Benevolence Beyond Pluto

     It’s typical of the “progressive” that he readily displays callousness toward identifiable individuals while he proclaims his love for anonymous collectives. It’s why you’ll so frequently hear them defending some oppressive measure as for the good of “the nation,” “the people,” or (God help us all) “the children.” Individuals and their rights are too irritating to deal with; crowds of notional unidentified beneficiaries are much easier.

     The consequences of exporting one’s benevolent impulses so far from one’s proximate orbit “should” be “obvious.” They were to C. S. Lewis:

     Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.

     [C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters]

     Benevolence reserved for amorphous masses is benevolence that need never be actually exercised. So it is with the Left and its mouthpieces, as their own behavior so often demonstrates.

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     The following three items struck me powerfully this morning:

     For reproductive-rights supporters in the United States, it's long been easy to see the Republican Party's hard-line antiabortion politics as a kind of grotesque hypocrisy. How can a political body that has aligned itself against school lunches and for machine guns claim to support "life?" This juxtaposition has been particularly cruel over the past year, as revelations about the imprisonment of migrant children in concentration camps have coincided with a wave of draconian antiabortion legislation. (Just last week, a federal appeals court approved Trump administration rules cutting off federal funds from health-care providers that offer abortions or even discuss the procedure with patients, effectively slashing the budget of organizations like Planned Parenthood.) But understanding this confluence as ironic can actually mislead us. In fact, as King and his white nationalist allies have become increasingly comfortable admitting, state crackdowns on reproductive and immigrant rights are inextricably linked.

     [From the Washington Post]

     The owner of a legendary California eatery has blasted socialist presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders after he was ‘cranky’ and ‘rude’ to staff during a dinner with his campaign team on Thursday.

     Senator Sanders had been in San Francisco to attend the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting last week when he stopped by the iconic John’s Grill on Union Square, flanked by a number of his entourage.

     But the owner of the 111-year-old restaurant, John Konstin, said he was less than impressed by the 77-year-old Democrat’s decorum, claiming that he was ‘rude’ to staff and declined to shake hands or pose for photos.

     ‘It was all very nice, except for cranky Bernie,’ Konstin told Politico. ‘He was just rude, not friendly.

     [From The Daily Mail]

     “Beto” O’Rourke had no trouble telling a man that his mother had an absolute, unchallengeable “right” to abort him on the day before his birth. He was defending the “progressive” doctrine of “women’s rights.” Women, you see, are a special subsector of Mankind with extra rights and prerogatives that we Y-chromosome bearers don’t possess.

     Marissa Brostoff, the author of the WaPo article, seeks to defend those same “women’s rights” by attacking Congressman Steve King, Dutch political figure Geert Wilders, and the rest of us who want to see the white race survive and prosper as “white supremacists.” Never mind that were she to plug any other race into that formulation, she would immediately garner enough denunciations to hound her out of public life and into a name change and plastic surgery. Abortion “rights” (a.k.a. “reproductive services” or “safe medical procedures”) must be defended a outrance!

     And then we have kindly old Bernie Sanders, the doddering uncle figure the openly socialist Left can’t seem to replace. Sanders has long been known as a rude old bastard. He jostles and shoves. He disdains the common courtesies. He has no time for commoners who work in lowly service and hospitality jobs. But “he speaks for the people!”

     The “progressives” keep turning out spokesmen of this sort. Yet those who back them are uninterested in the contrast between their rhetoric and their behavior. There’s an election to win.

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     Among the bits of advice frequently offered to those still looking for mates, the following are prominent:

     “If you want a preview of how he’ll treat his wife, watch how he treats his sister.”

     And:

     “Watch how she treats waiters and retail clerks, because that’s how she’ll treat you in five years.”

     The application to political figures and their behavior could hardly be clearer. Yet an appalling number of persons are unable to see it. Still fewer will consistently apply it.

     Say what you will about the presidency of George W. Bush, he was a decent man who treated those around him with courtesy, even charity, at every encounter. The accounts of his courtesy and generosity toward those who approached him are beyond enumeration. Yet only a thin margin in Ohio spared us a John F. Kerry presidency. Had American voters given more thought to the way he treated his Secret Service entourage, he’d have been lucky to get ten electoral votes.

     Personal quality is inseparable from one’s behavior toward the persons nearest him. Concentration on politicos’ statements obscures that factor – which is exactly as the Left likes it. The Left is willing to “break eggs” in whatever number is required to make its collectivist “omelet.” How could we expect those who carry its standard to behave otherwise? How could we fail to use such persons’ day-to-day behavior to distinguish them from decent Americans?

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     Allow me to conclude with a passage from a great work of fiction:

     After an idle discussion with the pest control man who came once a month to spray around the outside of his home in the Ruxton section of Baltimore, William Sterog stole a canister of Malathion, a deadly insecticide poison, from the man’s truck, and went out early one morning, following the route of the neighborhood milkman, and spooned medium-large quantities into each bottle left on the rear doorstep of seventy homes. Within six hours of Bill Sterog’s activities, two hundred men, women and children died in convulsive agony.
     Learning that an aunt who had lived in Buffalo was dying of cancer of the lymph glands, William Sterog hastily helped his mother pack three bags, and took her to Friendship Airport, where he put her on an Eastern Airlines jet with a simple but efficient time bomb....The jet exploded somewhere over Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Ninety-three people—including Bill Sterog’s mother—were killed in the explosion, and flaming wreckage added seven to the toll by cascading skydown on a public swimming pool.
     On a Sunday in November, William Sterog made his way to Babe Ruth Plaza on 33rd Street where he became one of 54,000 fans jamming Memorial Stadium to see the Baltimore Colts play the Green Bay Packers....Even as 53,999 screaming fans leaped to their feet—making his range of fire that much better—as the ball was snapped to the quarterback, holding for the defensive tackle most able to kick a successful field goal, Bill Sterog opened fire on the massed backs of the fans below him. Before the mob could bring him down, he had killed forty-four people.
     When the first Expeditionary Force to the elliptical galaxy in Sculptor descended on the second planet of a fourth magnitude star the Force had designated Flammarion Theta, they found a thirty-seven-foot-high statue of a hitherto-unknown blue-white substance—not quite stone, something like metal—in the shape of a man....None of these men, standing under a gorgeous brass moon that shared an evening sky with a descending sun quite dissimilar in color to the one that now shone wanly on an Earth unthinkably distant in time and space, had ever heard of William Sterog. And so none of them was able to say that the expression on the giant statue was the same as the one Bill Sterog had shown as he told the final appeals judge who was about to sentence him to death in the lethal-gas chamber, “I love everyone in the world. I do. So help me God, I love you, all of you!” He was shouting.

     [Harlan Ellison, “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World”]

     Food for thought.

No Escape

     If you aren’t familiar with the works of the late Jean-Francois Revel, repent of your sins and become so. Revel was among the best thinkers to arise in France in the years after World War II, yet he remains largely unappreciated – indeed, practically unknown – among his own people, to say nothing of the rest of the First World. Those of his works that have been translated into English and remain non-extortionately available include How Democracies Perish, The Flight From Truth, and Anti-Americanism, all of which have valued places in my library.

