Drives Part 2: Yin To His Yang

She said she'd married her an architect
Who kept her warm and safe and dry.
She would have liked to say she loved the man
But she didn't like to lie.

     [Dan Fogelberg, “Same Old Lang Syne”]

     It’s been said innumerable times that men have far simpler psyches than women. However many times it’s been said, however many people have made it an unexamined conviction, nevertheless it’s arrant nonsense.

     The psyches of the sexes do differ, but neither one is particularly complex. Each one has fundamental drives. Neither can dismiss or deny them without adverse consequences.

---

     In our species’ mating dance, it’s up to him to take the initiative. While she has the greater comfort of being the responder, and therefore possesses the privilege of merely not responding if he doesn’t appeal to her, she also has the more difficult investigative journey.

     No matter what she says or thinks, she wants:

1. Personal safety;
2. Material security;
3. Community acceptance and status;
4. Children.

     ...and she expects her husband-to-be to provide them, or at least to collaborate in acquiring them. Thus, her selection of a husband involves determining whether particular candidates are likely to get her those things.

     (Are there exceptions? Yes, there are – but they’re exceptions, and few in number. The great majority of women conform to the pattern. Even some women who consciously disavow the priorities above – i.e., who sincerely believe themselves to be exceptions – ultimately discover that they conform, too.)

     When she was expected to find her spouse among the sons of her family’s friends and neighbors, the investigative effort was less. It was mitigated by prior familiarity and the knowledge of her parents. The downside of a bad choice was also less, as there were usually two families to stabilize the match and cushion any failures it might experience.

---

     "What's eating you, Filthy?" she inquired. "You haven't said two words since we sat down."
     He returned to his surroundings with a start. "Nothing important," he lied-wishing that he could unburden himself to her. "You haven't been chatty yourself. Anything on your mind?"
     "Yes," she admitted, "I've just selected the name for our son."
     "Great jumping balls of fire! Aren't you being just a little premature? You know damned well we aren't ever going to have children."
     "That remains to be seen."
     "Hummph! What name have you picked for this hypothetical offspring?"
     "Theobald-'Bold for the People,'" she answered dreamily-
     "'Bold for the-' better make it Jabez."
     "Jabez? What does it mean?"
     "'He will bring sorrow.'"
     "'He will bring sorrow!' Filthy, you're filthy!"
     "I know it. Why don't you forget all this business, give that noisy nursery a miss, and team up with me?"
     "Say that slowly."
     "I'm suggesting matrimony."
     She appeared to consider it. "Just what do you have in mind?"
     "You write the ticket. Ortho-spouse, registered companion, legal mate-any contract you want."
     "To what," she said slowly, "am I to attribute this sudden change of mind?"
     "It isn't sudden. I've been thinking about it ever since ... ever since you tried to shoot me."
     "Something's wrong here. Two minutes ago you were declaring that Theobald was impossibly hypothetical."
     "Wait a minute," he said hastily. "I didn't say a word about children. That's another subject. I was talking about us."
     "So? Well, understand this, Master Hamilton. When I get married, it will not be to a man who regards it as a sort of super-recreation."

     [Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon]

     You have to be pretty old to remember when “she’s barren” – usually uttered in a whisper, and where she wouldn’t hear – was an expression of pity. A woman who reached her middle years without producing children was regarded as lacking, no matter how high her material status, how admirable her husband, or how beautiful her home. Moreover, it was expected that her husband would feel disappointed at her barrenness.

     Today, children are regarded as a sort of luxury good, not to be indulged in until she’s “made it” occupationally. (Her marital status is almost irrelevant.) Yet both her body and her mind demand children. Her reproductive organs are less likely to remain healthy without them. Her psychological inheritance from the thousands of generations of homo sapiens before her strongly suggest that if she doesn’t produce kids, she’s a “failure.”

     More to the point, she expects her husband to want children, and to cooperate in producing them. If he disappoints her in this, she’ll denigrate him and their marriage subconsciously at the very least.

---

     Today, marriage is attended by extravagant romantic expectations. She’s “supposed” to marry – if she marries – out of “love.” For her to choose a mate because he’s a traditional “good catch” – i.e., a young man of proven character who’s far more likely than not to be a faithful husband, good father, and a good provider – is frowned upon: “But do you love him?” rises the cry, with the unstated implication that if she doesn’t she’s shortchanging herself.

     At its best and least destructive, romance is a preliminary, not a characteristic of a married couple.

     Romantic illusions, both about him and about marriage itself, compound all the problems a married woman can face. Also, she’s more collectively oriented than is he. The attitudes of other women can steer her away from the course best suited to her – and the attitudes of women generally are being continuously engineered: away from traditional conceptions and expectations about marriage, and toward the notion that a marriage should possess the characteristics of a love affair, lifelong.

     Quite a lot of women’s current aversion to childbearing, in defiance of the demands of their bodies, can be traced to that notion. Motherhood is “not romantic.”

---

     Part of the appeal of feminism derives from the supposition that she cannot rely on a husband for her desiderata: that she must contrive to protect herself, to provide material security for herself, and to attain community acceptance and status through her own efforts. (Children, of course, will require a modicum of male participation...at least, as of this Year of Our Lord 2017.) Unfortunately, owing to contemporary social complexities it’s difficult enough to gauge a young man’s “prospects,” and there are enough men who ultimately prove to be unreliable protectors and layabouts, that the feminist argument is not without some power.

     The romanticization of the “bad boy” or “rebel” makes matters still worse. If she believes marriage to be just a socially-certified permanent love affair, she could be deluded enough to marry a “bad boy.” But the “bad boy,” no matter how much of a thrill she gets from his “rebellion,” nearly always makes a bad husband. There’s precious little salve for the wounds from that kind of marital mistake.

---

     Have a second look at the Dan Fogelberg lyric at the top of this piece. She “married her an architect / Who kept her warm and safe and dry.” That marriage satisfied at least some of her desiderata: personal safety, material comfort, and status. Let’s stipulate that she also got children out of it. But we’re told she doesn’t love him. Is theirs a successful marriage?

     I would say so, at least from her perspective. Romance is nice; few emotions are more thrilling than the intoxication of romantic love. But it pays no bills, mows no lawns, and does nothing for one’s standing in the community. Moreover, if he’s a faithful husband who’s also satisfied with the match, and she’s capable of appreciating his good qualities, she might be deceiving herself about not loving him.

     There’s much insight in this scene from Fiddler On The Roof:

(Tevye)
"I have decided to give them permission to become engaged. I have to.... go inside and-"

(Golde)
"What?! Just like this? Without even asking me?!"

(Tevye)
"Who asks you?! I'm the father!!"

(Golde)
"Who is he? A pauper! He has nothing, absolutely nothing!"

(Tevye)
"I wouldn't say that. I hear he has a rich uncle, a very rich uncle. He's a good man, Golde.
I like him. And what's more important, Hodel likes him. Hodel loves him.
So what can we do?
It's a new world... A new world. Love. Golde..."

(sung)
Do you love me?

(Golde)
Do I what?

(Tevye)
Do you love me?

(Golde)
Do I love you?
With our daughters getting married
And this trouble in the town
You're upset, you're worn out
Go inside, go lie down!
Maybe it's indigestion…

(Tevye)
"Golde I'm asking you a question..."
Do you love me?

(Golde)
You're a fool

(Tevye)
"I know..."
But do you love me?

(Golde)
Do I love you?
For twenty-five years I've washed your clothes
Cooked your meals, cleaned your house
Given you children, milked YOUR cow
After twenty-five years, why talk about love right now?

(Tevye)
Golde, The first time I met you
Was on our wedding day
I was scared

(Golde)
I was shy

(Tevye)
I was nervous

(Golde)
So was I

(Tevye)
But my father and my mother
Said we'd learn to love each other
And now I'm asking, Golde
Do you love me?

(Golde)
I'm your wife

(Tevye)
"I know..."
But do you love me?

(Golde)
Do I love him?
For twenty-five years I've lived with him
Fought with him, starved with him
Twenty-five years my bed is his
If that's not love, what is?

(Tevye)
Then you love me?

(Golde)
I suppose I do

(Tevye)
And I suppose I love you too

(Both)
It doesn't change a thing
But even so
After twenty-five years
It's nice to know.

     And a woman prepared to marry – to be a wife – should hearken to it.

Stock market disconnect.

The stock market appears to reflect only the froth of our political and economic distortions.

Central banks once bought assets such as bonds and futures as a temporary plunge protection team tactic to stop a downturn from accelerating into a rout or crash. Now they are buying trillions of dollars in bonds and stocks during so-called "good times" to keep the market lofting higher even as growth slows.

