Quickies: Those Maddening Christians!

     The Democrats are pissed. The mass murder in Charleston isn’t inspiring the necessary outrage required for new gun-control legislation. Where’s the crisis they were hoping for? You can practically hear them whining “What’s wrong with those people?”

     You can count on Muslims. Execute a Muslim terrorist and Muslims go on a worldwide rampage. Hell, publish a few cartoons of Muhammad and they’ll give you all the rioting and carnage you could want. But Christians? Expect Christians to get uppity over an atrocity perpetrated against them? Please!

     Democrats spent the weekend trying to get the focus back on Obama and their agenda, where they think it belongs. Congresswoman Donna Edwards on Fox News Sunday lamented that it would be a shame if all that came out of the Congress after this event was “a moment of silence,” while on Howard Kurtz’s Media Buzz, Joe Trippi lamented at the unlikelihood of any legislation coming from this.

     And while the Sunday hosts were uncomfortable directly addressing concepts of Christianity (even as they broadcast the church service at Emanuel), they too tried to turn the topic to politics with the family members who were their big “gets” for the day as interview subjects.

     But it was to no avail. “Today is not about politics,” came the firm answer in one form or another from all of them. And while the families of the murdered Charleston Christians meant it for the glory of God, it was unintentionally directly opposed to the agenda of Barack Obama.

     That’s from the congregation of a black church, Gentle Reader. A church where a white racist gunned down nine innocent people who had come there to pray. When I wrote in 2007:

     If there's a central irony here, it would be this: despite everything, the great majority of American blacks are devout Christians who strive with all their might and main to live according to their faith. If you're a white Christian, used to the tenor of the religious services that white Christians normally attend, you'd be blown away by the fervor of a service at a Southern Baptist or Church of God in Christ meeting. There's no hypocrisy there: these folks are passionate Christians who really mean it, in all particulars.

     How much greater an injustice could we do than to group these good and gentle people with the thugs who exploit black class privileges to the hilt, cynically and ruthlessly, to the detriment of all of American society? But the thugs and grievance-mongers have their race's microphone; it's they from whom and about whom we hear. There's no redress for it except that the privileges themselves should be withdrawn, leaving blacks and whites equals before the law and the opinions of their fellow men. Yet that is the exact opposite of the stance of American left-liberals.

     ...these are the people I had in mind.

     Honor their generosity of spirit. You won’t find it in many other venues.

Quickies: An Israeli Speaks The Unspeakable

     Former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren’s new book has Washington in a lather, but his recent article in Foreign Policy is having nuclear impact:

     Understanding Obama’s worldview was crucial to my job as Israel’s ambassador to the United States. Right after entering office in June 2009, I devoted months to studying the new president, poring over his speeches, interviews, press releases, and memoirs, and meeting with many of his friends and supporters. The purpose of this self-taught course — Obama 101, I called it — was to get to the point where the president could no longer surprise me. And over the next four years I rarely was, especially on Muslim and Middle Eastern issues....

     How did the president arrive at his unique approach to Islam? The question became central to my research for Obama 101. One answer lies in the universities in which he studied and taught — Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago — and where such ideas were long popular. Many of them could be traced to Orientalism, Edward Said’s scathing critique of Middle East studies, and subsequent articles in which he insisted that all scholars of the region be “genuinely engaged and sympathetic … to the Islamic world.” Published in 1978, Orientalism became the single most influential book in American humanities. As a visiting lecturer in the United States starting in the 1980s, I saw how Said’s work influenced not only Middle East studies but became a mainstay of syllabi for courses ranging from French colonial literature to Italian-African history. The notion that Islam was a uniform, universal entity with which the West must peacefully engage became widespread on American campuses and eventually penetrated the policymaking community. One of the primary texts in my Obama 101 course was the 2008 monograph, “Strategic Leadership: Framework for a 21st Century National Security Strategy,” written by foreign-relations experts, many of whom would soon hold senior positions in the new administration. While striving to place its relations with the Middle East on a new basis, the authors advised, America must seek “improved relations with more moderate elements of political Islam” and adapt “a narrative of pride in the achievements of Islam.”

     In addition to its academic and international affairs origins, Obama’s attitudes toward Islam clearly stem from his personal interactions with Muslims. These were described in depth in his candid memoir, Dreams from My Father, published 13 years before his election as president. Obama wrote passionately of the Kenyan villages where, after many years of dislocation, he felt most at home and of his childhood experiences in Indonesia. I could imagine how a child raised by a Christian mother might see himself as a natural bridge between her two Muslim husbands. I could also speculate how that child’s abandonment by those men could lead him, many years later, to seek acceptance by their co-religionists.

     Muslim or not – and I consider the “jury still out” on this matter – Obama is plainly more aligned with Islamic values and the Islamic world than he is with any other sector of Mankind, including America. More, Obama’s immersion in the thought prevalent in academia caused this alignment. Keep that in mind the next time you hear someone refer to academia as a source of guidance on Middle Eastern affairs.

Quickies: The Racism Double-Bind

     Ed Driscoll calls out the Washington Post:

     From Piyush to Bobby: How does Jindal feel about his family’s past?

     .... Jindal’s status as a conservative of color helped propel his meteoric rise in the Republican Party — from an early post in the George W. Bush administration to two terms in Congress and now a second term as Louisiana governor — and donors from Indian American groups fueled his first forays into politics. Yet many see him as a man who has spent a lifetime distancing himself from his Indian roots.

     As a child, he announced he wanted to go by the name Bobby, after a character in “The Brady Bunch.” He converted from Hinduism to Christianity as a teen and was later baptized a Catholic as a student at Brown University — making his devotion to Christianity a centerpiece of his public life. He and his wife were quick to say in a “60 Minutes” interview in 2009 that they do not observe many Indian traditions — although they had two wedding ceremonies, one Hindu and one Catholic. He said recently that he wants to be known simply as an American, not an Indian American.

     “There’s not much Indian left in Bobby Jindal,” said Pearson Cross, a political science professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who is writing a book on the governor.

     Driscoll asks: ‘HOW IS THIS NOT RACIST?’ In view of which I shall present the applicable formulae.

1. If the candidate is a minority Democrat:
   • His race/ethnicity will be used as an asset among the relevant minority voting blocs;
   • Republicans who dare even to mention his race/ethnicity will be thunderously denounced.
2. If the candidate is a minority Republican:
   • He will be denounced to the relevant minority voting blocs as “inauthentic;”
   • Republicans who attempt to use his heritage as an electoral asset will be condemned.

     In the case of a thoroughly Americanized Republican such as Governor Jindal, not only does case 2 above apply, but extra pressure will be brought to bear on the candidate to “acknowledge his roots.” That pressure will definitely come from his detractors, who’ll see it as a way to highlight the candidate’s “insincerity.” However, some might also come from his supporters, out of fear of a reaction against the candidate’s “rejection of his past.”

     Care to make a few casual wagers, Gentle Reader? I’ve got my two-headed coin right here...

Quickies: The “Fast-Track” Trade Bills

     These bills have been represented as everything but a cancer cure. Their supporters claim they would be nothing but good for America. Their opponents denounce them as a stroke against Americans’ jobs and general well-being. Both arguments are irrelevant.

     Mike Flynn makes the only salient point:

     It is almost impossible to verify these claims, however, as very few people actually know what’s contained in this trade deal. The current draft is literally locked away in a room in Washington. Only members of Congress are allowed to even review the current treaty language. Any notes they take of the treaties details are confiscated at the door when they leave.

     Obama used his presidential prerogatives to classify the bills, such that only persons with a security clearance are permitted to know what’s in them. Moreover, the bills’ classification level – Confidential; Secret; Top Secret; the rarefied levels above – is also unknown to the public, so even those of us with security clearances can’t be sure we’d be allowed access to them, apart from the esoterica of “need to know.”

