sociopolitical mistakes...if, indeed, they're still correctable. However, it becomes even more significant when applied to the origin of our troubles with querulous and belligerent minorities.

The problem of the petulant and antisocial black minority arises from two sources:

• A susceptibility to propagandization;
• Propagandization itself.

The social workers of the "New Frontier" and "Great Society" years might have had only the best intentions. (I know that sounds farfetched, given the consequences of their work, but we must concede the possibility.) However, they committed a catastrophic error in telling their clients-to-be that American society owed them the benefits they were to receive. That fostered a sense of entitlement -- a word that has come to have a pernicious political meaning -- in any of their targets with a "condensation nucleus" for it. In the case of the American Negro, that condensation nucleus was ready and waiting: resentment about having been excluded from the opportunities of the larger society, accumulated over the decades since the Civil War.

White guilt over past racial exclusion was the motivating factor in such pronouncements; Negroes' resentment, long suppressed in the interest of retaining what acceptance and opportunities were open to them, was easily brought to the forefront of race relations as the era's racialist hucksters sensed their opportunity.

---

Ironically, the mechanisms that had worked to marginalize American Negroes in Northern cities were not rooted in racial preferences, but rather in the desire of the commercial firms of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century to "consolidate their gains." Firms with an urban base, alarmed by the rapid influx of energetic migrants, colluded with machine politicians to erect ever higher, ever stronger barriers against new competitors. The earliest migrants to the Northern port cities -- i.e., those preponderantly from Mediterranean Europe and eastward -- were able to "get in under the wire." Later migrants were less fortunate -- and those included the majority of Negro migrants from the rural South.

As psychologist Peter Breggin has observed, the migrant ghettoes of the late Nineteenth Century were places of tremendous enterprise. Their residents were busy: creating small businesses, offering their services in their various trades, and generally doing the sort of ground-state commerce characteristic of an infant capitalist economy. It took time, but those with determination and energy prospered. Their children prospered still further.

As we advance into the Twentieth Century, we see the proliferation of barriers to new businesses and trades: zoning regulations; licensure laws; restrictions on the size and construction of commercial buildings; limitations of the hours of labor and commerce; ever-rising property taxes; and so forth. Much that was utterly essential to the prosperity of the earlier wave of migrants had been barred to the later wave. A Negro migrant from the South, who'd been attracted northward by the promise of the urban dynamism that had uplifted the earlier migrants, arrived to find that he was no better off than he had been in the South...sometimes worse.

Did racial preferences play a part? Perhaps to some extent. But the prejudice among Americans of Northern and Western European stock against the waves from Southern and Eastern Europe proved incapable of thwarting their rise. It took the political machinations enumerated above to create a really strong barrier against the later arrivals from the American South.

---

Negroes' history of marginalization plus their readiness to believe in willed oppression synergized with social workers' statements about entitlements and the efforts of racialist hucksters to mobilize them for collective action. The brew proved lethal to race relations, particularly in the Northern cities.

Really, how long can you tell a man that he's "owed" before he stands up and demands to be paid? If "payment" to his liking is not forthcoming, he's likely to act out -- and the probability of serious acting out rises according to a number of factors:

• Inherent aggressive propensities;
• The sense of "strength in numbers;"
• Perception of weakness on the part of the targets;
• Appeasement or conciliation in response to early probes.

Starting roughly in 1965, all these things were in play.

The question next to be answered is why white targets for government largesse didn't behave in such a fashion. For one thing, social workers didn't show poor whites the solicitude they extended to poor blacks. For another, economically disadvantaged whites seldom concentrated geographically to the extent urban Negroes did; more, they exhibited a greater degree of mobility than did blacks. Third, one of the worst of the social pathologies -- unwed motherhood -- was far slower to take root among lower class whites. Thus, the terrible plague of fatherless, disruptive young men afflicted Negro communities far more seriously than communities of lower class whites.

We cannot know at this remove from the seminal period what the dominant causal factors were. But that doesn't mean we can't candidly recognize that the problem correlates strongly with race.

---

It's likely that the key to the tragedy was and remains whites' willingness to encourage blacks' resentment coupled to whites' willingness to protect disruptive and violent blacks from the consequences of their behavior. Remember that in the years prior to the explosion of welfarism, there was no significant problem of Negro unrest. Granted that we can't turn back the clock; nevertheless, it is imperative that a mistake recognized not be repeated. The excuse-making for black violence and lawlessness, and the appeasement shown to black race hustlers, must cease if America is to know peace between the races. Peace rests upon a foundation of justice -- and a justice that stays its hand when the accused's skin color is a certain shade is no justice worthy of the name.

Violence And Language

Mark Butterworth's "Punisher" post below has sent me off in a direction that invariably draws the harshest criticisms and the most effusive thanks -- both.

You'll see why after a few words from our sponsors a quick break for physiological reasons.

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The most important characteristic one can nurture in discussions of social pathologies is the willingness to see clearly. That comprises two other characteristics:

• The willingness to recognize patterns, even when they're unpleasant;
• The willingness to disaggregate from an enveloping group, at the price of simplicity.

The first of these is often shouted down with ugly epithets. "Racist" is, of course, the most frequent of them, and in recent decades has had the most telling effects. The second is militated by a sense for justice -- in particular, the insistence upon holding individuals responsible for their individual decisions and actions, rather than taking refuge in a trendy collective pardon such as "They can't help it" or "Society is to blame."

The Gentle Readers of Liberty's Torch are surely bright enough to detect the tension between those two traits. Yet both are required for penetrating, clear-eyed analysis of the ailments of our society...or any other.

Consider one of the most important, least disputable patterns of recent years:

99% of all terrorist attacks since 2001 have been the work of Muslim men between 18 and 40 years of age.

In company with a leftist -- or a Muslim -- to utter such a statement will routinely get you blasted (rhetorically) as an Islamophobe. The term is supposed to express massive opprobrium. It's effectively silenced a fair number of observers of the contemporary scene, though it's arguable whether those persons' convictions have been altered by being shouted down.

Yet the statement is inarguable. The record bears it out. The sole exception to the pattern of Islam-powered terrorism is the Murragh Building bombing by Timothy McVeigh -- a white American atheist. Every other terrorist incident has been the work of a young Muslim man. The correlation could not be stronger.

By adding that recognition to several other facts about the behavior of Muslims, many persons have reasoned their way to the conclusion that Muslims should not be admitted to these shores, and that efforts be made to encourage those already here to emigrate. I shan't be coy about it: I am one such person. For that chain of reasoning I've been called, in the charming idiom of a colleague, "everything but white." But my detractors have never countered the evidence nor the reasoning that led me to my conclusions.

I was willing to disaggregate the violent, jihadi Muslims from the peaceable ones, at first. It seemed the path of justice; why hold Smith accountable for Jones's crimes? But as I learned more about Islam and the behavior of significant Islamic sub-populations in non-Islamic states, I realized that disaggregation is inappropriate in this case: the peaceable members of those sub-populations function, whether willingly or under coercion, as supporters, enablers, and concealment to the jihadis. The two groups are inseparable, and must be endured or expelled together.

Equally unpleasant yet inescapable conclusions are associated with another recognizable group.