This permanent intervention via buying stocks has distorted what the market can tell us. Rather than communicate a sense of how the real economy is doing, the market now reflects the will of central banks to keep the market lofting ever higher on the back of central bank purchases and liquidity.

"Market Musings: What Does the Stock Market Tell Us about Economic 'Reality'?" By Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds subscriber newsletter, June 2017.

If only we'd been warned.

Across the West, social welfare states are threatened by falling revenues, taxpayer flight, rising debt as a share of GDP, sinking bond ratings and proliferating defaults.

"Are Illinois & Puerto Rico Our Future?" By Patrick J. Buchanan, 6/26/17.

Fantasy land.

What has been evident right across Western media recently however is the development of a new narrative – “the end of Islamic State” – accompanied by talk of “winning the peace”. This narrative is both delusionary and disingenuous – though that’s hardly a strong enough word to describe the evident planning for ongoing illegal military occupation of Syria by the US and its allies. Not only does it envisage some fantasy state existing outside any international convention or UN resolution, occupying the territory of the “former” caliphate, but the picture excludes all the parties who have legitimate interests in Syria including Syria’s own government.

* * * *

. . . The Syrian jet they shot down near Raqqa was purportedly targeting IS forces, though these may have been indistinguishable from militants fighting with US support – the so-called “Syrian Democratic Forces”. Following on weeks of suspect behaviour by the US coalition, where Islamic State forces were apparently allowed to escape from Raqqa and move down the Euphrates towards Deir al Zour and Palmyra, the shoot-down was the last straw; Russia declared openly that the US was supporting terrorists in Syria, including Al Qaeda and Islamic State.

This is where we have a ‘radical disconnect’. In the world outside the Western cultural and media echo-chamber it is not news that terrorist groups across the Muslim world are being supported by Western powers, along with their Gulf state allies, Israel and Turkey.^[1]

Syria today is like the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, though "civil war" applies to neither conflict, especially to Syria now, which is flooded with foreign cash, weapons, equipment, and troops. But for the foreign interference in Syria there would be no civil war. Both conflicts were and are distillations of the pathologies of the age. A potent liqueur of mayhem, lies, murder, and intense foreign involvement. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade morons come to mind.

It is said of batteries that the more energy you pack into the same space, the more the battery begins to resemble an explosive device. So with Syria now. The more lies and stupidity that are packed into that area of the world, the more chance there is of a detonation that will sweep all before it.

I had hopes that within days of Trump's inauguration we would read of a stand down order from Trump to reverse course in our pointless but expensive exercise in chasing our tail in Syria and our greasy, disgusting, stupid effort to bring down exactly the kind of regime that, if spread across the Muslim world, would make that world livable and civilized instead of the stink hole that it is now.

This is a satanic exercise to which no one seems willing to call a halt. And who is in the forefront of trying to keep civilization alive in Syria? Why, none other than the Russians the target of every American political class nitwit. Upside down times, to be sure, but especially what Mr. Macilwain wrote" "terrorist groups across the multiculturalism world are being supported by Western powers."

Notes
^[1] "The Death and Rebirth of Islamic State." By David Macilwain, Russia Insider, 6/29/17 (emphasis added). More to the point, I think "[i]n the world inside the Western cultural and media echo-chamber it is not news . . . ."

ATTENTION! A Rambling Wreck Debuts Saturday July 1

     Attention! If you enjoyed Hans G. Schantz’s The Hidden Truth as much as I, you’ll be pleased to learn that the sequel, A Rambling Wreck, will become available on Saturday, July 1. Hans is using LibertyCon in Chattanooga, Tennessee as his launch pad, so if you’re going, consider looking him up while you’re there; he’s an engaging and delightful fellow.

Drives

     When a man reaches “a certain age,” he becomes prone to reflecting on his past. In particular, he muses over his mistakes and how, “had I known then what I know now,” he could have improved on his results in the contexts of those past times. Quite a lot of what one might call one’s “historical dissatisfaction” arises from a very small cluster of absolute truths that all of us are prone to wishing away:

The Rules: Reality is independent of your opinions. It's also indifferent to your desires. Every situation comes with incentives and constraints. Though you will try to maximize your harvest of the incentives, you must satisfy the constraints. Effort put toward trying to control the uncontrollable is effort wasted. The clock is always running; there are no "time outs."

     If “The Rules” appear familiar, it might be because you read about them here. Not only are they absolute and immutable, they’re applicable to everything, everywhere and everywhen.

     Recently, the unprecedented difficulties of contemporary marriage have been much on my mind. It’s come to bedevil American men. Indeed, marriage has become such a minefield for the contemporary man that increasing numbers of men are forswearing marriage lifelong. Dr. Helen Smith’s book has shed considerable light on the subject. However, there’s an aspect to it that tends to receive less attention than the risks Dr. Smith justly emphasizes in her book: the tendency toward “buyer’s remorse” among both men and women, as the years establish the power of two other maxims:

• She chooses him hoping that he’ll change...but he doesn’t.
• He chooses her hoping that she won’t change...but she does.

     Quite a lot of unhappiness has resulted from marital buyer’s remorse. Yet that remorse is avoidable much of the time, if one takes the maintenance of the relationship seriously. Today, some of the efforts involved in that maintenance are foolishly resisted by both sexes. As an appetite-whetter, please read this article by Inez Feltscher. While her focus is narrower than mine, the author shares my attitude.

---

     Today let’s look at his side of the thing. (Hey, I’m a man; this way I can put off the research I have to do.)

     A man first becomes interested in a woman because of her appearance:

• Her face;
• Her figure;
• Her grooming;
• Her carriage.

     Those visible characteristics have approximately equal weight for most men. However, there’s a not-entirely-visible component that deserves to be included. He doesn’t just want her to take proper care of her appearance; he also wants her – girls, hold onto your boyfriends – to care about what he thinks of it. He wants perceptible evidence that she wants to look good for him.

     Quite a number of wives either aren’t aware of this or have been persuaded that “once you’re hitched, it stops mattering.” Inasmuch as more than 70% of contemporary divorces are initiated by women, perhaps it’s not so strange that women overlook it. Yet it’s more important to averting marital buyer’s remorse than most women would imagine.

---

     In a simpler time, things were...simpler. She, wanting nothing so much as a protector and provider, focused on making herself someone a suitable protector-provider would willingly accept as a spouse:

     “But what about you?” she asked, and looked away nervously. “I don’t know much about men. My book says it’s easy to win a man’s heart, if you’re cute. Just be pleasant company, a good housekeeper, and eager in bed, and as long as you’re sincere about it any man will fall for you.” [E. William Brown, Black Coven]

     Quite a lot of Twenty-First Century women have begun to yearn for the return of those requirements. It’s easy to understand why. They were clear. They were simple. They appeared to guarantee, if not permanent bliss, at least an enduring degree of acceptable comfort. Perhaps most important of all, they allowed her to relax a bit about everything outside her sphere.

     His innate drives have a lot to do with it, of course. He’d like to be allowed to concentrate on his priorities: being a good protector and provider, and pursuing as far as possible the pursuits he prefers. To the extent that he can believe that:

1. His needs and desires in a wife are being met;
2. She’s happy with the arrangement and will hold up her end of it;

     ...he will turn his attention to those other matters.

     Would that it had remained that simple and straightforward! Toxic feminism has a lot to do with it, of course. Nor should we neglect the ways in which the Leviathan State has positioned itself as a husband-surrogate to which women are encouraged to turn. A third important contributor to the mess is the incredible expense of contemporary living – another governmental artifact – which for at least fifty years has pressed her to work for wages even though he’s gainfully employed.

     But perhaps it needn’t be that way. Take it from a fairly typical man of the times: the comforts and pleasures of a happy home will more than compensate for most of the material goods with which so many of us distract ourselves from our miseries.

     (What’s that you say? A Certified Galactic Intellect has no business representing himself as “a fairly typical man of the times” -- ? BALDERDASH! We brainiacs don’t spend all our time unscrewing the inscrutable. There’s far too much love to be made, too many books to write, too much good music to be listened to, too much chess to be played, and far too much wine to be drunk. Priorities, man!)

