The Food Chain: For Corpus Christi Sunday

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

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

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

---

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

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

Thus, a brief exploration of the food chain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Gospel According To John:

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

And may God bless and keep you all.

Payment Plans

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Thoughts?

The Sovereign Power Of Indifference

Consider the following schematic for a brief political exchange:

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

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

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

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

Would you be lying? Even a little?

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they are upon us today.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

Mob Metastases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beware.

Americans

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

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

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

Why?

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Are you an American, or is he?

Think about it, if you must.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps. But wishing won't make it so.

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

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

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

Recession Within a Recession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Odds Would You Give?

Before we get into the meat of today’s tirade, allow me a brief exposition on odds and odds-making as practiced by the professionals. It's remarkable how many people fail to understand the subject.

Let's say a friend offers to bet against you on a sporting event -- perhaps a baseball game -- at odds of 2 to 1. He's not certifying that his team's shot at winning is twice as good as yours; he's merely specifying the payoffs for the two possible outcomes. He's putting $2 of his money up against $1 of yours. If your team wins, you'll profit by $2, whereas if his team wins, he'll only profit by $1.

Giving odds in this fashion is an incentive to bet a certain way. The odds-giver is expressing an opinion about the probable outcome. He could be correct; he could be incorrect. Either way, the game must be played -- and no matter how it comes out, there's no way to determine whether the odds-giver's assessment was accurate, whether before or after the event.

Professional odds-givers -- e.g., Las Vegas touts for sports betting -- continuously monitor the money flowing into bets on a future event. If the odds start at 1 to 1 but money is accumulating twice as swiftly on the Yankees as on the Red Sox, the tout will alter the odds in the Yankees' favor, perhaps as high as 2 to 1. If that causes money flowing to a Red Sox victory to overbalance that on the Yankees, the tout will reduce those odds in an attempt to find the balance point. The balance point is especially precious to a "house" that actually takes bets and pays the winners thereof; it never wants to be far away from it.

For a bettor to take the short end of the odds doesn't mean he thinks his team will win. He's just as likely to be "following the money." Indeed, one of the most sought after conditions in gambling is the opportunity to bet on both sides of a contest at a guaranteed profit. This is called a "straddle," and it's a condition as greatly feared by the odds-makers as it is prized by knowledgeable bettors.

A straddle comes about through fluctuations in the odds being given on an event. For example, in the case above, imagine that the odds in the above example swing from 2 to 1 on the Yankees to 1.5 to 1 on the Red Sox, perhaps because a Yanks' star has fallen to injury, causing the majority of bettors to lose confidence in them. If Smith has already staked $1 on the Red Sox at the earlier odds favoring the Yanks, he can now stake $1 on the Yanks at the new odds favoring the Sox. If the Yanks win, Smith loses the earlier dollar, but wins $1.50 at the later odds; if the Sox win, he loses the later dollar, but wins $2 at the earlier odds. He's guaranteed a profit of at least $0.50.

Opportunities for a straddle are uncommon. They're particularly rare when the critical event is an election.

* * * * * * * * * *

Elections in the United States are seldom runaways for either side. There've been a few -- for example, LBJ's landslide over Goldwater, and Reagan's two massive victories -- but they're not common, except for elections in which a lone candidate faces no opposition. The usual margin in the popular vote is two to four percent. Thus, those who bet on the outcome of an election face close to even-money odds in the great majority of cases. Conversely, were high odds to be available, it would indicate that the prognosticators think one of the candidates to be very nearly a "sure thing," likely to win by an unusually large margin. Seldom is a lot of money made on "sure things:" the bettor would have to accept the short end of the odds, and then pray that the touts are wildly wrong, which isn't often the case.

This makes the recall election taking place today in Wisconsin rather unusual, to say the least.

The polls give the incumbent governor, conservative Republican Scott Walker, an edge of from three to nine percent. Three percent is a typical, and typically small margin. Nine percent would be a large one. The average of these various polls has been given as about a five percent margin for Walker, though the method of averaging has not been disclosed.

A five percent edge in the balloting sounds like a substantial margin. It certainly would be, if this were a national rather than a state election. But the opportunities for gaining a state-level victory through deceit, fraud, and intimidation are far greater than for a presidential contest. Bettors should know that, which makes the flood of money being wagered on a Walker victory somewhat counter-intuitive.

At this time, the odds-makers are putting the probability of a Walker victory at over 90%, entirely on the strength of the betting to this point. They see him as very nearly a "sure thing," despite ongoing union agitation and the possibility of massive vote fraud in Wisconsin's urban areas. Despite the slender return on those odds, bettors have lined up for Walker in huge numbers through yesterday evening.

Who knows something we don't?

* * * * * * * * * *

Naturally, commentators in every medium are drawing connections between the Wisconsin recall election and the prospects for November. It's far from invalid to see Governor Walker's staunch stand for fiscal responsibility as a national rallying point; quite a lot of his financial support has come from out of state. But the power of public-sector unions, against whom the most publicized Walker reforms were drawn, is not uniform nationwide; Wisconsin is one of the states where they've been strongest. We should look in other directions.

