Who'd a thunk?

The system of hitting up The Man in order to buy votes from a captive electorate dependent on the federal government, so successful during the postwar boom, has finally stopped working.

"The Third Party." By Richard Fernandez, PJ Media, 10/16/13.

A hard look at ourselves.

Witness the ultimate reality of the totalitarian progressive state.

The North Korean government is also concerned about how much ordinary North Korean are learning about the outside world, especially the much higher living standards in South Korea. To deal with that more secret police have been assigned to workers at Kaesong. For every hundred workers there will be 60 security personnel.^[1]

The Soviet variant collapsed from its delusional socialist economic fantasies, if not from its innate viciousness. North Korea would too if the Chinese would desist from propping up this hideous regime.

However, we are just as affected by the gangrenous horror, lest you think we have been somehow exempted from the laws of gravity and political, moral, and economic common sense. Despite centuries of effort in Britain to establish the rule of law and the astonishing attempt to create and protect liberty in the United States, Britons and Americans have, in the past 100 years, chosen the path of servility by worshiping Savior Government. Britons -- and Europeans -- disgraced themselves by creating and submitting to the E.U., with its duplicitous Treaty of Lisbon and unelected president and European Commission hell bent, astonishingly, on extinguishing European nation states. Americans daily tolerate a massively unconstitutional federal leviathan government celebrated and affirmed by the Imperial Judiciary that would declare the moon made of cheese if it would ratify some asinine federal usurpation of the people's freedom. Think "War on Coal." Or ObamaCare.

The countries of the E.U., socialist all, now struggle to stave off economic collapse with higher taxes, confiscation, and moving funds from one account to another like carnival shell game artistes. The U.S. has long since distinguished itself as the world's master of debasing the national currency. Over it all is a blanket of lies.

At the heart of all of this is the fatal indifference to the fundamentals of how to maintain liberty that is the consequence of (1) a desire to be taken care of, (2) a degraded morality that enthusiastically embraces parasitism and a debased libertinism, and (3) a shortsighted devotion to narrow political goals like federally-protected abortion, environmentalism, public sector union privilege, and multiculturalism. The result in Western countries is, in the short term, inevitable economic collapse with a leavening of totalitarian, malicious prosecution of free speech in general and patriots offering resistance to inundation and takeover by minorities, third world primitives, and Muslims, in particular. The long-term will involve a fascist (i.e., far left) solution to economic collapse and a deracinated citizenry.

If you need citations to any of these points at this late stage in our long, suicidal march to economic and political oblivion you have been too long in the media bubble of lies and juvenile entertainments that are unworthy of anyone who claims to be a citizen, let alone a functioning adult. If this is all new and strange to you now, just go back to sleep. You have no pride and if your country will be taken over by foreigners and the hard left it won't bother you so long as you can still catch the ball game or watch the latest metrosexual sitcom episode on cable. And, if you want to know what pathetic is, look in the mirror.

Notes
^[1] "The Starving Masses Push Back." Strategy Page. 10/20/13.

Saviors

Disillusioned saviors search the sky,
Wanting to just to show someone the way,
Asking all the people passing by,
"Doesn't anybody want the way?"

[Jackson Browne, "Colors of the Sun"]

If only more of our self-nominated "saviors" could be disillusioned -- and that we could disillusion ourselves about them!

Yes, yes, there's a point to this. Hang in there.

---

The self-nominated or secular savior is a phenomenon of mass-media society. He could not arise without the promotion possible through channels of image distribution that span continents. Thus, when we see flickerings of such figures in pre-mass-media history, unless they press for political hegemony by the use of force, they tend to be only locally or regionally significant, and for only a short time. Only when radio and television enabled the erection of widespread networks for disseminating news, opinion, and propaganda did the secular savior become a persistent and nationally important force.

In the usual case, the secular savior is a promoter of an ideology: a compact system of mutually-supporting ideas, or ideons, that purport to address a large problem space. Within that problem space, various problems are supposedly solved -- i.e., their unsatisfactory aspects are remediated and give way to near-to-ideal conditions -- by matching them against the ideology's most relevant ideons. In the most extreme case, the promoter claims that the problem space addressed by the ideology is universal: that is, he proposes the ideology as a complete solution to all the problems of human life, eliminating any need to look outside the ideology for the solution to any significant human problem.

(Please pardon my use of information-theory jargon; I'm doing the best I can with a slippery set of abstractions. Besides, it's early Monday morning.)

The larger the specified problem space, the more likely the media are to give the savior broad and lurid exposure -- and the more likely the savior's claims are specious, self-serving, or worse.

---

The secular savior typically promotes himself above his ideology. At any rate, the most notorious such personalities have always eclipsed the actual ideas they espoused. What often escapes notice in such cases is the savior's desire to elevate himself, both above material concerns and moral constraints.

Decent persons are generally willing to concede that a man has a perfect right to enjoy the fruits of his ingenuity, even if said ingenuity was put to fleecing the gullible. Indeed, we sometimes make cultural icons out of men whose major talent is "shearing the sheep" in so charming, disarming a fashion that the sheep repeatedly bleat for more. ("Makes a fine Christmas gift!") However, a decent man will not allow a savior the use of violent, coercive, or fraudulent means -- and many a savior has aspired to all of that.

Watch out for the man ever eager to shove his face before a camera. It hardly matters what ideas he's promoting; his desire to force himself on you, even through the media, is enough to classify him as untrustworthy. Give him any appreciable amount of attention and pretty soon he'll be reaching into your pocket. It's reason enough to avoid aggressive street preachers, including the ones in three-piece suits with no detectable body odor.

---

Contemporary politics is infested with saviors. These are the worst of all.

The politician-savior is actively reaching for the tools of the State: force, fraud, and intimidation. He's already convinced of one of two propositions:

• "It's for the greater good;"
• "I can get away with it."

The history of politician-saviors in power should have convinced anyone tall enough to reach the levers on a voting machine that all such persons are untrustworthy and their schemes fraudulent. That, of course, is why the Left, which has bombarded us with one politician-savior after another for more than a century, is anxious to take total control of education in these United States. The "deactivation of history" (Clarence Carson) is their best protection against an awakening of the citizenry. Unfortunately, they've achieved an appalling degree of success.

Americans' native skepticism about politics and politicians wasn't enough to protect us from Franklin D. Roosevelt or Barack Hussein Obama. Both men promoted themselves above their ideologies; indeed, FDR had to hide his ideology behind a diametrically opposed Democratic Party platform to get elected in the first place. (Ask your teenage son whether his American History course made any mention of that.) In both cases, Americans responded to glamor and charisma without taking appropriate notice of what lay beneath the veneer.

Woe be unto the nation that permits such a man to lay his hands upon the levers of power, for it will know miseries untold.

Woe is unto us right now.

---

The ultimate manifestation of the politician-savior's megalomaniacal narcissism is mass murder, nominally in the name of the "greater good." We've seen it more than once these past few decades. One good thing about the mass media is that there's no averting the horror of such an atrocity, though Walter Duranty put his best efforts to concealing it and Noam Chomsky tried hard to minimize it.

What we all too frequently lack is a glimpse into the mind of such a savior. They don't often come right out and assert a privilege of genocide. Far more often, they ramble on about "the greater good," or "the needs of the revolution." Some will openly counterattack the questioner's morals and character.

In his extraordinary thriller Corpse In Armor, Martin McPhillips provides us exactly that glimpse:

    "Your certainty is impressive," Ryan said. "It allows you to justify your faith in mass murder."
    "It's not murder," she said, "when the violence is justified by the revolution. The bourgeois regime being attacked is criminal and inhuman and all who are obedient to it are complicit in its interminable violence. In acts of revolutionary violence against the enemy anyone complicit with the enemy who is killed is guilty of the crime of the enemy. It is not murder."
    "So riding a subway train to work," Ryan said, "is a criminal act punishable by death?"
    "When seen in its true historical context, it certainly is," she said confidently.
    "Everyone on the subway is equally guilty," Ryan suggested.
    "No, not if you go person by person, a maid or janitor is not carrying the same level of guilt as a stockbroker or corporate executive, but revolutionary violence sweeps with an inclusive broom. The statement it makes is bold and absolute and is a warning to all...."
    "And what do you believe in, soldier boy? Gawd?"
    "In the individual and his liberty," Ryan said, rising to the bait."
    "Oh dear, an American. You people are so charming, so quaint," she said, "always the perpetual football players running onto the field to the roar of the crowd and the bouncing breasts of the cheerleaders."
    "You're an American, aren't you, Ms. Garvin?" he asked.
    "Ah, no," she said. "I stopped thinking of myself as that, as an American when I was a teenager. That's what we call 'the normal maturation process' these days, soldier boy. Sorry you missed it."
    "So you're not an American," Ryan said. "What are you?"
    "I'm a citizen of the world," she said.
    "That's a big concept," Ryan said.
    "It's basic," she said. "You must have missed it while you were attending your ROTC meetings."
    "I guess I did," Ryan said. "That would explain why I'm still just an American with a silly belief in freedom."
    Garvin laughed.
    "Freedom? You think this America is free? You've got ninety percent of the people glued to their couches gazing like zombies into their televisions and eating non-stop. And then they jump off their couches for five minutes of history when a couple of tall buildings are knocked down in New York. That's the America I see. That's the America the revolution sees. This freedom thing you believe in, soldier boy, is a fairy tale, just like Gawd. History is unfolding right before your eyes and you're running in the opposite direction after the fairies of freedom and the goblins of terrorism. You should run in the direction of revolutionary violence, all of you should, get out in front of it, get off this America thing, because it is dead, a thing of the past. America no longer exists. You just haven't realized it. None of you have...."
    "What you people refuse to understand," Garvin said, jumping into the silence that had fallen over the room, "is that this freedom of yours is no more than pitiful self-indulgence at the expense of others. What the revolution does is take the anger and frustration of those who hunger for justice in the world and shape that into purposeful violence. You try to deny that by calling it 'senseless violence' and "mass murder,' but I'm looking at your faces now and I can see those old defenses and the lies that support them draining out of you. You all look like children who have just been told that there is no Santa Claus, and you had really known that all along. You just needed an adult to make it official for you. Well, here I am, kids, giving it to you straight, what you already knew."

McPhillips also provides a glimpse of the only permanent cure:

    The door to the building opened and the General came in. He was by himself and he looked as if he had been watching the whole thing. I noticed that he was carrying a nine millimeter in his hand, hanging at his side, and I thought he was going to threaten Garvin with it, possibly because he'd found a problem with her statements about Beers and Spencer.
    His mouth was tight, and he shot only a quick glance Ryan's way, not looking at the rest of us. He walked straight to Garvin and she looked up at him.
    "You," she said, with shock in her eyes.
    "Yes, me," the General said. "Let me shape some purposeful violence for you."
    He raised his nine millimeter about three feet from Garvin's head and pulled the trigger. The bullet entered above her left eye and exploded out the back of her head.

---

To sum up: secular saviors -- mortal men who promote themselves and their ideologies as the solution to the world's problems or the cure for your ills -- are inherently untrustworthy and dangerous. Nearly all of them seek power over you and prestige and riches for themselves at your expense. Exceptions among them are few and minor. So if you have a hankering for a savior, you're best advised to wait for the real thing.

Disrupting The Conversation

This is going to be an unusually busy day for me, so I must limit myself to one brief but important observation.

Leftists have found a new destructive tactic.

The aim is to disrupt the process by which persons in the Right are finding and reinforcing one another via the Net. As a side effect, it tempts conservatives to abandon civility.

The tactic is based on Disqus, the popular commenting system in use at the Breitbart sites and several others. Disqus supports a mechanism it calls following, which permits any member of its large user community to be notified of activity by another, named user.

Individual left-wing activists have begun using the "following" capability to harass individual conservatives.

I can't swear to the details of this campaign, but it appears that these leftists are being dispatched by some coordinating agency to:

• Pick a rightist commenter to a Disqus-equipped site, preferably an intelligent and knowledgeable one;
• Follow that rightist;
• Harass the rightist by "replying" to his comments, whether with leftist drivel, personal insults, or reams of irrelevancies.

If the rightist reacts discourteously, that's a victory for the leftist.
If he reacts by marking his activity private, that's a bigger victory.
If he ceases to contribute at Disqus-based sites, that's the biggest victory of all.

The whole point is to disrupt the process by which we pool our ideas and reassure one another that we're not isolated cranks that decent people would cross the street to avoid.

There is no perfect countermeasure. Here's Disqus's note on preventing such harassment:

How do I block people from following me?

While the functionality to block followers doesn't currently exist within Disqus, you do have the option of making your activity on Disqus private.

Of course, making your activity private prevents other conservatives from following you just as effectively as the harassing leftist troll you've attracted. However, no better solution exists at this time.

Sigh. The interactive Web, which seemed entirely positive at first, is steadily being reduced to the level of a kindergarten playground where the biggest and most obnoxious spratlings are free to harass and terrorize the rest. Those who wish to enjoy their recess undisturbed are forced to stay inside. I suppose it was inevitable; we're dealing with the sort of creeps who can't argue, lie and insult by preference, regard freedom of expression as the exclusive property of the Left, and dismiss fair play as something for others to bother themselves about.

Enjoy your Sunday.

A Threat Catholics Should Have Seen Coming

Let's be candid here: Most people have about as much ability to project future developments, including even the nearest-future developments, as I have to levitate a skyscraper. (Yes, yes, I'm working on it. Be patient.) Yet some things that have come upon the Church in recent years have been as easy to foresee as a raw egg's breaking when hurled against a wall. More poignant still, they arose from the same incentives and dynamic processes that have corrupted our politics.

To set the stage: What sort of person is most likely to want to stand at the head of a Catholic flock? Will he be the humble, unassuming sort who truly desires only to serve the New Covenant of Christ? Or is he more likely to view himself as a leader who deserves the deference and obedience of others? If the latter sort of person enters the priesthood and rises through the Church’s hierarchy, to what sort of temptations will he be exposed, and how will he respond to them?

Regardless of their overt purpose, hierarchies, and the respect that flows from ordinary persons to those who attain altitude within them, are always the targets of those who:

• Want power;
• Think themselves worthy of it.

There are no exceptions, not even for the holiest of institutions.

---

After that intro, perhaps you're ready for this:

Writing in the liberal Jesuit outlet America Magazine, Auxiliary Bishop of San Francisco Robert McElroy claims that the Church in the United States “must elevate the issue of poverty to the very top of its political agenda, establishing poverty alongside abortion as the pre-eminent moral issues the Catholic community pursues at this moment in our nation’s history.”

Taking his cue from Pope Francis, whom he says has “unswervingly pointed to the scandal of poverty in a world of plenty as a piercing moral challenge for the church and the whole human community,” McElroy writes that the pontiff’s “teachings on the rights of the poor have enormous implications for the culture and politics of the United States and for the church in this country.”

McElroy argues that “both abortion and poverty countenance the deaths of millions of children in a world where government action could end the slaughter.” He asks why, if the sanctity of the unborn human life is a doctrinal issue of the Church and, therefore, requires faithful Catholics to defend it in the public square, Catholics do not feel equally compelled to demand that their government fund social justice programs in the United States and abroad.

That very same prelate goes on to argue that abortion-supporting politicians should not be denied communion.

The Vatican has issued some unfortunate pronouncements in recent decades. The notion of "economic justice" is one such. There's no such thing, of course, any more than there's such a thing as "social justice." Attaching a qualifier to the word justice automatically creates an absurdity, for justice is concerned solely with the recognition and protection of individuals' rights. "Economies" and "societies" have no rights, being fictions of the mind assembled from wholly conceptual components.

But that's tangential to the larger point. What is a Catholic bishop doing promulgating a political position? In case you're unaware, the rank of Bishop is the highest to which a Catholic priest can rise; cardinals and popes are merely bishops with additional responsibilities. Therefore, McElroy's pronouncement that the Church in America must take this nakedly political position is being proclaimed from the very spires of the Church!

No, he's not the first. That doesn't make his betrayal of his responsibilities, nor his utter lack of humility before his proper role as an ordained priest of Christ, any less.

---

I was at first minded to put McElroy's nonsense down to confusion and lack of comprehension, especially given this snippet from his article:

Taking his cue from Pope Francis, whom he says has “unswervingly pointed to the scandal of poverty in a world of plenty as a piercing moral challenge for the church and the whole human community..." [Emphasis added]

We do not live in "a world of plenty." We live in a world whose reliable natural laws -- perhaps God's greatest gift to Man -- provides every man with opportunity to prosper, if he has the understanding, the willingness to work, the required degree of perseverance, and is free from coercion or constraint. In those places and times where Man's mind and heart have been free to seek prosperity, those who have exerted themselves have invariably prospered. Just as invariably, those who lack understanding, will-to-work, and perseverance have sought to blame everything under the Sun for their failure to rise -- including the comparative success of others.

Such envy has been the would-be dictator's foremost tool for centuries, as C. S. Lewis pointed out in The Screwtape Letters:

What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.