     Lawmaking in secret. Reaction 1: How much more un-American can you get? Reaction 2 comes a bit more sedately: How does this compare with the lawmaking of the early Republic?

     Before the emergence of high-speed communications and mass media, all federal lawmaking was done in secret, though de facto rather than by conscious intention. However, that’s not a reason to relax about the TPP and TAA bills, for in those early days there was a strong (albeit inaccurate) presumption that Congress would remain within its Constitutional limits...and before the creation of the huge military necessitated by our involvement in the wars of the Twentieth Century, once the citizenry heard about a Congressional transgression, it could do something about it.

     Things aren’t what they used to be, eh, Gentle Reader?

Freezing The Pipes

     The Internet, with emphasis on the two-way facilities of the contemporary World Wide Web, has provided freedom lovers with the most important information we could possibly have: reassurance that we’re not alone, that in fact we are many – possibly a majority – and are well represented in virtually every nation.

     Before the two-way Web we lacked that reassurance, because the most important media of mass communication had been conquered by our enemies on the Left. We were ceaselessly bombarded with statist messages, the opinions of statist thinkers, and comments that strained to “humanize” tyranny and subjection. The overarching theme was always There are no alternatives. There is no escape. This is how it is and how it must be.

     From roughly 1933 to 2000, there was essentially no countervailing voice. Huge numbers of young Americans were inundated with Leftist premises and attitudes by the media’s barrage of statism, and many bought into the scam. The effect was reinforced and amplified by the Left’s dominance of the “educational system,” particularly America’s “institutions of higher learning.” Those were the American Left’s best and happiest days.

     Things changed dramatically as the Web opened up two-way channels of discourse. A great deal of conservative and libertarian sentiment came out of the shadows. Persuasive, well-informed commentators who had previously been unable to find an outlet for their thoughts found their audiences and energized them. Suddenly freedom was no longer just the stuff of an old man’s reminiscences of an era never to return. It was au courant, the happenin’ thing, and thousands of young Americans wanted a piece.

     Alarm bells sounded in the high citadels of the Left. Their strategists found the counter-movement unacceptable. It threatens their entire enterprise. Something had to be done.

     Something is being done.

---

     The key to enervating a movement is to atomize it. If you can persuade its allegiants to believe that they’re alone, members of a tiny, crackpot minority, you can dissolve the thing without firing a shot. The key to doing that, of course, is to prevent those allegiants from communicating with one another.

     If lines of two-way communication exist and are cheaply and easily accessed by ordinary citizens, the first approach that comes to mind will be to conquer those lines and deny access to the enemy. But this is not always possible. What then?

     If you can’t impede communications, the next best thing is to inhibit the communicators: to convince them that merely speaking their minds is more hazardous than they’d care to risk. There are several variations on this approach: campaigns of public vilification, harassment by energetic “victim groups,” pressure on employers, commercial boycotts and threats thereof, lawsuits, and sub-penal government action. Combining these elements in the proper proportions will often persuade some mouthy freedom advocate to pull in his horns for the sake of his personal well-being.

     The legal lexicon, in discussions of freedom of expression, often uses the term chilling effect. That’s the Left’s goal: to make objective delivery of facts and candid expression of opinion seem too dangerous, or too expensive, for a private citizen to undertake it. They can’t shut down the huge pipe of Internet communication, so they strive to lower the temperature therein to the freezing point.

     They’ve been having an appalling degree of success.

---

     Perhaps you’ve heard or read about the attempt, by DOJ thug Preet Bharara and miscellaneous accessories to the crime, to intimidate Reason magazine and its readers out of their criticism of various federal judges. For those a bit behind the curve on this atrocity, here’s former Reason editor Virginia Postrel on the throw-down:

     Wielding subpoenas demanding information on anonymous commenters, the government is harassing a respected journalism site that dissents from its policies. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York claims these comments could constitute violent threats, even though they’re clearly hyperbolic political rhetoric.

     This is happening in America -- weirdly, to a site I founded, and one whose commenters often earned my public contempt.

     Los Angeles legal blogger Ken White has obtained a grand jury subpoena issued to Reason.com, the online home of the libertarian magazine I edited throughout the 1990s. The subpoena seeks information about commenters who posted in response to an article by the site’s editor Nick Gillespie about the letter that Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht wrote to Judge Katherine B. Forrest before she sentenced him to life in prison without parole. Ulbricht was convicted of seven felony charges, included conspiracies to traffic in narcotics and launder money, and faced a minimum sentence of 20 years in prison. The letter was an appeal for leniency.

     Please read the whole article. But the obscenities didn’t end there. The judge also issued a gag order forbidding Reason to talk about the subpoena:

     When the government orders people not to talk about what it's doing, it's hard to keep track of what it's doing. That's what the First Amendment is intended to prevent. It's ironic that the Obama administration — whose supporters in 2008 made much of threats to civil liberties from George W. Bush's national security apparatus — has so thoroughly embraced surveillance and gag orders.

     But if it won't support a prosecution, why gather this information? Bharara's office isn't talking, but I suspect that the purpose of this exercise is to chill speech: To send a signal that whether or not the First Amendment protects your right to talk smack about a federal judge, you'd be wise not to do so if you don't want to attract the attention of the feds, who might choose to share your information with employers or the news media. Consider it a sort of prosecutorial brush-back pitch, if you like.

     Of course, the First Amendment term for "brush-back pitch" is "chilling effect."

     Indeed.

---

     No one enjoys being criticized. Those who wield power dislike it even more than the rest of us. This is particularly the case among those with electoral ambitions, or shaky positions, or who have misdeeds to hide.

     It’s always been that way. Have a gander at this September 1973 Russell Baker column:

     Here is an alarming little news story. It is about eight men who went to Florida in 1972 with a mind to stage some sort of protest against the Vietnam War....

     Very quickly, however, they ceased being in politics and became in jail. The Justice Department had them indicted on charges of conspiring to do violence [in Miami Beach, where the Democrats and Republicans were both holding their quadrennial conventions], which they never reached, on account of their major problem with the law.

     They were tried in Gainesville. After deliberating briefly, a jury found them not guilty. This was fourteen months after their arrest and five weeks of trial....

     ...the eight men who wanted to protest at Miami Beach have bills of about $150,000 as a result. Being tried by Uncle Sam is an expensive luxury.

     In fact, Uncle Sam is something like the man in the cigar commercial who keeps threatening that he is going to get you. He doesn’t know how. Maybe by putting you in prison, maybe by letting you escape prison and merely driving you into bankruptcy. But he is going to get you.

     With resources limited only by its ability to steal, the State can intimidate anyone into silence and passivity. It can do so as it did to Reason, or to the eight men in the Baker column above. It can do what it did to Gibson Guitars. It can do what it did to Catherine Engelbrecht. Should those methods fail, it has others.

     Prosecution and official harassment aren’t the end of it. Whether they’re inside or outside the halls of power, they who have it in mind to silence the rising torrent of pro-freedom sentiment on the World Wide Web have other methods as well. Shouts of “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” and other epithets. Defamation lawsuits, sometimes merely for quoting someone else’s public utterances. Commercial boycotts. Threats to one’s employer. Threats to one’s relatives, including minor children. On occasion even violence, perhaps with the assistance of some energetic “victim” group.

     Still think “talk is cheap,” Gentle Reader?

---

     There is no Last Graf. We can only wish we had more resources and more tools at our disposal. The fact remains that the Left and its henchmen within government have many highly effective ways of rendering the pipes of mass communication inhospitably chilly to us whom they detest. If there is warmth to be had, at this time we can only seek it from one another. Let’s do so while the means and opportunities avail us.

