It Isn't Often...

...that a major star bursts onto the silver screen seemingly from nowhere. Which was one of the reasons Jennifer Lawrence, the incredibly magnetic young actress who played Katniss Everdeen, protagonist of The Hunger Games, stunned the world of cinema as she did.

But Miss Lawrence didn't come from nowhere.

Her first starring role, in Winter's Bone, a tale of a dirt-poor Missouri family struggling to survive in the absence of its no-account head-of-household, got very little notice, either critically or from audiences. Small wonder: It's an exceptionally grim, unglamorous story -- but Jennifer Lawrence, playing the 17-year-old Ree Dolly, is just as incandescent as in her better known role in the blockbuster made from Suzanne Collins's novel.

Highly recommended.

The Helix

[Inasmuch as I just recently had a most striking reminder of the power of prayer, it seems appropriate that I reprise the following article, which first appeared at Eternity Road on April 2, 2006.]

---

C. S. Lewis has proposed that the human tastes for constancy and novelty are best conjoined -- that they are intended to be mingled in a particular way:

The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, The Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty, yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before. [From the Screwtape Letters]

The above strikes me as Divine inspiration speaking through the mouth of a man. Yet there is another element for our consideration, which Lewis's passage does not address. A cycle may have change built into it in more than one way. The one Lewis illuminates is only the most obvious. Another, subtler mechanism for cyclic change is built into all of us at a level beneath anything we can control, for which reason it's often overlooked. Indeed, from time to time it's been the fashion to deny it.

---

The Christian world is swiftly moving through the Lenten season, one of the four major demarcations of the Christian liturgical year. Each of those seasons has a pervading theme, which Christians are exhorted to ponder as the season progresses. The themes never change. The liturgical year, based on the events of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, is itself a constant. The shifts from one season to the next are as regular as the stars in their courses.

That regularity and constancy of theme has caused some to scoff at the meaninglessness of such a formalism. Of course, there are many who scoff at all formalism as empty and pointless. A thing that does not change, they contend, cannot possibly imbed meaning or value for an intelligent person. By such an argument, Christian rituals would be complete wastes of time.

To which this writer would reply with his First Carbohydrate Aphorism:

"Keep thine eye upon the doughnut, lest thou pass all unawares through the hole."

Yes, Christian rituals are highly constant in form and theme. Yes, they repeat with extreme regularity in time. But one ought to look carefully at such things before running off at the mouth. In particular, one ought to exhibit a trace of humility about one's outside-observer's position:

"If I, an outsider, am correct in thinking that what I observe is pointless, does it not imply that the persons who voluntarily participate in it must necessarily be idiots? Were I to find non-idiots among them and (gasp!) ask what sustenance they draw from these endlessly repeated forms, what might they say?"

This question apparently does not occur to many of those who deride the Church.

---

Formalisms and rituals have several known effects upon the mind. They're calming, promote peace and order among their participants, and provide a form of psychic refreshment unavailable from informal activities. We seem to realize that unconsciously; much of life consists of regularities practiced for no other reason than regularity itself. Ask yourself: wouldn't it make more sense to eat when hungry and sleep when sleepy, rather than to set to these things at particular times of day? Wouldn't it be more efficient to work when charged with energy and to cease when exhausted or demotivated than to set out for the workplace at a set time each morning and to leave it at a set time each evening?

Nevertheless, we formalize and regularize those things, not merely because our intercourse with others benefits from the imposition of order, but because they structure our days in a beneficent fashion that assists us in maintaining our composure. We know, broadly, what to expect. We know what will be expected of us, and therefore, upon what conditions we'll be able to say we're done with our current tasks and may move on to what comes next. The regularity of our days reassures and soothes us.

Social psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written extensively on "the flow experience:" the mode of consciousness in which men experience their greatest inner harmony, productivity, and satisfaction. The majority of such experiences exhibit a great regularity: they're repetitions of deeds done many times, that will be repeated many times more in days to come. Yet how could one call them empty or pointless, when they clearly create satisfaction, peace, and even joy in their practitioners? Even the least productive ritual that induces such things would seem completely self-justifying, unless satisfaction, peace, and joy are themselves ruled out of the evaluation.

Nor are we finished. For though the forms might be invariant, the practitioners are not. He who looks at a ritual and dismisses it for its changelessness neglects to consider its critical element, which cannot be insulated from change and is the ultimate point of the whole affair: the participant himself.

---

A formalism with spiritual content has the twin benefits of reminding the participant of its themes and stimulating him to ponder their relevance to his own life. In this sense, the form simultaneously channels the participant's thoughts while it frees him to apply the theme creatively to his personal circumstances. Not only in engineering is form a source of liberation.

This is particularly true as regards Christian observances. My two favorites, the Mass and the Rosary, are heavily stylized in practice, yet uniquely stimulating and liberating when approached with an open mind and an accepting heart.

The Mass varies little from week to week. The order of the sub-ceremonies remains the same, the prayers themselves vary little, and of course at the center of it all is the Miracle of Transubstantiation, the recreation for contemporary worshippers of the event, two thousand years ago, when the Son of God, in offering Himself as a Sacrifice for the benefit of Man, sealed God's New Covenant with the world for all the time that remains.

The Rosary is even more constant. The prayers themselves never vary; one prayer is repeated ten times per decade and fifty times per day. The twenty Mysteries, through which one rotates over the course of the week, are also unchanging. Many devotees of the Rosary pray it at exactly the same time, in exactly the same place, every day of their lives, further reinforcing the regularities of the event.

But they who give themselves fully to these celebrations of love and worship grow with each repetition. Indeed, the repetition itself, even if indulged tentatively and in a spirit of doubt, will draw the participant ever deeper into the spiritual themes imbedded in each prayer. It takes an actual effort of resistance, and a strong one at that, to deny oneself the lightening of heart and enlargement of soul they confer.

In other words, prayer changes him who prays; the prayer itself stays constant.

In reviewing the above, it strikes me that I might be accused of having made ritual prayer sound like a panacea. Nothing could be further from my intent. Life offers each of us many problems, both temporal and spiritual. One cannot solve them all through prayer; it would be arrogant to imagine that one could.

But given the many aspects of the life journey that try one's soul to its stops, that leave the traveler exhausted and desperate for surcease, isn't it marvelous that a balm as soothing and costless as ritual prayer is available to us?

---

The cycles of ritual do change somewhat over time. The Mass I love is not the same Mass I celebrated as a boy. It's even further distant from the Mass celebrated by the Christians of the earliest centuries after Christ. The Rosary, though its major elements are what they've always been, has been altered over the years to include new opening and closing prayers. Pope John Paul II himself decreed that the original fifteen Mysteries -- the Joyful, the Sorrowful, and the Glorious pentads -- should be expanded to accommodate an additional pentad: the Luminous Mysteries, which commemorate the five major mileposts in Christ's time of ministry. Other Christian ceremonies have also been altered in gentle, nondestructive ways, always with an eye to strengthening their binding to the themes they express, and deepening their spiritual effects upon those who partake of them.

And Christians who partake of them grow thereby. The cycle of Christian rituals and observances is only flat and unchanging when viewed two-dimensionally, as a set of practices that stand apart from those who practice them. For Christian worship is not two-dimensional, but three: a rising helix of souls striving, through their forms and the meditation they elicit, to an ever better understanding of God's Will, and an ever greater appreciation of His Love.

---

May God bless and keep you all.

In The Usual Case...

...I would let the post below stand as my tirade for the day. However, I have lately taken to refreshing my acquaintance with the works of the great classical liberals: the men whose thoughts and writings would give us the body of convictions and reasoning that has become contemporary libertarian-conservatism.

One of those men, perhaps less well known than the others, was William Graham Sumner, the first American thinker to practice and promote the academic discipline we know as sociology. Sumner had a great deal in common with the great Herbert Spencer, though the two had some fundamental differences over whether there are truly such things as "natural rights." Nevertheless, when it came to political and social policy, the two hardly ever disagreed.

Regard well the following segment from Sumner's "What Social Classes Owe to Each Other:"

The humanitarians, philanthropists, and reformers, looking at the facts of life as they present themselves, find enough which is sad and unpromising in the condition of many of the members of society. They see wealth and poverty side by side. They note great inequality of social position and social chances. They eagerly set about the attempt to account for what they see, and to devise schemes for remedying what they do not like. In their eagerness to recommend the less fortunate classes to pity and consideration they forget all about the rights of other classes; they gloss over all the faults of the classes in question, and they exaggerate their misfortunes and their virtues. They invent new theories of property, distorting rights and perpetuating injustice, as anyone is sure to do who sets about the readjustment of social relations with the interests of one group distinctly in mind and the interests of all other groups thrown into the background.

