Chronicles Of The Low-Trust Society

     Good morning, Gentle Reader. It’s a lovely day here on Long Island, New York: bright sunshine, gentle spring warmth, a sweet breeze redolent from the mulch pile around my front hedge. Yuck. With all that to be pleased by and thankful for, I thought I might say a few words about today’s plague of vipers: online scammers and their methods.

     The Internet is a marvelous development, but it does have a downside. Time was, if you wanted to defraud a man, you had to get close enough to him that he might just knife you. No longer! Today, scammers from around the world can ply their trades on targets from every land and clime. The victim doesn’t have a Chinaman’s chance to get him back.

     The predominant type of scammer offers his target something that’s too good to be true: easy money, in the usual case. “Guaranteed 100% return in just ten days! Just sign here. Oh, and we’ll need your bank account information so that we can forward your winnings to you.” Of course, if it’s too good to be true, what do the odds favor?

     Some scammers are “sympathy scammers:” “I can’t pay my rent! I can’t feed my baby! I can’t put gas in my car so I can get to my minimum-wage job putting panties on lamb chops! Please just send me an Apple gift card for $500!” I don’t think this variety fools many people, so why are they constantly bugging me? Must be my goofy looking face.

     But there are other subspecies of scammers operating today. Some don’t offer you easy money or the chance to “do good.” Instead, they tout their skills at doing something you wish you could do, but know that you can’t. The payment for those skills must be in advance, of course. Don’t expect to hear from them afterward.

     Indie writers are particularly promising targets for the skill-scammer. Even those of us who can actually write a decent tale are usually complete failures at selling our works. He who can persuade us that he’s ready, willing, and able to do that job for us looks like a dream come true. His come-on is an impressive-looking multi-stage “campaign strategy” that looks like something culled from an MBA program’s marketing textbook. Consult this weird Al Yankovic video for a taste of the “look and feel.”

     I have an email folder into which I put solicitations from such “promotion and marketing experts.” It’s bulging at the seams. I’ve asked other indie writers about their experiences, and they parallel mine: all buzzwords, no performance.

     But here’s a fresh one: a radio station wants to interview me! Wonder of wonders, a respectable format, interested interviewers, and an immediate audience to which to prattle about my books. Wait… what’s this? There’s a price? To “defray production costs?” Uh, thanks but no thanks, guys. Better luck next time.

     I’ve received two radio-station-interview solicitations this week already. I’m sure more will arrive with the morning dew.

     None of this strikes me as at all surprising. What does is that even with all the experience I’ve already garnered – some of it remarkably painful – the scammers are still coming up with ways to elicit my interest. Fresh new pitches! Fresh new offers! Fresh new plans! And for the low, low price of only $49.99!!

     At least they haven’t yet tried the late-night-TV commercial stinger: “If you act now we’ll double your order at no extra cost! Operators are standing by! Pay only separate shipping and handling.” But I suppose I should give them time.

     If an old Curmudgeon can feel tempted by such things after all this time, no one is safe. Consider this your heads-up:

     They’re out there.
     They’re clever.
     They’re hungry.
     They’re swarming.
     And they’re looking at you!

     Beware!

Practice Trumps Theory

     Happy Cinco de Mayo to all you Mexicans out there among my Gentle Readers. To the rest: don’t go out for Mexican food tonight. Trust me on that.

     Now have a snippet of dialogue from an unnamed story:

"Why is there a herring duct-taped to the ground wire?"
"Sir, I don't question your methods."
"That's not a method, that's madness. Witchcraft."
"Look, sir. Do you want to be right, or do you want results?"
"Well, results, of course."
"Then don't touch the fucking fish."

     That made me howl with laughter, not just because of the exceptionally clever phrasing, but because I’ve been there.

     In my years in engineering, I was often responsible for meeting a tight, rigid deadline: one which allowed for no slip-ups. On a couple of occasions there was a large pot of money at stake. Once it was in the tens of millions of dollars. Defense engineering can be like that.

     No one in his right mind would commit to such a deadline without the certainty that he can meet it. In the world of military procurement, there are no second chances. If Company A fails to meet the time and budget targets, Company B will be ready to step forward.

     But once you’ve committed, the watchword becomes No Experimenting! You must insist on proven methods only. The development team leader must resist any attempt to insert an attractive but unproven method with immovable firmness. Yes, the attractive but unproven method might later be proved better, faster, cheaper, or some combination of the three. But you can’t risk it with all those bucks on the line.

     That’s akin to blasphemy to a bright young engineer, only a year or two out of college, who’s sure he has a silver bullet chambered and ready to fire. The team leader was educated in the Sixties or Seventies; he’s hopelessly out of touch with what’s been happening since then. And boy, can that bright young engineer pout! He’ll also talk to his colleagues about his old fuddy-duddy of a boss. “Isn’t engineering about doing things the best way?” he’ll protest.

     It’s a sad lesson, but it’s one that must be administered and driven home with as many hammerblows as necessary. No: engineering is not about doing things “the best way.” It’s about meeting the specification within the given constraints, especially the constraints of time and budget.

     Getting that across to subordinates has been among the toughest and most thankless tasks of my career. I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

     But there’s worse: that bright young engineer might not be a subordinate. He might be a “compliance officer” assigned by the customer. Again, that’s common in defense engineering. You have to listen to him; he can throttle the money flow at his whim. And it’s amazing how intrusive and extensive his whims can be.

     There was one such occasion where a compliance officer wanted to have my team develop a very large program in a language none of us knew. I fought him off, but it was a memorable tussle. We delivered on time and within budget, but I never got another polite word out of him. Fortunately he was reassigned to another defense contractor after that.

     In such situations, when you have a love of knowledge and technology, the temptation to “go along to get along” is amplified by your own predilections. Here there be tygers! What a victory it would be, your subconscious whispers, to improve on the prevailing state of the art – even if no one knows you did it! Maybe the shiny new method will work!

     Well, yeah… but what if it doesn’t? What if you can’t get it debugged in time? You’re the point man; when you miss the deadline, the avalanche will fall on you. You won’t get to point at anyone else and say “Well, he said it would work.”

     So consider engraving this exquisitely concise and pointed motto on a nice piece of mahogany, inlaid with mother-of-pearl:

Don’t Touch The Fucking Fish.

     Hang it where all your people will look upon it daily. And do have a nice day.

Of Cars And Cash

     First, some music:

     Did you play it? Did you listen with attention? It’s one of the most moving odes to freedom ever put into song form. It’s musically brilliant as well. Every syllable and every note speak of the passage of time, the uninterruptible progression toward death, for a creature denied the freedom that belongs to it by nature.

     Yes, we make pets of birds, dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, ferrets, turtles, wombats, aardvarks, tree sloths… oh, never mind. And it’s arguable that in some cases, their lives improve from domestication. But they’re still captives, held in thrall by a more powerful and capable species. The poignancy of birds kept in cages is particularly striking, considering how flight is possible to them but not to us except by artifice. Yet flight figures pre-eminently in our dreams of freedom:

     There she stood, her eyes screaming hatred and fear, like a trapped raptor – hawk eyes, he thought, which you better never look into. I learned that early, he reflected; don’t look into the eyes of a hawk or an eagle. Because you won’t be able to forget the hate that you saw…and the passionate, insatiable need to be free, the need to fly. And oh, those great heights. Those dreadful drops on the prey; panic-stricken rabbit: that’s the rest of us. Funny image: an eagle held prisoner by four rabbits.
     The MPs, however, were not rabbits. He made out the kind of grip they had on her – where they held her and how tightly. She couldn’t move. And they would outlast her.

     [Philip K. Dick, Our Friends from Frolix 8]

     Ponder that passage for a moment. It’s one of Dick’s best.

* * *

     Humans don’t make pets of other humans. At least, not often in the First World. It’s one of those things that’s “not done.” Our civilizations have progressed sufficiently that we understand the wrongness of such a practice. Captivity is conferred on a man only by the force of law, as a punishment.

     Unrestricted mobility, limited only by the property rights of others, is regarded as a human right. We build roads and highways, cars, trains, boats, and planes, to actualize that right. It sits at the core of our concept of freedom: room to move.