New Fiction

     Henry Hallstrom, a widower in his middle years, has unexpectedly encountered a woman who strikes him as perfect...almost. Having consigned his dear and quite unusual daughter Juliette to Athene Academy, the academic institution of which Amanda Everhardt is dean, he’s already inclined to think well of her, if only in defense of his decision to send Juliette there. But Dean Everhardt is as unusual as Juliette, and in the same way. One small detail is all that stands in the way of a second love for Hank and a first one for Amanda...but they’re so taken with one another that it might not obstruct them after all.

     A companion story, written under incredible demand pressure from the readers of “A Place Of Our Own.” Enjoy!

Dynasties, Courtiers, And Wars

     Bill Whittle’s recent video manifesto:

     ...got me thinking hard about one of the great historical transitions in Western sociopolitics: that from limited monarchy to absolute monarchy.

     As far as I know, medieval European monarchies, with the notable exception of the Scottish and Irish varieties, were all dynastic in nature; i.e., when the monarch died, his successor was determined by the rule of primogeniture. That rule continued in force through the Renaissance, and into the somewhat more muddled “early industrial” era of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. The foremost inheritor of that monarchic tradition, Great Britain, continues it today, though today’s British monarch is a powerless figurehead maintained solely for reasons of tradition.

     However, medieval monarchies were better behaved – in most cases, much better – than those of the succeeding era. Kings and queens did enjoy lifestyles more lavish than any but the richest of the nobility. They did tend to be “above the law” in certain respects, at least for as long as they didn’t conspicuously flaunt such an immunity. But in their behavior as rulers, they showed a degree of restraint, and of de facto deference to individuals’ rights, that was absent from the Renaissance and early Industrial Era monarchs. More, royal heirs deemed weak or of low character were more often dispatched by their families before they could don a crown.

     M. Stanton Evans covers much of this ground in his book The Theme Is Freedom. Evans highlights the greater influence of Christianity on medieval monarchs. Granted that the medieval clergy was more able to mobilize popular sentiment against the king should he transgress, but this fails to be a complete explanation. Why, after all, was Renaissance Europe, which was no less Christian than what came before it, not equally able to restrain its royal rulers?

     The answer might lie in the differences between medieval and Renaissance royal courts. Nobles during the medieval era had important functions of their own. They administered the lands over which they presided. They dispensed justice locally. They were often involved to a significant degree with the Church: owing to primogeniture, a noble family with more than one son often sought to have him enter the priesthood as “the next best thing” to inheriting his father’s title – the origin of the old saw about “sending the idiot of the family into the clergy.” The upshot was a degree of local authority and responsibility that prevented the noble from spending great amounts of time away from his fiefdom.

     The Renaissance and later years exhibited the centralizing tendency of power. As the medieval era waned, kings and princes began to assume the authorities that had previously been wielded by nobles. The nobles’ loss of their earlier functions “freed them up” to join the royal court. Indeed, the royal court became just about the only place in a kingdom from which any vestige of nobles’ traditional powers could be wielded...and only by exerting influence upon the monarch.

     It is notable that a Renaissance king was often said to have punished a noble by telling him that “your lands are in need of your attention:” an implicit dismissal from the royal court. The noble was thus informed that he had “fallen out of favor:” he was no longer welcome at court, and therefore without any influence on royal decisions. He had little choice but to accept banishment and return to his fiefdom, where he would usually find that all was as he had left it.

     Equally notable, most medieval-era wars were not fought by kings. They almost always arose over quarrels between nobles. They were fought by armies of baronial retainers, plus a leavening of young commoners who hoped to gain the noble’s attention and perhaps “rise above the soil” to which their families were attached. Thus, the military power of a medieval realm tended to be well dispersed among the nobility. That had two salutary effects. First, it inhibited the monarch from levying taxes directly on the common folk. Second, it provided a check on royal behavior, the importance of which was demonstrated at Runnymede. When Renaissance kings succeeded in directly taxing commoners and common trade, they also acquired the financial wherewithal to maintain armies that the nobles, their own revenue streams weakened thereby, could not afford.

     The parallels with the devolution of American federalism, which first became blatant after the ratification of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments, could not be more striking.

---

     No one of our time expects any great reduction in federal power during his lifespan. Things have been as they are for a century. If my surmises above are at all accurate, the foundation for federal absolutism can only be unmade by the repeal of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments, a development that strikes most persons (and all politicians) as “unthinkable.” But what a difference it would make! Imagine the dissipation of centralized power that would result if our tax system were made truly federal, such that Washington could only tax the state governments, the state governments could only tax the county governments, and so on. Imagine further how local and regional politicians would respond to such a reorganization: by actually paying attention to their local responsibilities, rather than perpetually striving for “higher office.”

     The effect upon American military might would be a two-edged sword. Under such an arrangement, the ability to fund a huge national military establishment would vanish. State militias would become significant once again, and the president would have to request that Congress declare war before demanding to federalize them. The readiness of the Senate to accede to such requests, once again a body of representatives of the state governments, would be lessened. In today’s hyper-militarized world, that might prove unworkable. We’d have to try it to know. (The possibility of a war between New York and New Jersey is merely icing on the cake.)

     It won’t happen, of course. As Isabel Paterson wrote in The God of the Machine, the political “ratchet” only transports power toward the center. It is never re-dispersed. But it makes an appealing thought for a Monday morning...especially for us New Yorkers who’ve “had it” with New Jersey drivers.

Probability And Plausibility: A Kinda-Sorta Rumination

     Any number of persons who call themselves atheists do so because, as they would put it, “I just can’t believe all that stuff.” If you probe a wee bit, you’ll discover that the can’t is about the plausibility of the claims made for God, the supernatural, an afterlife, and so on. In the case of Christianity, it’s about the plausibility of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, most particularly His Resurrection.

     I wrote earlier this year that:

     [T]here is no way to determine “the probability that God exists.” That would require:

• The attribution of a specific, spatiotemporally based definition to God;
• Deductions from that definition about what circumstances “should” evoke a manifestation of God;
• A tally of observed manifestations of God and failures to observe such manifestations.

There’s only one word for any such proposed investigation: ridiculous.

     However, the typical atheist bases his assessment of implausibility on a different standard:

• The miracles attributed to Jesus of Nazareth, particularly His Resurrection, cannot be performed by anyone living today.
• That makes the Jesus story one of a unique life and unique events, not to be reproduced, and beyond rigorous historical investigation.
• The premise first enunciated by David Hume – “Proportion your belief to the evidence” – seems applicable.
• Therefore, the evidence being infinitesimal, the atheist dismisses the Jesus story and its appurtenances.

     I’ve said it before: That is an entirely respectable position. Its defensibility is unaffected by my quite different, equally respectable, and equally defensible position. That’s why it’s called faith.

     But plausibility is not certainty. It’s a subjective evaluation of probability, founded on one’s personal exposure to the world and personal knowledge of times past. It is therefore the weakest, factually and procedurally speaking, of all methods for arriving at a probability. Though it can thwart the acquisition of faith, it does not disprove what persons of faith believe and hold to be true.

     Any problems that arise between atheists and theists emerge from disrespect: the unwillingness of one to concede the intellectual defensibility of the other.

---

     The weakness of the plausibility approach to religious questions can be shown merely by applying it to any other dramatic but unique event of the past. This works for a single, simple reason: there is always more than one possible explanation – i.e., one causal hypothesis – for a past event.

