Tea Leaves By Twilight Part 2: Wars And Rumors Of Wars

We met on the beach amid rumours of war,
Your head in your hand, what you saw you won't say,
As the newspapers blew in the wind.
I can see you're one of that kind
Who carry around a time bomb in the mind -- no one knows
When you'll slip the pin.
Rumours of war...
Rumours of war...

I see that your dress is torn at the edge,
You are lost, intense, like a man on a ledge, waiting to jump,
As the waves break over the shore.
You say there's a storm that can't be delayed,
And lately it seems to be coming this way -- you can hear it break
Like the slam of a door.
Rumours of war...
Rumours of war...

You tell me, just look all around
At the past and the present, the cross and the crescent,
The signs and the planets are lining up like before.
There are souls on fire in the day and the night,
On the left and the right, in the black and the white,
You can see it burn in the eyes of the rich and the poor!
Rumours of war...
Rumours of war...

[Al Stewart, "Rumours Of War"]

War, as I noted in the previous essay, is in its most abstract form a struggle over who shall rule over a contested item. The "cold race war" already in progress is exactly that sort of struggle. The most recent front was made visible by the George Zimmerman / Trayvon Martin affair: a substantial fraction of American Negroes is claiming, in effect, that when a white man kills a black man, the white man is guilty of murder regardless of any other considerations or contextual factors. The demand for such a departure from the ancient law of self-defense, specifically to favor Negroes, is a demand for a separate sovereignty demarcated by race.

But let it not be thought that only Negroes are demanding such a sovereignty. Muslims are at it, too. Indeed, Muslims' demand for special exemptions from the law is rooted in their most fundamental scripture:

For that cause We decreed for the Children of Israel that whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind. Our messengers came unto them of old with clear proofs (of Allah's Sovereignty), but afterwards lo! many of them became prodigals in the earth. [Qur'an, Sura 5:32]

Those who believe fight in the way of Allah, and those who disbelieve fight in the way of the Shaitan. Fight therefore against the friends of the Shaitan; surely the strategy of the Shaitan is weak. [Qur'an, Sura 4:76]

"I will instill terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them." [Qur'an, Sura 8:12]

But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war); but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity, then open the way for them: for Allah is Oft-forgiving, Most Merciful. [Qur'an, Sura 9:5]

"Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, of the people of the Book, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued." [Qur'an, Sura 9:29]

"O Prophet! Struggle against the unbelievers and hypocrites and be harsh with them." [Qur'an, Sura 9:73]

American Indians, of course, already enjoy certain exemptions from several aspects of state and federal law. So also do elected federal officials and federal employees. And thanks to federal antidiscrimination statutes, women, the handicapped, and homosexuals have gained privileges that persons outside those groups do not enjoy.

We have been divided from one another by the very mechanisms that promised us e pluribus unum. To be divided from one another by the law itself is to be set against one another, albeit indirectly.

Indirectly...at first. What follows is more direct and often far more horrible.

---

Thomas Sowell and others have repeatedly noted the consequences of raising one group over another through the law. Egregious cases involve Malaysia and Sri Lanka, where laws that distinguish among the various ethnic and linguistic groups have provoked enduring inter-group hostility that has often risen to violence. More recently, the de facto exclusion of Egypt's Coptic Christian minority from the protection of the law has given rise to continuing pogroms against the Coptics by the Muslim majority.

These are natural consequences of discrimination embedded in the law. They are unavoidable, for a simple reason:

Privilege confers advantage.

Over time ever more of the members of a legally privileged group will exploit its privileges, to the detriment of the unprivileged groups. The swelling envy and resentment that result are guaranteed to tear any nation apart...including ours.

When a nation embarks upon "the downward course" (Winston Churchill), one of the group-independent sociological consequences is a general shortening of time horizons. People's "time preference ratios" -- their preference for immediate satisfactions over long-term gains -- tilt ever more toward the present and away from the future. Indeed, it becomes noticeable that there's a general accord that "we have no future." What conclusion could a reasonable man reach, other than to live for the present? And what result could be more certain than the "eating of the seed corn" -- the profligate consumption of the nation's assets in total disregard for the needs of posterity?

The best summation of this mindset ever written comes from a great science-fiction novel:

"The fall of Trantor," said Seldon, "cannot be stopped by any conceivable effort. It can be hastened easily, however. The tale of my interrupted trial will spread through the Galaxy. Frustration of my plans to lighten the disaster will convince people that the future holds no promise to them. Already they recall the lives of their grandfathers with envy. They will see that political revolutions and trade stagnations will increase. The feeling will pervade the Galaxy that only what a man can grasp for himself at that moment will be of any account. Ambitious men will not wait and unscrupulous men will not hang back. By their every action they will hasten the decay of the worlds. Have me killed and Trantor will fall not within three centuries but within fifty years and you, yourself, within a single year." [Isaac Asimov, Foundation, emphasis added.]

Dr. Asimov grasped that the fates of great polities lie in their own hands: specifically, in the resolve of their rulers to maintain absolute -- and absolutely evenhanded -- justice. When that resolve fails, "the downward course" begins. It soon becomes irreversible.

---

As in the Al Stewart lyric above, no one knows when we'll "slip the pin." Of only one thing am I sure: Our current rulers are at the heart of the problem. There has never been a group as openly hostile to equal justice under law as the one that currently prevails in Washington. Should that group continue to ride roughshod over the rule of law and equal justice thereunder, the United States of America will not survive.

Look all around you, "at the past and the present, the cross and the crescent," and all the rest of the legal, judicial, and social divisions we've endured these past fifty years. Note how many persons are already dead certain that the nation is doomed, and are making what preparations they can for the collapse of what order still remains. Note the rise of the preparationist industries, that cater directly and unabashedly to that conviction. Note the growing disaffiliation of ordinary Americans from American public institutions, in preference for whatever private alternatives exist. And note especially how many Americans already hold that the law has become an instrument of oppression, and is therefore to be skirted or disregarded whenever it's practical to do so.

And pray.

Tea Leaves By Twilight

Among the greatest of the curses upon the race of Man is our propensity for "thinking" with our wishes rather than our powers of reasoning -- our willful disregard of what is in favor of what we'd like. It leads us to imagine that we inhabit a world far distant from the one around us, governed by processes wholly at odds with the ones that rule objective reality.

Sometimes we awaken from our fantasies in time to save ourselves from calamity. But not always.

---

Several readers have written to ask me why I so greatly fear the outbreak of "a real, full-scale, flying-lead race war." Clearly, such correspondents deem the probability of such a thing well below my own estimate. So it becomes important that I justify my assessment.

War, in the most abstract view, is a condition in which two (or more) organizations struggle for dominance over some contested item. Historically, when nations have made war, it's normally been over territory or population. There have been other casus bellorum, but that's been the most common...until recently.

Today, wars between nation-states tend not to be over the position of a border or who has jurisdiction over some ethno-linguistic group. They address other sorts of slights and more recent sorts of risks. The looming war between Israel and Iran won't be over a territorial dispute, but rather over the existential threat to Israel inherent in Iran's possession of nuclear weapons and a delivery system for them.

A civil war is a struggle over what organization possesses sovereignty over the embroiled nation or a region thereof -- that is, which of two (or more) groups is the "legitimate government," entitled to make and enforce the law. The American Civil War, though the issues that ignited it were fairly limited -- slavery and tariffs -- was exactly such a conflict. The Union maintained that the federal government based in Washington, D.C. retained sovereign jurisdiction over the states of the Confederacy; the Confederacy insisted on its right to secede from the Constitutional compact that the Union states respected. The matter was settled -- de facto if not necessarily de jure -- by the test of arms.

Today, Syria is clearly in a state of civil war. Egypt is teetering on the edge of one, and could fall into the abyss at any time. So also with the United States of America, though the battle lines are of a unique and tragic kind.

---

The American conflict is, once again, over what the law shall be...but this time, the disputed "territory" is not real estate but race.