     But we do endure some limitations of mobility. Fuel, money, time, and competing responsibilities keep us within a short distance of some home point most of our lives. We accept those limits as the price of things we want: comfort, security, information, diversions, and so forth. They don’t hold us captive, really. They just keep us close to home, for the greater part of our lives.

     Yet look at how we cherish the machines that can take us away! Americans, above all other peoples, have known the mobility of personal transportation: the automobile. Walter Chrysler called autos “The most wonderful machines ever made by Man.” Whether we use them to go near or far, and often or seldom, they continue to be one of our foremost tangible symbols of freedom.

     That’s why those who despise individual freedom and seek to eliminate it want to take our cars away.

     The utter abolition of the private car wouldn’t be accepted by the American people. The power-seekers know that, so they use “salami tactics:” minor, seemingly modest infringements on our mobility, often in the guise of environmentalism. Increases in fuel and mileage taxes. Changes to the formulation of fuels. Ever-stiffening emissions and safety regulations. And think for a moment about the electric car, which has been touted so stridently as environmentally beneficial. Who controls the fuel for that?

     The “15-minute city” concept was a blatant stroke against personal mobility. It would have made the ownership of a car too burdensome to contemplate, for those within its limits. Give thanks that it’s been rejected so soundly.

     But quoth the Great Marketer, wait: there’s more!

* * *

     The ability to transact in privacy, such that only the seller and the purchaser are aware of the transaction, is an aspect of individual freedom that too many fail to appreciate. For quite a long time, most transactions were simple: you give me the product; I give you the price – in cash. Occasionally we’d write a check for things such as the mortgage or the phone bill, but the greater part of our commerce was in cash.

     But cash, it seems, has problems. The government agency that prints our currency is reporting losses. It just ended the production of pennies: they cost too much to make! Whether the rest of our coinage is endangered, I can’t say. But the penny’s demise has already been decreed.

     Then there’s our paper currency. Those steel engravings, produced with elaborate care, are a problem too! It seems that no matter how hard it tries, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing can’t quite make them un-counterfeitable. There are ways to make it harder, but every such tactic comes up against Porretto’s First Law of Engineering:

For every engineer,
There is an equal but opposite engineer,
And he’s straining to undo your work as we speak!

     Do not doubt this, Gentle Reader. Anyway, from the standpoint of a government economist, that means only one thing: physical currency must be obsoleted. Abolished. Supplanted by some electronic scheme of credits and debits that can’t be hacked. Something like credit and debit cards, but better, more secure.

     What could be better than credit and debit cards? Only a device that ties your balances, who owes you and whom you owe, directly to your person: an implanted identity chip! Your thumbprint would thereafter suffice to complete any transaction. The “reader” would access the ID chip, use it to inquire of the entirely-on-line Money Mesh, and issue a request for payment from whatever account you the purchaser designate. The seller would have to put his thumb on the device to “receive” the payment, of course. Sauce for the goose and all that.

     What’s that you say? Who would validate the transaction? Who would maintain the Money Mesh and certify its accuracy? Why, the government, of course, through the Federal Reserve System!

     And all privacy in transaction would vanish in a puff of smoke from a bonfire of twenties.

* * *

     I’ve written about these things before, of course. This piece addresses the hostility to personally-operated cars. This one addresses the threat to cash. But many a reader has told me I’m conjuring phantasms.

     I’d like to believe that. I hope I am. But I don’t think so.

     Hold onto your car and your cash, Gentle Reader. Shy away from these latest cars that transmit everything about your driving to a distant entity. The ones coming next year can rule you unfit to drive. As for cash, I hope there’s no need to advise you further.

     Have a nice day.

The Helpless Who Are Not Human

     If you’re a regular reader of Liberty’s Torch, you’re surely aware that we here at the Fortress of Crankitude are animal lovers. Not in the “PETA sense,” mind you; just as persons who cherish innocent lives. We’ve had pets of several kinds: dogs, cats, rabbits, turtles, hamsters, a white rat, a raccoon, and briefly an opossum who’d “tied one on” and couldn’t make it home after his bender. It always hurts when we lose one.

     Wherefore, upon reading about an egregious case of animal abuse, I did some research and discovered that aggravated animal abuse is a felony in all 50 states of the Union. However, it seems that prosecutors are as reluctant to try animal abusers as felons as judges are to put black felons in prison. Why? If the law is clear, why not enforce the law? Are our “enforcers” afraid of something, or are they just lazy?

     I suppose that’s a subject that needs further research. But this one doesn’t:

Abuse of the helpless is vile.
Including those helpless that aren’t human.

     Western civilization is distinct from all others in several ways, but this one is particularly notable: We condemn all abuse of the helpless. We don’t tolerate it in any form or under any rationale. When we see it, the decent among us – and that’s very nearly all of us – move against it.

     Wait, what did I just write? All abuse? All of us? Hm. That might demand a bit more thought.

     We permit Muslims abusive practices in the preparation of “halal food.” We permit them cruelty in their treatment of wives and children that no other Americans would be permitted. We permit black fathers to abandon their children, and black mothers to neglect them. We permit Hispanics their cockfights, as long as they “keep it to themselves.”

     Fury against the abuse of the helpless is a White thing. If you aren’t White, you might not understand.

     Even Whites make an exception, of course: abortion. Third-trimester and partial-birth abortions are demonstrably abusive, even barbaric, yet they don’t receive uniform condemnation. We’ve been told that that would be “judgmental.” God apparently forgot to include that sin in the Decalogue. Funny that we’re allowed to be “judgmental” about so many other things.

     There’s a continuum here. Abuses of humans don’t stand isolated in the realm of moral evaluation. The abuse of helpless subhumans touches them at the low end. Tolerating those abuses makes it easier to tolerate the abuse of humans. But the reverse is also true: tolerating the abuse of humans makes it far easier to turn aside from the abuse of subhumans.

     If I may inject a bit of black humor here, we’ve had a declaration on the subject from a voice of years past:

     If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time. – Thomas de Quincey

     That’s quite enough humor.

     Wasn’t the nasty little boy who pulls the wings off flies once held up as the prototype of the abuser-to-be? Have we forgotten how “great oaks from little acorns grow?”

     Man is at the top of the Terrestrial food chain by virtue of his intellect, his adaptability, his skills at fabrication, and his moral sense. Animals may kill and eat one another, but with vanishingly rare exceptions they don’t abuse the helpless members of the animal kingdom. Are we really superior to our animal brethren? Shouldn’t we be?

     I’d like to see our awareness of the abuse of the helpless – human and subhuman – restored to full horror. I’d like to see our censoriousness, our judgmentalism, directed unflinchingly at it. It seems to have slipped a bit. And should some judgmental type go a bit overboard and cripple an abuser he caught in the act, I’ll vote to acquit him. Maybe strike him a medal, too. A few examples would help to keep our less civilized fractions in line.

The Artist As Instrument

     I just received an email from Megha Lillywhite, who runs a Substack titled Classical Ideals. In it she invites attention to this piece. A brief appetite-whetter:

     To deny one’s moral disease is the primary symptom of it, so those who have the worst judgements of beauty, are the most morally diseased, and the most vociferous in their claims to the idea that judgements of beauty are “subjective”. They claim that what is ugly to one person may be beautiful to another so there is really no meaning to beauty and ugliness anymore. One of the most morally diseased people in the world, Frida Kahlo, expressed her malaise best when she said “La belleza y la fealdad son un espejismo” meaning, “beauty and ugliness are a mirage.” It is because of this disease that Kahlo never made a single work of beautiful art in her life and is another charlatan pushed on the population to demoralise us with the ugliness of her work.

     If you have any interest in art and what’s happened to it in recent decades, I exhort you to read the whole piece.

     I wasn’t conversant with Frida Kahlo, other than as a Mexican Communist activist. Miss Lillywhite’s evaluation of her as “One of the most morally diseased people in the world” made me sit up and take notice. So I surfed through a few online reproductions of Kahlo paintings, and I came to agree with Miss Lillywhite: Kahlo was an enemy of beauty, in intent and effect.

