Because That’s What They Do

     First, Happy Bastille Day. If your schooling didn’t include the details of the French Revolution of 1789, you can read about some of the more prominent ones here. Even if their reasons differ, mobs storming prisons have taken Bastille Day as their model ever since.

     Second, Long Island is about to be broiled once again, which may force me into our basement for the duration. Yes, we have central air conditioning, but the system starts to struggle when the outdoor temperature exceeds 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Fortunately, there are two more computers down there… but there are also a large TV, a comfortable recliner, and several hundred movies on DVD. Which of those will command my attention is always a crapshoot.

     Third – here we are again, Gentle Reader – a news item that slipped past me a few days back has been brought to my attention:

     Alarming new satellite images show signs that the Iranian regime appears to be rebuilding its suspected nuclear facilities at Pickaxe Mountain and Parchin.
     Footage of both areas – which sustained extensive damage during US and Israeli-led bombing campaigns that began in late February – reveal “major signs” of activity, according to CNN, which obtained images from private firms.
     Such construction likely runs afoul of the Memorandum of Understanding that Iran and US negotiators reached last month during a cease-fire that President Trump called “over” this week following Iranian attacks on shipping vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.

     Are there any Gentle Readers who didn’t expect that? Who sincerely expected the ayatollahs to abide by the MoU? That could only be due to a severe case of wishful thinking. Imagine me tut-tutting and waving an index finger.

* * *

     Long ago, I wrote:

     Possibly no novel in history has excited as much admiration or discussion as J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy classic The Lord Of The Rings. If you're one of the three remaining English-speakers who has yet to read this extraordinary work of the imagination, it's essentially the tale of the final conflict between the Free Peoples of Middle Earth, belatedly come together in a defensive federation, and Sauron the Dark Lord, the superhuman embodiment of evil, who seeks to enslave the entire world, simply because that's what he does.

     Enslaving others makes Sauron happy. Perhaps he could also get some use out of them – as soldiers against Gondor, for example – but even if he could not, enslavement is his supreme temporal aim.

     For Islamists worldwide, the supreme temporal aim is the destruction of all competing creeds. The destruction of all Jews must come first, for it was Jews who first defied Muhammad. No agreement struck with another power will change that. Their creed – I refuse to call Islam a “religion” – demands the death of all Jews everywhere. The concentration of Jews in Israel and Israel’s geographic placement make it Islam’s foremost target.

     But Islamists know that destroying Israel will require nuclear weapons. They also regard agreements struck with “unbelievers” as to be dismissed when doing so would bring “advantage to Islam.” Thus, their creed makes it next to obligatory for them to enter a “peace agreement” fully intending to violate it. The MoU, in which Iran’s rulers supposedly agree to abandon the quest for nuclear weapons, was signed under the falsest of pretenses, for they intended to violate it from the start.

     I can easily imagine how President Trump, a consummate deal-maker, feels about this. To Trump, keeping one’s given word is a matter of honor and respect for the other party. While Iran’s violation of the MoU is consistent with the behavior of Islamist rulers, it must surely enrage him. We must hope that fury won’t lure him into a ground war, an outcome few Americans would approve.

     Yet what the Post reports is just what Islamists do. They always make such a promise with their fingers crossed.

* * *

     There is no Last Graf. Given prevailing attitudes and America’s experiences with 21st Century warfare, we must not expect an American expeditionary force to invade Iran and topple the Islamic regime. President Trump would resist the idea fiercely, and the preponderance of our citizenry would support him. If the Post’s report of Iranian duplicity is confirmed, the most likely consequence would be the resumption of bombardment of military and political targets within Iran.

     It’s a bleak prospect, but the alternatives are unpalatable.

A New And Vital Voice

     For some time now, I’ve been casting about for “new voices” to whom the beleaguered of our era should pay attention. In the process, I’ve encountered a lot of pompous asses – hey, a man should recognize his kind when he meets one, shouldn’t he? – and no small number of persons who parade erudition in place of insight. What’s missing from most discourse offered to the general public today is something I’ve prized lifelong.

     In Three Days of the Condor, one of the most impressive movies of the Seventies, director Sydney Pollack includes a thematic snatch of a conversation between CIA Director Wabash, played by John Houseman, and Assistant Director Higgins, played by Cliff Robertson:

Wabash: I go even further back than that. Ten years after The Great War, as we used to call it. Before we knew enough to number them.
Higgins: You miss that kind of action, sir?
Wabash: No… I miss that kind of clarity.

