A Pointed Observation

     This one is from John Hinderaker:

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

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

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

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

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

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

     Words to live by.

A New And Vital Voice

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

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

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

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

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

     I do.

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

     Her name is Haretina Kukuri:

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

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

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

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

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

— Haretina (@HaretinaK) July 5, 2026

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

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

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

Minimum Requirements

     I’ve been in love with the English language all my life. It’s the most versatile and powerful tool for communication ever to arise among men. Now that it’s the de facto international language, it provides that power to anyone who has the time, energy, and brain matter to learn it. (No, that’s not everyone, but it’s enough of Mankind to keep things moving.)

     Now, just as there are specific properties that make a commodity suitable for use as a money, there are specific properties that make a language suitable for communication among large numbers of persons. I could go into gruesome detail about this. Perhaps I will, some day when I’m feeling cruel. But this morning a specific characteristic of languages is much in my thoughts: the capacity for precision.

     If tongue A makes it possible to convey an idea more clearly than does tongue B, then over time A will prevail in common discourse. For clarity is possible only if precision in expression is available. That tends to privilege languages that have large vocabularies and whose constructions, both formal and idiomatic, are broadly understood. There are many fine aspects to this, including how relations and time are expressed in particular languages. The capable speaker / writer is one who appreciates those things and is careful about them.

     I’ve occasionally wielded a barbed flail about certain sins common among fiction writers. This isn’t the time for that, nor am I in the mood for it anyway. Rather, I’d like to emphasize something that a lot of writers, excessively concerned with being “creative,” have managed to miss:

Clarity is more important than creativity.
Above all else, the reader must know what’s going on.

     The very worst writers completely discard clarity in an attempt to impress with involutions and vermiculations. I’ve called that literary masturbation before this, and in retrospect, that’s exactly the right term for it. The storyteller must serve the story, not the other way around. If he serves the story, he serves the reader… and the reader will love him for it.

     Mind you, I’m not talking about deliberate ambiguity after the manner of Gene Wolfe in his early work The Fifth Head of Cerberus. That’s a choice to tell a particular kind of tale: one I wouldn’t tell, but such stories do have their aficionados. My shafts are aimed at the writer who puts his ego above the stories he tells.

     Some writers I’ve admired have slipped and fallen that way. The late Robert B. Parker, my favorite writer of detective thrillers, had a tendency to do so when Spenser, his series detective character, got into hand-to-hand combat with an antagonist. There’s a particularly painful case of that in his novel Chance. In an attempt to convey the speed and violence of desperate hand-to-hand combat, Parker discards all punctuation and several rules of grammar. We do get speed and violence, but we don’t get clarity.

     Heed me on this as on no other subject, storytellers and storytellers-to-be: Clarity comes first. No imaginative construction or special effect matters more than keeping the reader aware of what’s happening, as precisely as the English language will allow. Hew to that rule and your readers, however many they may be, will follow you to the ends of the thesaurus. Trust me on that.

Resisting The Heist Part 1

     While this tragedy still has a couple of stages to endure, the prospects for using existing, “official” institutions to undo the Left’s theft of the presidency are dimming. NB: I’m not saying “give up.” The fight must go on. Even if the courts find against the Trump campaign, the effect of mobilizing and energizing the Right and making the evidence for the theft of the election available to all are critically important. However, the probability that the Supreme Court, or any lesser federal court, will rule that the election was sufficiently corrupted to be set aside seems low. Courts just don’t like to touch that kind of controversy.

     So what now?

     There are several things Americans in the Right can do, for themselves and for one another, to resist the usurpers of federal power. Some are generally applicable; others are variably practicable according to one’s station in life and one’s responsibilities. I plan to address certain of them over the course of the next few days.

     Today’s topic is essentially psychological: how to orient oneself for a state of affairs in which:

• A coup against the Constitution and the law must be recognized;
• The usurpers who engineered the coup will soon occupy federal offices, including the White House;
• The usurpers are likely to implement policies intended to cement themselves into power permanently.

     This is an unpleasant prospect, especially given the attitude of the coup engineers toward freedom, property rights, privacy, and free enterprise. But that makes preparing oneself even more important, regardless of the aversion we feel toward it.

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     A healthy attitude toward anything, pleasant or unpleasant, begins with the acceptance of reality, regardless of any expectations or preconceptions to the contrary.

     So: Let us postulate that the electoral coup currently under way will succeed. We must recognize and accept that as fact. NB: That does not mean accepting the usurpers of federal power as “authorities” legitimately entitled to the powers they have seized; quite the contrary. It means only accepting that our fight for our rights as Americans against illegitimate, anti-American “rulers” has entered a new stage.

     The first required recognition would be that the federal government is now in the hands of the enemy. I don’t emphasize that it is an ideological enemy, though it is, but rather that it is our enemy: yours and mine, personally and specifically.

     The second required recognition would be that the usurpers know that, too. As they are our enemy, we are theirs. They will treat us as enemies in contests a outrance always have and always will—and we must do the same.