     My thoughts veered from there to a passage from That Hideous Strength:

     He had a look at the pictures.
     Some of them belonged to a school of art with which he was already familiar. There was a portrait of a young woman who held her mouth wide open to reveal the fact that the inside of it was thickly overgrown with hair. It was very skilfully painted in the photographic manner so that you could almost feel that hair; indeed you could not avoid feeling it however hard you tried. There was a giant mantis playing a fiddle while being eaten by another mantis, and a man with corkscrews instead of arms bathing in a flat, sadly colored sea beneath a summer sunset. But most of the pictures were not of this kind. At first, most of them seemed rather ordinary, though Mark was a little surprised at the predominance of scriptural themes. It was only at the second or third glance that one discovered certain unaccountable details—something odd about the positions of the figures’ feet or the arrangement of their fingers or the grouping. And who was the person standing between the Christ and the Lazarus? And why were there so many beetles under the table in the Last Supper? What was the curious trick of lighting that made each picture look like something seen in delirium? When once these questions had been raised the apparent ordinariness of the pictures became their supreme menace—like the ominous surface innocence at the beginning of certain dreams. Every fold of drapery, every piece of architecture, had a meaning one could not grasp but which withered the mind. Compared with these the other, surrealistic, pictures were mere foolery. Long ago Mark had read somewhere of “things of that extreme evil which seem innocent to the uninitiate,” and had wondered what sort of things they might be. Now he felt he knew.

     If that gets you thinking about the degeneration of art from classical subjects and standards to the presentation of mounds of filth in museums, you’re not alone.

* * *

     I hold to an admittedly minority view: i.e., that there are objective standards for beauty. By implication, there are objective measures by which to discern beauty from ugliness. The prevailing “eye of the beholder” view crashes against Robert M. Pirsig’s demonstration that there is a reality to Quality:

     When I say, “Quality cannot be defined,” I’m really saying formally, “I’m stupid about Quality.”
     Fortunately the students didn’t know this. If they’d come up with these objections he wouldn’t have been able to answer them at the time.
     But then, below the definition on the blackboard, he wrote, “But even though Quality cannot be defined, you know what Quality is!” and the storm started all over again.
     “Oh, no, we don’t!”
     “Oh, yes, you do.”
     “Oh, no, we don’t!”
     “Oh, yes, you do!” he said and he had some material ready to demonstrate it to them.
     He had selected two examples of student composition. The first was a rambling, disconnected thing with interesting ideas that never built into anything. The second was a magnificent piece by a student who was mystified himself about why it had come out so well.
     Phaedrus read both, then asked for a show of hands on who thought the first was best. Two hands went up. He asked how many liked the second better. Twenty-eight hands went up.
     “Whatever it is,” he said, “that caused the overwhelming majority to raise their hands for the second one is what I mean by Quality. So you know what it is.”

     Pirsig, in his “Phaedrus” persona, had touched what C. S. Lewis called the Tao: the absolutes that are the bedrock of reality itself:

     The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. ‘In ritual’, say the Analects, ‘it is harmony with Nature that is prized.’ The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being ‘true’.
     This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’. Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.

     From here I could spin off into an exhausting ramble about things versus events, and what modern physics tells us we can and cannot know, but I’ll spare you. The point is a simple one:

There are real things.
We know them by their qualities,
Which reflect Quality – The Tao – in greater or lesser measure.

     Among those real things are beauty and ugliness.

* * *

     Artists, like the rest of us, are purposive beings. What they do, they do for a reason or reasons. It’s not always easy or pleasant to infer their reasons.

     Contemporary visual art has largely turned away from depictive art: i.e., art that attempts to show the viewer something real or plausible, though perhaps in a heightened or dramatized degree. Some “artists” have departed altogether from art as derived from artifice. Have a tale of a museum janitor who “destroyed” an exhibit by such an artist, because he took it to be trash:

     “The most delicious news to emerge from the art world this year,” I wrote at the time, “came in October, courtesy of the BBC.”

     Under the gratifying headline “Cleaner Dumps Hirst Installation,” the world read that “A cleaner at a London gallery cleared away an installation by artist Damien Hirst having mistaken it for rubbish. Emmanuel Asare came across a pile of beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays and cleared them away at the Eyestorm Gallery on Wednesday morning.”

     I went on to express the hope that Asare would be immediately given a large raise. “Someone who can make mistakes like that,” I noted, “is an immensely useful chap to have about.”

     I also daydreamed about this paragon of the cleaning industry being taken on by some large metropolitan paper, the Daily Telegraph, for example, since he clearly demonstrated sounder aesthetic judgment than most of the fellows calling themselves art critics.

     Alas, Asare’s good work was soon undone.

     John Q. Smith, the Celebrated Man in the Street, coming upon a heap of “beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays” in the street would unhesitatingly classify it as garbage and ask why it hasn’t been cleared away. Put that same detritus on the floor of a museum and he’d all but certainly react the same way. But what happens when the museum puts a placard on it, naming it and attributing it to an artist? Would it change Smith’s reaction? More pointedly, should it?

     Smith is either in harmony with the Tao or he isn’t. If he is, garbage is self-evident to him. If he isn’t, he can be bamboozled, propagandized, led by the nose… trained to celebrate offenses against the Tao. Which brings us, via Miss Lillywhite’s observations through Pirsig and C. S. Lewis, capped by Roger Kimball’s tale, to the point I had in mind.

     We have been admonished in stentorian tones not to ask “What is art and what is not?” But unless we insist upon answering that question, we cannot discriminate – we cannot rule some things out of consideration as artistic efforts. A firm answer to the question would make it possible. It would also dethrone quite a number of “artists” and the critics that celebrate them.

     The above focuses on visual art, as I intended, but similar questions must be asked about other art forms: sculpture, musical composition, storytelling, poetry, dance, and so on.

* * *

     There’s a snippet from “Individuality,” a poem by 19th Century poet Sidney Lanier, that comes to mind here:

What the cloud doeth,
The Lord knoweth,
The cloud knoweth not.

What the artist doeth,
The Lord knoweth;
Knoweth the artist not?

     I submit that the question is an imperative one. We must answer it. Why is the artist doing what he does? What is his intent? Does he have an agenda – and if so, is it for good or for ill?

     Many an artist of times past spoke of himself as an instrument: a tool being used by some remote power. For some artists, such talk was a form of “humble-brag.” But some were sincere. George Friedrich Handel said something of the sort when an admirer asked what drove him to compose The Messiah.

     But there are powers and powers. Might some self-styled artists be tools in the hand of Satan? Might the filth and degradation they present as “art” – all too often celebrated as “transgressive” by a gaggle of critics – be something more than a jest at our expense? Consider the passage I cited from That Hideous Strength. Perhaps Lewis had seen such “artwork;” he wrote about it piercingly enough.

     Do such “artists” know what they’re about?
     Do they know what they serve, and do they serve it willingly?
     And can we the audience afford not to ponder the implications?

     Have a nice day.

The Natural, The Supernatural, And The Arguments

     I hadn’t intended to write anything today, but I just had an encounter with something both brilliant and concise. When you find those two attributes in a single package, applause isn’t just appropriate; it’s damn near mandatory.

     First, have a quote that’s rather popular among atheists:

     “I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” – Stephen F. Roberts

     Appended to that slogan is this summary of a particular pseudo-argument against belief in any god:

     As a dear departed friend liked to say, “It has a certain syrup, but it doesn’t actually pour.” He had a way with words, even if most of us didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, much of the time. But enough of that. What do Roberts’s statement and the appended image actually contend? Do they concern themselves with anything factual or logical?

     Of course not. They don’t offer an argument, but a rejection of argument. “These previous claims are substanceless; therefore all other claims that have certain specific similarities to them can be dismissed without examining the associated logic or evidence.” That looks a lot like “It never happened before, therefore it can’t happen.”

     Now on to the good part:

It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. If you don't keep your feet, you may end up regurgitating unhelpful slogans that obfuscate reality.