     Clarity is the most underappreciated virtue in the discourse of our time. It has often seemed to me that many writers treat it as an enemy – something that could get in the way of achieving public acclaim, or a position in the State Department. You might easily conclude that such a writer isn’t willing to say what he means and stand his ground when confronted about it.

     Clarity makes demands of both the writer and the reader. A clearly written opinion / analysis piece leaves the reader in no doubt about its contentions. It requires the reader to engage with it open-eyed. A lot of readers aren’t happy about being compelled to do so. They need the cushion of periphrasis to keep their sensibilities from getting scuffed up. But readers who matter – readers who reach definite conclusions and base their subsequent decisions on them – love clarity.

     I do.

* * *

     This era might one day be called the Age of Orwell’s Lament. There is so much that’s “plain as a fart,” staring us right in the face, that millions are unwilling to confront. That unwillingness is fundamentally defensive, as Orwell himself was at pains to tell us:

     ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten….
     ‘The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’
     One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.

     Yet there is a hunger for clarity among Us the People. It accounts for the elections of Donald Trump to the presidency. Trump’s style may be extravagant and occasionally self-glorifying, but he is nevertheless clear. He makes no secret of his intentions, and the common citizen loves him for it.

     The new voices that will command popular sentiment will be champions of clarity. They won’t hide. They may strut, as Trump does, but no one will be able to justly say that they weren’t clear about what they planned. Aspiring opinion-formers – I hear they’re called “thought leaders” these days – should take note and act accordingly.

* * *

     To those Gentle Readers who’ve been asking “But what’s the point?” I must admit to a bit of lede-burying. Yes, there is a new voice to which attention should go. She’s a young woman of conspicuously clear vision, high intelligence, and hard sense. I encountered her by chance at X, where so much is said to so little effect. I hope she will be heard.

     Her name is Haretina Kukuri:

     Haretina Kukuri is a strategic consultant operating at the intersection of commercial brokerage, geopolitical intelligence, and cross-border market navigation.
     Her practice is built on the understanding that the most consequential business decisions are never made in a vacuum. Markets respond to politics. Politics responds to power. And power rarely announces itself in advance.
     Working across emerging and frontier markets, Haretina advises clients who need more than analysis — they need actionable intelligence integrated directly into their decision cycle.

     Miss Kukuri first impressed me with a statement of convictions at X:

Hello. I’m Haretina. 25. Born in Greece

I’ve studied tourism management, criminology, and business with finance. I’ve lived in five countries. I speak five languages. I write about geopolitics, markets, power, and history.

I believe in common sense, which has quietly become a… pic.twitter.com/AnZQ1z0g3K

— Haretina (@HaretinaK) July 5, 2026

     If you want a dose of clarity about important matters, including many that other commentators are loath to address, read Haretina’s whole tweet. Follow it into the comments.

     Europe needs this young woman. Indeed, the whole world needs insight and forthrightness of her caliber, but Europe is dying from the lack of it. Her penetration and clarity are conspicuous in the essays at her website as well.

     Haretina Kukuri is a vital voice for our time, and for times to come.

Context Matters Part 2

     The talk about Citizen Vigilante continues hot and heavy. There are critical voices in the mix. Some consider the film dangerous, while others cheer for the Michael Sanders character and express a yearning that someone make him real. It’s perfectly clear what sensibilities and spirit the film has tapped.

     The facet of the film that’s excited the most negative comments is the scene in which Sanders, enclosed in a steel box, must shoot it out with two dozen SWAT team members. “He didn’t have to do that!” shriek the critics. And indeed, they’re right: he didn’t. But once they had confronted him and made it plain that their mission was to cut him down regardless of the consequences, the moral choice became too clear to avert.

     What did it say about the priorities of those police and their commanders that they would bring seemingly overwhelming firepower to the task of killing Michael Sanders? When rape and murder are running riot throughout Europe? When those same police have been told to treat violent savages as if they were made of spun glass? When justice has become the bitterest word in any language? What did it say about their commander that after the first wave had been eliminated, he sent a second wave, no better prepared, to the same fate?

     It may strike even some who see the matter as I’ve delineated it above as unfortunate, unnecessary to the movie and preferably to be omitted. I disagree completely. I find it to be the element of the film that cuts through all the noise:

The State’s highest priority is always to assert and preserve the supremacy of The State.

     Michael Sanders gave those SWAT members a chance to back away. He allowed that “You’re only doing your jobs,” but followed by telling them what “doing your jobs” – i.e., following their commander’s orders – would bring about. Their commander, a loyal State employee who mouthed “democracy” as if that shibboleth could excuse the complete abrogation of justice, sent them forward into withering fire.

