Liberty's Torch

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

The Russian perspective.

Do you think that Putin and his advisors have had their heads in the sand for the last 15 years, that they haven’t noticed the US rampaging around the globe bumping off one country after the other leaving behind nothing but anarchy and ruin? Do you think they don’t know that Russia is on the top of Washington’s hit-list? Do you think they haven’t noticed NATO inching closer to Russia’s borders while foam-at-the-mouth politicians in Washington wave their fists and growl about Hitler Putin and evil Russia?^[1]

Notes
^[1] "Putin Throws Down the Gauntlet." By Mike Whitney, The Unz Review, 12/15/15.

Something unclean.

The US is engaged in a vast “pivot” project to remove secular regimes that are hostile towards Washington, control vital resources from North Africa through the Middle East and across Central Asia, establish military bases wherever necessary, maintain the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and redraw the map of the ME in a way that best suits the commercial and strategic interests of its core constituents; the banks, the multinational corporations and the big weapons manufacturers.^[1]

I'd add

to advance the agenda of Saudi Wahhabism,
to destroy Western nation states, and
to destroy resistance to the elite formula for bankruptcy and murder by
- undermining free speech,
- fanatically encouraging mass immigration,
- holding sham primaries and elections funded by the super rich,
- using the MSM to propagate complete fairy tales, and
- leaving our national borders undefended.

There was a time when we had an honorable foreign policy. That time has passed. Whatever that foreign policy is, it's not one that has been presented to the people of the U.S. And what has been presented is a lie.

Workable going-in assumption.

Notes
^[1] "Putin Throws Down the Gauntlet." By Mike Whitney, The Unz Review, 12/15/15.

The president who hates America.

Mr. Obama spends billions, and far more important, sends our young men to faraway Muslim lands to fight terrorists and supposedly protect the homeland from Muslim terrorism, that is, to keep them far away. Some of our men die. At the same time, he opens the floodgates to America for thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people from countries and a culture that hate us and want to kill us. While our soldiers kill a few of the terrorists over there, Mr. Obama waves his wand and brings in infinitely more possible terrorists to our country. And don’t let him fool you. There is NO meaningful vetting or screening of these people. They just say abra-cadabra and they are in and we don’t know a thing about them besides that they come from a culture that hates us.^[1]

This is deliberate. Obama knows what he's doing. People intend the natural consequences of their acts.

Notes
^[1] "Afternoon Bulletin: What Are We Doing? Under the leadership of Mr. Obama, of course." By Ben Stein, The American Spectator, 12/14/15.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Quickies: KISS Off Dept.

The Wall Street Journal boasts some fine editorial work. However, even an insightful article can contain a clinker or two:

     Today Mr. Obama has become our most politically correct president, with nothing real to say on the threats we face. No surprise, then, that the chief beneficiary would be our most politically incorrect candidate, Mr. Trump.
     Because when Mr. Trump speaks about suspending Muslim immigration or “bombing the s—t” out of oil fields controlled by Islamic State, what supporters hear is this: I won’t let political correctness stand in the way of keeping America safe. And when Republicans respond by tut-tutting about how distasteful they find him—instead of showing why his argument is full of holes—they too come across as condescending, implicitly sharing the president’s belief that the knuckle-dragging American public just can’t handle the truth.
     That’s a pity, because as admirable as a lack of political correctness is in a dangerous world, it’s no substitute for a tough foreign policy. For the main weakness of Trump foreign policy is not that it’s “fascist,” “unhinged” or “outrageous.” It’s that it’s almost all seat-of-the-pants.

“Seat of the pants” is a circumlocution” for “simplistic.” Herewith, a word of advice to every politician who aspires to national office:

Foreign Policy Can, Should, And Must Be Simple.

A simple foreign policy would look like this:

No foreign aid of any kind, for any reason.
No alliances except for during a declared war;
Well-controlled borders to assure national sovereignty;
Free international trade except for state of the art military goods;
An immigration policy that excludes persons from hostile regions or cultures;
A strong military with a “reflex” component that can be anywhere in 12 hours or less;
A policy of immediate reprisals for any harm done to Americans or Americans’ property;
No “special relationships” that would compromise any of the above provisions.

The above would say to the rest of the world: Show us your best and we’ll show you ours. But don’t mess with us, or we’ll stomp you – and we’ll laugh at your stupidity while we do it.

Granted that we’re a long way from such a foreign policy now. We’d have to make quite a lot of changes to get near it. But simplicity, as delineated above, would guarantee that other nations could not fail to understand what we say and do – or to anticipate how we would react to this or that initiative on their part.

A foreign policy must never encourage adventurism adverse to one’s own interests – and a complex, endlessly mutating policy that seems to be unanchored to any principle encourages that in quantity. Remember this bit of wisdom from Henry John Temple, better known as Lord Palmerston:

"There are neither eternal allies nor eternal enemies. Only interests are eternal."

There’s a reason Palmerston is regarded as the foremost statesman of his time.

The Discomfort Offensive

Nicki at The Liberty Zone cites the most egregious case I’ve seen so far:

     Mark Twain’s classic has always been the subject of controversy. It its early days, racists condemned the novel for positively portraying a friendship between a white boy and a black man.
     Today, Special Snowflakes^TM demand its removal from schools and libraries, because it chafes their fragile labia.
     This week, a Montgomery County school removed Huckleberry Finn from its curriculum after a group of students said the book made them uncomfortable.
     After a forum for students and faculty, the administration of Friends’ Central School decided to strike the book from the 11th-grade American literature class, principal Art Hall said in a letter to parents this week.
     “We have all come to the conclusion that the community costs of reading this book in 11th grade outweigh the literary benefits,” Hall said in his letter.

That Twain’s markedly countercultural novel, hailed for decades as among the most rebellious books of its era, should be excluded from a high-school curriculum is disturbing enough. But it’s my responsibility to plumb the implications and secondary consequences of such phenomena, and I take my responsibilities seriously.

Let’s postulate that there were – hopefully, there were and still are – instructors at that high school who wanted their classes to read Huck. The “discomfort offensive” has just undermined their lesson plans. Indeed, it’s cut into their vaunted “academic freedom.” Do you imagine we’ll hear from the teachers’ unions about that? If so, to what effect?

If there’s a “right not to be uncomfortable,” can children assert it against their parents? Against other authority figures?

But let’s not stop short. The “right not to be uncomfortable,” if it’s truly a right, belongs to everyone. Individuals could assert it against their neighbors. Employees could assert it against their supervisors. Litigants could assert it against one another during a trial. Members of legislatures could assert it against their colleagues. And you may take it as written in the stars that it will be asserted, by all those folks and others that haven’t yet occurred to me at this early hour.

Scared yet? If not, I prescribe more coffee.