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     Third, and most difficult for many in the Right, is the recognition that collaboration with the enemy makes one a part of the enemy, and therefore equally to be opposed. War has always been hard on personal relations across battle lines. There’s no help for it. Even a beloved relative must be distrusted and kept at a distance, should he league himself with the other side.

     Each of us is likely to love and live among persons who applaud the capture of Washington by the corruptocrats. Relatives, friends, neighbors, business partners, and occupational colleagues might be part of that swarm. It becomes massively unwise to give them any insight or intimate knowledge of what you’re doing or planning, or of what you believe. Your prior relations with them must be set aside for the duration of the contest.

     This has unpleasant implications. It will intensify the disintegration and atomization of American society, American enterprise, American communities and neighborhoods, and the American family. And there is absolutely no help for it. Someone you’ve loved for decades could be the person who turns you in for your gold, your guns, your group memberships, or your convictions. It’s happened before, including here in America—look into the suppression of anti-war sentiment during the Wilson Administration—and it will happen again.

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     Fourth and last of the required psychological elements is the need for clarity of intentions and capabilities. You must have a clear, well-formed idea of what you want and what you propose to do to get it. Fantasies about glorious charges against the enemy’s redoubts are all very well for dreams. For your waking life, you must have a realistic grasp of your capabilities. You must also take time to think about two unpleasant subjects: how much risk you can bear, and the limits on your endurance. It’s comparable to the choice of an investment strategy.

     In this connection, it’s vital to know what you owe to others, as a matter of simple ethics. Let’s imagine you to be a “normal” American not yet retired from wage labor. You probably feel responsibilities to others: a spouse, children, occupational colleagues, and others. But not every responsibility you feel is a real one.

     One of the most pathetic of all contemporary phenomena is the sadly pervasive notion that we remain responsible for our children even after they’ve reached maturity and (should have) become self-responsible adults. Now, not all children manage that transition. Some remain mired in immaturity and dependency lifelong. Worse yet, they expect their parents to collaborate in their protracted infancies: with shelter, with money, and with unfailing emotional support.

     That sort of willfully chosen dependency is a major weapon of the Left. If you enable it, you are helping the enemy. As is more were necessary, the resources you put to the succor of your grown children become unavailable for other, more constructive action. It cannot be made plainer than that—and it has analogues in many other venues, including the workplace.

     It’s time to decide what your responsibilities really are.

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     There’s a hard edge to the above. It demands that we see things as they are despite the many unpleasantnesses involved in doing so. It also demands that we be realistic about ourselves, our abilities...and our past mistakes.

     But it is the precondition for any degree of success in resisting the all but guaranteed efforts to come of the usurpers to reduce us to Twenty-first Century villeins and serfs.

     More anon.

NOW I’m Angry

     At this stage of my life there aren’t many things that can catapult me into a full-blown fury. I’ve seen enough, and endured enough, to have developed fairly thick calluses over my rage nerves. A good thing, too: with my blood pressure, the consequences could be maximally serious. So I mostly stay fairly calm, with occasional bouts of profanity – Dad was a Navy man, you know – to let off occasional accumulations of steam.

     But every now and then...

     I’m sure the “literati” would dismiss me as an unlettered Philistine for this, but in my opinion, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is the greatest literary achievement in the English language. It doesn’t just tell a memorable adventure story; it delineates human (and Elven, and Dwarven, and Hobbitish, and Entish) challenges and difficulties of many kinds and depicts various characters striving to surmount them. It embeds those challenges within a mythopoetic setting of a grandeur that no other novel – or novelist – has ever approached. And it does all this without descending to irrelevancies or artifices of style that would detract from the underlying tale of ultimate moral crisis.

     Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy could not capture all of that, even in nearly twelve hours of film. He tried his best, but as the late Joseph Sobran noted, he failed to capture Tolkien’s moral vision. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, structured The Lord of the Rings around the Scriptural tale of the Fall of Man and the Christian moral framework. His extraordinarily rich “backstory,” the essence of which he related in The Silmarillion, makes that abundantly clear. That’s tough stuff to get onto the silver screen.

     But now we have this:

     Amazon Prime’s “Lord of the Rings” series set to release in 2021 has been eagerly anticipated by devoted LOTR fans around the world. The $1 billion series will be set in the Second Age of Middle Earth, which spans 3441 years, before the events of the LOTR movies.

     Unfortunately, it looks like the creators of the series, which they claim is based on J.R.R Tolkien’s original work, may be trying to imitate “Game of Thrones”-type nudity and “rapey” storylines. This, no doubt, will delight the left, who have long detested Tolkien’s writing and distinctive Christian influence on popular culture.

     According to TheOneRing.net, the casting agency for the series put out an open call for actors who “must be comfortable with nudity.” In addition, Amazon Studios has hired an “intimacy coordinator,” and the writer and producer from “Game of Thrones,” Bryan Cogman, has officially been hired as a consulting producer.

     “Game of Thrones,” made by Amazon for Amazon, could not be more different from Tolkien’s beloved, classic books about Middle Earth, so of course, LOTR fans are worried.

     Please read the whole article. “Worried” doesn’t nearly cover it. I’m outraged by the mere possibility.