The traditional American view of the rule of law is very simply stated: Legitimate, Constitutionally conformant law stands above all details of identity, locality, and affiliation. No matter who you are, where you are, or with what groups or institutions you're associated, your conduct is subject to the same laws as everyone else. Conversely, a law that embeds matters of identity, locality, or affiliation in its determinations is illegitimate under the rule of law. You would be hard pressed to find anyone in these United States who would dare to differ with that formulation, at least in the abstract.

However, recent events, of which the trial of George Zimmerman was merely the most visible outcropping, have demonstrated that quite a large percentage of our population discards the rule of law when racial differences are involved. Consider: Had Trayvon Martin been white, the Sanford police's decision that the evidence clearly made his death at Zimmerman's hands a case of self-defense would not have been questioned. Similarly, had both participants in the event been black, Zimmerman would never have come to trial. The immense political pressure brought to bear on the state of Florida to try Zimmerman for murder arose entirely because Martin was black and Zimmerman is white.

(Don't quarrel with me about that last. "Hispanic" is an ethnic classification, not a racial one. Zimmerman is racially Caucasian. Away with the objection that he had a black great-grandparent; we don't obey the "one-drop rule" here at Liberty's Torch.)

Though the great majority of American Negroes are decent and law-abiding, a large percentage has internalized the notion that they possess certain exemptions from the law and extra privileges under it. Tragically, among the decent and law-abiding are many -- perhaps a majority thereof -- who are moved to protect the lawbreakers simply because of their shared race. If you ever hear a Negro talk about "The Man," you're in the presence of one such.

A claim of an exemption from the law, or of a privilege that others do not possess, inherently rejects the rule of law and the legal / judicial system based upon it. That puts that group in a state of civil war with the larger society, albeit a "cold" version as long as the conflict remains nonviolent.

From the data in Colin Flaherty's book White Girl Bleed A Lot and from other, corroborating sources, it would appear that an outbreak of mass violence is creeping very close indeed.

---

The factor that's most likely to touch off the "flying-lead race war" is the behavior of the federal Department of Justice, which has outrageously aligned itself with those forces determined to lynch George Zimmerman. The satrap of that agency is, of course, Eric "I'm the black attorney-general" Holder, the first openly racist person ever to occupy that position.

Holder has already allowed DoJ personnel to guide and participate in rallies and "protests" designed to bring Zimmerman to trial, and which have more recently railed against his acquittal as "unjust." Today he seeks grounds on which to charge Zimmerman with "civil rights violations," as if self-defense could possibly be viewed so. The agenda Holder and his boss, Barack Hussein Obama, are pursuing has nothing to do with justice or any interest therein; they seek political advantage for themselves and their allies, by fomenting as intense a state of racial animosity as they can contrive. They, and the Democrat Party generally, are aware that retaining the near-unanimous allegiance of black voters is critical to their retention of power. Stirring up hatred of whites is their tactic for reinforcing that allegiance.

It is possible that Obama and Holder are aware of how close to the abyss of outright race warfare the country has drifted. It is possible that they believe they can stretch the cord of civil peace and social tolerance still more tautly without going over the edge. And it is possible that they just don't care.

My sense of the state of things inclines me to believe the last of those possibilities.

---

America's racial troubles are a facet in a large mosaic of social, economic, and political turmoil. They are unusual in that they involve violence, both actual and potential, and an implicit yet obvious dispute over the concept of the rule of law. Few other aspects of our ongoing conflicts share those characteristics.

We ought to have learned from our troubles with Muslims that demands for exemptions and privileges under the law must always be rebuffed -- and sternly, at that. Concessions encourage troublemakers to make more trouble; that's fundamental reinforcement psychology, proven on innumerable occasions to operate automatically, even unconsciously, on the persons involved. Yet white Americans continue to make that fundamental mistake in dealing with the demands of blacks.

Steyn's Thesis has never been more visibly in action:

If it were just terrorists bombing buildings and public transit, it would be easier; even the feeblest Eurowimp jurisdiction is obliged to act when the street is piled with corpses. But there's an old technique well understood by the smarter bullies. If you want to break a man, don't attack him head on, don't brutalize him; pain and torture can awaken a stubborn resistance in all but the weakest. But just make him slightly uncomfortable, disrupt his life at the margin, and he'll look for the easiest path to re-normalization. There are fellows rampaging through the streets because of some cartoons? Why, surely the most painless solution would be if we all agreed not to publish such cartoons. [From Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It]

An exact parallel: There are fellows rampaging / beating passers-by / disrupting traffic / making death threats / holding mass demonstrations because of a jury verdict? Why, surely the most painless solution would be if we all agreed to reverse that verdict...or to pretend that it could not possibly be legitimate.

However, as those "feeble Eurowimp jurisdictions" have discovered, the terminus of that progression involves bullets, bombs, and great piles of corpses. And unless we learn from both their failures and our accelerating racial turmoil, we will suffer the same.

Assorted

Yes, yes, I usually do these on Fridays, but...well...

---

1. Prosecutorial discretion.

You really have to wonder how much more blatant it will get before Congress will act:

The Treasury Department has admitted for the first time that confidential tax records of several political candidates and campaign donors were improperly scrutinized by government officials, but the Justice Department has declined to prosecute any of the cases.

Its investigators also are probing two allegations that the Internal Revenue Service "targeted for audit candidates for public office," the Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, J. Russell George, has privately told Sen. Chuck Grassley.

In a written response to a request by Mr. Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Mr. George said a review turned up four cases since 2006 in which unidentified government officials took part in "unauthorized access or disclosure of tax records of political donors or candidates," including one case he described as "willful." In four additional cases, Mr. George said, allegations of improper access of IRS records were not substantiated by the evidence.

Mr. Grassley has asked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to explain why the Justice Department chose not to prosecute any of the cases. The Iowa Republican told The Washington Times that the IRS "is required to act with neutrality and professionalism, not political bias."

But has the Attorney-General's office replied?

In a July 12 letter to Mr. Holder, Mr. Grassley asked whether the attorney general knew about the cases, who in the Justice Department decided against prosecution, and with which parties the “victims” in the cases were affiliated.

"Although this may not be indicative of wide spread targeting, any instance is cause for concern," Mr. Grassley wrote. "Even more alarming, in at least one instance TIGTA referred evidence of 'willful unauthorized access' to the United States Attorney’s Office, but criminal prosecution was declined. Decisions such as these directly impact the political process and should be subject to the scrutiny of the American public."

The IRS did not respond to a request for comment on Mr. George’s findings.

To borrow a slogan from a better-known new source: We report. You decide.

---

2. A curious request for counsel.

People ask me some very strange questions. One I had to field recently, from a younger colleague, set me back on my heels:

She: When is it okay to have an affair?
FWP: What? Why are you asking me this?

She: My husband has...lost interest.
FWP: That's very sad, but...you're aware that I'm a Catholic, aren't you?

She: Yes, but you're the smartest guy I know, so I figured...
FWP: Geez. I can't think what to say. You know I'd be against it, that I'd deplore it for reasons of conscience, but you want my advice on how to go about it?
She: Well...yes!

There are days I feel like changing my name, getting facial surgery, and moving without leaving a forwarding address. But my young colleague was persistent, and it was the middle of the workday, and besides, I don't know any plastic surgeons who'd accept payment in software, so...

FWP: I get the feeling you have someone in mind already for your...extra-marital adventure. Am I correct?
She: Yes, I do.

FWP: Well, is he married too?
She: Yes.

FWP: How many children does he have?
She: Two, a boy and a girl.

FWP: I seem to recall that you don't have any kids.
She: That's right.

FWP: That rules him out, at least if he's smart.
She: Huh? Why?

FWP: He has more to lose than you. The Prime Directive of Adultery is Equal Risk. You and your partner in illicit amour must be as equally placed in the world as possible. If he's married, you must be married. If he has kids, you must have kids -- and preferably the same number. If he has an income of X, you should have roughly the same. That way neither of you has a lever to use against the other.