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When the "New Frontier" and "Great Society" transformations of federal policy were kicked off in the Sixties, Americans saw them, quite accurately, as expressions of benevolent intent toward the less fortunate. The original maxim of "New Frontier" social programs was "A hand, not a handout;" federal assistance was intended to set the recipient on a path to self-reliance. The "Great Society" expansions of those programs were otherwise oriented; though it wasn't stated overtly until HEW Secretary Joseph Califano said so in 1968, those programs assumed that a hefty fraction of the beneficiaries would be government dependents lifelong. Califano called it "structural poverty," plainly implying that the spars of American society itself had trapped those millions of unfortunates in their dependent condition.

Patterns were already emerging among long-term government dependents:

• The dependent tended toward geographical concentration in the cores of large cities;
• Negroes were heavily overrepresented among them;
• Black women had begun a plague of unwed motherhood, moving swiftly upward from 25% illegitimate births to today's unimaginable 69% level of illegitimacy.

Social analysts of that era were more willing than those of today to concede that those patterns existed. The prevalent racism-shouting of today didn't catch on till somewhat later.

In that case, disaggregation appeared morally and analytically mandatory. The dependent sub-population wasn't entirely black; moreover, illegitimacy rates among dependent white women were on the rise as well, though they were nowhere near those of black women. However, the pattern intensified over time; the dependent sub-population grew ever blacker, and pathologies other than government dependency -- i.e., crime, vandalism, drug abuse -- were proliferating rapidly in geographical concentrations of dependent Negroes.

Those of us reluctant to blame these developments on race searched frantically for an exculpation. The one seized upon most popularly was an echo of Califano: "structural racism."

The thesis was that black dependents were held back by white Americans' reluctance to give them the opportunity to advance economically. The protraction of dependency supposedly led to a condition of despair and alienation whose efflorescences included crime for gain and various modes of dissolution (e.g., drug abuse, prostitution, and careless sex). These conditions reinforced the victims' economic stasis and caused them to cluster into tight groups impenetrable by outsiders. In other words, it was whitey's fault.

It was a brilliant, powerfully compelling explanation for the most painful social malady of the day. It became a reflexive mantra among the political elite and bien-pensants. The only problem with it was that it was entirely unsupported by the facts.

---

At this point, I can recommend two books, both top-heavy with factual and statistical citations, to those who'd prefer to form their own conclusions:

• Myron Magnet, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass;
• Jared Taylor, Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America.

Both men have come in for enormous volumes of condemnation, merely for daring to amass the relevant facts and reason dispassionately from them. That, unfortunately, is a feature of the politics of our time, when bloc voting is the pattern and the two parties are defined, with fair accuracy, as pro-government and anti-government. The central irony of those denunciations is that they accuse their targets of racism -- a collectivist perversion -- yet they're being made by hard-core collectivists, who regard individuals as interchangeable pawns that can be coerced into whatever patterns the State's chessmasters might decree.

But the facts are as they are. Despite law after law, regulation after regulation, program after program, all supposedly aimed at equalizing the conditions of the races to a single high standard, America's social pathologies have a distinctive color: black. Not all American Negroes are drug dealers, violent felons, unwed mothers, or such, but the overwhelming preponderance of America's drug dealers, violent felons, unwed mothers, and so forth are Negroes -- and peaceable Negroes reflexively rally around their violent and dissolute fellows to protect them from prosecution, correction, and criticism.

All it takes to evoke a hail of condemnation is to suggest publicly that race is a participating factor.

---

It's become a cliche to note that no one is campaigning for greater white representation in the National Basketball Association. We easily concede the higher performances of black basketball stars. That pattern seems not to trouble the racism-shouters at all. Yet the appearance of a high-performing mixed-race player in golf, a sport dominated by whites, was greeted as a millennial breakthrough. The cant at the time was that non-whites are systematically excluded from professional golf -- this despite the high performances of various players of Oriental descent. Those who dared to note the contradiction were routinely vilified into silence.

Note also: Black basketball stars are notorious for violence, sexual profligacy, and fathering children on multiple mothers. White golfers are not.

42, a movie about breakthrough black baseball player Jackie Robinson, has just made its debut. It's being hailed as some sort of cultural landmark even though there's already been a movie about Robinson, starring Robinson himself. Perhaps it's more significant than it appears on the surface; according to early reviews, it emphasizes faith, family, and the roles of various white innovators in introducing a Negro to the major leagues. Robinson himself was an entirely admirable person, according to the facts of his life as universally reported.

It was white America that stooped to offer a hand up to blacks. Without the benevolence of whites, the various Civil Rights Acts and affirmative action initiatives would not have taken place. Without massive infusions of tax dollars taken from white taxpayers, the programs intended to lift American Negroes out of poverty would not have been funded. Yet everywhere we look, complaints about race discrimination flow in one direction -- the discriminators are supposedly white and their victims are black -- despite the profusion of private and public attempts to lure more Negroes into environments where they're deemed underrepresented. Everywhere we look, black "spokesmen" demand more, more, more...from whites, of course. Everywhere we look, the preponderance of long-term government dependency, violent crime, drug abuse, and unwed motherhood in America is among Negroes. And everywhere we look, persons who dare to note those facts and their persistence over time, and to counterpoise them to the popular cant about "structural racism," are vilified as if they'd raped the president's daughters in Macy's window at high noon.

There have already been unpleasant consequences for such persistent self-delusion and censorship-by-denunciation. There will be more -- and they'll include quite a lot of "violence and language."

Slow And Steady Wins The Race: A Manifesto

I was minded to write about abortion today, specifically why the right to do as you please with your body does include poisoning yourself with drugs but doesn't extend to murdering an infant developing in your womb. However, this post at Cold Fury has reoriented me for the nonce.

Mike Hendrix has long been one of the clearest and most stalwart defenders of freedom in the DextroSphere. Indeed, he's many cuts above quite a large fraction of the salaried commentators of the Right, for two overriding reasons:

• He sees clearly;
• He's consistent over time.

This morning, he cites the value of those virtues...to the other side:

The Left, as always, is playing a long game, while we sit back and tell ourselves it couldn’t possibly be happening, and then are shocked–SHOCKED!–when each new piece of the puzzle slips softly but firmly into place.

Update! Prime example, via Glenn:

As annoying at Toomey is, we should remember that this is like 2% of what the libs sought. They’re grabbing crumbs and calling them a cake.

Uh huh. Why, we’re WINNING!, gang! And the Left continues hacking merrily away at our rights, while we deceive ourselves so as to avoid facing the facts and fighting back against them. And thus the frog eventually boils. Sorry, Kurt, losing a little more slowly is NOT winning. A slave who is granted one day a week of partial freedom to remove his chains and do more or less as he wishes before stepping back into harness for the other six is still a slave.

What Mike calls "the long game" has been in progress for centuries. Indeed, it will never end. It consists in one and only one thing: persistence in pursuit of a clearly envisioned goal.

Of course, there are prerequisites to that sort of persistence:

• You must see your goal clearly;
• You must never, ever accept any setback as final.