     Hillary Swank’s excellent movie The Reaping provides a good example of this:

     [Hilary Swank as protagonist Katherine Winter:] “In 1400 B.C., a group of nervous Egyptians saw the Nile turn red. But what they thought was blood was actually an algae bloom which killed the fish, which prior to that had been living off the eggs of frogs. Those uneaten eggs turned into record numbers of baby frogs who subsequently fled to the land and died. Their little rotting frog bodies attracted lice and flies. The lice carried the bluetongue virus, which killed 70% of Egypt's livestock. The flies carried glanders, a bacterial infection which in humans causes boils. Soon afterwards, the Nile River Valley was hit with a three-day sandstorm otherwise known as the plague of darkness. During the sandstorm, intense heat can combine with an approaching cold front to create not only hail, but also electrical storms which would have looked to the ancient Egyptians like fire from the sky. The subsequent wind would have blown the Ethiopian locust population off course and right into downtown Cairo. Hail is wet, locusts leave droppings, spread both on grain, and you have got mycotoxins. Dinnertime in ancient Egypt meant the first-born child got the biggest portion, which in this case, meant he ate the most toxins, so he died. Ten plagues. Ten scientific explanations.”

     Given that the events in question are past, and that they and their precursor conditions can no longer be observed, the above explanations are intellectually acceptable. To the observationally-oriented mind, they will seem more plausible than the supernatural explanation offered by the Old Testament’s Book of Exodus, because the proposed causes are more mundane – i.e., they rely upon causes and influences that have been observed in other contexts, rather than postulating intervention by something that cannot be observed, reproduced, measured, and studied.

     Which doesn’t prove that they did bring about the ten Biblical plagues that afflicted Egypt, any more than the narrative in Exodus “proves” that it was God’s way of loosening Pharaoh’s grip on the Hebrews.

---

     The great challenge, both to the theist and to the atheist, is to find and to exhibit respect for the other’s position. You cannot validly claim to respect another person if you insist on deriding his cherished beliefs. That doesn’t mean you must accept those beliefs. Neither does it mean you must accept their implications, nor grant the other any special exemptions from the law or the rules of polite discourse. It’s more a matter of conceding the nature of a faith: the acceptance of a proposition or a set of propositions that can neither be proved nor disproved. Theism and atheism are both faiths by that standard.

     It would be easier, I think, if we were more conscious of the many things we take on faith at each and every moment of our lives. Anything believed upon authority is taken on faith unless personally verified – and not merely by recourse to another authority. Any assumption made “for practical purposes” – e.g., the assumption that the floor of a room will not collapse beneath you – is taken on faith until it’s tested and found to have been true — but we must allow that such a test verifies the assumption only for the duration of the test!

     Arthur Herzog, in his masterpiece The B.S. Factor, exhorted us to become “rational skeptics.” His rational skeptic accepts that there is indeed an underlying objective reality, which is composed of facts rather than opinions or suppositions, but that his sensory and ratiocinative capabilities are only partially capable of apprehending it. It’s rather a pity that the word skeptic has a negative connotation, because the Herzogian approach to reality and the conditional nature of the many propositions upon which we rely is the best defense against the arrogance that has so frequently precipitated rhetorical warfare, if not worse, between theists and atheists.

     May God bless and keep you all...whether you believe in Him or not.

---

     UPDATE: This literally just arrived in my email:

     I find it compelling. What about you, Gentle Reader?

Conversations

FWP: You know, one of the best things about being retired is not having to deal with people.
CSO: But that just means that everyone you do deal with, you have to pay!

FWP: Hm?
CSO: You pay [our contractor]. You pay [our landscaper]. You pay [our electrician]. You pay [our plumber]. You pay [our pest-control guy]. You pay [our masseuse]...

FWP: Well, yeah, but that means they all have to be nice to me. The miracle of the market, y’know?
CSO: That’s why I save my niceness for my clients.

FWP: Speaking of which, I haven’t received your invoice for this month.
CSO: [Convulses in laughter]

The plague years.

There are estimated to be 1.8 billion M*sl*ms in the world making up about 25% of the population. But though M*sl*ms are just 25% of the world population, they seem to account for about 80% to 90% of world conflicts.

In Thailand, M*sl*ms have been fighting the majority Buddhists for decades. In India there’s regular trouble between M*sl*ms and the majority Hindus. M*sl*m Pakistan is at daggers drawn with Hindu India and within Pakistan M*sl*ms are eagerly slaughtering each other. Across the border in Afghanistan there’s a very uncivil war between M*sl*ms. In China, there have been years of problems with their M*sl*ms. In Myanmar, the majority Buddhists are so fed up with M*sl*m violence that they’re throwing them out and sending them to M*sl*m Malaysia and Indonesia. In the Middle East, we’ve had more then half a century of M*sl*ms trying to destroy tiny Israel. And now across the Middle East, M*slims are both slaughtering the few remaining Christians they can find and also busily slaughtering each other.^[1]

The West is plagued by a diseased, mendacious left who turn on their own people, hate their traditions, dishonor their ancestors, undermine law, bow down to totalitarians, worship foreigners and minorities, and fawn over feminist freaks, homosexuals, and useless males in whom there is no fight.

And since the seventh century the world has been afflicted by a savage, backward political system that worships death, revels in conquest, and rejects reason itself.^[2]

The combination of these evil forces and their present-day alliance is a plague on us all. This plague is as inexplicable to me as the plague must have been to medieval Europe. Then flaggelants traveled around Europe, whipping themselves for their supposed sins they believed had brought God's wrath down on them.

Maybe there's some similar phenomenon today of self-loathing on the part of the left that makes them want to punish us for their sins? Dr. Sanity (see blogroll) would be the right person to explain that.

It's not an idle question. Were the left to cease its treasonous idiocy and help the West deal with the Muslim threat, we could work out a new understanding -- free of irrelevancies and distractions about "capitalist exploitation," "inequality," "structural racism," and assorted other foolishness -- while reversing the damage done to us by the madness of mass immigration of primitives and hostiles.

If the left won't cease and desist, the West will be extinguished.

It already is if you consider that Muslim and third-world breeding rates will continue and Western men will almost certainly persist to the bitter end in their suicidal determination not to see and understand obvious mortal threats.

To repeat: Muslim and third-world fertility will inundate and destroy the West even if not one "immigrant" ever sets foot in the West for the next 50 years. That's now the default. Only Western action will change this.

It is not a plague we are helpless to reverse.

Notes
^[1] "Are M*sl*ms always bad news?" By David Craig, Snouts in the Trough, 6/16/15. The Religion of Peace website will vastly expand on the author's list if you care to spend 15 minutes there.
^[2] On the latter point, Muslim notables have decreed that the earth is flat, the sun orbits the earth, that scantily clad women cause earthquakes, and Mickey Mouse is a soldier of Satan. Breast feeding male business colleagues and the permissibility of eating mermaids have been discussed. Too, drinking the urine of Mohammed is blessing. You can read it here. There are Muslims who cringe at this nonsense as the brave scientist in the video linked to above. But in a contest between a rational Muslim and an imam who can decree that the former is being blasphemous, my money is on the imam so far as figuring out who runs things in Muslim societies. The idiots are not the minority in Islamic society and disputes with Muslims can put one in mortal danger.

“Compelling Government Interest”

     Time was, I wrote more than I do today about the abstract ideals that undergird freedom. These days, my attention is more focused on current events and what they portend. I’m not sure why that should be, except that it’s clear that, as Jubal Harshaw said in Stranger In A Strange Land, wallowing in the troubles of others can make you seriously neurotic.

     Back in the old Palace Of Reason days, and during the Eternity Road era that succeeded it, the subject of rights – what they are, why they exist at all, and what they imply for government in a society that respects them – was frequently on my mind. Of all the brief, powerful things ever said on the subject, my favorite is this one, from a Nineteenth-Century French politician and historian:

     Either rights exist, or they do not exist. If they exist, they involve absolute consequences...Furthermore, if a right exists, it exists at every moment. It is absolute today, yesterday, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, in summer as in winter, not when it pleases you to declare it in force. [Louis Thiers]

     When Thomas Jefferson wrote the birth certificate of the United States:

     We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

     ...he had that concept of rights – the peaceable individual’s possession of absolute moral trumps that prohibit infringement for any reason – firmly in mind.