If the Church should abjure Christ's perfectly clear separation of politics from faith, thus allying itself with the Tyrants, where, then, can we turn for moral guidance?

---

This transformation of Christian moral-ethical teaching into political posturing may be the greatest threat to Christianity since the Crucifixion. The Church narrowly escaped this trap when it emerged from the Renaissance stripped of its previous, jealously guarded political powers and privileges. A number of forces converged on it to perform that saving excision, not the least of them the treaties that constituted the Peace of Westphalia. To plunge back into darkness at this time, given the implacable hostility to real Christianity that inheres in every government on Earth, could be the fall that dooms the Church for all time.

Yet the lure of power -- over men's bodies and minds as well as their souls -- has attracted an unholy number of American clerics to the path Robert McElroy has chosen. Political prominence carries with it a promise of prestige and influence that the lowly service of Christ and the succor of His people cannot equal...as if it were ever intended to do so.

Does your parish have any "political priests?"
Do you challenge them on their notions when they orate about politics?
Do your fellow parishioners listen more intently to such secular preachments, or to the Gospels of Christ?
We cannot afford to stand mute before this threat to the future of Man.
Be outspoken, in service to your faith in Christ.

Pray.

Assorted

1. "Settled Law"

Ann Coulter's column of yesterday makes a very important observation:

No law, certainly not one that fundamentally alters the role of the government, has ever been passed like this.

But now, this greased-through, irregular law is relentlessly defended as "settled law" and "the law of the land"! (At least the parts that Obama hasn't unconstitutionally waived -- again, anybody know if the Constitution is "settled law"?)

Wow -- Obamacare sounds fantastic! Not only does Congress refuse to live under it, but its proponents' strongest argument is that it's "settled law!"

The most hilarious part of the "settled law" argument is that it's coming from the left, for whom nothing is ever "settled" until they get their way.

Indeed. But this is not a new phenomenon. Consider the Brezhnev Doctrine:

The Brezhnev Doctrine was a Soviet Union foreign policy, first and most clearly outlined by S. Kovalev in a September 26, 1968 Pravda article, entitled "Sovereignty and the International Obligations of Socialist Countries." Leonid Brezhnev reiterated it in a speech at the Fifth Congress of the Polish United Workers' Party on November 13, 1968, which stated:

When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.

This doctrine was announced to retroactively justify the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 that ended the Prague Spring, along with earlier Soviet military interventions, such as the invasion of Hungary in 1956. These interventions were meant to put an end to liberalization efforts and uprisings that had the potential to compromise Soviet hegemony inside the Eastern bloc, which was considered by the Soviets to be an essential defensive and strategic buffer in case hostilities with NATO were to break out.

...and, more recently "in the news," the "Islamic Waqf:"

The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or part of it. No Arab country nor the aggregate of all Arab countries, and no Arab King or President nor all of them in the aggregate, have that right, nor has that right any organization or the aggregate of all organizations, be they Palestinian or Arab, because Palestine is an Islamic Waqf throughout all generations and to the Day of Resurrection. Who can presume to speak for all Islamic Generations to the Day of Resurrection? This is the status [of the land] in Islamic Shari’a, and it is similar to all lands conquered by Islam by force, and made thereby Waqf lands upon their conquest, for all generations of Muslims until the Day of Resurrection.

(That, of course, is from the HAMAS Charter: its justification of its irrevocable determination to destroy Israel.)

So the American Left, particularly its political arm, the Democrat Party, has taken the same position on "settled law" as the Soviet Communists and the terrorists of HAMAS. Be sure to point that out to the next leftist you're unfortunate enough to cross swords with.

---

2. "Civility's Anointed One."

If you had sense enough not to subject yourself to Barack Hussein Obama's most recent victory dance, you missed the following:

“And now that the government is reopened, and this threat to our economy is removed, all of us need to stop focusing on the lobbyists, and the bloggers, and the talking heads on radio, and the professional activists who profit from conflict, and focus on what the majority of Americans sent us here to do.”

What's that you say? Freedom of speech? Freedom of the press? The right to assemble and petition for a redress of grievances? But...but...but civility! How can we have civility with all this unruly, disorganized dissent? Surely we are morally obligated to get behind our Maximum Leader and trust to his infallible sense for the Right, the Just, and the Future? Why, the alternative involves disagreement, even argument!

Given that Obama can't even open his mouth without blaming others for his failures and condemning those who disagree with him in some scrofulous fashion, this was probably inevitable. However, it's not likely to get a warm reception outside his hardest-core base. The Daily Caller's Jim Treacher gives it the appropriate coloration:

He should’ve been more specific. He’s just fine with the lobbyists, bloggers, talking heads, and professional activists on his side. Hell, he’s a community organizer by “trade.” No, it’s only the ones who disagree with him who need to shut up.

The only guy angrier than a leftist who just lost is a leftist who just won. It’s not enough that he got what he wanted. He’s seething that anybody has the gall to oppose his decrees.

I love being scolded by an autocrat who just got done calling anybody who disagrees with him a hostage-taker, and then turns around and says $#!+ like, “We don’t have to suggest that the other side doesn’t love this country.” See, it isn’t incredibly ugly, hyperpartisan rhetoric when he says it.

Barack Obama is either completely insane and doesn’t realize he does exactly what he accuses his opponents of doing, or he’s the biggest troll in the history of the world. I guess it could be both?

Obama is not insane in the clinical sense. Nor is it possible to believe that he's a patriot of any variety. He has made it plain that he's determined to have his way in all things. Our "Constitutional law professor" president really, truly does demand that we kowtow before him as he crowns himself king. Dissent will not be tolerated; it's simply "uncivil."

Given that the GOP's Surrender Caucus has emerged dominant over the Tea Partiers, there are no non-violent solutions remaining. What that portends for the next few years, I hesitate to guess.

---

3. Book Recommendation

Ann Aguirre has recently risen to the front ranks of speculative-fiction writers on the strength of two excellent series, each of which features an appealing heroine:

• The "Sirantha Jax" science-fiction series;
• The "Corine Solomon" contemporary-fantasy series.

Recently she's lit out on a new and curiously fresh path with her novel Perdition, set on a prison-spaceship of that name whose inmates, the most violent irreformables of a future society, can never leave even as corpses. Granted that prison dramas are a well established genre of their own, Perdition carves a new trail in that this prison has no warden or guards, and is essentially a closed ecology. Perdition's inmates must contrive all things for themselves from the limited, steadily deteriorating resources of the ship itself.

The consequences involve sociological, economic, and political developments of exactly the sort Thomas Hobbes had in mind in Leviathan. Yet the multifarious struggles for existence, for gain, and for power are made new and fascinating by Aguirre's adroit use of unusual characters with unusual drives, fetishes, and quasi-religious creeds.

As with most spec-fic penned by female authors, including Aguirre's other works, the protagonist is a woman, "Dred," who somehow beats the amoral men aboard Perdition at their own games. Also, there's a significant romantic element in Perdition, which some readers might say could have been omitted without loss. However, Aguirre handles such things well; they don't detract at all from the power of the plot or the appeal of the major characters.

Recommended.

---

4. Freedom's Fury

The first draft of the third and concluding -- really! -- volume in the Spooner Federation series recently passed what I conceived as its midpoint, which prompted one of my test readers to note that:

1. There are a lot of conflicts going on here;
2. You don't have a lot of word-count left with which to resolve them all, Fran!

Well, that isn't the worst problem a science-fiction writer could have, but it's non-trivial all the same.

The past couple of decades have seen a spontaneous convergence of SF novels around an "optimal" length of 100,000 words, or about 300 pages in standard mass-market-paperback format. That seems to be the dominant length among novels in that genre, though there are exceptions. I have no explanation for this; it might arise from reader preferences, it might have something to do with the economics of paperback publication, or there might be some other reason. All the same, a survey of the books on the SF shelf at your local Barnes & Noble will confirm the trend at a glance.

(Note: The trend does not apply to the fantasy works intermingled with the SF. Whatever the reason, fantasy writers allow themselves, or are allowed, more room to roam their fictional worlds. They seem to need it.)

In consequence, a writer who has a lot to write about -- a lot of themes, or a lot of conflicts, or a lot of fascinating characters -- can find himself straining to accommodate all of it between a single pair of covers. For the writer who takes the 100,000 word length as a limit, the only solution is to "thin out the herd:" to save some of his seemingly irresistible ideas for another day. But that's not the easiest thing to do, especially when the ideas at issue are strongly interlinked and seem to have "taken root" in the plot.

