Out Of Uniform

     This morning, Black Dumpling, a uniquely intelligent and provocative X poster, asks this critical question:

This is the question.

If an invasion fired only arms one out of one hundred of their soldiers is it unethical to open fire?

What if those other 99 are explicitly there to serve as cover and the one out of a hundred only starts shooting after they're deep within your territory… https://t.co/qZsVxSSm33

— BLACK DUMPLING™ (@BlackDumpling) July 30, 2026

     Underneath BD’s question is another: the question of the hour. Considering how critical the answer is to many other questions, it’s a wonder that it hasn’t been explicitly asked.

Are we at war?
How do we decide? * * *

     I don’t know of many periods in recorded history comparable to this one. There have been large-scale migrations in the past, often motivated by political upheaval, famine, or destructive weather. In 1971, an estimated 10 million Bengalis fled into India, to escape West Pakistani forces’ ferocious attempt to suppress East Pakistan’s moves toward regional autonomy. Those events et sequelae touched off a war between West Pakistan and India, and gave birth to the nation we call Bangla Desh.

     But the immense flood of migrants into these United States, mainly pouring over our somewhat porous southern border, can’t be ascribed to any of the “usual causes.” It’s essentially economic in nature: Third Worlders looking for economic opportunity. That motivation even applies to the agents of Mexican and South American drug cartels.

     That flood has been called an invasion… perhaps not always metaphorically. But if it were taken seriously as an invasion, we would be forced to ask Who is invading us? The invaders’ ethnicities are scattered rather than uniform. The great majority bear no weapons and carry no standards. No nation has declared that a state of war exists between it and the U.S.

     Now, just because no government has said that a war is in progress doesn’t mean that a war isn’t in progress. What constitutes a state of war? is a tough question to answer definitively. Time was, for a government to order an armed man across another nation’s borders was deemed an act of war. But once again, the migrants are nearly all unarmed when they wetback our borders. And no government will say that it has ordered them to penetrate these United States.

     We’re in a situation that the usual understandings of war and peace fail to cover. We need clarity desperately.

* * *

     By the most trusted estimates, illegal aliens now make up nearly 10% of the population of our nation. Other estimates are higher still. The destabilization of the American economy, the large increase in robberies and crimes of violence in alien-heavy districts, and the formation of de facto exclaves within our borders have the nation in a state of crisis.

     As Robert Higgs has shown us, a crisis provides an opportunity for a government to increase its powers and exactions. Rahm Emanuel has said so explicitly:

     You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.

     A serious crisis allows The State to act extra-legally, with “necessity” as its rationale. People are sympathetic to the plea of “necessity,” especially if the crisis at issue directly affects them. But as Isabel Paterson wrote, increases in political power to deal with a crisis are seldom entirely retracted:

     The difficulty of taking back powers once granted is illustrated in the repeal of the Prohibition Amendment; although it was demanded and carried by overwhelming sentiment of the citizens, the article of repeal contained a proviso which would retain numerous Federal jobs; it was impossible to make a clean sweep of the pernicious usurped power.

     In that sense, the migrant flood constitutes two kinds of crisis: one that threatens the integrity and stability of the federal and state governments, and another that threatens the freedom, prosperity, and security of the American people.

     Black Dumpling’s question addresses both crises. If the illegal-alien flood into the U.S. were recognized as an invasion, albeit of a novel sort, we would recognize the illegals as non-uniformed invaders. Under the laws of war, they would have no rights. They would be “outlaw” in the old sense of lacking the law’s protections. Shooting them on sight would be perfectly licit.

     The prospect may horrify. But is it worse than the prospect of accepting the invaders – of tacitly conceding that the invasion is beyond our power to counter?

     Those are among the most difficult questions I can imagine. The aliens are much like a swarm of hungry locusts. None of them are wholly innocent; all have broken the laws of the United States. But summary execution is an extreme penalty for wetbacking the border. And granting the federal government permission to militarize the whole country on the strength of the illegal-alien tide would have far-reaching consequences for the future.

     Perhaps we’re not looking at it the right way. Or praying enough. You decide.