     Clearly, the Jefferson / Thiers concept of rights differs from that of a permission or a license, which is granted only when the State pleases to do so and may be qualified or withdrawn at any time. Which brings us to this morning’s question:

Are Americans accorded any rights whatsoever?

     Not de facto, mind you, but de jure. In other words: does an individual possess any absolute protections against State coercion? Protections that cannot legally be abridged, infringed, or set aside on the grounds of a “compelling government interest?”

     Think it over.

---

     “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Jefferson’s original phrase was “Life, Liberty, and Property,” but after some wrangling with the rest of the convention he agreed to substitute “the Pursuit of Happiness,” probably because the assertion of an absolute right to one’s property would thwart the later assertion of a power to tax.

     Yet Jefferson was sincere about property rights. One of the accomplishments of his first term as president was the cessation of direct federal taxes:

     At home, fellow citizens, you best know whether we have done well or ill. The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes. These covering our land with officers, and opening our doors to their intrusions, had already begun that process of domiciliary vexation which, once entered, is scarcely to be restrained from reaching successively every article of produce and property. [ Second Inaugural Address ]

     Every tax, regardless of its nature or its rationale, is an infringement upon property rights. This is true even of an indirect tax, for it infringes upon the right of buyer and seller to trade their rightful property. Jefferson’s dedication to property rights led him to eliminate direct federal taxation – taxes that fall upon individuals and institutions – out of the federal exchequer, leaving indirect taxes – taxes on imports, exports, and particular kinds of commerce, which can therefore be avoided – as Washington’s sole sources of revenue.

     What persons or institutions escape direct taxation – federal, state, or local – today? In these post-Kelo years, what item of real or tangible property is safe from arbitrary confiscation? Is it safe even to have cash or other valuables on your person?

---

     Jefferson’s conception of liberty embraced the freedom of choice and movement he deemed every peaceable individual to possess. An American’s self-ownership, in Jefferson’s view, was absolute; he could therefore do whatever he pleased, subject only to the constraint that he not interfere in others’ equal right to do likewise, and the State could do nothing to hinder him. Nor could the State force him to labor for its sake, which would constitute the most direct imaginable “tax” on his unalienable rights to himself and his freedom of choice.

     The writ of habeas corpus, mentioned specifically in the Constitution, is an expression of Jeffersonian liberty. An individual’s freedom of movement could only be constrained by the State if it could make a “valid reply” to a petition for habeas corpus. In the early years of the Republic, few replies were deemed valid: chiefly imprisonment subsequent to a criminal conviction by a jury of one’s peers.

     When Abraham Lincoln decided to institute conscription for the purpose of fighting the Civil War, he found it legally necessary to suspend the applicability of habeas corpus. Though there is provision for this in the Constitution:

     The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it. [Article I, Section 9]

     ...it is a specifically Congressional prerogative to do so. Lincoln bypassed Congress and issued an order on presidential authority that habeas corpus petitions were to be ignored by his military commanders.

     Today, habeas corpus can be answered by a slew of “valid replies.” Most of them would have horrified Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers. Given that a man can be stopped for “questioning” without pretext or charge, and can be detained arbitrarily for 72 hours, entirely on police say-so, in every state in the Union, is there freedom of movement in America today?

---

     Ah, the “right to life.” You’d think that one, at least, would still be respected. After all, the State can’t just kill you as you’re walking along, can it? Surely it can’t come into your home and kill you, just because it decides to do so?

• Ruby Ridge
• Waco I
• Waco II
• No-Knock SWAT raids
• Other Executions by Cops

     Oops. Sorry. My mistake.

     So much for your “right to life.”

---

"Rights are an archist concept. Rights have no meaning except when confronted with superior power. They are what is left to the people after the government has taken all its wants. Your country's Bill of Rights defines your most cherished freedoms how? By limiting the legal power of government to encroach upon them." [Eric L. Harry, via fictional anarchist theorist Valentin Kartsev in Harry's novel Protect and Defend.]

     It would appear that “superior power” acknowledges no rights. The rationale is almost always “compelling government interest:” that is, the State’s interest in...what? How can the State, a fictional creature made up of individuals such as you and I, hired to do the relatively simple jobs (NB: “simple,” not necessarily “easy”) of keeping the peace in the streets, operating a court system, and defending the territory of the United States, have “interests?” It’s a BLEEP!ing hireling, and hirelings have no interests; they have responsibilities and delegated, enumerated powers, nothing more.

     The State’s “interests” are nonexistent. However, the individuals at the levers of power don’t see it that way. They want power, and as much of it as they can grab. Your “rights?” Sorry, buddy, they were just an Eighteenth Century philosopher’s idle fancy. Just a few words on a scrap of parchment. At any rate, we shan’t concern ourselves with them today. There’s oppressing work to be done!

     “Your government’s” work.

---

     I’ll close this tirade with a snippet from a work of fiction. It comes closer to capturing my cynicism and fear than anything else that currently comes to mind. The book it’s from is about an unusual family. All three of its members possess psi powers...and all three of them have the State’s crosshairs on their backs:

     “Once upon a time there was an experiment in which twelve people participated,” Quincey said. “About six years ago. Do you remember that?”

     “I remember it,” Andy said grimly.

     “There aren’t many of those twelve people left. There were four, the last I heard. And two of them married each other.”

     “Yes,” Andy said, but inside he felt growing horror. Only four left? What was Quincey talking about?

     “I understand one of them can bend keys and shut doors without even touching them.” Quincey’s voice, thin, coming across two thousand miles of telephone cable, coming through switching stations, through open-relay points, through junction boxes in Nevada, Idaho, Colorado, Iowa. A million places to tap into Quincey’s voice.

     “Yes?” he said, straining to keep his voice level. And he thought of Vicky, who could sometimes turn on the radio or turn off the TV without going anywhere near it-and Vicky was apparently not even aware she was doing those things.

     “Oh yes, he’s for real,” Quincey was saying. “He’s—what would you say?-a documented case. It hurts his head if he does those things too often, but he can do them. They keep him in a little room with a door he can’t open and a lock he can’t bend. They do tests on him. He bends keys. He shuts doors. And I understand he’s nearly crazy.”

     “Oh ... my ... God,” Andy said faintly.

     “He’s part of the peace effort, so it’s all right if he goes crazy,” Quincey went on. “He’s going crazy so two hundred and twenty million Americans can stay safe and free. Do you understand?”

     “Yes,” Andy had whispered.

     “What about the two people who got married? Nothing. So far as they know. They live quietly, in some quiet middle-American state like Ohio. There’s maybe a yearly check on them. Just to see if they’re doing anything like bending keys or closing doors without touching them or doing funny little mentalist routines at the local Backyard Carnival for Muscular Dystrophy. Good thing those people can’t do anything like that, isn’t it, Andy?”

     Andy closed his eyes and smelled burned cloth. Sometimes Charlie would pull open the fridge door, look in, and then crawl off again. And if Vicky was ironing, she would glance at the fridge door and it would swing shut again—all without her being aware that she was doing anything strange. That was sometimes. At other times it didn’t seem to work, and she would leave her ironing and close the refrigerator door herself (or turn off the radio, or turn on the TV). Vicky couldn’t bend keys or read thoughts or fly or start fires or predict the future. She could sometimes shut a door from across the room and that was about the extent of it. Sometimes, after she had done several of these things, Andy had noticed that she would complain of a headache or an upset stomach, and whether that was a physical reaction or some sort of muttered warning from her subconscious, Andy didn’t know. Her ability to do these things got maybe a little stronger around the time of her period. Such small things, and so infrequently, that Andy had come to think of them as normal. As for himself...well he could push people. There was no real name for it; perhaps autohypnosis came closest. And he couldn’t do it often, because it gave him headaches. Most days he could forget completely that he wasn’t utterly normal and never really had been since that day in Room 70 of Jason Geameigh.

