Vacua

     It seems that for some kinds of learning, you have to get old.

     I’m old. I’ve lived 73 years as of the fifth of September in this Year of Our Lord 2025. And I sometimes thank God that I can’t clearly remember the foolishness I espoused in my younger days. I’d die of embarrassment if some of it were to come to light. And that’s enough for personal disclosures.

     I was educated as a physicist. I’ve retained very little of that knowledge. I couldn’t solve a Schrodinger’s Equation problem to save my life. But I did hold on to one critical insight. It’s one you probably acknowledge, too, even if you would express it in other terms.

Excepting the effects of entropy,
The universe is ruled by equilibrium.

     Practical living incorporates that insight in particular ways: “The goldfish will grow to the size of the bowl.” “Water seeks its own level.” “Dirty is automatic; clean takes work.” “Nature abhors a vacuum.”

     That last one is much on my mind this morning. No calculus will be required to follow it out.

***

     Experimenters create vacua for specific purposes, often to gauge the consequences of a reaction that cannot occur in air. Vacua are also required for certain types of high-tech manufacturing. But have you ever contemplated the production of vacua by activists and politicians? Why would they do it?

     (Before we proceed further, yes: the plural of vacuum is vacua. The alternate plural vacuums is best reserved to the discussion of floor-cleaning devices.)

     Nature abhors a sociopolitical vacuum just as much as the physical kind. Indeed, a sociopolitical vacuum is often paralleled by a physical one. Both demand to be filled by something. All it takes is time.

     Now consider what’s happened to birth rates in the First-World nations. I don’t know of any advanced nation other than Israel that’s reproducing at or above replacement rate. Without an influx of immigrants, those countries would “empty out” within a few generations. The effects are already visible in Russia and Japan.

     Those declines in fertility don’t create a hard vacuum... but they indicate a reduced pressure within the affected countries. The pressure against their borders is higher than the pressure to maintain racial, ethnic, and cultural norms can resist. Moreover, there are elements within those countries that want a flood of immigrants, regardless of any countervailing considerations.

     Those pro-immigration elements have effective control of the governments of Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

     Yes, movements have arisen in all those nations to agitate against unrestricted and unqualified admission to their lands. But to this point, the pro-immigrant elements in their governments are holding sway. It’s unclear whether the balance will tip in the other direction in the near future.

     I’d bet against it, because of a cooperating vacuum that’s been under construction for several decades.

***

     Moral and ethical norms are best inculcated in the young person by his parents. Should they fail to do so, he might manage to acquire them in some other fashion, but he’d likely give and receive a lot of pain and damage in the process. Some of that damage would be to his beliefs about individuals’ rights.

     For decades the trend in Western nations has been away from firm moral-ethical norms and toward a freewheeling relativism: “whatever’s right for you.” Parents have been swayed in that direction as much as anyone else. But relativism acts like a vacuum. Under the guiding principle of “whatever’s right for you,” even a nation whose heritage is strongly Christian will lack the will to defend Christian norms against an incursion by an aggressive and confident opponent.

     Relativism synergizes with the reluctance to confront – an unwillingness to risk conflict, even if it’s just verbal conflict. The relativist will not argue for any absolute norm. How can he? Under the relativistic principle, there are “no right answers.” Everyone is entitled to “his own truth.” But a time may come when someone else’s “truth” mandates the relativist’s subjugation or death.

     That’s what’s happened to Canada, Britain, and Australia. It’s beginning to raise its head here in the United States. The great majority of Americans are at least nominally Christian. Our Nation’s laws were founded on Commandments Four through Nine of the Decalogue. But we have exhibited an increasing disinclination to take up cudgels in support or defense of Christian norms.

     Those norms will not prevail without a stouthearted defense. Their adversaries’ numbers are growing while ours are stagnating. Do the math.

***

     My personal conviction is that Islam is toxic to human life and must be destroyed root and branch. I feel similarly about the tide of Negro savagery that’s manifested in recent years, most notably in the larger cities. But underlying those threats to Christian-Enlightenment civilization are the vacua of relativism and non-confrontation. Those vacua will be filled by something. It behooves us of the Christian Enlightenment to be ones to fill them.

     Time is not on our side.

Issues

     Have you noticed? No one has problems any more. No one has a character defect that demands correction. And no one is ever irritated. Instead, we have issues.

     Issues, they say, are for “working out” – and you know how hopeless it is to argue with They. Of course, there are better and worse means of working out an issue, but we wouldn’t want to be judgmental, would we? Each to his own vision of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful!

     Except that some of them are pretty damned ugly, aren’t they? Especially the ones that involve rape, murder, and rioting in the streets.

     I’m a long-time admirer of Mark Steyn. There’s hardly any other commentator in the Right who equals his gift for unsparing penetration. He’s especially good at coining a pithy phrase. I have several of his books, and that pattern of penetration married to eloquence persists throughout.

     But by my lights, one of his coinages stands above the rest. He made it in America Alone, in discussing the evil that has striven to displace national pride, patriotism, and love of justice: multiculturalism. He called it “societal Stockholm Syndrome:”

     If Islamist extremism is the genie you’re trying to put back in the bottle, it doesn’t help to have smashed the bottle. At the core of multiculturalism is the assumption that a non-Western culture is somehow primal and immutable, but that an advanced nation is no more than the sum of its parts. It’s a kind of societal Stockholm Syndrome—a desperation to identify with anything that comes along other than your own.