A Quick Thought

     Every society has its own set of vise clamps. Every society tries its subliminal damnedest to squeeze the individual in them until he conforms to some life pattern that society has deemed acceptable. And most of us aren’t nearly strong enough to resist it.

     That’s neither good nor bad; it simply is. But the “is-ness” of it accounts for a fair amount of human dissatisfaction. For at any given time and any selected society, there will be individuals who cannot or will not conform. Their desire to deviate from the accepted patterns makes them unhappy. Oftentimes it makes others unhappy as well.

     In witness whereof, have a declaration from a brilliant writer, Armond Boudreaux:

You are not an interchangeable economic unit. Your life isn’t interchangeable with someone else’s. Your gifts and talents aren’t interchangeable with those of others. Your family isn’t interchangeable. Your neighbors aren’t interchangeable. Your community isn’t interchangeable. https://t.co/yIkS0AC3IH pic.twitter.com/ORPtS0gTj5

— Armond Boudreaux (@armondboudreaux) July 30, 2026

     All that is indisputable. Yet survival itself sometimes hangs on conformity. When that’s the case, finding a modus vivendi is a major challenge. It can absorb one’s whole existence.

     The general level of prosperity that obtains in a society is a rough determinant of how much nonconformity it can tolerate. A few seconds’ thought will make the correlation clear. Thus, if you live in a poor society, you may not be able to escape conforming to one of the life patterns your society tacitly prescribes. But if you live in a rich society, you’re far more likely to find a “middle way” that will both allow you your differences and permit you to support yourself.

     Americans, especially radical nonconformists: Give thanks for capitalism. It makes your deviance possible. If you understand this, you’ve grasped a fact few of your fellows can comprehend.

     Have a nice day.

The Storyteller's Art: Metaphorically Speaking

     “Avoid clichés like the plague!” – a well known “Fumblerule.”

     This one is for the aspiring writers in the Liberty’s Torch audience. It concerns a subspecies of reader with which most writers are familiar: the critic that’s determined, for whatever reason, to pick apart individual sentences and phrases within a sentence for judgment. There are plenty of them, and not all of them work at publishing houses or in university departments of “literature.”

     Forgive me, Gentle Reader. I can’t help but remember a high-school teacher I had who possessed a fetching way with words. As he taught European history, it was incumbent upon him to season the factual material with segments on “culture.” I think he enjoyed them, but every so often he would say something to the opposite effect. On one particularly memorable occasion, he came up with the following:

     “I can’t help it. When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I think of things in those little Petri dishes.”

     Indeed, culture as a grab-bag term for the aggregate of a people’s efforts in the arts does derive its application from the “Petri-dish culture” of microorganisms. Metaphorically, it expresses what is happening to that people as it grows: that is, as it becomes ever more prosperous and therefore ever more able to afford for some of its members to devote themselves to the arts rather than to “practical” activities.

     (A digression: Persons who use the word culture to refer to the practices of some savage tribe are departing from the foundation of the metaphor. Savages’ “cultures” are largely propelled by superstition. They’re attempts to propitiate unseen powers: “We’ve sacrificed to you and done as you wished. Please don’t harm us.” That distinguishes them from the arts as civilized peoples practice them: efforts to express themes and motifs that are significant and inspiring to themselves. End of digression. Back to metaphors and clichés.)

     As I’ve written before, a cliché is a dead metaphor: that is, a metaphor which, due to overuse, no longer evokes its original foundation. “Avoid it like the plague” derived its original metaphorical effect from the horrors evoked by the Black Death, one of the greatest tragedies in the history of Mankind. But people no longer react to the mention of the Black Death in horror. It’s too far back in time, and anyway, no one alive today has had any contact with it. So the metaphor is dead. Rest in peace.

     As a general matter, the avoidance of clichés in your writing is a good idea. But it must be said that that “rule,” like all the other “rules” of good writing, can be superseded by a higher rule. One higher rule was best expressed by George Orwell:

     Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

     Now, in the cited essay, Orwell was principally concerned with nonfiction writing, especially exposition and opinion about public matters. As he put it, he was addressing “language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.” But when we come to fiction, the rules, such as they are, don’t bind nearly as firmly.