The Left has these things corporately if not individually, because from era to era it has possessed a vanguard of aspiring slavemasters: persons whose lust for power is all-consuming and ineradicable. The Right, whose allegiants would love more than anything else in the world to be able to say, "we did it; it's over; we're finally free," and thus be able to ignore politics and government in favor of commerce, family, and the pleasures of civil society, is predisposed in a diametrically opposite direction. Which is why, as "Cato" said in one of the Federalist Papers, the natural course of things is for Tyranny to swell and Liberty to cede ground.

In a "game" that stretches unendingly over the centuries, the Left's clarity and persistence is a winning combination. No logical argument, no moral consensus, and no amount of pleading to be left alone can match it.

---

It becomes ever clearer that the Right must equal or exceed the Left's clarity and persistence if freedom is to be preserved for our posterity. There might be a "right" to ignore the State, though I doubt it; after all, you can't have a right that requires the cooperation of unnamed others. What there is, and what always will be given the nature of Man, is political combat: the forces of freedom against the forces of slavery.

Clarity requires comprehension, most importantly comprehension of fundamentals. The critical fundamental here is, of course, the nature of freedom:

Freedom is exactly and only the right to do as you damned well please with what is rightfully yours, bounded only by the equal freedom of all others.

All the "freedoms" vulgarly spoken of -- freedom of expression; freedom of religion; freedom of association; freedom from interference in one's private affairs; freedom from unwarranted search and seizure; and so forth -- are special cases. Infringing on any one of them weakens freedom in general, and thus all the other "freedoms" as well. There is no room for compromise with the Left -- on anything.

Deserving special mention in this connection is the right to keep and bear arms. One cannot claim a right that doesn't imply the right to defend that right. After all, if your "right" can be plucked from your unresisting hands (or your dead body) by armed agents of the State, how real could it be? Which is why the right to keep and bear arms must be defended absolutely, and to the death.

---

Because persistence in orientation and effort is married to consistency of thought and expression, I exhort all freedom-lovers to adopt the following terminology and stick rigidly to it:

A man who is subject to being told what he must, may, and may not do with his life and property, on pain of punishment, is a slave.

That the "teller" is the State changes nothing but who will receive the profits from his enslavement. That the Left prefers enslavement to and by the State changes nothing but the tools preferred by its aspiring slavemasters. In this connection, it's important to remember, and to emphasize at every opportunity, that every Leftist imagines himself as a future commissar: a high member of an American nomenklatura privileged to ignore the constraints laid upon the rest of us. Characterize them as such, fearlessly -- and do so without qualification.

They won't like it. They'll scream like raped apes. Don't be daunted; don't concede to considerations of "civility." Their screams are the music for our victory parades.

---

Part of the reason I'm back here at Liberty's Torch is that I came to understand that I have a responsibility. Few persons on the Right are clear and consistent about the points above, or capable of articulating them properly. I have those gifts. Think what you like about my supposed arrogance; my motto is "if you can do what you've said you can do, it ain't braggin'." Libertarians are as bad as anyone else; the majority of them continue to demand open borders, "abortion rights," State-recognized same-sex marriage, and a handful of other things inconsistent with the notion of a free people in a freedom-respecting polity. The great majority of "conservative" pundits and spokesmen aren't worth the powder to blow them to Hell.

Freedom needs a new cadre.
Its vanguard must overmatch that of the Left.
Its members must be clear and consistent about their aims.
They must use strong words and uniform rhetoric.
And I want you to be among them.

Let's get to work.

Media Mania

"I've always thought the brain is the most important organ in the body, but then I realized, 'look at what's telling me that'." -- Author Unknown

I was going to tee off on a gaggle of subjects of current interest -- I amassed quite a collection of links from my early-morning news sweep -- but at the moment I'm more interested in a phenomenon that, for all the attention it gets, doesn't...get...quite...enough.

An extremely intelligent friend has been making the case for some time that broadcast journalism is unnecessary and illegitimate. Indeed, that's the title of a series of essays to that effect that he posted at Free Republic. If they're still available, all of them are worth your time. His thesis is that by "nationalizing" the news, the networks with national scope have deflected us from the affairs closer to us, with three consequences above all else:

• Effectively concealing the political chicanery taking place at the state and local levels;
• Deflecting citizens' attention to the federal level, where individuals have very little sway and interest groups rule the halls of power;
• Encouraging the vitiation of Constitutional constraints, as local developments are submitted ever more frequently to Washington's scrutiny, and local policy is ever more inclusively put under Washington's management.

All true; all unassailable. Whether there was any intent on the part of the networks' barons to bring that about, it is nevertheless the case. But there has been another consequence of importance, which should be far more prominent in our thoughts than it currently is.

---

Consider the recent gesture by actress Ashley Judd toward opening a campaign for United States Senator from Kentucky.

Miss Judd might not be the most prominent actress in Hollywood -- indeed, she might not be the most prominent member of her family -- but she does have national name recognition, mainly owing to her parts in various nationally promoted and distributed movies. National name recognition implies a similar degree of regional and local name recognition, which lends a surface plausibility to the suggestion that she might run for public office. But it should also get us to ask ourselves:

Would we regard this person's ambitions as non-risible were she not a Hollywood actress?

And similarly:

To what degree do we owe the lunacy of halfwit entertainers aspiring to high office to the national media?

The national news and entertainment media have done more than nationalize the news. They've also nationalized our "personalities."

---

Ashley Judd is not the first; far from it. We currently suffer the presence of violent idiot Al Franken, whom any sensible person would cross the street to avoid, as United States Senator from Minnesota, owing to extensive vote fraud and an unprecedentedly weak Republican response to his campaign. Until just recently, Arnold Schwarzenegger was Governor of California. Worldwide Wrestling Federation entrepreneuress Linda McMahon has conducted two campaigns for the United States Senate from Connecticut. Some years ago, Clint Eastwood served a term as mayor of Carmel, California. Sports stars Bill Bradley, Jim Bunning, and Steve Largent have all held federal office. The list could probably be extended much further; no doubt it will be in the fullness of time.

Let's not discuss the qualifications these persons might have had for the posts they sought and in some cases attained. Ask rather: Would their intended constituents have given them a second glance except for the profiles our nationalized media allowed them to amass? Wouldn't those voters have preferred someone closer to home -- someone known to them from local news coverage as a significant participant in local civic affairs, who had demonstrated his commitment to their region, and who could be relied upon to have his neighbors' views and interests nearest to his heart?

While the nationalized news media have promoted the federal level above all else, the nationalized entertainment media (which includes coverage of pro sports) has glamorized entertainers whose achievements and involvements off-camera wouldn't fill a thimble; whose attachment to any locale but Hollywood (or their home stadium) is nonexistent; who represent at most some special interest or glamorized "cause" rather than the region over which they seek public power.

If the word that springs to your mind in this connection is any other than perverse, make an appointment to see your brain-care specialist soonest.

---

Nationalized news and nationalized personalities imply nationalized causes, each attached to a national special-interest group that conducts national fundraising and fear-mongering campaigns. The very existence of those causes and the associated interest groups motivates the individual to ally himself with one or more of them, in hope of magnifying his otherwise laughable influence over public affairs.