If Walker survives the balloting, it will be above all a demonstration that ordinary voters are willing to face down the special interests to stand by a man whose policies they approve. Those special interests -- mainly the aforementioned public-sector unions and their out-of-state affiliates and backers -- have done everything but a rain dance in their drive to impede the Walker program and, having failed in that effort, to punish the governor and his supporters in Wisconsin's legislature. Wisconsin is one of the American cradles to left-liberal "progressivism" -- Robert LaFollette came from there -- and so those interests have received substantial support from other residents. They've simply been outnumbered by the governor's supporters.

Will a Walker victory embolden private citizens in other states to do the same as Walker and the Wisconsin legislature have done? Will the governors of other badly deficit-ridden states, such as California and New York, take a new tack should Wisconsin's Republicans prevail? Will the outcome foreshadow that of the November elections in any significant degree?

What odds would you give?

Reflections on The Nature of Human Evil, Part II: Pride

Of all the endemic and destructive human impulses, pride is probably the most difficult to control and the most central to the tendency towards evil.  It is a formidable barrier to almost every aspect of human growth.

I think that there is a great deal of confusion surrounding this subject, so much so that I'm quite sure that I do not even remotely have it straight myself.  But I do think that I might contribute some ideas towards clearing up the topic that perhaps the reader may not yet have encountered.

Firstly, one should really begin such a discussion by attempting to define as clearly as possible what he is talking about.  Unfortunately, as with virtue and with 'quality,' some of the most important notions seem to be the most difficult to define clearly, and as the whole confusion surrounding the topic of pride would suggest, that seems to be the case here as well.  So, as a very precise but bad definition would seem to be much more misleading than a clear discussion about an imprecisely defined term, I will choose the latter course.  This seems to me a most useful approach in such circumstances, and the more I use it the more I like it.

Nevertheless, a little sketch of the idea of pride here at the beginning would be useful, and a helpful clue to begin cutting through the haze can I think be found by dissecting a certain confusion about the topic that I think arises out of a sloppy use of language which leads to inaccurate thinking.  It is often thought that there must be a sort of 'balance' of pride.  Too little pride, and one lacks confidence or 'manliness.'  To much and one is an arrogant jerk.

Actually, I think that this is all wrong, as hopefully I will show in just a moment.  But what is basically going on here, I think, is that a great number of flavors of things and many various sentiments are being lumped under the single heading of pride.  The English language is using a single word to describe many things.  For example, 'pride' in one's country could also be called patriotism or nationalism.  But I do not think that this is pride per se.  Likewise, I think that there are many other tangled strands of thought here which I am unable to name or describe quite as well, but are being lumped together as 'pride' and actually are perfectly harmless or even positive things.

I think that it is not quite correct to think of pride as a sentiment even if language tends to treat it primarily that way, though pride can certainly manifest itself in many forms of sentiment.  The fact that we may call these sentiments 'prideful' should illustrate.  If pride is a sentiment, then a 'prideful sentiment' would seem a somewhat redundant thing to say.  I suppose the particular sentiment in question could be a combination of the sentiment of pride itself and some other sentiment and this phrase would still make sense, but it would seem to be a more reasonable or meaningful thing to say if pride were actually something else which was informing or shaping or being reflected in the sentiment.  I would think that pride is more a pattern of thought or of seeing the world, or perhaps a quality of character like virtue, but which belonged to the opposite class of things as virtue -- whatever one might call virtue's inverse.

Actual, real pride is, I think, always bad.  There is no balance to be had with it, and none should be attempted nor any compromise with it struck.  Real, true pride cares only for itself; it is its own center, its own joy and a cancer to everything else.  Unfortunately, it is ubiquitous with the human condition, and I suspect that this tangling and confusion with other issues is a sort of nefarious form of protection or a defense mechanism.  By creating this tangle with positive points of character, the man pursuing virtue often finds himself led either to quash things of himself which are good, or else to incidentally encourage pride while trying to build up something different.  I suppose that this is somewhat to be expected, as pride is so connected with self that it would naturally tangle itself up in anything else which referred to the self.  But it still seems nefarious to me.

Hopefully, I can demonstrate a bit of what I mean in all of this to the reader's satisfaction with a few illustrations and discussion.

***

Pride can manifest itself in ways which are very difficult to recognize.  One of the more interesting examples is the quality of shyness.

This is one of those qualities that most people would initially associate with a 'deficit' of pride -- an example of the 'balance' error.  They would suggest that the shy person needs more encouragement and confidence, so that he will have the courage to express himself more freely and would lose his anxieties and find more enjoyment in the company of others.

Not so.

I would posit that if indeed this were the case with a person, and that person were sufficiently encouraged so that he did begin to voice himself more freely, in general his acquaintances would not find themselves presented with a newly confident and well-adjusted individual where the timid little mouse had been.  Rather, he would turn out to be an obnoxious, excessively talkative jerk, and probably astonishingly self-absorbed.  As the pride took on a new flavor in its outward appearance, its would become recognizable, and they would wish that they had not encouraged him.

But of course, this kind of thing rarely happens this way, because the diagnosis of the problem is completely wrong.  Shy people rarely ever undergo such a transformation.  If they do ever become more talkative and confident, it is usually for very different reasons.