> The "absence of discriminating evidence" is the entire game. Taking me on this journey only gets us to where we already… https://t.co/8YKdXic0Fn

— Limit and Mind | Know the Times (@limitandmind) April 27, 2026

     Allow me to repost the really striking portion, as I don’t want my Gentle Readers to stop short:

     The "absence of discriminating evidence" is the entire game. Taking me on this journey only gets us to where we already were...evaluating the evidence for and against different god claims. Otherwise we are collapsing into the same boring mantra that we hear all the time "there is no evidence for god."
     Parsimony is misapplied if explanatory power is not equal. If you hold that the universe is brute, as many atheists do, the theist has an explanatory advantage, and I don't have to believe Zeus is real or treat his claim of divinity as equally serious as the Christian God to get there. Which feeds into the next point.
     All deities are obviously not in the same reference class. The slogan treats them as if they are. The Greeks never considered their deities to be the sufficient ground of their existence. Overall, I think it's clear how unhelpful to the conversation the slogan is.
     When both atheists and theists are saying it's time to retire this one, it may be time to retire it and move on.

     Extraordinary. I’m in awe.

     I’ve ranted before about the widespread misunderstanding of Occam’s Razor, alternately known as the “Principle of Parsimony.” (Please read that earlier essay if you’ve forgotten.) The universe is decidedly not simple. We probe for simplicities beneath the complexities we can see, but we’re not guaranteed that the understratum is any simpler than the layer of reality we can perceive. That’s why we keep probing.

     As the embedded tweet says, you cannot validly use “parsimony” to dismiss an explanation for a phenomenon without examining the evidence for it. It’s an especially egregious violation of logic to do so when no other explanation has demonstrated validity – even conditional validity. If we maintain that existence itself demands an explanation, we must be dispassionate in our consideration of any candidate explanations.

     Even those atheists who claim that no explanation is required continue to probe. They seek to reach and know that understratum as avidly as theists seek to know God. That makes their militancy against theism, especially Christianity, particularly ironic. If they could accept that our explanation is no worse logically or evidentiarily than their “it just is” dogmatism, and allow us to go our own way, an awful lot of bad feeling could be avoided.

     What’s that you say? You want to know why they can’t allow us to go our own way? I wish I knew. But ultimately, it’s irrelevant. We all believe what we prefer to believe. Our respective choices in that regard are a great part of what defines us.

The Viciousness Of The Righteous

     Don’t take the title too literally, Gentle Reader. There’s a dollop of sarcasm in it.

     I’ve ranted many times about how the Left’s assumption of moral and intellectual superiority seems to license it to do all manner of vicious, amoral things. History offers us many examples of its big crimes. Its lesser sins against honesty and decency tend to go unnoticed, except by those who are the targets thereof.

     This vignette by Jim Trageser provides us a look at one such “lesser sin:”

     In the early 1990s, I was the opinion pages editor of the Oceanside Blade-Citizen in San Diego County. We were a 30,000 circulation daily serving Oceanside, Carlsbad, Vista and Encinitas. At that time, California and a few other states were pioneering new laws that required financial institutions to share with customers the files they kept on us - and to provide a process for challenging inaccurate information.
     The editorial board - publisher Tom Missett, managing editor Rusty Harris, and myself - were in favor of this development, and wrote a series of editorials in support of it. Then we went a step further, and in another editorial argued that political and activist organizations that keep files on American citizens should also have to disclose those files on request, and have a process whereby inaccurate information could be challenged.

     Please read the rest.

     There’s a curious tension in there. The notoriously brutal tactics of the Southern Poverty Law Center were already well known, at least among conservatives. Yet that organization clearly felt that it had to maintain the secrecy of its operations. From Trageser’s tale, the SPLC’s masters regarded anything that might breach that secrecy to be a threat to it. Yet there could be no question about the magnitude or the direction of the SPLC’s activism; it made its accusations quite publicly.

     Would the exposure of the SPLC’s files have done it harm? Probably, though I can’t see that harm being mortal or near-mortal. Its orientation and agenda were too plain. But as Trageser tells us, it was willing to use its methods to bludgeon a relatively small and local newspaper, rather than allow even the suggestion that activist groups of its kind should be transparent about their recordkeeping.

     I must conclude that the SPLC’s masters were aware that what they were doing was wrong, despite their belief in themselves as morally superior to those they were targeting. That awareness didn’t seem to have any effect on their behavior. They went on righteously denouncing anyone to their right as purveyors of “hate.” The recent revelation of their funding of public demonstrations of “hate” and “racism” surprised few conservatives.

     Cognitive dissonance doesn’t quite cover this. I don’t know what would.

     This is one of those “How can they possibly sleep at night?” questions that arise repeatedly about left-wing organizations and activists. It’s not far from the usual run of such things, apart from its blatancy. Still, add it to the catalogue. Keep it handy for the next time some leftist blathers about the Trump Administration’s “lack of transparency.”

Forward, Into The Past! 2026-04-25

     (Thank you, Firesign Theater, for anticipating this need.)

     Quoth Matt Walsh:

Matt Walsh “Almost all of the arrests that happen in a given year are from like 5% of the population”

“Cause you take out the 70% who are never arrested, you take out the 25% who are arrested one time in their entire life, and you're left with 5% of the entire population that's… pic.twitter.com/NnTeztc84n

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) April 24, 2026

     Yes, those are valid statistics. They may mix misdemeanors with felonies, but I’m unable to resolve that at this time.

     Time was, there were “three strikes” provisions on the law books in several states. Those laws constrained the sentencing practices of judges: a criminal convicted of a third felony offense was automatically sentenced to life without parole. For a while, those states locked up felony recidivists permanently; the public was permanently protected from their proclivities.

     I’m not sure what happened to those three-strikes laws. This article sheds some light, but not enough to be sure that the three-strikes provision is still enforced. Among the facets of criminal law that would bear on this is the propensity of judges and prosecutors to alter an indictment on their own authority. A judge who dislikes the three-strikes provision might unilaterally dismiss a felony indictment to keep an accused criminal from suffering permanent incarceration.

     There is also the racial aspect to consider. If we go by national demographics, American prison populations already overrepresent blacks and Hispanics. The implications are not hard to grasp. Neither is the message a further concentration of imprisoned blacks and Hispanics would send to the White majority.

     The hawkers of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are violently hostile to an accurate representation of blacks and Hispanics among felonious criminals. It’s the statistic they dislike most. So they screech about “social justice” and “the legacy of slavery,” as if those were valid justifications for allowing habitual felons to continue to prey on the rest of us.

     However, another statistic is on my mind this morning: the population of these United States. That’s estimated at 330 million persons. If we were to imprison 5% of that number, that’s 16.5 million permanently incarcerated persons. I don’t know if enough prisons could be built and staffed to accommodate that many permanent residents. A far smaller number of persons are imprisoned today – about 1.25 million – and cries of “prison overcrowding” already resound nationally.

     An old friend, a far harsher person than I, advocated not lifelong incarceration for the habitual felon but execution: “Three strikes and you’re dead.” Given the way the death penalty is treated today, that wouldn’t relieve the pressure on our prisons. But Tom is a forthright fellow; he envisioned the application of the penalty to occur immediately after the third conviction.

     That calls to mind a scene from Neal Stephenson’s early novel The Diamond Age:

     “Congratulations, Bud, you're a pa,” Judge Fang said. “I gather from your reaction that this comes as something of a surprise. It seems evident that your relationship with this Tequila is tenuous, and so I do not find that there are any mitigating circumstances I should take into account in sentencing. That being the case, I would like you to go out that door over there”—Judge Fang pointed to a door in the corner of the courtroom—“and all the way down the steps. Leave through the exit door and cross the street, and you will find a pier sticking out into the river. Walk to the end of that pier until you are standing on the red part and await further instructions.”
     […]
     The pier did not turn red until the very end, where it began to slope down steeply toward the river. It had been coated with some kind of grippy stuff so his feet wouldn't fly out from under him. He turned around and looked back up at the domed court building, searching for a window where he might make out the face of Judge Fang or one of his gofers. The family of Chinese was following him down the pier, carrying their long bundle, which was draped with garlands of flowers and, as Bud now realized, was probably the corpse of a family member. He had heard about these piers; they were called funeral piers.
     Several dozen of the microscopic explosives known as cookie-cutters detonated in his bloodstream.