When I have read certain of these discussions I have thought that it must be quite disreputable to be respectable, quite dishonest to own property, quite unjust to go one's own way and earn one's own living, and that the only really admirable person was the good-for-nothing. The man who by his own effort raises himself above poverty appears, in these discussions, to be of no account. The man who has done nothing to raise himself above poverty finds that the social doctors flock about him, bringing the capital which they have collected from the other class, and promising him the aid of the State to give him what the other had to work for. In all these schemes and projects the organized intervention of the State is thus made to become the protector and guardian of certain classes. The agents who are to direct the action of the State are, of course, the reformers and philanthropists. Their schemes, therefore, may always be reduced to this type -- that A and B shall decide what C shall do for D....

Here it may suffice to observe that, on the theories of the social philosophers to whom I have referred, we should get a new maxim of judicious living: Poverty is the best policy. If you get wealth, you will have to support other people; if you do not get wealth, it will be the duty of other people to support you.

This is as complete a formulation of the major contemporary uses of State power as I have ever seen.

William Graham Sumner is little known and even less read in our time. Perhaps his most prominent descendant will change that. At any rate, we can hope.

Lawless

By now, the entire spiral arm has heard about the decision of His Majesty Barack Hussein Obama the First (long may he reign) to suspend the enforcement of America's immigration and port-of-entry laws as they pertain to younger illegal aliens. This, of course, is the king's privilege under the American system of unlimited monarchy, so it caused hardly a stir at the royal court, though a few visitors from the provinces were heard to mutter "Can he really do that?"

We should be profoundly grateful that Providence has bestowed such a wise and generous autocrat upon us. Why, under the previous, never-to-be-revived scheme of Constitutionally defined powers, the president had no lawmaking power. He was obliged to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" -- laws made by others of lesser station, some of them mere commoners! Such a constraint would have deprived our illegals of the incalculable benefits of His Majesty's compassion. Why, it would have left all those helpless Hispanic youths with nowhere to go! That they were all legally still citizens of other countries, and had either graduated high school or had been honorably discharged from the United States' armed forces, would matter not a farthing. Surely those young illegals would have suffered mass death out of despair at being shorn of their American refuge.

Hm? What's that? Oh, excuse me, Gentle Reader. Someone is prodding me and murmuring "wake up...wake up" too insistently to be ignored any longer. Bide a moment while I deal with the intrusion.

***

Ah. That's better. I haven't been getting enough sleep lately, and recent developments have had me wondering if there's any percentage in waking up. Though I do believe I would eventually miss my wife, my animals, my power tools, and blogging.

It's time for the entire country to undertake a serious contemplation of the man who currently inhabits the White House and his use of the "executive order." No one has given the executive order a serious analysis since the New Deal. It has absolutely no Constitutional foundation, yet president after president has used it as if he possessed a lawmaking power equal, if not superior, to that of Congress. The consequences have been very bad for the Constitutional order.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to give the "executive order" national prominence. His first such, as far as I am aware, was his order directing all Americans to surrender their gold holdings to the federal government. He issued several others during his thirteen years in office, gradually undermining the separation of the legislative from the executive power.

FDR benefited from a completely compliant Congress, and after some judicious terrorizing, a compliant Supreme Court. More, the Great Depression had, in the words of Republican Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, persuaded the nation that "if this nation ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now." Consequently, Roosevelt never faced serious opposition to his methods. No one dared to go up against a president that popular, with so many new tools of coercion at his disposal.

FDR was fairly blatant about what he had done. Quoth Garet Garrett in "The Revolution Was:"

Two years later [FDR] was saying to Congress "In thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power." Who had opposed this extension of government power? He asked the question and answered it. The unscrupulous, the incompetent, those who represented entrenched greed—only these had opposed it. Then he said: "In the hands of a people's government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets, of an economic autocracy, such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people."

But note Garrett's comment on the matter:

There, unconsciously perhaps, is a complete statement of the revolutionary thesis. It is not a question of law. It is a question of power. There must be a transfer of power. The President speaks not of laws; he speaks of new instruments of power, such as would provide shackles for the liberties of the people if they should ever fall in other hands. What then has the government done? Instead of limiting by law the power of what it calls economic autocracy the government itself has seized the power.

This may be the most open-eyed and candid assessment of FDR's methods that has ever been penned. In effect, FDR said, "I had to become a dictator to protect you from them!"

Dare to give FDR's statement this entirely accurate and proper coloration, and his defenders will march upon you in a body. How dare your breathe your retrograde criticisms upon the greatest president in American history -- the man who saved us from the Great Depression and steered the nation through the Second World War! You are unfit to call yourself an American! Silence and begone!

Nevertheless, I will ask: Who is His Majesty Obama the First protecting us from?

***

I'm a Constitutional absolutist. I make no pretense otherwise. Either the Constitution of the United States is the Supreme Law of the Land, or it is not. If it is, then its words mean exactly what they say, not some other trendy thing modern power-mongers and their tame hair-splitters would prefer them to mean. More, under the overarching principle of constitutionalism, the federal government has only those powers delegated to it by the Constitution, defined and separated as its first three Articles define and separate them.

By openly refusing to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" (Article II, Section 3), Obama has declared that he will no longer perform the duties of president of the United States. More, he has arrogated to himself a lawmaking power never granted to the president. He is in violation of his oath of office, and no longer has any claim to the powers of the presidency.

Congress is unlikely to initiate impeachment proceedings against Obama. The best members of the GOP caucus fear him too greatly even to vote a contempt citation against his openly racist, demonstrably corrupt attorney-general.

The Supreme Court cannot act until someone brings a case against Obama for his open seizure of extra-Constitutional powers and blatant dereliction of presidential duty. Even should that wildly unlikely event come about, the Court does not possess a unilateral power to remove the president from office. Neither does it possess an enforcement arm capable of thwarting the will of the president -- and this president has displayed a perfect willingness to defy the courts several times already.

The law is now what a single man decrees it to be, when and as he deems it fitting to decree it. But when a man's whims determine what is and what is not lawful, there is no law as law has been understood since the earliest inception of jurisprudence. Force, not law, is now the standard. The United States of America has become lawless.

The Republic has fallen. We are now in an undisguised state of tyranny.

Let him save himself who can.

A Friday Assortment

1. More on elitism.

Among the aspects of "traditional" elitism that baffle (and often irritate) outsiders is the impenetrable elite, also known as the clique. You cannot gain entry to a clique by attaining some standard or expressing some commonly held sentiment; it admits no additional members according to so impersonal a criterion. If it does deign to accept a new member, it will be for reasons that aren't just non-objective; they're also inexpressible, whether by virtue of irrationality or taboo. High school girls intuitively understand cliques; they form a significant element of adolescent society.

Adults also form cliques. If you've ever heard someone speak of "the right sort of people," it's possible that he was concerned with prohibiting entry to his clique by the wrong sort of people. Ask him to define either "sort," and he'll award you a dismissive sneer, no more. After all, to ask such a question automatically tars you as someone who'd never understand the answer -- and therefore, one of the wrong sort!

Cliques might be unfortunate, but they also appear to be inevitable.

***

2. Tribalism in politics.

The Democrats are becoming ever more concerned about their prospects in November. Barack Hussein Obama, though notoriously averse to anything resembling actual work, has nevertheless extended himself sufficiently to attend a record number of fundraisers. What's notable about those fundraisers is the open tribalism of their attendances -- and the open pandering they receive from The Won.

Hm. I seem to recall that Obama once billed himself as a "uniter, not a divider." Well, politicians do gab rather freely during campaigns. All the same, the extent to which the 44th president has pursued a politics of division -- of inter-racial, inter-ethnic, inter-gender, and inter-economic strife -- can no longer be hidden. Obama is clearly attempting to harness tribal resentments and competitiveness over "the place at the trough."

Is it working? Of course, we won't actually know until November. But Obama's effort is itself significant. No politician since the days of Southern segregation has worked as hard to elicit fear, inter-tribal distrust, and rapacity for power over "the other" as an avenue toward personal prosperity and security. Apropos of which, do please remember that the Southern segregationists were Democrats.

In a speech of exceptional eloquence, Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) gives this tactic its starkest coloration. Senator Rubio, one of the leading lights among young Republican officeholders, plainly has a national future: if not in 2012, then in years to come.

***

3. Head of State.

Some media gaffes are simultaneously horrifying and hilarious:

HBO couldn’t save George W. Bush’s head, but it is working hard to save its own.

The cable network and the creators of fantasy series “Game of Thrones” issued apologies for using Bush’s face on a decapitated head during an episode.

“We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste,” HBO said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. “We made this clear to the executive producers of the series who apologized immediately for this inadvertent careless mistake. We are sorry this happened and will have it removed from any future DVD production.”

So far, so routine, eh? I mean, we all know that a mass media outlet would never deliberately insult a former president by using his severed head as a screen prop, right? After all, we've never seen John F. Kennedy's or Bill Clinton's severed heads, or any other identifiable body parts (never mind exactly who might be able to identify them, or how), in a TV production. But wait: there's more!