My young colleague was nonplussed by my advice. Being young, she couldn't imagine how her "wine and roses" impulses toward her, ah, intended could possibly morph into "pistols at dawn." (The young tend to have this "But it can't happen to me" conviction about life's less pleasant possibilities.) However, the intended, whom I know well, is both older and more worldly wise, so even if she didn't believe me, his natural caution should prevail...I hope!

---

3. Some developments.

Paul Kersey, who specializes in writing on race relations and racial tensions, has posted an illuminating article at VDARE:

As I noted in a March 26, 2012 VDARE.com column as the Main Stream Media narrative of the martyrdom of St. Martin was unraveling, cities across the country were being forced to enact emergency curfews to deal with rising racial anarchy since Obama’s election in 2008.

“Obama’s sons” were out of control:

• Columbia, South Carolina: Columbia curfew proposal faces opposition, September 30, 2010
• Newark, New Jersey: Newark seeks public's help in stemming bloodshed, forms 'Safe City Task Force', June 1, 2011
• Baltimore, Maryland: Baltimore teens are getting a curfew, June 15, 2011 Cleveland Heights, Ohio: Cleveland Heights' teen curfew brings questions in regard to legality, and whether it targets minorities, July 01, 2011.
• Louisville, Kentucky.: Police enforcing city-wide curfew for teens in Louisville, July 19, 2011
• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (which was quickly deemed racist) Philadelphia City Council passes new youth curfew law, October 28, 2011.
• New Orleans (which has also been deemed racist) New Orleans City Council passes 8 p.m. curfew for anyone under 16 in French Quarter, January 18, 2012
• Gary, Indiana: Gary police set to enforce curfew law, April 14, 2012
• East St. Louis: East St. Louis officials institute youth curfew, put limits on clothing for males, September 27, 2012. (Limits on clothing means no “royal blue or bright red clothing commonly associated with gangs.”)
• Memphis, Tennessee.: Memphis Police Speak Out on Curfew, February 1, 2013
• Kansas City, Missouri (wasn’t spared from being labeled racist either, because all of the curfew violators cited with tickets have been black.). Kansas City plans to crack down on curfew violators in Northland, May 30, 2013
• Macon, Georgia: Macon police increase attention to curfew during summer, June 13, 2013

Kersey also makes mention of Colin Flaherty's widely praised -- and widely denounced -- book White Girl Bleed A Lot, which compiles a staggering amount of objective information about the upsurge in black-on-white violence of recent years: pure-quill journalism of the sort we no longer see these days. Flaherty's detractors dislike his book for precisely that reason...as if you couldn't have figured that out on your own.

After The Acquittal

Perhaps there's a Gentle Reader in Andromeda who isn't yet aware that George Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges this past Saturday...but surely you are.

---

"What now?" is the question. Some of the answers are arriving as we speak: "protests" in various cities; a slew of probes into the behavior of the most visible agitators; and some rather clear-headed commentary about the larger picture.

First, have some observations from Jim Treacher of the Daily Caller:

Who's Joshua Chellew? The fact that you don't know his name is the whole point. But that's not your fault.

Marietta Daily Journal, 7/3/13:

Four south Cobb teenagers are in custody in connection with the beating death of a 36-year-old Mableton man on Mableton Parkway early Sunday morning…

They have been accused in the beating death of Joshua Heath Chellew, 36…

According to the warrant, the four teenagers are accused of starting a fight with Chellew at a Chevron gas station in the 6200 block of Mableton Parkway near Community Drive at about 1:20 a.m. Sunday. They repeatedly punched and kicked him, according to police.

While attempting to escape, Chellew backed into the center five-lane highway and was pushed to the ground and knocked unconscious, the warrant states.

They then walked away from Chellew, "leaving him helpless," and he was eventually hit by a car, the warrant states.

A horrible, senseless murder. Why hasn't it received wider attention?

The answer to Treacher's entirely reasonable question lies in the photographs that follow it. Those photos are reminiscent of the ones in this article of a few years ago.

A bit more straight-to-the point commentary, published before the verdict was in, comes from Nicholas Stix at VDARE:

The point of this persecution is to make an example of George Zimmerman, and to teach whites, and the "white-enough," that:

• They must endure and defer to black criminals as neighbors and trespassers;
• They must not form neighborhood watches, because they'll eventually be sued into penury. Let criminals of color take and do whatever they want;
• Don't carry a legal firearm, because we'll treat you like a criminal anyway;
• Be the frightened prisoner of your vehicle and home. Don't act like a free man, and follow suspicious characters who may be endangering your family and neighbors, because that is now a crime;
• Don't call the police to report suspicious behavior, or even to report crimes you see being committed by those groups who commit most crimes;
• If you are violently attacked by a black, do not defend yourself, because if you do you may spend the rest of your life in prison, which would amount to a death sentence.
• Just pray that your attacker only maims and/or rapes, but doesn't kill you.

This is what America has come to under Obama—a banana republic, replete with government-orchestrated mobs, political prisoners, and show trials.

The campaign against George Zimmerman is entirely political. In the end, it must be fought politically, via demonstrations, petitions, and by elected and non-elected political leaders.

George Zimmerman must be kept out of jail. But even then he will need to get a new name, a new face, and … a new country.

In fact, we all need a new country.

Is there any way to dispute Stix's concluding assertion? As God is my witness, I can't, and I'd desperately like to find one.

Yet people are baffled at how I shrug when I'm called a racist.

---

Racial tensions in these United States are principally the product of "good intentions." As I wrote a few months ago:

When word gets around about the exploitation of unearned benefits or legal privileges by members of a collectivity designated for "help," those who are being mulcted or disadvantaged for that "help" tend to become very angry. However, the inhibition against seeing unworthy or vicious individuals within a "protected" collectivity can be made strong enough that the result is rage against all the members of the collectivity: the decent, responsible, and moral ones right along with the dissolute, the ne'er-do-wells, and the thugs.

When such a reaction begins to gather, the Left, which proposed and rationalized the nurturance of the designated collectivity, senses a threat to its moral position. The original motive power for "helping" that collectivity was a sense of moral obligation successfully imposed on the rest of society. They come to fear that their self-concept will be wounded, perhaps fatally. When the facts of the matter are immovably against their policy prescriptions and collectivist moral exhortations, the only possible means of defense is concealment: delaying the exposure of the evidence as long as possible.

The Mainstream Media, as anyone can see for himself, are politically biased toward the Left. Leftist political orientation, being so focused on "good intentions," tends to gather in persons whose strongest response to any scenario is emotional -- and emotionally-oriented persons have always dominated the communications-intensive trades. Thus, journalists are naturally inclined toward alliance with the explicitly political Left, and will assist the Left in bending the news "narrative" away from inconvenient truths. The growth and gradual predominance of a predator sub-class within a collectivity nurtured by the Left is such an inconvenient truth.

The one and only remedy to the above dynamic that would conduce toward harmony is a counter-dynamic animated and enforced by the decent members of the collectivity in question. In other words, if a percentage of blacks becomes violent, preys upon others, and generally disregards the norms of civil society, the corrective action must come from other blacks. For whites to impose enforcement from "outside the community" merely reinforces a sense of battle lines having been drawn -- of two cohesive groups engaged in a de facto struggle for dominance. However, as I noted on Saturday, this runs into the overarching dynamic of group identity and cohesion, which militates toward protecting the group's deviants -- even the dangerous ones -- from "the other:"

There's no such thing as a group identity that engenders no other consequences. Groups coalesce for a reason -- most often, to oppose other groups -- and their first and most powerful impulse is to protect those of their members who are threatened by other groups.

Racial group identity is no exception to this pattern. Indeed, it's the prototype for such studies. He who thinks of himself as black first and foremost will reflexively rally to the defense of even the most violent, criminally inclined persons of his race. In a sense, that's what group identity is for; it's the most visible expression of the innate xenophobia that's built into Mankind's genes.

Which is why the nurturance of separatist racial and ethnic identities is inherently wrong and destructive. Theodore Roosevelt knew it:

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all … The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic … There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.