     He closed his eyes and on the dark field inside his eyelids he saw that comma-shaped bloodstain and the nonwords COR OSUM.

     “Yes, it’s a good thing,” Quincey went on, as if Andy had agreed. “Or they might put them in two little rooms where they could work full-time to keep two hundred and twenty million Americans safe and free.” “A good thing,” Andy agreed.

     “Those twelve people,” Quincey said, “maybe they gave those twelve people a drug they didn’t fully understand. It might have been that someone—a certain Mad Doctor—might have deliberately misled them. Or maybe he thought he was misleading them and they were deliberately leading him on. It doesn’t matter.”

     “No.”

     “So this drug was given to them and maybe it changed their chromosomes a little bit. Or a lot. Or who knows. And maybe two of them got married and decided to have a baby and maybe the baby got something more than her eyes and his mouth. Wouldn’t they be interested in that child?”

     “I bet they would,” Andy said, now so frightened he was having trouble talking at all. He had already decided that he would not tell Vicky about calling Quincey.

     “It’s like you got lemon, and that’s nice, and you got meringue, and that’s nice, too, but when you put them together, you’ve got...a whole new taste treat. I bet they’d want to see just what that child could do. They might just want to take it and put it in a little room and see if it could help make the world safe for democracy. And I think that’s all I want to say, old buddy, except...keep your head down.”

     [Stephen King, Firestarter]

     Know of any convenient planetoids, Gentle Reader?

Politics of exclusion.

[Aldous] Huxley thought this [social control and the propagation of ignorance] might take place through drugs and genetic engineering, but the real drugs and social planning of late modernity lies in the presence of an entertainment and public pedagogy industry that trades in pleasure and idiocy, most evident in the merging of neoliberalism, celebrity culture, and the control of commanding cultural apparatuses extending from Hollywood movies and video games to mainstream television, news, and the social media.^[1]

Like all leftists, it seems, the author of this quote, Mr. Giroux, can actually make insightful observations but then he comes up with what he calls "the politics of exclusion." This is actually being practiced with "Big Brother" now patrolling public spaces to spot "the people who do not fit in" and "departing" them or just "never allowing them to come anywhere near." Near, that is, to the home countries of Western people.

Now, to test this proposition, consider the daily litany of stories that demonstrate Western governments are weak, servile, and pathetic in the face of the third-world invasion of the West:

• Criminal alien rapists, child predators freed.
• Greek Island struggles with "migrant" arrivals.
• "Migrants" saved by Swedish ship.
• 100 million immigrants to U.S. since 1965 (Ann Coulter).
• Syrian refugees to be granted asylum in Britain (David Cameron).
• Calais descends into anarchy.
• No more room for migrants.
• German navy saves 544 refugees.
• Niqab "controversy" in Canada.
• "Migrant"-related sanitation and security issues in Rome.
• Terror in Calais.
• Thirty million illegal immigrants living off taxpayers.
• Politicians demanding further opening of European borders.

From this glimpse of the reality of modern Western life -- and 20 years of other such stories -- Mr. Giroux thinks he has discovered "the politics of exclusion."

What planet do these people live on?

Notes
^[1] "Orwell, Huxley and America’s Plunge into Authoritarianism." By Henry A. Giroux 6/19-21/15.

And Now For Something Completely Different

     The world of independently published fiction is exploding, which is a mixed blessing. The garbage still heavily outweighs the good stuff, and probably always will. But there is some good stuff, and he who encounters it is likely to enjoy it greatly. He’ll find it equal in all the most important respects to the best of Pub World’s offerings.

     One asset good fiction of any sort must have is a sense of having been reviewed and revised until any noticeable flaws have all (or almost all) been found and removed. This is sometimes called “polish.” When a physical device exhibits good polish, it conveys a sense of craftsmanship and quality that assures the purchaser that he’ll be getting good value for his money. When a book exhibits good polish, it conveys the same sense and assurance. The reader can proceed with confidence that his experience won’t be ragged or crude.

     This is a far harder characteristic to imbue in independently produced films. Whether one approves of its emissions or not, Hollywood’s financial resources, technological base, and accumulated expertise pretty much guarantee that its productions will exhibit high polish. At any rate, it’s a rare thing for a prominent production company to produce a crudely finished movie. Indie filmmakers, lacking the assets Hollywood’s major houses command, have a much tougher row to hoe...even with the explosion of digital technology for videography, editing, and special effects available at low cost.

     Please excuse this fairly wordy lead-in for a simple offering. I have something to show you that I encountered quite by accident. It’s a short indie film, something of a homage to the Tomb Raider video games featuring the intrepid Lara Croft. Those games have inspired two major Hollywood productions starring Angelina Jolie, which came off very well.

     You wouldn’t think a crew of indie moviemakers, working with a minuscule budget, could do anything near to the polish and overall quality of those Hollywood productions. In a sense, you’d be entirely correct...but I think you’ll find the following impressive all the same, especially for the performance of actress Cassandra Ebner, who plays the heroine and performs all the stunts herself.

     I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

The Vicious Among Us

     Apologies in advance for this one, Gentle Reader. It’s a few minutes after one AM as I write this. I can’t sleep and am cranky from chronic pain, conditions that are seldom conducive to good reasoning or finely wrought prose. But after reading this cri de coeur from Sarah Hoyt, which I commend to you in its entirety, I simply must vent a bit.

     The great problem with many of the most important descriptive terms in any language is that their meaning can only be illustrated: i.e., made plain by example. This is particularly the case with characterological words. Consider this collection of definitions for the word vicious:

Vicious \Vi"cious\, a. [OF. vicious, F. vicieux, fr. L. vitiosus, fr. vitium vice. See Vice a fault.]
1. Characterized by vice or defects; defective; faulty; imperfect.
[1913 Webster]

2. Addicted to vice; corrupt in principles or conduct; depraved; wicked; as, vicious children; vicious examples; vicious conduct.
[1913 Webster]

3. Wanting purity; foul; bad; noxious; as, vicious air, water, etc. --Dryden.
[1913 Webster]

4. Not correct or pure; corrupt; as, vicious language; vicious idioms.
[1913 Webster]

5. Not well tamed or broken; given to bad tricks; unruly; refractory; as, a vicious horse.
[1913 Webster]

6. Bitter; spiteful; malignant. [Colloq.]
[1913 Webster]

Syn: Corrupt; faulty; wicked; depraved.

     You might think there’s useful meaning in the above definitions...until you try to explain them to an eight-year-old. Upon examination, they prove to be almost perfectly circular. The problem is that you know perfectly well what vicious means, because when you were eight you had it pointed out to you a sufficient number of times by an older and wiser head.

     If you’re a regular reader of Liberty’s Torch, you’re all but certainly of a conservative or libertarian bent. You’re a friend to political freedom; you uphold American national sovereignty; and you subscribe to the Judeo-Christian system of morals and ethics that until about 1970 virtually every child raised in this country was taught before he was allowed to cross the street unaccompanied. The probability is high that you learned the meaning of vicious as I suggested in the paragraph above.

Now for a snippet from Sarah’s piece:

     Among other things I’ve been called a white supremacist (blink), a fascist (blink), homophobic (blink, blink), racist (blink), a “fan of the Portuguese regime deposed in the seventies” (this by the German wonder who doesn’t get that one can oppose both a regime and its replacement. Ah, for a mind that simple), atheist (blink, blink, blink), Mormon (blink)… Well, let’s say and save time that I’ve been called everything but a good person.