     Their moral clarity is one of the main reasons for the immense popularity of Tolkien’s works. They pit good against evil, freedom against enslavement, and heroes against villains, vacillators, compromisers, and the “let me think it over” types whose sole concern is to be on the winning side. Those who insist that “there’s no black or white, only shades of gray” can never be comfortable with such a premise.

     Please don’t confuse moral clarity with prudishness. No, there are no sex scenes in Tolkien’s stories, but that’s irrelevant to the larger issue. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, best known by the title of its first volume, A Game of Thrones, is founded on a completely different moral perspective: one in which essentially everything goes and who was in the right is determined, after the dust has settled, by the victors. It’s not founded on a clash between good and evil, but on what the movers and shakers are willing to do to triumph.

     A simple touchstone – “Would you prefer to associate with Tolkien’s heroes or Martin’s?” – dramatizes the differences between the two conceptions, and the reason for the far greater (and more enduring) appeal of Tolkien’s oeuvre.

     Amazon’s project managers had better think hard and deeply before they make any irrevocable moves toward “Westerosizing” Middle Earth. That fall from grace could destroy them.

Words Have Meanings Part 1

     As I sit here, contemplating the exact direction in which I’d like to steer this essay, I find myself reflecting on...myself.

     Time was, I was a working physicist. Not for long; I threw it over in favor of software engineering while I was still quite young. I did so because I found the work uninteresting owing to its narrow focus, and the academic environment uncongenial owing to the extremes to which people in academia tend to fight over trivia. However, the experience was valuable, perhaps more for one reason than all others combined: It revealed to me how readily people, including people who claim to be concerned with accuracy and precision, will resort to ambiguities and imprecisions that amount to deliberate deceit if it will get them what they want.

     That realization would elicit the central driving influence of my life. I became all but obsessive about saying exactly what I meant. In any discussion of anything whatsoever, I strove to use the correct word, allowing for topical and contextual considerations, that would most accurately, precisely, and clearly capture my intended meaning. I was equally at pains to grasp exactly what my interlocutor meant by every word he employed.

     Suffice it to say that it didn’t make me a big hit at parties.

     Nevertheless, I maintained that practice. I’ve maintained it to this very day. Senility and its ravages to the side as exceptions, I doubt I’ll ever willingly abandon it.

     As you could surely have guessed, the emotional infrastructure that supports that attitude has more than one effect.

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     I purely despise people who deliberately twist or mangle the meanings of words. I particularly despise polemicists who do so to “make a point,” to win (or escape) an argument, or to con a listener into believing or doing something he wouldn’t otherwise believe or do. They are beneath contempt. Indeed, they’re responsible for a huge fraction of our contemporary sociopolitical fractiousness.

     Words are our fundamental tools of both communication and thought. They deserve all the respect and defense we could possibly give them. When I discover that I’ve encountered a word-rapist, I hurry to put as much distance between us as possible...as much for his sake as for mine. It makes political exchanges difficult, sometimes hazardous.

     One of the symptoms of our steadily hardening political division is the increasing frequency with which words are abused in such exchanges.

     While it’s accurate to say that some word-rape occurs on the Right – no sector of politics is free from it – the major (and most gleeful) practitioners of word abuse are on the Left. Indeed, I would argue that the Left could not have made the political gains it’s accrued over the century past without its extensive abuse of the English language. George Orwell had his take on the subject; this essay is mine.

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     “I’m going to say something really crazy: I believe in science. Climate change is real and we have a moral obligation to protect this Earth for our children and grandchildren.” – Elizabeth Warren, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, in a recent “tweet.”

     There are two kinds of people from whom an utterance of the above sort could come:

• Idiots;
• Villains.

     Miss Warren, a thoroughly odious figure whose political ascent has had me worried ever since she defeated Scott Brown, is not an idiot. The implication is left as an exercise for the reader.

     But let’s not hurry away. Let’s look closely at the statement, the specific words used, and the particular abuses Miss Warren has committed in it.

     “I’m going to say something really crazy.” What is the meaning of crazy? Doesn’t it mean psychotic, deranged, or in a mental state of unreality? If Miss Warren’s statement was accurate – i.e., if it accurately described her mental state – would there be any point in listening to her on any subject? If her statement was inaccurate, what was her purpose in making it? Satire?

     “I believe in science.” Seldom has so much semantic noise been crammed into a four word sentence. To believe is to accept some proposition without demanding a rigorous proof thereof. It’s only appropriate in discussing statements about specific facts, or propositions about cause and effect. But in what does Miss Warren believe? “Science.” But what is science? It’s a compressed way of referring to scientific method: a process by which one can investigate the causal mechanisms of the natural world. One cannot “believe” in “science;” one can only practice it or dismiss it.

     “Climate change is real.” Meaning what? That the climate – i.e., the general meteorological tendencies of the atmosphere that recent years have led us to expect – is changing? No one disputes that. Earth’s climate has been changing since it acquired its atmosphere. This is a palmed-card technique: a way of invoking catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, a tendentious, heavily politicized hypothesis about Mankind’s influence on Earth’s climate that’s unsupported by objective evidence.