I’ve written before about rights and how they differ from other kinds of claims. Probably the most important statement anyone could make about rights comes from one of my fictional characters:

     "But there's still quite a lot unexplained, big guy. Like that baby in Terry's arms, when Teodor swore by the host of the Great Sacrifice that you and she could never conceive. And what's become of your little kingdom in the wastes. And just how much exploring you intend to do, and how. What should we brace for? Doesn't Hope have a right to know?"
     Armand regarded her steadily for a long moment. Though the rest of the family had departed the kitchen before he'd returned, the sense that the entire mansion was listening intently to his every word was unshakable.
     "Mom," he said, "maybe you should sit down."
     She nodded, squeezed his hand, and sat next to Teresza and Valerie. The baby cooed at her, and she put a gentle finger to the infant's cheek.
     "First we'll do the question you've wanted to ask for months. Our baby's name is Valerie. She's a child of rape. We adopted her a few days after I executed the man who raped her biological mother."
     A murmur circled the table.
     "What's the matter, gang? Isn't that what we do down here in civilized society? It's just that up there where your outcasts live, keeping the pecking order neat is a little bit more important than getting community buy-in. If you want to see justice done, you'd better be the biggest, toughest guy around, and maybe have a little something extra on top of that. Guess who that was in the fair city of Defiance?"
     He swept the table with his gaze. No one spoke.
     "As for my little 'kingdom,' they gave me a nice sendoff, and I told them I'd be back if I could manage it. I didn't promise; it might have turned out to be something I can't deliver. I won't know until I've finished my exploring. But I'll say this much: they deserve to have a lot better life than they've got. Most of them, anyway. Say, did you know that they were confined there? That the Midgard Spacehawk battery has been incinerating anyone who comes south over the land bridge? Until recently, that is. So have the grace to speak no ill of them while I'm still in town and above ground."
     "Armand --" Chuck started.
     "Shut up, roomie. Chary led you into this, didn't she? She asked the questions, and she'll have her answers, here and now. And then you can decide whether her favor is enough recompense for your sarcasm and your angry glare."
     The muscles in Chuck's jaw rippled, but he said no more.
     Armand smiled. "Thanks for your forbearance. Last but certainly not least, Hope's 'right to know.' You've studied rights theory, Chuck. We talked about it a few times, back when. 'Rights are those things you can morally acquire or defend by the use of force.' Those were your words, as nearly as I can recall them. How close did I come?"
     Chuck nodded, his eyes wary.
     "Well, what's your opinion of 'Hope's right to know?' Do the hundred million people not sitting at this table have any right to beat my intentions out of me? Does it have any bearing on the question that I don't know them myself?"

Therein lie the ultimate implications of “a right not to be uncomfortable.”

Still think you shouldn’t spank your kids when they're naughty, Gentle Reader?

A summary of what the financial crisis is all about.

If you're like me, trying to understand the Fed and the obviously fixed world of investment, currency manipulation, bail outs, overspending, reckless war mongering, and suicidal immigration makes your head spin. These excerpts from an article by Jim Quinn with its insights from John Hussman are about as apt a distillation of what the heck is happening economically as I've found:

Bernanke is no hero. He did not save us. He saved his cronies on Wall Street and their captured politician lackeys in Washington DC. The unholy alliance between central bankers, corporate America, and corrupt politicians resulted in Glass Steagall being repealed and allowing Wall Street to run roughshod over our economic system, reaping riches during the good times and heaping the inevitable losses onto the backs of taxpayers. That’s the new American Dream.^[1]

He then quotes from John Hussman^[2] to the effect that:

The Fed caused the financial crisis, it didn't save us from it. It kept interest rates too low that made investors turn to mortgage-backed securities. Poorly-regulated financial institutions supplied huge quantities of mortgages given to higher-risk borrowers creating a housing bubble. (The federal government also pressured lenders to lend to marginal or unqualified borrowers but Hussman did not go into that here.) The repeal of Glass Steagall encouraged new lenders to jump in. (Marginal lenders did so without the benefit of the repeal.) When the mortgages turned out to be sour, banks and others were of necessity left holding the bag. Bad mortgages became liabilities when the holders thereof had to value them at their true market value ("mark-to-market') which made them (or threatened to make them?) insolvent.

Quinn continues:

The liquidation of insolvent criminal Wall Street banks would have set the country back on the path to legitimate recovery. Instead, the ruling class chose accounting fraud, QE to infinity, and screwing senior citizens with 0% interest rates.

Quoting again from John Hussman to the effect that:

The financial crisis ended in March 2009 when The Financial Accounting Standards Board changed rule FAS 157. The mark-to-market requirement was out. In was “significant judgment” regarding valuation of assets. This, Hussman says was "often called mark-to-model (or as some of us call it, mark-to-unicorn)."

Cronies rescued . . . by the regulators. Ultra-low interest rates also fuel the current stock market bubble as investors and people hitherto reliant on interest income have been forced into the stock market hoping for returns greater than virtually zero. Some investors have also sought higher yields in the junk bond market and, possibly, in investments in emerging markets (EM). I can't recall reading that ZIRP (or really low interest rates) have the same relationship to risk taking in the EM but logically the removal of any inducement to save should lead to taking higher risks in any area (with the related problem of malinvestment).

The TARP money went to bail out the banks, insurance companies, and others thereby keeping them alive and protecting them from the consequences of their errors. Free markets assume that market and business realities reward and punish as reality dictates and that the short-term pain for people affected by the failure of moribund companies is balanced by the overall benefit to everyone when resources are re-directed into the hands of more competent, more honest, and/or more innovative people with a better grasp of what will lead to growth and the creation of more wealth. But the demise of important bad market actors was averted.

There's more that's wrong with how we're handling things and the above hints at a lot of it. The income inequality that the left loves to cry about is real and a terrible problem. But it's not a manifestation of "capitalism" or free markets. If you were paying attention above, you know they are anything but free of manipulation and are under-regulated precisely where they should be regulated. (Over regulation is a problem too but it's not touched on above.)

Concentration of wealth in the hands of the few is the result of many things. I applaud anyone who can become wealthy by dint of superior judgment and skill. What is unacceptable is the enormous influence individual wealthy people now have on the electoral process. Who the hell is Sheldon Adelson? The left's fury at the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court is well warranted precisely because it enables this electoral distortion. Two thumbs up for the left on both issues although I don't trust them on the "income inequality" issue, at least where talk of a remedy is concerned.

Ok. Back to the very entertaining theater in the Middle East where we are waging war against the sovereign government of Syria with the help of money borrowed from China and Japan. Thanks God we don't have a moron like Putin as our president and that we've got the Republican majority in Congress watching our backs.

Notes
^[1] "Deja Vu All Over Again." By Jim Quinn, The Burning Platform, 12/13/15.
^[2] "Deja Vu: The Fed's Real "Policy Error" Was To Encourage Years of Speculation." By John P. Hussman, Ph.D., Hussman Funds, 12/14/15 (my paraphrasing).

Monday, December 14, 2015

The Race is Fixed

The day after two radical Islamic terrorists killed fourteen people in California the New York Daily News ran a headline that proclaimed, “God’s Not Fixing This.” One of the few times, the liberal-secular media has got something related to God right.