We should know that by now, from experiences such as the Zimmerman trial if for no other reason.

---

The vicious, self-serving scum that seek to profit from racial agitation -- the Jesse Jacksons; the Al Sharptons; the Ben Jealouses and Julian Bonds; and the would-be savages who style themselves "Black Panthers" -- ought to be held in absolute contempt and barred from any gathering of decent persons. Yet they continue to be treated as representatives of a viewpoint that deserves consideration.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Yet far too many Americans are reluctant to say so, for fear of being called "racists." But that fear looks to be on the wane, in light of the growing consciousness that interracial violence is almost entirely black-on-white. Just as Americans have suffered "compassion fatigue" over the endless expansions of the welfare system, we are quite capable of contracting "race fatigue" over the hectoring of racialist hucksters whose hands are forever reaching for our necks and our pockets.

The racialists have one weapon remaining to them: the Main Stream Media, which appears incapable of disaffiliating itself from the racialist cause. But the mass media, too, are losing their foothold on the American mind. You cannot tell a man repeatedly that the Sun rises in the west, in blatant contradiction to his own observations and experiences, and expect to retain his credulity.

More strife of the sort threatened over the Zimmerman acquittal might even make the accusation of racism a badge of honor. But first we must survive the sequel...whatever it proves to be.

---

Perhaps I'm worried over nothing much. Perhaps there will be no riots. Perhaps there will be no uptick in interracial violence -- which, as I noted above, is almost exclusively perpetrated by blacks against whites. Perhaps our political class will finally open its eyes to the carnage it has engendered by conferring special "victim" status upon the Negro race. Perhaps Americans generally will wise up, and will cease to grant any respect to those who claim that contemporary Negroes are "owed" for the oppressions suffered by Negro slaves of a century and a half ago, at the hands of persons long dead. Perhaps the promoters of those fantasies will finally sit down, shut up, and learn to be Americans, unhyphenated.

And perhaps pigs will fly.

Just In Case You're Not Yet Thoroughly Sick Of It...

...have a little Mark Steyn on l'affaire Zimmerman:

The defining characteristic of English law is its distribution of power between prosecutor, judge, and jury. This delicate balance has been utterly corrupted in the United States to the point where today at the federal level there is a conviction rate of over 90 percent -- which would impress Mubarak and the House of Saud, if not quite, yet, Kim Jong Un. American prosecutors have an unhealthy and disreputable addiction to what I called, at the conclusion of the trial of my old boss Conrad Black six years ago, "countless counts." In Conrad's case, he was charged originally with 17 crimes, three of which were dropped by the opening of the trial and another halfway through, leaving 13 for the jury, nine of which they found the defendant not guilty of, bringing it down to four, one of which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional and the remaining three of which they vacated, only to have two of them reinstated by the lower appeals court. In other words, the prosecution lost 88 percent of the case, but the 12 percent they won was enough to destroy Conrad Black's life.

Steyn is, of course, referring to the prosecution's thwarted attempt to admit "Murder 3" -- homicide with aggravated child abuse -- as one of the verdicts the jury is permitted to reach. Technically, under federal law and (I think) the laws of the state of Florida, Trayvon Martin at age 17 was a minor -- a minor trying his best to commit Murder 2 with his fists. Self-defense still applies; given the overwhelming weight of both the eyewitness testimony and the circumstantial evidence, Zimmerman was entirely within his rights to take Martin's life.

Zimmerman committed a praiseworthy, pro-social act. I don't care who thinks otherwise; a violent, thuggish person of any race or creed taken permanently off the streets is a net gain to social peace. Florida's political elite, under pressure from the federal Department of (In)Justice, felt Zimmerman had to stand trial for something. Accordingly, the prosecution is desperate to convict him of something -- anything at all. But the prosecution's case, despite the suppression of evidence favorable to the defense and a presiding judge whose pro-prosecution bias could hardly be more blatant, has folded like a cheap accordion...and the consequences have laid bare the fiction of "equal justice under law" in these days of rampant racialism, victimism, and anarcho-tyranny (Sam Francis).

No doubt further consequences will soon be upon us. However, there are still several possible directions they could take.

---

Florida's firearms laws are relatively permissive. It's what's called a "shall-issue" state, in which the authorities have essentially no discretion: an applicant for a concealed-carry permit whose criminal record is clean cannot be arbitrarily denied that permit. Since 1987, when the state's firearms laws were liberalized, many Floridians have availed themselves of such permits.

The possession of a carry permit doesn't automatically mean that its possessor will go everywhere armed. However, the typical permittee does prefer to carry when it's convenient to do so; that is, when he doesn't intend to go anywhere that bars armed persons from entering, or into some inherently firearms-hostile environment such as a swimming pool. Thus, a substantial fraction of permitted Floridians carry routinely, and their neighbors have grown comfortable with it.

The strong possibility of race riots over a Zimmerman acquittal will raise that fraction closer to 100%.

Now, it might not be immediately obvious, but a man set upon by surprise will seldom manage to defend himself successfully, even if he's armed. Surprise, coupled to the attacker's natural initiative, is that great an advantage. But an environment in which many persons are armed enjoys a "network effect" unknown to disarmed locales such as New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago: armed bystanders are far more likely to come to the aid of an attack victim. Should George Zimmerman be acquitted, and should the "organizers" really precipitate the threatened riots, that "network effect" is what the rioters will need to contend with...in Florida, at least.

In other, less well prepared parts of the country, things could take a much uglier turn. Think Rodney King Redux: massive and widespread violence; large-scale destruction of property; looting of retail establishments; and (of course) hordes of black racialist hucksters telling us "creepy-ass crackers" how we "had it coming."

Such riots, of course, would have nothing to do with justice. They'd be explosions of envy and hatred, inculcated and carefully nurtured these past fifty years, among blacks toward whites. In other words, the rioters would be rioting because they want to riot, have wanted to riot for some time, and felt the opportunity had arrived. The Zimmerman verdict would be only a pretext.

And the Law of Unintended Consequences would begin to function at once.

---

White Americans have already begun to react against the imposition of unearned guilt upon us for the "troubles" of American blacks. The black-on-white crime statistics, the two Jesse Jackson clown shows, the Tawana Brawley affair and other Al Sharpton-emceed circuses, the Rodney King riots, the flash mobs of black youths that have assaulted white passers-by in several cities, the total collapse of black-ruled cities such as Detroit and Washington D.C., and the unending demands for "reparations" for the injustices done to persons long dead by persons long dead have -- pardon the phrase -- raised whites' consciousness of the great danger victimist, racialist blacks pose to our well being and the well being of the nation. There's a good reason Mark Butterworth's Tales of New America are so popular.

There's a threshold looming ever nearer: a line which, should we cross it, we could never un-cross: the line that precipitates a real, full-scale, flying-lead race war, after which America would know its own version of apartheid.

Blacks might tell themselves that it could never come to that, that American whites are already sufficiently suffused with racial guilt to be firmly inhibited against that degree of backlash. They're wrong -- typical victims of racialist wishful thinking -- and I shall tell you why.

---

There's no such thing as a group identity that engenders no other consequences. Groups coalesce for a reason -- most often, to oppose other groups -- and their first and most powerful impulse is to protect those of their members who are threatened by other groups.

Racial group identity is no exception to this pattern. Indeed, it's the prototype for such studies. He who thinks of himself as black first and foremost will reflexively rally to the defense of even the most violent, criminally inclined persons of his race. In a sense, that's what group identity is for; it's the most visible expression of the innate xenophobia that's built into Mankind's genes.

(A side note: There are persons who claim that Mankind's innate xenophobia is a bad thing, to be combated and ultimately erased. They're wrong. Evolution equipped us with that reaction for good and sufficient reasons. More, few of the xenophilia-promoters ever face the question, "If I don't know the stranger at my gate, why should I trust him without evidence?" Christ commanded us to love our neighbor, not to open our arms to every wandering vagabond who happens by pleading for a free meal.)