---

     Quite a great deal of contemporary unhappiness of all varieties arises from the displacement of the pleasures and satisfactions of home and hearth by the pursuit of material gain, whether it’s propelled by a lust for particular goods or a quest for “security.” In Which Art In Hope, the first novel of my Spooner Federation Saga, I had a professor of sociology declaim thus:

     “When Earth's regard for families and their most fundamental function deteriorated, her people ceased to enjoy the sorts of ties that had held them together throughout the history of Man. Without families, and especially without children, they groped for other things to fill their time, whether to give them a sense of purpose, or to distract them from the waning of their lives. Some invested themselves in industry or commerce, but without the sense of the family line to be built up and made prominent, those things failed to satisfy. Others immersed themselves in games, toys, fripperies, and increasingly bizarre forms of entertainment, which palled on them even faster. Still others made a fetish out of sex; there was a substantial sex industry on Earth, though it tended to operate in the shadows and was seldom openly discussed. They needed emotion and substance, but all they could contrive was sensation and novelty, and they pumped an ever greater share of their effort and wealth into seeking them. That's my thesis, for what it's worth.”

     It’s difficult to distinguish the causes from the effects. Toxic feminism, which strove from the Sixties onward to persuade her that she had to have a remunerative job, started its explosive rise at about the same time as Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and its ever more aggressive exactions from the American pocketbook. As Hans G. Schantz wrote in The Hidden Truth, governments found the shift in her priorities agreeable to their own ends, for the work she’d been doing in keeping a home and rearing children wasn’t taxable, nor was it malleable by the social engineers of the Left:

     “The women’s rights movement had three goals. First, it got women into the workplace where their labor could be taxed....So, with more women entering the workforce the supply of labor increases and wages are depressed....

     “Now couples need to have two careers to support a typical modern lifestyle. We can’t tax the labor in a home-cooked meal. We can tax the labor in takeout food, or the higher cost of a microwave dinner. The economic potential of both halves of the adult population now largely flows into the government where it can serve noble ends instead of petty private interests....

     Maybe it wasn’t planned that way, but governments and Leftist propagandists have certainly exploited the opportunities her separation from her husband, home, and family has offered them. The concomitant diversion of her attention from keeping her husband (and therefore their home) happy is entirely coincidental...I think.

---

     The time has come to learn what we can from those whose marriages were sturdier and whose homes were happier than ours. That will necessitate both learning from the experiences of our forebears and disabusing ourselves of many illusions fostered by contemporary society. Part of what we must recognize is that simplicity is more available than we’ve been led to believe. Another major lesson is that simply because a custom or pattern of life is old doesn’t mean that it’s obsolete and inapplicable to our lives today.

     That’s all for the moment, Gentle Reader. I expect I’ll do her side of things tomorrow. Until then!

God bless Viktor Orban.

Merkel, Fatima Merkel as the clip wittily calls her, is busy with her grocery list during Orban's speech. No applause from her.

I suppose Germans will re-elect her the next opportunity they get. Treason seems to be in style. She's doing what the Eighth Air Force failed to do. Destroy Germany root and branch. Has Morgenthau risen from his grave?

H/t: ArmstrongEconomics.

Pearls of expression.

The conservative have been politely voicing their concern over the leftists decades-long destruction of the society.

Trump was elected because politeness has failed.

Comment by Harry Vederchi on ""Please Just Stop": Republicans Slam Trump's Attack On Mika." By Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge, 6/29/17.

Recent Development in re “A Warning”

     If you’ve read “A Warning,” consider the matter as serious as do I, and have wondered what would come of it, here’s an update.

     Just this morning at the conclusion of Mass, I spoke to Monsignor Christopher Heller, the pastor at St. Louis de Montfort parish and a highly respected clergyman. When I related the matter to him, he was astonished and appalled. He seemed quite as offended as I, perhaps more so, by the idea that parish charitable donations might be going to any purpose other than charity to the needy of our district. He promised to delve into the matter personally and immediately.

     I’ve just received a call from Father Chris – and when I say “just received,” I mean that I’ve only just rung off with him. He says he’s in shock over the matter. I expect he’ll bring it to the appropriate conclusion.

     Concerning trust in the honesty and utility of charitable institutions, religious or otherwise, it’s clear that even one who donates only food and clothing, never cash, can and sometimes will feel his trust shaken. Only swift and public corrective action can undo such a disturbance of one’s trust. Be guided appropriately.

Political Infidelities And Their Consequences

     Just now, quite a lot of Americans are experiencing “voter’s remorse:” the political analogue to the “buyer’s remorse” one feels upon discovering that he could have gotten better and / or cheaper at the place across town. The Republican caucuses in the Senate and House of Representatives are giving them ample reason, though for many the knowledge that the Republicans are the sole practical alternative to the Democrats will likely “keep them in the fold” in the 2018 elections.

     The Democrats, you see, have been reminding “their” voters how little reason there is to trust them with power:

     The loss in last week’s special congressional election in Georgia produced predictable hand-wringing and finger-pointing inside the Democratic Party. It also raised anew a question that has troubled the party through a period in which it has lost political ground. Simply put: Do Democrats have a message?

     Right now, the one discernible message is opposition to President Trump. That might be enough to get through next year’s midterm elections, though some savvy Democratic elected officials doubt it. What’s needed is a message that attracts voters beyond the blue-state base of the party.

     Ye gods! Candor from a Main Stream Media outlet about the failings of its favored ones! Surely the Apocalypse is at hand. But every now and then a little truth will leak through the barriers. Of course, whether it will penetrate the “fact-proof screen” (Eric Hoffer) around the minds of Democrat allegiants is quite a different story.

     On this subject, our favorite Bookworm deposeth and sayeth:

     For those looking to make a sale to Trump voters and undecided voters, though, a Democrat party emphasis on the economy is going to be a hard sell. It’s only the base that’s honest enough to admit that, from the top down, the only economic goal the modern Democrat party has is full frontal socialism:

     For progressives, the answer to this problem is clear: a boldly liberal message that attacks big corporations and Wall Street and calls for a significant increase in government’s role in reducing income and wealth inequality. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been aggressive in promoting exactly that, as he did during the 2016 campaign, with calls for a big investment in infrastructure and free college tuition at public colleges and universities. He has said he intends to introduce legislation he calls “Medicare for All.”

     The other article, which comes from The Hill, notes that some Dems, seemingly those not on the hard Left, are pushing their congresscritters to stop talking about Russia all of the time.

     Taking these two articles in conjunction, there is little doubt that, subject to a small (and easily ignored) subset of semi-sane Democrats, Progressives (aka the Democrat Party) see talking about Russia as far more edifying than the economy. One can’t help but be fascinated by what the Democrat Party power brokers mean to do if they “turn towards the economy.” How does one push socialist ideas while denying their socialism, even as the base is screaming “We love you, Karl Marx”?

     So both major parties are currently disappointing the electoral cohort they need to achieve their aims: the one whose members are desperate for substance plus commitment. You know, statements of intentions that those whose support they hope to win could trust? You’d think the strategists and kingmakers who steer those parties would have done the obvious by now....except that “obvious” really means “overlooked.”

     In this regard, the GOP is actually worse off than the Democrats. GOP campaigners do promise particular outcomes...and then fail to produce them. That leaves those who supported GOP legislative candidates with a foul taste in their mouths. With the Democrats, voters other than masochists, State worshippers, and Marxist ideologues tend to assume betrayal from the outset.

     Clearly, lying to those whose support you need is not a viable long-term strategy. You’d have to be brain dead to think otherwise. But there is this to ponder: political aspirants don’t think long-term. Their horizons are bounded by the upcoming election season, which will determine whether they get to keep the power and perquisites they’ve acquired.

     Here we can see a difference between the major-party candidates:

• Democrats who gain legislative offices strive to cement themselves into power irremovably.
• Republicans who gain legislative offices subsequently become fearful of “rocking the boat.”

     The Democrats of the Obama years embarked on a fevered campaign to socialize as much of the American economy as they could. They did so in the belief that their enhanced ability to hand out favors and freebies would keep them in hegemony. The Republicans surprised them by winning back control of the House of Representatives in 2010, and the Senate in 2014. However, they did so by promising a sharp rollback of those Democrat initiatives...a rollback they’re now terrified would cost them their hegemony.

     Which is why the Right side of the electorate, given an incredibly strong and varied field of Republican presidential candidates from which to choose, selected “outsider” Donald Trump...and why the American people installed him in the White House.

     At this point, only President Trump can justly be said to have kept his campaign promises. Granted that he seems to have backed away from a couple of them; granted that there’s some reason to be disappointed on those scores. However, Trump’s executive actions to reverse the tide of economy-smothering regulation, unshackle the domestic energy industries, liberate the construction of critical oil pipelines, and advance a plan to dam the tide of illegal (and threatening) immigration are genuine fulfillments, for which we who supported him – in my case, with trepidation – should be grateful.