     It wears on me, not so much because they’re insults, but because they’re crazy insults. I am aware that at some level, permanently, my name is tainted with a large selection of the public. This doesn’t worry me perhaps as much as it should, because a) most people don’t play that much on the net, much less in our circles b) there’s always indie. I can duck out, go fully indie and write historical erotic romances, for all I care. (No, I didn’t write them. No, I don’t advise you to look, but while researching? Henry VIII Catherine of Aragon lactating erotica. I didn’t see anything past the title, and I don’t even.)

     I differ with the above in only one respect: they’re not “crazy insults;” they’re deliberate, premeditated attempts to delegitimize her, such that persons who don’t know Sarah personally won’t grant her the conditional respectful hearing we call “the benefit of the doubt.”

     Mind you, I don’t know Sarah personally. I’ve read much that she’s written, both fiction and nonfiction; that’s all. But on the strength of what I’ve read, she’s a good and honorable person who deserves none of the awful things her detractors have said about her. I would be pleased to make her acquaintance, were the opportunity to arise. But what of someone unacquainted with her work? What if he were to read or hear the slanders that have been showered upon her? What if he were inclined to accept then, perhaps because they emerged from the mouth of a friend or a respected acquaintance?

     Sarah is not alone in having suffered such a shower of venom. Virtually anyone of a generally conservative or libertarian bent who expresses himself where others can hear or read it has caught some of it.

     The people who pour these slanders upon decent Americans like Sarah know they’re untrue. They do so for political advantage. They seek to intimidate those who disagree with them into silence, possibly out of political engagement altogether. And they’ve reaped an unfortunate degree of success.

     Were I required to define vicious to an eight-year-old, such deliberate slanderers would be among the first examples I’d give him.

---

     Nothing illuminates the innate viciousness of the Left quite as well as the foofaurauw over the Sad Puppies 3 campaign. If you’re unacquainted with the world of science fiction, it was a campaign to open the Hugo Awards balloting to a spectrum of works wider than those that have dominated the Hugos in recent years. If you’re interested, read further about it at your leisure. Here are some links:

• On Feminism, Power, And Groups Yet Again
• Sad Puppies Update: Outrage Edition
• Even Sadder Puppies: An Insider Cops To The Scam

     If not, I’ll merely say that campaigns of slander and denunciation conducted by persons of leftist politics have been used to discourage the consideration of books and stories from writers on the Right. It made no difference whether those conservative and libertarian writers injected their politics into their works; all that mattered to the Leftist slanderers was the writer’s personal political posture. In that regard, it was a perfect illustration of Leftist viciousness, with this for a grace note: a Hugo Award has no monetary value. It’s just a form of applause from science fiction fandom.

     Before the slanderers got their act into gear, a Hugo was a token that could bring a book increased sales. These days, it’s indifferent at best. Sometimes having “Hugo Award winner” on the cover has harmed a book’s sales, precisely because of the awareness of many SF readers that the awards process has been “colonized” by the activist Left. Perhaps the breakthrough success of “Sad Puppies 3” will change that; at any rate, it is to be hoped.

     It’s an old bit of wisdom that the most vicious battles are fought over the smallest stakes. We have an example in the above.

---

     It’s about 2:30 AM, the Aleve^TM is starting to work, and I might be near to trying afresh for a few hours’ sleep. If you like, you can dismiss the above diatribe as the maunderings of an old and very weary man. I’m fed up with the viciousness of the Left side of the political spectrum. After reading Sarah’s plaint, I simply had to give it the proper coloration at long last.

     These people are evil.
     They know precisely what they’re doing.
     They deserve to be ostracized for their slanders.
     Decent persons should tell them so to their faces.
     Whatever follows, follows. Be not afraid to do right as you understand it.

     Good night.

“Shut The Barn Door, Sadie! The Horse Is Gone!”

     You might find this hard to believe. As one who has worked with – indeed, alongside – far too many government functionaries, I don’t:

     It’s often been a theme here that the State is evil...and it is. (Whether it’s a “necessary evil” is still up for discussion.) But wait: There’s more!

The State Is INCOMPETENT.

     And I will tell you why.

---

     “Senescence begins when growth ends.” – “Lansing’s Law”

     “Institutions have their own dynamic, and the dynamic of governments is to grow.” – David Friedman

     Government Systems, acting in accordance with the laws of growth, Tend to Expand and Encroach. In encroaching upon their own citizens, they produce Tyranny, and encroaching upon other Government Systems, they engage in Warfare. -- John Gall, Systemantics

     A blade which is designed both to shave and to carve, will certainly not shave so well as a razor or carve so well as a carving-knife. An academy of painting, which should also be a bank, would in all probability exhibit very bad pictures and discount very bad bills. A gas company, which should also be an infant-school society, would, we apprehend, light the streets ill and teach the children ill. -- Herbert Spencer, "Over-Legislation"

     Apologies for the barrage of quotations, Gentle Reader, but this is a subject upon which much has already been said, and not just by your humble commentator. The problem is putting it together properly, a trial with which anyone who has ever coped with that Satanic torment called customer-assembled furniture will already be familiar.

     Any human institution will strive to grow. Indeed, any living thing, whether it’s an individual or a colony organism, will strive to grow, for growth is the sole alternative to death. But growth always comes at a price. The price of growth isn’t always paid by the thing that’s growing.

     An institution grows by expanding its sphere of activity, which inevitably involves acquiring personnel and assets. In a competitive ecology, that implies the consumption of other organisms. However, it also implies at least a partial diversion of the personnel and efforts dedicated to the institution’s previous sphere of action.

     Every institution has an optimum size. That size is determined by its goals and the context within which it pursues them. But an institution that pursues goals that are unrelated to one another, or worse, which interfere with one another in some way, will carry overheads of personnel and internal protocols that engender costs and inefficiencies that two institutions pursuing those goals separately would not experience. Thus, when an institution reaches its optimum size, it faces a choice:

1. Grow beyond that optimum size, whether by acquiring new goals or by expanding beyond its original context, and thus become inefficient;
2. Begin to die.

     There are no other possibilities.

---

     All other things being equal, over time an inefficient institution will be required to face more efficient competitors. This will compel one of the following responses:

• Decline;
• Fractionation;
• Warfare.

     The first of these is obviously undesirable. The second is plausible only for institutions that are capable of surviving the process. The third, while it might not involve flying lead and spurting blood, necessitates further loss of efficiency and must eventuate in recourse to one of the other two.

     This is as true for governments as for private companies and associations.

     A government, of course, is an institution which has arrogated the privilege of coercing individuals and institutions that lie within its “jurisdiction.” Therefore, it’s capable of suppressing competition. (Indeed, competition between governments is normally called warfare; competition between governments within a “jurisdiction” claimed by more than one of them is civil warfare.) Thus, a government need not be balked by any limit upon its growth other than the purely physical.

     But as stated above, and has been confirmed by innumerable historical examples, growth beyond an institution’s optimum size inevitably engenders inefficiency...and the further from its optimum size a government grows, the more inefficient it becomes.

---

     The problem is compounded by the sort of person who works in government, whether as an elected official, an appointee, or a hireling. As I’ve written on several previous occasions, such persons are not primarily interested in providing anything you or I would deem a “public service.” Some service-minded sorts will aspire to such positions, but the institutional dynamic of government makes it improbable that they will remain in them for long, nor will they rise in authority.