It is not only my theological assessment that they are exactly right; it is my position that God is allowing, if not causing this, to happen. I know it is hard to fathom, but God has often used ungodly nations to bring judgment on His people. (See Ezekiel 14:4-23). He does this in hopes that we would turn to Him. The fact that the New York Daily News mocks those that solicited His divine favor through prayer does nothing to discredit the wisdom of seeking the true and living God.

I’m certain the writers at The Babylonian Daily News had a field day blasting Noah the boat builder. Think about it -- it wasn’t God who built the boat. God delivered the flood. The boat was what God told Noah to build to escape His coming judgment.

I believe Noah, who had NO power tools, would’ve taken great exception with Obama’s “you didn’t build that” comment. So as the floodwaters were covering the earth, the headline from The Babylonian Daily News? Yep, you guessed it -- “God’s Not Fixing This.”

The book of Genesis gives an account of the days of Noah: “The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the Lord said, ‘I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.’ But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.”

Can the New York Daily News find favor in the eyes of the Lord? The Bible says, “faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” It’s no surprise that the Daily News couldn’t see the utility in prayer. Less than seven verses later the Bible commends Noah for his faith in the unseen, “By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. By his faith he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness that is in keeping with faith.”

If the liberal-secular media is not going to call upon God, they’re probably not worried about the devil either. The apostle Peter warned us about the devil, “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.Resist him, standing firm in the faith...”

This reminds me of a joke a General in the 82^nd Airborne Division used to tell us: “There was a US Marine and a US Army Paratrooper walking through the jungle. All of a sudden, they realized a lion was following them. They both immediately broke in to a run. After about two miles the paratrooper, for apparently no reason, suddenly stopped. He dropped his rucksack, opened it up, and removed a pair of running shoes. The Marine became indignant. Flabbergasted and confused he asked the paratrooper, “What the heck are you doing”? The paratrooper responded calmly, “What does it look like – I’m putting on my running shoes.” The Marine responded, “That’s stupid, you can’t outrun that lion!” The paratrooper agrees, “You’re right – I can’t outrun that lion, but I can sure outrun you!”

Our nation has become morally repugnant, by any measure. Selling baby body parts; homosexual behavior celebrated, and an inability to acknowledge -- let alone confront evil. Jesus warned of this day. “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark;and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.”

Dear friend, God sent his Son to fix this. I’ll race you to the Ark of Christ.

The “They’re Not All Like That” School

...has been taking it in the shorts. Apparently, pollsters have started asking the right questions:

     It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that with 1.6B Muslims, even if 10% of them were radical, that’s 160 million people: about half of the total US population. But in looking closer at their survey, I’d put the number closer to 25%.
     My analysis focused only on the questions about Sharia law: (1) Should the law of the land be Sharia law?; and (2) should that apply to everyone, including non-Muslims? Pew asked question (1) in countries that account for about a billion Muslims, and question (2) in countries that account for about 830 million. If you accept their results in just the countries they surveyed, we learn that:

70%, or 700 million Muslims out of the billion represented by Q1 of their survey, want Sharia law to be the law of the land;
32%, or 266 million Muslims out of the 840 million represented by Q2 of their survey, want to force it upon everyone.

     I don’t know about you, but I’d say that alone represents over a quarter billion “radical” Muslims, with only just over half (53%) of their total population accounted for by the survey.
     But we can make reasonable (and conservative) assumptions about the rest of them, and the results are even scarier. I extrapolated Pew’s results in each region (e.g., Central Asia) across the whole region, using the smallest percentages that they found for the countries in the region they did survey. The lower-bound estimates I get for the world Muslim population are as follows:

63%, or just under a billion Muslims, want Sharia law;
38% of those Muslims, or about 370 million, want to force it on everyone.

Shari’a law is the portion of the Islamic creed that dictates such things as death for apostates, heretics, blasphemers, homosexuality, adultery, the consumption of alcohol, and being unfortunate enough to get raped while not in the presence of four male Muslim witnesses indisposed to side with the rapist(s). 38% of the Muslims surveyed want to force it on you and me. Let that sink in while I fetch more coffee.

Ponder the assemblage of deflections and demurrers we usually hear from Muslim-mouthpiece groups after an Islam-powered terrorist act:

“That’s not true Islam.”
“We’re not all like that.”
“That had nothing to do with us.”
“It’s because of your policies.”
“Backlash! Islamophobia!”

In particular, we always hear about “religious freedom” whenever some braver than average soul suggests that Islamic immigration be curtailed, mosques be kept under observation by the FBI, or preachers of jihad be expelled from the country. By masquerading as a religion, Islam wins free of the sort of scrutiny and careful handling that would be applied to any similar ideology that disdained that label.

If we accept the Pew statistics presented above as reasonably accurate, we’re nudged rather forcefully toward the dismissal of those deflections and demurrers. About a third of the Muslim population of the world admits that it condones (if not encourages) violence in the service of Islam. If we omit all speculation about Muslims who “told the pollsters what they wanted to hear,” that’s one in every three. At least a third of world Islam, therefore, will be inclined to support, protect, and perhaps even facilitate the jihadist fraction: i.e., the fraction that puts the assertions of shari’a into action.

Stipulate that “they’re not all like that.” Stipulate that two out of every three are sufficiently decent to make tolerable neighbors and fellow citizens. Enough of them are “like that,” at least in their sympathies and inclinations, to present a threat to the West that exceeds that of any recognized nation-state in history.

Other totalitarian ideologies have disdained to wear the protective guise of a religion. Of course, most of them have been of more recent origin than Islam, whose roots are in Seventh Century Arabia. Nevertheless, note that all totalitarianisms, regardless of names, specific tenets, or places and times of origin have been absolutely hostile to the Christian and Judaic faiths, to the point of decreeing the elimination thereof. For there is only one thing a totalitarian ideology cannot abide: a competing source of moral guidance.

When the competing source of moral guidance is innately superior – and is there anyone reading this, regardless of his personal inclinations, who would argue that Christianity and Judaism are inferior to Islam? – the totalitarian contestant swells with the need to destroy. Invariably, those whose passion exceeds their inhibitions will act on that need.

Reason has no place in what happens next. Religious freedom? That’s a concept the totalitarian doesn’t even acknowledge, much less argue against.

Yet we of the West persist in thinking that we can detoxify Islam. We take the "we're not all like that" apologists at their word. We project our own, Christian-Enlightenment attitudes of deference to reason and evidence onto persons who’ve surrendered their will and reason to the commands of a bloodthirsty god. And we profess to be baffled at the consequences.

More anon.

Muted despair.

I am 68. My Mother is 92. My Father lived til 93. I am very thankful that they were able to live out their lives without fear of poverty. I will not be able to. Though I have been working since seventh grade, I missed out on the pensions. Laid off for the last time at 62, I now look at the end of my life with great fear. The globalization of the economy sent my work to India. I don't begrudge them a growing middle class but I am no longer in one here. Their gains are my loss and I am very afraid. I am not a Trump supporter but I know the depths of anxiety he is appealing to.^[1]

In short, she doesn't begrudge them her own job.