Thus, even decent, responsible, peaceable blacks will feel an inclination to rally to the defense of blacks accused of some crime. They will feel that impulse even when the evidence for the criminality of the accused is open and overwhelming. The O.J. Simpson verdict, delivered by a majority-black jury, was no accident.

Should a race war break out, many normally peaceable American blacks would not remain absolutely "on the sidelines." They would engage in the conflict at least to the extent of sheltering their more militant brethren. Indeed, just as nominally peaceable Muslims have cooperated in sheltering and sustaining their jihad-inclined co-religionists, many American blacks would do the same for fighters of their race. Thus, they would make themselves co-combatants...and therefore, targets...and thus would summon even more whites "onto the battlefield."

The level to which this must rise to convince American whites generally that blacks can no longer be tolerated in the larger society cannot be known until that level is reached. After that, no remediation would be possible. The outcome of the war would be foreordained by the numbers involved. Afterward, either there would be no blacks alive and free within our borders, or the nation would be racially partitioned even more firmly than apartheid South Africa. In either case, there would no longer be a United States of America as we've known it since the end of the Civil War.

---

At this time, for reasons that have become far too obvious to require enumeration here, blacks, at least in concentration, are dangerous to whites. It simply doesn't matter why. No more does it matter how fervently we wish it were otherwise. John Derbyshire's "talk" might have cost him the acceptance of the conservative Establishment, but that doesn't mean he was wrong.

Envy and hatred toward whites among American blacks have metastasized such that any racially-polarizing incident could be the falling stone that looses an avalanche. Race riots in the wake of a Zimmerman acquittal have a better chance than most of triggering a nationwide race war. The more intelligent black leaders ought to understand this -- and to convey it to their fellows, as forcefully as necessary. Millions of lives could well depend on it.

Assorted

1. "Ostensibly"

This piece should make it clear why I consider Mike Hendrix of Cold Fury one of the Blogosphere's chief ornaments. A snippet:

The Zimmerman trial is ostensibly not a reverse-racist farce ginned up by howling con artists, the ostensibly unbiased press, and various other ignorant, ass-covering screechmonkeys for the purposes of pursuing a politically-correct agenda and supporting a false narrative, rather than a quest for justice and the truth.

And ostensibly the Department of Education is tasked with education; the Department of Energy is supposed to be helping to ensure plenty of affordable energy to what was once a booming, thriving economy; the Department of Justice works to fight crime instead of committing it themselves, and to guarantee the proper meting out of justice rather than the railroading of citizens guilty only of self-defense or branding patriotic Americans “terrorists” and hounding them into silence; and the IRS is supposed to fairly and impartially collect revenues rather than persecute people and groups with the temerity to think improper and unapproved thoughts and exercise their former First Amendment right to express them and petition the government for redress. Ostensibly.

Please read the whole thing. You'll thank me, I promise.

---

2. The return of slavery...with the races reversed.

Certain "commentators," particularly on MSNBC, are all too obviously chosen according to two overriding criteria:

• Skin dark enough to qualify them as "minorities;"
• Possession of rabidly bigoted -- racially bigoted -- opinions they're not at all shy about spewing.

Joy Reid is one, as the following should surely demonstrate:

On Thursday’s “NOW w/Alex Wagner” on MSNBC, MSNBC contributor and managing editor of The Grio Joy Reid charged that Republicans oppose elements of the controversial immigration reform bill out of desire for indentured servitude and to prevent what she called “brown people” from becoming U.S. citizens.

“I mean, didn’t we do this before?” Reid said at the opening of the show. “Wasn’t it called indentured servitude, right, where you come and pay all this money out and you are not a citizen, but you’re legally allowed to work on the farm?

Host Wagner concurred. PJ Media's Ed Driscoll presents a similar snippet from MSNBC's favorite dark-skinned racist, Melissa Harris-Perry:

Didn’t we do this before? Why yes we did. Just this past April, when MSNBC seemed pretty darn cool with the notion of indentured servitude. Or as host Melissa Harris-Perry said in an ad promoting her network, “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents:”

[MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry's] statement wasn’t an aside on live television. She didn’t misspeak. The spot was shot, produced, and aired without, apparently, raising any alarm bells. No one with influence raised his or her hand and said, “Should we really broadcast something that sounds so outlandish?”

The foundation of the Harris-Perry view is that society is a large-scale kibbutz. The title of Hillary Clinton’s bestseller in the 1990s expressed the same point in comforting folk wisdom: “It Takes a Village.”

As the ultimate private institution, the family is a stubborn obstacle to the great collective effort. Insofar as people invest in their own families, they are holding out on the state and unacceptably privileging their own kids over the children of others. These parents are selfish, small-minded, and backward. “Once it’s everybody’s responsibility,” Harris-Perry said of child-rearing, “and not just the households, then we start making better investments.”

Don't avert your eyes, Gentle Reader. Yes, it's upsetting to confront this much hatred of privacy, parental rights, and Americanism generally. Condemn it and its promoters, by all means...but don't deny, to yourself or anyone else, that it's out there, bold, brassy, and in quantity, at that.

---

3. Oh, to be an illegal alien!

They do seem to get a lot of breaks, don't they:

Howard is a tax examiner at the IRS’s ITIN processing center in Austin, Texas.

The large, unmarked building in south Austin is where the IRS decides whether to issue an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number to the millions of illegal immigrants who apply for them. An ITIN allows undocumented workers to file tax returns and pay taxes, a legal requirement for those who earn income in the United States … even those who come to the country illegally.

But 13 Investigates discovered the ITIN system is plagued by abuse and fraud.

. . . .

“We were being told by upper management to ignore fraud, to assign ITIN numbers and … pay out refunds to people who are lying,” Howard explained. “It’s a license to steal when you allow that.”

Howard and five other tax examiners at the ITIN processing center in Austin all told WTHR the same thing: for years, IRS managers have instructed them to “look the other way” while processing ITIN applications that appear to be filed fraudulently – even when those applications contain clear signs of criminal activity.

For example, Howard received a stack of ITIN applications for dozens of children attending the same school in South Carolina. (Adult tax filers can request an ITIN for a child if they want to claim that child as a dependent in order to get child tax credits and a larger tax refund.) When he researched that school, he discovered it didn’t even exist. When Howard reported the apparent scam to his bosses, he claims his managers ordered him to approve the applications anyway.

Courtesy of Patterico's Pontifications.

---

4. Book Notes.

I've been in correspondence with Jodi Taylor, the delightful author of the equally delightful Just One Damned Thing After Another, and just this morning she's informed me that the sequel, which will continue the action-filled saga of the intrepid historians of St. Mary's, is near to completion. However, that book will have a price -- "a small charge" -- so start saving your lunch money now.

Apropos of which, for those of you slavering uncontrollably over the prospect of a sequel to Freedom's Scion, I'm about 15% done with the first draft, and Gentle Reader, my characters have already stolen the plot from me. Oh, for some sort of digital scourge with which to punish the creations of my mind for their flagrant insubordination! But they'd probably find a way to wrest it away and use it on me.

Protection Rackets, 2013 A.D.

“When Sir Robert Peel proposed to organize the police force of London, Englishmen said openly that half a dozen throats cut in Whitechapel every year would be a cheap price to pay for keeping such an instrument of tyranny out of the State’s hands....We are all beginning to realize now that there is a great deal to be said for that view of the matter.” -- Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, The State

I've been upbraided, in other fora, for contending that American police are rapidly becoming thuggish, militarized forces that regard anyone not toting a badge as an obstacle at best, "the enemy" at worst. The evidence seems ample enough to me:

• The number of no-knock raids that mysteriously and inexplicably get the address wrong;
• The nationwide expansion of S.W.A.T. teams and the acceleration of their deployments;
• The attestations of various cops that they'd immediately "prone" anyone they saw carrying a handgun, even in jurisdictions where open carry is legal;
• Cops' overwhelming hostility to being videorecorded while in action in a public place;
• The use of "obstructing" and "disobeying a lawful order" charges to intimidate persons going about their lawful affairs;
• Recent cases of police tyranny, such as the quasi-military occupation of Boston, or this peaceful homeowner having his home commandeered at gunpoint, in blatant violation of the Third and Fourth Amendments.