I should my begin my explanation with a slight clarification.  Shyness is not the same as merely being given to quietness.  Shyness is an inappropriate quietness, such that when polite or appropriate behavior requires one to speak, one nevertheless 'shies' away from speaking and refuses.  The reason shy people do not speak when it is appropriate is because they are afraid to speak, and the reason they are afraid is because they fear losing esteem in the eyes of others.  Their pride -- and an inability to control their pride -- causes them to behave in a way that they clearly know to be wrong.

The case of insecurity is similar.  Many insecure people are also shy, but some are not.  Insecure people often express a lack of faith in themselves, and annoy their acquaintances with a constant need for reassurance.  Again, people often diagnose this condition as a lack of confidence or pride.  But notice the inconsistency -- the insecure person considers himself useless and not really worthwhile, yet he seems to think everything is 'his fault,' and that others are constantly thinking bad things about him, as if he were the very center of the universe.  In truth, if he were really of no account, he would not be significant enough to affect much of anything, and nobody would bother thinking about him at all.

The insecure person is obsessed with himself and his standing with other people, to the point of creating a pathology of character.  In this light, his case is little different from either the shy person or the arrogant jerk himself.  The insecure person lets his petty issues of pride get in the way of his being a good person, so that he often becomes a useless liability to those he cares about.  When his 'friends' are in need, oftentimes he is so paralyzed by his own fear of failure and need of their approval that they can get nothing from him.  They wind up shouldering the burden of dealing with his frail ego on top their own problems, comforting him rather than the other way around.

What the shy person and the insecure person alike need is not a dose of pride, but of humility.  They are all manifestations of the same disease, and require the same medicine.  Shy people generally overcome their shortcoming – which I hope the reader now agrees with me is a shortcoming -- by becoming comfortable with themselves.  They are 'cured' by gaining the self-control to accept the fact of their own imperfection and learning to behave themselves accordingly, taking whatever resulting 'embarrassment' comes their way in stride.

The insecure person is usually best served by putting himself and his 'issues' aside long enough to develop a proficiency at something, at which point he hopefully learns that he is a better person by learning to deal with things, whatever they are, well or poorly, just so long as they wind up in the rear-view mirror.  Both must accept the fact that they are not going to be accepted by everybody.  Arrogant people generally just have to be humiliated by some situation, so that they, too, just learn to deal with it.

Again, virtue shows up as a kind of self-control.

***

As further evidence of my thesis, I point to what may have until now seemed a rather strange juxtaposition of Far-Eastern culture -- the very cultures known for a strong prevalence of 'shyness' are also known for their consummate observance of 'saving face.'

Actually, I think a lot about these cultures might be understood in connection with the issues of pride and shyness and the structure of family.  I don't think it explains everything; certainly it is a complex situation with a great number of complex dynamics and influences at work, and certainly it is always a mistake to think that 'everybody is the same,' but I do think a good deal can be understood by looking at how family might influence personality and instigate or reinforce certain tendencies.

At least among Chinese -- I can't really say anything about the others, as I don't know much about them -- the way the family is structured is very different from the West.  At least up until about 70 years ago, it seems to have followed one model, while after the coming of communism it seems to follow a sort of hybrid model with the West.  The Chinese model is structured vertically, in a lineage from father to son, stretching back into antiquity, while the Western model is more 'nuclear,' with households sending their offspring to form new nuclear households when they start new families.

In the West, 'grandpa' is considered part of 'extended family,' who gets visited every now and then, and maybe stays with the family when he gets too old to take care of himself. But in ancient China and up until the early 20th century, he was very literally the head of the household pretty much until he died.  Most people know that women spent their lives more or less as chattels in what a Westerner would probably consider a somewhat stunted existence, yes, but most people don't think about the fact that most men spent their lives under the shadow of their father in a situation which most Westerners would also consider rather restrictive.

From their own point of view, certainly this was a normal aspect of life, but to a Westerner the Chinese man is in something of a developmental predicament.  As a grown man he occupies a world somewhere between adolescence and adulthood.  He has a wife, perhaps more than one, and is fathering children, and he also probably works to support the household.  But he has little real authority or responsibility, which rests with his own father, and will not be passed on to him until he is perhaps forty or fifty years old.

This also creates a conflict of authority in terms of raising children.  The father has limited authority over them and is not altogether responsible for them because he is not the head of the house.  But to the grandfather, they aren't really so much 'his' children.  The women, as chattels, don't have much authority, either.  So, the children tend to occupy what would appear to a Westerner something of a void.

The modern Chinese family model is something of a thrown-together affair, with many of the same problems, except that in most respects they are considerably worse.  Adult children don't generally live with their parents after they are married, so in that respect they are more like Western households.  On the other hand, young children are often sent off to be raised by their grandparents until they are school-age, and even where they are not, the residue of elder domination of younger generations remains.  The older generation tends to interfere strongly in the decisions of their children's families long after they have 'left home.'  This tendency is strongly reinforced by the tradition of guanxi, which I'll discuss later. 

When all is said and done, under both regimes the authority of the parent of young children, especially as disciplinarian, is heavily undermined.  I would not be the first to observe that young Chinese children have a strong tendency to be 'spoiled.'  One of the more important consequences of this situation, at least as it seems to me, is that it appears to reliably produce two extremes of personality -- one aggressively meddling and tyrannical, and the other extremely timid and shy.  The dynamics of Chinese society tends to be dominated by the interaction of these two personalities, with the tyrannical sort perpetually vying and fighting with one another for domination and its spoils, and the mousy sort scurrying about just trying not to get stepped on.