     The storyteller’s agenda is a different one. He writes about people under conditions that stress them. Such conditions compel them to confront needs that demand change. Sometimes, as in the speculative genres, those conditions depart radically from what men alive today would call “reality.” (Never mind that reality is a term insusceptible to definition.)

     The storyteller isn’t there to teach physics, or economics, or – God help us all – the rules of prescriptive English grammar. His aim is to evoke emotion in the reader. Rules are only relevant if they serve that end.

     The significance of that distinction is most obvious when writing dialogue. People use clichés frequently in spoken English. Indeed, the English language depends so heavily on metaphorical constructions that one could argue that without clichés, speaking English would be impossible. An attempt to evict all clichés and similar phrases from one’s speech would effectively silence him.

     But there’s also non-dialogue matter, isn’t there? And the “literati” are so fond of picking at one’s sentences! So we must ask whether clichés in narrative and descriptive passages are ever acceptable.

     I claim the answer is yes.

     As I’ve already written, the determinant is the storyteller’s agenda. Does he want the reader to proceed slowly, pausing to savor individual images and expressions? If you’re Vladimir Nabokov, you might aim at that; at least, the beauty of his prose is the only conceivable reason to read Lolita. Or does he want the reader to move swiftly, absorbing the tale at a speed possible only if he needn’t stop repeatedly to ask “What’s the BLEEP!ing author trying to tell me here?” Most thriller writers would seek to impose that pace on their prose.

     The aim is prior and superior to the tool. The tool must serve the aim. The cliché is just a tool. If immediate recognition and swift forward motion is the storyteller’s aim, clichés can sometimes serve that aim.

     This is not an argument for or against clichés. It’s an exhortation to the storyteller: Know what you’re trying to do. If you have a particular aim, tools that serve that aim are entirely justified, even if the “literati” should quibble. Unless you’re one of the benighted forelock-tuggers more concerned with what some prize jury will think of your style than whether the reader enjoys your story, approves of it, and is willing to recommend it to his friends, use clichés if and when they serve your purposes. You have my blessing, for what that’s worth.

Chronicles Of The Death Cults 2026-07-29

     Europe is still ahead of us:

     Just days after France legalized “assisted suicide,” the French government has now ruled that doctors can euthanize a conscious patient against his wishes by withdrawing life-sustaining treatment, even though he repeatedly says he wants to live.
     The bombshell ruling has intensified fears that France’s euthanasia regime is already sliding toward a system in which doctors, not patients, ultimately decide who lives and who dies.
     At the center of the case is Rémi, a man who regained consciousness after a devastating accident and now consistently tells doctors and his family that he wants to continue living after getting a second chance at life.

     I can’t say I anticipated exactly this course forward for the Apostles of Death. But tell me, Gentle Reader: doesn’t it make a demonic kind of sense? France has legally codified the notion that doctors, not the patient being sustained nor his family, can rule an ongoing course of life-sustaining treatment “disproportionate:”

     Hospital physicians nevertheless concluded that continuing treatment would merely prolong [Rémi’s] life without any realistic prospect of meaningful recovery.
     They invoked France’s Claeys-Leonetti Act, which governs end-of-life medical decisions for the nation’s socialized healthcare system.
     The act permits doctors to discontinue treatment they deem medically futile or disproportionate.

     Merely being alive and conscious and wanting to remain that way is considered insufficient to override the doctors’ judgment.

     “He who pays the fiddler calls the tune.” France’s socialist medical system makes the State the paymaster. Rémi, a mere citizen of the Republic, is subordinate to the will of the State. Indeed, the decision that confirmed the doctors’ “collegial judgment” said so explicitly:

     France’s Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court, has now sided with the doctors.
     In one of the ruling’s most alarming declarations, the court stated that “the patient’s wishes are subject to the law.”

     We don’t have that kind of medical system in these United States… yet. But the penetration of third-party payment – insurance, Medicare, Medicaid – into medical decisions has reached a depth that makes the complete federalization of medical care likely, owing to the many clashes between patients in need of expensive care and insurance companies’ focus on their loss ratios. Under such circumstances, the demand for “correction” will swell. How far, we cannot know in advance.