     “We have a moral obligation to protect this Earth for our children and grandchildren.” Again, meaning what? Where does morality come into it? Morality is a useful concept only in discussing individuals’ treatment of other individuals. There’s no moral component to one’s decision to make, use, buy, or sell something unless violence, theft, or fraud are involved. Moreover, the “children and grandchildren” might not exist. At any rate, fewer are being produced than at any previous point in history.

     Word rape from beginning to end, all of it in service to a political position for which there is no evidentiary support and precious little interest from the American public.

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     As one who writes fiction as well as these interminable op-eds, I need to maintain and manage two contrasting attitudes toward words and verbal expression. Fiction writers must occasionally resort to various “devices:” similes, metaphors, metonymies, images, coinages, synecdoches, hyperboles, and litotes. But the fictioneer’s mission varies from that of the expositor: to evoke mental pictures in the reader’s mind, to cause him to feel particular emotions, and to bind him to the story being told. The expositor is expected to “keep to the firmest footing:” i.e., to express himself with the greatest degree of accuracy, precision, and clarity the language will support. Keeping those missions separate involves keeping the linguistic practices appropriate to them separate.

     The expositor must not abuse the words he employs. He must not engage in rococo phrasings or verbal tarantellas that dazzle the listener so he can change the subject without being caught at it. He must be an honest vendor of both information and implication. To do otherwise is to corrupt.

     A great many persons engaged in political polemics have consciously embraced corruption.

     More anon.

Quickies: The Lady In The Ring

     There aren’t many women in politics that get my respect, but the most recent entrant is proving to be both insightful and candid:

     STEPHANOPOULOS: You just heard Senator Menendez, the Iranian side as well. You said that you would have walked away from the talks a long time ago. So if you were president today, what exactly would you be doing with Iran?

     FIORINA: Well, I would have walked away because if you can’t walk away from the negotiating table, the other side just keeps negotiating. And that’s precisely what’s happened. We have caved on every major goal that President Obama set, as Senator Menendez pointed out, and so I would walk away and I would the Iranians that until and unless they are prepared to open every nuclear facility, every uranium enrichment facility to full and unfettered inspections, that we will make it as difficult as possible for them to move money around the global financial system. We can do that. We don’t need anyone’s permission or collaboration to do that.

     And beyond that, of course, we should have recognized from the outset that China and Russia have not been negotiating on our side of the table. It is in those two countries interests that Iran's economy is open. And so in many ways they have been negotiating on Iran's side of the table.

     A bit later in the interview, Stephanopoulos asked Mrs. Fiorina about Hillary Clinton’s “income inequality” comments, and she came up with a stunner:

     Well, I think income inequality is a huge problem. And let's look to the state of California where I lived for 12 years, liberal policies have been in place for decades, and yet 111 billionaires, good for them, the highest poverty rates in the nation, the exodus of the middle class, the destruction of industry after industry. Now they're destroying agriculture in California.

     The truth is, Hillary Clinton's ideas create more income inequality. Why? Because bigger government creates crony capitalism. When you have a 70,000 page tax code, you've got to be very wealthy, very powerful, very well connected to dig your way through that tax code. So, she made to cry income inequality, what I will continue to point out is the fact that every policy she is pursuing will make income inequality worse, not better, crony capitalism even worse, not better. And meanwhile, we will continue to crush the businesses that create jobs and middle class families.

     Stephanopoulos was nonplussed enough to ask: what about the Donald Trump campaign, Ma’am?

     Well, you know, it's interesting. I have been in New Hampshire now for six days. And I have not been asked a single question about Donald Trump.

     On the other hand, I think Donald Trump taps into an anger that I hear every day. People are angry that a commonsense thing like securing the border or ending sanctuary cities is somehow considered extreme. It's not extreme, it's commonsense. We need to secure the border.

     People are also angry at a professional political class of both parties that talks a good game, gives good speeches, but somehow nothing ever really changes. And people are angry as well at a double standard in the media.

     Three haymakers to the chin of an open shill for the Left. Bravo! If only she would learn not to start every statement with “Well...” Yes, Reagan got away with it, but past performance is no guarantee of future returns, don’t y’know?

Just Because I Feel Like It...

...and because there's been so much talk from the Left about "the 1%" and "upper class" lately, I thought this taste of a real class structure -- the genuinely rigid, State-maintained type that allows no escape -- might evoke some thoughts.

I don't want you to be high
I don't want you to be down
Don't want to tell you no lie
Just want you to be around
Please come right up to my ears
You will be able to hear what I say

Don't want you out in my world
Just you be my backstreet girl

Please don't be part of my life
Please keep yourself to yourself
Please don't you bother my wife
That way you won't get no help
Don't try to ride on my horse
You're rather common and coarse anyway

Don't want you out in my world
Just you be my backstreet girl

Please don't you call me at home
Please don't come knocking at night
Please never ring on the phone
Your manners are never quite right
Please take the favors I grant
Curtsy and look nonchalant, just for me

Don't want you part of my world
Just you be my backstreet girl
Just you be my backstreet girl

[Jagger / Richards, of course.]