***

The system of guanxi is both an extension of these tendencies and a reinforcement of them.  Guanxi, 'officially,' if anything about it can be said to be official, is a sort of all-encompassing system of relations between people and the social expectations that attend them.  It is a very common word, possibly because it is always at the front of the mind.  One often will hear people use the phrase 'mei guanxi.'  If asked for a translation, most Chinese would respond that it means 'no problem.'  But that is not really what it means, as attempting to use it in a sentence in the same way will prove completely wrong.  It would be closer to say something like 'Don't worry.  I'm not going to try to destroy your relationships with other people and ruin your life over this.'  Maybe that's a little strong, but it will get a Western mind closer to the actual idea.

The person trying to successfully navigate Chinese society must keep his mind focused on guanxi.  The tyrant must keep his allies with him and in line, and remain vigilant against other tyrants trying to unseat him.  The mouse must keep the tyrants and the other mice happy so that he isn't squashed or nibbled to death.  To many Westerners it must sound kind of like being in high-school, except that your life pretty much depends on how popular you are.

Which is to say that it is a sort of childish, society-wide self-obsession.  If many Chinese appear inescapably shy or insecure to Westerners, it is probably because they can never become comfortable with themselves.  Not to obsess over one's self and one's status practically amounts to suicide.  Many Chinese who immigrate to the West express a sentiment along the lines of 'Thank God!  No more guanxi!' and proceed to live happy lives in relative insignificance and obscurity, having cared very little about whatever program of study got them into their adoptive country and with no real ambitions of actual achievement.  They are just happy to escape the stress of that mess.

It is easy to think of the enforcement of this system as being perpetrated by the proud, oppressive, vicious tyrants against the 'good,' weak and timid mice, as well as everybody else.  But actually both groups are responsible, and both are proud, vicious, oppressive and weak.  Obsession with self and status is practically a requirement for survival, such that both groups are actually struggling with pride, just manifested in different ways.  Both groups are vicious, the tyrants openly and actively, the mice in their participation in guanxi and the neglect of their weaker fellows as a matter of self-interest.  Both groups participate in 'oppression,' the tyrants actively and openly, the mice in appeasement of the tyrants.  And both are weak, neither able to control themselves.

On the other hand, they are up against a very powerful confluence of circumstances which must be very difficult to break and beyond any individual's control.  Westerners have the meliorating influences of the sovereign family and individualism on their side.  The tyrannical and insecure attitudes of childhood have forces of parental discipline working against them to temper their influence.  A spirit of individualism allows Westerners to freely associate and disagree without destroying one another.  But the Chinese standing against pride, status-mongering and petty viciousness stands alone against a hostile world.

It can't be easy being Chinese.

***

I have posited that insecurity is actually an outward manifestation of pride which often goes unrecognized.  But following this train of thought would seem to lead to a rather odd corollary.  If confidence is the opposite of insecurity, and humility the opposite of pride, a sort of argument from symmetry would suggest that confidence is actually the outward manifestation of humility.

Does this make any sense?  Actually, I think it does.

The insecure person finds everyday life debilitating because, like all prideful people, he is in the constant habit of placing himself at the center of his thoughts.  With the worst of such people it is very nearly impossible to have a meaningful conversation, because for such a person there can never be a conversation about anything other than himself.  One might ostensibly be talking about almost any subject under the sun, but in the insecure person's mind, every comment will somehow be connected back to his perception of himself.  Practically anything could be construed as an insult or somehow destructive to his self-image.  Every statement made will be strenuously analyzed for some tenuous connection back to some issue of his own standing.  Outright criticism of anything is impossible for him to handle, because it can never be an objective criticism of an idea or an event, but must always be personalized.  Likewise, the most mildly challenging of circumstances instantly bring out his fear of being revealed as a failure.

The confident person is able to cope so supremely well with reality not because he is some superhuman, ultra-competent demigod, but precisely because he is not doing any of this.  He has, by some means or another, flipped the pride-switch to 'off.'  He can talk comfortably about almost anything, because for him, statements can actually be just what they are, and can mean just what they are stated to mean.  He can think about and respond to the situation at hand because he is able to stop thinking about himself.  Neither his failures nor his successes 'get to him,' because he has stopped compulsively connecting them to his self-image.  Life can finally just be life, because his self has been forgotten, and is no longer getting in the way of things.

I witnessed what I think is a very interesting demonstration of this about a month ago when getting some  repair work done on my car.  I had a problem with the alignment, and had to take it to a specialist with whom I had never done business before.  When I walked into the office, the interior was dark and old, but extremely tidy and clean.  The middle-aged proprietor was standing there, leaning against a pole with his arms crossed.  I asked him how much for an alignment, and he quoted me a price, using as few words as possible.  His 'vibe' was extremely nervous and uncomfortable, though you would think he'd been through just this scenario hundreds or thousands of times in his lifetime.

I pulled my car into the garage, and he started looking it over.  In a few minutes, he returned to me and started relaying his diagnosis.  But this time, he was open and excited.  He went from uptight and utterly laconic to positively effusive, gesturing very expressively as he talked, his eyes wide with energy.  He actually acted like someone you might want to approach and have a conversation with.