     We’ve already had the worldwide legalization of abortion. The demand for the legalization of euthanasia and “assisted suicide” is spreading; it’s already won in nine European nations. We’ve heard about the Groningen Protocol, too. A helpless woman has been starved to death legally, by the decision of her estranged husband. And now in France, a helpless, severely injured man will lose his life by the decisions of physicians, with the concurrence of the State.

     In one of my most contentious essays, which was stimulated by the starvation-to-death of a helpless woman, I wrote:

     Were a condemned serial killer to be sentenced to the same ordeal, every civil-rights and humanist group in the country would be up in arms. Nay, it would arouse every such group in the world. Such groups cannot abide the death penalty even for men convicted of the most heinous crimes. The United States would be castigated in every organ known to Man for its callousness, its brutality, and its lack of respect for human life.

     So never, ever imagine that “It can’t happen here.” It already has. Those of us whom age is steadily rendering ever less capable of caring for ourselves are in more danger than we might know.

     When the late, great Joseph Sobran wrote that “The State should not deliberately kill,” I was troubled. I had the usual rationales in mind: war and the most heinous of crimes. I’d accepted H. L. Mencken’s observation that the lives of some demonstrably vicious men were “incompatible with the reasonable safety of the rest of us.” I still struggle with those arguments. But Sobran was right, as he nearly always was. Once you have admitted the deliberate infliction of death to the laws and morals of your country, you’re aboard a train on a single, unalterable track. The terminus of your journey is plain.

     Pray.

Unthinkable Or Inevitable?

     After the parliamentary systems piece appeared, I got an inquiry from a reader about religious affiliations among political parties. He wanted to know whether there were other parties that explicitly aligned themselves with specific religions.

     It’s a subject of some interest, yet I’d never actually researched it. So I took the lazy man’s way out: I asked Google’s powerful AI component, Gemini:

(My query:) What European political parties are explicitly aligned with a particular religion?

European political parties aligned with religion include Christian democratic and small confessional parties like the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Germany, the Christian Democrats in Sweden, and the Christian Union in the Netherlands. While major historical parties have evolved into broad-based centrist groups, explicitly faith-based and niche religious parties still operate at national and European levels. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Christian Democratic and Conservative Parties

• Christian Democratic Union (CDU) / Christian Social Union (CSU) (Germany): Historically confessional and explicitly rooted in Christian ethics, though it now functions as a broad center-right "catch-all" party. [1, 2, 3]
• Christian Union (ChristenUnie) (Netherlands): An explicitly orthodox Protestant party that bases its practical policies directly on the Bible. [1]
• Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) (Netherlands): A traditional center-right party formed from a merger of historic Protestant and Catholic parties. [1, 2]
• Christian Democrats (Kristdemokraterna) (Sweden): Centers its platform on Christian social ethics, family values, and human dignity. [1, 2]
• European Christian Political Party (ECPP): A transnational European political party uniting socially conservative, Christian-values-focused national parties across the continent. [1]

Niche and Regional Confessional Parties

• SGP (Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij) (Netherlands): A strict, traditional Calvinist party that advocates for governance explicitly based on biblical principles. [1, 2, 4]
• Islamic-oriented / Immigrant-focused groupings: While mainstream Islamic political parties do not hold major seats in Western Europe, smaller local or niche lists (such as Partij Ideal or various minor inclusion/diversity movements) occasionally organize around Muslim community interests, though most operate within secular frameworks or general immigrant-advocacy platforms rather than as formal theocratic entities. [1]

     Forgive me for not inserting the links. I’m sure that those who are deeply interested can find the references as easily as I did.

     These are pointers to a past Europe whose vestiges have not yet been erased. Europe was once called Christendom: “the land of Christ.” Its Christian heritage was once overwhelming, in testimony to which we have the innumerable beautiful cathedrals, other architecture, and works of Christian-influenced art, music, and sculpture for which the Old World is known. That makes it especially sad that Europe has become so secular.

