Food for Thought

In military doctrine, there is something that resembles the old food pyramid, but actually pertains to cognition rather than nutrition.  Rather than illustrate the proportional intake of the various food groups recommended for sound health, the pyramid of cognitive hierarchy illustrates the relative levels of cognition necessary to make sound decisions.  The doctrinal publication puts it this way, “Commanders and staff require not only information to make these decisions, but also the knowledge and understanding that results in the wisdom essential to sound decision making.”

Think of the trouble that could be avoided if we (or our leaders) simply have wisdom.  Think of the satisfaction in always making the wise choice.  Knowing we have chosen the right option, taken the right path, or selected the most advantageous course of action.

If the optimal number of servings from each of the basic food groups to be put in our stomach each day is important, how much more important is that material we put in to our mind?   

Instead of grains and breads as found at the base of the food pyramid, the cognitive pyramid has “data” as its base.  It is interesting that both pyramids have as their foundation relatively innocuous items.  However, what should not be missed is that there is something lower than data, in fact, it is far worse than data – and that is junk food for the mind and misinformation.  Reality TV, the biased mainstream media, and liberal-secular education camps masquerading as places of higher learning will all wreck or rot the mind.  They are so unhealthy and counterproductive that they do not even have a place on the chart.  

The second level on the food pyramid is fruits and vegetables; second on the cognitive hierarchy is information.  Today we are inundated with data; the World Wide Web has tons of information.  Between blogs, banners, web pages, and pop-ups we are flooded with data and information.  The challenge each of us faces is turning the plethora of information into “useful knowledge through filtering, fusing, formatting, organizing, collating, correlating, plotting, translating, categorizing, and arranging so that it is useful for immediate application.”  

Third up on the food pyramid are meat and dairy; the cognitive pyramid’s third level is knowledge.  In the context of the cognitive hierarchy, “knowledge is information analyzed to provide meaning and value, or evaluated as to implications for the operation.”  Above knowledge is understanding -- that is, “knowledge that has been synthesized and had judgment applied to it in a specific situation to comprehend the situation’s inner relationships.”

The left talks about food deserts.  The USDA describes food deserts as, “urban neighborhoods and rural towns without ready access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food.”  I do not know about food deserts, but I do know there are many folks starving for knowledge.  In fact, it's not just knowledge, they are also low on information.  Unfortunately, we have all experienced the devastation that low-information voters can produce when they are allowed to be unsupervised in a voting booth.    

The highest tier on the food pyramid is oils; on the cognitive hierarchy, it is wisdom.  Perhaps it’s more than mere coincidence that the Bible often uses oil as a metaphor for the Holy Spirit.  It is only the Spirit of God that can make one truly wise.  I completely understand that some people find this hard to believe, but the fact of the matter is when it comes to God; you have to believe in order to understand.  

Here’s where there’s some good news and some bad news.  The good; there is a source of knowledge that is available to everyone.  The bad; very few find it.  It’s wrapped up in a relationship with the true and living God.  The same God who humbled himself and came to earth as a man.   

King David, a warrior and man after God’s own heart prophetically penned these words, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’  God looks down from heaven on all mankind to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God.”  Seeking God is evidence of understanding.  

King David obviously didn’t get the memo on sensitivity and political correctness.  He’s pretty clear about it, denying God’s existence makes one a fool.  

David’s son Solomon put it this way, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”

There’s no better time to taste and see that the Lord is good.  Wise men still seek Him.

Quickies: Incredible Surprises Dept.

     Who in the audience couldn’t see this coming?

     The anti-Christian Human Rights Campaign is asking the federal government to harass Christian schools that have asked for or been granted waivers that would allow them to live out their Christian faith.

     The 1972 Title IX amendments prohibiting sex discrimination in hiring, housing, and employment at schools receiving federal funds is at issue. The law allows religious schools to opt out of the requirements.

     On the heels of their huge Supreme Court win in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision mandating homosexual marriage coast to coast, the radical LGBT establishment is looking for their next win. They believe they have found it in going after religious companies and employers who may hold that accepting a normalization of the homosexual agenda is against their religious beliefs.