     Efficient, yes, but I’m fairly sure our anti-death-penalty activists would disapprove, to say nothing of the social-justice crowd.

     Still, that 5% statistic has considerable power. If it were to get the right amount of airtime and column-inches, who could say what might follow? The conversion of Manhattan Island into a giant, open-air prison camp, perhaps?

     Just an early-morning thought.

Imperfections

     Among the things that tire me most severely are comments to the effect that this, that, or the other thing “isn’t perfect.” Given the general lack of understanding of what constitutes “perfection,” I’m tempted to launch into a lecture about the speaker’s choice of words and the failure of comprehension they reveal. But in these later years of life, I restrain myself, so as not to add to my already unfortunate “body count.”

     One observation, pithily phrased by the late, great C. Northcote Parkinson, puts the whole subject to bed:

     Perfection is finality, and finality is death.

     It seems that too few persons are sufficiently acquainted with the Great Lawgiver to have encountered that one, so here we are.

     Just this morning – yes, I know it’s early – a French commenter at X, in the midst of a spirited defense of market capitalism, said this:

     Market capitalism isn’t perfect.

     That lit my boiler, and moved me to resurrect the following piece from 2015. But don’t hurry away if you remember it, for I have a trailing comment to make.

---

     No doubt every Gentle Reader has encountered, at least, someone who constantly and vociferously denounces the status quo for some perceived flaw. Such a person will be known to complain constantly about his personal lot in life, as well. It won’t matter how well off he is, or how well supplied with friends, lovers, opportunities, or comforts. The comparison of his situation to that of far less fortunate others will not affect his malaise. Anything he perceives as a defect, whether in his circumstances or “The System,” will be enough.

     To which the recently deceased Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra, he of the ten World Series rings and endless records, deposeth and sayeth:

     If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.

     Many people have chuckled over Berra’s supposed malapropisms, thinking only that the Yankee great had intended to say something plain and obvious, but that it was muddled by his low facility with the English language. For my part, I find an immense practical wisdom in many of them. The above is a case in point.

     There are two piercing insights to be had here. The first is the more general of the two. That which is perfect is finished, complete, at the terminus of its evolution. It cannot be improved. It requires no changes. Indeed, it tolerates no changes, for any change rendered to a perfect thing or context would destroy its perfection.

     Therefore, if “the world” were perfect, it would deny Man any latitude for action. Any sort of change at all would deface it. Since Man, as Loren Lomasky has put it, is a “project pursuer,” a “perfect world” would destroy a fundamental requirement of human life: opportunities for action in pursuit of improvements to oneself or one’s condition. A “perfect world” would find Man intolerable. We would shortly be extinct.

     The second insight is more personal. It’s highly unlikely that any two persons would agree on what constitutes a “perfect world.” Our personal priorities and preferences vary too greatly for that. Indeed, for some of us, “perfection” equates to absolute hegemony over others. But what of the others? Are they to be allowed no say in the matter?

     The old pastimes “What would you do with a billion dollars?” – yes, it used to be a million, but prices are higher these days – and “What would you do if you were king?” cast additional light on Berra’s truth. Your billion would not be mine; your monarchy would limit my sphere of action. Your use of either of those things would deprive me of something I value: in the first case, the ability to afford whatever pleasure or luxury you’ve gobbled up, thus raising the price above my means; in the second, the freedom to live and act as I see fit, without a requirement for anyone’s permission or approval.

     And so, if “the world,’ however conceived, were “perfect,” however conceived, it wouldn’t be. Quod erat demonstrandum.

     I find it fitting that such wisdoms should have come from Yogi. Perhaps the American Philosophical Society should confer an emeritus membership upon him. By the way, does anyone know when they hold the balloting for the Philosophy Hall Of Fame?

---

     A nice trip down Memory Lane, wouldn’t you say, Gentle Reader? But wait: there’s more! For we see defenders of the free market say it “isn’t perfect” with appalling frequency. That raises two questions:

1. Why do they do it?
2. What usually follows?

     The answer to the first question is that the speaker feels compelled to admit that free markets don’t solve all the problems of the world. Now, if you’re of a rational but sarcastic bent, as is your humble Curmudgeon, you might say “Well, what would?” But that is exactly what the Leftist dueling with you wants you to say. He has this “solution,” you see…

     That’s the answer to the second question. Admitting that there are imperfections in the world provides an entering wedge the Leftist can use to go on the attack. The Left strives always to be on the attack. (Note how vituperative Leftists become when forced onto the defense.) Any admission by a Rightist that there are “problems” gives him an opportunity to mount an offensive against “the System.”

     Never mind that the Left’s prescriptions have always produced poverty, oppression, and hopelessness. Leftists don’t want to address the record of socialist and communist systems. Force them to do so and their mildest rejoinder will be to call you “heartless.” (That usually follows their perennial deflection: “That wasn’t real socialism.”) Their whole aim is to attack freedom’s “imperfections” and claim that they can be remedied by their methods.

     Don’t fall into their trap. Free markets don’t exist to fulfill Utopian objectives. They can’t; nothing can. The existence of marginal people, less well off than the rest of us, does not indict capitalism. Nothing but copious charity could raise their lot to that of an American middle-class wage earner… and we have learned the limits of large-scale charity:

     We shall not get rid of pauperism by extending the sphere of State relief...On the contrary, its adoption would increase our pauperism, for as is often said, we can have exactly as many paupers as the country chooses to pay for. – Thomas Mackay, Methods of Social Reform

     So have done with the “capitalism isn’t perfect” crap.

Going Your Own Way

     Yes, yes, yes: My “output” is declining. But then, so am I, and not slowly. Please bear with me. These days it takes a lot more effort for me to produce something worth my Gentle Readers’ time and attention.

     Nevertheless, if you’ll keep reading, I’ll keep trying.

* * *

     Just this morning, I encountered this on X:

When training for a mission in space, people are judged on their psychological ability to work as a team. They can hardly afford someone who is not part of the team and wants to do it their way only. That could spell disaster for a mission in space. Yet here we are on spaceship…

— SpiritsofIdaho (@SpiritsofIdaho) April 22, 2026

     The “spaceship Earth” motif isn’t new, of course. The conception of Earth as a vessel rather than a static environment goes back several decades. While it can be used tendentiously, as it is above, there’s also some value in it for directing one’s attention.

     One of Earth’s features that spaceships lack is room. The land area of Terra is about 50 million square miles. Every one of those square miles enjoys a breathable atmosphere. While some of those square miles are less hospitable than others, there are at least 25 million square miles of land surface that are habitable, or can be made so with time and effort.

     If we approximate Earth’s current population as 8 billion souls, the average human density of our world is no greater than 320 persons per square mile. 320 persons per square mile does sound ominous. It becomes less so when we figure human density per acre.

     There are 640 acres in a square mile. Thus, that 320 persons per square mile figure equates to two acres of land per person.

     Have you ever had to mow a two-acre plot? I have – and with a push-mower, at that. You don’t want that experience; trust me on that.

     Humans prefer to cluster at far greater densities than one every two acres. Consider Manhattan: an island of 22 square miles with a population of about 2.2 million persons. That’s 100,000 persons per square mile, If we figure Manhattan’s human density per acre instead of per mile, we get approximately 160 persons per acre. Roomy? No, yet the great majority of Manhattan residents live there by choice.

     The most densely populated major nation, India, has approximately 1.4 billion residents on approximately 1.2 million square miles of land. That’s still only about 1200 persons per square mile: less than two persons per acre. The great majority of Indians live in population centers much denser than that.

     Consider SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, which usually carries a four-person complement. I don’t have exact figures, but I’d be shocked to learn that there’s 100 square feet of floor space in that capsule. I doubt the crew holds any cha-cha contests in there. That 100 square feet figure would give the Crew Dragon, as it’s normally manned, a human density of 1600 persons per acre. In all probability, it’s higher than that.

     Therefore the Crew Dragon, when manned, is at least ten times as dense as Manhattan Island. The astronauts are all there by choice. There’s no “astronaut draft,” at least for the moment.

     In nearly every case of social, economic, or political importance, we choose to cluster with others.