     Among my reasons to be grateful is that Trump’s successes and fulfillments have put the “gray heads” of the major parties on notice. The strategists know that the people are watching. Those impressed with a president who actually keeps (some of) his promises are more likely to give other “mavericks” a better shot at the brass ring. While in politics nothing is certain, the prospects for renewal, in the GOP at least, are better than they’ve been since Warren Harding.

     President Trump could still foul his own nest. However, it looks as if he really did mean what he said while campaigning. Perhaps all the promises he made in 2015 and 2016 will be fulfilled eventually. He’s got at least three years left in which to see to it – and those shadowy ones who’ve made “Republican Party” a synonym for “terrified pensioners’ club” have a reason to fear for their coffee and cakes.

     We shall see.

Headline.

US Ambassador to UN, Nikki Haley pre-blames Assad, Russia, and Iran for a future chemical weapons attack in Syria

By Alex Christoforou, The Duran, 6/27/17.

Sanity from Germany. And more on WH war mania.

The German Center's Christoph Hörstel to the Syrian People: We want to apologize!

He is a thoroughly decent man by all appearances who recognizes the evil of the proxy war being fought by the U.S. against Syria.

A refreshing contrast to the egregious Gen. Jack Keane without whom FoxNews is incapable of forming an independent thought about Syria or the Soviet Union Russia. Lou Dobbs, an otherwise outstanding commentator, has co-authored a book about a fictional Russian character who wants to re-establish the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. That character's name happens to be "Putin" so it's not hard to see why Jack ("The Tiger") Keane has a lock on Fox commentary on Russia and its drive for world domination. For that matter, the whole FoxNews foreign policy commentariat is as small as a John Podesta dinner party. I can see why Fox was embarrassed by its "Fair and balanced" mantra.

Keane has the script down pat and the undisputed source of evil in this world is . . . are you ready? Assad supported by Evil Vlad Putin!

Arrogant, fatuous Americans to the rescue. We are here to help. Procrustean solutions made to order so long as they involve regime change, complete social collapse, and absolute control by jihadi scum.

Resemblance to anything as decent as envisioned by Mr. Hörstel is nowhere in sight. Nope. Mendacious, distorted, murderous policy is what's on the menu. The thought that Bashar Assad and his confederates would undertake to make chemical attacks in civilian areas at precisely the moment that it would do the most damage to Syrian interests does not disturb Keane in the least. Nuh unh! Chemicals involved; therefore Assad. And FoxNews laps it up with a spoon.

Hörstel is to be understood in conjunction with George Washington's piece^[1] on the insanity of Trump's latest revelations about Mr. Assad's apparent preparations for yet another chemical attack on his own people including, wait for it . . . innocent children.

Washington has an apt observation on neocon tweeter Nikki Haley over at the United Nations. Quote:

[Haley tweet:] Any further attacks done to the people of Syria will be blamed on Assad, but also on Russia & Iran who support him killing his own people.

[Washington:] Notice that Haley does not say:

Any further attacks CARRIED OUT BY THE SYRIAN GOVERNMENT and done to the people of Syria will be blamed on Assad, but also on Russia & Iran who support him killing his own people.^[2]

So we have the perfect setup for the jihadis to mount another chemical attack a la Ghouta 2013 and possibly^[3] Khan Sheikhoun in April of this year. WH to jihadis: "Hey, guys. If you all do something that looks like a chemical attack on Syrian civilians, we'll run with the 'Assad did it' garbage and support you with a massive attack on Syrian troops, equipment, and installations this time. Just sayin'. But it would be just awful if there were another 'Syrian' attack."

Future Syrian government responsibility already established: "will be blamed on Assad." You can't make this stuff up.

The Ghouta gas incident has been established as not the work of Assad troops^[4] and Seymour Hersh reports that military and intelligence types did not see any evidence that the Syrian Air Force attacked Khan Sheikhoun with chemical munitions. In fact, there was meticulous coordination of the Khan Sheikhoun bombing by the Russians with the Americans.^[5]

If you take Hersh's report as accurate, it turns out that the initial Russian explanation was accurate: a regular, non-chemical bomb struck something on the ground that caused the injuries and deaths supposedly seen in Khan Sheikhoun. The Trump position, by way of contrast, was a lie. An unadulterated fairy tale. The Sean Spicer announcement in Washington's piece is an anticipatory lie. A future fairy tale waiting to happen:

The United States has identified potential preparations for another chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime that would likely result in the mass murder of civilians, including innocent children.

The activities are similar to preparations the regime made before its April 4, 2017 chemical weapons attack. [Oh ... you mean the Syria government is planning on bombing Islamic terrorists again?]

***

If … Mr. Assad conducts another mass murder attack using chemical weapons, he and his military will pay a heavy price.^[6]

U.S. pronouncements on world events are intellectually dishonest. We are determined to conduct a proxy war for Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. The whole story about Assad the evil dictator who precipitated a "civil war" is a lie. Witness a pro-Assad demonstration in the year that this "civil war" ignited in 2011:

Photo: Al Jazeera.

Whatever we are doing in Syria it is underhanded and unclean.

Notes
^[1] "After Getting Busted for Bombing Syria Based On a Lie, Trump Doubles Down … Threatens to Bomb Syria Even Harder Based On Same BS." By George Washington, Zero Hedge, 6/27/17.
^[2] Id.
^[3] I say "possibly" above because Hersh (note 5, below) reports that the Syrian Air Force attack was on a building with chlorine and fertilizer (that could cause medical effects similar to sarin). Thus, it may actually be that the jihadis didn't perpetrate the attack themselves though it's hard to believe that as the White Helmet scum were on the job "rescuing" and "treating" victims of a supposed chemical attack within the hour after the supposed Syrian Air Force attack. Someone was really prepared for that photo op. My operating assumption at present is that the Russian's were correct in their argument that a regular bomb had secondary effects unrelated to mere HE and shrapnel. Furthermore, any evidence of chemical casualties is from prior staged events or even the use of civilians kidnapped from two villages south of Khan Sheikhoun and later killed. There is precedent.
^[4] "Possible Implications of Faulty US Technical Intelligence in the Damascus Nerve Agent Attack of August 21, 2013." By Richard Lloyd and Theodore Postol, Independent research study, 1/14/14.
^[5] "Trump‘s Red Line." By Seymour M. Hersh, Welt, 6/26/17.
^[6] Washington, supra. Bracketed comment by Washington.

H/t for the video: Marko's comment on "VICTORIOUS SYRIA: The New Dawn of Resistance Against Imperialism." By Bruno Guigue, 21Wire, 6/23/17.

U.S. backing off, no more Syrian partition of eastern Syria.

The shooting down of the Syrian SU-22 fighter appears to have been intended as a warning to stop the Syrian army from capturing Rusafa, so as to block the Syrian army’s attempt to relieve the pressure on Deir Ezzor.

The Russian warning to the US looks in turn to have been intended to make clear to the US that this sort of interference in the Syrian army’s operations to relieve Deir Ezzor is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.

The US has heeded the Russian warning. The various statements made by the US and by various US officials today, though full of the usual bluster about the US defending itself and its allies anywhere and everywhere, in fact clearly signal that the US is backing off.^[1]

Kurdish state in northern Syria still on the table.^[2]

Notes
^[1] "BREAKING: No partition of eastern Syria; US 'welcomes Syria destroying ISIS' there." By Alexander Mercouris, The Duran, 6/25/17.
^[2] Id.

We're taking over.

Not that any Western government gives a damn. Not one! Except in E. Europe. God bless those heroes.

All measures "in response" – feeble and an affront to patriots and common sense.

Western governments' agenda: barbarism and destruction.

Breaking news.

La La has no current plans to divorce Carmelo.

“Not right now,” La La confirmed . . . .

Details here.

Who Evil Thinks

     [The political hate-fest in progress on the Left has me thinking very dark thoughts. I suppose that’s no surprise to the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch, but now and then I become so conscious of my revulsion that I must retreat from the fray. Accordingly, have a repost: the following article first appeared at the Palace of Reason on June 6, 2003. -- FWP]

---

     Granted that political argument can be trying. Eighty percent of us enter the discussion of any issue convinced that we're right -- yet there's the other guy, smugly stubborn about his contrary and completely irrational position, and he won't shut up and he won't go away! It can drive a man to all kinds of discourtesies.

     But let's leave that sort of lapse to the side. What are we to make of the fellow who leads off with vile insults? Who accuses you of lack of compassion for your fellow man, or of possessing horrible motives? Who compares you, or public figures you admire, to Hitler?