The appearance of Bush’s head on set was first disclosed in the DVD commentary for the episode. The series’ creators, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, said Bush’s likeness was used out of necessity rather than to make a political statement.... [Emphasis added]

“We can’t afford to have these [props] all made from scratch, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, so we rent them in bulk,” the creators said in a statement.

If you believe that self-exculpation, by the makers of a screen extravaganza budgeted for several years and many millions of dollars, I have a wonderful investment opportunity for you. No checks, please. Cash only. Small-denomination bills.

(Would someone on the Right please make a severed head of Barack Hussein Obama and send it to the producers of A Game of Thrones? They're so obviously hurting for cash, surely they'll appreciate the contribution. Yes, you can wait until after the election.)

Pieties

[This was first published at the long-lamented Palace Of Reason, on March 29. 2002]

A recent, tax-funded study, conducted by the Public Service Research Institute, dared to delve into the truth or falsity of the allegations that New Jersey State Troopers have been enforcing an unlegislated statute against Driving While Black. According to what I've read, the study was conducted with meticulous alertness for factors that might bias its results. It made use of impersonal, double-blind techniques at every stage of its processing. It was apparently a model of its kind, a showcase for the best statistical practices of the social sciences.

Unfortunately, the results of the study were:

• The troopers were not engaging in racial profiling when they stopped black drivers, because:
• Black drivers violate the motor vehicle laws disproportionately to their numbers. The disproportion is approximately 50%. That is, whereas blacks made up 16 percent of motorists on the New Jersey Turnpike, they accounted for 23 percent of the traffic stops and for 25 percent of the speeders. This verdict was rendered not by the troopers themselves, but by automated radar units and camera records.

Because the study both exonerates the troopers and indicts the most sensitive American racial group, the US Department of Justice has turned its face against it. The state of New Jersey refuses to release the study to the public. That didn't keep it from being reported by the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/21/nyregion/21TROO.html) -- and denounced by the NAACP.

The objections registered to this study ring hollow. They questioned methods that New Jersey authorities had approved enthusiastically before the study, and which logic indicates could not have biased the results. For example, of the 18,000 snapshots taken through windshields to identify the races of drivers, about one third had to be discarded due to excessive windshield glare. Obviously, this effect would not discriminate among the races, especially since the screeners making those decisions were not permitted to know whether the drivers at whose photos they were staring had been clocked above the speed limit.

Does the putative finding that blacks speed more than non-blacks (in New Jersey, at least) have any enduring social significance? Probably not. But the reactions against the study do.

Our society, animated by an enduring guilt about the enslavement and subsequent differential legal and social treatment of blacks, has elevated the notion of equality among the races to a piety: an assertion that demands homage, but which is unsupported by evidence, and is sustained entirely by faith.

One cannot challenge the pieties of a society without provoking condemnation or ostracism. To question a piety, even along its margins, is to ask to be thrown out of the church. This is an absolute that applies to all peoples and times.

Pieties have their dangers. The unquestioned belief, in late 17th Century France, that Catholics were morally superior to Huguenots allowed Louis XIV to revoke the Edict of Nantes, the decree of religious tolerance for the Protestant minority. The resulting mass emigration of Huguenots to Belgium weakened France severely, as the Huguenots were among the most industrious and educated persons of northern France. Indeed, part of the Catholic animosity toward them was that they worked on Sundays, and thus had a competitive edge over Catholics in business and commerce.

If we are in thrall to a piety contrary to the actual facts of our society, we are in danger too. The question is only of degree.

No decent person would gainsay the principle of equality before the law. It's the only sort of enforceable equality that doesn't violate the rights of Man. He who commits a crime by the written laws should face an impersonal juridical procedure and receive an impersonal sentence -- impersonal in the sense that they should take no account of anything about the accused other than what he did and the circumstances within which he did it. Plainly, we have departed from this simple, honorable standard in many ways. That doesn't vitiate the ideal.

Black-identity groups, which have grown powerful in recent years, have used the law to impose the equality-of-the-races piety on us whether we agree or not. This has led to a marked inequality of treatment of the races, with net benefits flowing coercively to blacks, in particular to politically active blacks, at the expense of whites and Asians. As a matter of justice, this situation is indistinguishable from apartheid and Jim Crow, except for the race of the beneficiaries.

If there are real, substantial differences among the races, whether in ability, civility, or willingness to conform to the law, this could be the death blow to our society.

The black-identity groups and their mouthpieces know this, of course. That's why the NAACP was so quick to condemn the traffic study. It's a chip in the iron wall around the piety. It invites people to think about what the NAACP's central cadre would prefer to remain unthinkable. With the piety for protection of their perquisites, they don't want to risk a collision with contrary objective evidence. Therefore, any study that suggests that blacks and non-blacks differ in anything but skin color is to be condemned out of hand, and suppressed entirely if possible.

It's not my intention to discuss the differences among the races here. I believe that there are some, though I also hold that, whatever any statistic might say about any group, each individual deserves to be dealt with according to his own merits. What upsets me is that we should so readily accede to the desires of organizations whose agenda is, quite baldly, to denigrate objective facts objectively gathered.

But this is of a piece with another American piety. Discomfiting others is near the top of our secular list of thou shalt nots. Adults aren't supposed to call other adults to account for incivility, or cite their character flaws to them even in private. A gentleman, the old code says, is one who never gives offense intentionally -- and whether we still adhere to the code in its full extent, that inhibition is firmly ingrained in white American society.

The race-hustlers are using our highest and best impulses against us. How long can it go on?

Standards And Elitism

The C.S.O. and I went to see Ridley Scott's new movie Prometheus just this past Sunday, and were blown away by it. If you haven't seen the movie, I shan't spoil it for you, but I must mention this: one of the subcurrents in the plot involves the Christian faith of protagonist Dr. Elizabeth Shaw.

The Prometheus expedition is an attempt to determine the source of Mankind -- the nature of our progenitors, if any. Dr. Shaw's great enthusiasm for the undertaking is founded, in large measure, on her faith. However, that aspect of the movie is handled very delicately: not as an afterthought, but rather as a subtle inducement to think about the nature of faith and the obstacles to expressing it in a militantly secular age.

In a comment I made to Andrew Klavan's brief review of Prometheus, I called it "a true piece of visual fiction for the thinking man." Well, apparently that was enough to set off another commenter, who riposted thus:

Insisting a movie is for "the thinking man" smacks of elitism....Science Fiction should be about educating the masses by asking the question in a way they understand, not obfuscating secret meanings in language only understood by a certain subculture.

I very nearly fell off my chair from laughter. Who but a total numbskull could proceed from an accusation of "elitism," a concept I'm certain he does not understand, to a statement about "educating the masses" -- ? But it did provide stimulus for an essay here at Liberty's Torch.

***

"Elitism" sounds vaguely sinister. It implies the exclusion of some, under certain circumstances at least, according to the preferences of others. But what is an elite? Are there different sorts of elite? Is it a completely subjective construct, or can an elite have objective significance?

I can think of at least two kinds of common elites:

• Elites based on tastes;
• Elites based on ability.

The former sort of elite is rather insubstantial. Anyone can affect a preference for this over that. It doesn't have to be sincere, as long as one can mouth the right sentiments at the right time...and not get caught indulging in one's true but contrary preferences, of course. So here we're discussing something that has no true boundaries, and thus no claim to objective import. It's also called snobbery.

The latter sort of elite will be populated by persons capable of a thing or things that outsiders cannot do. This is, in my view, a true elite, of the sort that's defensible on objective grounds. If we speak of a technique, such as masonry or prestidigitation, then the elite is actually a "guild" of sorts. If we speak of a cultivated virtuosity, such as great skill at commerce or with the sword, we'd simply emphasize the performance aspect. If we speak of an intellectual attainment, it will involve either demonstrable intelligence or a relevant credential.

(A tangent: Much fiction has been written about "fallen" elites that persist long after the members' supposed qualifications for membership have fallen into desuetude. If you've ever read a story in which the phrases "old money" and "nouveau riche" occur, you've read of that sort of elite. An excellent example is Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. There are others of that kind, of course.)

A true elite will possess objective standards for inclusion. Among those who aspire to admission but cannot meet the standard, there will be some who refuse to acknowledge that the shortcoming is theirs. Here's where the usual resentments against "elites" and "elitism" arise. It is those resentments that a charge of "elitism" normally expresses.

***

In The Hot Gate, the third installment in John Ringo's "Troy Rising" series, one of the critical plot points involves the resentment of a group of Latin American engineers and technicians on an orbital battlestation against the requirement that they...perform the duties of engineers and technicians on an orbital battlestation. Because the attitude is cultural rather than a matter of innate incapacity, it is correctable...but the persons involved are anything but willing to address it.