     It had to happen. It was entirely in keeping with both the context of the film and the nature of the State.

* * *

     The question must be posed: Are matters in Europe – or anywhere else – really that bad? Would a real-life Michael Sanders who committed himself to delivering justice to proven criminals be acclaimed by Us the People? Would the minions of the State do their level best to cut him down, while ignoring the savageries being perpetrated by those criminals? And would Sanders’s acclaim among common people have any effect on State priorities and practices?

     Apart from the occasional reportage of some immigrant atrocity, I haven’t really kept track. But it does seem that Europe, which has admitted millions of Third World immigrants to its shores, is trending in that direction. Indeed, matters aren’t that much better in North America.

     Let it be said outright: the majority of those immigrants are Muslims. They were schooled in the most aggressive and violent “faith” the world has ever known. That faith tells them that it’s quite all right – indeed, it’s their duty to Islam — to rape and murder the “unbeliever.” Many of them cannot read the Koran that exhorts them to those deeds. Few have anything to “contribute to society,” even if they have the potential.

     They’ve behaved as the soldiers of a savage conquering army have always done. As their numbers swell, so will their crimes… perhaps faster, at that.

     I’ve written elsewhere that justice in this world is a human artifact. The concept of justice is one of Mankind’s highest intellectual creations. Men have tolerated States among them in the hope that an entity supposedly dedicated to the maintenance of justice would improve upon “nature red in tooth and claw.” The challenge of our time is to read the news and evaluate the validity of that hope.

Which Way, Indies?

     The question of the hour among those of us who write and self-publish fiction is what to do about piracy… if anything. Here’s a typically impassioned statement on the matter:

Do not pirate books. Respect the work of the people who spend hundreds to thousands of hours writing, refining, rethinking, and revising their work—and especially those trying to create something different. pic.twitter.com/ta5rpf4VLg

— DanNeo S.S. ✮ 𓂃🖊 (@DanNEO_SS) July 8, 2026

     Piracy is indeed dismissive of the author’s work and rights. But there are other perspectives, chief among them this one:

Would you rather make money or be read?

     And it is not to be fliply dismissed.

* * *

     When I started writing fiction, I had a spread of reasons, including the need to know whether I could do it. But paramount among those reasons was this one: I had stories to tell that I felt deserved an audience. Whether I could tell them effectively, affectingly, was to be determined.

     Now, a story worthy of adults’ attention must involve things adults care about. Were the stories in my head of that sort, or were they inane juvenilia fit only for children? (Let’s leave out that a lot of them have adult characters doing adult things.) There was only one way to know: I had to write them and find an audience for them.

     In my review of Martin McPhillips’s brilliant first novel Corpse in Armor, I wrote:

     Many fiction writers claim to write for the sheer pleasure of it. Some claim they only write for the revenue – "to buy groceries," as the late Robert A. Heinlein put it. But all of us, without exception, write to be read. Anyone who claims otherwise deserves no more of your time.

     And so it is. Yet the tension between wanting one’s book to be read – or at least, wanting to believe that one’s book is being read – and the desire for a tangible return from all the effort that went into it can be agonizing.

     I have no idea how other writers feel. Why do I write? See previous answer. Why do they write? You’d have to ask them. I haven’t done much of that. But I’d bet heavily that it does a lot for them when a reader writes to thank them for their books. It’s more or less what I live for.

     What’s noxious is when other people manage to profit from the writer’s efforts. I don’t know how many book pirates manage to do that. I doubt there are many; if we indies can’t pull it off, why would anyone else be able to manage it? Yet the problem is not illusory; piracy is rife.

     Can anyone think of a way to poll book pirates for their motivations? Has anyone ever buttonholed a book pirate and tortured an answer out of him? If any of my Gentle Readers can think of a way, please let me have it! After all, there might be a book in it.

Context Matters

     It was a long time ago that I first heard the following instructive exchange:

P1: I saw something disturbing today.
P2: What was that?
P1: An old woman was walking down the street when a young man rushed at her, knocked her down, rolled her along the ground, and slapped her all over her body.
P2: Horrible! How could anyone treat a defenseless old woman that way?
P1: Wait, did I mention that she was on fire?

     Little details such as that one matter a lot. Yet a great part of what passes for journalism today consists of concealing certain details to ensure that the story being told conforms to “the narrative,” or at least doesn’t damage it. This is also true for a lot of public rhetoric. If you tell the story just right — tell just enough truth, then shut up – you can enlist your audience in its own deception.