     You knew the whole “gay marriage” thing was a “camel’s nose under the tent” deal, didn’t you, Gentle Reader? Same-sex marriage was a thinly rationalized con job from the first. Yet after Obergefell v. Hodges we immediately saw it creep forward. We saw it destroy Brendan Eich for a political donation. We saw it try to sink the Ender’s Game movie because Orson Scott Card, a devout Mormon, opposes same-sex marriage. Did you really think that any institution that wanted to be left out of the swamp of homosexual perversion would be left alone for very long?

     When the “gay rights” stormtroopers screamed that “all we want is for our marriages to be recognized,” many of us were taken in. But the campaign for "marriage equality" was never about marriage or equality; it was just another part of the Left's quest for power and its determination to destroy every important Western institution or tradition.

     When a Left-aligned group says “All we want,” normal people should immediately translate it as “We want it all.” Because it's a lead-pipe cinch that they do.

Unities And Disunities

     I was dithering among a dozen assorted topics for an essay when I chanced upon the following video of a brief speech by legendary thriller writer Frederick Forsyth:

     Yes, it’s about Britain and the EU, it’s sixteen minutes long, and – horror of horrors! – it’s in British English. Watch it anyway. I promise that your time won’t be wasted.

---

     Among the most enduring fantasies of government worshippers has been the notion of a single, all-encompassing world government. I remember being intrigued by the idea myself, when I was much, much younger. But the aspect of the proposition that’s remained with me over the subsequent half-century is the way its proponents always characterized it as “inevitable.” Inevitable. Remember that word. It’s the one the Left is forever using about subjects like national health insurance. Its sole purpose is to silence, or at least weaken, resistance to the “inevitable” idea.

     In that most feared and despised of all venues for the clash of ideas, Reality, nothing is inevitable but death. Yet thinkers such as Bertrand Russell repeatedly promoted the idea of a world government as “inevitable,” mainly because they disliked or distrusted the Westphalian nation-state. Leftists’ ardor for the idea is understandable, as their dislike of small, independent polities free to deviate from their designs is a continuous thread through the history of collectivism. Yet even some intelligent men on the side of freedom, such as A. E. Van Vogt, have said that a single world government would be preferable to an array of independent nation-states.

     As passionate as the world-government camp has been, its leading lights have acknowledged, albeit grudgingly, that “you can’t get there in one step.” The League of Nations and the United Nations have demonstrated the difficulties rather starkly. So they’ve promoted regional federations and similar alliances as an intermediate state. The most recent sally in that direction is the European Union.

     The strains being put on Europe as a result of the EU have made unbelievers out of many Europeans who were once strongly in favor of complete, continental political unification. The sense that “we ought to have known better” is becoming ever stronger, especially in those countries that have suffered economically or have experienced significant cultural dilution as a consequence of the EU’s no-internal-borders policy. British sentiment for a complete withdrawal from the EU is strong and rising. Whether it will attain majority status, and whether the British political class would respect a majority vote to leave the EU, remain to be seen.

---

     What creates a stable polity? It’s a question without a definitive answer. Polities have formed and dissolved in innumerable ways over the centuries. There have always been arguments about the reasons for both, and there always will be.

     A single common language has been regarded as indispensable. Yet the bloodiest and most brutal wars in history have been civil wars, in which the sides shared a single language. Borders demarcated by Nature have been extolled as a critical factor, yet nations have come together without or despite such borders. Race, uniformity of technological attainment, cultural or ideological commonalities...the list goes on. No one really knows.

     What appears to be well established is that an enduring political union cannot be imposed “from above:” i.e., by the will of a political elite upon an averse population. Such a polity can only be held together by military force, and once a sufficient fraction of the subject population is determined to rebel, there’s no amount of force that can keep it together.

     The EU was formed by its political class, against the will of a fraction of the people of Europe that verged on a majority. It might well be to the EU’s advantage that there is no military force capable of perpetuating it. That will make the process of dissolution a good deal faster and more peaceful than it would otherwise be. Should the British vote themselves out, and should the British political class respect the referendum, all Brussels will be able to say is “goodbye and good luck to you.”

     I predict that should Britain depart the EU, Ireland will follow just behind it, Irish notions of independence from their British cousins notwithstanding.