The 100,000 word trend isn't enforced by any agency I know, but a pattern as strong as that one demands attention, and perhaps a modicum of respect. That implies that I have a bit of thinking to do about how to make the resolution of all the conflicts in Freedom's Fury converge satisfyingly in the 40,000 words or so I "have left." It's that or reductive surgery, and my characters are guaranteed not to like that.

Misleading Yourself

...is an offense for which you'll never find someone else to blame. Consider the following:

Libertarianism is spreading on our college campuses. An unusually large number of politically-minded, frustrated students, who refer to themselves as the "liberty movement," believe themselves to be part of a rising tide that will restore the country to greatness.

Much of the recent growth in libertarian activism emerged after Ron Paul's 2008 failed presidential bid, when Jeff Frazee, Paul's national youth coordinator, founded Young Americans for Liberty (YAL). Aided in part by the right-of-center activist training group the Leadership Institute and its team of field representatives, YAL now boasts chapters on over 380 campuses and a membership of some 125,000 students. Another libertarian group, Students for Liberty, has since seen exponential growth since its founding in 2008. At the end of 2008, there were 42 campus groups in the SFL network. By 2013, SFL claimed an affiliation with 930 groups worldwide: 767 in the U.S., over 100 in Europe, and a few dozen in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

David Deerson, who was the president of UNC-Chapel Hill's YAL chapter until he graduated in May, says that his personal story is a "microcosm" of the growth of the liberty movement on campus. When he arrived at UNC as a freshman, he sought out the student libertarian group. There were only about four people regularly attending the weekly meetings, and they didn't do much in terms of activism. But by the time Deerson graduated, roughly 25 people attended weekly meetings, and the group--now a chapter of YAL--was winning awards for its activism.

While it's heartening to read of young Americans taking a lively interest in freedom and cocking a jaundiced eye at politicians' promises of a governmentally-engineered Utopia, the assertions in the cited article have insufficient foundation for anyone to take them as a harbinger of a libertarian groundswell. From later in the article:

Another issue driving libertarian activism is disenchantment with middle class entitlements. Programs like Social Security are beginning to run deficits, and demographic projections suggest that receiving a substantial payout upon retirement may not be an option for those just entering the program. In surveys, many millennials say they don't think the program will exist by the time they're supposed to receive benefits.

Young people are getting a "raw deal" from politicians' deceptive promises, Deerson said.

What are these young folks really cheesed off about? The entitlements themselves, or that today's young Americans are highly unlikely ever to receive significant payouts from them?

It would behoove us to ask around before we leap to any rosy-glassed conclusions.

---

Over the decades I've watched political trends, I've noticed some strong correlations among youth, political engagement, and particular passions:

• The young man is principally concerned with sex and money. The late teen / early adult is biased heavily toward sex; as he ages, the balance tilts ever more toward money.
• Young women are nearly obsessed with romance and getting properly mated up. Very few are interested at all in politics or political theory; the ones who are lean heavily toward the Lesbian-Feminist Left. ("The angry ugly-girl faction" -- Duyen Ky)
• Young Americans of both sexes have very short horizons and powerful time-preferences. This stems from being:
  1. Young;
  2. And American;
  
  ...and nothing can be done about it.

In short, young Americans are the pampered progeny of the most opulent and indulgent society in the history of the world. Their natural interests are in extending their range of enjoyments and conveniences, if possible at little or no cost. Moreover, we, their parents, made them that way.

Yes, there are exceptions. The cited article is about such exceptions. And what does that word exception mean, Gentle Reader?

For those reasons, I remain skeptical about a "rise of libertarianism" originating among young American adults. Indeed, I'd be surprised to discover that the trend on college and university campuses is all that strong. It's likely to be a fleeting surge of distaste for current conditions and recent developments, if anything.

---

Youth movements this century past have always been unrealistically Utopian. They've focused almost exclusively on two fantasies:

• The abolition of war;
• The abolition of "poverty."

This is a consequence of youth itself: the lack of knowledge and historical perspective required to grasp that central bit of wisdom best articulated by the great Thomas Sowell:

There Are No Solutions;
There Are Only Tradeoffs.

With the decline in sincere religious belief, especially Christian belief, this has become a larger problem than ever. Who, after all, told us that "The poor you will always have with you" -- ? Who was it who railed against the religious establishment of classical Judea for making the Temple effectively inaccessible to poor Jews? Who was it who drove the "moneychangers and the sellers of doves" out of the Temple vestibule -- and why? And just how many young people understand the implications of all that?

Christian faith, among its other virtues, provides a conceptual bridge for the young: a protective channel from the irrepressible all-things-are-possible confidence of the unscarred to the older-and-sadder-but-wiser comprehension of the way the world works that only comes with life experience. Properly appreciated and internalized, it cushions the young person against his ignorance of economics and the darker aspects of human nature. It guides him toward proper treatment of those around him, especially the less fortunate. But treated as an old-fart's superstition, or (arguably worse) as a set of ritualized dogmas that can be held apart from the "real world," it loses that protective character.

Psychologist Peter Breggin, in a lecture he delivered many years ago, noted that the tendency to become more conservative with age is coupled to an intensifying interest in religion. However, he inferred that such a swelling interest is driven by a desire to explain one's success in this world. He erred in that inference; the belief that one's religious faith and affiliation is the key to his material success nearly always arises before success is acquired. Nor is it always incorrect.

From here I could vault into a tirade about modern "social justice" clerics who preach that we have a responsibility to bring the Kingdom of God to reality here on Earth, but you've already heard that one, so I'll spare you.

---

Don't kid yourself. The salvation of this country from the social-fascist Left will not come from our supposedly idealistic and energetic young people. All but a tiny minority of them have "drunk the Kool-Aid^®" of the Heaven-on-Earth Left, and won't shake off the sugar hangover until they reach their forties...if, indeed, they ever do. As gratifying as it is that the liberty movement is gaining more footholds on college campuses, these will not be the incubators of the Second American Revolution. At best, they will be auxiliaries: primarily useful for disillusioning their coevals, to whatever extent the starry-eyed idealism of youth allows for such, as the collapse of the Liberal-Fascist Corporate State accelerates.

The hard work will remain with those of us who have lived the nightmare unswaddled by parental concern or the uniquely protective environment of the Ivory Tower. We cannot delegate it to younger and fresher bodies. Even the attempt is likely to cause harm: to ourselves as parents, guardians, and "gray heads," and to the nation at large.

Glitch Or Threat?

Sometimes, it can be hard to tell:

Shoppers around the country could not use their EBT food stamp cards because of a computer problem Saturday.

KGAN-TV reported that North Carolina was one of several states impacted and others included Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Maine, Pennsylvania and New York.

Xerox spokeswoman Karen Arena confirmed via email Saturday that some Electronic Benefits Transfer systems are experiencing temporary connectivity issues, according to the Associated Press....

The outage is not related to the government shutdown, said U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Courtney Rowe.

...and sometimes, it seems all too clear:

States across the country are being told to stop the supplemental nutrition assistance program for the month of November, pending further notice.

That’s according to a letter from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Fox 13 obtained a copy from the Crossroads Urban Center in downtown Salt Lake City. Crossroads says if Utah families don’t get food stamps, they’ll turn to the local food pantries, which are already strapped due to the government shutdown. Homeless people Fox 13 talked to, some who use SNAP, say losing food stamps would mean going hungry.

“This is going to create a huge hardship for the people we serve here in our food pantry,” says Bill Tibbits who is the Associate Director at Crossroads Urban Center.... “What this means if there’s not a deal, if Congress doesn’t reach a deal to get federal government back up and running, in Utah about 100,000 families won’t get food stamp benefit,” says Tibbits.

In other words, tens of thousands of Utah families may not be able to feed their children come November.

People out on the streets like Richard Phillips says, “It could impact us and it’s going to cause problems because you’re going to come to find out that people are going to steal and do what they have to do to survive.”

Let's leave aside the unwisdom of becoming dependent on a single benefactor -- any benefactor -- for your necessities. Let's even leave aside the folly of entrusting the provision of those necessities to a government. Those are not arguable points; anyway, the Gentle Readers of Liberty's Torch are already aware of them. What does it say to those of us who value public peace that many millions of persons already addicted to this government program are about to have the benefit cut off? And what does it say about the motives of the Obama Administration that it openly contemplates doing that?

"People are going to steal and do what they have to do to survive." Indeed they will, even if their interpretation of the word "survive" strikes the rest of us as overstrained. They've been told that the assistance of the SNAP / EBT program is theirs "by right." Many of them have internalized the notion. Combine the sense of being deprived of a "right" with "survival pressures" Americans haven't faced for many decades, and what do you see coming?

Don't all rush at once, now.