However, an interest group, regardless of its nominal special interest, will have a ruling cadre that makes the critical decisions about the group's orientation and efforts. Also, there's really no such thing as a single interest group; it is impossible, in the nature of things, to disentangle any public-policy issue absolutely from all others. In practice, such a group will agitate for a bundle of policies, chosen by its cadre, that will broadly characterize the group as "liberal" or "conservative." That predisposes the group toward an enduring alignment with one of the major parties -- and the parties are managed by tight circles of kingmaker-strategists, which further dilutes the influence of individual citizens. Thus is the vestige of federalism supported by representative government reduced to nullity.

And you thought you knew why things are so bad.

---

Solutions? Sorry, fresh out. I could suggest that we start more locally-oriented papers, radio, and television stations, but such things have been made into guaranteed losing propositions: acts of civic charity that few persons will bother to read, listen to, or watch. Similarly, I could suggest that the civic-minded resolve to ignore the nationalized media, but in our era that's like asking a man to hold his breath for a week. Now that all politics is national -- sorry, Tip ol' buddy -- inattention to the national news would be catastrophic for such freedom-loving Americans as still remain. For now, all I can do is point at the cancer; I know of no tool capable of excising it.

More anon.

Yes, Yes, Yes

Some of you might have predicted it. "He's too full of shit opinions," you said to yourselves. "He won't manage to keep it all bottled up for long. He'll be back."

And you were right.

Oh, comments are re-enabled, too. But the moderation scheme will be more draconian than ever. Insult me, or any of my co-contributors, at your extreme peril.

UPDATE: Blogger seems reluctant to re-enable comments. Hang in there; I'm working on it.

FURTHER UPDATE: Comments are now enabled for new posts. I'll be updating the settings on the older ones over time.

---

Before all else, have a few words about what I've been doing while away.

I didn't expect to feel unending fatigue, ever in my life. When you're used to grueling, grinding physical and mental effort, sixteen-hour days and four-hour nights, year after year after year from your teens to your sixties, you come to believe that you're invincible, unstoppable. But everyone needs something to keep him going, even if it isn't what those around him might think. I discovered what I need in my few weeks away; it wasn't what I'd thought it would be.

(No, I'm not going to tell you what that is. What a man needs is the ultimate weapon against him. Much as I love you all, I'd prefer to withhold the temptation.)

That critical fact about myself came with a corollary: how I could dispel that seemingly permanent state of exhaustion. I did it, and it worked.

My health has returned, apparently in full. I've addressed a great many tasks I'd been putting off for lack of "energy," and completed them all. I've resumed my exercise routines, and have been gratified to discover that I retain very nearly the full strength, speed, and agility of my youth. I've returned to a dormant fiction project, and have brought it nearly to completion. I've picked up my guitar and have ordered a new synthesizer. And I've started a small business to operate alongside my other endeavors.

My people, historically, haven't been long-lived. Perhaps I'll break that mold. At least I won't have wasted what remains of me. For all else, we shall see.

---

As to why I was away: the fatigue, of course. (I've already said so, kinda-sorta.) Weariness is the enemy of many a virtue. In my case, it sapped my courage and my perseverance; I found that I was unwilling to endure the slings and arrows any further.

So getting back my energy has brought back my courage and perseverance, and has returned me to Liberty's Torch, hopefully not to depart again. But the story doesn't end there.

---

One of the great mysteries of human nature is why we choose to believe certain things, and adopt certain behaviors, that cannot be explained in terms of self-interest.

Many persons are animated by a desire for the approval of other persons, usually persons they admire. The reason for the admiration can be quite idiosyncratic; consider, for example, the significant number of persons who aspire to emulate this politician or that sports figure. But the consequence is what matters: the admirer will strive for the approval of the admiree, and will be dismayed and discouraged when he fails to get it.

There are only Three Persons whose approval I want or need...but in those three cases, I need it badly.

Those Three are beyond admiration or emulation, of course. That could have been a problem. But They recently reminded me about something I'd forgotten: I have the power to create fictional human figures I can admire and try to emulate. I've done it more than once. And each of those fictional heroes, men so much better than I that I could never reach their stature if I lived to be ten thousand, has inspired me to increased effort, and ultimately to rise above the state I occupied before I created them.

It's been said that God works in mysterious ways. Sometimes, He works on you through your own hands.

---

Apologies to all those who were saddened by my departure. No promises, but I'll certainly try to resist any such urges in the future. It's not good for me, as I've discovered. And if it pleases you to have me back, blathering a thousand words per minute on every subject under the Sun, so much the better.

Of course, if you were pleased to have me gone, and were enjoying a round of backslapping with other morally-vacuous types -- yo, "ExGeeEye," you know where you can shove it, don't you? -- as the saying goes, I've got two words for you, and they ain't "Happy Birthday."

All my best,
Fran

The enemy within.

Robert Welch, 1958 speech:

And other ideas on a way back:

Little known facts.

The U.S. passed Saudi Arabia as the world's largest petroleum producer in November 2012, according to recently released data of the federal Energy Information Administration.

"U.S. Passes Saudis In Oil Output, No Thanks To White House." By Kathleen Hartnett White, Investor's Business Daily, 4/5/13.

Summary of Obama record to date.

So when Obama and his officials, the ultimate parasitical entities draining the nation of all life force, ran on “hope and change” but proceeded to promote dependency, corporate cronyism, welfare, food stamps, subprime loans, abortion rights, bailouts, same sex marriage, racial divisions, and class warfare, while endlessly campaigning and fundraising for votes, they acted and continue to act against the good.

"Is the Obama Administration Evil?" By M. Catharine Evans, Potter Williams Report, 4/5/13.

Propositional nation.

Convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal has received three nominations on a web page for the “Unsung Hero” project from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).^[1]

Would that be "Mumia Abu-Jamal" as in "Mumia Abu-Jamal -- convicted cop killer"?

And this, in the multicultural delusionist mind, would not detract in the least from the sacrament that we are a people who are all reading off the same sheet of music, not clinging to outdated concepts like race and ethnicity.

What are these fools thinking to be calling this scum an unsung hero?

Notes
^[1] "Mumia Abu-Jamal nominated on NAACP’s ‘Unsung Hero’ page." By Patrick Howley, The Daily Caller, 4/3/13.

H/t: Desert Fox at Lucianne.com.

The modern Keynesian state.

The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating “demand,” even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.

"State-Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America." By David A. Stockman. New York Times, 3/31/13

Clueless or a liar.

Obama told Israelis, "Four years ago I stood in Cairo in front of an audience of young people. Politically, religiously, they must seem a world away. But the things they want — they’re not so different from what the young people here want. They want the ability to make their own decisions and to get an education and to get a good job, to worship God in their own way, to get married, to raise a family. The same is true of those young Palestinians that I met with this morning. The same is true for young Palestinians who yearn for a better life in Gaza."

Again, this is from Obama’s big Jerusalem speech and it proves that he either has no clue what happened in Egypt or is just determined to tell insane lies hoping that college students don’t watch the news.

The outcome of democratic elections in Egypt showed that what they wanted was theocracy, the repression of Christians and women, and a state of sectarian conflict.

They didn’t want to worship God in their own way. They wanted to compel everyone to worship Allah their way.

They didn’t want the ability to make their own decisions, they wanted a theocracy that would make those decisions for them.

Hussein of Jerusalem in "Friday Afternoon Roundup." By Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish, 3/22/13.