     Note how quasi-authoritarian institutions such as unions exert a “slow down, you’re working too fast” efficiency-damping influence upon their members. The State, a fully authoritarian institution, takes that to its logical conclusion: persons who challenge the anti-service ethics and behavior of their co-workers are forced out, if not subjected to punishment for “whistleblowing.” I submit that we’ve seen quite enough demonstrations of that phenomenon within the tenure of the current administration.

     Thus, with no counterbalances and no viable competition that cannot be suppressed by the force at the behest of the State, the State grows without limit: first beyond whatever might be its proper sphere; then through ever increasing levels of inefficiency; finally to complete incompetence. Any task it nominally undertakes is virtually guaranteed never to be accomplished. Indeed, in many cases its “progress” is retrograde: conditions move in the direction opposite to the one it purports to seek.

     Robert Conquest’s Third Law is thus established as the supreme operating rule of the State.

---

     Given all the above, which is easily within the mental scope of anyone capable of reading this essay, we should not expect competence from government at any level. Indeed, we must not. Nor is the problem specifically characterological. The laws and dynamics that militate toward this outcome are only intensified by the accession to power of persons of bad character. At this stage in our devolution, you could populate the 88,000 governments of these United States entirely with living saints, and it would make virtually no difference. Hence the title of this piece.

     There is no cure but the hoof-and-mouth disease cure. There is no palliative but effective separation of oneself from the State. The Katherine Archuletas of Washington are the dominant lifeforms therein. It could be no other way, for the State is their ecological niche, wherein they are optimally positioned to survive and flourish. We cannot eliminate them without eliminating their habitat.

     Think it over.

Human conceit.

From what I've seen over the past 43 years, attempts to bypass the negatives of "organized religion" while still maintaining its "spiritual" benefits have failed, and the Boomers had the benefit of being raised in a functional society with actual rules and obligations. I'm not foolish enough to think I could do better on my own.^[1]

What could go wrong?

Just another take on the fatuous "modern" belief that tradition has nothing to offer and that we can just dump the past like a mattress on the edge of the highway. Alcoholics will tell stories of how they lost wife, children, health, job and self respect and then add, "And my best thinking got me there." It's a heck of a thought and one that should be taken to heart by all the mechanics and tinkerers among us who think they can sweep everything off the table with one smooth motion and then come up with something better.

The economic and immigration madness that has infected the West is something created by the deliberate actions of many highly educated people enamored of (1) secularism, (2) "equality," and (3) the idea that lemonade and candy can gush forth if a rational and humane "socialism" can replace the rotten ways of the past.

Life is unequal and unfair but more equality and fairness came into the world because of people freely pursuing their self interest in free markets. Wise, loving, "enlightened" people had nothing to do with, unless it was those who created a legal structure of rationality, predictability, an even-handedness within which trial and error could slowly lead to amelioration of the harshness of life.

No attempt to cast aside workable legal restraints has led to anything more decent or more just. When was "revolutionary justice" anything but a satisfaction of individual revenge fantasies and bestial instincts that led straight to more slaughter? Handing more and more political power to what some like to think are the "right" kind of people has only led to horror in our times, not just mass killing but social decay that threatens civilization itself. Once-great American cities in our own time are being laid waste by uncivilized people and where is there a scintilla, a soupcon, or a smidgin of evidence that that will ever be turned around? Destruction of our cities is today the course that we pursue with determination. Each new fracturing draws not leaders but buffoons and other political jokes like vultures on the Ferlinghetti Plain.

The Christian religion has attempted to deal with the idea of fallen man. It gives hope to people conscious of their own transgressions and keeps sinners as a part of a larger community. Not an insignificant effort in a world that has always had no lack of suffering humanity.

But secularists and iconoclasts have yet to address the issue of human limitation. In fact, they do not acknowledge it except to offload the defects of the world onto the shoulders of "bigots," "racists," "sexists," and such. This is what the psychologists refer to as "displacement" which is seen in people who transfer personal failings onto others. Only people who have no consciousness of their own failings and propensity for sin can so casually, so recklessly abandon, in the case of the U.S., the salutary protections of the Constitution. What is the need for law, if the rulers are good people?

Hubris is bound up in secularism and today we see its full flowering. Neither common sense, decency, tradition, law, or arithmetic restrain. All correction or limitation is swept aside like tissue. Are you an illegal immigrant? Well, then amnesty's just the thing for you. Is that yet another illegitimate child? Why, it's more money for you! Are education and a job to you like Kryptonite to Superman? Oh, but for structural racism! Eighty trillion dollars in the hole and counting? Please. Let there be an end to hate.

But we got rid of the accursed stupidity and cruelty of the Christian religion. There's that.

Notes
^[1] "Create Your Own Religion." The Lost Art of Self-Preservation (for Women), 1/3/2015.

Quickies: This Post Will Have No Title

     You’ll see why from this Washington Post article by Eugene Volokh:

     One of the latest things in universities, including at University of California (where I teach) is condemning “microaggressions,” supposed “brief, subtle verbal or non-verbal exchanges that send denigrating messages to the recipient because of his or her group membership (such as race, gender, age or socio-economic status).” Such microaggressions, the argument goes, can lead to a “hostile learning environment,” which UC — and the federal government — views as legally actionable. This is stuff you could get disciplined or fired for, especially if you aren’t a tenured faculty member.

     But of course this concept is now being used to suppress not just, say, personal insults or discrimination in hiring or grading, but also ideas that the UC wants to exclude from university classrooms. Here, from the UC Office of the President, Academic and Personnel Programs department’s site (promoted, for instance, here, here, and here), are some of what the UC wants to see stamped out, in classrooms and presumably elsewhere as well...

     Please read the whole thing. Marvel at the list of "unspeakable" words, phrases, and ideas. Ponder what an untenured faculty member or matriculating student might be compelled to endure if he were accused of such a "microaggression." Come back after you’ve goggled over this last bit:

     UPDATE: Fox News reports this response by a UC Office of the President spokeswoman:

     “Given the diverse backgrounds of our students, faculty and staff, UC offered these seminars to make people aware of how their words or actions may be interpreted when used in certain contexts. Deans and department heads were invited, but not required, to attend the seminars,” University of California Office of the President spokeswoman Shelly Meron told FoxNews.com.

     She added that the university had not banned the words when it labeled them as examples of micro-aggressions and insisted that the university system is “committed to upholding, encouraging and preserving academic freedom and the free flow of ideas.”

     Words fail me. Hmmm...maybe that should have been the title.

Quickies: This Morning’s Mass

     One of the more pleasant things about retirement is the opportunity to attend Mass every weekday. As it’s scheduled to begin at 8:30 AM (Eastern), the congregation is almost entirely retirees. However, on occasion someone considerably younger will attend. This morning, there were two young mothers in the chapel, with their children – and it was gratifying to see the kids taking the rite as seriously as their moms did.

     (The parish in which I grew up celebrated the Mass at least three times per weekday, the earliest one starting at 5:00 AM. You didn’t have to be a retiree or a stay-at-home mom to attend Mass daily back then. But I digress.)

     One thing that’s troubled me for quite some time, however, raised its head once more: the tendency of the homilist to graft his own message onto the Gospel reading. Today’s reading from Matthew cited this familiar passage:

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

     ...which the homilist, a deacon I’ve come to dislike for his pomposity and self-importance, interpreted as a command to give to charity regardless of any and all circumstances.

     This struck me as so blatant a misreading of the words of Jesus that I was barely able to restrain myself from looking up the deacon after Mass and disputing with him. As I write these words, I find that I’m unsure whether I should have done so.

     So many clerics of every station, the Holy Father among them, have been larding such tendentious interpretations onto the words of Christ – to say nothing of the many priests who openly preach politics from their pulpits – that it sometimes seems as if the Church is reorganizing itself into a special-interest group, perhaps even a political party. It’s becoming difficult for me to put an innocent face on it. What do you think, Gentle Reader?