The consequences are dire for the nations of those involved: they're automatically excluded from the international military alliance to which the battlestation belongs. The announcement is delivered in a setting that leaves those nations' grandees no maneuvering room whatsoever. It's a wound to their pride that challenges their self-concept in a way they cannot evade. Worse, it couples to Latin resentment of "the gringo" that reaches well back into the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries.

But the defense of Earth against rapacious, aggressive, extremely well armed forces cannot make room for the pride of the Latins or their disdain for performing "menial" duties. As a general at the critical conference informs them with not a scintilla of salve for their egos, "If you do not meet the standard, then you do not meet the standard." Quod erat demonstrandum.

Standards are like that. Objective ones, anyway. Either you meet them, or you don't. If the standard exists for an important reason, it will not be relaxed simply to spare your feelings.

***

Each of us has standards of some sort, by which we choose our associates, our employers, and our other involvements. The process is bidirectional: those people and institutions have their own standards, which we must meet to be acceptable to them. Sometimes, Smith will find Jones entirely acceptable by his standards but fail to meet Jones's standards, reciprocally applied. Life is like that.

Those who dislike this simple fact tend to condemn it as "discrimination." That happens to be one of my favorite words; rescuing it from its common employment as a tool of derision is one of my passions.

To discriminate is merely to include or exclude according to a standard. If the standard is wholesome, so is the practice of discrimination. But try putting that across to someone who regards you as a dirty elitist.

What standards of yours, Gentle Reader, have you enforced against resistance and resentment from others? Have they responded by calling you an elitist? If so, how did you respond?

Nukes For Whom?

In all the foofaurauw over the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, what the United States can and should do to prevent it, and what Israel will need to do should it develop, the underlying question of what nation-states or similar entities should be permitted to possess nuclear weapons has been addressed only in the most superficial fashion.

Among the Anglospheric states, opinion appears to be solidly against allowing Iran's rulers to acquire weapons of mass destruction, which category includes nukes. The argument is essentially a single step: They're crazy, bloodthirsty Muslim fanatics. While I appreciate the simplicity of this argument and agree with its conclusion, it addresses only the single case of Iran, a terror-state ruled by a clique of insane Islamist mullahs and the slightly more secular "elected officials" that form its public face. We might apply the argument to other terror-states ruled by crazy Muslim clerics, but its usefulness would end there.

Indeed, it's unclear whether the larger question of whether any government should be allowed to possess nukes has ever been addressed. A government differs from a criminal organization only in its pretense of legitimacy. We tolerate such entities grudgingly at most; even the best of them are prone to abuses of power and oppression of their subjects.

But of course, ours is a world partitioned into nation-states, whose subjects rely upon them for protection from other nation-states. More, the laws of physics are an open book; the knowledge required to make fission bombs is widely dispersed, as is the engineering expertise. Therefore, as long as there are nation-states, a condition likely to persist beyond the foreseeable future, one or more will possess weapons of mass destruction, including the nuclear sort, if only to keep the other states at bay.

The question is too perilous to be addressed in a diplomatic fashion alone, as the Iranian problem has demonstrated. If some coalition of states reaches the conclusion that state X, which is approaching nuclear-club status, must be prevented from reaching its goal, those states must be prepared to use force to prevent it -- and the force required just might involve the use of nukes. "Jaw, jaw" might indeed be better than "war, war" most of the time, but negotiation unsupported by the readiness, willingness, and ability to use force is pointless. When the subject is nuclear weapons, the degree of resolve demanded is higher than for any other imaginable subject.

At this time, there are several nations in the nuclear club that most Americans would prefer not to have seats there:

• Russia
• Red China
• Pakistan
• India

The first three of the above states are unfree and anti-democratic; India, despite its representations, is a question mark. All by itself, the questionable legitimacy of those governments, judged according to American norms, casts a shadow over their possession of nuclear arms.

But is the legitimacy of a state, according to some standard, the best guide to whether it ought to be allowed nukes? Legitimacy has worn many masks over the years. The contemporary conception of legitimacy as the consent of the governed, expressed and regulated by elections, is a considerable departure from that of past eras.

I would prefer a standard based on the ability of the subject population to overthrow the government. If we are prepared to assume that most people in most nations are sane, that would constitute a better check on a government's aggressiveness than the dubious willingness of other governments to restrain it. But there are problems here as well.

At this time, very few nation-states fully respect the individual's right to own weapons. Even here in the United States, there are numerous restrictions on gun ownership, to say nothing of more effective weapons. But it's still the case that, were a popular uprising to commence, the federal government would be unable to put it down. Americans are sufficiently well armed to enforce the expulsion of our political class, should it ever slide low enough in our esteem.

I can think of only one other nuclear-armed state where that holds true. Our nuclear-armed NATO allies Britain and France have some of the world's most draconian anti-firearms laws. The four nuclear states named earlier are just as harsh toward private armament. Only Israel, one of the most completely armed societies in world history, appears capable of evicting its rulers should the popular demand for it arise.

So: In the other nuclear-club states, should a cadre of villains with serious expansionist aims come to power, the populace at large could do nothing about it. Should that state possess nukes, it would be the task of other nuclear-club states to restrain it. Given the general enervation of American geopolitical assertiveness, it's hard to imagine that we would make an adequate effort. It's even harder to imagine Britain or France doing so.

It's a frightening portrait of the world, both as it currently stands and as it's likely to develop. It bodes terrifyingly for the future, especially as regards the political and religious storms now sweeping across the Middle East.

Maybe it's time to get back to work on my starship.

Everything But The Relevant Facts Dept.

Since I'm a software engineer, you'd expect me to be alert to developments and trends in that field. You'd be wrong.

When it comes to the extremely faddish field of computer science, I'm a "late adopter." I have work to do, inadequate time to do it, and more demands on my attention than you might imagine. Keeping current with glamorous, strongly touted new offerings -- I call them "brights-and-shinies" -- is typically too time-consuming to be compatible with my obligations.

Alongside that, I'm economically minded. My time is a scarce resource. I spend it carefully, and only when I can get something for it that's worth the expenditure. The myriad fads and fascinations of others in this field, some of whom apparently have more free time than is good for them, usually trail off into the weeds without offering a positive return on investment.

Which is why I read this Wired article with a dismissive chuckle:

At Princeton and the University of California at Berkeley, two researchers are trying to shed some light on why some programming languages hit the big time but most others don't. In what they call a "side project," Leo Meyerovich and Ari Rabkin have polled tens of thousands of programmers, and they're combing through over 300,000 computing projects at the popular code repository SourceForge — all in an effort to determine why old languages still reign supreme.

"Why have we not been reliably able to improve on C?" Rabkin asks. In the thirty-five years since C was popularized, there have been enormous leaps in the design of software and operating systems, he says. But although C has been beefed up and other new languages have been very successful during that time, C is still a mainstay.

Yes, and why do cars still incorporate steering wheels, accelerator pedals, and brake pedals? The article does make some interesting observations, but it hits the grandest of all clinkers with this:

Most programmers learn three to four languages, the researchers say, but then stop. "Over time, you'd expect that as developers get older, they'd get more wisdom; they'd learn more languages," Meyerovich says. "We've found that's not true. They plateau."

Part of the problem is that by the time they hit 35 to 40 years old, they're often moving from hands-on coding to managing other programmers. At that point, there's little motivation to learn and implement new languages.

Those "researchers" should study humility. Perhaps they might stand before a mirror for fifteen minutes each day, and practice saying, "It's not you, it's me," until they can at least make it sound sincere.

Though I do have supervisory responsibilities, I'm still hands-on; I still participate in my group's undertakings as a senior technologist. If these "researchers" were to ask me why I haven't troubled to learn C#, or Ruby, or Python, or whatever the hot language fad is just now, I could tell them in a single sentence: They're irrelevant to my problem domain.

My group's problem domain is real-time simulation. For that domain, nothing has come along that bests C++ and the available supports for it. There are other domains, some of which are more efficiently addressed with other languages and support systems. (I wouldn't dream of addressing a database problem or an artificial-intelligence project with C++.) A good engineer strives always to use the right tool for the job before him.

No doubt there are clever fellows working on a spiffy new language that does address the real-time domain. Perhaps I'll hear about it soon. But I still won't rush to embrace it. A good engineer doesn't adopt an unproven technology for dollars-and-cents work; he waits until those too-much-time-on-their-hands types can show him how their bright-and-shiny really supersedes his older tools. To do that, they must address four principally nontechnological considerations:

• The weight of legacy maintenance;
• The writing-off of prior (intellectual) investment;
• The front-loaded expenditure of money and time required by the new tool;
• Network effects.

These are all economic considerations. Even network effects are about economics rather than technology: they arise from the mass adoption of a technology, such that the size of the user community itself becomes an asset to its individual users. The Department of Defense discovered the importance of network effects with its abortive, highly expensive attempt to impose a new programming language, Ada, upon the defense industry. Today, DoD strongly recommends the use of C++ in new embedded systems.