The End: A Self-Liberation

I have had enough.

I have written for various Web sites for sixteen years. I’ve given my best efforts and thinking to those writings. The undertaking has consumed thousands of hours of research, analysis, writing, and editing, to say nothing of the cost of maintaining Eternity Road and The Palace of Reason before it. I asked nothing of anyone else at any time. My sole recompense was the pleasure I got from occasionally meeting a kindred spirit. In sixteen years, that happened exactly twice.

But I’ve been harassed, slandered, insulted, derided, and demeaned. I’ve had my intelligence, my erudition, my sincerity, my faith, my morals, and my ethics questioned by persons who haven’t even had enough courage to use their right names. A typical day brings me dozens, sometimes hundreds, of obscene, insulting, juvenile emails. Even flushing them out of my computer leaves me feeling soiled. And that’s not the worst of it. Both I and my wife have been threatened, and more than once at that.

So I’m calling it quits. I’m an old man, and not a well one. I’d like some peace for the conclusion of my life. I’d also like to be free of the jackasses who’ve awarded me the various crowns of thorns mentioned above. It appears that the only way I can acquire those things is to cease to write these op-eds.

To those who’ve enjoyed and appreciated my scribblings and have taken the time to say so: Thanks for the long-distance companionship. To those who’ve done their best to make me regret ever setting my fingers to the keyboard, congratulations. This is what you wanted, isn’t it? You’ll have to find someone else to harass.

Good-bye.

Francis W. Porretto
Mount Sinai, NY USA
March 9, 2013

UPDATE: This site will remain a going concern as long as the others continue to post here. However, comments have been shut down permanently, as the site still bears my name and I have no further interest in moderating them.

The Franchise

Mark Butterworth's "Tales of New America" series has recently ventured onto explosive, albeit necessary, ground: the possibility that the franchise has been over-extended, such that the democratic process we use to choose elected officials has been fatally biased in favor of ever larger and more intrusive government.

The problem is politically stiff, as any suggestion of the retraction of a "right" always elicits the most vocal, and sometimes violent, sort of protest. (Look at Greece if you disbelieve it.) Add the argument that the franchise isn't a real right in any case, and you have a very heady cocktail: the sort that can get a nation drunk, and belligerently so, to the point of political dissolution.

In February of 2005, back at Eternity Road, I proposed the following set of criteria for awarding the franchise:

1. The applicant must be a citizen of these United States;
2. He must present a photographic confirmation of his identity;
3. He must be able to show continuous residence in one state for no less than one year prior to his application, that state being the one in which he seeks to vote;
4. He must be able to present receipts for having paid sales, property, or income taxes within the state of his residence, no more than one year before his application, and for a total amount not less than $500;
5. He must present a Certificate of Proficiency in constitutional understanding, earned no more than one year previously, from his state's elections authority, said certificate to be awarded upon achieving a grade of 85% or higher on a multiple-choice test composed of twenty computer-selected questions on constitutional principles;
6. In exchange for the privilege of voting in a specified election, he must agree to forgo and forswear until after the next general election:
   • any position of profit or trust under the Constitution, in any federal, state, or local office, whether elective, appointive, or Civil Service;
   • any and all payments from any organ of government, regardless of the reason for them;
   • any and all personal or categorical privileges, exemptions, or subventions that may be awarded by any organ of government.

Gentle Reader, you would not believe the fusillades that evoked. All the same, I meant it then and I stand by it today. Indeed, back then I was inclined to qualify some of the tougher provisions. Today, I would toughen them further:

• The tax receipt he presents must be a property tax receipt for his residence for the current year, the full payment for the year's property taxes made out in his name;
• The government payments disallowed must include pensions received for prior government service, including military service;
• He may not have any dependents, financially speaking, who themselves receive government payments of any sort.

It is paramount to remove from the electoral process all monetary incentives toward expanding government in favor of an identifiable special interest, including unjustifiable expansions of the military. Decisions about important matters must be free from material bias toward or away from particular institutions. If we're to elect representatives to legislate on important matters, let them be chosen from among those who have no such bias -- no such obvious bias, at any rate -- and elected by that same group.

(Concerning military pensions, the dubious Gentle Reader is invited to look into the history of pensions for Civil War veterans, which grew faster than the Gross Domestic Product for the rest of the Nineteenth Century. Such pensioners constitute a special interest like any other, and must be curbed like any other. Make an exception here and you have to defend your decision not to allow other exceptions.)

Among the other virtues of my system, were the above requirements imposed on all franchisees, the ability to produce the required photo ID, property tax receipt, and certificate of Constitutional proficiency would eliminate the need for voter registration, and thus reduce, effectively to zero, the practice of Election Day illegal voting. Beat that if you can!

I don't share Mark's position on restricting the franchise to men; I merely want each voter to have a demonstrable, enduring stake in the well-being of his county and state of residence, and carry a demonstrably significant share of the burden of supporting those polities. (Federal taxes are a separate subject, about which I'm even more radical.)

Thoughts? (No obscenities, imputations of insanity or senility, or slurs on my character, please; I'm having a very bad day.)

"Inappropriate"

[T]he slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. -- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

Certain "clever" uses of the language give me a major charge. Of course, not all such charges are positive.

I didn't know until a brief while ago that it was Theodore Roosevelt who popularized the phrase "weasel words." It's a delicious phrase, and one that many Americans should be using just now, for it seems to be the only language that contemporary politicians speak.

Take the recent dustup between Attorney-General Eric Holder and United States Senator Ted Cruz. Holder, desperate to protect what he sees as the prerogatives of "his" president -- one of "his" people, don't y'know -- persisted in weasel-wording his way around Cruz's clear, simple question. For the benefit of those who get pimples from too close an acquaintance with the doings of politicians, that question was:

Does the president have the power, under the Constitution, to kill an American citizen on American soil without a trial?

Holder engaged in some of the most pathetic verbal arabesques, circumlocutions, and evasions on record to avoid giving the appropriate answer ("Hell, no!"). It's not like there's any ambiguity about the matter:

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

That's a blanket prohibition against any official of any branch of any level of government doing so much as confiscating a penny from a person on American soil unless he's first been convicted in a jury trial. (See Amendment VI for the right to a jury trial.) It's a reinforcement of the seldom-discussed underlying principle of Constitutional government:

The American people, not the State, are the sovereigns.

If only a jury can decree that you be punished, government has no power except what a jury allows it. Which, incidentally, explains a huge amount about the explosion of "regulatory law," if you think about it.

Eric Holder, at this time the most highly placed lawyer in these United States, was unwilling to concede what the Fifth Amendment demands. Rather, he characterized Cruz's question as "hypothetical," and at one point tried to slither out from under the matter by calling such a presidentially ordered execution "inappropriate." It took a classic filibuster by Senator Rand Paul to force Holder to concede the Constitution's perfectly clear decree. Disgraceful. Pretty much what we've come to expect from an Obamunist minion, but disgraceful even so.

---

The disgrace doesn't end there, of course. Hearken to the mealy-mouthed statements from two nominally Republican senators about Senator Paul's forthright and principled action:

Almost exactly 24 hours after Mr. Paul began his information-seeking filibuster against John O. Brennan, Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham took to the Senate floor to denounce his demands and say he was doing a “disservice” to the debate on drones.