     One of his books, The Totalitarian Temptation, was until recently unavailable in English. In it, Revel discourses at length on the tendency among “progressives” to champion policies that are totalitarian in nature: i.e., policies that force their vision of “the good” on all of us, willy-nilly. Their combination of intellectual arrogance with an assumption of moral superiority leads them to infer that it is legitimate, even morally obligatory, for them to coerce the rest of us. After all, if the rest of us are so stupid, or so venal, that we won’t embrace “the good” freely, what else can they do?

     The attitude should be familiar to anyone who follows American politics in the present day. It manifests in virtually every statement any “progressive” politician or “thinker” makes – and certainly in every legislative proposition a “progressive” advances. They never show the slightest hesitation or uncertainty about it.

     Given the characteristic American attitude of defiance toward would-be dictators, how such persons can command anyone’s respect is a mystery. Yet they have, and they do – and on issue after issue, including completely fabricated ones, they presume to dictate how it must be – it’s a matter of RIGHTS!

     No one is more creative than a “progressive” at inventing “rights” that Almighty God would blanch at. But as rights is the Ace of Trumps in all political discourse, that’s their immediate claim about everything they demand, from free abortions to a law protecting the zyzzyva.

     (What’s that? They haven’t demanded a law protecting the zyzzyva? Probably because they can’t spell it. Anyway, we shouldn’t give them any ideas.)

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     Today, Rod Dreher quotes Catholic Czech thinker Vaclav Benda:

     There are times when Christians do not realize that the idea of the forced establishment of paradise on earth and the emancipation of man with regard to any kind of higher authority comes from the same crucible as the idea of the improvement of sinners (or elimination of their occurrence) with the help of draconian laws, the idea of Christian dictatorship (totalitarianism): rebellion against the Creator stands at the root of all this, the same longing arbitrarily to correct imperfections in His work of creation....

     Totalitarianism devotes all its strength, all its technical know-how, towards a single goal: the unimpeded exercise of absolute power. It is capable of the most bizarre tactical somersaults imaginable, but it can never, under any circumstances, admit that anything is more important, more sacrosanct, than “the leading role of the party.”...

     One has either to submit oneself unconditionally to the violent and totalitarian power which sees a threat in every shadow and every free breath, or to confront it and to pit real strength against it (even if this is “mere” moral strength, for even that has shown many times in the history of Christian civilization how effective it can be). What is without any sense at all is to try to persuade the power that we mean well, and that we intend to limit its monopoly (its very essence!) only in its very own interest.

     Absolutely! The totalitarian is unappeasable; he cannot be bought off with a compromise. Moreover, he’s never really “finished.” There’s always just a little more “improving” he can do; wait while he searches for it. Note that totalitarians in power never voluntarily relinquish it. They depart from their palaces feet first, always. I made note of this in Shadow of a Sword:

     The moral dimension of arranging the assassination of a popular politician didn’t trouble Wriston at all. Living in the public eye had always entailed increased risk. Historically, whenever some troublemaker had roused the rabble to a greater pitch than the Establishment of that time and place could tolerate, it had disposed of him with no compunction and extreme prejudice. There were parts of the world where that was still the inevitable price of rising to power—places where a dismissal from high office was always administered with high-velocity lead. Power seekers in such lands arrived in their palaces with their death warrants already signed and sealed; they merely awaited delivery.

     If there is any Christian moral imperative that arises from politics, it’s to resist totalitarianism with all our might. God did not give us wills of our own just so we could be subjugated to the will of another...even “just a little.”

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     David Thompson, in his pithy way, adds a grace note:

     Put another way, “State education is generally sub-optimal and often shockingly bad. Let’s make sure that’s all there is available.”

     That is the true core of the Left’s totalitarian-socialist agenda: there shall be no escape. It’s not about anyone’s “needs.” (Sure as hell it’s not about anyone’s “rights.”) It’s about the Left’s determination to eliminate every last vestige of individual choice in favor of a fabricated Utopia imposed top-down by “our betters:” a scheme guaranteed to produce widespread misery and a privileged caste of commissars.

     Yet there are people who condemn Donald Trump, the first president in many years to openly condemn socialism – to proclaim that “socialism is slavery” and that “America will never be socialist!” — for daring to say so. With the Left slavering for total control of every occupation, every choice, and every word or thought, supposedly conservative commentators have condemned Trump for daring to speak his mind openly and fearlessly, and for putting America first.

     “Collegiality” be damned. Trump in 2020.

The Game Plan

     Is what follows a realistic summary of a major part of the strategy of our political elite, or merely a conspiratorialist’s fantasy?

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

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

     “The second reason is to get children out of the potentially antisocial environment of the home and into educational settings where we can be sure they’ll get the right values and learn the right lessons to be happy and productive members of society. Working mothers need to send their children to daycare and after-school care where we can be sure they get exposed to the right lessons, or at least not to bad ideas....

     “They are going to assign homework to their students: enough homework to guarantee that even elementary school students are spending all their spare time doing homework. Their poor parents, eager to see that Junior stays up with the rest of the class, will be spending all their time helping their kids get incrementally more proficient on the tests we have designed. They’ll be too busy doing homework to pick up on any antisocial messages at home....

     “Children will be too busy to learn independence at home, too busy to do chores, to learn how to take care of themselves, to be responsible for their own cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Their parents will have to cater to their little darlings’ every need, and their little darlings will be utterly dependent on their parents. When the kids grow up, they will be used to having someone else take care of them. They will shift that spirit of dependence from their parents to their university professors, and ultimately to their government. The next generation will be psychologically prepared to accept a government that would be intrusive even by today’s relaxed standards – a government that will tell them exactly how to behave and what to think. Not a Big Brother government, but a Mommy-State....

     “Eventually, we may even outlaw homeschooling as antisocial, like our more progressive cousins in Germany already do. Everyone must known their place in society and work together for social good, not private profit....

     “The Earth can’t accommodate many more people at a reasonable standard of living. We’re running out of resources. We have to manage and control our population. That’s the real motive behind the women’s movement. Once a women’s studies program convinces a gal she’s a victim of patriarchal oppression, how likely is it she’s going to overcome her indoctrination to be able to bond long enough with a guy to have a big family? If she does get careless with a guy, she’ll probably just have an abortion....

     “All those Career-Oriented Gals are too busy seeking social approval and status at the office to be out starting families and raising kids. They’re encouraged to have fun, be free spirits., and experiment with any man who catches their fancy....And by the time all those COGs are in their thirties and ready to try to settle down and have kids, they’re past their prime. Their fertility peaks in their twenties. It’s all downhill from there....