What happened?  He became comfortable.   He was talking about cars now, apparently a favorite subject.  He was too excited to think about himself, so he forgot to.  He could become friendly and open without worrying about what I might think.

***

My wife informs me that one of the highest ideals of Buddhism is achieving 'emptiness' of the self:

"How much suffering and fear, and

How many harmful things are in existence?

If all arises from clinging to the "I",

What should I do with this great demon?"

--Shantideva

I don't know if this is exactly the same idea, but it appears to be fairly close.  Pride would seem a good fit to the description 'the great demon 'I'.

If this thinking is generally correct, perhaps I might venture that the beginnings of a definition of pride should not be so much concerned with the notion of thinking particularly well of one's self, as it is usually taken, but more generally a compulsive dwelling of one's awareness on issues of self, whatever the content of the thought.  Achieving humility, then, and displaying confidence would seem to be best secured by 'emptying the self of the self',' or forgetting one's self, or at the very least allowing one's own petty issues as little room in his mind as possible.

So, maybe the best advice is to 'get rid of your self.'  Apparently, you're better off without it.

Money Statistics for China

The FED has been adding many new statistical series to its databases which are available to the public, and in particular it has started publishing economic statistics for China, presumably as reported by the PBoC (China's central bank).  It's true that one must treat such numbers with a bit of skepticism, but nevertheless, it doesn't hurt to take a look.

First, China's monetary statistics, M0 (which is just currency), M1 and M2:

These don't reveal much to me, except that it appears that China has adopted a more or less Friedmanesque monetary policy of creating X% more money every year, regardless of what is going on in the economy.  If you are wondering what those little spikes in M0 are, it is probably paper currency being issued by the bank to meet demands for Spring Festival each year (a.k.a. Chinese New Year.)

I think that the discount rate and CPI are a bit more revealing:

From these two, we see that CPI stabilized in 1996-1997, as the PBoC slashed the discount rate from ~10% down to ~3%.  This suggests to me that China entered into a new business cycle in 1996-1997.  This cycle appears to have begun coming to a close around 2005-2006, as CPI began to creep up, and was at least initially met by higher interest rates.

However, it appears that as the global recession of 2008 set in, the PBoC decided to ignore CPI and push rates back down to 3%.  So, apparently, the central bankers didn't care so much about price inflation, figuring that a global recession would help to staunch the effects of a loose monetary policy (at least as far as CPI is concerned!).  Either that, or they just blindly plowed ahead with the same policy that they always had, and do not target interest rates at all, which is what the M0, M1, and M2 data suggest.

Lastly, given the mercantilist tendencies of the Chinese government, I thought I would look at imports, exports, and the forex rate against the US dollar.

First, exports, imports, and the ratio of the two:

The most obvious feature of these graphs is the massive hit that trade took due to the 2008 recession.  It is also apparent that, while both exports and imports have recovered since, imports seem to have rebounded a bit more strongly, as reflected in the general decline in the ratio after 2008, from a surplus of exports over imports of about 25% to only about 5% today.

This is interesting for several reasons.  First, lately China has not been nearly as eager to purchase of US Treasuries as it has in the past.  Holdings have been basically flat for at least a year.  Secondly, oil has become quite expensive over this time frame, and China is a large importer of oil.  So, it appears that China is mostly able to balance the books without Treasury purchases, and is running a far less mercantilist policy than in the recent past.  In fact, I'm a bit surprised that the overall ratio is so low.  Yes, at times it appears that exports exceeded imports by 40% or so, with one very brief spike up past 60%, but on the whole it is neither systematic nor severe, averaging perhaps 20% since the beginning of the 1997 business cycle.

This rather tepid mercantilism is also reflected in the exchange rate:

The yuan fell against the dollar from 1980 to 1995 (again, the beginning of that business cycle) and was flat until 2005 (again, nearing the end of that business cycle when CPI started to rise).  So, it would appear that the Chinese authorities saw a mercantilist policy as the solution to their problems in 1994-1995 and set up an export boom by engineering a fall in the currency and then fixing exchange rates.  But on the other hand, it appears that this policy has come to an end, and it is not yet apparent (at least to me) what is next.

So far, it appears that the plan is steady-as-she-goes inflation with less mercantilism.

Mysteries: For Trinity Sunday

First, please allow me a rather lengthy self-quotation, from an essay I posted three years ago at Eternity Road:

First, I have one gear, and it's very, very high. I can't move slowly. At any moment I'm either sitting completely still or moving at a speed that makes other people wonder if I'm running from the law, or if there's a sale somewhere nearby that they ought to know about. On occasion, that trait has gotten me into serious trouble. However, it appears innate; no one's attempts to dampen it -- and there've been many -- have had the least success.

Second, I have an unlimited need for answers. Call it a hunger of the intellect, as compelling as that of a man who's gone a week without food. The unsolved problem is a challenge before which I very nearly can't hold still. It's what propelled me into the sciences; it's what's moved me to study politics, economics, warfare, rights theory, game theory, cybernetics, aesthetics, and every other subject I've ever addressed; and it constitutes the greater part of what drives me today, no matter what I do.

Combine those two in a single, ultra-high-performance chassis and throw the compound into a "mystery religion." What do you suppose you'll get?

Now, now, let's not always see the same hands!

***

"God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind."

[Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons]

Some years ago, when my gift of faith reasserted itself and I returned to the Church, I realized that I had yet to confront the core mysteries of Christianity, much less to accept them as beyond question. That sort of acceptance is more difficult for me than anything else I could name.

Being what I am, I had to allow my intellect its time at bat. Allowing unconditional pronouncements from a self-authorizing source to pinch-hit for my reason would have been unthinkable. Insistence by such self-nominated authorities on prefabricated dogma was part of what had separated me from God as a young man; I wasn't about to let that happen again.

Some of the Christian mysteries rest on particular postulates about the nature of God: His omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence. If you can bring yourself to accept the existence of a Supreme Being -- which I do -- those characteristics are consistent with His Supremacy. So such mysteries aren't much of a problem.

But not all the Christian mysteries are that simply resolved. The one we celebrate today is one such.

Today is the Feast of the Holy Trinity, upon which Christians celebrate and praise the Three Persons of God. No tenet of Christianity involves more intellectual suspension of disbelief than that one. Christ born of a virgin? Naah, too easy. Resurrection of the body? Child's play. God knowing all yet Man having free will? Once you stop thinking of time as we perceive it as the only sort of time there is, that one cracks in a jiffy. But three Persons, yet one God?

Give me a minute for that one.

***

Your deeds can open the door for your words; nothing else will. And when that door is opened to you, you must speak. You must tell your story -- without embarrassment or fear -- and you must learn how to reassure others who haven't "gotten there" yet that their stories still have a few chapters to run. -- Duyen Ky

It strikes me as odd that the invention of abstract categories, the foundation upon which all other reasoning rests, should be traceable only as far back as classical Greece. That concept, so critical to organized thought, makes its first appearance in recorded history in the writings of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers with radically different attitudes toward it. The Aristotelian approach, based upon his approach to definition, is the underpinning for virtually the whole of Western analytical thought.

But categories and definition have their limitations too. Indeed, they're premised on the existence of limitations to all things that are less than the totality of existence, the All. A category must have a genus and a differentia, else it is without definition, and therefore useless. You cannot reason about something unless you can say both what it is and what it is not.

But it follows from those requirements that the All as we know it, and whatever might envelop it from some higher plane we cannot access, are beyond all our categories. We might learn something of it -- we might be able to say with fair confidence that certain assertions about it can or cannot be true -- but we cannot grasp it whole, for we are too small for it. The old Qualifying Exam gag, "Define the universe. Give two examples," has much point.

This seems to me to be the case with the arguments over the Trinity: whether it's factual or metaphorical; whether the Persons are merely manifestations of an unchanging Unity, or whether we ought to throw the whole thing aside as beyond resolution by human reason. But for one to whom comprehension seems a necessity, the frustration involved is very hard to bear.

***

Doubt is inseparable from faith. We cannot have either one without the other. Most persons, the overwhelming majority throughout history, have not merely had faith but have wanted to have it. If we desire faith we must learn to tolerate and endure that which makes us doubt.

In that connection, the Trinitarian conception of God might be the most important of all the posers presented by Christianity.

But in the Gospels we read of manifestations of all three Persons to human perception. We read of God the Father speaking of Jesus as "My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." We read of Jesus's miracles, and His Passion and Resurrection. We read of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Mary and the eleven Apostles, granting them the gift of tongues that every man might hear them in the language most familiar to him. These aren't mysteries themselves, but narrated events the accuracy of which one must take or leave as they are.

If the events recorded in the Gospels occurred as they're set down there, the Trinity is real. Or some super-race with a really good cloaking device and a cruel sense of humor is playing a two-thousand-year-long joke on us. You pays your money and you takes your choice; I've made mine.

***

Trinity Sunday often brings out the worst in a Mass celebrant. Far too many priests attempt to explain the inexplicable: to make lucid to minds inextricably locked into temporal bondage a phenomenon that pertains to a supra-temporal Entity. I've endured several such sermons, and have tried my best not to cringe.

Rather than tackle the how of the Trinity, which is impervious to mortal understanding, perhaps we should confront the why: Why did God elect to manifest three divine Persons, rather than to maintain the Unity that seems intuitively obvious about a Supreme Being?

C. S. Lewis once tossed off a comment about how the Trinity allows God to incorporate love right into His nature. As an obscure writer of little-known novels and stories once said, isn't it pretty to think so? But in a rare episode of dissent from the views of the greatest lay Christian apologist of recent years, I think that's fundamentally irrelevant to the Divine purpose in this connection. Being an old engineer, I prefer a functional approach.

Personhood is about personality.

The three divine Persons have dramatically different Personalities, at least in the appearance they present to Man:

• The Father: The Lawgiver, who has decreed the laws that govern all things, who sees all ages as a single gestalt, and who will preside over our ultimate fates.
• The Son: The Emissary, who points us in the way we should go and intercedes for us before the Lawgiver’s judgment.
• The Holy Spirit: The Defender, who empowers us to restrain ourselves from what is wrong, and steels us to confront and accept our duties, however trying they may appear.

These three Personalities regard Man from the standpoints appropriate to their respective roles in the creation, maintenance, and ultimate disposal of all things. We experience them in that way: through the functions each has taken up, and the attributes they manifest in fulfilling those purposes. This is a part of the divine Gift to Man, which makes our relations to and with God more comprehensible, and thus more reassuring, than would otherwise be the case.