---

Last Saturday's EBT-card outage provoked massively unruly, lawless behavior in several locales. Several stores reported a degree of disorder that effectively closed them for normal operations. Even that brief cessation of the benefit proved to be something to be feared.

What if it wasn't the "temporary connectivity issue" Xerox claimed it to be? What if it was a planned event -- a demonstration of the chaos the Administration could inflict upon the nation should it choose to do so?

Conservatives have contended for some time that the Obamunist agenda is essentially the Cloward-Piven strategy for crashing our market-based economy. Though no one can be confident that he knows the exact number of dependents that would precipitate a wholesale convulsion in the sociopolitical order, it seems clear that the percentage must be less than 50%. There simply aren't enough earners far enough above subsistence for each of them to carry someone else on his back.

There's no question that the Administration and its allies on Capitol Hill have greatly increased the number of Americans receiving some sort of benefit from the federal government. As of the last measures, approximately 47 million persons were receiving SNAP benefits. One in five Americans is officially "poor," and most of those are entitled to WIC benefits. That's quite an army of the disaffected. It's hard to imagine that the economy as it stands could support any further increase without buckling under the load.

But if the events cited above can legitimately be read as political moves intended to frighten House Republicans into surrendering to the Administration, we're not looking at a purely economic phenomenon. We're looking at political extortion.

---

Author and commentator Matt Bracken articulated the most enraging and frightening possibilities at Western Rifle Shooters just yesterday:

It looks like Obama plans to crash the economy and instigate massive food riots in November. This will be blamed, naturally, on the Evil White Racist Tea Party Republicans. American Pravda, (ABCNNBCBS, the NYT, the WaPo, the LAT) will dutifully serve as Obama’s microphone for this scapegoating....

Last Saturday’s hours-long EBT “glitch” led to mass panic and near riots in 17 states. Was that just a “warning” from the regime to the GOP to extend his infinite debt ceiling pronto, “or else?” If the EBT system is shut down for even three days, every supermarket will be looted, and riots will sweep our cities that will make 1968 look like a picnic. This is not an accident, this is deliberate.

We’ve seen this kind of deliberate provocation before: Reichstag Fire, anyone? I’m beginning to feel like it’s Berlin, 1933, and my name is Goldstein. And the new “Berlin Zeitung” will be the NYT and the Washington Post.

Unfortunately, malice in such matters is a difficult thing to prove. Even if the Obamunists were to state openly that they were terminating EBT benefits to force an end to the current partial government shutdown and compel the House of Representatives to accede to an unconditional budgetary resolution and rise in the debt limit, millions of Americans would refuse to hold it against them. The song would be "They're doing it for the good of the country." It would be near to impossible to convince the singers otherwise.

Worse, the magnitude of the convulsions likely to sweep the country would preclude the appropriate response from patriotic Americans. Except for the most fortunate of us, we'd be too busy guarding our own neighborhoods and pantries to march on Washington and remove the Administration by force. Survival does trump political correction.

There's no way to know how this will turn out, and every reason to fear that it will turn out badly. Be prepared.

Betrayal Guaranteed

These past five days, I've rigidly refrained from reading anything about politics, legislation, or events relevant to either. That's a radical departure from my usual practice. I adopted it because my activities over that interval have required:

• That I be perfectly cheerful and upbeat;
• That I concentrate wholly on my work.

I managed both. However, the success of the decision got me to thinking about the underlying phenomenon: that is, the maddening and saddening overall quality of contemporary politics and political discourse.

There are more maddening and saddening things about American politics in our time than anyone could cover in a large book, much less a short op-ed here at Liberty's Torch. But if there's one that stands head and shoulders above all the others, it just might be the certainty of betrayal by our elected representatives.

I chose to use the word certainty after much deliberation. Over the century past, I can name only a handful of exceptions to the betrayal-habit among American politicians. Granted that not all betrayals are of a single type -- there are policy betrayals, and character betrayals, and will-to-fight betrayals, and possibly other kinds -- I estimate that the probability that an elected official will exhibit one or more serious betrayals over the course of his political life exceeds 99%.

A serious betrayal is one that causes those who had previously given the politician their support to withdraw that support. That's the sort that makes headlines and leads to convulsions during conventions and primary battles. It also persuades Americans to plunge into ever deeper cynicism about politics and governance.

Who can seriously argue, given the incredible number and variety of the betrayals we've experienced over the most recent decades, that such cynicism isn't entirely rational?

---

Just as everyone has his own highest-priority political issues, everyone irked by political betrayal will have his own little list of the worst incidents. If nothing else, it makes conversations about such things variegated and lively.

The T.E.A. Party arose out of a sense of betrayal by the "Republican Establishment:" the "old guard" of long-established Senators and Congressmen that has steered the behavior of GOP caucuses for some years and appears cemented into place. Seniority in a legislative position is a cumulative asset: the longer you've held your seat, the more power accrues to it and the easier it is to retain it. That makes it difficult to displace a party's "kingmakers" in favor of younger and more combative blood. Nevertheless, T.E.A. Party support enabled three candidates, all well out of the Establishment vein, to attain seats in the United States Senate in 2010 and 2012. Those three Senators are responsible for all the vitality in that House of Congress, and they've attracted a mass of vilification to rival anything ever heaped on a Western politician.

I have great hopes for Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Rand Paul -- most especially for Paul, whose soft-spoken, highly appealing style seems well suited to the presidency -- but I also have great fears. They're politicians, members of an occupational category known for a powerful tendency to betray their followers. They're human, and so are guaranteed to have weaknesses and vulnerabilities. It's not impossible that, as good as they look today, their ongoing exposure to the incentives attendant upon legislative powers will corrupt them. We can only wait and see.

Meanwhile, they and the like-minded in the other House are fighting the good fight against the surrender-minded in the GOP Establishment. That guarantees something else: that those who are discommoded by their stances will target them with the heaviest weapons in the political arsenal. Indeed, we've already seen assaults on Cruz for his Canadian birth and on Dr. Paul for his father's eccentricities and questionable alliances. Expect more and worse the longer they hold out against the pressure to conform.

Strong, forthright convictions in politics have always carried a cost. Ask Sarah Palin.

---

Most politically aware persons don't have the temperament required to contend for political office. It demands too much of one's time and energy, the surrender of personal and familial privacy, and fortitude before the assaults of those who would see one brought down. There's no shame in admitting that to oneself, or insisting upon it to those who insist that "you really should run, Fran." (Yes, I've been approached thus. I still talk to those people...well, to some of them, anyway.) For a man with political principles founded on deep moral premises to enter the arena requires more than energy and equanimity: he must be unusually courageous and staunch in the face of the attacks he will confront and the vilification he will surely receive. This is made even worse than it would otherwise be by the behavior of our Legacy Media.

I heard a snatch of an interview with Newark mayor and Senatorial candidate Cory Booker yesterday. Whenever Booker evaded a question, the interviewer backed down. Only on one occasion -- the question whether Booker lives in Newark or outside it -- did the interviewer even dare to pose the question twice. It came to nothing: in the pattern established by Booker's mentor Barack Hussein Obama, the candidate "ran out the clock" by changing the subject -- indeed, by ranting about rival Steve Lonegan's "extremist views" and his association with the T.E.A. Party.

Even if it was as obvious to other listeners as it was to me just what was going on, it's more likely to have reinforced the typical listener's conviction that "they're all liars and thieves" and to intensify his resolve never to grant his trust to a politician. A sincere interviewer, passionate about the truth and its importance in politics, would have cut Booker off in mid-sentence, and said explicitly to the audience that "the candidate is clearly unwilling to answer that question." No such thing occurred.

The betrayals of politicians are greatly assisted by the media's disinclination to put an evasive or clearly prevaricating politician "on the spot" in a fashion that denies him a convenient escape. Political betrayals might be possible without such cooperative betrayals by the media, but they'd certainly be a lot harder.

---

For five days I allowed myself to live in a betrayal-free world: a world in which the statements of others could be relied upon as a predictor of their subsequent behavior. The temptation to return to it, never again to leave it, is strong. I have no doubt that many other decent Americans -- i.e., the sort that want nothing from others but respect for their rights -- feel much the same.

Quickies: Peacemakers

Among the least comprehensible practices of awards committees, from the highest to the lowest, is the habit of “peace” groups of giving their awards to persons who openly and actively foment conflict. The most egregious example is, of course, the Nobel Peace Prize, which goes to activists for massively divisive causes so regularly as to suspect that the name of the thing is an intentional sarcasm.