     There are more such than ever before in your Curmudgeon's memory. Moreover, they tend to be consistent in their approach to, ah, conversation. Given their proliferation, oughtn't we to try to understand what propels them? Assuming it's possible, of course.

     Certain correlations present themselves straight off: These folks are also prone to refusing to admit to error, denying the validity of adverse evidence, and putting words in others' mouths. They tend to downplay, sometimes conceal, their core principles and agendas. They can often be found in alliance with very unsavory types.

     These habits are not just ungentlemanly; they're wrong. They bespeak a lack of respect for the truth, and for human fallibility. But then, a man who opens a political disagreement by comparing his adversary to Hitler would likely have a few character flaws, wouldn't he?

     But perhaps we should stay on point: the tendency to treat those who disagree with one as the lowest of the low, not merely mistaken but evil. What can it possibly mean?

     Among some, it expresses moral uncertainty: the interpretation of disagreement as a challenge to one's moral postulates, a challenge against which one does not know how to defend. Among others, it expresses moral certainty, of a degree so complete that it relegates all dissenters to a lower plane of moral consciousness.

     But there is a third group disjoint from these, perhaps the most important of the three: those persons whose sole concern is tactical advantage.

     In his 1978 book A Time For Truth, the late William Simon, Treasury Secretary during the Ford Administration, noted an important pattern among businessmen: a tendency to respond to unfounded condemnation with moral collapse:

     As is so often the case in our society, when the liberals orchestrate a nationwide uproar over good versus evil, all those defined as evil suffer an acute loss of nerve. Businessmen and bankers, who seem to value respectability more than their lives, are incapable of tolerating this moral abuse. Invariably they collapse psychologically. And whatever they may think and say in private, in public they either go mute or stumble frantically over their own feet as they rush to join the moral bandwagon.

     Collapse manifests itself in a capitulation to one's enemies, even when recognized as enemies. Simon pointed out how major corporations would kowtow to outright enemies of capitalism, agreeing to fund efforts to destroy the scheme of private property on which all market behavior is founded. Bankers would pledge their support to groups opposed to banking. Automakers would contribute to the coffers of groups whose activities threatened to destroy the automobile industry. Energy-industry executives would cede their autonomy to "public interest groups" whose ill-concealed aim was to prevent any further energy exploration or development of any kind.

     This pattern isn't confined to businessmen alone. In our present day, many nominally freedom-oriented politicians hasten to conciliate enemies of freedom and capitalism. They simply can't stand to be vilified.

     Obviously, this response to condemnation will evoke more of it from the third group. As long as they feel they're getting what they want with their chorus of condemnation, they'll pump up the volume and intensify their search for targets. And having seen many others bend the knee to them, their newer victims will be even more likely to do so. After all, if Captain of Industry Smith chose to propitiate them, what chance to prevail have I?

     In the realm of pure political combat, the third group operates with accusations of horrific wrongdoing. A good recent example is the charge that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, all of them captured in combat in Afghanistan, most of them members of the al-Qaeda terror network, are being brutalized or denied basic needs. Inasmuch as these prisoners are leaving confinement in better physical condition than they arrived in, the allegation is obviously baseless. But those making it have seen conservative administrations fold before still weaker charges, so why not press it home?

     Similarly, we've heard endlessly from the opponents of the Bush Administration about how Operation Iraqi Freedom had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction or the anti-terror campaign; it was "all about oil." A ten year old could disprove this. It's been done too many times to repeat it here. But because the charge strikes at the moral basis for the decision to go to war, it offers the possibility of a psychological collapse such as William Simon described.

     It's hard for your Curmudgeon to refrain from classing as evil those who would mount baseless campaigns of vilification against innocent men. Their behavior conforms precisely to the Kantian definition of evil: the use of others as means to their own ends, without regard for the rights or just deserts of those others.

     "Honi soit qui mal y pense" -- "Evil are they who evil think" -- is a condemnation of malicious attribution nearly seven centuries old. It's the motto of the Order of the Garter, England's elite society of the highest military merit. It's your Curmudgeon's attitude toward those who would demonize their political adversaries to gain an increment in public attention or a rhetorical edge.

---

     [For a coda of sorts, have a look at this recent piece from Stacy McCain. -- FWP]

A Warning

     The charitable impulse can easily be transformed into a fury that sets heads to rolling.

     My parish – St. Louis de Montfort in Sound Beach, NY – maintains, as so many Catholic parishes do, an Outreach pantry, intended to assist the needy with free food and other consumables while (hopefully) they struggle back to a condition of self-sustenance. My fellow parishioners are generous souls; the pantry shelves are virtually always kept full, even though an average of 150 families partake of the bounty each week.

     Sounds good, right? Christian charity in action, just as the Redeemer prescribed. Well, once in a great while things are not so good.

     Four weeks ago, the parish bulletin listed one of the pantry’s needs as “pork & beans.” Actually, the listing was PORK & BEANS, that we parishioners might grasp the intensity of the need. Accordingly, the next time I was near a supermarket I purchased half a dozen 1 lb. cans of pork & beans, a few other items listed as Outreach needs, brought them to the pantry, and thought no more about it.

     The next Sunday, PORK & BEANS appeared once more as the pantry’s principal need. So the next time I went grocery shopping, I purchased a dozen 1 lb. cans of pork & beans, a couple of other items on the bulletin’s Outreach list, brought them to the pantry, and thought no more about it.

     Sunday June the 18th: the Outreach pantry still listed PORK & BEANS as its principal need. I was beginning to grow a bit concerned. So I made a special trip to the supermarket and bought 24 1 lb. cans of pork & beans. (I’m sure you can see the pattern developing.) I brought them to the pantry and told the supervisor that “if I see pork & beans in next Sunday’s bulletin, I’m going to be very cross. Tell whoever’s eating all the pork & beans to eat a vegetable now and then.” She assured me that it would not appear in the June 25th bulletin.

     That assurance was false.

     This morning at 9:30 AM EDT, I brought 48 1 lb. cans of pork & beans to the Outreach pantry. The expressions that greeted me ranged from poker-faced to stunned. I dropped the case – approximately 70 lb, gross – on the sorting table, fixed the Outreach supervisor with my best gimlet eye, and said, “Where’s all the pork & beans going?”

     The supervisor said, “There was a big barbecue.”

     It took me about a nanosecond to go from relative calm to incipient stroke.

     “The food donated to this pantry is supposed to be for the local needy,” I said. I put more effort into controlling my demeanor than I’ve ever put into anything except concealing my glee at having just been dealt a straight flush. It proved insufficient. “It is not supposed to be used to supply institutional functions!”

     The supervisor smiled sheepishly and shrugged. “Well, you know.”

     I departed swiftly, before I could burst a blood vessel.

     That supervisor doesn’t know what kind of agony she’s in for. I intend to spread the news of this all over the parish – with her name attached.

     Fellow Christians, are you sure your charitable donations are actually doing charity? Really sure? If you were to discover otherwise, how would you react?

     Beware the charitably inclined Christian who discovers that he’s been duped. Few creatures are more dangerous. St. Louis de Montfort is about to experience a demonstration.

Infinities, Eternities, And Free Will: A Belated Rumination

     Dystopic’s recent piece on fate has caused me to revisit several questions that have baffled theologians and philosophers for millennia. The confusion of those earlier thinkers was understandable: they approached questions about the nature of God, His relation to Creation, and the destiny of the human soul from the vantage of a time-bound creature. However, as with all inquiries into matters beyond the reach of human senses and the extent of human intellect, the postulates make all the difference. Those baffled thinkers started from a premise that guaranteed that they’d never escape the maze they’d entered.

     Among the reasons I write fiction is that I can “put words in the mouths” of my protagonist characters: convictions and sentiments that might seem inappropriate coming from me. As my protagonists are usually several hundred percent larger than life, the trick makes them more persuasive than they’d otherwise be. Yet they’re still my words – my conjectures and reasoning – and it’s only proper that I stand behind them.

     Besides, this is some of the most intellectually exciting material ever entertained by a human mind. So let’s get excited! (To the Balmer level, at least.)

---

     “I never really got that part,” Christine said.
     Ray nodded. “Understandably so. It seems paradoxical. I don’t really think we’re expected to ‘get’ it. Just accept it on the evidence.”
     The room had grown dim. It had gotten quite late, but neither Ray nor Christine was in any hurry to conclude their chat.
     “What makes it hard for most people,” Ray said, “is that we tend to think of God as just a very powerful temporal entity, like some sort of super-magician. But He’s not. He created time. He looks down on it from above, the way you or I would read a map. He knows the path we follow because He knows all the paths we might follow, and what might flow from every one of them.” He sat back and reflected for a moment. “So our time-dependent language about ‘choosing’ and ‘knowing’ gets us into trouble when we try to apply it to God.”