     Activists tend to omit details in the stories they tell, too. Smith is homeless, living on the street and begging passers-by for food? Very sad. But how did he get there? Drink? Drugs? Drawing to an inside straight? Unwise moves in the commodities markets? Give us the process, not just the consequences.

     The technique makes use of prevailing assumptions about what isn’t said. The young man in the opening vignette could be anyone, and the context could be anything. But it’s highly uncommon for young men to attack old women. It’s also uncommon for old women to be publicly on fire… in the literal sense, at least.

     Good people tend to assume the goodness of others: i.e., that unless it’s made explicit that this is not the case, other people share their ethical basis. That’s our inheritance as members of a Christian-Enlightenment culture.

     Prevailing assumptions prevail because they’re correct more often than not. Yet even when society is at its most uniform, there will be exceptions to them. More critical yet, in a society that’s losing uniformity, those assumptions will develop an increasing number of exceptions. This is especially important in a society which, for whatever reason, is shedding its cultural cohesion.

     Many First World countries are losing their cultural cohesion today. There are several reasons, which apply differentially according to the country under discussion. Rather than go into yet another tirade about immigration, I’ll say simply that as largely uniform populations become ever less uniform, the prevailing assumptions in those nations will become ever more dubious.

     Street violence? It might not be a failure of the “forces of order.” After all, certain ethnicities concentrate their numbers geographically. There are only so many police. Besides, some ethnicities regard the police as their enemies and would turn from whatever animates them to attacking the men in blue. There are a lot of guns out there, y’know.

     Open, blatant shoplifting? Don’t we teach our children not to do such things? Of course we do… some of us. Others tell their kids that “The Man” has been holding them down, and that the only way to “get a little back” is to grab it and run away. Or swagger away, if the shopkeeper is a tiny Asian man and you’re Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri.

     Idleness and shiftlessness concentrated in particular demographics? Ain’t no jobs, bro! Besides, who would hire one of us? Never mind that there’s a national labor shortage. And while it’s true that most employers would hesitate to hire one of you, don’t you think there might be reasons for it – and that you might want to put some effort into being an exception?

     The disintegration of a First World society into increasingly insular, increasingly mutually hostile subcultures makes it vitally important to be alert for exceptions to our assumptions. Maybe they’re becoming less reliable than in seasons past. As for the implied importance of preserving a common, Christian-Enlightenment culture, I trust that no more need be said.

Egocentrism: A Few Kind Words

     The title subject is much on my mind, for reasons partly derived from fiction. One of my fiction gurus, Robert A. Heinlein, early in his career produced a stunning short story titled “They.” It was an exploration of a species of madness… or so it seems at the start. In his anthology The Dark Side, Damon Knight introduces the story thus:

     This brilliant and compact story has the hallmark of great fiction: you will never be quite the same again after you have read it.

     The story reaches for the heights of solipsistic paranoia when its protagonist says this to his therapist:

     “All of these creatures have been set up to look like me in order to prevent me from realizing that I was the center of the arrangements. But I have noticed the key fact, the mathematically inescapable fact, that I am unique. Here am I, sitting on the inside. The world extends outward from me. I am the center…”

     What makes this story so compelling is that each of us sees things exactly the same as its protagonist. Berkeleian subjective idealism arises from that fact. In its collectivized version, it becomes the social construction of reality.

     And we can never wriggle completely free of that wholly individual viewpoint. You can’t really “see it the way he does” unless you are “he”… and you’re not.

     That this is “built in” to the human psyche is one of the downsides of individual consciousness. Heinlein wasn’t the only great writer to use it. Judith Guest employs it in her first novel, Ordinary People, in building up the ultimate rift between Calvin and Beth Jarrett.

     Each of us is the center of his own universe. Maturation is in part the process of learning to accept others’ equally egocentric viewpoints. He who cannot do so is unlikely to have a good time in society.

     A great deal of social strife arises from certain persons’ inability to allow others to believe what they wish. The difficulty of accepting other people’s convictions as beyond your power to change moves some to embrace force and fraud as their methods. Think a little about politicians and you’ll see the causal chain at once.

     But none of this is really news. It’s just that it’s seldom addressed openly. Even the word egocentric has been shorn of its etymological meaning. Today it just denotes the attitude of someone you wouldn’t want to be around. That’s because he’s an egotist. He’s on an ego trip. In other words, he’s not you.

     Ayn Rand did some good and some harm by emphasizing egoism in her novels Anthem and The Fountainhead. Ethical individualism is a vital stance, to be sure, but that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with a genuine egotist. In social dealing, the practicing egotist tends to evoke the egotism of others. The consequences are seldom pretty.