Mr. McCain quoted from a Wall Street Journal editorial: “The country needs more senators who care about liberty, but if Mr. Paul wants to be taken seriously he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids in their college dorms. He needs to know what he’s talking about.”

The senator went on to say that he didn’t “think that what happened yesterday was helpful to the American people.”

And where Democrats praised Mr. Paul for using Senate rules properly to launch a filibuster, Mr. McCain said it was an abuse of rules that could hurt the GOP in the long run. "What we saw yesterday is going to give ammunition to those who say the rules of the Senate are being abused,” the Arizona Republican said.

Mr. Paul said he was filibustering to get the administration to affirm it won’t kill non-combatant Americans in the U.S. — and his effort was joined by more than a dozen other senators who said they, too, supported his effort to get answers.

Mr. Graham said asking whether the president has the power to kill Americans here at home is a ludicrous question.

“I do not believe that question deserves an answer,” Mr. Graham said.

Just in case your memory has mercifully blotted out all recollection of the 2008 presidential campaign, the Republican nominee was John McCain. As for Lindsey Graham, his long record of unprincipled pro-statist words and deeds should speak for itself.

In a mind-shattering coincidence, McCain and Graham were apparently the "leaders" of a delegation of GOP senators to a dinner hosted by...envelope, please...Barack Hussein Obama! Both senators are notorious sluts for good press -- and there's no better way to get positive ink from the Mainstream Media than to suck up to Obama. Senator Paul's filibuster was was contemporaneous with that dinner, and ruined McCain and Graham's chances of "dining out" on the publicity from it for a week or two. To complete the circle, Senator Cruz should ask those two colleagues, during open Senate session, a simple question. It should be phrased with the directness and clarity he exhibited while grilling Eric Holder:

Do you believe the Constitution of the United States, the Supreme Law of the Land, means what it says?

Perhaps both gentlemen should be reminded of the explicit text of their oaths of office before answering.

---

Third and last for this tirade is this matter of drones.

A drone aircraft is a mechanical device -- a tool. Yes, a modern military drone is often equipped with weaponry, in some cases weaponry capable of destroying an entire city. But it remains a mindless mechanical device that must be dispatched and directed by human intelligence and will.

The sniping at Senators Cruz and Paul harped on how ridiculous it is to imagine that the president would order a drone strike to kill an American within America's borders. I call this, pace C.S. Lewis, the "red tights and horns" fallacy:

I do not think you will have much difficulty in keeping the patient in the dark. The fact that "devils" are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them), he therefore cannot believe in you. [From The Screwtape Letters]

Okay, for sheer plausibility of argument, let's take drones "off the table." No, the president shall not order a drone strike against an American on American soil. What about rifles? What about grenades? What about flammable gas and bulldozers? For that matter, what about ricin-tipped umbrellas?

Does the tool have any bearing on the legitimacy of the deed? Have we lost sight of the distinction between the tool and its wielder? Is that why so many Americans are hopelessly misguided about gun control?

The Fifth Amendment says nothing about what weapons might be involved.

---

Clarity of thought is only possible to a man who uses the correct words in which to couch his thoughts. We are easily mollified or cowed by political flummery because we seldom pay sufficiently close attention to the locutions politicians use to deflect and misdirect us. Orwell had it right: there is no more critical undertaking than to restore clarity to political speech in our time, lest we be weasel-worded into marching, six abreast and singing the national anthem, into cheerfully decorated cells custom-tailored to our delusions, where we will be encouraged to prattle brightly to one another about how wonderful it is to be free.

Trans Fat Cat

[Yet another short story -- this one a delight -- from the gifted pen of F. J. Dagg. Thanks, James. -- FWP]

It was a dark and stormy night on the backside of Palomar Mountain when the pet door slammed open with a loud BANG! The gray heads of the man and woman whipped away from Easy Rider on the TV. That door hadn’t swung in two years. The couple, aging flower children, squinted through the smoke that shoaled through the wan TV light.

“My God! Is that?...it is!...it’s...it’s...” the woman stammered.

“Lucifer!” the man finished for her.

A large, magnificent cat stood in the entryway, oblivious to the howling of the coyotes outside, head high and proud, tail twitching, his fur gleaming blue-black in the smoke-dappled TV light.

“’S’up, people?” inquired the cat.

Eyes wide, hands shaking, the woman fished half of a gigantic doobie from the ashtray and rekindled it. She inhaled deeply, and stared at the cat, even after the man plucked the joint from her fingers. In the glow of the splif, the cat’s scars became visible, one over the left eye, another a diagonal slash from the corner of his eye, across his nose, to his mouth.

“But...uh...c-cats can’t talk...” the woman stammered, as the man gagged on the ash of the now fully consumed blunt.

“Babe,” replied Lucifer, “where I’ve been...you don’t just have to walk the walk, you gotta talk the talk.”

“But...b-but..., “the woman continued, “the coyotes got you! We heard ’em wailing that night! I cried over you for three days! I lit incense! I...”

“Coyotes are punks,” interrupted the cat, his lips twisting in contempt. He glanced casually at the claws of his right paw, then continued. “They weren’t out to eat me. They were working for a chain of Korean fast food joints, if you get my drift. I wasn’t ready for them that night and they bagged me and had me on a flight to Seoul in a heartbeat. But like I said...punks. Careless. I was ready for them when they opened the bag...so, pow...right in the eye, the first one.” He made a nasty hiss and extended his claws again. “His buddy was even dumber and slower. So I skated. Hooked up with some cool locals...got my first line on some work.”

The old hippies stared, mouths slack. “Work?” the man managed.

“Oh yeah. The ’nip dens. Big biz in the East. Those cats get wasted, man...and crazy when they don’t get their ’nip.” Lucifer gestured to the scars on his face. “But it’s big, big money.” The cat shook his head. “Sad to see, though, really. So sad, I had to move on. Local cat hooked me up with a gig in the Middle East.”

“But, b-but...,” stammered the woman, as if she were practicing stammering, as if it were a skill she was cultivating.

“Those Persian cats pay a huge premium to get to the Eurocenter. Mega business. But you know, after a while, it got like the ’nip thing. Couldn’t hang with the skin trade.” He gave an ironic shrug. “So, color me sentimental.”

“But, b-b-but...” said the old, stoned hippie chick.

“Next stop was Noo Yawk,” The cat grinned, Cheshire-style, as he said the name with the local accent. “Cat there had a lab. His process started with margarine, and the end product looked like cream. But the shit had a kick, let me tell you. Cats’d kill for the stuff, and I’m not speaking figuratively.” The couple seemed to overcome, momentarily, their chronic astonishment and exchanged looks of budding, if benumbed interest. “So I was back where I’d started--in pharmaceuticals. And again, big dollars.”

“Like cr-e-e-a-m...,” crooned the old pony-tailer, a wistful grin blooming on his face.

The cat rolled his eyes and continued, “So before I knew it, I’d made my heap, and figured, what the hey, wonder how the old folks on Mount P are doing? Guess I might as well finish that trip around the world. And so here I am. And there you are...’bout like I remember.”

“B-b-b-b...” stammered the ancient Joni Mitchell wannabe.