Today our own beloved InstaPundit accidentally lands in that very trap:

WELL, THEY’RE GIVING OUT NOBEL PEACE PRIZES TO JUST ANYBODY THESE DAYS: Nobel Peace Prize Again Goes To Group That Has Done … What, Exactly? “As these unworthies collect their laurels, authentic peacemakers — such as 16-year-old Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, who was shot in the face by Taliban terrorists solely for urging girls to go to school — go ignored.”

Really, now, Professor! Two for the price of one. Granted that the awardees are fomenters of conflict of no uncertain kind, Miss Yousafzai has promoted a practice that’s at the very heart of conflict in the Islamic world: rights for women and girl children. She’s not wrong to do so, of course – indeed, she’s shown more courage and moral insight than the rest of her country taken together -- but is her crusade really about promoting peace?

The English language is looking a bit battered, these days.

Reduced Blogging Ahead

Apologies, Gentle Reader The next few days are likely to see a decline in postings here at Liberty’s Torch. I’m headed out of town on business for a bit, and am likely to be very busy indeed. Keep safe and well informed while I’m gone, no wild parties, don’t bust up the furniture, and avoid those unsavory new acquaintances of yours!

Of course, my worthy Co-Conspirators could pitch in and take up the slack. (Hint! Hint!) And please enjoy this excellent "Firewall" from the one and only Bill Whittle:

Compassion: Reasoning Backward

I'm sure you can imagine what sort of hate mail this post provoked. Apparently I want to starve old people and children to death, assuming that casting them into the frigid, snow-covered streets doesn't do them in first. One or two of my detractors expressed a certainty that my Christianity is purely cosmetic, a veneer adopted to attract a particular audience. After all, Jesus Himself told us to "help the poor," didn't He?

Well, actually, no, He didn't. Once again, with trumpets:

“Be careful not to display your righteousness merely to be seen by people. Otherwise you have no reward with your Father in heaven. Thus whenever you do charitable giving, do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in synagogues and on streets so that people will praise them. I tell you the truth, they have their reward. But when you do your giving, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your gift may be in secret. And your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you. [Matthew 6:1-4]

Also remember this scene:

Now while Jesus was in Bethany at the house of Simon the leper, a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of expensive perfumed oil, and she poured it on his head as he was at the table. When the disciples saw this, they became indignant and said, “Why this waste? It could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor!” When Jesus learned of this, he said to them, “Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a good service for me. For you will always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me! When she poured this oil on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. I tell you the truth, wherever this gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.” [Matthew 26:6-13]

The Christian message of material compassion -- that is, charity toward the "poor," however they may be defined -- is a qualified message. It emphasizes the individual conscience and underscores questions all too frequently sloughed in discussions of charity:

• Does the beneficiary really need help?
• Is the benefactor really capable of helping?
• Should the help be of a specific material nature?
• Will it really help the recipient, or will it leave him as he was or degrade him further?

All sorts of observations derive from those questions. Perhaps the most important one is that he who ponders whether to give must first position himself so that he can answer them, both before and after giving alms. Most State-administered "charity" fails even to ask them, which should be refutation enough for any thinking man.

---

All the above having been said, most of the inveterate boosters of State "charity" are unconcerned with the Christian message, except for its utility as a rhetorical bludgeon. They have other priorities. However, quite a lot of them are utterly insincere and can be demonstrated so.

Consider: State-run "charities" invariably take the form of large bureaucracies. The "help" they give "the poor" consists almost entirely of writing checks. The checks are drawn from accounts filled by coercion. The recipients are chosen according to criteria that largely disregard the four questions in the previous segment. In particular, how the disbursements actually affect the recipients goes unmonitored.

The central tragedy of modern State welfarism is not that we can't afford it. We're a very rich society; we can afford quite a lot. The current level of public expenditure on "Health & Human Services" doesn't come near to breaking our bank. The tragedy is that it produces more dependency, more dependents, and more protracted misery rather than less.

No one needs more citations than anyone could find in the Statistical Abstract of the United States. Anyone who bothers to look for facts will find them all there, neatly compiled into easily read tables with a single overwhelming implication:

The welfare state has done immense harm and will do further harm if allowed to continue.

All alone, the statistics on the percent of children born to single mothers, that overflowing fount of social pathologies fueled almost entirely by State welfarism, should convince anyone.

---

Let's take the Man from Mars approach: Let's look at the situation as if we could see it in all its particulars but have no practical nor emotional allegiance to the current scheme of things. Such an alien would have to reason backward, from our current conditions to their putative geneses, to arrive at a positive prescription. How would he assess what he sees?

His first impression would be that, given the utterly incontrovertible boldfaced observation above, they who demand the perpetuation and enlargement of the welfare state must have other reasons for it than the well-being of the nominal beneficiaries. Therefore, their opinions and exhortations can be dismissed with prejudice.

His second impression would be that the State welfare system has become so luxuriant, and has attracted so many communities of interest that would never accept a reduction in their sector of the thing, that it cannot be "fixed" or "trimmed." Indeed, the system's tentacles reach everywhere, and have become so intertwined that there's nowhere to start in such an effort. The Alexandrian solution -- don't try to disentangle the Gordian Knot, just slash through it -- is the only practical approach.

His third impression would be that, given the history of private charity, in the absence of State-moderated redistribution of wealth, few if any of the truly needy would really suffer. Americans are the most charitable people in the history of the world. Alexis de Tocqueville noted it in the early Nineteenth Century, and little has changed since then. Privately run and funded eleemosynary institutions are everywhere. Were the dead load of the State welfare system removed from our backs, they would be energized to perform miracles of social uplift.

His conclusion would surely be that our seminal mistake was inaugurating a politically controlled scheme of "help" to the "needy." Nearly every social ill America suffers from today can be traced to that collection of decisions and actions. In the absence of a time machine, only ending all such activity would allow for the correction of its errors, and for its replacement by something as benign in practice as it might be in theory.

As a grace note, our Martian would observe that those who clamor for ever more State welfarism are among the least personally charitable of our number. Their "charitable" impulses seldom extend beyond the voting booth. Given the terrible consequences of State welfarism, those who don't profit personally from the system must need it for a sop to their consciences or an increment to their self-regard.

Charity must not be used as an analgesic for the conscience, nor as a self-awarded laurel of moral elevation. Sadly, most persons who advocate State-run charity in ever greater amounts use it in exactly those fashions. The ironies are almost too great to bear.

---

Nothing in the above is truly new. It's all been said before, and by persons much higher placed than I. Given the terrible corruptions that have been worked upon so many facets of American society, the time has come to shout it from the rooftops. The thoroughgoing politicization of our churches alone would justify the most drastic retrenchments, for no institution has been nearly as successful at combating human misery as American Christianity in its several denominations.

The mantle of "compassion" properly belongs to those who act to help deserving others, not to fatten their own wallets nor to soothe the wounds on their souls. He who disregards the actual effects of the "help" he supports is not "compassionate" by any valid measure. Nor should we grant any respect to those who decry Christian charity because it's Christian. Theirs is an agenda more vile than any words I could heap upon it, fueled by an utterly irrational hostility toward those who have chosen to believe and a fear that their works might result in more like them.

I recommend two landmark books:

• Charles Murray, Losing Ground
• Henry Hazlitt, The Conquest of Poverty

...and the automatic dismissal of those who shriek that "we can't go backward!" When you've gone entirely the wrong way, and find your nose pressed into a corner, "backward" is the only way to go.

Tells

Devoted poker players constantly look for their opponents' "tells," habitual behaviors that reveal the actual state of their hands. The observant player who accurately notes such tics can profit handsomely from them...if the opponent doesn't notice the pattern in his losses and consciously alter his behavior, of course.

Politicians and power-seekers have their own "tells." Most of those are expressions, not of the strength of their current postures but of their characters. As the late, great Jack Vance put it in his early masterpiece "The Moon Moth," "A man can mask his face, but he can't mask his personality."

The personality of the would-be dictator reveals itself in a number of ways. Courtesy of Common Sense And Wonder, this morning we have an example of one of the most common displays of intent:

Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, is seeking special power to rule by decree in order to wage “economic war”, as he battles a litany of problems with a loosening grip on power.

Currency market distortions have fuelled worsening shortages of food and basic goods from milk to toilet paper alongside high and rising inflation, posing a threat to the late Hugo Chávez’s socialist revolution. Price controls as well as endless fiddling with strict but ineffective exchange restrictions have generated a scarcity of foreign currency on which the import-dependent economy relies.

Mr Maduro, who served as Mr Chávez’s foreign minister and vice-president, has asked for “special powers” for 12 months from the country’s national assembly, to “fight against corruption and the economic war declared by the bourgeoisie against the people”. The president claims members of the “fascist” opposition, with support from the US, are “sabotaging” the economy in order to bring down the government.