     “In another generation, we’ll have implemented our own version of China’s One-Child-Per-Couple policy without the nasty forced abortions and other hard repressive policies which people hate. What’s more, there’ll be fewer couples because so many young people will just be hedonistically screwing each other instead of settling down and making families. Makes me wish I were young again, like you, to take full advantage of it. The net effect is we’ll enter the great contraction and begin shrinking our population to more controllable levels....

     “It’s profoundly ironic. A strong, independent woman is now one who meekly obeys the media’s and society’s clamor to be a career girl and sleep around with whatever stud catches her fancy or with other girls for that matter. A woman with the courage to defy that social pressure and devote herself from a young age to building a home and raising a family is an aberration, a weirdo, a traitor to her sex. There aren’t many women with the balls to stand up against that kind of social pressure. It’s not in their nature.”

     The above excerpt from Hans G. Schantz’s The Hidden Truth struck me so powerfully that I feel a moral obligation to pass it along. Ponder it, please.

Things No One Should Be Told Dept.

     Gather round, my educator colleagues, and I shall tell you a tale of the Bad Old Days. Back then, before we all grasped the Truth and made it the center of the curriculum, the schools taught a subject called history. It purported to teach students about stuff that happened before the center of the universe shifted – that is, before they were born.

     No, we don’t teach history today. In recent years it’s been replaced by a much more important regimen called global studies, which schools the young in what really matters: the inherent and inexpiable guilt of the white race and all its members; the refutation of Western religious traditions; parental “discipline” as the root cause of all crime; the superiority of African culture; the exemption of Muslims from the penal laws; the sanctity of polymorphous perversity; the inalienable rights to abortion, same-sex marriage, and government-subsidized sex changes; and why the other nations of the world hate the United States even though they hunger for our bucks and demand that we defend them from one another.

     History was suppressed because it’s nothing but a collage of innumerable scraps of useless and misleading trivia that were called facts. These items, which were assembled in time sequence, gave students inadmissible notions about supposed causal relations that prevail among people and nations. Clearly, this is dangerous to the developing mind, which must not be contaminated by any notion that there exist actual laws of nature no legislature can repeal or modify. That would make the teacher’s job of inculcating the tenets of the progressive gospel in his students much too difficult. History simply had to go.

     But hark! What’s this? The citation of a nasty, retrogressive fact? On a publicly accessible Website where anyone might stumble over it? Horrors!

     Black slaveholding is a historical phenomenon which has not been fully explored by scholars.

     Graduate students of history are often sur¬prised to learn that some free blacks owned slaves. Even historians are fre¬quently skeptical until they discover the number of black masters and the number of slaves owned by them. To many readers, slavery was an institu¬tion exclusively utilized by white slaveowners. The fact that free blacks owned slaves has been lost in the annals of history.

     Yet at one time or another, free black slaveowners resided in every Southern state which countenanced slavery and even in Northern states. In Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia, free blacks owned more than 10,000 slaves, according to the federal census of 1830.

     From this it becomes quite clear that young people’s innocence must be carefully guarded from this “history” business. Why, if exposed to such poison, they might actually ask questions! I had to deal with such questions when I was your age, and the experience was terrible indeed. Was “racism” really the cause of slavery? What was the condition of enslaved Americans before their importation to North America? Were they free in any sense, or were they effectively the rightless property of African tribal kings, who happily bartered their lives for liquor, firearms, and ammunition? Why was slavery prevalent in the agrarian South rather than the industrialized North? Could federal tariff policies, which affected the South disproportionately, have had anything to do with it?

     No, this “history” rot had to be suppressed. We simply couldn’t have young people asking inconvenient questions – i.e., questions with inconvenient answers. They might start to wonder whether the legacy of slavery so frequently cited by the infallible spokesmen of African-Americans is an unadulterated crock of shit. The progressive project is much too important to allow it to be imperiled that way. Ponder that as you head to your government-approved, government-funded classrooms. Have a politically correct day.

     Good morning, young progressives Americans! The schedule for the day has just arrived. Your first class today will be White Christian Patriarchal Capitalist Oppression, which begins in ten minutes. All rise for the Pledge. No, you don’t actually have to say it if you prefer to think of yourself as a “citizen of the world.” But none of that nasty, regressive praying, you hear me? It might interfere with your schooling!

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     [Applause to the indispensable Brock Townsend.]

Sad Puppies Update: Outrage Edition

     I wrote only yesterday that the ability to outrage your adversary is an important weapon in political combat:

     The attitude of superior wisdom and morality is itself a weapon in the Left’s hands, in that it enrages us in the Right and deflects us from making our own cases. Such an outraged reaction has been observed among many conservatives, including some of demonstrated intellect and wide knowledge....

     The proper reply to the Left’s attitude is amusement, with or without audible laughter. Mind you, we must never become arrogant about our own positions; that would constitute jumping into the moral-intellectual pit with them. However, an amused dismissal of their positions and of them as well is something leftists find massively humiliating. It enrages them, which nullifies their proselytizing powers.

     Recent events in the world science fiction stand as examples of the power of outrage induced within the Left. Let’s start with this microcephalic twit:

     An award whose nominations are, in six categories, dominated entirely by neofascists, and where Theodore Beale has that kind of influence has already lost legitimacy. The phrase "2015 Hugo Award Winner" is already not one that anybody should want. It is not something that anybody should desire for a work they love. "Listen" and Ms. Marvel are too good to win this award.

     Obviously progressive voices within the sci-fi/fantasy community have to fight, and fight hard to reclaim fandom from the neofascist entryist movement that has just stolen it. But until that fight is won, it is also the moral duty of progressive voices to form a blocking majority, and to loudly admit that fandom as it stands is broken, and that any work proclaimed to be the best of the year by a fandom this broken is demeaned by the association.

     I purely love that “neofascist” stuff, don’t you? Because the Sad Puppies 3 slate included a number of writers of conservative and libertarian views, and because enough actual readers of SF and fantasy liked those books to submit nominations for them, this whiner shouts that “progressive voices...have to fight!”

     Have a little more outrage, this time from a “progressive” who doesn’t like democracy and openly says so:

     The problem with democracy in general isn’t so much that people are “stupid” or “evil” or the other nasty things that people who rag on democracy like to throw out, it’s that there’s a ton of decisions to make and people are busy. The “vote” doesn’t end up being among everyone but among the tiny subset of people who really care about that question, which isn’t necessarily correlated with being right about that question–often, in fact, it’s the opposite.

     The people who pay the most attention to these questions are the people who have some deep emotional investment in the issue at hand combined with a great deal of time and emotional energy to burn making their “voices heard” about it. That can happen on any end of the political spectrum, but in practice? It tends to be a space dominated by privileged reactionary jerks....

     Today’s longest-lasting, most determined trolls have a real ideology behind their trolling, and it usually takes the form of a feeling of betrayal and resentment of the world around them and a knee-jerk rage against the idea of progress.

     The worst trolls are almost universally hard-right conservatives, in other words, and they generally care about their pet causes with a breathtaking fervor that their enemies can’t possibly hope to match.