With thoughts of Shae, Tyrion's doomed love from A Game Of Thrones.

Investing Your Credulity

What to believe? is among the eternal questions. So many people are propounding so many dramatic claims about so many different subjects -- often in stark contradiction to one another -- that the most common reaction is to dismiss them all, draw into one's own protective shell, and spend one's attention solely on reruns of Millionaire Matchmaker and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

The critical word in the above is believe. The propositions of which I speak are ones which resist objective verification. Some are about things that happened long ago; some are about things to come; and some are about things supposedly going on right now under a thick cloak of concealment. Whatever the case, the claimant is passionate about his claim and wants you to invest in it equally.

Is this wise? Seldom. As I wrote just yesterday, Man is highly fallible. We screw up a lot. We keep damaged, tendentious records; we forecast on the basis of insufficient knowledge and insight; and we tend to believe lurid fantasies over banal facts.

Yet it is in the nature of things that now and then a wild-eyed type actually gets one right and surprises us all...all of us, that is, except for whatever tiny group took him seriously. Sometimes, being a part of that tiny group produces a payoff. And we like payoffs. So: when confronted with such a dramatic proposition, how should we allocate our credibility?

Hmmm...

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In case you were wondering, this subject is on my mind because of a flock of recent Web articles. The Web has become the preferred outlet for outlandish claims, a phenomenon that should require no explanation. The mere fact that such claims appear on the Web and not in "respectable" organs is often cited as a reason to dismiss them with prejudice. Yet now and then, a claim will prove correct, startling the more skeptical and reinforcing the credulity of the credulous.

Here are three such articles:

• The Stock Market Has Officially Entered Crazytown Territory
• DHS Insider Gives Final Warning
• Wall Street advisor recommends guns, ammo for protection in collapse

Note the epistemological commonalities among the three pieces:

• All three forecast a looming disaster;
• All three rely upon imputed authority over the subject matter;
• All three imply that drastic action on the part of individuals is necessary to ensure our survival.

These pieces are about as lurid as lurid gets before we enter alien-invasion territory. Yet any one of them could be correct in its claims. The average reader has no way to know.

Assuming you haven't adopted the turtle-defense measures I mentioned above, how do you cope, Gentle Reader?

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I'm a skeptical sort. I prefer to deal with verifiable facts and causal mechanisms that I can confirm from observation. That's my front-line defense against being panicked about some development or some representation being urged upon me by crisis-mongers. Were I present in Seldon's Trantor, I'd have been one of those reluctant to put stock in his forecast.

But skepticism is a play on probabilities. It's not guaranteed to be correct; unlikely-seeming things happen all the time. Inasmuch as some of those unlikely-seeming things have had significant, wide-ranging consequences in the past, giving some attention to those who prognosticate about them is a reasonable investment of a modest fraction of one's time...always with the proviso that one be on the lookout for evidence at all times, and ever mindful of the major wisdoms about human credulity:

• We tend to believe that which favors our prejudices;
• We tend to believe that which would benefit us personally;
• We tend to believe that which issues from persons we like or admire;

...to some degree independent of the plausibility of the claim involved. Which makes mechanisms for "tuning" one's degree of credibility investment important enough to ponder at some length.

---

"Proportion your belief to the evidence." -- David Hume

Facts trump theories, always. If facts relevant to a claim are available, they should be gathered and measured against the representations of the claim. This is particularly important in gauging claims based on trends -- and the most dramatic claims are all based on trends.

Trends are important. Trends can have a significant impact on our decision-making. But trends are neither universal nor eternal. Indeed, by their very existence they tend to evoke damping mechanisms of equal intensity.

Financial trends are a good example. If you haven't heard the term contrarian investing, it's proved to be one of the surest routes toward modest but steady gain. Contrarian thinking proceeds from the postulate of fallibility, as confirmed by the evidence: Nearly all forecasts are wrong nearly all the time.

The contrarian must have a stolid disposition, inclined to walk, not run. He doesn't bet on the exact opposite direction of the current trend. Rather, he prepares for its eventual dissipation. He looks for "irrational optimism" and cautiously takes a stake in the opposing view. Speculators riding the trend, looking for a "big score," are the contrarian's natural feeding ground. It's an approach that requires patience and an imperturbable nature, but it's solidly founded on the facts: No trend lasts forever. Equilibrium always triumphs.

Which leads to the next yardstick for gauging the plausibility of a claim.

---

"Action equals reaction." -- Sir Isaac Newton

As I stated above, a strong trend is likely to evoke a damping mechanism of equal intensity. The nature of the damper will depend on the nature of the trend; it need not be of identical form.

In the late Nineteenth Century, when a largely free market, the rapid industrialization of the cities, and a little political favoritism gave rise to the first very large enterprises, a critical damper arose in the form of the Progressive movement. This rapidly swelling movement, founded upon envy and inherently fallacious in its claims, was the counterweight to the great industrial fortunes. It was a political response to an economic and technological phenomenon. And it largely succeeded in reining in the industrial development of the United States.