This woman is struggling to be reasonable and to appreciate the needs of the foreigners who have replaced her. Of all the presidential candidates out there, Trump is the only one who has articulated a desire to protect people like her from foreign competition. Yet, she cannot bring herself to support him.

Eight years under an affirmative-action community organizer who hates America and produced, reluctantly, a forged birth certificate is perhaps the definition of "normal" to her. Do other candidates appeal to her because they act like everything is normal still? Do sharp-edged truths unsettle her to such an extent that she will not grasp the only obvious lifeline?

She will sink further into marginal employment, a vastly reduced lifestyle, or penury while still being reasonable and understanding. Obviously, she's a decent soul but her decency will be the end of her. She actually does have non-negotiable interests in a vibrant American economy and is entitled to see Indians organize themselves to achieve the same for themselves. But she still cannot, or will not, see that.

Notes
^[1] Comment by Gina on "Life in America: The 80's." By Bulldog, Maggie's Farm, 12/11/15.

Sunday, December 13, 2015

Simulation, Calibration, And Chaotic Systems

With the recent conclusion of the Paris Conference has arisen a fresh set of cries from the warmistas: this time, to the effect that “there’s an international agreement now, so it’s time to cease your blasphemous dissents.” As usual, they point to their simulations, chant that “the science is settled,” and expect everyone to fall in line. And as usual, they’re furious that we’re not doing as they ask. One fellow with whom I recently crossed swords gave me this for a valediction:

You dipsticks are terminal failures to mankind. Let's hope your wilful ignorance of science extends to medicine and you die a long, slow, painful death of dick bleeding disease.

Charming, eh? But that’s what you get from persons who claim to march under the banner of “science” without having the faintest idea what science is.

Among other things, simulation is not science – and as I’m an expert on real-time simulation, I believe I can speak on this subject with some authority.

Simulation techniques can be useful to scientists, but in and of themselves, they are not science. The essence of science, without which the word means nothing, is scientific method:

Collect a substantial amount of real-world data centered on a phenomenon of interest.
Note patterns in the data, specifically with regard to sequences of events in time.
Formulate a hypothesis about what causal mechanism might lie behind those patterns. (Steps 2 and 3 constitute the inductive phase of the scientific method.)
Use the hypothesis to predict specific outcomes from related contexts and stimuli applied to them.
Design experiments that can test the above predictions. (Steps 4 and 5 constitute the deductive phase of the scientific method.)
Perform the experiments:
- If the predictions come true, the hypothesis has been confirmed, and testing should continue. (Note: Confirmation is not proof; no scientific hypothesis is ever regarded as “proven.”
- If the predictions don’t come true, the hypothesis has been falsified and must be discarded. From here, one must return to steps 2 and 3 to try again.

The applicability of simulation to the scientific method is at step 3. Once a causal mechanism has been hypothesized, a simulation of that mechanism can be used to explore it further: in particular, to make the predictions which subsequent experiments will test. However, the simulation cannot and does not confirm the hypothesis. How could it? It’s an artificial environment under the complete control of the simulation writer. He has dictated its starting conditions and its rules, which don’t necessarily match reality...and reality is notably indifferent to anyone’s opinions about it.

Only an experiment in the real world, with strictly specified and enforced starting conditions and a strictly specified and reproducible stimulus, can confirm or falsify a scientific hypothesis. The warmistas cannot produce such an experiment – no one can – because the Earth is an open system. So they fall back on simulations which:

Omit consideration of admittedly mysterious atmospheric, oceanic, and solar phenomena;
Employ disputed, heterogeneous data sets that they refuse to disclose;
Require repeated adjustments to that data, hewing to no widely agreed-upon standard;
Have yet to produce a result markedly similar to real-world conditions;
Cannot even reproduce previous eras’ climatic developments.

As one of my physics professors once said of a bit of theorizing, this is so bad it’s not even wrong.

A few words about calibration and chaotic systems and I’ll close for today.

The atmosphere and oceans are empirically regarded as chaotic. Most laymen don’t understand the term, which is an arcane one that pertains to the equally arcane realm of perturbation theory. To be as brief as possible while remaining clear, in a chaotic system, there is no way to predict the extent of the system’s response to a proposed stimulus, regardless of the nature, magnitude, and duration of the stimulus. The response’s magnitude, or its scope, or its duration, or some combination thereof, can (and sometimes will) exceed any proposed upper bound.

This is of central importance to the problem of calibrated measurement. In a chaotic system, if one’s measurements are not absolutely exact, then there is a possibility that either the starting conditions or the magnitude and duration of the stimulus will differ sufficiently from the experimental proposal to produce completely irrelevant results.

There has never been a measurement technique for any measurable item or event that provides absolute accuracy. In the nature of things, there never will be one. Thus, experiments proposed to probe the laws that govern a chaotic system are inherently problematic. We can observe the behavior of such systems at a macroscopic order of magnitude. We can hope that the patterns we see in them provide some basis for prediction. But no matter how often we’ve used the pattern successfully, those predictions will sometimes be wrong, and there is nothing we can do about it.

Ask your local weatherman.

The idea of a law against bad weather was once a commonplace joke about the limits of governments and legislation. (The Soviets would have loved to pass such a law, but then, they’d have loved to make a lot of counterfactual things true.) Weather – the instantaneous condition of the atmosphere in a particular region – is merely one of the aspects of a chaotic system. Climate – our large-scale, long-term expectations about weather patterns in a given region – can never be anything but chaotic. No simulation can capture all its oddities. It’s not merely a matter of “not knowing enough yet.” Chaos is inherent in an open system of fluids whose dynamics are influenced by Brownian motion and turbulence.

Max Born once said that should the opportunity be afforded him in the next life, he would ask God two questions: “Why relativity?” and “Why turbulence?” Frankly, I’d like to know the answers myself. But I think I already know what He would say:

“They make the game interesting.”

Hard to argue with that, isn’t it?

The real curse on mankind.

Eugene Genovese, one-time communist Party member:

The horrors [of communism] did not arise from perversions of radical ideology but from the ideology itself. We were led into complicity with mass murder and the desecration of our professed ideals not by Stalinist or other corruptions of high ideals, much less by unfortunate twists in some presumably objective course of historical development, but by a deep flaw in our understanding of human nature -- its frailty and its possibilities -- and by our inability to replace the moral and ethical baseline long provided by the religion we have dismissed with indifference, not to say contempt.

Our whole project of `human liberation' has rested on a series of gigantic illusions. The catastrophic consequences of our failure during this century - not merely the body count but the monotonous recurrence of despotism and wanton cruelty -- cannot be dismissed as aberrations[.]
... They have followed in the wake of victories by radical egalitarian movements throughout history. We have yet to answer our right-wing critics' claims, which are regrettably well documented, that throughout history, from ancient times to the peasant wars of the sixteenth century to the Reign of Terror and beyond, social movements that have espoused radical egalitarianism and participatory democracy have begun with mass murder and ended with despotism.^[1]

In short, a feature not a bug. The record of communism is ghastly, plain, and incomparably worse than any of the excesses or abuses of the white bourgeoisie, crusaders, capitalists, or colonialists.^[2] The undeniable communist lies, methods, and results – which nonetheless have been vigorously and creatively denied (and ignored) – could not break through the ideals of communism (and socialism and progressivism and liberalism).