* * *

     There will probably never be a “vessel” as roomy as “spaceship Earth.” Yet people do complain about crowding. Rush-hour traffic congestion, retail stores during major holidays, even the construction of new housing in relatively sparse districts draw muttered forebodings about “running out of room.” But the complainers seldom seem inclined to move to more spacious environments. The reasons are many, but nestled among them is this one: We like one another’s company, as long as we can take it or leave it at our personal whim.

     Granted, some of us prefer to be alone. There are also some people no one wants to be around. Still, they’re not the products of intolerable crowding. As long as each of us has a place of our own to which he can retreat at need, undesired and undesirable company isn’t an “issue” that demands a “solution.”

     The need to cooperate with others – colloquially speaking, to get along – arises from the need to be with others. When there is no such need, the imperative of cooperation vanishes. This has two implications above others.

     First, the preservation of privacy depends on the preservation of private property as Americans understand it. For the principal feature of private property is that its owner has the legal and moral right to exclude others. That has always been the basis every kind of property, real or movable.

     Second, individual mobility must be preserved at all costs. He who can “get away” has the power to seek refuge from others, at least for a time. That idea is of course violently opposed by the promoters of “15 minute cities” and similar chimeras. For individual mobility means that you can get away from them. No would-be dictator, determined to decree every last aspect of others’ existence, can abide that.

     Watch for the doom-shouters of “overpopulation.” Their arguments don’t matter. Their enemy is privacy itself. They are uniformly hostile to private property and to the ability to “get away” at will via individual mobility. Only when privacy has been effectively eliminated can they rule us absolutely, with no escape possible.

     Orwell knew it:

     The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
     […]
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH      He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette Packet — everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed — no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

     Be vigilant.

Companions

     Today, the Third Sunday of the Easter season, is the day Catholics read about the encounter on the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus:

     And behold, two of them went, the same day, to a town which was sixty furlongs from Jerusalem, named Emmaus. And they talked together of all these things which had happened. And it came to pass, that while they talked and reasoned with themselves, Jesus himself also drawing near, went with them. But their eyes were held, that they should not know him.
     And he said to them: What are these discourses that you hold one with another as you walk, and are sad?
     And the one of them, whose name was Cleophas, answering, said to him: Art thou only a stranger to Jerusalem, and hast not known the things that have been done there in these days? To whom he said: What things? And they said: Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet, mighty in work and word before God and all the people; And how our chief priests and princes delivered him to be condemned to death, and crucified him. But we hoped, that it was he that should have redeemed Israel: and now besides all this, to day is the third day since these things were done. Yea and certain women also of our company affrighted us, who before it was light, were at the sepulchre, And not finding his body, came, saying, that they had also seen a vision of angels, who say that he is alive. And some of our people went to the sepulchre, and found it so as the women had said, but him they found not.
     Then he said to them: O foolish, and slow of heart to believe in all things which the prophets have spoken. Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and so to enter into his glory? And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded to them in all the scriptures, the things that were concerning him.
     And they drew night to the town, whither they were going: and he made as though he would go farther. But they constrained him; saying: Stay with us, because it is towards evening, and the day is now far spent. And he went in with them.
     And it came to pass, whilst he was at table with them, he took bread, and blessed, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him: and he vanished out of their sight.
     And they said one to the other: Was not our heart burning within us, whilst he spoke in this way, and opened to us the scriptures?
     And rising up, the same hour, they went back to Jerusalem: and they found the eleven gathered together, and those that were staying with them, Saying: The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon. And they told what things were done in the way; and how they knew him in the breaking of the bread.

     [Luke 24:13-35]

     What a good thing it was that they were two together! For miracles that occur in the presence of a single witness are easily waved away. But when two or more give witness an event, it becomes harder for others to doubt it. It’s still possible, of course, but disbelievers’ accusations must change from hallucination to conspiracy.

* * *

     I have no quarrel with sola scriptura Christians. After all, the Church’s proper authority depends upon the Gospels, so he who prefers his own interpretation of Christ’s words is welcome to it. However, the sola scriptura Christian is frequently alone. That can be an uncomfortable condition.

     Those of us who occasionally entertain doubts are comforted by the knowledge that we’re not alone in our beliefs. Really, how many Christians are there who never have a moment’s doubt? After all, the key events are far back in time. Surely it’s possible that the history is inaccurate, as histories have sometimes been. And there’s always the (remote) possibility that it’s pure fiction – that Jesus of Nazareth was an ordinary man like ourselves, or even that He never existed at all!

     Doubt can creep into any man’s soul. Pope Benedict XVI was unabashed in admitting that doubt had sometimes afflicted him. In his book Introduction to Christianity, he declared doubt an unavoidable part of human existence. I feel that he is correct. Moreover, doubt can work most powerfully upon one who is alone in his faith.

     What really holds faith fast is the determination to go on living it:

     Gavin extracted himself from his bed and plunged into his Sunday morning ritual. When he'd buckled himself into the passenger seat of his father's car, and Evan had backed them out of the driveway and onto Kettle Knoll Way, he said, "Dad? Do you ever...doubt?"
     "Hm? Our faith in God, you mean?" Evan kept his eyes on the dark ribbon of road unwinding before them.
     "Yeah." Gavin braced himself for the answer. What he got was not what he expected.
     "Now and then," his father said. "It's hard not to doubt something you can't see or touch. But faith isn't about certainty. It's about will."
     "So you...will away your doubts?"
     Evan chuckled. "That would be a neat trick, wouldn't it?" He pulled the Mercedes Maybach into the small side parking lot of Our Lady of the Pines, parked and killed the engine. "No, I simply command myself to do as I know I should do. Faith is expressed just as much by our deeds as by our words. As long as I can consistently act from faith, I can keep my grip on it, regardless of my doubts." He nodded toward the unlit church, barely visible in the darkness. "You might say that's why we're here."

     [From this short story.]

     But even that determination can falter in the face of severe temptation – and never doubt this, at least: it’s the best among us who are most severely assailed by their tempters.

     A companion in faith is a kind of armor against doubt. If you have one, you can’t doubt your own intellect or sanity without doubting his as well. Cleophas and his companion on the journey to Emmaus saw the same thing: the risen Christ, briefly revealed to them in His glory. Neither doubted for that same reason.

     Perhaps you don’t have a companion in faith. Perhaps you don’t feel you need one. But if there’s room in your life, why not see about making the acquaintance of someone like yourself who’s willing to talk about his faith now and then? He’ll be a fallible human believer, who’s subject to doubt from time to time. But at such times he’ll have you, and vice versa. Each of you, in living your faith, will help to protect the other.

     May God bless and keep you all.

The Best We Can

     Good morning, Gentle Reader. I sense that this will be a special day, here at the Fortress. Unusually for these latter years, there are no irritating home-maintenance issues to labor over or spend on. The routine chores have all been addressed; nothing lingers. We have adequate supplies of everything that should be kept in stock. And – thank You, God – there’s no customer-assembled furniture to build or fix.

     It’s that rarest of all jewels, a completely free day!

     So I thought I might talk about ideology.

* * *

     The word ideology has an irritating etymology. Given its roots, it “should” mean “the study of ideas.” But of course, it doesn’t. Rather, it’s a categorizing term that’s used to answer questions such as “What is Marxism?” or “What is Islam?”

     Here’s what the nice folks at Merriam-Webster have to say about ideology:

     Ideology has been in use in English since the end of the 18th century and is one of the few words whose coiner we can identify. The French writer A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy proposed it as a term to designate the “science of ideas,” and in that sense the word was quickly borrowed into English. Though ideology originated as a serious philosophical term, within a few decades it took on connotations of impracticality thanks to Napoleon, who used it in a derisive manner. Such connotations are still present in some contexts, but the word today is largely used neutrally, most often to refer to a systematic body of concepts, and especially to the set of ideas and beliefs held by a particular group or political party.

     Several political stances are routinely referred to as ideologies. Others tend to avert that categorization, though the reasons are often unclear. For example, while Marxism is called an ideology, capitalism doesn’t wear that label. Libertarianism, which is a relatively systematized ideology focused on freedom, does bear the label.