When a tool is developed with a well-defined problem domain in mind, it can be successful -- if it truly offers its prospective users a way of solving their problems that's superior, not just from a technological standpoint, but from the broader economic perspective. But IBM's PL/I disaster -- its attempt to obsolete all other programming languages with its language PL/I -- should make it clear that there's no such thing as a tool that applies to every kind of problem. Even an attempt to address two disconnected domains with one tool usually produces an unsatisfactory compromise, which is why I don't reach for my Leatherman Multi-Tool when my regular toolbox is within range.

Researchers of the sort quoted in the Wired article seem to miss those points far more often than not -- and then prattle about their superior "wisdom" while utterly unable to explain the contrary decisions of others. Well, perhaps that's inherent in the mindset one must adopt to deem oneself a "researcher." Now if you'll excuse me, a forty-foot oak tree fell across my fence last night, and it's time I went out back and disposed of it. I'm all ready for the challenge; I've got my Swiss Army knife right here in my hand.

The Food Chain: For Corpus Christi Sunday

We who believe often speak of the need to "grow in faith." I've never been certain exactly what that means. But as time has passed, my own faith has become ever more important to me: not as a comfort against the certainty of bodily death, and not as some sort of confirmation of my own superiority, but rather as a unifying set of premises that allow the universe, and human life within it, to make sense.

This is critical for one overriding reason: the incoherence of every other religion Man has ever practiced with the observable laws of Nature in action around us.

Today being Corpus Christi Sunday -- a holy day celebrated much more enthusiastically and demonstrably in Latin countries than in us of the AngloSphere -- allow me to reprise an old favorite from Eternity Road.

---

The most fundamental of all relations among living things is the food relation. For any two species, which one can eat the other, either in theory or in practice, determines just about everything else about their interactions.

This might seem a little fuzzy in certain cases. Beyond question, a dog can kill and eat a man. The same is true for the Portuguese Man O' War. But how often does it happen? Yet there are millions of people in various parts of the world for whom dog or jellyfish is a regular part of their diets. (You can stop shuddering now.) In the usual case, Man is considered the eater and these other species the eaten.

Thus, a brief exploration of the food chain.

Man has been an eater for a lot longer than he's been a builder of civilizations. His career as a hunter has established him as the world champion at that contest. His development of systematic agriculture demonstrated that his hegemony extends equally well to the plant kingdom. By all measures, he's at the pinnacle of the food chain. He eats whatever he wishes, and only in the rarest of cases does any other species eat him.

The centrality of food relations to Earth's biosystem is so obvious that we're all but unaware of it. Two of the more significant but less frequently pondered manifestations of the thing can be found in our nightmares and our rites of worship and propitiation.

Almost as soon as men began to compose tales for one another's entertainment, they invented creatures with power to hunt, kill, and eat human beings. Vampires, ghouls, and werewolves are items of fantasy, traditional terrors that have been invoked in horror tales for many centuries. Yet what is it that makes them so terrifying? Not that they can kill men, for far lesser creatures can do that, if they get the breaks. No, their ability to frighten comes from their greater-than-human hunting ability, and their view of men as food.

There's nothing that terrifies like the prospect of being eaten. Men have gone into battle against other men under conditions that virtually guaranteed their deaths, yet they've often gone willingly, sometimes even eagerly. They still do. But no man can face the prospect of becoming an entree for a greater creature without quaking in fear.

Mess with a man's assumptions about the food chain and you upend his whole concept of himself as a man.

On the other side, there are human practices with relation to their concepts of divinity. Divinities -- gods -- are by definition superior to men. Yet their participation in the life of Man is not categorically predatory, even in those creeds which place evil gods on an equal par with good ones, and see the history of the world as a struggle between equally matched forces of light and darkness in which humans are less than pawns. In our attempts to win the favor of the gods, and on occasion to avert their wrath, men have traditionally offered sacrifices to them. Those sacrifices have almost always been food.

Contemplate the nature of ritual sacrifice for a moment. What's offered to the god being propitiated is something valuable to men: creatures men had to hunt or cultivate, whose substance could nourish and sustain human life. Yet it is deliberately removed from the human economy, usually by burning, in the attempt to convey to the god the sense that we acknowledge his superiority to us. By denying themselves the consumption of the offered food and instead offering it to the god, the sacrificers make plain that they submit themselves to him. Metaphorically, the sacrificed items are substitutes for human bodies: pleadings that the shamans and their congregants not be eaten.

The Biblical story of God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, and Abraham's readiness to obey, is terrifying and exalting for that reason. On the one hand, the God of the Old Testament was not perceived even by His Chosen People, of whom Abraham was the progenitor, as being so intrinsically kindly disposed toward Man that He would never, ever demand such a sacrifice. Moreover, His power was such that there was no question that He could enforce His will in such a matter, and much worse besides. On the other hand, God intervened at the last instant to prevent the sacrifice, having established to His satisfaction that Abraham submitted entirely to His will. Thus, the pact between God and the children of Abraham -- the Jewish people -- was sealed as one of guidance and beneficence from above in exchange for worship and obedience from below. God did not intend to eat His people.

***

Clearly, the food relation is a superiority / inferiority relation. He who eats is the stronger, who can have his will in all things. He who is eaten is the weaker, who must prostrate himself before the other in the hope of benevolence or mercy.

Men, the highest of the creatures of this world, do not eat one another, except in the most extraordinary circumstances. Those micro-societies that have practiced cannibalism have extinguished themselves thereby -- there are some very nasty diseases, with fatality rates approaching 100%, that arise from cannibalism -- or have been humbled and re-educated by more civilized, more insightful peoples. We have attained enough insight into moral matters, and most particularly into the fundamental equality of rights all men should enjoy, to regard cannibalism with appropriate horror.

But we still tell, and shudder over, stories of powerful, inhuman creatures that hunger for human flesh and blood. Vampire legends make up a healthy fraction of our fantastic literature. When we figure in the werewolf, the ghoul, and the occasional extraterrestrial who regards us as haute cuisine, we've covered the overwhelming majority of our scare stories. That's how fundamental the food relation is to our view of our place in the natural world.

There aren't many religious sects in the modern world that still practice the old form of ritual sacrifice, in which a food item -- usually an animal -- is offered up to a god in hopes of winning his favor or pardon. The devotees of Santeria do it, now and then, as do the practitioners of voudoun. But these are meager survivals of old, animistic-pagan creeds. Their adherents are few and will probably never be many.

However, a form of sacrifice still characterizes the most important religious rite in the world. Its devotees number in the billions. They partake of this sacrifice at every opportunity; to them, it is the highest a living man can rise in communion with God. And most curiously of all, it is a bidirectional sacrifice, the only such ever celebrated in all the eons of Man.

I speak, of course, of the Miracle of Transubstantiation in the Christian Eucharist.

In the days of Christ, the ritual sacrifice of food animals at the Temple in Jerusalem was still the preeminent religious rite in the classical world. The Hebrews regarded those sacrifices as God's due for extending His protection over them as His Chosen People. Indeed, according to the Book of Exodus, such sacrifices were ordained by God Himself, as He gave the Ten Commandments to Moses. The Jews of that time considered them the only truly complete act of religious devotion.

Christ upended their world by inverting the food chain. No more would they give up their sustenance in propitiation of the divine will. Henceforward, it would be the other way around: the Son of God would be the Sacrifice, and His people would partake.

From the Gospel According To John:

"I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."

The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" So Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever." [John 6:48-58]

The rite of the Eucharist, in commemoration of the Last Supper, offers bread and wine to God and prays that they might be found acceptable. In response to this humble offering, and in fulfillment of Christ's promise, through the celebrant-priest He works the Transubstantiation, which allows the form of the bread and wine to remain as they are, but converts their substance into the body and blood of Christ. At each Mass, a traditional sacrifice of food to God is met with a renewal of the offering of Christ's body and blood to the world, for the remission of sin and as a perpetual grant of His grace to all who will accept it.

No other creed has anything to compare with the Eucharist. Nor could any conceivable rite, however elaborately crusted with mystery or symbolism, approach the stunning power of God Himself, in the Person of His Son, offering Himself as food to lowly Man.

He could eat us all. Instead He offers Himself as food, that we may remember His Sacrifice for us, and draw as close to Him as mortal creatures can get while still in this world.

Today is the Sunday ordained for the celebration of the Body and Blood of Christ, the Sacrifice beyond all others, that no offering by mortal men could ever equal. The proof that the food chain is not God's manacle about our hands. The unanswerable refutation of those who insist that a malevolent power bestrides the universe. The ironclad guarantee that we are not to be eaten, but to be fed.

---

And may God bless and keep you all.

Payment Plans

The longer I've pondered it, the more firmly I've concluded that the principal economic ailment of American society is the installment plan.

Shocked? I shouldn't wonder. What fraction of your house and car do you own?