Ideals have proved to be the iron wall that conservatives simply could not penetrate, the curse visited upon mankind.

It's more than that though. The real curse is man's infatuation with cheap or incomplete ideas. A beloved friend is a committed Christian but she never fails to affirm that scripture must be interpreted in the light of (other) scripture.^[3] The Bible Answer Man I loved to listen to on AM radio similarly performed a vital service in disabusing callers of strange notions about or interpolations from scripture. No, he would say, it's not a useful line of inquiry whether angels can have sex with humans. Just stay focused on the basics.

How successful he was all told, he'd have to say. It seems to me, however, that there is no way to beat these twin defects in human beings -- the tendency to become infatuated by particles of truth (a little learning is a dangerous thing) and the laziness or zealotry that causes us to extrapolate from these particles to the level of galactic truth for which sanity, civilized society, and life itself must, as the "dialectics" dictate, be sacrificed. Classless society? You bet. New Soviet Man? Sounds good. Forced labor? Sacrifice is necessary. Lies in service to the state? Party leaders know best. Distort the historical record? Ends justify the means.

The Yiddish proverb is just classic: "Send a fool to close a window and he'll close them all over town." That particular gem has made clear a lot of human idiocy encountered by the Colonel is his 72 years.

So unbreakable is the grip of this delusional thinking that the man who tells the truth about the terrible threat is himself excoriated and destroyed:

As it turned out, Communism proved to be much more terrible than all but a tiny number realized. And yet, for years America's intellectual and cultural elite routinely vilified staunch anti-Communists as McCarthyites, political Neanderthals, reactionaries, bigots, and so forth. The view of Communism and anti-Communism that prevailed among liberal, supposedly "enlightened" Americans during the 1930s and 1940s was perhaps best summed up by Arnold Forster, for many years a top official of the mis-named Anti-Defamation League. In his revealing memoir, Square One (p. 171), Forster wrote: 'The civilized world was more revolted by McCarthyism than by Communism."^[4]

Pol Pot as a student said he wanted to create a "perfect democracy" when he returned to Cambodia. He succeeded admirably if one understands that the murders of the regime he headed were democratic after a fashion. It is more accurate to say, however, that the choice of victims was indiscriminate, arbitrary, and completely devoid of any assessment of individual worth, status, background, hostility to the regime, age, sex, or class. Naked, senseless murder could not be, and was not, restrained by notions of love, friendship, kinship, justice, habit, or reason. So artless and simple an admonition that "decent people do not do such things" was in effect answered by "What is bourgeois morality to us?" In this way the habits of eons of civilized life were smothered or cast off.

The character Koppel Stein says in Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Job":

[In addition to wars and pogroms initiated by capitalists,] I’d seen plenty of wickedness, stupidity, and pettiness among my own comrades, but I answered myself ten times a day with the same refrain: we are products of the capitalist system. Socialism will produce a new man—and so on and so forth.^[5]

The by-now classic delusion. Someone relying on politics and happy talk will fix things.

Stein is "denounced by my Jewish and proletarian brothers" in Poland and goes to jail after a farcical trial.

At the time I went to prison, I still believed in revolution, in Karl Marx. I had all kinds of political illusions. Back outside I was completely cured.
* * * *
. . . When I got out of jail, in 1934, and told [my wife] Sonia what I thought about our little world and those who wanted to save it, she attacked me like the worst of them. The fact is that while I sat behind bars I’d become a kind of martyr or hero for the Trotskyists. I could have played the role of a great leader. But I told them: dear children, there is no cure for the human race. It was not the 'system' that was guilty but Homo sapiens itself, in the flesh.^[6]

The Awakening. The epiphany.

Stein illustrates something I saw just a day or two ago somewhere.

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.^[7]

We should emulate the fruit inspection stations on the California border. Every person who crosses a state line, applies for a job, seeks entry to a university, or asks for a driver's license should be required to swear or affirm, "I am completely free of ideals and the urge to inflict them on any other human being." Arrivals from overseas should be required to declare to customs, "I am arriving with no dumb ass ideas and have none concealed on my person or in my baggage."

Candidates for office should post a $100,000 bond to be forfeited if Debbie Waspherman-Schultz, Elijah Cummings, or Barbara Streisand like any of their subsequent ideas.

Notes
^[1] Quoted in "William Chamberlin: A Man Ahead of His Time." By Mark Weber, from an address at the Twelfth IHR Conference, September 1994, in Irvine, California, published in The Journal of Historical Review, Nov.-Dec. 1994 (Vol. 14, No. 6), pp. 16-18 (emphasis added).
^[2] Whether Muslims have approached or exceeded the murder, torture, and enslavement inherent in all communist regimes I can't say offhand. The Muslim conquest of part of the Indian subcontinent alone saw the murder of some 80,000,000 infidels.
^[3] I forget what errors caused her to say that at various times but she may have had the Diggers in mind who got out of Acts 4:32 ("The group of believers was one in mind and heart. No one said that any of his belongings was his own, but they all shared with one another everything they had.") the command to organize around a kind of agrarian socialism. Also, long-time readers of the Intergalactic Source of Truth blog know of the Colonel's own fascination with the Adamites who settled on the idea that it is possible to regain the innocence of the Garden of Eden and so, by the irresistible processes of human logic, took to holding services in the buff. Sign me up!
^[4] Mark Weber, supra.
^[5] "Job." By Isaac Bashevis Singer, The New Yorker, 8/13/12 (originally published 1970).
^[6] Id.
^[7] Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841). By Charles Mackay.

Saturday, December 12, 2015

The Psychology Of The Ambush

This vitally important piece at The Daily Anarchist reveals the central fact about those who go forth to murder en masse:

They expect their victims to be unarmed.

The tremendous difference between the mortality statistics in mass shootings of unarmed versus armed victims should settle that question forever:

When the killer is stopped by police: 14.29 deaths.
When the killer is stopped by an armed citizen: 2.23 deaths.

Note that the cited piece is more than three years old. Ergo, we have no excuse for being at all uncertain about the advantages of an armed society. But I submit that even more important is the psychology of the mass killer: the mindset in which he strides forth to reap innocent lives.

It’s been military doctrine for quite some time that when ambushed, a unit must immediately attack. The concept has proved sound over many years of military experience. Attacking the ambusher is the approach that best limits casualties and preserves unit coherence. Yet it takes a great deal of training and practice to overcome the natural impulse to seek cover from incoming fire and go on the defensive.

Our intellects can easily cope with the contradiction. The ambushers have the element of surprise on their side. By carefully choosing the locale and designing the attack, the ambushed unit, in its natural inclination to seek cover, can be herded into a position of tactical disadvantage, if not immediate defeat and annihilation. Only by immediately going on offense can the unit caught in a well-planned ambush seize the best available chance for survival.