     [From Shadow Of A Sword]

     Yes, that’s me expressing a personal conviction through a character – a Catholic priest, at that – that I could never, ever “prove:” that our wills are free and our choices are unconstrained by anything but the laws of physics. It arises from postulates about the Supreme Being that I regard as most plausible:

1. That God exists;
2. That all we sense or experience (and possibly a whole lot more) is His deliberate creation, including time;
3. That He stands outside it all, capable of viewing it “from above.”

     A time-bound mentality has a great deal of difficulty coping with the implications of those assumptions. We’re not equipped for it. That can cause us to overlook the possibility of the assumptions themselves. But without them, we strain to cope with the paradox of human free will versus the existence of an omniscient Creator. We start pondering “fate:” more specifically, whether we’re predestined to make the choices we make. And we find ourselves trapped in an inescapable maze.

     In other words, the postulates, whether we accept them or not, predetermine the success or failure of our attempts to find a satisfactory explanation.

---

     Despite the human mind’s difficulties at coping with infinities and eternities, the concepts are critically important to several fields. We deal with irrational and transcendental numbers, which cannot be expressed in a finite number of digits. We deal with a variety of number systems, each of which has an infinite number of elements. We conceive of “space” itself as being infinite in extent. Moreover, we silently assume that “space” – i.e., nothingness – will “exist” forever.

     An exercise familiar to physics students nicely illustrates the utility of infinity. Imagine yourself floating motionless in space, looking at a perfectly flat, featureless plane infinitely long and wide. How would you determine your distance from that plane?

     You couldn’t. Even if you were to set yourself into motion, you wouldn’t be able to do it. Without features whose perceived size would change as you move, you’d have no way to do so. By postulate, the plane itself is infinite in extent, so you wouldn’t be able to judge by the perceived motion of its edges; it doesn’t have any.

     Important exercises in calculus ask us to evaluate the limit of an algebraic expression as its dominant variable goes to infinity, and the numerical values of integrals that range over infinity. It’s possible even though the mind can’t really cope with anything that’s unbounded in extent.

     Cosmologists struggle to cope with the phenomenon of unidirectional entropy vis-a-vis unidirectional gravity. Their speculations are temporally unbounded: they deal comfortably – well, more or less – with the problems of black hole formation versus quantum evaporation: Those phenomena imply the possibility of an alternation between an ever-expanding, featureless sea of radiation and a Big Bang-style monobloc that gives birth to a “new” universe...an alternation that repeats eternally.

     Unbounded things appear to be as important to human conjectures about “reality” – a word I like almost as much as “should” – as they are to our conceptions of God.

---

     Contemporary physics has begun, tentatively and with much trepidation, to toy with the theoretical possibility of the “multiverse:” an expanded conception of existence that includes “universes” that are separated from one another by differences in the “fundamental constants” that define their physical laws. Some exceptionally daring thinkers are exploring the possibility that the “fundamental constants” aren’t constant at all. I exploited that concept in Freedom’s Scion:

     “The experimental results from our test crystal are consistent with a fifteen percent increase in the speed of light.” Althea grinned again. “That’s fifteen percent over the speed of light in a vacuum.”
     A gasp circled the group.
     “What can you do with that?” Teodor asked.
     “With that alone? Not much. But that’s just from the power we have from one eighteen-century-old fission reactor that spends most of its juice keeping us alive up here. If my equations are sound, with a terawatt of power I can get raw space to accept passage at approximately Michelson eighty. Give me a terawatt more, and I can drag a fifty-ton mass up to that speed in about two months.” She pulled a mock innocent face. “Hope to Earth in four months or a little better. That fast enough for you?”
     She swept her eyes over the stunned guests.
     “Rothbard, Rand, and Ringer,” Valerie breathed. “You actually did it.”
     Althea nodded. “We think so, Mom.”
     “Wait a moment,” her mother said. “What about reaction mass?”
     “Don’t need it.”
     “How, then?”
     “Basically, the same technique that allows me to increase the speed of light,” Althea said. “Alteration of the permittivity constant, applied differentially—a front-to-back gradient—over an ovoid volume enclosing the mass to be propelled. A properly distributed effusion of gamma rays and W-plus bosons is all it takes to get the process started. Put a negative charge on the outer surface of the vessel, and you're off. That gives you a reactionless drive and the next best thing to perpetual motion. Only works in a hard vacuum, though, so don't expect to use it for anything groundside.”
     The genesmith appeared near to apoplexy. “You altered a fundamental constant of physics?”
     Althea nodded again. “Should I have asked permission first?” She grinned. “I had to, Granduncle. The only way to breach what we call the lightspeed barrier is to alter the conditions that determine lightspeed. The only way to do that is to increase the permittivity of the vacuum. And the only possibility of doing that lay in Althea's Axiom.”
     “Which is?”
     “Constants...aren't.”

     Yes, it’s speculation – but it’s speculation that illustrates the utility of conceptions about infinity and eternity to our inherently limited minds. In our universe, the Planck Constant is terribly small: about 6.63 x 10^-34 Joule-seconds. Its tininess allows us to employ a cause-and-effect-based physics at macroscopic scale. But imagine a universe whose Planck Constant is a whole Joule-second! Causality would appear to reign only at scales so incredibly large that the behavior of objects as large as stars and planets would appear indeterminate. Life of our sort could never exist there.

     If it “exists” – whatever that word “really” means – the Lord God made it all.

---

     Yes, these are the sort of things I think about when I have time for the “longest thoughts:” the ones that trail off into infinity, that can’t reach a firm conclusion on this side of the veil of Time. They’re among my reasons for looking forward to the afterlife...assuming (of course) that there is one, that it won’t be awful, and that God will deign to answer a few questions in His free moments.

     Max Born once said that he had two questions for God:

1. Why relativity?
2. Why turbulence?

     As that great mind has gone to his reward, I hope the Almighty has gratified his curiosity...and that when my time comes, He’ll deign to gratify mine, should I have the opportunity to ask Him about the subjects addressed above. But should He be willing to help me with those, I must admit that I’ll have another: “Lord, why the Boston Red Sox?”

     Jesus said to the Twelve, “Fear no one. Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed. What I say to you in the darkness, speak in the light; what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops. And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both body and soul in Gehenna.” [Matthew 10:26-28]

     May God bless and keep you all!

Megaphones Part 3: Future Guilt

     My last two pieces on this subject covered media bias, and the media’s promotion of anger from the Left as it suppresses anger from the Right. Today’s focus is an old favorite whose exploitation by the Left is well known: guilt. But not guilt over something you, or anyone, has already done: guilt over something that hasn’t yet occurred and might never occur.

     Just now, our ears are ringing over denunciations of the GOP Senatorial caucus’s proposed American Health Care Act (AHCA) by the luminaries of the Left. Here are a few of the choicest ones:

On CNN, Montel Williams: GOP Plan Would Send 140 Million to ‘Death.’
“Forget death panels. If Republicans pass this bill, they’re the death party.” (Tweet by Hillary Clinton, yesterday.)
“Republicans are trying to pass a bill that could kill up to 27,000 in 2026 so they can give tax cuts to the wealthy.” ( Deleted tweet by Bernie Sanders yesterday.)
“Let us be clear and this is not trying to be overly dramatic: Thousands of people will die if the Republican health care bill becomes law. (Not-deleted tweet by Bernie Sanders, yesterday.)

[Thanks and applause to Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.]

     Note that the AHCA has only been on the Senate’s table for a few days. That’s hardly time enough to digest all the legalese. It’s certainly not time enough to perform a sober analysis of its impacts. And of course, all those “deaths” the Left is predicting are notional: that is, they haven’t yet happened and may never happen.

     However, the predictions are more than mildly disturbing. No doubt many Americans are accordingly disturbed. Most people can’t retain clarity of mind when the subject is death. That’s why there are so many jokes about it. So the contemplation of mass death as the result of a legislative action is enough to make us want to close our mental eyes and wish it away.

     He who is personally invested in some political issue and has taken a stance festooned with predictions like the above is the target. The predictors, their backers, and their media assistants are doing their best to hobble his mind with future guilt, which can be just as difficult to abide as the sort for one’s regretted personal deeds.