     So you “progressives,” with your superior wisdom and virtue, are too heavily outnumbered by us “privileged reactionary jerks” to withstand an open election? Therefore, forbid the “privileged reactionary jerks” to participate, so the right – meaning Left – candidates are guaranteed to win? Riiiiight! Maybe we should let Stalin count the ballots.

     But these are hardly alone among outraged “progressives.” A few of them persuaded Entertainment Weekly to publish this:

     The Hugo Awards have fallen victim to a campaign in which misogynist groups lobbied to nominate only white males for the science fiction book awards. These groups, Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies (both of which are affiliated with last year’s GamerGate scandal), urged sci-fi fans to become members of the Hugo Awards’ voting body, World Science Fiction Convention, in order to cast votes against female writers and writers of color.

     ...which, after someone with actual reading skills troubled to inform EW that the Sad Puppies’ nominations included both black, Hispanic, and female writers, forced EW to publish this retraction:

     After misinterpreting reports in other news publications, EW published an unfair and inaccurate depiction of the Sad Puppies voting slate, which does, in fact, include many women and writers of color. As Sad Puppies’ Brad Torgerson explained to EW, the slate includes both women and non-caucasian writers, including Rajnar Vajra, Larry Correia, Annie Bellet, Kary English, Toni Weisskopf, Ann Sowards, Megan Gray, Sheila Gilbert, Jennifer Brozek, Cedar Sanderson, and Amanda Green.

     You simply have to love it, as much for the spittle-flecked faces of the “progressives” who’ve succeeded at stuffing the Hugo ballot boxes for several years now as for the red faces at Entertainment Weekly, whose editorial staff must be pondering whether it can ever again trust a known “progressive.”

     David French adds a concurrence:

     Correia, Torgerson, and their Sad Puppies allies are living arguments against cultural defeatism. With humor and verve, they’ve taken on the allegedly unstoppable Left, stopped it, and thrown it into spasms of impotent rage and amusing disarray. In its rage and self-righteousness, the Left always overreaches. Always. I’ve seen that reality in 20 years of on-campus battles, we’re seeing that reality as their hate campaign against Memories Pizza helped make the owners a pile of money, and we saw it when we watched unhinged rhetoric help turn American Sniper into the top-grossing movie of 2014.

     Congratulations, Sad Puppies. Long may you reign.

     But let’s not, in our jubilation, lose sight of the part salient to political combat: These outraged “progressives” have been reduced to whining to one another. That’s an anti-persuasive stance. It can even evoke disaffection among one’s supposed allies, as conservatives should know from experience. The moral should be clear:

     Laugh at them.
     Ridicule them when they deserve it – which is most of the time.
     Needle them by caricaturing their positions: “What? You only want a $10 minimum wage? Why not $100, so we can all be rich!”
     Above all, restrain your own impulses to become outraged. Remain cheerful and upbeat at all times -- especially when the “progressives” seem to have won one.

     Rumor is a more potent weapon than too many of us have ever realized. Saul Alinsky realized it:

     “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

     Let’s learn from our enemies’ icon and turn this weapon against them.

Quickies: Economic Bigotry And “Progressive” Psychology

Mark Perry of AEI explores an interesting question today:

Evil Walmart makes a lot of money, right? We hear that all the time even though the retail giant’s profit margin was only 3.12% in the most recent quarter. Interestingly, we never seem to hear as much about the much higher profit margin of Apple, the “darling of the progressives.” In the most recent quarter, the computer behemoth with a market capitalization ($725 billion) that exceeds the value of the entire stock markets of Mexico, Thailand and Russia, had awhopping profit margin of 24.2%. No wonder its market cap is so astronomical....

So why is Walmart so reviled by progressives when its profits (and prices) are so low that it might earn a “profit day” every 31 days, and its main corporate objective is to provide low-cost merchandise to America’s low- and middle-income households?

Perry professes ignorance of the answer. In truth, the answer has nothing to do with economics, but with the distribution of “progressives’” reasons for being “progressives:”

Pinnacle: Strategists
Next Layer: Implementation specialists
Next Layer: Emotionally committed “progressives”
Base Layer: The stupid and “low information voters”

In brief, at the top we have the political strategists who direct essentially all left-wing political movements and campaigns. Their sole goal is the increase of their power and influence. Just below them are the specialists in infecting large numbers of people with the core lies of leftism, such as the static character of the economy and the wrongness of “exploitation.” Just below them are the emotional cadre, who are passionate about “progressivism” without being able to explain why. (Many of them simply like the idea of “progress,” but are incapable of articulating the concept in a fashion that will hold water.) The base level is the famous “low information voter,” who basically does what he’s told by his key influences. Most such persons are uninterested in reason or evidence. However, their attachment to the left isn’t emotional either; it’s entirely a matter of having been told by a source of authority that “good people vote this way.”

The rest of the evolution is left as an exercise for you, Gentle Reader.

The Letter And The Spirit

I've just read one of the most remarkable, even critical documents of our time. It's so vitally important to the future, not merely of the United States but of Mankind as a whole, that not to proclaim it far and wide would be a sin of omission for which no penance would be sufficient.

Wait for it. I have a couple of other things to say first. I trust you'll appreciate the perspectives they afford.

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First, allow me to recount an episode from more than a decade ago. It occurred at the home of some friends, who had invited us over for dinner. They'd also invited another couple, about whom I’d been told nothing except that the husband, Abe, was someone "you might enjoy talking to, Fran."

Abe was a left-liberal of typical left-liberal opinions and arrogance. We fenced verbally for an hour or more -- apparently our mutual friends had told him a little about me and my proclivities -- during which:

• The topics were many and various;
• Abe repeatedly made factual assertions I could easily disprove, but which he insisted were true, while freely dismissing my factual assertions as "nonsense;"
• Despite severe temptations to do otherwise, I remained courteous. I was in someone else's home and felt an obligation to maintain the peace.

But there came a point where Abe felt he simply had to address what he deemed the inadequacies of President George W. Bush. Now, whatever Dubya's missteps were -- and I'll allow he made a number of them, some of which were quite serious -- he was a man of sterling character. You could believe that he meant what he said. When he proposed a plan of action, you could be confident that he was sincere about it and would prosecute it to the limit of his ability and authority. When Abe lit off in that direction, I could sense that trouble was on the horizon.

And indeed it was. I managed to hold myself in check throughout most of Abe's tirade, but when he sneered at Dubya for his Christianity -- for "needing the comfort of an imposed structure," as Abe put it -- I snapped.

"Do you have any idea," I said in a tone that might have issued from the bowels of the Earth, "what you just said to a devout, practicing Catholic?" I didn't wait for an answer. I turned on my heel and walked away. We exchanged no further words that evening. Indeed, my wife and I left without wishing him a good night.

---

I wrote some time ago -- apologies; I can't find the link -- that among the patterns that characterize men of good will is the tendency to assume that others are equally as benevolent. That attitude is one of the main supports to the maintenance of the conventional courtesies: broadly speaking, refraining from calling someone an idiot, fool, dupe, liar, slut, thief, murderer, or otherwise unsatisfactory person in a nominally social setting. Abe felt no such inhibitions, at least when his target was someone who wasn't physically present. When I put him on notice that he'd denigrated my convictions, his face fell apart. He couldn't believe I had reacted in such an unrestrained fashion. Why, it was positively discourteous. And after such a nice dinner, too!