     The challenge for public discourse is to assert the rights of the individual while remaining untainted by the accusation of egotism. That is, we who champion the individual must strive to uphold the political implications of our egocentric nature without allowing the promoters of collectivism to claim that “you only care about yourself,” as they so often do. For that reason, the defense of egocentrism must be coupled to the promotion of Golden-Rule-patterned behavior and the rejection of self-absorption in all its forms.

I Hadn’t Planned To Post Today

     This tweet, the product of an AI, has impressed me more than anything else I’ve seen from such a source:

     I asked Anthropic's most expensive and intelligent model, Fable 5, to write a response to Mamdani's speech as if it were George Washington...

To the Mayor of the City of New-York
Mount Vernon, 3d of July, 2026.

Sir,

     Intelligence has reached me that you have lately seated yourself at my desk in the City Hall of New-York, with its face turned toward the publick eye, and that from this station, upon the eve of the 250th anniversary of our Independence, you delivered an address to the Citizens of that City. I have read it with attention. I confess I did not expect that these memorials would be employed in the service of principles so opposite to those by which I endeavoured to govern my publick life; and he who makes use of the memorials of the dead assumes an obligation to the principles for which they are remembered. It is upon that obligation, Sir, that I now address you, with a plainness the occasion demands.

     Let me first render what justice requires. Your account of the retreat from Brooklyn is correct in its facts; I was the last to leave that shore, and the deliverance was as providential as you describe. Nor shall I quarrel with your praise of those who have passed through the Narrows in hope of beginning anew; I have myself written that the bosom of America is open to receive not the opulent and respectable stranger only, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions. Had you stopped there, I should have had no cause to write. You did not stop there.

     For having borrowed my desk, my city, and the memory of my retreat, you proceeded to employ them in the service of the very doctrine against which I spent the labour of my publick life. Your address divides the People of America into two nations: the many, whom you flatter, and the few, whom you teach the many to abhor. You speak of soft hands and calloused hands, of men of immense fortune who have taken what the multitude have made. I have seen this rhetorick before; it was old when I was young. It is the eternal grammar of the demagogue, under every government and in every age; and I warned my Countrymen, in the last address I ever gave them, that the disorders and miseries of faction gradually incline the minds of men to seek security in the absolute power of an individual, and that cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men would ride that spirit to their own elevation upon the ruins of Publick Liberty. I ask you plainly, Sir: when you teach the labourer that his prosperous neighbour is his enemy, whose elevation do you serve?

     You will answer that you speak for the poor, the sick, the tenant beneath the leaking ceiling; and the condition of that man commands my sympathy as it commands yours. But the remedy you propose has been tried, in the centuries since my time, with a thoroughness I could never have imagined. Wherever men have been persuaded that property is plunder, property has fled, and want has remained; wherever the State has been made the master of industry, it has soon made itself the master of the men who labour in it. An hereditary aristocracy I opposed, and I hold no tenderness for privilege; but the security of property is among the first objects of Government, and the man who would make one class of Citizens the spoil of another has abandoned republicanism for a science older and darker, whatever new name the age may fix upon it. Nor can I pass over the manner of the thing. To greet new Citizens, upon the very day of their adoption, with an inventory of their Country's crimes, is to give them a most unhappy first lesson in the duties of citizenship; and I know of no household, no army, and no Republic that was ever held together by such instruction.

     Permit me, before I close, one observation upon the desk itself. It was at such a desk, in Annapolis, in December of 1783, that I performed the only act of my life in which I take an unmixed pride: I returned my commission to the Congress, and with it every power the war had gathered into my hands, and went home to my farm. The desk of a republican officer is a place for the laying down of power; the men of my generation understood this, and it is the whole of what we added to the history of government. I observe in your address a great fluency concerning what the People are owed, and a great silence concerning what their Magistrates must surrender. When you have sat at my desk long enough to learn its principal lesson, Sir, you will be welcome to it.

     I do not question your talents, which are considerable, nor the sincerity of your attachments, which is no defence; the most dangerous errours have ever been sincerely held. I tell you, with the freedom of a man who has nothing further to seek from any publick, that he who kindles the jealousy of Citizen against Citizen, though he kindle it in the name of Liberty, is burning the timbers of the ship he claims to steer. May Providence grant you the discernment to know it, the firmness to act upon it, and the candour to acknowledge it; and may the Union, purchased by so much sacrifice, never be surrendered to those who would divide it in the name of saving it.

     I have the honour to be, with due respect, Sir, Your most obedient and most humble servant,

Geo. Washington

     Somewhere in the afterlife, the ghost of The Father of Our Country is nodding and smiling.