     That calls to mind the Generic Future Guilt Headline, which is surely familiar to my Gentle Readers:

GENERIC DISASTER AHEAD:
Women, Minorities, and the Poor to Suffer Worst

     And of course we mustn’t neglect “backlash” prognostications:

ETHNIC COMMITS HORRIBLE CRIME:
Other Ethnics Fear Backlash

     A wag in the UK composed the “ultimate backlash headline:”

British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing

     (See also this Michael Walsh column.) That had me laughing so hard that perfectly good Harvey’s Bristol Cream Sherry shot out of my nose. Yet the import of it is anything but funny.

     The imputation of “backlash” – against persons innocent of the deed, of course – is supposed to derail your anger-propelled reaction to the atrocity itself by shifting your focus to a notional future filled with even more horrible horrors, committed by people like you.

     And whatever your reaction to such media manhandling, Gentle Reader, I assure you that it works surprisingly well.

---

     “Reportage” decorated with predictions of hypothetical disasters that haven’t occurred and might not occur is merely disguised opinion-editorial. It has no place in the news section of a newspaper or a news broadcast. Yet we get quite a lot of it, often delivered in the thundering tones of an old-time fire-and-brimstone preacher who seeks to save his congregants from eternity in Hell by inflicting a little Hell on them right then and there. It’s the worst sort of emotional manipulation. It’s ample justification for never again consulting that paper or broadcast.

     Yet we get it in quantities that compel me to infer that it works on some of us. Maybe the suppression of our ability to feel righteous anger is the prerequisite. Whatever the case, it’s still coming.

     Now and then there are exceptions to the rule. An architect who had foreseen an event like the al-Qaeda airline attacks on the World Trade Center, for example, could also have predicted that the discontinuation of the use of asbestos in the walls of Twin Towers guarantees a massive death toll from such an event. Whether anyone did make such a prediction, I don’t know – before it occurred, such an assault was next to unthinkable – but after the event, as little as we like I-told-you-sos, we would have been compelled to grant him much retrospective respect.

     However, the doom-shouting from our media is usually not of that sort.

---

     Several others in the DextroSphere have argued that the Main Stream Media ought to be regarded as propagandists for the enemies of the West. Their arguments have much point. Yet there was a time when it wasn’t so, and many here in America are old enough to remember it.

     In the first of these pieces, I submitted that the MSM “must be delegitimized and rendered impotent.” This series is my contribution to the effort. If any of my Gentle Readers can think of other distinct elements to the media’s campaign against freedom, capitalism, and the bourgeois values, please submit it in the comments, that I might contribute my thoughts as well. Thanks in advance.

Megaphones Part 2: The Unbalanced Treatment Of Anger

     I’ve written at least once before that to become genuinely powerful, the Right must harness its anger rather than suppressing it. Anger, especially when morally or ethically informed, is one of the most potent motivating tools. Moreover, an angry advocate tends to intimidate the typical “reasonable man;” sensing that violence is not far off, he will usually seek to defuse the other person’s anger, often by offering a compromise position. Indeed, there’s no other explanation for how the Left, which is now in a badly shrunken minority position, continues to exert substantial influence in American politics.

     However, I’m not the only loudmouth out here who knows this. The Left knows it too, which is why they seek to delegitimize conservatives’ anger while sanctifying their own. Their media allies are fully enlisted in that cause:

     Less than a week after [James Hodgkinson’s shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise and others], there was a high-profile House election in Georgia—the most expensive House race in history. The Republican candidate Karen Handel had been specifically named by Hodgkinson in one of his anti-Republican Facebook rants. When I say named, I mean he called her a “shit” then exhorted his followers to “Vote Blue!” This tidbit got only the briefest of mentions outside local news, as did the threatening letters containing white powder Handel and her neighbors received days before the election. The powder turned out to be non-toxic.

     Hodgkinson’s attempted massacre was not part of media coverage of GA-6 despite his act of intimidation having clear implications there. Targeting a specific population for its beliefs usually has a secondary consequence—to cow the members of the community the murderer didn’t succeed in killing. Would Republican voters be intimidated into staying home or emboldened by this attack on elected Republicans? It seems like an interesting question in a special election where turnout is important and unpredictable, yet it was rarely if ever discussed.

     Instead, the only time the shooting came up in national media coverage of GA-6 was when an outside group ran a small, ham-handed ad tying Democratic rhetoric to the shooting. The ad was promptly, rightly denounced by Handel, but the scolding coverage of the ad went on for a day. My, how quickly we move in the news cycle from Republicans literally shot to Republican overreach about Republicans being literally shot.

     Pay special attention to the last paragraph. Not only did the media lavish a great deal of “scolding coverage” on an ad that – in my opinion, at least – was substantively correct, they targeted Republican Congressional candidate Karen Handel and conservative writer Mary Katherine Ham approved of the media’s decision to do so. That’s how deeply embedded in the Right’s consciousness the media have driven the “anger isn’t acceptable” postulate...a nonsensical notion that gets no respect whatsoever from the Left.

     This is a political auto da fe in progress.

---

     Asking an angry man “Why are you so angry?” is an indirect way of challenging his rationality and his priorities. The subtext is always “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.” Dial it back, dude! You’re harshing our mellow. There are better ways to expend your energy, Bubba, so take a chill pill. Gotta go with the flow, y’know, Joe?

     How anyone could imagine that he has the necessary stature or perspective to rule on the validity or the appropriateness of someone else’s emotions is beyond me. Yet it happens too frequently to bear enumeration – and the media are involved more often than not.

     (Full disclosure: I, a lowly software engineer, once chased a vice president of marketing out of my office while screaming at the top of my lungs that he was wasting my time. Not only did I get away with it, the head of my department complimented me on being so forthright and my group took me out to lunch to celebrate. There weren’t any media around at the time, though.)

     Consider the wildly asymmetric media treatment of Islamic terror events. Immediately afterward the media are all over us, counseling us against “disproportion” while donating endless air time and column-inches to Muslim mouthpieces to wring their hands about “backlash against Muslims.” But who’s doing the dying? Whose children are being cut down by jihadists? And when has anything a hundredth as bad as mass murder ever been visited upon Muslims in America, England, Europe, or Australia?

     Disarming a populace ready to rise in righteous fury has often seems the highest priority of our media. We ought to tell them to stuff it where the moon don’t shine...but so far we’ve done nothing of the sort.

---

     The greater part of the problem can be credited to two factors:

1. The general delegitimization of anger as such;
2. The Left’s superior skill at treating its causes as moral issues.

     Two recent movies will serve to dramatize the matter.

     If you haven’t seen the Adam Sandler / Jack Nicholson tour de force Anger Management, I strongly urge you to do so. Sandler is underappreciated as an actor, and Nicholson, of course, is one of the immortals. Though the movie is billed as a comedy, it’s practically a sermonette on the unwisdom of our society’s contemporary attitude toward anger. It depicts how ordinary pique, fully justified by circumstances and in no way threatening to anyone, as something that deserves to be sentenced to mandatory therapeutic remediation. Today we’re practically no allowed to be angry. The natural censoriousness of Man has seized upon this new excuse for criticizing others and turned it into a social crusade.

     Did I say that “we’re not allowed to be angry?” Why yes, I did...with one categorical exception: moral issues. But they must be the Left’s moral issues; the media will not permit the Right to have any such.

     Time was, Americans got angry:

• At obscene public demonstrations by homosexuals;
• At sexual indoctrination in the public schools;
• At having their taxes go to foreign satraps;
• At having to fund abortion on demand;
• At being lied to by the media.

     Virtually all such anger has “gone underground.” No one wants to be castigated for “letting his emotions run away with him.” Unless, that is, those emotions have been harnessed to a media-approved cause.

     A recent example of great importance is Cassie Jaye’s remarkable documentary The Red Pill, about the Men’s Rights movement and the Left’s attempt to silence it. Not one of the men’s rights activists Cassie interviewed allowed himself even a trace of visible or audible anger. Yet the Left has strained to demonize the movie as merely agitprop for “angry white nationalists” who have no right to have any grievances...nor to receive any attention. A recent interview of Miss Jaye on Australian television highlights the media’s alignment:

     As difficult as it is to endure that clip, I hope you’ll steel yourself to it. Miss Jaye is an honest documentarian: her film presents both sides of a painful social division as plainly and as factually as I’ve ever seen done in a video format. But the “interviewers” in the clip above are openly determined to slander the film, despite their admission that they hadn’t seen it. How Miss Jaye maintained her composure is difficult to imagine...but had she allowed any anger to surface, it surely would have been highlighted and used as “evidence against her.”

     That makes me furious...but how would the media treat my anger over their deceitfulness?