Most horrifyingly, the doctrine of sovereign immunity, once used to protect kings from the wrath of their subjects, has been extended to shield police from retribution for the wrongs they commit. Indeed, the Supreme Court recently ruled that a private citizen has no right to resist an unlawful search or seizure. The police can kill him where he stands, without legal repercussions.

Makes "To Serve and Protect" ring a bit hollow, doesn't it? But protesters upbraid me for arguing that this makes the police the enemy, de facto, of the peaceable private citizen. I've heard all the common rationalizations:

• "They have families, too."
• "They're there to protect you."
• "They're in mortal danger every moment on the job."
• "What would you do if you needed a cop and none came?"

...and so on.

I have little doubt that there are still policemen who take the rights of Americans seriously, and would go well out of their way, even into great danger, to see that those rights are respected. But the incentives that govern their trade today militate toward their steady diminution and eventual elimination. Just as with any other institution, incentives and penalties will ultimately determine everything.

Those incentives will operate on the citizenry as well. One consequence will be a citizenry that consciously views the police as a poorly organized and operated protection racket, and resists them in all practical ways. Another will be a sharp increase in private security forces of all kinds, from the sort of forces-for-hire that corporations employ to protect their campuses and personnel to the "neighborhood watch" groups that homeowners operate to reduce the probability of crimes against their property.

I wouldn't expect the police to receive the routine cooperation of those forces, would you?

---

In this light, the George Zimmerman / Trayvon Martin affair acquires an extra dimension. Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch captain. It's clear that he took the responsibility seriously; had it been otherwise, he wouldn't be in the dock today for shooting Martin. Martin, a typical product of the "gangsta" culture that's run amok among young American Negroes, plainly saw Zimmerman as having no business challenging him. I'd bet heavily that had Zimmerman been wearing a police uniform and a visible badge, the lethal incident would not have occurred.

But the neighborhood watches will proliferate -- and ever more of their volunteers will go armed.

The painful paradox here is that protection is catnip to the predator. It alerts him that there's something valuable around, something he'd take if he could do so. The magnitude and seriousness of the protection, measured by the number of bodies and the state of their arms, is a good gauge of the value of what's being protected. The predator knows that, too.

Only a security force that's visibly impenetrable will absolutely deter the predator. Few forces, now or ever, will qualify; that degree of security is just too expensive.

Now shift a single entry from one side of the ledger to the other: Reclassify the police, just for the sake of argument, as a predatory force rather than a deterrent to predation. What happens then?

I contend that we're closing in on just that correlation of forces.

---

Present trends, the voracity of the State and its ever more intrusive penetration of our affairs, and the slowly stiffening resistance of private persons to being preyed upon suggest that the police will soon become an instrument no longer aimed at the lawbreaker, but solely at the law-abider: the man who wants only to be left alone in the peaceable enjoyment of what's rightfully his. The State wants total control of what he has and does; as violence and intimidation are its methods, the police -- ever more thuggish, ever more militarized, ever less mindful of rights or justice -- will be its means.

There's not a lot, in these Cheyne-Stokes days for individual rights, that anyone can do to reverse the trends. Politics has proved to be impotent at best, utterly toxic at worst. No public official has much of an interest in restraining the police. Sovereign immunity renders threats of legal recourse pointless. And like the Red Death, the enabling spectre of terrorism holds dominion over all.

Still, private persons will do all they can to protect their own. Accelerating clashes with the "official police" must ensue. More and more blood will be spilled. Justice will be seen as something citizens must contrive for themselves.

What, then, must we do?

Usings Part 3: Bettors and Abettors

As the trial of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin has entered its final stage, any number of developments have surfaced to cast peculiar shadows on the controversy itself, on the general attitude toward justice, and on the contemporary American psyche.

It seems clear at this point that were justice the point of the affair, Zimmerman would be acquitted. Indeed, the presiding judge should have dismissed the charges with prejudice, in the interests of justice. The prosecution's case has been a complete disaster, a hodgepodge of self-contradicting witnesses and witless speculation about "profiling." With the testimony of the eyewitness and the forensic experts, all suggestions that Zimmerman was the aggressor have disappeared from the realm of plausibility. Moreover, all this testimony, all this evidence, was available well before Zimmerman was indicted. It's become indisputable that the case was brought out of "political pressure:" that is, to quench various black mouthpieces and placate the rabble they roused.

Various persons in middle and high positions in Florida politics bet that the indictment and trial would pour oil on Florida's racially troubled waters. But as the multitude of "Kill Zimmerman" Facebook rants and similar outpourings of hatred have revealed, the very persons the trial was supposed to mollify are ready to touch a match to that oil.

They should have known better. Accusing a clearly innocent man of a heinous crime to please a troublesome interest group could only have one result: to whet the appetite of that group, and the "spokesmen" who stood to profit most greatly from their bellowings, for much larger incitements: possibly even a bloody riot.

---

The politicians and officials who acceded to the demands for a trial of Zimmerman constitute an interest group of their own. Like most of us, they prefer tranquility to public unrest; no doubt they believed the trial would serve as a means toward that end. Having only just expressed myself on that subject, I trust that my Gentle Readers will allow me to pass on from it without further comment.

What's less obvious and ultimately more important is the existence of a substantial community of persons outside both the political class and the "roused rabble" who probably believe the very same thing -- who might even be hoping that Zimmerman is convicted, against the evidence, so that their lives and comforts won't be disturbed by rioting and violence. Many of them probably think themselves good persons for wishing so. After all, they tell themselves, "we only want what's best for everybody."

Daniel Greenfield opined thus:

To understand the Zimmerman case, you have to live in a neighborhood that has just enough property values to keep you paying the mortgage and just enough proximity to dangerous territories to make you feel like you're living on the frontier.

The chain of events doesn't make much sense to the elites, which is one reason why they assume that the explanation must be racism There weren't a lot of New Yorker readers cheering as Charles Bronson's Paul Kersey stalked the subways and parks of the city blowing away hoods. The perfect target audience for the Death Wish movies or for Goetz saying "You don't look too bad, here's another" was that bottom half of the middle class that didn't have enough money to leave the city and didn't have enough liberalism to accept the violence as their just due.

True enough, as far as it goes. But it misses a key point: some of the persons wishing for Zimmerman to be convicted are conservatives.

---

Back at Eternity Road, I wrote:

Quite a lot of conservatives -- even a few hard-core libertarians -- are squeamish about the right to keep and bear arms. One very bright fellow of your Curmudgeon's acquaintance opined that "rudeness ought not to incur the death penalty," implying that he would expect a wave of homicide in the streets were the tradition of bearing firearms in public to be renewed. Another wanted to know what would become of peaceful public places such as supermarkets and movie theaters, should the hips of citizens be decorated with weapons once more. Granted that cell phone users can be very annoying, he said, surely they deserve no more than a broken arm, at worst....

The politically engaged tend to be among America's better off. Conservatives in particular often feel they have a lot to defend. In the main, they've worked hard for what they have, and justifiably feel that they deserve it and deserve to keep it. If our typical conservative, Smith, senses some sort of threat to his position and holdings, from where would it emanate, and what form would it take?

Most violence and crime against property takes place in a relatively small sector of the country: the heavily populated urban areas and their nearest, densest suburbs. Smith is highly unlikely to live in such a locale, preferring the greater safety and gentility of the outer suburbs or rural America. Therefore, he's unlikely to be too often aware of his vulnerability to personal attack. Nor will he think of his home as a probable target for plunderers.

However, Smith hears the stories, as do we all. He hears about the plagues of gunfire and gang warfare on the evening news; he simply can't get away from them and remain reasonably well informed. So the "threat" posed by firearms, which the Old Media have promoted ceaselessly since 1965, will appear linked to forces which, were they to impinge upon his life, would have the aspect of an invading army, albeit one that wears no uniforms and flies no banners.