     North America, a heavily Christian continent, could be called Christendom with equal justice… but it isn’t. Heavily Catholic Mexico and heavily Christian America and Canada entitle the New World to that label, yet I cannot recall ever hearing it called that. North America just isn’t thought of that way, even though today its people are more Christian than their Old World cousins.

     I could go on in this vein, but I won’t. What I find myself wondering this morning is whether there will ever be a recognized political party in America that openly aligns itself with any religion. If one should arise, with which religion would it identify?

     The most plausible answer is not pleasant. Neither is the political direction in which such a party would be most likely to take us. And with that, I shall wish all my Gentle Readers a very nice day.

A Word About Parliamentary Systems

     There aren’t many polities structured as is the United States. Most other First World nations have parliamentary systems, which vary from the American Constitutional model in several important ways:

1. The legislature is elected at irregular intervals.
2. The executive branch is not elected; the dominant party or coalition in the legislature determines the control of the executive.
3. Within limits, the executive determines when elections will next occur.
4. All members of the executive have seats in the legislature.

     The progenitor of modern parliamentary systems was England of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Note that its descendant, the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, lacks a written Constitution. Long ago I read a claim from a British commentator to the effect that the lack makes British parliamentarianism “superior” to the American system. His argument was that a written Constitution “can be an impediment to doing what’s needed.” I have no idea if that commentator is still alive; if so, I’d like to ask him if he feels the same today.

     Parliamentary systems are friendly to small parties. That’s because there are no national elections; the voter votes only for local officials and his member in the legislature. Thus, elections tend to concentrate on local issues. Unfortunately, there are national issues, especially in a nation which lacks Constitutional guarantees of individual rights and limits on government. So it matters very much, as you’ve probably already guessed, who controls the national executive.

     In the practical realm, such a system will have two major parties, just as does the U.S. Those major parties will differ sharply in their policy prescriptions, just as do the Democrats and the Republicans. Yet in practice no major party will exercise complete control over the national agenda, whatever it may be, because it will need to form a coalition with one or more minor parties to achieve control of the executive.

     Those minor parties can be terribly difficult to control, even after their legislators have agreed to form a coalition with a major party. They know that they can bring down the executive by defecting. That gives them outsized political power – and that gives the major parties a strong incentive to find ways to dampen the influence of minor parties that are regarded as particularly fractious or unruly.

     So political dominance in a parliamentary system requires a coalition and mutually agreed suppression of minor parties regarded as unacceptable. This is an important political influence in Europe today. The reason is an effect similar to what’s happening in America: the major parties and the coalitions they build have demonstrably failed their peoples. Thus, new parties better attuned to popular sentiment are on the rise – and the major parties want nothing to do with them.

     The best observable example of this is Germany. Two parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP), have dominated German governance for decades. But those parties, both of which are Euro-socialist, have largely lost the allegiance of German voters. The Alliance for Germany (AfD) has attracted so much support that, were free, fair, non-fraudulent elections to be held in Germany today, the AfD would outpoll the CDU and the SDP combined.

     But the AfD is explicitly nationalist. It’s also far less socialist than the older parties. That has thrown the ruling class of Germany, and indeed much of Europe, into a panic. Without German participation in and support of the European Union (EU), that union would dissolve. Continent-wide policies would cease to bind. Establishments throughout Europe would totter and fall.

     So the CDU and the SDP are straining to assemble a coalition whose sole purpose is to exclude the AfD from the selection of the German executive branch. They’re pleading for support from other European powers as well. Their sotto voce appeal is to stability. Whether German voters value stability more than national policies that strengthen Germany and ethnic Germans is uncertain.

     Analyst and commentator Haretina Kukuri, whom I admire greatly, has this to say:

     The CDU governs with a partner that blocks the reforms it needs. The SPD governs with a partner that demands them. Both leaderships are under internal fire. Neither can deliver anything, and neither can walk away, because there’s nowhere left to go.

     BUT if the AFD rules then we are talking about a divided Europe. They are against Europe as a union.