One of the least appreciated phrases in theology is the one that would provide the most assurance in the face of this mystery: Holy Trinity. For holiness always pertains to wholeness: unity, integrity, and internal consistency. The Three are holy because they are, from the supra-temporal standpoint, also One.

Persons of other creeds have often denigrated Christianity on the basis of the Trinity. The above is my answer to them, with the following as a grace note:

"You, who claim to know God so much better than I, have committed a critical error: you have arrogantly imposed one of your limitations upon Him. But He stands above you, not only in this way but in many others your limited vision would deny. A temporal creature attempting to comprehend the infinite and the eternal should exhibit more humility. May God guide your thoughts and your steps henceforward."

May God bless and keep you all.

Morons Everywhere

I'd say we've gone too long without a good, old-fashioned disemboweling, wouldn't you?

Today's target comes from Fox News, of all places:

Time to toss the SAT test

Last year, 20 teenagers from five New York high schools were charged in an SAT cheating scandal; five of the students were accused of using fake IDs to take the college entrance exam for others and 15 were accused of paying students $500 to $3,600 to take the tests. Authorities believe as many as 50 students might have been involved.

Now, in an effort to curb cheating, the SAT will require students’ photos be printed on their test admission ticket.

There’s a better solution: Toss the test.

Do my Gentle Readers suspect that Miss Calandra's true motives have nothing to do with the prevalence of cheating on the SAT?

I'm not going to pull the whole moronic article over to Liberty's Torch. Please read the whole thing, then hustle back here for the refutation.

Finished so soon? My, my. I do hope you kept from dying of laughter.

Miss Calandra's argument reduces to the following:

• "Low income" students with deficient English skills are "too poor to cheat."
• The test is time-limited, which disadvantages slower thinkers.
• " The SAT measures proficiency only in writing, reading and math....[It] does not measure the potential success of a student who is a masterful photographer or another who excels at interior design."
• Those aforementioned "low income" students are "judged by their performance on the same standardized test as students with far more privileged backgrounds."
• And last but not least laughable, "Education is a birthright, not a privilege."

This...person makes her living, or part of it, preparing students for the SAT. Do you suppose she thinks that gives her "moral authority" on the subject?

This is so typical a left-liberal screed that it's a wonder it hasn't already attracted belly laughs from a thousand other commentators. Every last objection Miss Calandra posits against the SAT (and by implication, against standardized tests in general), amounts to an ill-disguised claim that it discriminates among students: in part according to their mastery of the fundamental skills required by learning, thought, and expression; in part according to the incomes of their parents. It's founded in its entirety on a radical egalitarian vision that presumes, not merely that "education is a birthright," but that every child should receive the same education, and the same outcome from it, as every other.

Well, here's a hot flash for you, lady: Children are not identical in their capacities for academic achievement. Indeed, they vary greatly, as an hour's exposure to any classroom in America will demonstrate. But that, of course, is utter blasphemy to a radical egalitarian such as Lion Calandra.

The plague of grade inflation in primary and secondary education, coupled to the collapse of actual academic standards in the government-run schools, has made standardized tests more important than ever. Teachers are under so much pressure, from parents and school administrations, to give every child good grades that grade records have become useless in determining who could benefit from further education. A college admissions officer who's determined to uphold a standard above mediocrity would be an idiot to pay more than token attention to a student's high school grades.

Beyond that, one of the problems that besets higher education in our time is the widespread assumption that "everybody ought to go to college." (Including those masterful future photographers and interior designers, no doubt.) That assumption funnels many young persons with neither the capacity to absorb a college education nor any real interest in acquiring one into the halls of ivy, frequently against their own inclinations. Many universities, avid for every dollar of income they can get, have collaborated in the process by grade inflation and the creation of degrees in meaningless subjects. Among the consequences is that a college degree is gradually coming to mean as little to a potential employer as a high school diploma already does.

(In this connection, note that the Left is absolute death on employers' use of proficiency tests of any kind. Why? Because they sort the able from the unable by an objective standard. They make no allowances for race, ethnicity, sex, or a "disadvantaged background." A business that exists specifically to make a profit -- one of the dirtiest words in the English language, by the Left's lights -- cannot afford to hire the unskilled and the inarticulate for any but the most menial jobs. With scholastic and academic institutions at every level systematically corrupting their own standards, businesses must test job applicants, thoroughly and ruthlessly. But you'd take your life into your hands in saying that to such as Lion Calandra.)

Finally: Yes, money, wisely spent and combined with parental oversight and encouragement, plays a part in actualizing a child's capacity for learning, thinking, and expressing himself. That's why so many people are willing to pay more for houses in school districts with good reputations. It's why parents strive to save for their children's higher educations. In fact, it's among the biggest reasons parents strive to earn a decent income: so that their children will have the benefits thereof, and might thus be equipped to do even better than their ancestors. But once again, we tread on egalitarian toes in saying so; how often, after all, have we heard them rant about the unfairness of "income inequality?"

Miss Calandra probably isn't so stupid that she can't grasp the imbecility of her "arguments" for ditching the SAT. That forces me to assume that she's consumed by envy of the more intelligent, the more industrious, and the more materially fortunate, whether in propria persona or vicariously, in place of the students she tutors. And envy, as Ayn Rand has told us, amounts to hatred of the good for being good.