In a recent tit-for-tat exchange, Washington expelled three Venezuelan diplomats in retaliation for Mr Maduro’s expulsion of three US diplomats days earlier.

“Venezuela’s economy is at a critical juncture. The productive apparatus is being acutely hit by a series of distortions such as speculation, hoarding, contraband, and the impact of the illegal currency exchange market,” Mr Maduro told legislators on Tuesday afternoon as he submitted the proposal, adopting a more conciliatory tone than in recent speeches.

Like his predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez, Maduro is determined to have absolute power over Venezuela and Venezuelans, in all things. He cannot afford to allow that the policies of the Chavez regime brought about the conditions from which his nation is suffering. That would cost him power over the Venezuelan economy. Arguably worse from his perspective, it would weaken the support of his allies, both inside and outside Venezuela. Therefore, he must represent the steadily worsening economic catastrophe as someone else's fault: "members of the 'fascist' opposition." Ironically, he intensifies his accusation by invoking that perennial boogeyman of socialist tyrants everywhere, the United States, currently under the thumb of a Chavez admirer and emulator.

There are few more reliable "tells" in politics than a habit of laying off your crimes onto others' shoulders.

Here in the U.S., our own Self-Exculpator-In-Chief is straining to lay off his sins onto Republicans' shoulders. He's told more than a few lies in the process, no doubt in the belief that his worshippers and sycophants in the Legacy Media will protect them from close examination. But some of his recent moves make it all too clear that he refuses to accept less than 100% of his will-to-power -- deliberate inflictions of suffering, or deprivation, or humiliation on ordinary, law-abiding Americans -- and they're happening right out in front of God and everybody.

Those who support the Obama Regime must fall into one of a very few camps:

• They stand to benefit directly from his policies;
• They're utter dupes incapable of rational appreciation of events;
• They're villains as deeply dyed as Obama himself, who hope to ride his coattails to power for themselves.

Though the aggregate might be shrinking, there will always be some persons in each of those categories. Indeed, the ObamaCare fiasco was aimed quite deliberately at the expansion of the first category. It might yet work; we won't know for a while longer. However, trends in public polling suggest that the second group might be much smaller than Obama and his lieutenants have counted on.

But Obama's "tells" make one thing certain: he will never, ever accept that any degree of authority over anything belongs in any hands but his. Neither the number of his opponents, nor the popularity of their stances, nor the eloquence of their arguments can sway him. His narcissism complements his dictatorial aspirations perfectly. The combination renders him incapable of self-criticism or compromise. He cannot be reasoned or bargained with; he can only be defeated.

John Boehner and the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives must stand strong. Boehner's earlier wimpy "We control one half of one third of the federal government" excuses for allowing the Regime to push him around must not be allowed a rerun.

It's been an interesting week. The week to come will be more interesting yet. Stay tuned.

"Our Church" -- ?

Courtesy of our beloved InstaPundit comes this curious report:

How Far Should Churches Go to Appeal to Men?

One question has plagued the modern church over the past few years: how to appeal to men, particularly to fathers? Churches across North America have tried different tactics to lure men into the fold, with varying degrees of success. Men’s events like motorcycle rallies and fish fries often work. Christ’s Church of the Valley in Phoenix once temporarily replaced a planter in their foyer with a motorcycle in an attempt to attract male members. Eastridge Community Church, where I am a member and serve, has brought in various players and coaches from the University of Georgia football team for men’s events.

But should churches consider the impact of their worship music? The women of one church in Canada did, and they enacted changes that increased their male attendance....

Without changing anything other than the music, the church’s gender gap quickly evaporated. Men participated more, including a marked increase in the number of men who spoke their praises aloud to God. And overall attendance grew.

The title of that piece -- "How Far Should Churches Go To Appeal To Men" -- irritates me greatly, and for more than one reason. But the body of the thing is puzzling in the extreme. A superficial change -- the excision from the liturgical music schedule of pieces deemed "too feminine" -- increased both male attendance and overall attendance? Really? How about asking the next questions?

• Who are these new male attendees?
• What sort of men are they? Husbands or singles? Fathers or childless? Workingmen, idlers, or retirees?
• What prompted them to attend? (After all, they couldn't experience the change in music without first being there, now could they?)

Superficial matters matter to the superficial; the rest of us yawn and change the channel. All the same, at least someone has noticed that men have distanced themselves from churchly attendance and involvement in an unprecedented proportion. But it would be nice were our clerics to consider soberly what it is about contemporary Christian practices has so depopulated their congregations of Y chromosomes.

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Any question that asks "why men," or "why women," or "why women but not men," et cetera ad nauseam infinitam, is a question about the innate differences between the sexes. Inasmuch as one risks being tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail for even daring to suggest that there are such differences, it's no surprise that such questions are asked only infrequently and always sotto voce.

All the same, one of the reasons you come here, Gentle Reader, is because I'm crazy enough not only to ask such questions, but to do so in a loud voice, and to answer them without regard for popularity, political correctness, or who might take offense. So let's get it on, shall we? To begin, the most salient and penetrating questions are:

1. What differences between the sexes are relevant to Christian affiliation and involvement?
2. Are those differences natural, cultural, or incidental to particular congregations?
3. Has the Church changed perceptibly? If so, was it in "message," or merely in tone?
4. What aspects of those changes would appeal differentially to men and women?
5. What forces or influences brought those changes about?

Let's examine the matter through those lenses.

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The Church exists to conserve and promulgate the Gospels of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and the Redeemer of Mankind. It has no other legitimate mission. Those Gospels, which a sincere Christian believes to be substantially accurate records of the commandments and other teachings Christ bestowed on Mankind, constitute the whole of the Christian creed, mythos and ethos both.

Time was, Christian clerics understood this. They stuck to the Gospels. They emphasized their primacy, and were humble before the Authority expressed therein. They didn't try to lard the Gospels down with officious dictates that have no foundation in the words of Christ.

Time was.

Today's Church -- and in using the capital C, I don't mean to refer solely to the Catholic Church, though it stands at the center of Christianity and is ever in my thoughts -- doesn't exactly demean the Gospels, but it certainly emphasizes quite a lot of activity beyond the promulgation and explication of the Gospels. Most of that activity falls under one of two headings:

• "Good works"
• "Reaching out"

"Good works," one of the doctrinal tenets of Catholicism and an important part of most of Protestant Christianity as well, have been at the forefront of congregational activity for centuries. "Reaching out" is a modern addition, an attempt to increase congregation size by appealing to groups traditionally uninterested in or hostile toward the Church. Both these motifs result in the proliferation of "programs."

It sometimes seems that the most serious activity in a Catholic parish is making sure there are "programs" for every imaginable "need," and that all such activities are well staffed and funded. Some such "programs" do have some relation to Jesus's teachings, though some are feel-good exercises that don't objectively benefit anyone, and one or two are actual departures from the wisdom of the Redeemer. But all require participants, and therefore time.

Even today, with women in the American labor force to an unprecedented degree, women have more discretionary time per capita than men.

Christian clerics can't help but respond to this. More, experience shows that people tend to collect around those like them, and that those who already give are the best bet for giving more. Thus, once a "program" becomes female-dominant, it tends to accelerate in that direction until male participation has dwindled to little or none.

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Statistically, men tend to prefer individual decision-making and action. Eons of evolution have oriented us toward the roles of protector and provider. We outperform women at tasks that require aggression, concentration, and symbolic manipulation. Though we are capable of the full range of human emotions, we tend to subordinate emotional considerations in our decision-making. The manly virtues are not some sort of artificial veneer we don for mating purposes, but an expression of our natures.

Statistically -- I have to keep saying that if I don't want some feminist harridan to start raving about exceptions that "disprove" my thesis -- women tend toward consensus decision-making and collaboration. Eons of evolution have oriented them toward collective action, particularly in matters that go beyond an individual woman's individual or familial concerns. They outperform men as organizers and front-line managers, though their advantage disappears at higher levels in a corporate hierarchy. They are more susceptible to emotional appeals than men. And of course, they are more domestically and parentally oriented than most men, though those traits are probably not germane to this subject.

These divergences between the sexes factor into involvement in the Church in certain ways. The "programmatic" aspect is probably clearest, as any "program" is likely to emphasize consensus and organization over individual initiative. But the differences also affect our responses to religious rituals. A rite that attempts to elicit powerful emotions rather than depths of comprehension will be more to women's tastes. To the extent that contemporary religious practices emphasize the emotional aspect of Christianity -- and the trend in that direction began decades ago -- they appeal more strongly to female communicants, perhaps far more strongly.