But intellect is not supreme over the inclinations of the body. Immediate survival is the paramount consideration in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The degree of discipline and training required to overcome the run-for-cover impulse is correspondingly great.

It was an important day indeed when military theorists realized that that impulse can be turned against the ambusher.

The mass killer with a gun is a classical ambusher. He has the element of surprise on his side. He has the run-for-cover impulse in his favor as well. More and worst of all, he has a reasonable expectation that his fire will not be immediately returned. But should that expectation be defeated by reality, he’s in the deepest of deep shit, for he has entered the situation with the ambusher’s mindset. He’s inherently unready for a counterattack.

No, not all counterattacks succeed. The elements of surprise and choice of context matter greatly, and they’re always in the ambusher’s favor. But even in the worst of circumstances, the man who refuses to run for cover and plunges headlong into attack has better chances than does he who sees the “turtle tactic” as his only hope.

As I noted just yesterday, weaponry – who has it, how ready, willing, and able he is to use it, and where he is – makes all the difference. This is equally the case in political combat.

Among the reasons Donald Trump has been unaffected by the widespread attacks on him is that he remains on the attack himself. He refuses to play defense. Even among his staunchest supporters there are many who don’t endorse all his positions without qualification. They back him anyway, and for excellent reasons:

First, because they believe he’s on their side;
Second, because he’s exhibiting a rhetorical candor that career politicians habitually eschew;
Third, because he contrasts sufficiently with the rest of the Republican field to make it credible that if given the presidency, he will do as he has said.

Other aspirants to the Republican presidential nomination don’t have all of that going for them. Ted Cruz has it to some degree, yet even the junior Senator from Texas is prone to circumlocutions, qualifying his statements, and couching them in terms calculated not to give offense. At this time, people want to hear anger, even fury, in “their guy’s” voice. They want a Man on Horseback who’ll scream “Charge!” and ride straight toward the enemy’s guns waving his saber overhead. As Mel Gibson’s William Wallace said in Braveheart, men don’t follow titles, they follow courage.

No single aspect of Trump’s campaign is more important to his current pre-eminence than his display of fearlessness.

John F. Kennedy, no great shakes as president, won the office by campaigning in a style much like Trump’s: all-out attack. In his first campaign, Ronald Reagan, arguably the best president of the Twentieth Century, did much the same. Before their respective victories, the bien-pensants were inclined to dismiss them. We can observe the same behavior today among the media and the talking heads, with regard to Donald Trump. Whether the initiative is with him or with an adversary, he always attacks.

It’s a great help to Trump that the political and media elites have squandered their credibility so completely. The Democrats squandered theirs by speaking and acting in defiance of realities we could all see and touch...and in many cases, that could touch us as well. The Republicans squandered theirs by promising many things if we would raise them to power...and then reneging on nearly everything the moment they controlled Congress. The media, of course, squandered theirs by omitting crucial facts from the stories they covered and by refusing to cover so many others. Their lack of credibility is the key to the current popularity of the “outsider” candidacies, most especially that of Donald Trump.

I still think Trump’s personality is unsuited to the White House. Among other things, you can’t “fire” elected legislators or the potentates of other countries. However, he’s teaching our elites lessons they badly need to learn...that they should have learned long ago.

The electoral horizon is nearing. Iowa and New Hampshire will tell us much. Stay tuned.

Friday, December 11, 2015

When Public Officials Fail Of Their Duties

...sometimes, other public officials will acknowledge theirs:

Randy Kennedy, who made the clip, is the Chief of Police of Hughes Springs, Texas. Please watch it. It’s the sort of thing I would hope to see from every one of the police chiefs and sheriffs of these United States.

In the video above he makes only a single misstep: when he tells Barack Hussein Obama that “we [the American people] are not your enemy.” I think, given his record since ascending to the presidency, it’s beyond dispute that Obama sees us, correctly, as his enemy. He cannot bring about the “fundamental transformation” of America without first disarming us.

Unfortunately, Obama has a number of allies in that effort.

Hearken to this bit of news from Connecticut:

     Governor Dannel Malloy announced today that he will issue an executive order stripping the gun rights of some state citizens without them having been accused of or charged with a crime.
     Malloy, a Democrat, said his state would become the first in the United States to implement a rule linking gun ownership to the no-fly list. President Obama has called for Congress to institute such a measure in the wake of the San Bernardino shooting last week.
     “Here in America, it’s way too easy for dangerous people to get their hands on a gun,” the president said in his most recent weekly address. “Right now, people on the no-fly list can walk into a store and buy a gun. That’s insane.”

Mind you, the names of Congressmen, Senators, and prominent journalists have appeared on that list. It’s populated by a mysterious process and is shielded from public scrutiny. The only way to learn whether one’s name is on it is to undertake to travel by air. The Heritage Foundation’s Steve Hayes found himself on it quite by surprise – because he’d booked a one-way flight to Turkey. Once on it, getting off it is fraught with difficulty and can take months. The problem is compounded by the non-uniqueness of most Americans’ names.

Governor Malloy, who really ought to know better, has chosen to collaborate with Barack Hussein Obama. He’s prepared to strip an unknown number of Connecticut residents of their Second Amendment-protected rights, by executive order from the governor’s mansion, on the strength of the mysterious no-fly list. Will Connecticut’s sheriffs and police chiefs stand up to him? Until Malloy actually makes good on his threat, we’ll have no way to know.

When the odious Andrew Cuomo rammed his “SAFE Act” through the New York State legislature in the middle of the night, it evoked an immediate negative reaction from the great majority of New York’s sheriffs and police chiefs. Many have said openly that they would not be a party to the enforcement of that law. Their colleagues in Connecticut might soon face a similar challenge to their sense of public duty.

It’s a bedrock of American justice that an individual's’ rights cannot be taken from him except by “due process of law:” a jury trial. No political executive has the authority to override the due-process protections of the Constitution. Yet at least one northeastern governor seems poised to attempt it. We shall see.

Do not doubt that the Left is serious about stripping us of our firearms, Constitutional guarantees be damned. Major Leftist publications have gotten on that wagon and are driving it as hard as they dare. Hearken to Phoebe Bovy at The New Republic:

Ban guns. All guns. Get rid of guns in homes, and on the streets, and, as much as possible, on police. Not just because of San Bernardino, or whichever mass shooting may pop up next, but also not not because of those. Don’t sort the population into those who might do something evil or foolish or self-destructive with a gun and those who surely will not. As if this could be known—as if it could be assessed without massively violating civil liberties and stigmatizing the mentally ill. Ban guns! Not just gun violence. Not just certain guns. Not just already-technically-illegal guns. All of them.

And here’s Amitai Etzioni at The Huffington Post:

Given that even micro gun control measures will be effectively blocked by the NRA and its allies, and that promoting mini measures as potentially effective is misleading, progressives may as well go for the big enchilada: Call for domestic disarmament.

And of course, The New York Times is already on board:

It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.

They’re serious. Trust me on that.