Given this sense of a potential but distant threat, Smith would prefer to see it kept at bay by "professionals": the police and armed forces. Economically, it makes more sense to him; a citizen militia would cut too deeply into his time and the walk-in trade at his place of business. Besides, defending the borders is what government is for, isn't it?

Another economic vantage arises from the comparative theory of wealth: that Smith regards himself as wealthy only because he has more than most others. If those others are poised at his gates, and might just be contemplating the redistribution of his wealth, he'd rather wrap himself around his property than take up arms to repel them. It will be infinitely easier for "the authorities" to protect him and his if no one else is permitted a firearm; it will make their targets easier to spot.

As unpleasant a perspective as this might seem, I stand by it: I've met even more self-styled conservatives who feel that way since the quoted essay was posted (3/21/2005). From that vantage, George Zimmerman, a working class fellow from a working-class neighborhood, had no right to carry a weapon, much less to use it -- even if the sole alternative was a crippling or lethal beating by an urban thug who'd forfeited by his own actions any shred of a right to life.

In another essay, I wrote:

Near the conclusion of his book The Bell Curve, sociologist Charles Murray notes that "conservatism" means different things in different lands. In Latin America, we find conservatives among the landed gentry and the industrialists -- but the ideals they hold are a far cry from those of American conservatives. Their wealth and power arises, in the main, from political connection and favoritism. Their whole aim is to conserve their perquisites against invasion by los peones. Murray uses the hacienda on the hill, walled and guarded by armed retainers, as the perfect pictorialization of Latin conservatives' preferred end state -- obviously a far cry from American conservatives' freedom-oriented constitutionalism.

At least, it should be a far cry from the attitudes of American conservatives. But a fair number, including some popular commentators, appear to have adopted the "hacienda perspective." These deplore any development that might spur los peones into charging up the hill. Justice is an entirely secondary consideration.

---

At this point, it begins to seem likely that blood will be spilled over this. Zimmerman cannot justly be convicted of second-degree murder, with which the indictment charges him. But the six-person jury might well feel that it must convict him of something, "for the good of society." They might even rationalize that it would be for Zimmerman's protection. Yet a manslaughter conviction would hardly satisfy the mobs that are already forming...the mobs the Florida authorities are begging to "raise your voice, not your hand."

If there's a ray of sunshine to the affair, it would be that Floridians are very well armed. Any mobs that think to run rampant, in the fashion of the "flash mobs" of black teenagers that have terrorized several major cities, will have to deal with that. They might find it a less pleasant experience than their predecessors enjoyed among the largely disarmed populations of Philadelphia and Chicago.

Usings Part 2: Users And Borders

The esteemed Charles Hill linked to this piece, and added a spot-on observation:

The “free and open market” is the problem, according to proponents of this foul proposition: in any such market, there is competition, and therefore there will be unequal outcomes, which are deemed unacceptable in this day and age. “Fairness,” doncha know.

Of course, if life were actually fair, then your below-average outcome is, by definition, your fault. So there’s a definite disconnect between fairness and “fairness,” which governmental mutts are more than happy to exploit, knowing that Smith and Jones have day jobs and therefore aren’t able to spend forty hours a week inventing grievances for the government to redress.

Commenter fillyjonk chimed in with yet another gem:

I guess I prefer the image of a mutualism – yes, the bee has to do work to get fed by the flower, and vice versa, but without transferring pollen, the bee is gonna wind up starving, and without feeding the bee, the plant is gonna wind up without offspring. And in many mutualisms, each gives up something that’s easy for it to get, in return for something that it’s hard for it to get.

Which brings me to the subject foreshadowed by the title of this tirade.

---

Imagine, if you can -- I'm sure it's hard for any Gentle Reader of Liberty's Torch -- that you're a user by character and preference. Given the choice, you prefer force and / or fraud to honest, voluntary trade: a la mode Screwtape, "to get the man's soul, and give him nothing in return." With that as your established preference, if we assume you command force and / or fraud enough to work your will on your victim, what is your next most pressing tactical need?

Exactly: keeping him from getting away.

If your target can't flee, he must fight. If you can overwhelm him at will, you need not fear forceful resistance. So foreclosing his avenues of escape is paramount.

Users-by-preference are a small minority of Mankind: 10% is an upper bound, and might not be the least upper bound. But as with all of us, they will gravitate to those habitats in which their natures will afford them the best chance of flourishing. The "habitat" best suited to the user is, of course, the State: employment as an agent thereof.

The Constitution of the United States specifies a small number of topics -- seventeen in all -- over which Congress has power to legislate, and therefore, for the management of which the federal government has the power to coerce the citizen and his voluntary associations. Under the contractarian assumptions on which the Constitution is based, We the People have agreed to this as the price for the provision of certain "public goods," including secure borders, stable money, post offices, and so forth.

(I might need new glasses, but nowhere in the document can I find the power to defraud delegated to any of the three branches of the federal government. So we can skip that possibility.)

How are those secured borders, that stable money, those post offices and so forth working out for us all? Has Washington held up its end of the contract? And if I may assume -- may I? -- that the answer is "Hell, no," how shall we curb the federal government's aggressive expansion beyond its delegated authorities and responsibilities?

While there was a land frontier, the answer was "Go west, young man." What is it today?

---

The more tyrannical a government becomes, the more tightly it controls the movement of its subjects. In particular, it straitens the rules governing emigration, such that "desirable" subjects are prevented from leaving: on occasion by bribery, but more often by simple prohibition.

The reason is obvious: a mobile populace will possess numerous avenues by which to elude the grip of the State. A populace that can exit the country completely, when the coercions and exactions reach a certain, difficult to predict level, will "vote with its feet." So the mature tyranny will control its borders with maximum concentration.

It's not always a matter of barbed-wire barriers and armed men with their guns pointed inward. Some countries -- the United States is one -- impose a confiscatory exit tax on a man who renounces his citizenship. Others will permit temporary departures, but never without a "surety:" a beloved family member held hostage to ensure the traveler's return. And of course there are the pure-garrison states that use naked force to prevent anyone from leaving, as was the case with East Germany before reunification.

The shocking aspect of these measures is the high degree of cooperation many nations routinely accord one another in the effort of retarding emigration. Not all countries are as eager to see their people depart as Mexico.

---

If we cannot flee, we must fight. But what are the odds? This is the critical question about the prospects of a return to individual freedom and Constitutionally constrained government. It breaks down into several "smaller" questions:

• What development would finally trigger a violent revolution against the federal Leviathan?
• Assuming that development, what fraction of the able-bodied population would willingly take up arms?
• Should such a revolution occur, what would its probability of success be?
• Should the revolution succeed in overthrowing the federal government, would the successor government (or lack thereof) be any better?
• Should subsequent conditions prove substantially preferable, what would be the most likely threats to them?

Each of these questions demands an answer. With the possible exception of the last one, the answers as the general public perceives them must all be favorable for a revolution to occur and succeed. It's a problem in what Douglas Hofstadter called "superrationality," or, alternately, "renormalized rationality" (Martin Gardner). Only when an adequate majority of the nation is persuaded that an adequate majority of the nation is persuaded that an adequate majority of the nation is ready to revolt will an adequate majority of the nation be ready to revolt.

Barring a shattering of Leviathan's controls over emigration, those are the conditions required for a pro-freedom resurgence. Until they're realized, both in objective reality and in the minds of Americans generally, we will continue to be used. In the interim, let him save himself who can.

Trials Can Be Murder

I've never been involved in a criminal trial in any capacity. But I've known others who were jurors in such trials, including in the most serious of all criminal allegations -- first-degree murder -- and their recounting of events in the jury room is enough to make one wonder whether a jury of "twelve good men and true" is always concerned with determining guilt or innocence.