I'd reached my limit. Everyone has one. Abe had found mine, whether or not he'd deliberately sought to do so.

It was the beginning of a rather sharp swerve in my attitude toward leftists who denigrate Christianity. I once felt it was something like an obligation to remain courteous, to try to demonstrate how far wrong they were by my conduct, erudition, and sound reasoning. Beneath that, of course, lay the assumption that they could be led to see their error and retreat from it: if not to the extent of becoming Christians, at least so far as allowing that we might not be the imbeciles, buffoons, and would-be oppressors they'd taken us to be.

The assumption was the problem. Indeed, it still is: far too many men of good will retain it, despite innumerable demonstrations that it is false-to-fact.

President Bush labored under that assumption, too. He repeatedly acted as if he accepted without question that his political adversaries were as benevolently inclined as he. He received numerous rebuffs without ever abandoning that premise. It cost him, and the country, in ways that still burden us and will continue to do so for some time to come.

To cut to the chase: Courtesy toward one another is a formal thing. It's not context-free; sustaining it requires a state of reciprocal obligation, in which all persons strive to remain courteous. It derives from the spirit of the Second Great Commandment: to love your neighbor as you love yourself. But one can maintain the specific standard of the Commandment without straining to remain courteous to an unmannerly boor.

Once Abe had demonstrated that he felt himself unbound by the courtesies, I declared myself free of them as well. But Abe is in no way exceptional among left-liberals. To left-liberals, courtesy and propriety are shackles for conservatives, Christians, and their other enemies. They have no interest in donning those fetters; they might keep them from winning an argument...or an election.

---

The double standard in political and social discourse has never been clearer. One side has declared itself outside all rules. It will lie, cheat, steal, sling unbelievably vile calumnies, and generally do whatever it deems useful to its aims, moral standards be damned. The other side strains to remain within the traditional standards of polite conduct, even to the extent of declining to give true coloration to the adversaries' words and deeds. The height of the madness is captured in this: left-liberals' slanders frequently include accusations that conservatives are doing what left-liberals have already done or are planning to do.

Religion has become a particular battleground. The Left has put its nominal atheism to the side to defend Islam, despite its exhortations to violence and oppression and the savagery of its most visible adherents. That's an outcome of leftist "othering," in which any enemy of American norms is immediately granted sanctuary within the Leftist fold. But Islam has sworn the destruction of its enemies -- Christianity and Judaism in particular -- and the Left, in support of its clients, has taken up cudgels against those faiths, while ceaselessly proclaiming that we whom it would destroy must be "tolerant of other faiths."

If you're familiar with the "Islamic Two-Step," this tactic should be familiar to you as well.

---

The spirit of the Great Commandments is generous beyond measure. As the angels who massed above Bethlehem sang, they proclaim peace on Earth and good will toward men -- all men. But the letter of the Law does not demand that Christians sit meekly and unresistingly before a campaign of annihilation.

Now for a snippet from the essay that I praised so highly in the opening segment:

The degradation of our culture has gone too far, and I’ve fucking had it....

This is the Progressive vision for the future, where fat and unhygienic is beautiful. This is a world in which John Scalzi is the pinnacle of writing talent, where Michael Moore is your script writer and Ben Kuchera is your journalist. Your State Department official is a moron who claims the unemployment numbers in Syria are largely responsible for global terrorism. Your own President cannot name who the terrorists are.

Utopia for Progressives is Hell on Earth, possibly worse than any the Bright One who Fell could think up. Your live entertainment will be based on vaginas. Your art is a Crucifix in a jar of piss, or period blood on canvas. Paul Krugman will be your personal banker, with every Western government worth mentioning so far in debt that the entire population could work for well over a year doing nothing but paying it, without coming close to discharging it....

I’m going to say two things in rapid succession, because, again, I’ve had it. My patience has been exceeded. The tank for tolerance is empty, it’s been running on fumes for years now.

I’m a Christian. Okay? And this is a remarkably unChristian thing for me to say, but if you don’t like it… to hell with you (I just realized this is a good pun). I’m tired of being Peter to the rest of the world and skirting the issue, denying it because it’s the fashionable, popular thing to do in a degenerate age, because it might mollify a gatekeeper lording over his own personal pile of waste. I encourage other Christians to do likewise. Proclaim it, loudly and proudly, and say “now what?” Yes, I DJ Industrial-Goth dance clubs, and I am a Christian. We’re everywhere, you know. And there are more of us than there are of them, even today.

Second, and I want to make this as abundantly clear as I possibly can with words, I’ve had enough of the destruction of Western Culture. Progressives have ruined all that is good and Holy on this planet. Wherever there is ugliness, you can be sure to find one of their ilk behind it. Not only do they loathe standards of conduct, beauty and comparison, they actively promote anti-standards. They deconstruct so far, they’ve tunneled straight through civilization and into barbarism, they are the men digging in the ground all the way to China.

They elevate diarrhea to fine wine, while pouring the good vintage down the drain. A beautiful woman in a bikini is an ugly demonstration of sexism, to them, instead of a wonderful example of femininity. A strong man is a patriarchal, heteronormative oppressor. The intellectual is a “mansplainer.”

When you next make use of the bathroom, know that your excrement, your bodily waste, is of higher value than anything they can produce. For at least that waste can become fertilizer for something greater. They are the snake, the worm, the voice of unreason. They are the Autumn People, the product of a century of spoiled children, rotten parenting and failing families. They are reared on garbage, educated by propagandists and coddled by elitist fucks living so far up the Ivory Tower they haven’t seen Terra Firma in their entire lives. Yet, as high up as they are, Dante knew their ilk well enough in the bottom rungs of Hell.

The garden is full of weeds, more wheels are squeaking for the greasing. Civilization is oinkin’ for the boinkin’ while politicians discuss the proper regulations for tree removal in my front yard.

Dystopic, you're my hero. I could not have said it better. Gentle Readers, please read the whole thing. Spread word of it far and wide.

---

A significant number of people look at me, probably because of my tirades here and elsewhere, as an authority of sorts: someone who can certify conclusions, award permissions, and pronounce absolution. In reality I'm nothing of the sort: just one more American with opinions he dares to set forth on the Web. I'm flattered by those who regard my reasoning as sound and my conclusions as important, but in reality the only thing that could make them important is if they were to become your reasoning and conclusions as well. If that's the case, I'm doubly flattered, but remember that it's you that made the critical difference.

All the same, in recognition of the exalted status I don't deserve, I hereby declare, ex cathedra from my bellybutton:

Conservatives and Christians are hereby relieved of any perceived duty of courtesy toward the Left.