     Regardless of what ideas or attitudes we may discuss, and whether or not they qualify as ideologies, one set of questions stands above all others. For any Idea X:

1. What are Idea X’s goals?
2. Has it ever achieved them?
3. If so, what are its requirements?

     Every idea that aims at achieving some goal will have requirements: a set of conditions that must be met for that idea, when put into practice, to have a chance of success. Absent those conditions, the idea will fail, or will be irrelevant.

     Those conditions are called the idea’s domain of applicability. Within its domain, the idea will be effective. It will work, given some expenditure of time, money, and effort. Outside its domain, the idea is irrelevant, if not destructive.

     One of the best examples of the importance of such a domain is the nuclear family. A family cannot be operated along capitalist lines. Demanding that minor children pay for what they need is pure madness; so also with a dependent housewife. The breadwinner must practice a kind of Marxism within the family: “To each according to his needs.” Else the thing flies apart, with much destruction and sorrow.

     But when a nation-state tries to apply Marxian socialism nationwide, poverty and oppression follow. You cannot bind millions of people to one another by the bonds of love and mutual responsibility that occur within a (healthy) family. The nation-state is outside Marxism’s domain.

* * *

     To limit the destructive potential of ideology – don’t kid yourself; your ideology can be just as destructive as any other – we must illuminate and emphasize the concept of domain of applicability. Of course, that demands that we put in the effort required to understand why Idea X succeeds in this case but not that one, and why Idea Y, which fails in the former case, succeeds brilliantly in the latter. And that demands that we be unsparing of ourselves and others in asking “What are you trying to achieve?” and “How will you know when you’ve succeeded or failed?”

     The great Thomas Sowell has proposed three questions for us in the Right to put to those on the Left when one of their proposals comes up for discussion:

1. Compared to what?
2. At what cost?
3. What hard evidence do you have?

     Sharp questions such as those clarify an idea’s proper domain of application. They can put an end to a lot of nonsense, especially the sort of starry-eyed Utopianism that propels so many fanatical evangelists. Mind you, I’m not talking here about “proving” or “disproving” particular ideologies. I merely seek to limit their power to cloud men’s minds. Proof and disproof have their own requirements, none of which are found in common discourse about ideologies and their implementations.

     We can only do the best we can.

A Quick Survey

     I don’t have it in me to produce an essay today. However, I have something developing that will probably be of interest to a great many people. To get a sense for its impact, I’d appreciate it greatly if my Gentle Readers, and anyone else they can rope in, would answer a few questions about “the oldest funny subject:” sex.

     I’ve written many pieces concerned with sex. Thirty-six of them adorn this site. Though I’m a Catholic, my views on sex differ rather sharply from the teachings of my Church. I’ve been called a “cafeteria Catholic” for that reason. But I maintain that there are good reasons to dispute Church doctrine on this subject.

     So, if you’re willing to help me with my project, please read and answer the following questions, preferably in an email:

1. Are you male or female?
2. Are you currently married?
3. Have you had sex outside of marriage?
4. Do you regard sex outside of marriage as sinful?
5. Do you regard parasexual conduct (e.g., “oral sex,” “heavy petting,” etc.) as morally equivalent to sex?

     That’s all. It’s just a survey, conditioned by gender and marital status. I’d like it to be answered widely enough to be statistically significant, though given the sensitivity of the subject, I’m not hopeful that it will be. I don’t need to know your name, your age, your religious affiliation, or any other details about you. So please don’t include any such details.

     Thank you for considering responding to this request. This post will be at the top of the blog for the rest of the week. Look below it for new material.

All my best,
Fran

The Felony Of Life (UPDATED)

     Great age tends to diminish the energies required for certain activities, such as fulminating about injustices. Even so, there are some discoveries that still light my boiler and turn it up to 11.

     This is one such:

     WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden “withheld evidence” and approved “aggressive arrest tactics” when targeting pro-life defendants — and then slapped them with longer prison sentences than pro-abortion ones, according to an explosive internal review released Tuesday.
     The DOJ revealed the stunning abuses in a nearly 900-page report after examining more than 700,000 records related to the Biden administration’s prosecutions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.
     The 1994 law was passed to protect access to houses of worship, religious institutions, abortion clinics and pregnancy resource centers.
     But the Biden DOJ was found to have engaged multiple times in “biased enforcement” of it — while also collaborating with and even seeking to fund pro-abortion groups, according to the DOJ Office of Legal Policy report.

     The article is long, but it’s eminently worth your time, regardless of your opinions about abortion. I thought I was past taking umbrage at the Biden Administration. I was wrong.

     Rather than froth at the mouth over this, I’ll simply point out that Joe Biden is, nominally at least, a Catholic. A plurality of seriously active pro-lifers are Catholics. So a Catholic president presided over a Justice Department that pursued and prosecuted Americans for their Catholic affiliation. When the prosecutors were able to secure a conviction under the notoriously vague “FACE Act,” they exhorted the sentencing judge to be far harsher toward the convicted pro-lifer than toward a pro-abortion defendant convicted for the same offense. So much for Catholic politicians taking orders from the Vatican.

     Meanwhile, we have violent offenders – assaulters, rapists, kidnappers – being given light sentences because of their “religion:” Islam. A number of such criminals, here and in Europe, have been able to avert punishment by pleading that their “religion” commands that they do as they did. Given the propensity of Muslims to riot over cartoons and such, I doubt that requires a great deal of explanation.

     Could it be clearer that the First World, these United States in particular, need a clarification of what constitutes a valid religion protected under the First Amendment? Could it be clearer that religious affiliation must be excluded from decisions to prosecute, from sentencing decisions, and from peremptory challenges during the voir dire? Could it be clearer, given the events of the Mark Houck incident, that the “FACE Act” must be repealed, or failing that, heavily revised to make absolutely objective and indisputable what constitutes an offense?

     “The law is a ass—a idiot,” wrote Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist. Sometimes, definitely. Especially when it’s made by villains with an axe to grind, and enforced by others who seek to ply that tool against the necks of disfavored persons and groups.

     UPDATE: I've just learned that Mark Houck has won a $1,000,000 award from the FBI for the tactics it used against him. I can't think of anyone who would deserve it more.

Sophie

     Her life started in circumstances unknown to me. All I know of her first two years is that she was neglected. Her humans sent her out to forage for her meals. They left the back door to their house open at all times, so that they didn’t have to be bothered walking her or taking her out to eliminate.

     That family was pure trash. Why they wanted a dog in the house is unclear, considering how little attention they paid her. They had to haul stakes and leave town quickly when their 14-year-old daughter got knocked up by a member of MS-13. They drove off in a big hurry and left Sophie behind them. I’m told she chased their rented truck for a couple of miles before giving up on them.

     A friend of ours who’s involved in rescue work found her and took her in. She told us almost offhandedly about the two-year-old German Shepherd / Husky mix she’d just taken in. I immediately told her we’d take Sophie. My wife Beth gave me one of those looks; I shut her down on the spot.

     Sophie was ours a few days later. She had a little trouble settling in: learning not to pee or poop in the house; adjusting to Rufus, our Newf; learning not to eat the cats’ food; and so forth. But from the start she was as affectionate as if she’d been with us from birth.

     That was the late summer of 2012. Sophie hung on through a lot of changes. We lost Rufus in 2017, to lymphoma. We lost Precious, our Pit Bull Terrier, in 2023, to an untreatable abdominal tumor. We lost several cats. Sophie took that hard. She loved the cats.

     Sophie was my dog. Beth has always been more partial to Newfs. That didn’t bother Sophie. It certainly didn’t bother me.

     Dogs do get old. They do deteriorate and die. But their humans are never really ready for it. I certainly wasn’t.

     For nearly fourteen years I had her companionship and affection. She’d sit in my home office while I worked. I’d take her on walks around the neighborhood, or out in the back yard, where she’d romp around with our other dogs, and sometimes with a neighbor dog. I had her on the sofa beside me, her head in my lap, while I read or watched some sporting event on the idiot box.

     These past few months, Sophie’s joints and nervous system started to degenerate. She lost control of her back legs and her sphincters. As of early in March, she could no longer deal with stairs, even the two steps from our deck to the back yard grass. I told myself she could still get over it. Even if it was against the odds, she still might recover. I knew better, of course.