Mind you, I don't have a better approach to offer. Indeed, the jury of twelve private citizens is historically the most reliable bulwark against the overreaching State. As long as the punishment of a criminal rests with a jury, none of whose members may be a government official or employee, the State has no power the citizenry cannot override at will. But there have been cases in recent memory in which the focus of the jury was open to dispute.

One might be in progress even now: the trial of George Zimmerman for second-degree murder in the killing of Trayvon Martin.

Commentators of every disposition have lined up to give their opinions on this case. Most are quite certain of the outcome, though the trial has experienced several notable reversals in its short run and the defense has yet to begin its case. Bombshells such as the recent indictment of lead prosecuting attorney Angela Corey for destroying evidence in the case haven't swayed the "pro-conviction" pundits one iota. Neither have the "pro-acquittal" opinion-mongers been swayed by testimony from Jacksonville, Florida medical examiner Valerie Rao that Zimmerman's injuries, reputedly inflicted by Martin before the fatal act, were "insignificant."

Both these communities of opinion have based their positions on a presumption they will not explicitly state: that the jury's verdict will not be overly influenced by the jurors' conclusions about Zimmerman's guilt or innocence.

And they just might be right.

Consider the trial, two decades ago, of O.J. Simpson for the murder of his estranged wife and her friend. The circumstantial evidence was stunningly one-sided: If evidence could convict in the absence of a jury, Simpson would have gone down for murder one. Yet the jury acquitted him. Observers drew every conclusion under the Sun, but the predominant evaluation was that the majority-black jury was simply unwilling to convict a black sports icon of Simpson's stature for murder.

The Zimmerman trial might prove to be the inverse of the Simpson circus.

There have been many threats, both open and subtle, of an explosion of interracial violence should Zimmerman be acquitted. The prospect of riots like unto those that followed the original Rodney King Affair trial cannot be waved aside. Indeed, such riots might not be confined to the state of Florida.

There's an equally distasteful inverse approach as well: should Zimmerman be convicted, which at this time would be against the weight of the evidence and the testimony of the available witnesses, blacks might regard it as a license for lawbreaking, including a declaration of "open season" on neighborhood watch volunteers. Not all such volunteers patrol armed.

Add to this the effect on the perceived reliability of the judicial system, should the verdict strike the general public as determined mainly by race-relations considerations. That system has taken enough body blows in recent years that just one more strong one might cast it permanently into disrepute.

A final thought: When a juror drifts away from the testimony, the evidence, and the conclusions to be drawn from the aggregate thereof, and focuses instead on "the good of society," or any partial approximation thereof, he is no longer concerned with justice. Justice is about the redress of violations of rights -- individuals' rights, not the mythical well-being of some mythical collectivity that can't even be intensively defined.

Which is why I find the optimism of well-known gun-rights commentator John Lott -- "the Zimmerman trial is already over" -- to be unfounded, unwise, and unreliable, no matter what fate George Zimmerman's twelve peers might ultimately decree.

Usings

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

Book Notes

1. Freedom’s Scion is now available at Amazon, for Kindle (UPDATE: and paperback, too!)
2. Mark Butterworth's Tales of New America are on Kindle, as well.
3. Run, do not walk, to SmashWords and download Just One Damned Thing After Another. It's the best, funniest thing I've read in several years...and it's free!

Just sayin'.

An Indictment

There are some subjects on which I hate to be proved right. One of them is the great, enveloping subject of race.

There are...persons...who specialize in playing both ends of the racial divide. When it suits their immediate aims, they'll claim that there's "no such thing as race." At other times, they'll claim that some specific race -- usually their own, but sometimes not -- absolutely must receive preferential treatment under the law, as a matter of "justice." This sort of dishonesty currently runs rampant in these United States. It will continue to do so for as long as the rest of us tolerate it.

Then there are persons who hold socially disapproved views about race and race relations, but who keep them to themselves unless they're absolutely certain that their in the company of the like-minded and no one else. They fear to be called racists, knowing that that epithet has been the death knell for many persons' careers, social prospects, and general acceptability.

Then there are the willful idiots: persons who can see the contextual and statistical differences between the races, but who stoutly maintain that "that doesn't matter" or, worse, that "it's whitey's fault." Some of these persons are perfectly safe to be around when the subject is anything else. Not all of them are left-liberals.

And then there are the realists -- and not all of us are white.

---

The heading over this cri de coeur from a black schoolteacher is "Before It's Deleted." Whether it has been or will be, I have no knowledge, but its content does suggest the probability thereof, so I'd advise you to read it now, in its entirety. I'll wait.

Back already? My, my. I hope you took me seriously and read the whole thing, horrifying as it is.

The most visible contextual difference between American Caucasians and American Negroes arises when the Negroes cluster, whether transiently or persistently. A high density of Negroes elicits the tribal characteristics of that race, as I delineated them in this piece of some months ago. The reasons are more complex than many might suppose, but the behavioral cleavage itself is indisputable.

Given that behavioral cleavage, which is amply supported by crime statistics and anecdotal evidence, Robert S. Oculus's open, courageous assertion that "blacks are dangerous to whites" gains tremendous force, at least within the American context. Few white persons behave as if they're unaware of that danger, whether or not they admit to the recognition.

It's been asserted, repeatedly and from many quarters, that America's racial problems, from its social and occupational divides to its racially disproportionate crime statistics, are "the legacy of slavery." From that stance, the speaker normally goes on to claim that that makes it "our responsibility" to redress that legacy. His proposed method will almost always be self-sacrifice by whites: social, cultural, and economic preferential treatment of blacks, almost always through government, including forms of deference amounting to self-abasement despite the social, cultural, and economic survival imperatives implicit in the situation.

In no other case of which I'm aware has anyone been so bold as to assert that persons with absolutely no quantum of proximate responsibility for a pathology are nevertheless responsible for curing it.

Does it make sense to you, Gentle Reader?

---

If the unnamed black schoolteacher's observations constitute an accurate general assessment of the disparities between white and black American schoolchildren, we need no other explanation for the disparities between white and black American adults. The child, as they say, is father to the man.

What's particularly trying about the whole thing is the undisguised general attitude of black anger and resentment toward whites. That attitude incorporates assumptions whites, laboring under an imposed weight of undeserved guilt over racial disparities, have reinforced by pandering to them. That makes it dangerous to make an assertion contrary to them.

However, the time has come to make such assertions, and to insist upon them as strenuously as possible:

Today's racial disparities did not arise from "the legacy of slavery."
No American Negro alive today was ever enslaved by an American Caucasian.
Contemporary racial prejudice emanates overwhelmingly from blacks toward whites.
Yet American Negroes, under current law, enjoy privileges and immunities superior to those of American Caucasians.
Those privileges and immunities are blatant violations of the principle of equality before the law.
Their perpetuation will perpetuate and worsen the divisions between the races.
The dangers blacks pose to whites arise from them, as well.

If that made you spit up your coffee, Gentle Reader, you're part of the problem.

---

I express these sentiments openly because the time has come when someone must do so. America's social fabric is being torn by many forces, but race is prominent among them. To the extent that American whites accept the premise that American blacks' "problems" are whites' fault, and therefore whites to redress, we collaborate in the gradual destruction of our nation.

This is made particularly painful by the statistics on interracial crimes.

I have a personal stake in the matter: one of my stepdaughters is a science teacher in a public high school. Her district isn't majority-black, nor is it trending that way at a great speed, but the demographics appear to be creeping in that direction. She already has some difficulties with the "babysitting" aspects of her position, which has tainted her enjoyment of her occupation. I pray nightly that the moderate unruliness of those non-students doesn't shade over into the sort of disorder and violence reported from districts such as that of the unnamed black schoolteacher cited above.

---

Dark skin doesn't have to correlate with foul behavior...but overwhelmingly more often than not, whites accept it as if it were rightly ours to endure, as penance for the sins of others.

It's time for the madness to end.
Time for whites to cease to feel guilt over what others did long ago.
Time for blacks to accept that their "problems" are their own damned fault
We will all be damned if we persist in denying those realities.
And we'll lose our nation in the process.

Pray.