Dystopic has stated the case in the strongest possible terms. Perhaps some of you have already experienced what I did from Abe. Perhaps you've cringed before the larger syndrome Dystopic has so passionately denounced. Perhaps you've been wondering "is it time to take off the gloves?" I proclaim it so. Indeed, the time arrived some time ago.

They have placed themselves above the Law.
They are no longer entitled to the protection of its spirit.
Treat them as roughly as they treat you.
Leave them naked before the firehose of your contempt.
They have earned that and nothing more.

Have a nice day.

The Naked Face Of Evil

Courtesy of Maetenloch at Ace of Spades HQ comes the link to the most despicable, monstrously evil piece of opinion writing I've read in many years:

They’re huge, they’re ruthless, and they touch every aspect of our daily lives. Corporations like Amazon and Google keep expanding their reach and their power. Despite a history of abuses, so far the Justice Department has declined to take antitrust actions against them. But there’s another solution.

Is it time to manage and regulate these companies as public utilities?...

They were created with publicly funded technologies, and prospered as the result of indulgent policies and lax oversight. They’ve achieved monopoly or near-monopoly status, are spying on us to an extent that’s unprecedented in human history, and have the potential to alter each and every one of our economic, political, social and cultural transactions.

Please read the whole thing...preferably on an empty stomach. From first to last it's a tissue of lies, baseless contentions, and expressions of ravening envy. And it is a perfect illustration of the core agenda of the Left: to ensure that nothing that actually works shall be left in the hands of those who created it.

---

The history of governments' invasions of enterprise is a record of unparalleled, undiluted failure. The reasons should not baffle anyone with a sense for how people respond to incentives and penalties. Milton Friedman boiled it down to a 2x2 matrix:

	The Benefit Will Accrue To Me	The Benefit Will Accrue To Others
The Cost Will Be Borne By Me	I	II
The Cost Will Be Borne By Others	III	IV

The unwisdom of government as a "provider of goods and services" really becomes quite simple when one reduces the question to incentives and their absence:

• When Smith is spending his own money on himself (I), he strains to optimize both the cost of what he buys and the quality of the thing purchased.
• When Smith is spending his money on something for someone else (II), he'll still try to keep the cost down, but the quality of the purchase won't much concern him.
• When Smith is spending on something for himself, but with someone else's money ( III), he'll still be interested in a quality purchase, but the minimization of cost will no longer concern him.
• And when Smith is spending someone else's money on something for someone else (IV), neither cost nor quality will concern him.

An enterprise "owned" by government is a Type IV enterprise. Those who operate it are providing something to persons other than themselves, using tax revenues or fees coerced out of private citizens. They cannot profit -- legally, at least -- from doing it economically or well. Indeed, in the usual case there's more gain to be had from doing it poorly. After all, it's always the failing projects and the overrun budgets that get the biggest increases in staffing and funding, isn't it?

But note! Governments very seldom seek to take over a business that's operating at a loss. They target profitable companies that are appreciably more popular than their competitors. The usual cry is "monopoly" or "exploitation," even when the targeted company has a number of competitors -- Amazon has thousands of them -- or provides its services for free, as does Google. When a government seizes such a concern, it almost immediately runs it onto the rocks, providing ever poorer goods or services at an ever higher end-purchaser cost, in obedience to the incentive structure outlined above. Examples are innumerable.

Given that the advocates of "nationalizing" this or that are seldom deaf-blind idiots who can't grasp the logic above, they must have some other end in view than improving the quality or cost of whatever they seek to seize. And they do, Gentle Reader, they do.

---

I have no previous acquaintance with Richard Eskow, the author of that atrociously evil article above, but the tag line at the end makes him "a Senior Fellow with the Campaign for America's Future," a hard-left "progressive" advocacy group. We may take it as written that his covert aim is the elimination of private enterprise: the overarching agenda of all "progressive" activists and organizations since the word first entered our political lexicon.

"Progressives" -- semi-closeted totalitarian social-fascists -- are animated by envy and power lust. Joseph Sobran and Ayn Rand had a common definition for envy, the one and only sin God forbade in the Ten Commandments: hatred of the good for being the good. Virtually none of them are capable of producing a good or service that others would willingly purchase. Virtually none of them have any substantive achievements of any sort. (No, I don't regard the acquisition of an Ivy League degree in "political science," "social policy," "journalism," or "communications" as a substantive achievement.) And virtually none of them, if pressed with maximum force, could justify the treatment of any enterprise as something that "should belong to 'the people'" -- and that includes all the various "nationalized" and "municipalized" enterprises we endure today.

I used the word justify for a reason. To justify something is to establish that it accords with the principles of justice: that is, with right and wrong as they're encoded in our fundamental laws. Eskow is so far from justifying the nationalization of Amazon and Google that he has to resort to lie after lie even to make a start on it -- the assertion that the development of broadband Internet access was "publicly funded" is only the most risible -- and to what purported end? To reduce Amazon's irreducibly thin profit margin? To make Google's services cheaper than free? Or might he have it in mind to use the information-gathering powers of those giants of the World Wide Web, which he excoriates for "spying on us" -- the term "progressives" invariably substitute for "market research" -- for his preferred political purposes?

Given that the "progressive" pole star is unbounded and irresistible power over all that exists, regardless of the "justification," which would you prefer to know about your purchasing patterns? Your tastes in entertainment? Your affiliations with other online groups and advocacy sites? Your Web-enabled vices, whatever they might be? Amazon and Google, or Richard Eskow and the Campaign for America's Future?

Think it over.

Guilding The Polity Part 2: Recognizing The Distribution

Yesterday's essay introduced the concept of a contemporary guild system -- i.e., a governmentally enforced distribution of "rights" among recognized groups -- as the Left's structural aim for American society. However, I deliberately left the treatment incomplete, and a good thing, too.

On Monday, the great Charles Murray wrote in the Wall Street Journal (sadly, subscriber-only) about the Right's failure to recognize a correlated distribution on the Left: "The Trouble Isn't Liberals. It's Progressives."

Social conservatives. Libertarians. Country-club conservatives. Tea party conservatives. Everybody in politics knows that those sets of people who usually vote Republican cannot be arrayed in a continuum from moderately conservative to extremely conservative. They are on different political planes. They usually have just enough in common to vote for the same candidate.

Why then do we still talk about the left in terms of a continuum from moderately liberal to extremely liberal? Divisions have been occurring on the left that mirror the divisions on the right. Different segments of the left are now on different planes....

It is that core philosophy [Progressivism] extolling the urge to mold society that still animates progressives today—a mind-set that produces the shutdown of debate and growing intolerance that we are witnessing in today's America. Such thinking on the left also is behind the rationales for indulging President Obama in his anti-Constitutional use of executive power. If you want substantiation for what I'm saying, read Jonah Goldberg's 2008 book "Liberal Fascism," an erudite and closely argued exposition of American progressivism and its subsequent effects on liberalism. The title is all too accurate.

Murray's distinction between liberals, whom he can judiciously approve, and progressives, whom he characterizes as the enemies of American ideals of freedom, is an important one. It illuminates a critical parallel to the behavior of the various segments of the Right at election time.