     That appears to have become the dominant approach to multicultural “issues” throughout Europe. Muslims think it’s just grand to kidnap and rape white European teen girls? Muslims force their own pre-teen daughters into marriages to much older men? Muslims harass Jews in public places, sometimes with violence? Well, it’s okay in their homelands, so who are we to condemn it? Besides, we wouldn’t want them to become angry with us, would we?

     I have an issue with that. So did this young woman. But it appears that few of her countrymen share that issue.

     Remember the Nuremberg tribunals? No, I wasn’t there, and I doubt you were either. But the principle they established is one that deserves a lot more thought than it routinely gets. They ruled that there is a standard of justice above all political law – that the Nazi war criminals brought before them could not stake their defense on the laws of the Third Reich, but must be judged according to that supreme standard.

     Europeans who cower before the Muslims that have flooded into their nations are as culpable as any Nazi official who claimed that he was merely following the laws of his nation. They avert their eyes from vicious and savage behavior, preferring “tolerance” to being called “racists.” They permit those hordes to disrupt the public life of their countries, rather than assert their long-established norms. They shun all possibilities of confrontation.

     And it’s coming to America. Muslim street prayers designed to monopolize parks, impede traffic, and assert dominance. Muslim demonstrations against Israel in public parks and before public places. Muslims marching and chanting for sharia — in Idaho, of all places. And no one says a word, much less does anything to prevent or correct it. Even in districts where there are water cannons and snowplows aplenty.

     Do you have an issue with any of that, Gentle Reader?

A New Entry In The War Of Words

     As my Gentle Readers already know, a great part of political combat is conducted through clever (and occasionally not-so-clever) choices of rhetoric. That makes it imperative that we who love freedom stay informed about what new and incisive rhetorical weapons are being deployed.

     The Left has been considerably more adroit in its rhetoric than the Right. Consider its transition from “global warming” to “climate change.” Once it became clear that the Earth is not warming, its flacksters moved from the previous phrase to the current one. They made it the spearhead of a new attack: “Senator do you believe in climate change?” Some public figures were unprepared for the shift and handled it ineptly. A similar rhetorical shift is observable in the Left’s campaign against the right to keep and bear arms: from “gun control” to “gun reform” to “gun safety.”

     For a change, the Right has struck back, specifically with regard to the Left’s tendency to use recent tragedies as bludgeons against gun rights. The phrase that’s just made the news, courtesy of Braden Langley of Langley Outdoors Academy, is “coffin surfing.”

     Braden is one of the most articulate popular defenders of Americans’ right to keep and bear arms. He’s been at it for a while and is conversant with all the Left’s gimmicks. This latest sally pertains to Leftists’ piling demands for gun control onto news of mass shootings. The meaning he gives to “coffin surfing” could not be more obvious, nor its impact more acute.

     Leftist ghoulishness about shooting deaths has been obvious for some time. The new phrase is a powerful blow against the psychology behind their tactics. Second Amendment defenders and other devotees of freedom should look for opportunities to use it. It lays bare the perversity that lies behind the Left’s habit of politicizing every tragedy that comes along. Leftists will cringe before its implications.

Money Mumbles

     If you haven’t been watching the open-market prices of gold and silver, I have two bits of advice for you:

1. Check them;
2. Don’t check them.

     Advice #1 is for those with sound constitutions. Advice #2 is for those who are prone to fret.

     The U.S. dollar may yet survive as a respected currency, but over a long baseline it’s not looking good. The experiment in planned inflation that’s been going on since 1913 has reaped a terrible reward. The gold-to-dollars and silver-to-dollars curves are beginning to go asymptotic. Given the availability of this data, I’ve begun to worry about mass disaffection from the dollar as a store of value. The more people notice the deterioration, the more people will notice. Then things get spicy.

     The dollar, like all fiat currencies, is sustained by faith: specifically, the faith of millions that dollars will continue to purchase what they need and want. undermined. Faith is a deposit of hope in the truth of a given proposition. Events can undermine faith. When faith in a currency is undermined, we have financial panics.

     With regard to financial panics, Robert Ringer quoted economist Gary North in How You Can Find Happiness During the Collapse of Western Civilization:

     When a majority of depositors become convinced that a majority of depositors have become convinced that a majority of depositors are going to try to get their money out simultaneously, a majority of depositors start trying to get their money out simultaneously.

     Why are all those depositors trying to get their money out simultaneously? Some have this reason: they can see that the purchasing power of their money is sliding ever more swiftly downward. Others have another: they see other depositors making mass withdrawals, and they suspect that those others know something they don’t. Those two motivations cause one another to accelerate. They bring about a panic.

     Underlying the panic is a loss of faith in the enduring ability of the dollar to store value.

     If a panic against the dollar is to occur in the near future, the availability of information that for many years was kept away from private citizens is the most likely trigger. The Internet has made that information freely available. More private citizens than ever before are making use of it.

     As always in an approaching-panic situation, being among the first to act will confer a large advantage. This site is about the promptest and most reliable provider of regular information about the money metals and their dollar values. I check it regularly. I’d advise you to do the same. (Don’t neglect copper!)

     Finally, for more of the whys and wherefores, review these pieces:

• The Nature of Money and Currency
• The Nature of Money and Currency Part 2
• The Nature of Money and Currency Part 3
• The Nature of Money and Currency Part 4