Unfortunately, such persons are everywhere. Their dominance of the schools, and the prevalence of their radical egalitarian doctrines there, constitute a compelling argument for homeschooling your kids. Beware them.

Commissar Complex: The "Winning Side"

A famous anecdote from the 1848 socialist upheaval in Paris has a coal-carrier accosting a gentlewoman, saying, "Yes, Madame, everything's going to be equal now. I'll go in silks and you'll carry coal." Though it cannot be verified owing to time and the lack of attribution, as an illustration of the sort of "equality" left-leaning types truly cherish, this one is unparalleled.

I've called this the Commissar Complex in other writings: the conviction that one will be rewarded for his support of a leftist movement with a position of power. The other side of the coin, of course, is that the sufferer cannot imagine the opposite outcome: that he will be under the heel of commissars in whose selection he had no voice, and whose power he cannot oppose.

But among those infected with the Complex are a few whose visions of eventual power have a firmer base than others:

    "Yes," said Feverstone, bringing his hand down smartly on the table. "That's just the point. People like Curry or James think the violent resistance of the other side ended with the persecution of Galileo and all that. But don't believe it. It is just beginning. They know now that we have at last got real powers. They're going to fight every inch. They'll stop at nothing."
    "They can't win," said Mark.
    "We'll hope not," said Lord Feverstone. "That is why it is of such immense importance to each of us to choose the right side."
    "Oh, I haven't any doubt which is my side," said Mark. "Hang it all-the preservation of the human race-it's a pretty rock-bottom obligation."
    "Well, personally," said Feverstone, "I'm not indulging in any Busbyisms about that. The practical point is that you and I don't like being pawns, and we do rather like fighting-specially on the winning side."...

    "No good, Sonny," said Miss Hardcastle shaking her head. "You don't know enough facts yet for your point of view to be worth sixpence. You haven’t yet realized what you're in on. You're being offered a chance of something far bigger than a seat in the cabinet. And there are only two alternatives, you know. Either to be in the N.I.C.E. or to be out of it. And I know better than you which is going to be most fun."

[C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength]

There are always some whose aspirations to rule will be satisfied. In keeping with Friedrich Hayek's analysis, it is overwhelmingly more likely than not that they will be the most ruthless and least scrupled of all the forces of darkness. In a struggle over political power, those are advantages.

Very seldom have political upheavals not elevated the very worst to the very highest positions. Moreover, the "very worst" are aware of this, which is why one finds a disproportionate number of the unscrupulous -- the liars, the thugs, the embezzlers, and miscellaneous other blackguards -- in the strategy councils of left-oriented movements. Search as long as you like; you will never find anyone resembling Saul Alinsky among conservative or libertarian thinkers. Such a person would rebel against the promotion of individual liberty; he'd seek to undermine it at every opportunity, such that no one on the Right would listen to him.

No, it's on the Left that you'll find the Rahm Emanuels and the David Axelrods, the Jeremiah Wrights and the Al Sharptons, the Tony Rezkos, the Rod Blagojeviches, the Alex Giannoulias, the Bill Ayerses and Bernardine Dohrns.

Have a gander at political strategy from that point of view:

    Zlugy fitted his fingertips together and frowned down at his lap.
    “All the trend lines are solid, Mr. President. Sumner is an attractive and eloquent candidate. He’s winning the affections of every identifiable group in the country, union members and hard-core environmentalists excepted. His message is simple and unchanging, and people are resonating to it.” He sat up straight. “Unless something wholly unanticipated should arise between now and election day, he’ll take between two hundred seventy and three hundred electoral votes. Lowry will be fortunate to win a single state.”
    The president stood, eyes downcast and hands thrust into his pockets.
    “What sort of ‘wholly unanticipated’ somethings are you thinking of, Adam?”
    Zlugy smiled thinly. “The usual, sir. Personal scandals. Extremely bad turns of health. Assassination.” He paused and looked off into the corner of the Oval Office. “Or a fatal revision of his message to accommodate some interest group he feels he must win over.”
    Coleman’s expression sharpened. He looked Zlugy full in the eyes.
    “What on Earth would induce him to do that?”
    Zlugy shrugged. “One cannot know, sir. But it’s happened before. Candidates are human. They respond to events in human, and therefore unpredictable, ways. An attack of hubris. A downtick in the polls. A caustic pronouncement from some prestigious commentator. Or,” he said with a slight smile, “strongly put advice from the most respected political strategist in the country.”

This, above all other things, is what makes it imperative that conservative candidates for office be the most carefully vetted, ruthlessly prepared, fearlessly outspoken persons we can find.

At this time, the Left is in control of many of the critical levers of power. Note that almost as soon as Barack Hussein Obama took office, he began to elevate the worst of his lieutenants to the highest positions available -- in the case of his many "czars," even bypassing Congress to do so. They will work like madmen to assure his continuation in power. No tactic will be considered too low to employ. They understand that ejecting Obama from the Oval Office will cause their downfall as well: no more ukases to the unwashed; no more Washington high life; no more endlessly importuning reporters.

Removal will invest them with a slavering need to rise to high positions once more. No one has a taste for power to match that of a former commissar. Beware.