     Clearly, Haretina views that unfavorably. In a reply to a comment, she adds this:

     [B]e careful what you wish the AFD will take us some decades back

     Would the dissolution of the EU, a “mock,” pseudo-parliamentary federation of European nations headquartered in Brussels, whose policies have inflicted a great deal of damage on the Old World, really “take us some decades back?” “Us” being Germany and / or Europe, that is.

     I’d like to say that “German voters will decide,” but there’s a strong possibility that their preferences will be overridden by Germany’s courts, or ballot manipulation, or a continental “super-coalition” unprecedented in European political history. It’s happened in these United States. German nationalists must not imagine that “It can’t happen here.”

Something Off The Beaten Track

     A reader just wrote to ask if I simply must continue with the doom-and-gloom pieces for some unexpressed psychological reason involving my boyhood, or might I be persuaded to post something, say, a bit uplifting? He was graciously complimentary about my usual output, my selection of topics, my focus, my writing style, and so forth. He just didn’t want to have to surf over here, as he does each morning, in anticipation of being brought down, as he put it. He’s a sunny sort who can find the silver lining around any dark cloud – I’m sure you know and despise a few people like that – and he wanted to register a vote in favor of more lighthearted pieces. You know, the kind that aren’t likely to get you eyeing the Barrett .50 and thinking about clock towers.

     It confused me, at first. I mean, do people really come to Liberty’s Torch for that kind of drivel? Posting that sort of thing makes me wonder if I’m letting my Gentle Readers down. Well, at least one person does, or hopes to do. So I tried to think of a topic about which I could hold forth with warmth, humor, and Christian love, yet do so with the splendiferous effulgence that characterizes my usual crap.

     For a while, I came up drier than the Mojave Desert. I suppose I was in the wrong frame of mind for happy stuff. So I decided to seek a distraction… and I found one:

When I was a steak cook at Ponderosa steakhouse, age 16, this beautiful waitress that went to another high school would always come back and sit next to me after her shift was over and talk.

I finally said “why are you still here? You are not getting paid. You should go home.” pic.twitter.com/2LEoel4rxQ

— Adam Rossi (@rossiadam) July 25, 2026

     Gentle Reader, you must read the comments to that tweet. Especially if you’re a man. I lack the words to capture the poignancy of those tales. If you don’t have a personal story that belongs in that collection, you’re a rare and precious jewel.

     But I do.

* * *

     It was 1967. I was a senior in high school, and my eyes were on the stars. Almost literally! I was soon to depart to my chosen university and begin (I hoped) a career in physics. More on that some other time.

     As the school’s Brainiac, I had had the usual young nerd’s experience of romance: that is, none. I’d noticed the girls around me, some of whom were quite fetching, but I’d never dared to approach any of them. As I was two years younger than all of them, it struck me as pointless.

     I was a loner even then. I used to walk to school and back, even though it was a three-mile distance from my family’s apartment and I was fully entitled to bus transportation. Needless to say, I had to set out early. But I walked fast, and I always got there well before anyone else. I would sit in the cafeteria and read until the time came to report to homeroom, where attendance was taken. For a long time I did so alone.

     But not always. There came a day in late winter when, with some fifteen or twenty minutes to go before I had to scurry off to homeroom, a very pretty teen girl sashayed down the hall. I noticed, of course. I tried hard to maintain “situational awareness” even back then, as the Class Nerd often becomes the Class Target. She glanced over at me, smiled, and hurried along. I gave it no further thought.

     Until the next morning, when she didn’t hurry along. She came directly to my table, perched herself next to me, gave her name as Shelly, said she was a junior, and started to chat. It was high school girl stuff: her classes, her friends, who so-and-so was seeing, new pop music, what’s good on TV, and so on. Nothing hugely consequential.

     I don’t think I’ve ever been so terrified, before or since.

     I was the focus of a girl. That is, she was there because I was there. She was talking to me. And she was pretty! Beautiful, really. Her nose was a little larger than she might have liked, but I could find no flaw in her. I couldn’t imagine why I had her company and her attention. In that, perhaps you can see the embryo of the Curmudgeon Emeritus I would someday become.