Grab a fresh cup of coffee and get comfy. There's a lot to talk about this morning.

***

If you were one of the regular readers of Eternity Road of loving memory, you might remember my friend Duyen, who was a contributor there for a little while. Duyen is the most remarkable person I've ever known. She's a true genius, a person of great moral courage, a helpful friend, and a perfect citizen. She's proved all of that repeatedly, just by confronting the many daunting challenges before her and wrestling them into submission. Yet even with all that I've learned about her over the twenty-plus years we've known one another, she can still surprise me with an unexpected bit of insight or a veering analysis that eluded me completely.

When last we spoke, I was in exceedingly good spirits for a reason many Gentle Readers would find equally pleasing: I had at long last paid off my mortgage. Three decades spent carrying a mortgage can make it seem eternal, one of the facts of life from which there's no escape. But as with many other burdens, a sufficient degree of perseverance can bring it to an end. ("And there was much rejoicing.")

When I told Duyen, she congratulated me, of course, but there was an undertone to her words that invited a longer discussion. So I probed for it:

DK: I know Americans see mortgages as natural, but after my experience in Queens I'll never head into that mess again.
FWP: Hm? Why not?
DK: Come on, Flashy. After thirty years of wearing that ball and chain, do you really think it was a good thing?
FWP: How else could I have afforded my home?
DK: Have you ever added up how much you paid for it?
FWP: Several times, dear.
DK: Did you include property taxes, maintenance, upkeep, care of your grounds, all that?
FWP: No.
DK: But I'll bet it still came to several times the nominal purchase price.
FWP: Well, yes. But the alternative was to rent, and my wife was absolutely set on having this place.
DK: She left you three years later, didn't she? Pardon me for saying so, but that doesn't make it sound like a good investment.

As usual, my diminutive Vietnamese-American sweetie was dead on target. I simply didn't want to admit it. I've never wanted to admit it.

High intelligence is a wonderful tool. I must remember to use it more often in the years I have left.

***

Among the ornaments of the Blogosphere, I particularly prize Charles Hill of Dustbury:

"What do we want?" began the Sixties chant. It was followed by naming That Which Is Wanted, and then "When do we want it?" Invariably, the answer was Now. (It took four decades and change to subvert that premise properly: this was the result.) One of the stereotypes of the Baby Boomer generation, apart from their being involved in Sixties chants, is that they have absolutely no concept of delayed gratification: they want it Now, and by Now, they mean it should have been delivered already, and why are you even asking about this? As with most stereotypes, there's a kernel of truth underneath several layers of horsepuckey: we concede that some things are timeless, but for everything else, there's MasterCard.

I need hardly point out that strict adherence to this policy has put the nation nearly sixteen trillion dollars in debt, with many more trillions promised as "entitlements" somewhere down the pike. And I would be remiss if I didn't point out that my own use of this dubious technique has played hell with my own cash flow, though I have taken steps to put my financial house in order, something Washington isn't about to do if there's any possible way to avoid it.

Hard sense with just a drop of jaundice: exactly what I've come to expect from Charles, whose emissions over the decade I've followed him have always exhibited both, in precisely the right proportion. The natural consequence of the inability to delay the gratification of one's desires is the adoption of a loot-the-future mentality: the installment plan. "Buy Now, Pay Later!" "No Money Down!" "Easy Terms!" As Americans have slipped away from the frugal ways of our more distant forebears, we've taken to living an ever greater fraction of our lives on credit. The attractions of having what we want immediately while deferring its cost to the remote future have overwhelmed our good sense. We forgot about the dark side of compound interest. ("The eighth wonder of the world" -- Baron Philippe de Rothschild)

The syndrome is pandemic. Installment plans abound. Loans are easy to get; why, the banks are practically forcing them on people. Retailers are doing it too. Look how low the interest rates have fallen! Anyway, you have lots of credit cards, don't you? It's become a rare thing to hear someone say, firmly and sincerely, "I can't afford that." (In one of the supreme ironies of our time, the speaker is usually quite wealthy.)

The installment-plan orientation causes us to overlook the true cost of our gratifications. Worse, it erodes, and eventually destroys, budgetary discipline. As discipline is a unitary mindset in most persons, other personal disciplines tend to erode right along with it.

***

The United States government, and a goodly number of the state and municipal governments, have also been living on credit. A significant fraction of contemporary political controversy arises from that fact in isolation from all else. But wait: there's more! The indulgences made possible by government borrowing have conditioned special interests to believe that any demand for government expenditure can be met immediately. Of course, this means that the full costs will land upon our posterity, but who gives a damn about them?

I can't be certain which is the chicken and which is the egg; possibly no one can. But it doesn't matter nearly as much as the synergy between governmental profligacy and the individualized version we've been seduced into embracing. Why can't we have it now? What do you mean, there's no money for it? There always was before!

Add the power of envy, so ably stoked by today's practitioners of political division, and the tendency of politicians to give in to such demands becomes easy to understand. They won't be paying the bills, and they have elections to win.

Our minor children and unborn grandchildren don't get to vote on today's decisions. It's easy to ignore what they might say about them, were they able to express their opinions.

If there's a silver lining to today's federal debt and entitlements crises, it's that the consequences of our profligacy to date have made it impossible for many Americans to accept that the practices of the past can continue indefinitely into the future. The future looms all too near.

***

A. E. Van Vogt, in his "Weapon Shops" stories, wrote that "People always get the government they want." That might not be strictly true. However, I think it's defensible to say that a people will reliably get the government it deserves...even if it has to overthrow a decent, frugal government to do so. Ask the Argentineans.

Governmental financial prudence cannot be attained by a people who fail to practice personal financial prudence. The correlation isn't accidental; it stems from the most powerful, most automatic of our impulses. Until we become accustomed to telling ourselves that we must wait until we can pay cash for what we want, Washington will continue to borrow against the earnings of notional future taxpayers. Since the lender of last resort is the Federal Reserve Bank, which creates new money with which to purchase Treasury bills, this will weaken the dollar ever closer to the wastepaper point.

I don't see us righting ourselves in what remains of my life, and not for the first time, I'm grateful that that's not many more years. But I fear for my stepdaughters and their as-yet-unconceived children. If we don't swiftly correct our spendthrift ways and learn to eschew the payment plans -- individual and governmental -- this country and its people will have a very bleak future. Our financial bondage will lock us into both personal and political fetters; our bills will come due both in dollars and in lost liberty.

Thoughts?

The Sovereign Power Of Indifference

Consider the following schematic for a brief political exchange:

Speaker 1: [Orates at length about some "cause" he deems important]
Speaker 2: Tell me, are you one of these supposedly downtrodden types, or are you trying to persuade me that I am?
Speaker 1: Well, uh...neither, actually. But--
Speaker 2: Stop right there. So, by your own admission, this cause of yours is personally irrelevant to both of us.
Speaker 1: Yes, but we're more fortunate than--
Speaker 2: Excuse me. You've already made your pitch. But you're not asking me to help you, and you're not asking me to help me, so why should I care?
Speaker 1: But the welfare of a lot of people--
Speaker 2: A group that includes neither you nor me.
Speaker 1: But don't you care about--
Speaker 2: Emphatically no. I care about myself, my family, my friends, my obligations, and my future. Beyond those boundaries, I don't give even half a damn.
Speaker 1: [draws himself up haughtily] Well, some people--
Speaker 2: Are better than that? By your standards, perhaps. Not mine. You know what? If I were a member of that group you claim to be so concerned about, I'd prefer that you not care about me. You and every other busybody who agrees with you. Because your sort have never done more good than harm. So do the world a favor and care less.

Speaker 2 in the above is what the typical left-liberal Cause Person -- e.g., Speaker 1 -- would call "a typical conservative, concerned only for himself." I have come to the conclusion that his is exactly the right attitude to wield against the self-serving, self-glorifying, would-be do-gooders that infest the political landscape:

• They're intrusive beyond endurance;
• They wear an air of moral superiority founded on how much they "care;"
• They think we need to be "re-educated" or have our "awareness" raised;
• Most damning of all, they don't really "do good."

Tell them, in exactly those words, that you don't care. Be as blunt as possible about it, to the point of being personally offensive.

Would you be lying? Even a little?

***

No doubt you've heard the term compassion fatigue. It first entered our sociopolitical lexicon in the Eighties, when the relentless demands of the New Deal and Great Society social-engineers finally jarred a good many Americans into a pattern of rejection against government meliorism. The underlying idea was that we'd been worn out by the unending stream of attempts to prick our consciences into action on behalf of unnamed others. We simply couldn't bring ourselves to care about any more causes, any more supposed victims of injustice, or any more casualties of the uncaring Fates. It was a useful phrase that expressed a useful idea, but like many political catchphrases, it was partially fallacious.

We weren't fatigued. Not most of us. We were irritated.