I wrote long ago – months before the September 11, 2001 atrocities – that Americans must marshal our willingness to defy the State:

     It's been awhile since I really reflected on the nature of a free people -- a people determined to remain free, and possessed of the means to do so.
     Armament is critical, of course. If your adversary is armed and you aren't, you're in the position of a grasshopper trying to face down a lawn mower. We might make admiring note of your courage in our elegies, but we surely won't be attending your victory parade.
     Also, one must be careful not to hand any levers to a potential tyrant. There are a number of things Man requires to survive and flourish: air, food, water, the ability to move about, the ability to communicate with others, heat, fuel, many kinds of knowledge, the cooperation of others with different kinds of knowledge, and so on. Whenever any entity moves to monopolize access to any of these or the other necessities of survival, it's nominated itself Tyrant-In-Embryo. Abort!
     But both the above are resultants of a far more critical, indeed, a fundamental requirement of the free man. No one can remain free, no one can ensure the freedom of his descendants, unless he nurtures and transmits to those around him the essential defiance that animates all the other freedom-conserving behaviors.

Without weapons, our defiance will mean little. The State will become irresistible, able to coerce and chivvy us as it pleases. If the Left is truly resolved, in this final year of the Obamunist Regime, to attempt to disarm us, the moment will be upon us to decide on our priorities.

Sheriff Randy Kennedy knows his priorities. Do you know yours?

Tiberge on feminists.

Women all over Europe have been raped, gang-raped and [harassed] for decades. But feminists are anti-West, anti-tradition, anti-Christian, anti-family, anti-men and in general anti-common sense, and little can be expected of them except the destruction of the moral code we used to live by. For this reason, they land in the same bed with the Muslims.

"Backlash against Marine." By Tiberge, GalliaWatch, 12/8/15.

The not-so-slow degradation of our national life.

The fugitive truths surrounding the Black Lives Matter protests are too unpleasant for the public interest to digest. For instance, the behavior of the new Holy Trinity of Black Martyrs, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice, in the incidents where they lost their lives. All were doing something likely to get them into serious trouble: 1) beating up on an armed sentinel, 2) groping inside a patrol car for a policeman’s gun, 3) brandishing a pellet gun designed to look like a .45 automatic in a public place. I’d go so far to suggest that the Black Lives Matter movement has become so virulent because it’s increasingly obvious that black behavior is so embarrassingly bad and nobody knows what to do about it, especially black people.^[1]

Not to put too fine a point on it but this "black lives matter" garbage does have a certain, um, backdrop. Here's a hint:

Nevertheless, I have to recognize that the tortured and put-upon BLM souls show a real grasp of irony in the midst of all their contrived angst:

Notes
^[1] "Boundary Problems." By James Howard Kunstler, Clusterfuck Nation, 11/23/15.

Thursday, December 10, 2015

A Useful Temperament

When Donald Trump first announced his intention to seek the Republican nomination for president in 2016, I was inclined to dismiss it as of no importance. Trump had made such gestures before, most recently in 2012. It came to nothing then, and I expected the same result this time around. For Trump, politics had always been either an obstruction to his projects or a tool by which to get what he couldn’t get another way. This year’s sally looked to be just one more point on a very predictable graph.

Well, suffice it to say that Trump has surprised me, and no doubt quite a lot of other Americans, with the energy and success of his current campaign. His enduring lead in the opinion polls suggests that persons who would have been described as “not engaged” in 2012 have decided to take notice, at least to the extent of registering an opinion with the pollsters. As his campaign has progressed, Right-inclined commentators previously as ready to dismiss him as I have steadily changed their tune, albeit not to the extent of endorsing him.

Indeed, Trump just might have done the Republican Party the biggest favor it’s received in seventy years.

These past few years, students of political discourse have popularized a term that was once relegated to academic journals: the Overton window. Joseph Overton’s original conception of this “window of discourse” suggested that it arises from popular willingness to consider only a bounded range of ideas – i.e., that the ideological range of the electorate puts some possible policy directions effectively beyond discussion. The term most often used to dismiss such policy directions is, of course, “radical.”

But that appears not to be the case, at least not just now.

Trump’s willingness to espouse several positions dubbed radical by his political opponents has demonstrated that the public’s window of discourse is broader than that of the political class. His statements on immigration in general and Muslim immigration in particular have evoked condemnation from his opponents – Right and Left – while eliciting steadily increasing approbation and support from the public. The public, apparently, is broader minded, at least as regards potential policy changes, than the political elite.

If we postulate, even just for argument’s sake, that there are persons in the political class who quietly agree with some of Trump’s “radical” notions, we’re forced to face a question: Why did it take Donald Trump to bring those positions into the national discourse?

I submit that this is the central question of politics and political ethics in our time.

When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose. – Noted song writer and occasional singer Robert Zimmerman

When you ain’t got but a measly $10 billion and your name on the biggest, baddest buildings in New York City, you got nothin’ to lose. – Me.

“Nothing to lose” is a frequently misapplied evaluation. More often than not, it would be more accurate to apply “can’t lose” to such initiatives. It’s not that the initiator has nothing he would be pained to lose. Rather, he’s convinced that the enveloping context couldn’t produce an outcome that would deprive him of anything he values. (A game theorist would say that “any negative cells in the payoff matrix have been rendered inaccessible.”) This is especially important in the assessment of such a person’s mindset as he charges forward.

The “can’t lose” mindset evokes a carefree attitude whose expression sometimes causes it to be confused with courage. I’ve written before about the importance of that virtue, which is conspicuous mainly by its absence from the political class. They are the persons most inclined to avoid transgressing the Overton window, regardless of its genesis.

Donald Trump is convinced, probably quite accurately, that he can’t lose. He wears that conviction like a loud tie. The conviction frees him to say whatever is on his mind, without qualification. It’s developed that a great part of the public has been waiting to hear a politician say exactly those things. I have no doubt that there are politicians, including some in high federal offices, who agree with some or all of the things Trump has said, but who would never have dared to say any of them publicly. Indeed, I’ve met a couple of them.

Who produced that window of discourse?

In analyzing the behavior of public figures, there are more factors than personal beliefs about vulnerability or invulnerability to be considered. Habit and training are of consequence. As Florence King once observed, no one could imagine Margaret Thatcher saying “goddamn son of a bitch” no matter how angry she might become. A desire to retain the approval of others, especially that of valued mentors and patrons, is another element. But temperament might be the most important of all.

Temperament – the willingness or lack thereof to impose self-restraint upon particular impulses and inclinations – determines much about what a man will say, do, or attempt. Donald Trump has the temperament of a freewheeling, daring risk-taker: one who will try anything, whether because he’s confident about the consequences or is simply unconcerned about the possible downside. By essaying the various, supposedly “unspeakable” ideas he’s introduced to our political discourse this campaign season, he’d been the most useful of all the figures involved in it. He’s shown us what the public is really willing to contemplate – and it’s a much broader spectrum of policy possibilities than any of the career politicians would have dared to address.