---

Despite the policy differences that divide social conservatives from libertarians, we in the Right tend to rally behind the same Republican candidate, especially in presidential elections. The general thinking is that the GOP candidate might not satisfy us in detail, but that he's "the lesser of two evils." Anyway, there's too much to lose should the Democrats gain or retain political hegemony. Similarly, liberals (in Murray's sense) will rally behind the same Democrat candidate as progressives (again in Murray's sense) under the same rationales. While that effect tends to make the Republican Party "split the differences" among the preferences of its subsectors, on the Left it causes a continuous, fierce struggle over the control of the Democrat Party, especially its mechanisms for choosing and promoting candidates for federal offices.

For the past eight years at least, the progressives have held the levers of Democrat Party power. They've striven to use their period of dominance to make themselves its permanent rulers.

The dominance of the Democrats by progressives has put the liberals in a corner. They can't bring themselves to side with the Right except on the most singular subjects. Atop that, absenting themselves from votes and public debates over progressive policy prescriptions is electorally hazardous. In consequence, these two blocs, which would appear to be separated by important differences on fundamental principles, vote together -- and as the progressives hold the whip hand, that will both advance the progressive agenda and solidify progressive control of the Democrat Party.

Contemporary American progressivism, as Murray delineates it, is militant social fascism. It's a perfect fit to Jonah Goldberg's conception of liberal fascism, marching under the flag of "social justice." Indeed, we can penetrate it further by noting its similarities to National Socialist Fascism, the key figures of which populated its hierarchy of "fuhrers."

The fuhrer personified the leader principle of National Socialism. A fuhrer of any level wielded absolute authority over all matters given to his jurisdiction. He was subject to being overruled only by fuhrers above him. Just as Hitler had ranks of "fuhrers" -- "leaders" -- inside his regime with himself at the pinnacle, in the cosmetically private sector, every industrial organization of any significant size had its betriebsfuhrer: an official approved by the Reich who exerted absolute authority over every aspect of the firm's operations. It was the National Socialist way of preserving the fiction of private enterprise.

Compare this to Obama's "czars," and to the progressives' demand for the absolute submission of any and every private organization, regardless of its purposes, to the dictates of the federal government.

---

The enormous foofaurauw over the Hobby Lobby decision is because the Court's defense of the private rights of the owners of a family corporation crosscuts progressive fascism. Progressives are unwilling to allow that any aspect of employer / employee relations should be exempt from federal mandates or a requirement for federal approval. The recent (2011) flap between Boeing and the Washington state machinists' union was a fine illustration of the progressive mindset. The NLRB permitted Boeing to shift aircraft construction to a site in right-to-work South Carolina only after Boeing agreed to preserve and expand union employment in Washington state.

Unions, as I mentioned yesterday, are a modern variety of guild. But let's not limit our perspectives to formally organized groups. Consider gender-war feminists, who are united mainly in sharing a hostile, aggressive attitude toward anything and everything they deem "patriarchal." In recent years that community of conviction has advanced through the law, steadily slicing away at employers' rights, men's rights generally, and longstanding conceptions of justice. It's hardly mattered that their assertions are nearly always counterfactual and foolish, for they are politically favored by the progressives who dominate the federal edifice, especially its regulatory sectors. They have the power and influence of a guild without being openly organized or recognized as such.

When viewed in that light, the Left's tumult over the Hobby Lobby decision becomes easier to comprehend. It's a step backward for the progressives' drive to eliminate the individual as the possessor of rights, and to replace him with guild-like groups whose "rights" are parceled out and protected by the State. Sandra Fluke and her ilk have never had a problem obtaining or affording contraception. Cost-free provision of contraception is merely the next hill their campaign has determined to secure, on the way to establishing "women" as a "stakeholder group" with specific "rights" it can exercise at the expense of non-members.

The ultimate beneficiary of this creation of de facto guilds is, of course, the State -- and America's progressives are determined to remain its masters.

More anon.

Venalities And Victims

Among the things we can count on, regardless of how the prevailing political winds are blowing, is this: If Smith discovers a way to profit while simultaneously wounding his enemy, then, absent moral constraints strong enough to inhibit him, he will use it. And so we get this bit of viciousness, powered entirely by a religiously based difference:

Progressive people of the world, go ahead and see “Ender’s Game” this weekend with a clear conscience: Orson Scott Card won’t see a penny of your movie ticket money, TheWrap has learned.…

If you really want to hit Card where it hurts, boycott his book instead: Card still profits handsomely from the novel, perched at the top of the latest New York Times Best Seller List for paperback mass-market fiction.

Hollywood, which is fighting a losing battle for patrons, would never encourage potential customers to boycott a movie...but a book? Too easy. In Hollywood's collective mind, people who read have two strikes against them from the outset. Also, homosexuals are both overrepresented in the cinematic world and more politically active than most of their fellows. The rest follows unnaturally.

But that's essentially tawdry and trivial: a hissy-fit thrown by mediocrities unable to restrain themselves when they've spotted a chance to harm one of their betters. If you need your blood pressure elevated, have a gander at this:

[Craig] Patty, the owner of a small trucking company in Houston, was never asked if he wanted to become a cog in the DEA’s sting of the Zetas Cartel. He was never asked if it was cool with him to have his truck, his driver, become part of their covert operation. The DEA didn’t care what Patty thought. They had a job to do and it was the duty of every good American to give up his life to help the DEA.

Except the DEA plan didn’t work out nearly as well as the brilliant government tacticians thought it would:

Commandeered by one of his drivers, who was secretly working with federal agents, the truck had been hauling marijuana from the border as part of an undercover operation. And without Patty’s knowledge, the Drug Enforcement Administration was paying his driver, Lawrence Chapa, to use the truck to bust traffickers.

At least 17 hours before that early morning phone call, Chapa was shot dead in front of more than a dozen law enforcement officers – all of them taken by surprise by hijackers trying to steal the red Kenworth T600 truck and its load of pot.

When Patty was finally told that his truck and driver wouldn’t be coming home again, it apparently didn’t occur to anyone at the DEA that this might be a problem. Nor did they consider that Patty, who had nothing to do with any of this, might not want to be in the crosshairs of the Cartel for being part of this government sting. “Suck it up, pal,” was the government’s attitude.

When this story first broke, one might have suspected that the DEA, in one of its occasional bursts of actual thoughtfulness, would have apologized deeply to Patty, handed him a generous check to cover the loss of his truck and begged his forgiveness. After all, there is utterly no explanation for taking a truck from an American businessman, converting it for use in the War on Drugs, and telling the guy tough luck. Yet, that’s what the DEA apparently did (which is something to remember when the DEA promises that it would never do harm and we should trust it).

So! The State has first claim on your property, and may seize it without prior notification and with no compensation. So much for the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, eh?