A man's proper concerns are with his own objectives and obligations. Even should he elect to go beyond that sphere, it must come first. A barrage of demands that he go so far beyond it that he's impeded in attending to it will either cripple him or evoke hostility from him. But the social engineers and do-gooders of that era didn't realize that. They pressed us far beyond what we were willing to bear.

The Reagan Administration was in part an expression of our irritation over being so beleaguered by the do-gooders. It hardly mattered whether we believed, individually, that the "causes" were mainly good ones that deserved attention. We'd had enough; we were depleted of the energy and emotion required to maintain our own nests; we had to withdraw into our shells and let the world beyond them see to its own needs.

Unfortunately, Reagan and his advisors were never willing to frame the matter quite that way. Instead, they concentrated on federal overspending and, to a lesser extent, over-regulation. The do-gooders never got the stinging rebuke they deserved for their merciless relentlessness, which so many Americans ardently wanted to see them receive.

We shall pass in silence over what fraction of the do-gooders were motivated by true charity or the sense of injustice. We shall pass in silence over which "causes" were fact-based and genuinely deserved redress. Those things were irrelevant to the irritation and resentment they evoked with their unending demands that we engage with one "cause" after another.

It seemed, for a little while, that the meliorists had drawn the moral from Americans' massive withdrawal from "causes." But they were back with a vengeance, as relentlessly demanding as before, when the Clinton years arrived.

And they are upon us today.

***

The typical American of middle-class means engages in a modest degree of charity. Sometimes his neighbors know about it; sometimes they don't. One of my purposes in this screed is to make the case for anonymity in one's eleemosynary activities. This idea rests upon more than one foundation:

Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly. [The Gospel According To Matthew, 6:1-4]

Beyond Christ's explicit exhortation (and subordinate to it) is this:

It's for the best that any object of charity know that he's one such, but not know to whom he owes thanks for the beneficences he receives.

If the reason for this isn't pellucidly obvious, take a few moments to think about the dynamics involved in not knowing whose expectations you have to meet to continue to appear to him to be worthy of his largesse. Jesus of Nazareth would not have told us to conduct ourselves in a manner that disserves social utility and harmony!

(Yes, this also militates against involvement with uncritical charitable organizations, which depersonalize benevolence and give without monitoring the consequences of their giving. But you've heard me rant about that many times before.)

Concerning other sorts of "causes" -- i.e., campaigns for tolerating this, legalizing that, or demonizing some third thing -- it's equally wise to be publicly indifferent. This is completely independent of how you feel about the matter privately. Public engagement in a "cause" tends to be "noisy," to evoke reactions from those around you that, on net balance, would degrade your social space, and can cause your friends and acquaintances to recharacterize you in a fashion both monochromatic and unkind. These things cannot help but affect the persons you love, as well.

***

Quadrennial election years are boom time for Cause People. They're never quite as thick on the ground as during a presidential election. They're aware that their chance of attracting some pandering from a candidate is greatest at this time. To augment that chance, they seek to rope as many persons as possible into signing petitions, participating in polls, attending rallies and demonstrations, and so forth. They need as many sheep as they can gather into their flock.

Don't be a sheep. Don't agree to be counted among them. Be better than that: be someone whose concerns are closely held and whose responsibilities are discharged as privately as possible.

Politicians, ever desirous of securing the largest support base possible, kowtow to Cause People with a shameful predictability.

Don't be a politician. Be better than that: be someone who wants nothing from anyone except to be left alone to tend your own garden and enjoy what you've justly and honorably earned.

Don't be a Cause Person, and don't be one of their victims.
Whatever your true concerns, keep them to yourself, in word and in deed.
Maintain a respectable public attitude of total indifference.
Be a self-sufficient, self-contained, sovereign individual.
Be an American.

Mob Metastases

Yes, yes, I know this is supposed to be a Day of Blogging Silence, to "protest" Brett Kimberlin and his ilk and the tactics they've deployed against anyone who dares to speak of their thuggery, but I've never been enamored of silence as a tactic of protest. I write when, where, and what I please. Let him silence me who can. No one has succeeded yet.

By now, I hope you've viewed the "Democracy died tonight" video sniveler and formed an appropriately contemptuous opinion of him. I doubt he could better articulate what so distresses him even if he were given a month to prepare his response. That's because he shares a malady that's becoming ever more common among our people: He's both highly suggestible and profoundly stupid.

We tolerate quite a lot of both failings in our young folks. Indeed, suggestibility is a trait our educrats prize highly; the government-run schools regard a youngling of independent mind as a troublemaker. It's all about "legitimate authority," you see -- and the preference of our political masters and their allegiants that the "legitimacy" of their "authority" never be questioned.

Unfortunately for them, they've painted themselves into a corner, at least as regards this matter of "democracy."

The Wisconsin recall elections are an excellent case for study. Why is our social-fascist / government-worshipping class so exercised about these elections? Because the results went against their preferences. How did that happen? More voters voted against them than for them. Why? Because Wisconsin voters preferred it that way, by a majority sufficient to overcome the unions, their "organizers," and the flood of outside money and labor that propelled the recall effort.

Oh dear, I've committed a mortal sin, haven't I? I've mentioned that the Left's efforts were largely propelled by outside contributions! We're not supposed to mention the sins of the Disloyal Opposition. It's just not done. But sauce for the goose and all that, inasmuch as they continue to claim that they were outspent 7 or 8 to 1, and that a lot of the money contributed to support Scott Walker, Rebecca Kleefisch, and the targeted Republican state senators came from outside Wisconsin.

So: Nostra culpa. Nostra culpa. Nostra maxima fucking culpa. Sit on it and rotate counterclockwise, Leftist thugs. You were perfectly happy to "nationalize" the Wisconsin recalls for your own purposes. You were overjoyed that unions with national organizations were willing to contribute money and volunteers to your undertaking. You just resent that you got outvoted.

But that's "democracy," isn't it? Or are you prepared to say "not when it goes against us" -- ?

***

"Democracy" has often been equated to mob rule. The charge has some substance. A mob that commands a local majority, and is unrestrained by any concept of rights, is about as democratic a form of "rule" as you can get. (For the purposes of this tirade, we shall omit consideration of a "mob" that constitutes a majority of all of Mankind, though that's among the Left's wetter wet dreams.) But as has been said about as often, the United States is not a democracy; it's a federal republic, whose states are guaranteed a "republican form of government" by Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution of the United States.

A republic is a polity whose government concerns itself with the rei publicae -- that is, the "public affairs" of the nation -- and nothing else. Those matters must be spelled out explicitly in a constitution; otherwise, the State will happily claim ever greater scope, ultimately translating "public matters" into all matters, as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is even now attempting to do. If you like that sort of tyranny-of-supposedly-good-intentions, you're welcome to it, but you and I have nothing further to say to one another.

Republics usually have representative governments. Those representatives are usually chosen through a democratic process: some sort of election. Such elections may be regularly scheduled, or they may be contingent on particular events. But however the State's powers and other mechanisms are defined, neither the elected representatives nor their appointees nor their hirelings are thereby empowered to go beyond the sphere defined for them in the applicable constitution or charter; that would undo the concept of a republic.

The Left dislikes republics. In truth, the Left also dislikes democracy, except as a sometimes handy rhetorical bludgeon. What the Left would prefer, given its druthers, is uninterrupted, unlimited rule by the Left.

In the United States, with its republican constitutional order and its tradition of regular elections, the Left can only achieve its dream through the mob.

***

A mob need not constitute a majority of any sort to be politically effective. Hitler's supporters in the pre-Third Reich period were not a majority. Neither were Lenin's in the pre-Soviet years. But both groups were exceptionally militant and energetic.

We've had periods of mob rule, actual and attempted, in parts of this country. The Huey Long years in Louisiana are a good example. More recently, the Occupy mobs have attempted to impose their wills on the locales they afflicted. But Wisconsin is probably the best case study of all.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of unions in the Wisconsin contretemps. The limitation of their collective bargaining privileges and the removal of their power to compel government employees to pay union dues were the reasons for the uproar. In attempting to punish Scott Walker and the legislators who had done that, Wisconsin's government-employee unions appealed to every other union in the country for assistance -- and they got it. Union money poured into the recall effort from all over America; union agitators, organizers, and protestors were bused into the state throughout the campaign. It was among the largest ad hoc mobs formed in the history of American politics.

It didn't succeed, which gave us the "Democracy died tonight" video sniveler and those who agree with him. But if Wisconsinites and Americans generally were more cognizant of the dissonance between republican government and that sort of mob uprising, it wouldn't have come nearly as close as it did.

As Louis Nizer wrote, defeat is education. (If you prefer Orson Scott Card's formulation, "Your enemy is your teacher.") The Left will draw an important lesson from its Wisconsin defeats. The lesson will not be that it can't win.

At the next iteration of mob tactics, there will be more violence. It will be more widespread, more personal, and more destructive. And "democracy," the Left's rhetorical ideal, will have even less to do with it.