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     There’s a great deal more to say on this subject, but I’ll close with one final exhortation: If you believe you have a just cause for anger but feel you’re not allowed to be, ask yourself who did that to you, and how...and why. The answers point the way forward not just politically, but for many who suffer countless depredations and humiliations in silence, personally as well.

Megaphones

     The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. – H. L. Mencken

     In A Time For Action and A Time For Reflection, former Secretary of the Treasury William E. Simon’s followups to his extraordinary bestseller A Time For Truth, he devotes considerable attention to “the media megaphone:” the media’s special position in our national discourse, which it has used for decades to nudge the Overton Window ever further to the left. When President Gerald Ford mentioned Simon’s name as a possible vice-presidential running mate in 1976, Simon’s well known conservatism sent the press into a frenzy:

     It was fascinating and revealing to note how the mention of my name as a possible vice presidential candidate raised the volume of the media megaphone and lowered journalistic standards. Truth was less relevant than ever. With my conservative beliefs widely known, there was a deliberate effort to smear me as some kind of far right weirdo. The media seemed to go out of its way to print the most uncomplimentary photo they could find. In my case, it was a shot of me with slicked back hair and thick glasses, looking like some kind of space alien.
     Once Carol and I were accompanied by a reporter on the way to Andrews Air Force Base. A week later, Carol, who had heard every word of the interview, read his article in the paper.
     “This is terrible,” she said. “Number one, you never said any of those things. Number two, he never asked you about these things. It’s all a lie.”
     “Toots,” I said, “welcome to Washington. If you don’t speak to reporters, they will kill you. If you do, they will lie about you. It’s just the way it goes.”...
     One occasion in particular caused me to blow my stack. I got wind of a story that was being spread around Washington claiming that I had been engaged in laundering drug money while a senior partner at Salomon Brothers. I was told that this absurd story was being peddled by Mel Elfin, Newsweek’s bureau chief, and a reporter named Jim Bishop.
     I invited the pair to my office and asked Elfin for an explanation. He offered not a shred of fact(because there was none) to support this vicious rumor. Instead, he said that since I was a leading candidate for vice president, it was his job to smoke out whatever damaging information he could find about me. Floating stories like this, he said, was a way of getting people to come forth with information that journalists might not find through a normal , straightforward inquiry.
     “Even if it ruins a person’s reputation?” I asked incredulously. Elfin merely repeated his mantra, explaining that he had some sort of cosmic responsibility to investigate everybody and everything. I dared him to print his story. In the end, Elfin declined and the rumor disappeared, but not before he had spread it over a fairly wide field with his inquiries.

     [From A Time For Reflection]

     No better man than William E. Simon, dedicated public servant, devout Catholic, father of seven, and wizard of finance, has ever occupied a high Washington office. Even his political adversaries admired him – and not with the “admiration” of a bitter enemy for his conqueror’s prowess. Yet Newsweek was willing to smear him in the hope of impeding President Ford’s re-election campaign, or at least to keep a nationally recognized and admired conservative off the Republican ticket.

     That was 1976: forty-one years ago. The press has only grown more biased and less ethical since then.

---

     Today there are alternatives to what we in the Right derisorily call the “Main Stream Media” – talk radio, the Internet, and a few less potent organs – but the power of the MSM has yet to be broken. In part, that’s because its operators have a gift for discovering – or inventing – the sort of stories readers find irresistible. They certainly don’t let any notion of fairness or balance thwart them.

     Just now, with the Republican Senatorial caucus having brought its ObamaCare replacement to the floor, the MSM are trumpeting the most lurid, entirely fictional accounts of the bill. The tottering old crone of the bunch, the New York Times, is leading the charge. Here are its most publicized articles for today:

• Senate Health Care Bill Includes Deep Cuts to Medicaid
• Shifting Dollars From Poor to Rich Is a Key Part of the Senate Health Bill
• Insurers Battle Families Over Costly Drug for Fatal Disease
• The Senate’s Unaffordable Care Act

     Actual facts are thin on the ground in all four of those articles. Scan them for actual numbers; good luck finding ones that actually inform the reader about the bill. For example, no comparisons between levels of current Medicaid funding and those proposed by the AHCA are presented; only a brief mention – in an editorial! — of a limit to be imposed on the rate of increase. Yet only the last of those pieces is billed as an opinion piece. They’re pure scare talk, intended to frighten the constituents of GOP Senators into berating them out of supporting the bill.

     But people read scare talk; that’s why the MSM features so much of it. They tend to take it far more seriously than it deserves, which is how we got the (happily short-lived) wave of public alarm over “global warming.”

---

     It is no longer accurate to call the Main Stream Media institutions of “journalism.” Their aim is no longer to inform, but to direct and propel...and always in one particular direction. Whether the subject is the military, taxation, education, the environment, medicine, firearms, or school lunches, they direct their fire exclusively at conservatives and small-government advocates. The impact of this inclination cannot be denied.

     I am reminded of the Left’s public “rallies” of my younger days. There was always a “bullhorner:” an activist with a megaphone. He would rant through his device at such a volume that no one else could be heard for many yards around. The aim wasn’t to persuade; indeed, it wasn’t even to publicize. It was to prevent others from going their own way without the activist’s left-wing propaganda resounding in their skulls.

     Today, the megaphone is the Main Stream Media. They’re wholly at the service of the Left, which made colonizing and conquering them a principal priority decades ago. If there’s any prospect of reclaiming them for actual journalism, I can’t see it.

     They must be delegitimized and rendered impotent. But how?

The Democrat zoo.

While it’s a bit unfair to personalize the Democratic Party’s problems, Hillary and Bill Clinton have come to represent how the party is viewed by many Americans. Instead of the FDR Democrats, we have the Davos Democrats, the Wall Street Democrats, the Hollywood Democrats, the Silicon Valley Democrats, and now increasingly the Military-Industrial Complex Democrats.

To many Americans struggling to make ends meet, the national Democrats seem committed to the interests of the worldwide elites: global trade, financialization of the economy, robotization of the workplace, and endless war against endless enemies.

And the Snowflake Democrats.

Who can turn this around? Tulsi Gabbard.

Notes
^[1]  "Russia-gate Flops as Democrats’ Golden Ticket." By Robert Parry, Consortiumnews.com, 6/21/17.

Whom Are You Addressing?

     In any politically oriented statement, whether oral or written, the issuer must have a clear conception of his audience:

1. Who are they?
2. What convictions do they already hold, and why?
3. To what sort of arguments are they most likely to be receptive?

     It’s a bit like marketing fiction. If Smith dislikes vampire stories, you can’t reach him (or his wallet) with a vampire story. To get into his billfold, you must offer him something he likes to read, at least generically. That having been said, the reverse is also true. If you detest vampire stories but that’s all Smith is willing to read, you might as well forget trying to hook him.

     I couldn’t help but address this subject after reading this piece:

     Rant: Stop with the False Equivalencies

     No, "everyone" does not need to simmer down.

     No, the right does not "do it too." Not as extensively and not with the same viciousness.

     And so on, and so on, and so on...

     Now, I like Stephanie. I read her blog fairly often. (It helps that we’re both SF readers. Inasmuch as I’m an SF writer, reading it is a professional requirement. Got to stay aware of what “the competition” is doing, don’t y’know.) But if she had a clear conception of her audience, her piece would have been quite different. Indeed, she might not have written it at all.

     Stephanie’s audience, like mine, is populated just about 100% by conservatives and libertarians. Those folks don’t need to be told that the Left’s many attempts to play the tu quoque game with us are utter, scrofulous deceits. They know it already – and it chafes them quite as badly as it does Stephanie.

     But the matter is more involved than that. Let’s have a quick gedankenexperiment. Let’s imagine that Stephanie’s audience had been replaced, for the duration of the cited article, with one that’s predominantly left-liberal. What then? Would her piece have persuaded any of those imagined lefties to change their ways?

     I think not, for some very simple reasons:

1. Left-liberals in our time are not concerned with evidence;
2. The tu quoque tactic is too useful to the Left for them to surrender it;
3. A left-liberal receptive to Stephanie’s piece would swiftly be “read out of the church,” friendless.

     The only imaginable audience to which Stephanie’s article might be both interesting and effective is an audience of the uncommitted but open-minded, and such persons don’t read political blogs. They prefer not to court the attention of ideologues and partisans, whom they regard with a moderate distaste, about like door-to-door religious proselytizers. They talk about politics only among themselves...if at all.

     I could go on about this. I could embellish it with clever arguments and illuminating examples. However, I know my audience would prefer to read about just about anything else, so I’ll close here.

     Back later, I hope.