Compare that development with its contemporary analogues. The Eighties and Nineties saw a second huge burst of capitalist enterprise, resulting in a new crop of major commercial firms and figures. The most effective counterweight in recent years was political environmentalism, only modestly buttressed by old-style "compassionate" Progressivism. (The latter had been weakened by rampant "compassion fatigue" from the Great Society and its sequelae.) Some who bet on the speeding elevator of Eighties capitalism gained from their gambles, but more others lost their shirts as the countertrends kicked in.

Consider in this light the massive gun purchases by private citizens since 2008, the Tea Party response to Obamunism, and the flood of new interest in preparationist writers, non-traditional schooling, concierge and other alternatives to traditional medicine, and the precious metals.

Keeping an eye peeled for asymmetrical responses to a development is among the most prudent ways to gauge the credibility of a claim founded on a trend.

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"Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead." -- Origin unknown

There's nothing quite as confounding as a claim premised on "inside information." The claimant might actually have it; you have no way to tell. What, then, are we to make of dramatic claims founded on such knowledge?

These are the cases that demand the most reliance upon our knowledge of Mankind. In particular, we must lean upon the aphorism at the start of this segment. No matter the stature of the claimant, the mere fact that he claims knowledge or insight unavailable to others casts a pall over his representations. Why him and no one else? Alternately, If others also know, why has he alone spoken of it?

The principle is most significant in assessing claims that imply a degree of conspiratorial action. There have been real conspiracies in the past, and no doubt there will be others in the future. However, the larger a conspiracy becomes, the more visible it becomes, both from the impact of the coordinated actions of its participants and from the inability of most people to keep their mouths shut.

We've all read about "conspiracies in plain sight" such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberger Group, and so forth. Those are all real organizations, each with a moderately coherent agenda. But the public nature of such groups gives rise to the forces that dampen their influence. To be genuinely important, a conspiratorial organization would have to fly under the radar, working its will without being detected until it was too far along to be thwarted. This isn't impossible, but it is exceedingly difficult, for reasons already stated.

Besides all that, a completely secret conspiracy of power and skill sufficient to impose its will on the nation against all countervailing forces would therefore be unopposable. There'd be nothing to be done about it. So believe in it if you please, but take Bobby McFerrin's advice to heart and tend your own garden.

---

This ramble proceeded from that part of my psyche wherein resides my faculty for amusement at Man's follies, including my own. I recognize my own credulity -- mostly after it's gotten me kicked good and hard -- as typical of the human race. I've believed enough absurd things in my sixty-plus years to have taught me the value of amiable skepticism: a let's-wait-and-see attitude that gives way to others' assertions only after amassing significant evidence and slow-roasting it on the rotisserie of reason and history.

This isn't a brief against ever believing any dramatic claim. It's an exhortation to a degree of imperturbability: not absolute immovability of conviction but a preference for reposing confidence in the laws of equilibrium. Yes, things change; that's absolute and inevitable. But swift, dramatic changes are fairly rare, are normally preceded by visible harbingers, and are predicted consistently by more than a few prognosticators at any given time.

And now that that's off my chest, on to more practical matters. I must pay the dues for my memberships in the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, and the Illuminati today, and buy another quarter-ton each of rice, beans, and peanut butter before DHS and FEMA close the stores. After that, perhaps I'll have time to clean all the guns. The voices have become most insistent about that lately.

Tragedies

It appears I've been given the unenviable position of saying the things others are unwilling to say. That's all right. We all have our tasks in this world; if this is to be mine, I'll discharge it as best I can.

---

America is in the throes of a national wailing session over the death of a thug.

Millions of people are bemoaning a single, unremarkable event, in which:

• A teenaged thug...
• Who was trespassing on others' properties in the dark...
• Was spotted and challenged by a Neighborhood Watch volunteer...
• Whom he (i.e., the thug) then attacked viciously and with stated intent to kill...
• But was himself killed by the volunteer in a clear case of self-defense.

They're calling it a "tragedy."

Check me on this, please: Isn't a "tragedy" when someone dies who deserved to live?

Had the survivals and deaths been inverted -- had Trayvon Martin succeeded in killing George Zimmerman -- that would have been a tragedy. A decent man would have died and a thug would have lived. The reality is far different.

Another potential tragedy was averted when George Zimmerman was acquitted of all the charges against him. No other outcome that would have been in accord with the evidence, the testimony, and the basic right of self-defense. As it was, that Zimmerman had to stand trial at all was an offense against all norms of right and justice.

If there's a tragedy in all this, it's in the behavior of America's cadre of professional race-hustlers, egged on by a political elite that profits from racial animosity. We can see from national embarrassment Barack Hussein Obama's recent emissions on the subject that they haven't yet conceded the point.

But then, given the encouragement they get from white left-liberals and the Main Stream Media, why would they?