Beware.

Americans

By now, you've seen the video of the weeping "Democracy died tonight" jackass, inconsolable because the union-backed and promoted attempt to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker didn't turn out the way he preferred. But just in case you haven't:

No doubt you find it as disgusting and contemptible as I do. No doubt you'd be marginally embarrassed to admit to a Martian that you and the sniveler belong to the same species. But worse would be any notion that the two of you share your conceptions of justice or "democracy," the shibboleth-word the Left thinks can be used to bludgeon us into bending to its will.

I have only one question for you, and I suggest you take your time over it:

Why?

***

The recall election was about a transfer program disguised as a labor agreement. Under that program, Wisconsin taxpayers would transfer ever more of their justly earned incomes to government employees, in the form of salaries, pensions, and noncash benefits, regardless of any objective need, any performance measures, and indeed, any actual performance on the part of those government employees. Governor Walker and the GOP-dominated Wisconsin legislature succeeded in enacting modest corrections to that program:

• They curbed public-employee unions' collective bargaining privileges;
• They ended mandatory union-dues-collection by Wisconsin for those unions;
• They compelled those employees to contribute to the funding of their pensions;
• They compelled those employees to accept a larger share of the cost of their health care insurance.

That's what had the Left up in arms. The unions are the muscle of the Left. They've been instrumental in every intimidation tactic the Left has wielded against Americans' freedom this century past. They enjoy special privileges no other institution in America possesses. And they have contributed materially to the conquest and subsequent ruination of America's cities, by putting their clout to the service of political racialists and redistributionists and elevating them to power. The government-employee unions have been particularly significant in these regards, by pressing relentlessly for increases in the size, scope, and cost of state and municipal governments.

Without the unions, the Left's gains in political power would have been far more modest.

But not enough persons actually grasp the magnitude of unions' influence on America's decline. Ask a hundred randomly selected persons whether unions are a good thing or a bad one, and the balance of answers is likely to favor unionism...because after all, we wouldn't want those heartless plutocrat capitalists in their top hats to run roughshod over poor defenseless workers, now would we?

A union is a device for coercing employers into paying more for labor than the market would normally bear. It's a transfer program in its own right, backed by two important federal laws passed under Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Wagner Act and the Norris-LaGuardia Act. Look 'em up.

A union markets its "services" solely by coercion. If you've heard the phrase "card check" but have wondered why there's so much emotion attached to the debate over it, that's the reason.

So our video sniveler was upset that a group of overtly oppressive, coercive forces, whose major effect is to extort employers and incidentally to reduce the number of persons working in particular occupations, failed to overturn the elections of men who acted to reduce their power. That's what he meant in saying that "democracy died tonight."

Let's imagine that you style yourself an American. I certainly hope you do, but for current purposes let's stipulate it. Does our video sniveler deserve the same appellation?

***

An American is supposed to be a free, self-reliant person of independent judgment. His freedom is assumed from the protection of his rights afforded by the Constitution of the United States and the subordinate constitutions and charters of the states, counties, and municipalities. His self-reliance is assumed from the freedom of the markets in which he works and vends the products of his labor. His independent judgment is assumed by the democratic process by which he chooses his representatives and (in some states) can initiate or pass on legislation.

An American is not supposed to rely on a gang with special privileges, whose members routinely use violence, fraud, and intimidation, for his latitude, his opinions, or his daily bread.

But according to the video sniveler, "democracy died tonight" because exactly such a gang, which openly used violence, intimidation, lies, and vandalism in its attempts to thwart the Wisconsin legislature, failed to exact retribution from the legislators and executives who stood in its way.

You must make a choice.
You must prepare to announce that choice widely.
You must also prepare to act on that choice, in every appropriate venue.
It's really quite simple, an either-or proposition that admits of no ambiguity:

Are you an American, or is he?

Think about it, if you must.

Wishin'...And Hopin'...And Prayin'

...are what an awful lot of folks are doin' this morning, now that the Wisconsin recall election is behind us.

The Left is straining to believe that it was defeated by something other than the genuine sentiments of ordinary voters. Leftists simply cannot abandon their creed; it's the bedrock of their self-concept, the foundation that keeps their assumptions of moral and intellectual superiority from sinking into their fever swamp. So they have to believe that Governor Walker, Lieutenant-Governor Kleefisch, and the four targeted GOP state senators were kept in office by chicanery of some sort -- probably interference by the evil Koch brothers. Drugs are often useful in creating and preserving such a fantasy.

The Right is equally eager to believe that Wisconsin is a harbinger of things to come in November. As a libertarian-conservative, I'd very much like this to be true. However, a little realism wouldn't be misplaced here:

• This was a state-level contretemps into which large amounts of out-of-state money and effort were injected by partisans on both sides;
• The recall effort was clearly mounted out of a desire to get revenge on the GOP for successfully curbing the collective-bargaining privileges of government-employee unions;
• The Democrats and their union affiliates didn't have a positive message upon which to plant their candidates, nor did they have attractive candidates to oppose the GOP's incumbents;
• There was a considerable degree of bad behavior by both Wisconsin Democrat legislators and the unions during the battle over the GOP's changes to union collective-bargaining privileges, which surely had some influence on voters' decisions.

I don't think these influences will be felt as strongly nationwide as they were in Wisconsin. Though government-employee unions are a problem everywhere -- including at the federal level, of course -- the ability of the GOP to marshal popular sentiment for correcting that problem is likely to be less nationally, given that no corrections have even been attempted yet, than was the case in Wisconsin, where a bitter contest has been fought and won over the issue. So, while it's pleasant to imagine that conservative-minded voters and independents tired of "progressive" oppression will be galvanized by the Wisconsin recall election, I think the effect will be rather dilute on a national scale.

Still, we can hope. I certainly do. America is right at the edge of the financial and fiscal abyss. Another step "forward" -- not a well-chosen campaign slogan, Democrats -- will take us irretrievably over that edge. Perhaps Americans have felt helpless to reverse our course without calling down some other kind of disaster on our heads. Perhaps Wisconsin voters' show of fortitude will lift our spirits sufficiently to turn our nation away from its current, calamitous course.

Perhaps. But wishing won't make it so.

Mitt Romney, the Republican Party's choice to oppose Barack Hussein Obama come November, is not a conservative, no matter how many times he claims that label. If he's installed in the Oval Office, it will be vital that he confronts a staunchly conservative Congress. Thus, it remains a matter of the first priority that voters send true conservatives to Congress, most particularly to the House of Representatives, where all appropriations bills must originate by explicit Constitutional command. If we are correct in our estimation that Romney is the probable winner of the presidential contest, then we should shift the greater part of our efforts to the legislative races.

(A possible rallying cry: RINOs belong in zoos! Or perhaps, Make the RINO an endangered species!)

Much work remains ahead of us. It's not time to celebrate quite yet.

Recession Within a Recession

Events in Europe appear to be causing unrest in markets.  Again.  Or perhaps reflecting unrest, depending on your point of view.  Things have been rather bad for some time, but they may be setting themselves up for another fairly dramatic plunge.

Everyone notices the various stock indices falling, but several things in particular point to a bad round of things in the short term.

The first is a flattening yield curve, and especially a drop in long-term rates.  Lending rates are determined primarily by two forces -- 1) supply of savings, and 2) demand for loans.  At the onset of recession, rates tend to drop, but in particular, long-term rates tend to drop dramatically as businesses fear making new long-term investments.  Meanwhile, some demand persists for shorter-term credit as businesses try to wrap up whatever they have going on at the moment.

On the flipside, lenders tend to pile on to the long end of the curve to lock in a higher interest rate and avoid short-term lending because they fear being forced to roll over the shorter-term loan at an even lower rate in the near future.  Together, the two groups wind up working at cross-purposes on the loan market, and lending terms tend to 'invert,' with short-term rates sometimes actually higher than long-term rates.  Sometimes it does not quite get to that point, and with short-term rates as low as they are now, and demand in general as low as it is, it would be rather difficult for them to invert at this point.  But the curve is definitely flattening.

The second big thing is falling factor prices, and as anyone who drives a car has noticed, oil prices have been falling pretty rapidly -- from about $105 per barrel about a month ago to about $85 today.  Some of this is due to new supply, as 'hydraulic fracking' technology has taken off of late.  But that has been going on for some time, and surely cannot account for such a rapid movement.  Many other commodity prices are falling as well, and if employment continues to stagnate as badly as the last labor report indicated, wages will eventually drop, too.

Several times since the 2008 crisis, I have thought that we were entering into another deep drop, but each time it has proved to be less dramatic than I had thought.  I do think that when all the dust settles and all the revisions are in, another small event will be declared in the 2010-2011 period which did not quite register enough to be called an official recession.  It is hard to say if this event will prove particularly more significant or not.

But eventually, 'the big one' will come...