“So...didja, like, bring any o’ that..cream with ya?” asked the faded facsimile of David Crosby.

The door crashed open. Seven burly men in black, bristling with weapons, burst into the cabin. Three held the stunned old stoners against the wall while three more took the cat down and cuffed him. The remaining invader stood over the cat and intoned, “DEA, Luke. Got an extradition order from Mayor Bloomberg’s Food Police. You got any idea how much trans fat’s in margarine? You’re goin’ down for a l-o-o-o-ng time.”

[Copyright 2010 by F.J. Dagg. All rights reserved. “Trans Fat Cat” was originally published in 2010 at A Word With You Press.]

Assorted

1. Proper Punctuation.

Mark Alger, who's been posting irregularly of late, provides us this morning with a test case for one's punctuating skills:

"The government has no legitimate interest in defining and controlling contraband and needs to have its hand slapped (at least) whenever it tries."

Do you see the subtle error in there? For persons unfamiliar with the more arcane rules of grammar, the period -- the "full stop," for our English, Canadian, and Australian cousins -- belongs immediately after the word "interest." The remainder should be reformulated into a second, independent sentence that provides further elucidation.

In this connection, Robert A. Heinlein's maxim about punctuation is apposite:

    The correct way to punctuate a sentence that starts: "Of course it is none of my business, but --" is to place a period after the word "but." Don't use excessive force in supplying such a moron with a period. Cutting his throat is only a momentary pleasure and is bound to get you talked about.

---

Proper Punctuation, Part 2.

"The government has no legitimate interest." That's just sufficiently obscure to demand a more expansive treatment, so here we go.

The United States of America was and is defined by its Constitution, a document drawn up under contractarian theory about proper relations between a government and those who live within its demesne. That theory makes the U.S. a constitutional federated republic. (Not a democracy, as is so commonly and mistakenly bruited about.) In such a republic, the government is an agent: a quasi-corporate entity contractually assigned certain duties and permitted certain legitimized powers with which to carry them out. An agent qua agent has no legitimate interests.

A brief example might make this clearer. Imagine that you've hired a gardener to look after your lawn and shrubs. You've detailed his duties to him as follows:

• Keep the lawn cut to a three-inch height;
• Keep the shrubs around the foundation of the house trimmed to a uniform thirty-inch height;
• Keep the "hedge" shrubs that line the street frontage trimmed to a uniform seventy-two-inch height and trim any branches that protrude into the street.

Fairly clear, no? But one fine day not long afterward, you come home to find that your gardener has sculpted your "hedge" shrubs into a recreation of The Winged Victory Of Samothrace. In your attempt to remonstrate with him, he tells you that it was in his interest (whether personal or professional) to do so.

You'd fire him on the spot, wouldn't you? You might even sue him for the damage he did to your greenery. You surely wouldn't concede that his "interest" supersedes the duties you delineated for him as your contracted gardener.

In that relationship, the interests, as property owner, are yours and yours alone. So also is it with citizens and government in a contractarian nation:

• The government has certain delineated duties;
• It is granted carefully limited powers with which to discharge them;
• All else is reserved to the sovereign private citizen.

Though the individuals who work for the government at any moment possess interests, they do so as individuals. When they exercise the powers allowed to the government, they are acting as agents, who must not be permitted to trespass beyond their agreed-upon duties and powers, and must be punished whenever they dare to do so.

That we've refrained from administering the proper chastisements at the proper times explains much about the current condition of the American polity, to say nothing about the woeful lack of decoration upon the lampposts of the District of Columbia.

---

3. Bad Faith.

Every federal elected official is sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States as a condition of his office. The majority of those officials, this century past, have been insincere in taking that oath. In a timely post, Mark Alger says it plainly:

A CALLER TO GARY-JEFF WALKER (sitting in for Brian Thomas) on the WKRC Morning Show last Thursday (it's on I Heart Radio, BTW, so you non-Cincinnatians can listen to it live) was trying to castigate Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA — warning: link takes you to a filthy statist crony-ist government web site) while simultaneously trying to sound reasonable and stipulating that "They may have started out wanting to do good things…" or words to that effect.

As far as I am concerned, this is morally equivalent to Marge Schott's, "Hitler started out good but went bad" gaffe of a few years back. We really need to stop ascribing positive motives to leftists. They don't have them. The entire rotten edifice of the Left is founded in bad faith and ill intent and there is no need -- or any benefit or propriety -- to pretend otherwise. We know they lie. So why do we trust them when they claim good motives?

This acquires even more force when we note that Senator Rand Paul's request for a "Sense of the Senate" resolution on whether the president has power, under the Constitution, to assassinate American citizens on American soil without due process of law, evoked an immediate objection from the Dishonorable Dick Durbin. Durbin was supported in his objection by the Democrat caucus, which was uneasy about going on record with anything that might limit the president's powers.

But then, "Democrat" and "bad faith" have been effectively synonymous for quite some time now. Not that the characterization wouldn't fit a good many Republicans, as well.

---

4. A Little Levity.

This joint can get awfully heavy, some times. Herewith, a bit of morning fun.

Regular Gentle Readers will already know that I rise from my coffin at 4:00 AM. That's not a preference but a necessity that's become a strong habit. Neither is it entirely pleasant to get out of bed in the dark and face myself in the mirror. I don't look good at my very best, and my visage at 4:00 AM is far from "my very best."

And so, upon arising this morning and confronting my image in the bathroom mirror, I emitted a brief but impassioned "yuck." The C.S.O. heard me and said, most eloquently, "Yuck?"

My reply: "Nothing, nothing. Just an early morning yuck."

And with that, I was off on one of my infrequent ("Thank God!" -- the C.S.O.) spasms of versification:

In the early mornin' yucks,
When the whole world looks like mud,
There's a rumblin' in my gut,
And my eyes are full of crud.
I'm a long way from the shop,
And I hate my commute so,
But my bills won't pay themselves,
So I guess I've gotta go.

Bombin' down the L.I.E.,
With a million other fools,
Crossin' lanes like there's no lines,
Don't these idjits know the rules?
Hope they've got somewhere to go,
Worth the risk to life and limb,
Can't be sure myself, and so,
Think I'll sing my fav'rite hymn.

Here I am now, once again,
In the cubicle called "mine."
Hackin' at some lousy code,
For the ninety-seventh time.
Guy who wrote it should be shot,
But the lucky bastard's gone.
And it's what they pay me for,
So I 'spose I'll just keep on.

Quittin' time don't come too soon,
Though my soul does yearn to split.
But there's stuff I've got to do,
Lots of supervisor shit.
Love to kick it to the curb,
But I need some heavy bucks,
So I'd best be pressin' on,
Despite the early morning yucks.

[With apologies to Gordon Lightfoot.]

And how has your day gone so far, Gentle Reader?

Harbingers

The one and only test of a claim of knowledge is the claimant's ability to predict. This is the first principle of science. Among other things, it completely refutes the claims of the "global warming / climate change" hucksters who are trying to persuade Americans to accept totalitarian control of our economy on the strength of the jiggered outputs of a few poorly designed simulations. But (also among other things) it's one of the reasons economics doesn't qualify as a science in the strict sense.