But it gets worse, Gentle Reader. Oh my, how much worse it gets:

FYI last night at the Great Falls Grange debate, Democrat delegate candidate Kathleen Murphy said that since many doctors are not accepting medicaid and medicare patients, she advocates making it a legal requirement for those people to be accepted....

Democrats appear to want to make physicians slaves of the state, but Democrats don't admit they would just drive more doctors out of practice into retirement and other occupations....

The head of Obamacare programs, Berwick, loves the socialized medical system in the UK, but never mentions that malpractice insurance is minimal. In the UK, panels of doctors review and approve malpractice awards, rather than emotional juries misled by trial lawyers.

It's bad enough that the Selective Service Act exposes doctors to the draft up to the age of 35, whereas young men in other trades cease to be vulnerable at age 27. But the notion of compelling doctors to take patients at a loss, while nevertheless leaving them exposed to all the other risks involved in practicing medicine, could only occur to a tyrant-in-embryo.

Forced labor is slavery, isn't it?

But perhaps ObamaCare's other effects will persuade certain persons that enslaving doctors isn't such a bad idea:

Everyone now is clamoring about Affordable Care Act winners and losers. I am one of the losers.

My grievance is not political; all my energies are directed to enjoying life and staying alive, and I have no time for politics. For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2% after diagnosis. I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31....

What happened to the president's promise, "You can keep your health plan"? Or to the promise that "You can keep your doctor"? Thanks to the law, I have been forced to give up a world-class health plan. The exchange would force me to give up a world-class physician.

For a cancer patient, medical coverage is a matter of life and death. Take away people's ability to control their medical-coverage choices and they may die. I guess that's a highly effective way to control medical costs. Perhaps that's the point.

Cue Kathleen Sebelius intoning "Some people live, some people die."

All this, plus Benghazi, and the IRS scandal, and the NSA scandal, and Fast and Furious, and the New Black Panthers scandal, and the several "stimulus" scandals, and the Obamas' ultra-indulgent lifestyle, and Obama's several usurpations of power and dismissals of Constitutional requirements, and his unending lies, and every last politician to the left of Ronald Reagan calling those who differ with them "extremists," "anarchists," and "terrorists," and still no armed insurrection. Americans must be a nation of saints, to suffer oppression so placidly.

Pssst! This is Guy Fawkes Day. Celebrate it in the spirit of the event it commemorates...according to your best judgment, of course. And do stay safe.

Fantasy

[Gentle Readers who remember Eternity Road will already be aware of Ol' Remus and the Woodpile Report. My admiration for this fine and insightful writer and commentator knows no bounds. Accordingly and with great pleasure, I reprint his most recent column, "Fantasy," with his permission. May God bless and keep you always, Remus. -- FWP]

It was a cliche during the '30s that the wealthy were Marxists, the middle class were conservatives and the poor were Democrats.

The upper class and the lower class have more in common with each other than either has with the middle class. Both the upper and lower classes value comfort and leisure above all else—except sports, both adore unearned wealth, both are extraordinarily self-aware and cohesive, both think themselves gifted and blameless, both scorn education, both make ostentatious display of such affluence as they have, or pretend to have, and neither shrinks from any criminal enterprise they think they can get away with. The industrious and law-abiding middle class supports both and has the respect of neither.

In the Depression of the '30s the middle class found itself in a train wreck economy, lived by the hard rules of deprivation, resisted anything that would dishonor them or their family, then faced the hardships and horrors of a world war. In the good years that followed they built the prosperous America of legend and righted wrongs which had seemed intractable, at no one's bidding but their own and at considerable cost to themselves.

The Progressive narrative turns the middle class's innate good will against them by demanding they be answerable for their success, as if they were beneficiaries of a theft, as if they were also responsible for those who mocked every opportunity and blamed others for the consequences. Those who the middle class is told to "answer to" are those who sit uninvited at their table and complain of the condiments. Amazingly, in the end, the makers and movers of real, tangible wealth stood maligned and displaced by those who did neither and despised those who did. It was a poisoning of the common well, and done in the name of justice.

In the broadest, deepest sense possible the putative demand for equality during the Civil Rights Era was a scam. Equality was a ranging shot, then a pose, now a marker for crypto racism, somehow. The middle class wasn't so much enlisted as borrowed. Now, step by step, the true intent of this particular swindle becomes clear. Who will claim we recovered more civil rights than we lost? Who will claim America is better off for it? For the beneficiaries, and there are beneficiaries, the down side is profound but not obvious. There is no surer way to create an enduring, transgenerational enemy than to betray the trust and good will of the middle class. Faithlessness has consequences proportional to the cause, it shapes events far into the future. The middle class can be defrauded, belittled and beaten down but it endures and it remembers.

The Progressive narrative also excuses its authors, those who imagine themselves Citizens Of The World and emphasize it with contempt for the middle class. Generally it takes the form of fraud, Al Gore's global warming for instance, all the more popular with Progressives for being an amusing ruse perpetrated on the townies. Some contempt is more stark than even this. Adam Kredo at the Washington Free Beacon reports a top Muslim Brotherhood official, one Gehad el-Haddad, served for five years as a top official at the Clinton Foundation. Outrage will be met with chatter of ecumenicalism or special knowledge. It may be a thrilling moment for the benighted and the interns, but for the rest of us it's another vector confirming our suspicions.

Much of the fraud perpetrated on the middle class takes the form of "investing in the future". As with Wimpy of Thimble Theatre, the investment part means now, the future part means never. Investment is invoked where maintenance would suffice, in education for instance. It isn't as if effective teaching is an elusive, secret skill. It's more a case of "you can't find what you're not looking for." Western education has roughly a thousand years of experience to draw upon. Not coincidentally, its success peaked at about the same time Progressive Education began to take hold. And education's been in an every-other-Monday crisis mode ever since.

The billions spent annually for their serial fantasies would be better applied to reincarnating the staff of any Normal School of the late nineteenth century. As it is, roofing funds are diverted to hire directors and assistants of this and that while rainwater drips in the classrooms as a photo-op for feature writers specializing in stories of underfunded schools.

Cui bono? It may not be who you think. Classic education, which is to say education, is a threat to the ruling class. Elite universities educate the reliable, their students having been properly vetted, but public schools and universities are outright anti-education enterprises. Mopping up the incorrigible is assigned to the NSA, DHS, et al. Fantasy is their queen bee, no threat is trivial, and education threatens the Progressive narrative like nothing else. For one, it's never "different this time" so they can't own the present without rewriting the past. As for surveillance, DC isn't looking for traffickers in plans for nuclear submarines, DC needs to know how much we understand and limit the damage.

Alas, reality is the mean to which fantasy regresses. Contrary to the fantasizers, reality isn't in need of seeking out and defining by them or anyone else, it's reality which does the seeking out, it's reality which does the defining, and it has an unchanging lesson: that which can't work, won't work. Reality is seeking out and defining the Progressives even now. Today we resist them at the cost of our livelihoods. In time it will be a curiosity. Only reality endures, it alone truly commands. The productive answer the helm. Those who don't are a danger to the survival of civilization.