     As with most Class Nerds, I had no small talk. My head was full of equations. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. She gave me plenty of opportunities to respond, but I hadn’t the faintest idea how to do so. I just tried my best to smile. It must have been the most artificial-looking smile in the history of Mankind.

     Well, at long last the bell rang, we wished one another a nice day, and parted to go to our respective homerooms. I gave a silent prayer of thanks for having been released from that conversation before I could beclown myself and tried to have a “normal” day thereafter.

     But she came to chat me up the next day, too. And the next. And the next, which was a Friday. If your high school years are too far back to remember the significance of Fridays to high school kids, allow me to refresh your memory: They matter. A lot.

     Friday was “game time.” Commitment time. It was when your hopes for the evening and weekend become either if-onlies or palpably real. If you have plans to socialize, Friday is when you discover who will have you, if anyone, and for what.

     High schoolers make a lot of bad decisions on Fridays. Some prove to be mere embarrassments. Others are destructive, or cruel.

     I had no evening or weekend socializing plans. No one else would have me, which made such plans moot. At least, that was how matters stood when I arrived at school Friday morning.

     As I mentioned, Shelly showed up again. In fact, she was there a little before me. I was in a wobbly state of mind. Yet I knew that I had to be there. If I didn’t show, she might take offense, and I didn’t want that.

     She started chatting with me again, the same pattern as before. You know how that goes: Math is really tough this year! Nancy has to go to summer school. Karen has started going out with Joel! Have you heard the new one from Paul Revere and the Raiders?

     I did my best to provide appropriate responses, though I doubt I improved on our previous encounters. She rambled on for a few minutes in an engaging, perfectly pleasant fashion. Never a mean word about anyone or anything. But it didn’t take long for her to get to the Sunday punch.

     She didn’t ask me out directly. She was subtle. She mentioned that her usual crowd was going to a concert that evening. Rock concert tickets were comparatively cheap back then. All the same, she didn’t want to go; she disliked rock-concert volume levels. I sympathized, of course. But her next two sentences are engraved on the inside surface of my skull:

     “But I don’t want to just sit at home. What do you think you’ll be doing tonight?”

     It blindsided me. I couldn’t believe she was asking me out. And I had no relevant, coherent idea how to respond. But she was looking at me, compelling me to make some kind of reply.

     Eventually I replied that I had no plans other than to go another chapter forward in Halliday and Resnick (my AP physics text). You can imagine how that went over.

     I think that blindsided her. She didn’t say anything for a long moment. Maybe she was hoping I’d come up with a suggestion spontaneously. Soon enough the bell rang, she wished me a good day, and ambled off.

     That was the last time I sat in the cafeteria before homeroom. I never saw her again.

* * *

     “She doesn't love you anymore. Maybe she did once, I don't know, but she doesn't now! These are used emotions. It's time to trade ‘em in! Memories are meant to fade, Lenny. They're designed that way for a reason.” – From Strange Days

     The memory above hasn’t faded. I knew I’d blown an opportunity that had been brought to me on a silver platter. I was smart enough to realize that. And I still wonder, now and then, how things would have turned out had I untangled my teenage tongue and suggested something moderately fun to Shelly.

     Maybe the reason memories are designed to fade is to spare us old folks the regrets and self-disgust that would arrive with them if they were fresh and vivid. I couldn’t say.

     I know this isn’t a bright and cheery piece. Sorry. But once I remembered, I had to get it out. Forgive me.

Schismata Part 4: The Biggest Chisel

     There are days when the total lack of shame of anti-Americans in power completely occupies my thoughts. Yes, I speak here of the Democrats. It’s impossible to embarrass them. It’s equally difficult to squeeze the truth out of them. One thing comes through clearly: they will do anything to get and retain absolute, unbounded power.

     Their principal opponents in that quest are not Republican politicians, who are spineless almost to a man and care far more about media air time and column-inches than they do about any supposed principle, but actual Americans. The bulk of us are of European descent, though there are exceptions. Thus, the Democrats strain to the utmost to conceal their machinations from us, though occasionally they’ll let favored members of the GOP in on the scam.