---

To call the death of Trayvon Martin a "tragedy" is to commit a grievous offense against both the integrity of our language and our conception of justice. If Martin's death was a "tragedy," someone needs to explain why the series of events that brought it about diverges so radically from other events we routinely call "tragic." For example:

• On their way to their honeymoon, a bride and groom are torpedoed in their taxi by another driver, killing him and permanently brain-damaging her.
• A beloved mother in her thirties is taken from her husband and children by cancer.
• A dedicated lineman responding to an emergency is struck by a falling power line and electrocuted.
• A highway overpass collapses, dropping huge chunks of concrete onto the heads of drivers below.
• A troopship succumbs to a waterspout -- an ocean tornado -- sinking the ship and killing hundreds of young servicemen.

Those are pure-quill tragedies, in which the deaths were of innocents who -- nominally, at least -- had done nothing to earn their fates. They're the sort of events that prompt the publication of books with titles such as "Why Bad Things Happen To Good People."

How does the death of a felon killed in the process of committing aggravated assault and battery compare to those? Does it matter how old he was at the time? How about the color of his skin?

To me, these are events that speak for themselves, just as would the death of a burglar from police gunfire. We wouldn't call that death a "tragedy," would we?

In the immediate aftermath of Zimmerman's acquittal, someone said that "not every tragedy means a crime was committed." True enough, but insufficient.

Not every death is a tragedy. Some deaths are quite well deserved.

---

There's an explanation, of course. The race-hustlers are straining to establish as a default assumption that whenever a white man kills a black man, an injustice -- a crime -- has been committed. They can't do that when the facts are beyond dispute, as, for example, in cases of police intervention in a felony in progress. But an incident like the death of Trayvon Martin is exactly the sort upon which they've founded their "careers." So they blow their racial horns at maximum volume, from the instant it's reported.

When a jury's verdict strips those horns from their lips, they fall back on a "smaller" instrument: they trumpet about the "tragedy" involved, and pontificate about measures to reduce "gun violence," or "racial tension." Such attempts to blur the distinctions between a righteous act of self-defense and a lethal occurrence that was clearly no one's fault are both cynical and exceedingly clever. Like it or not, we do want someone to blame for such events. That's why we're so susceptible to conspiracy theories and other devil theories.

Ten years ago, I wrote:

Devil theories are becoming more important every day. Apparently, the failed cultures and ideologies of the world -- Islam; Marxian socialism; social-welfare fascism -- need to see their failure as someone else's fault, just as inter-war Germans did. There's no hiding their failures. No exertion of wishful thinking could convince Middle Eastern Muslims that they've seized the brass ring of human progress. Socialists cannot abide the suggestion that there was some error in their theories about state control of the means of production; the theory was too appealing, too elaborate, too perfect. American social-welfare fascists -- a.k.a. left-liberals -- cannot be dissuaded that, once the government has made everything either compulsory or forbidden and bludgeoned everyone into accepting their definition of "tolerance," there'll be full employment, wide-screen HDTV, and copious disease-free orgasms for everyone.

So all these groups are looking for someone to blame.

The socialists, especially in Europe, have decided to blame America. America makes an appealing devil: distant, powerful, and radically at odds with socialist doctrines. If they can persuade themselves that American cultural, economic and military "imperialism" is the cause of their failures -- and they really want to -- they can evade the blame for the horrors socialism has inflicted on its victims.

American left-liberals want equally desperately to believe in the corrupting power of the "vast right-wing conspiracy." Considering the mountains of ridicule they've heaped upon right-wing conspiratorialists, you'd think they'd be alive to the dangers of such a position, but never mind. Thoroughgoing government regulation of everything from interracial and inter-gender relations to the smallest details of the national marketplace simply had to succeed. Evil forces must have been at work.

Of Islam, there's not much new to say. The world's 1.3 billion Muslims are the most squalid, backward, unfree peoples in the world. How could this be? They've been perfectly faithful to the dictates of the Prophet. They were promised dominion in this world and Paradise in the next. What went wrong? Allah's enemies must have plotted against them! The Jews! The Christians! Wipe them out, institute universal shari'a, and surely all will thereafter be well!

Seldom has so much human folly been available for inspection all at once.

It would appear that little has changed...and that American race-hustlers and the power-mongers that encourage them are fully aware of it.

How do you like being a devil, White America?

---

We don't have much time left. The fractionation of the American people is approaching a state from which no recovery would be possible. If we're to save the United States as the United States, we can tolerate no further steps toward the abyss.

The race-hustlers must be sternly rebuffed.
Peaceable, law-abiding Americans must stand openly for justice.
Separatists and particularists must be quelled or compelled to "get the hell out."
All sallies toward exemptions from the law, regardless of their bases, must be rejected with prejudice.
Attempts to infringe on our rights by characterizing fully justifiable acts as "tragedies" must be rejected with equal force.

Am I doomed to be the only one saying such things?

Usings

There have been some remarkable movies made lately -- along with the usual tonnage of crap, of course -- in which important ideas are broached, some more subtly than others.

The Bourne Legacy, starring Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz, Edward Norton, Stacy Keach, Scott Glenn, and a huge number of Filipino extras, is one such movie. It was promoted as an action flick, and it most certainly is that. But it also explores a particularly horrifying idea about the deliberate use of unknowing human beings as mere means to an end: the very definition of evil.