     Sophie died today, at 12:35 PM New York time. Her breathing stopped and didn’t resume, and that was that. We can’t be sure of her exact age, but our best guess is that she was sixteen years old.

     I’m 74 years old. My age and heritage suggest that I shouldn’t adopt another dog. I don’t suppose I will. I’ll be in mourning for Sophie for quite a while.

Automata And Idiomata

     On occasion I receive compliments for my facility with the English language. It’s a heartwarming thing, as the use and manipulation of symbols of all kinds has been my greatest asset lifelong. At such times I try to exhibit a modicum of modesty by reminding my admirer(s) that English is by far the world’s largest and most complex language. Its vocabulary is well over 2,000,000 words in size. I doubt I have the use of even five percent of that total. Then there’s English grammar and syntax, which we who speak it seldom reflect on, but which are as complex as any rule-based system ever devised.

     But all that, as overwhelming as it can seem, pales in importance before the extent to which communication in English depends upon the mastery of idioms.

     Idiom is a thing generally if vaguely understood. As idioms fly freely in our discourse, we must have both a sense for them and adequate skill at using them. Yet the sheer volume of idioms in even formal communications eludes most ordinary English speakers… until someone like your humble Curmudgeon comes along and points each of them out.

     No, this isn’t a dithyramb to the idiom or the services idioms render to us. It’s a reflection on peace and its requirements.

* * *

     Among the things that have kept peoples apart over the centuries, unintelligibility ranks high. Different countries have different languages. Within those languages they have different idioms. Until very recently, a traveler in a land where his native tongue isn’t spoken had to proceed with great caution. He could trip and fall over an idiom that a technical knowledge of the local tongue could not translate accurately.

     However, owing to the Anglo-American dominance of three key activities – finance, aviation, and computing – English, approximately of the American variety, has become the de facto international language. This is especially fortunate for Americans, who are well known to be unlikely to master a foreign language well enough to speak it fluently. It’s also fortunate for visitors to America from other lands, though they are often surprised at some of our abuses of our own tongue.

     But today, we have access to programs of remarkable power that can translate between any two of the world’s major languages. Google’s free Translate website, in particular, has been a great help to me, and no doubt to others as well. And of course pioneers in artificial intelligence have made great strides in programming their Large Language Models to do much the same.

     Yet beyond all that lies a problem domain that no one had dared to tackle until very recently: the real-time, multi-person, multi-language exchange. Imagine two hundred persons, each of whom speaks a language shared by none of the others, sitting together in a room and trying to converse. Imagine the complexity involved in arranging for mutual comprehensibility. Every utterance by any member of the group would need to be translated 199 times, immediately. Imagine the computing power it would consume.

     That is X, formerly known as Twitter. Persons from every currently spoken language make use of it. Time was, they’d have had no chance of communicating fluidly and comprehensibly with persons of other lands. No longer.

* * *

     AI translation services have matured greatly these past few years. However, AI programs are computing-power gluttons. Massive arrays of CPUs, memory, and storage devices are required for use by a single powerful AI. That’s one of the stiffest limitations on the application of AI programs at this time. Another, infrequently discussed, is the burden the idiomatic nature of human communication puts on such a program, for as I noted earlier, idioms defy straightforward translation.

     Enter Elon Musk. On his own initiative, Musk has dedicated a large fraction of the capabilities of his pet AI, Grok, to providing for the translation of tweets from any known language to any other – idioms and all. Thus, X users can talk to other X users without concern for language barriers. Considering the volume of traffic that flows through X, the processing power required by that application is mind-boggling. Yet Musk has made that translation service free to all X users.

     The enormity of this development defies description. People of widely separated lands are talking to one another, understanding one another, and discovering that they have little or nothing to fear from one another. They’re making friends with persons of nations whose governments are at war with their own. And they’re drawing the implications… no doubt much to their rulers’ dismay.

     It’s not peoples that fight wars. It’s governments – States. Those entities must induce their subjects to fight, for rulers don’t fight in the armies they dispatch. That requires propaganda to make “the enemy” appear evil, even inhuman.

     But fluid communication among the common peoples of nations defeats such propaganda. The State cannot “other the Other” if “the Other” is too plainly just like oneself. That vitiates the war effort at home. States resolved upon enmity toward others will have to deny their people access to X, lest they lose their grip.

     Elon Musk has been hailed for his enterprises SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, and Neuralink, and deservedly so. But his greatest contribution to Mankind may lie in his use of his xAI firm to provide real-time translation services to X’s users. This is the route to peace… and possibly, if I may fantasize for a moment, to the end of that ravenous and wholly destructive institution we call the State.

     Thank you, Elon.

Dominance Displays

     Societies are held together principally by their customs. Laws are far inferior to customs in providing social cohesion. When a nation’s laws are being openly flouted, it’s in the end stage of collapse, not an early one. The degeneration begins with disregard for the customs of public order and social dealing.

     Surely none of my Gentle Readers are unaware of what Islamic immigrants have done to the nations of Europe. Whatever bizarre chain of irrationalities led to their admission, today they’re asserting dominance over the European societies that host them. Their displays mostly defy important customs of public order. The following, cribbed from a Frenchman commenting at X, is a case of note:

     Tonight, I'm really angry and I need to let it out.
     Downstairs from my place, there's a little playground where I like to sit after work.
     There's a gentle cool breeze, I know people in the neighborhood, we chat peacefully.
     But regularly, a group of kids shows up and starts playing soccer.
     At first it was harmless, but the shots got more and more violent, until they nearly hit the little ones who were playing there.
     I took it upon myself to grab the ball and politely asked them to be careful and not shoot toward the younger kids.
     Immediately, a veiled mother (of course) got worked up and told me they weren't moving.
     Yet, just 100 meters away, there's a proper little soccer field perfect for them.
     The exchange turned heated. Then her friends showed up and, all in one voice, they threw at me:
     This is our home here, we're not leaving.
     If a kid gets hit by a ball, that's not our problem
     They won't go to the field they'll stay here and do whatever they want
     It's up to you to leave, not us.

     Here's a sampling of the phrases I had to endure.
     I preferred to leave rather than make the situation worse.

     So is this the France of today?
     Letting people with zero respect dictate their law in our country?
     People who have no business being here acting like everything belongs to them?

     Tonight, my desire for remigration has never been stronger.
     This is my country, not theirs. And I'll do everything to make them understand: they have no right to impose their law on our soil.
     The worst part? I'm almost scared now to go out and run into their husbands, who might be way more violent than they are.

     What country has my France become?
     How did we get here?

     Sorry for the length and the vehemence, but I really needed to vent tonight.

     The commenter never said “Muslims.” It wasn’t necessary; it was clear from the context. Only Muslims in Europe do such things.

     The phenomenon of traffic-blocking street prayers is an aspect of this. Muslims, aware that their host countries are reluctant to do anything about it, are disregarding customs, convention, and courtesy to assert their dominance over the countries to which they’ve immigrated. That makes them the outriders of an invasion: the spearhead of a much larger force that will soon arrive to Islamicize the whole country, sharia law and all.

     Someone must have read them Lenin’s famous maxim: "Probe with the bayonet: if you meet steel, stop; if you meet mush, push." For decades, Europe has been mushy. Muslims are taking advantage – taking over.

     Yes, they’ve been trying it here in America, too. Principally in cities where they’ve concentrated their numbers. Has America turned mushy? Has the “world policeman” ceased to police its own lands? Unclear.

     What’s perfectly clear is that this cannot continue. But it seems that everyone is waiting for someone else to act.

     Were private citizens with guns to gather and forcibly disperse such a group, shooting a few pour encourager les autres, it would probably be deemed excessive. But municipal authorities appear unwilling to act. And indeed, were they to marshal their courage, what would follow? Water cannons? Bulldozers? Tear gas? The bien-pensants would pee their panties. Can’t have that.

     First-World civilizations cannot abide an influx of savages determined to flout all the customs that make our nations orderly and peaceful. Yet Europe has done so, and America isn’t far behind.

     When, then, must we do?