     Apparently Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri is not one of the favored ones:

BREAKING: I am releasing a newly obtained internal Presidential memorandum from the Biden White House.

It details how Biden was advised to block President Trump's deportation of 3.1 MILLION noncitizens—including Tren de Aragua members—through “Temporary” Protected Status. pic.twitter.com/oIquq3pRm7

— Senator Eric Schmitt (@SenEricSchmitt) July 23, 2026

     The Democrats’ political conquest of these United States of America requires that the Euro-American bulwark of the nation be diluted and, ultimately, erased. The replacement population must have no attachment to any aspect of Americanism, especially the constraints on government codified in the Constitution. Why else would the “undocumented Americans” come almost exclusively from Third World nations?

     Recently I’ve been writing about the Left’s creation of fault lines in the American national culture and ethos. While some of those are rather subtle, the importation of non-Americans, mainly uneducated and unskilled and often of a creed hostile to everything American, is blatant. They’ve become so numerous that, as the saying goes, you can’t swing a fist without hitting one. Current estimates of illegal aliens within our borders hover around 60 million.

     Those aliens constitute the gravest of cracks in our common culture and ethos. They maintain numerous exclaves within which American law is effectively unenforceable. They don’t yet outnumber us, but they’re outbreeding us. They’ve already managed to take over a few of our larger cities. Their culture contains little that a Euro-American would recognize.

     Illegal immigration is the Left’s most devastating weapon against America as she was founded. That makes this memo more than a smoking gun of Democrat duplicity. By making plain the Biden Interregnum’s plans to impede the Trump / MAGA agenda, it makes the war against the Constitution and the American political ethos too visible for anyone to overlook.

     The SAVE Act has become critical to the future of America’s elections. Now is the time for maximum pressure on the Senatorial Republican caucus to suspend or eliminate the filibuster and pass that bill. They don’t want it – a lot of them profit from illegal immigration, and nearly all of them are in terror of what the media will say about them – so they must be compelled to pass it against their wills.

     Get on the horn to Republican Senators. Make sure they know that you will actively work against any of them who refuse to support the SAVE Act. If you think you know of a Democrat Senator who may be persuasible, contact him too.

     Don’t let up.

A Pointed Observation

     This one is from John Hinderaker:

     [26th Texas Congressional district Representative Brandon] Gill is the new hero of the conservative movement, largely because of his skill at questioning liberal witnesses…. Gill’s secret is that, instead of giving speeches as most members of Congress do, he actually asks the witnesses fair questions. And, time after time, it turns out that their ideology prevents them from giving coherent answers.

     Hinderaker scores twice in that short passage. If you’ve ever listened to a Representative interviewing a witness, you know what constitutes a “question” from a Representative. Virtually every one of them attempts to fold his own viewpoint into the question, such that the witness cannot possibly reply in a useful fashion without first conceding the Representative’s viewpoint. This is tolerated because it serves the agendas of the Representatives doing the questioning.

     Brandon Gill doesn’t do that. He asks simple, one-part questions. Usually, the witness can and should answer yes or no. A hostile witness will feel trapped by that. He’ll do his best to dance around the question: to obfuscate, to divert to side issues and irrelevancies, or to swerve to an attack on some disliked figure. He will never, ever answer yes or no.

     A sharp question must be simple. It must not have several parts; that clouds what the questioner is asking. It must be possible for the witness to answer it clearly. Indeed, in its simplicity it will make plain when the witness doesn’t want to answer clearly.

     Don’t look to Congress for copious examples of sharp, simple questions. Brandon Gill is just about the only Representative who asks them.

     “[N]ot just politicians but everybody responsible for communications in any way ought to take such a pledge [i.e., of a commitment to clarity]. The point, of course, is to cut through the thick grease and old varnish to discover what kind of material lies beneath. And the best tool the radical skeptic has is the sharp question—“Why?” “What for?” “When?” “What do you mean?” “Who?” These are terrifying questions, in a way, considering how seldom they are answered. And when the answers are given, they don’t appear to be the right answers.” -- Arthur Herzog

     Words to live by.