I shan't ruin the movie for you by revealing the core of the plot, which bears directly on the central motivation of protagonist Aaron Cross. Suffice it to say that you will find his driving fear to be inexpressibly poignant. That the shadowy federal organization that "created" him is trying to kill him is almost icing on the cake.

(Caveat for PETA-types and tree-huggers: This movie does not pander to your particular fetishes.)

That central plot / character motif put me strongly in mind of the Tuskegee Experiments. If you've never heard of them, perhaps the time has come to learn of what depravity men clothed in political power are capable.

---

It's a commonly expressed sentiment that "we're all users;" alternately, that "we're all prostitutes." The idea, of course, is that with the exception of whatever pure-subsistence farmers remain in the world, each of us sells something -- his labor, his skills, or his brainpower -- to earn his living. We "use" the desire of others for what we can do to produce income for ourselves, "just like a prostitute."

This quasi-condemnation of Mankind is among the foulest propositions ever to gain currency among us. It relegates the one and only way in which men could advance from the bloody savagery of the jungle -- the division of labor and subsequent specialization of men into our many distinct trades -- to the plane of venality. For what does it mean to say that Smith is "using" Jones? Doesn't that imply that Jones's desires are of no moment? That Smith is trying to get Jones to do something that is in no way in his interests, and indeed might be against them? How does that match up against the requirement, in a free and open market, that both participants in any transaction must regard it as beneficial to them on net balance?

Actually, it gets worse. Supposedly, husbands "use" their wives for sex and procreation, whereas wives "use" their husbands for protection and sustenance. That reduces the most important of all interpersonal relations to a loveless exercise in mutual enslavement.

Anyone who agrees with this "using" doctrine had better stay very far away from me.

---

As an evangelist for clarity in thought and expression, it's mandatory that I impose that virtue upon this notion:

Smith is using Jones only if Smith has coerced or deceived Jones into acting against his own interests.

When two persons voluntarily agree to transact, with neither force nor fraud as an element in the agreement, they are not "using" one another; they are collaborating in the increase of human happiness. Each expects to receive from the other something that's worth more to him than what he must give up to get it. Nothing could be more benevolent or beneficial.

Free persons interacting freely and honestly are not "using" anyone. Only two categories of miscreants do that: criminals and governments.

---

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us. -- Leo Tolstoy.

Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness. Society is in every state a blessing; government even in its best state but a necessary evil. -- William Godwin

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I was never molested by any person but those who represented the State. -- Henry David Thoreau

The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from the violence to which it owes its very existence. -- Mohandas K. Gandhi

I wrote not long ago about the overarching problem of political power. To summarize the argument as concisely as possible:

• Anarchy is inherently unstable.
• Government, regardless of form, is also inherently unstable.
• The deterioration of every government is guaranteed by the dynamic of power-seeking.

America today is in the terminal stages of the deterioration of its federal government, once believed to express the highest political ideals ever conceived and implemented, into a pure kleptocratic tyranny in which rights of any sort are a fiction. Yet the mushrooming power of the federal Leviathan has produced accelerating disorder rather than order. History testifies that this is the fate of all nations in which governments succeed in bursting out of their constraints.

The reason is not far to seek. The tyrant always has a personal agenda. He might not admit to it, but it will always be there. In consequence, his actions and proclamations will be focused on advancing on that agenda. His hirelings will be persons he can trust to carry out his orders and serve his agenda faithfully. He does not serve the nation; he uses it and its people, through the power he has attained, to serve his own desires.

Though there have been a tiny number of "benevolent despots" in history -- Rome's Marcus Aurelius comes to mind -- the dynamic of power-seeking guarantees that they will be followed by ever less worthy successors. Unbounded power is a magnet for those who want unbounded power above all other things. Thus, it is an egregious error to give even the most virtuous, intelligent, public-service-oriented man unbounded power, for he will pass it to successors whose agendas will not be nearly as pure.

---

If government is inevitable, then so are the evils governments commit. We tend to focus on the most garish ones, such as military aggression, but the State that confines its evils to undertakings that visible is very rare indeed.

Today's so-called "democratic" States are uniformly immersed in evil. Nearly everything they command or do involves using private persons or voluntary organizations against those victims' interests. Force and fraud are the instruments, whatever end they may pursue.

Yet some of the officers of those States are persons the majority would assess as persons of good character and noble intentions. Their aims are widely allowed to be good ones. That doesn't matter: they are users nonetheless, willing to coerce and defraud to gain their ends. They do so with the approval of their own consciences: C. S. Lewis's vision of self-righteous limitlessness in tyranny.

And we, Mankind under Leviathan's heel, are loudly and relentlessly told that it's all for the greater good, that the men mulcting us and micro-managing our lives have only the best of intentions, that we lowly groundlings are incapable of comprehending the big picture. Besides, we're told, there's nothing we can do about any of it anyway. All the alternatives have been foreclosed; the usings must perforce continue.

Forgive me, please, Gentle Reader. This probably wasn't what you wanted to read at the close of your Independence Day weekend. But it had to come out.