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Perhaps the most painful aspect of the disaffiliation of men from the Church pertains to preachments from the pulpit.

When the CSO and I go on vacation, I make a point of acquainting myself with the local Catholic parish, at least to the extent of attending Mass. The trend in sermonizing has quite definitely been away from salvation and toward Earthly compassion. Indeed, much of that preaching explicitly exhorts the congregants to endorse and support specific government programs. As a man determined to keep my own counsel about politics and make my own decisions about charity, the practice repels me; I find it hard to imagine a self-respecting man who'd react favorably to it.

But women seem to like it. The emotional reward from "doing good"...well, at least according to the pastor's own lights...appears to influence them positively and powerfully. Groups that respond to such exhortations, particularly those concerned with some political issue, are almost uniformly female.

That's a considerable departure from the words of Jesus:

“Be careful not to display your righteousness merely to be seen by people. Otherwise you have no reward with your Father in heaven. Thus whenever you do charitable giving, do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in synagogues and on streets so that people will praise them. I tell you the truth, they have their reward. But when you do your giving, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your gift may be in secret. And your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you. [Matthew 6:1-4]

...but it synergizes with women's preference for collective action.

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All the above combine into a single thrust toward female preferences and aptitudes. They fail to ratify men's preferences, our special capabilities, or the manly virtues to which Christian men have traditionally aspired. The overall effect is to give many Christian men the sense that the Church is indifferent to us or worse -- that women have the tiller and will keep it to themselves. As we prefer not to insert ourselves where we're not wanted, the consequences could not be more obvious.

If Christian clerics are conscious of these forces and approve of them, I fear there's little to be done. To those who are unaware, or who are bewildered by the absence of men from the pews and "programs:" Consider this a wake-up call.

The Great Mistake

"Never interrupt your enemy while he's making a mistake. That's bad manners." -- Attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, possibly apocryphal

Brace yourselves, freedom lovers and enemies of the Omnipotent State. We're winning. I'm here to tell you -- and more important, to tell you why.

The old Roman politico-military prescription, Divide et Impera -- "Divide and conquer" -- is the essence of smart warfighting. War is a means, a technique for imposing one's will upon the enemy. The first and by far the most imperative implication of that truth is that dividing the enemy's will gives you a huge and enduring advantage.

Divide et Impera isn't solely a general's maxim. Politicians of every land and clime have known this for centuries. It's the foundation of the Washington Monument Defense. In a political environment in which the State hands out favors to various groups, when the State's most recent decree causes resistance to swell, "cutting off the water" normally induces fratricide among those groups. Each group struggles to get the State to reopen the spigots that favor it specifically. Abandoning any agreement to "stand fast" with the other groups against State tyranny is the usual price.

Thanks to the impenetrable narcissistic arrogance of Barack Hussein Obama and the inability of anyone in his cadre of advisers to open his eyes to the realities around him, the inverse of this stratagem is now in play: Avoid doing anything that will cause your enemies to unite against you. Barack Hussein Obama has disregarded that bit of wisdom...and it's swiftly uniting Americans with spines against him and his schemes.

I haven't collected links. Why bother? If you can't find a zillion stories about irrationally closed war memorials, privately operated and funded parks, and other facilities that cost Washington nothing at all, your Google Fu needs some work. The National Park Service has allowed us to learn that it's under direction to inflict as much pain on the public during the "government shutdown" as possible. And as I've said more than once about other, equally ugly phenomena, word gets around.

Word has most certainly gotten around, particularly about the use of armed Park Police to prevent elderly veterans from visiting the memorials to the wars in which they fought...in which their brothers in arms suffered and died. The level of public offense over these tactics has gone stratospheric. Here's just one all too predictable reaction to this ham-fisted federal fascism. Others are massing as you read this.

"Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." You've seen that proverb innumerable times, at least if you're an American Christian. But did you ever expect to see it applied to the petulance of an American president?

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Drunk with power and convinced of his own invincibility, Barack Hussein Obama has concluded that he need not concern himself with the reactions of his subjects. He has committed the classic mistake of imagining himself incapable of mistakes. But then, this is the man who openly said that "I actually believe my own bullshit" -- who believes he "could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I'll hire to do it."

Obama had always had a high estimation of his ability to cast and run his operation. When David Plouffe, his campaign manager, first interviewed for a job with him in 2006, the senator gave him a warning: "I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I'll hire to do it," he said. "It's hard to give up control when that's all I've known." Obama said nearly the same thing to Patrick Gaspard, whom he hired to be the campaign's political director. "I think I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters," Obama told him. "I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm gonna think I'm a better political director than my political director."

[From Jodi Kantor's biography The Obamas ]

"He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it," saith Ecclesiastes. Obama has dug his own pit lovingly, shovelful by carefully selected and meticulously measured shovelful. With his current campaign to make the shutdown hurt as many Americans in as many ways as possible and as badly as possible, he has taken the Big Leap. It would be a crime against freedom, and against the worldly justice all too few tyrants get to experience in this life, to rescue him in mid-flight.

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Somewhere in my vast humor files, which are packed away in several of about a thousand unlabeled cardboard boxes in my voluminous attic, is a cartoon clipped from some periodical whose name I no longer recall. It depicts two convicts in a prison cell staring up at the barred window of their cell. They're watching a little bird perched at that window. The bird's beak is shaped exactly like a hacksaw blade, he's rubbing it against the bars, and the bars are gradually giving way. It's the caption that makes the cartoon, of course:

"No, I don't know what it is, but for God's sake don't frighten it!"

Verbum sat sapienti.

Uncategorizable

The CSO has just sent me a subscriber-only article from the Wall Street Journal that contains the following bit of ...interesting advice:

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American immune system is in serious trouble. A study released this year showed a 50% rise from 1997 to 2011 in the incidence of food allergies among children, with a whopping 69% rise in eczema sufferers. The only kids apparently not itching and sneezing were those living on farms and in other insalubrious places.

The idea that we've become too clean for our own health will come as a shock to a nation that spends billions on personal hygiene products. Yet it seems as though our malodorous ancient forebears were on to something....

Some bathing stalwarts may resist the new directive to go dirty. But they should recall the words of G.K. Chesterton, who argued that "man does not live by soap alone" and "hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you…feel a healthy indifference to it."

(Memo to me: Chesterton, though a genius, wasn’t right about everything.)

I recall hearing such suggestions from official and semi-official sources years ago. A batch of them were directed at hand sanitizers and anti-microbial soaps. They fell on deaf ears (as if you needed to be told, you excessively hygiene-conscious American person, you). Hopefully they will always fall on deaf ears...because cleanliness is a survival imperative.

There are threats in the world that arise from sources other than bacilli and viruses. Some of the most serious of them are other homo sapiens terrestrialis. Uncleanliness leads to malodorousness, and body odor is a trigger for some of our most regrettable responses to one another.

It should surprise no one that male body odor is a trigger for aggression. That’s the sort of thing young men are expected to learn through their formative experiences in locker rooms and elevators. However, we’re apparently too prissy to teach young women that female body odor is a trigger for sexual aggression from young men: i.e., attempted rape. Fortunately, Americans’ preference for cleanliness substitutes for that useful bit of knowledge. Unfortunately, an unintended consequence of American cleanliness is a disinclination to breed, but Yankee ingenuity has addressed that problem with diet, exercise, special clothing, exorbitantly expensive fragrances sold in quarter-ounce bottles, and by-subscription-only television productions found on the higher-numbered channels.

(How Europeans deal with the aggression problem, your humble servant knoweth not. One theory is that once one passes a certain threshold of corporal filth, our natural aggressive responses are neutralized by a repugnance great enough to keep us at arm’s length, though exceptions arise during soccer tournaments and major land wars. How do they elicit sufficient interest in sex to breed? Well, they don’t do that any more, now do they?)

Concerning the acquisition of important immunities: That’s why we (should) let the kids play in the dirt, and with domesticated animals (almost) equally dirty. But the aforementioned survival imperative of staying clean is why we demand that they wash up before sitting down for dinner. Too many sharp implements on the table, don’t y’know. As for the hijinks that once occurred under the tablecloth, the less said the better.

What’s that you say? Would the same aggression dynamics apply to an encounter between a gaggle of smelly humans and a tour group of pentapodal aliens from Aldebaran, all of whom were in the Big Apple to see the Christmas trimmings at Macy’s, if the lot were jammed into the F train just after enjoying the corned beef and cabbage lunch special at McSweeney’s? That’s a very good question, Gentle Reader. We’ll save it for another day.