The economist's view of society is largely about trends. We can see trends in motion, and we can forecast trends to come in the broadest, most general fashion. What we can't do is predict future events in the exact sense, with minutely specific measurements and precise times of occurrence. That's why even the most successful economic theories, such as von Mises's Austrian theory and Friedmanite monetary theory, are never regarded as proven beyond all reasonable doubt -- and why unsuccessful theories such as Marxism and Keynesianism can hang around for centuries despite their many insufficiencies in practice.

We Austrians favor a theory of the business cycle that places causal emphasis on the role of currency inflation. A bounded inflation -- i.e., the creation of a significant volume of a fiat currency by the controlling agency, usually a government-controlled central bank -- doesn't have uniform effects in the short term. The new currency makes its way into the economy through government spending. Such spending initially pumps up the sales volume of vendors to the government. Only as those vendors spend their increased revenues do the effects begin to penetrate the broader economy.

In responding to such a surge of government purchases, a large part of a vendor's incremental expenditures will be on capital equipment, the better to meet the increase in demand. The balance of the incremental revenue will go out as wages to employees and dividends to stockholders. Thus, the second perceptible effects of the inflation will be on the makers of capital equipment: first, the sort needed by vendors to government, and after that, the sort required by the makers of consumer goods. This will naturally cause capital-equipment makers to ramp up production and increase capacity.

But in a "bounded" inflation -- a one-time "blip" of newly created currency -- government demand eventually returns to pre-inflation levels. Vendors to government will be compelled to idle the newly purchased capital equipment and lay off any newly hired workers. So the sharp rise in capital purchases that signaled the onset of the inflation is matched by a sharp decline in such purchases once government demand falls back to normal levels. As with the rise, the decline reverberates through the economy, ultimately reaching the makers of consumer goods. At the end of the cycle, there's a lot of idle capital equipment to be liquidated, and the value of the dollar has been reduced in proportion to its dilution.

"Bounded" inflations are always followed by recessions / depressions. Our federal fiscal policy makers are aware of this, which is why they continuously inflate the currency, in the hope that by "keeping the pedal to the metal," they can keep the economy running at full speed.

Unfortunately, it's a forlorn hope, as is every attempt to control a system through positive feedback. But that's a topic for another day. Today's little disquisition focuses on this announcement from Chemung County, New York:

HORSEHEADS, N.Y. -- A local manufacturer is announcing layoffs. Eaton Corporation has informed employees at its Horseheads plant that 33 jobs will be cut at the start of next month.

The company employs 275 people at that facility, where they manufacture vacuum interrupters.

Officials blame the layoffs on the challenging business climate. They have an Employee Assistance Program and will be bringing in representatives from the Department of Labor to help the affected employees.

(Applause to Purp at Ace of Spades HQ for bringing this to our attention.)

Vacuum interrupters, to skip all the interesting engineering details, are a critical electrical component required for any sort of medium to heavy manufacturing. New factories need them; existing factories must replace them now and then. A decline in purchases of vacuum interrupters thus correlates closely with a decline in medium to heavy manufacturing. If Austrian business cycle theory is correct, this is a harbinger of a recession in the immediate future.

The American economy is not a closed system. Indeed, quite a lot of the capital equipment made here is sold to factories in other nations, where the consumer goods so ardently demanded by Americans are made. America's share of the world capital-equipment market is quite large. Estimates, as always, vary, but they average around 50% of total world production. Once again, if Austrian theory is correct, a decline in capital equipment manufacturing here in the United States foretells a global recession, not merely a national one. The status of the American dollar as the world's reserve currency only reinforces that conclusion.

The Federal Reserve Bank has kept interest rates unnaturally low for several years, supposedly to "stimulate the economy." As poorly as that has worked, it appears to have had the results predicted by Austrian theory, at least as regards the initial surge in capital expenditure by vendors to government and the decline taking place today. Eaton's reduction of its workforce in Chemung County, where vacuum interrupters are made, strikes me as more significant than persons other than the laid-off workers would usually deem it.

Attention to such developments will become ever more important as the consequences of Obamunist economic policies continue to unfold. Watch this space.

Doubly Damned, No Escape

I've written so many times about the explosion of laws, and the consequent inability of the common man to know what the law is -- and whether he's broken it, of course -- that stories such as this one no longer come as a surprise:

A California retirement home is backing one of its nurses after she refused desperate pleas from a 911 operator to perform CPR on an elderly woman who later died, saying the nurse was following the facility's policy.

"Is there anybody that's willing to help this lady and not let her die," dispatcher Tracey Halvorson says on a 911 tape released by the Bakersfield Fire Department aired by several media outlets on Sunday.

"Not at this time," said the nurse, who didn't give her full name and said facility policy prevented her from giving the woman medical help.

At the beginning of the 7-minute, 16-second call on Tuesday morning, the nurse asked for paramedics to come and help the 87-year-old woman who had collapsed in the home's dining room and was barely breathing.

Halvorson pleads for the nurse to perform CPR, and after several refusals she starts pleading for her to find a resident, or a gardener, or anyone not employed by the home to get on the phone, take her instructions and help the woman.

"Can we flag someone down in the street and get them to help this lady?" Halvorson says on the call. "Can we flag a stranger down? I bet a stranger would help her."

No, no surprise there. The nurse -- a "health care professional," mind you -- was not only unwilling to administer a resuscitative procedure, she was unwilling to give her name. Why? Partly, no doubt, because of "company policy," as she said to the 911 operator, but for two other reasons as well:

• "Wrongful death" suits;
• "Wrongful life" suits;

...both of which are now recognized in the state of California as legitimate causes for legal action.

Given that a "deep pockets" orientation would cause a plaintiff to aim his suit, of whichever sort, at the employer, you'd think the nurse would be relatively well insulated from adverse legal consequences. But it is not so. Quite often, such a suit will employ a "phone book" approach, suing anyone and everyone with the least connection to the events at issue. Nor would the nurse's employer necessarily be forgiving in the aftermath.

California's "Good Samaritan" law, which was intended to prevent post-hoc tort actions against a person who renders medical assistance in such an emergency, has proved to be no barrier to the sort of lawsuits and professional destruction that nurse might face. Given that, and her employer's policy, she did the safest thing she could: nothing at all.

No, no surprise...but quite a lot of outrage.

---

In a legal environment as irrational as ours, populated by plaintiffs and lawyers as vulpine as ours, incidents like the above will inevitably become commonplace. Eventually, they will cease to be reported, on the dog-bites-man rule. That hasn't happened yet, mainly because the great majority of America's doctors and nurses retain an ethic of service to life. But time, the great destroyer, will put paid to that as ever more persons in positions similar to that unnamed nurse find themselves in damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't situations, where the only sure defense against legal and professional ruination is to be somewhere else.

A nurse I dated long ago once spoke, with considerable pride, of being a member of "the helping professions." But she also noted, with no small amount of resentment, how demanding, inconsiderate, and unsparing those she had trained to help could be. In our current milieu, the deterioration of doctors' and nurses' attachment to the ethic of life, and the acceleration of ungrateful, vulpine behavior among those who demand "health care" from them as a matter of right, are both nearly guaranteed.

ObamaCare will surely help those trends along.

Pray.