I still don’t think Trump would make a good president. I still hope one of the more conservative aspirants – preferably Ted Cruz – will win the nod. But I think it’s time the Punditocracy allows that, whatever we might think of his ultimate political viability or value, we owe Donald Trump our thanks for demonstrating that the Overton window is at this time a product of the political class itself – and that its edges are neither impenetrable nor lethally sharp.

U.S. self-employment.

H/t: Charles Hugh Smith .

The U.S. has no intention of fighting ISIS.

UPDATE (12/9/15):

The U.S. "categorically" denies its planes struck the Syrian Army at Deir az-Zor but that they attacked a target 55 kms. away. The Russians confirm this but say this is not "the whole truth" according to Alexander Mercouris.^[1] They say that four other aircraft belong to two other countries (identity not specified) in the anti-ISIS coalition "were also flying at the time of the air strike over Deir az-Zor."

The Russians are pointing out that the U.S. "has failed to admit to the presence of these aircraft" and ask why?

On that question, Mercouris points out:

After the strike ISIS fighters were able to storm the Syrian Army position, raising the issue whether coalition planes were providing air cover for ISIS;
Deir az-Zor is "the area of Syria from which the Islamic State exports most of its oil" raising the question whether the air strike "was in some way connected to the illegal oil trade, and might have been intended to protect it";
The U.S. is remaining silent about the presence of those other planes, raising the question whether the U.S. wishes to protect those nations; and
The Russians are "well informed" about the incident and may be signaling that their intelligence capabilities are "very effective."

ORIGINAL POST (12/9/15):

6. “Our boys” will not be fighting ISIS, whatever the media may tell you. ISIS is on our side. ISIS is NATO. “Our boys” will be fighting alongside ISIS and a ragtag of mercenaries and lunatics and sociopathic mass murderers killing Syrian civilians, soldiers of the Syrian army, and maybe even Russians (all of whom are actually fighting ISIS). Merkel, Hollande, Cameron and all the other smirking morons are obediently lining up for WW3 to defend US imperialism. Because they’re too torpid, corrupt and stupid to know what they are doing.^[2]

Everyone stand on their head in the corner who believes that the December 6 U.S. attack on Syrian Army soldiers was an accident. One way to determine whether it was would be to examine all the other attacks by U.S. planes that took place in that area. My prediction: the attack on the Syrian Army position was not part of any action where U.S. planes also hit ISIS positions in the vicinity. This was a targeted strike and no other U.S.

If analysis of bomb fragments shows it was not U.S. ordnance, so be it. But, at this point, I don't for a minute believe it wasn't. Everything the U.S. is doing in Syria is premised on lies and illegal activity.

Notes
^[1] "Did Members of the US-Led Coalition Carry Out an Air Strike to Help ISIS? Russia Implies They Did. Russian statement appears to implicate aircraft from two member states of the US led coalition in the air strike on the Syrian military base in Deir az-Zor." By Alexander Mercouris, Russian Insider, 12/9/15.
^[1] "Six points to remember about the true origins of the Syria crisis as Europe obediently lines up for war with Russia." By Off Guardian, 12/4/15 (italics added).

H/t: Russian Insider.

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Easy for me to say...

Let's see if I can take my own advice as events unfold, shall we?

A short video (really, honest!) about Liberty's long game + Bonus apology to FDR (gag!).

Quickies: Some Thoughts On Hostile Political Intercourse

Each of us is entitled to his own standards for social dealing. It’s the compatibility of those standards with the standards of others that determines one’s choice of associates.

No one is required to answer to anyone else for his political affiliations or his policy positions. As I’ve said in other contexts, “Opinions are like assholes: everyone’s gotta have one.”

No one is obligated to suffer the assaults of others, especially when those others are openly trying to silence you or intimidate you.

No one is required to reply to accusations with politeness, regardless of the nature of the accusation. When the accuser is himself anonymous, insulting, or obscene, he should and must be answered with maximum vitriol. There is no other known remedy for such rhetorical assaults. Think of it as pre-emptive defense of unknown others who, if he were not firmly rebuked, the accuser might harass at some later time.

It is vitally important that we not permit the vicious cretins of the world to force us onto the defense. They know that’s our reflex reaction to an accusation. It’s a tendency we must fight. Ponder how they’ve rhetorically criminalized everything but absolute conformity to the Gospel of Political Correctness, and reflect.

While opinions vary about it when guns and bombs are involved, in political intercourse, total war is the most humane. It preserves one’s dignity, conserves one’s time, energy, and patience, and ends the fusillades faster than any other approach. While you mustn’t start such fights, you must always finish them – as swiftly as possible.

Food for thought. And no, the above is not because my arthritis is starting to flare up afresh...I think.

Really Quickies: The Conclusion To A Brief Conversation

This exchange just took place:

She: Your refusal to admit your sexism merely confirms it.
I: You’re a vicious, amoral idiot who should be forcibly confined for your own good and the safety of others.

My feminist adversary declined to reply. (Hallelujah! It is possible to shut them up.)

Quickies: Incredible Surprises Dept.

We have just been told of evidence that there were forces that could aid the Americans who were murdered in Benghazi in September, 2012. That they were within range, were preparing to sortie, and were told by someone to stand down. That the lives of Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty might have been saved by their intervention. But plenty of Americans have suspected all that for some time, so that doesn’t qualify as an incredible surprise by the standards we use here at Liberty’s Torch.

No, the surprise comes at the very end of the cited article:

Lawmakers investigating the events surrounding Benghazi already had acquired the e-mail, along with tens of thousands of others related to the probe, according to Matt Wolking, spokesman for the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
“The Select Committee has obtained and reviewed tens of thousands of documents in the course of its thorough, fact-centered investigation into the Benghazi terrorist attacks, and this information will be detailed in the final report the Committee hopes to release within the next few months," Wolking told FoxNews.com. "While the Committee does not rush to release or comment on every document it uncovers, I can confirm that we obtained the unredacted version of this email last year, in addition to Jake Sullivan’s response."

I added the emphasis.

What imaginable reason could the Select Committee on Benghazi have had for suppressing this information for more than a year? Given that the atrocities in Benghazi, including the rape and murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, occurred more than three years ago, why won’t it be until some time in “the next few months” before the committee releases its report?

The Committee is composed of a majority of Republicans. The Republican Party has represented itself for seven years as our only protection from the Obamunists and saviors from a second Clinton regime. How long have the Republicans on that committee known what we now know beyond all shadow of a doubt? Has this whole affair been entirely about achieving the best possible political timing?

Perhaps we should ask our “saviors:”

Trey Gowdy, Chairman (SC-04)
Susan Brooks (IN-05)
Jim Jordan (OH-04)
Mike Pompeo (KS-04)
Martha Roby (AL-02)
Peter Roskam (IL-06)
Lynn Westmoreland (GA-03)

Could they be among the persons denied this information? Is it possible that underlings handling the raw data concealed it from the people’s supposed representatives?

Something tells me we’re unlikely to get the answers any time soon...or to like them much when they finally arrive.

Please, God, send us a planetoid.