---

     Among writers of fantasy and science fiction, few names are nearly as honored as that of the late Poul Anderson. Many of his novels and stories were either politically themed or bore important political subtexts. I consider the most powerful and thoughtful of them to be his Hugo Award winning novelette No Truce With Kings, which concerns an attempt by an alien race to “encourage” Mankind toward a world government. Here’s the climactic confrontation between one of the aliens and a representative, not of a particular state (though he is that), but of the human impulse toward self determination:

     “Listen, listen,” the being pleaded. “We came in love. Our dream was to lead you—to make you lead yourselves—toward peace, fulfillment...oh yes, we would also gain, gain yet another race with whom we could someday converse as brothers. But there are many races in the universe. It was chiefly for your own tortured sakes that we wished to guide your future.”
     “That controlled history notion isn’t original with you,” Speyer grunted. “We’ve invented it for ourselves now and then on Earth. The last time it led to the Hellbombs. No, thanks!”
     “But we know! The Great Science predicts with absolute certainty—”
     “Predicted this?” Speyer waved a hand at the blackened room.
     “There are fluctuations. We are too few to control so many savages in every detail. But do you not wish an end to war, to all your ancient sufferings? I offer you that for your help today.”
     “You succeeded in starting a pretty nasty war yourselves,” Speyer said.
     The being twisted its fingers together. “That was an error. The plan remains the only way to lead your people toward peace. I, who have traveled between suns, will get down before your boots and beg you—”
     “Stay put!” Speyer flung back. “If you’d come openly, like honest folk, maybe you’d have found some to listen to you. Maybe enough, even. But no, your do-gooding had to be subtle and crafty. We weren’t entitled to any say in the matter. God in heaven, I’ve never heard anything so arrogant!”
     The being lifted its head. “Do you tell children the whole truth?”
     “As much as they’re ready for.”
     “Your child-culture is not ready to hear these truths.”
     “Who qualified you to call us children—besides yourselves?”
     “How do you know you are adult?”
     “By trying adult jobs and finding out if I can handle them. Sure, we make some ghastly blunders, we humans. But they’re our own. And we learn from them. You’re the ones who won’t learn, you and that damned psychological science you were bragging about, that wants to fit every living mind into the one frame it can understand.
     “You wanted to re-establish the centralized state, didn’t you? Did you ever stop to think that maybe feudalism is what suits man? Some one place to call our own, and belong to, and be part of; A community with traditions and honor; a chance for the individual to make decisions that count; a bulwark for liberty against the central overlords, who’ll always want more and more power; a thousand different ways to live. We’ve always built supercountries, here on Earth, and we’ve always knocked them apart again. I think maybe the whole idea is wrong. And maybe this time we’ll try something better. Why not a world of little states, too well rooted to dissolve in a nation, too small to do much harm—slowly rising above petty jealousies and spite, but keeping their identities—a thousand separate approaches to our problems. Maybe then we can solve a few of them...for ourselves!”
     “You will never do so,” the being said. “You will be torn in pieces all over again.”
     “That’s what you think. I think otherwise. But whichever is right—and I bet this is too big a universe for either of us to predict—we’ll have made a free choice on Earth. I’d rather be dead than domesticated.”

     Perhaps the imminent fragmentation of the EU will provide another lesson of that sort. Concerning the implications for the future of these United States, I prefer to reserve judgment.

Is Europe dying?

Probably.

I constantly point out that European voters only give grudging, reluctant support to nationalist, salvationist parties. Fine in the long run as the pathetically small numbers do seem only to head upwards.

But the nature of Islam is so clear that really telling predictor of the future of Europe is what is missing. It's possibly my favorite analytical tool. What is someone NOT doing or saying?

What Europeans are NOT doing is flocking to the polls to hand overwhelming majorities to their nationalist parties. Obviously they do not like them. Ergo, they are choosing suicide or slavery.

Where Europeans DO show energy is in their wish to ferret out "Nazis," crucify the "far right," remain blissfully ignorant of the crimes of communism, criminalize free speech, lick the boots of deranged feminists, indulge in fantasies about human nature, worship foreigners and minorities, fawn over government, and steal from their more productive "fellow" citizens.

That's where the energy lies.

Doing something about millions of arrogant pricks in their midst does not enter into their daily schedule. Look at Germany. Over a million Muslim invaders have entered this year and Merkel is still in power. Yes, yes. There's some support for PEGIDA and AfD but it's nothing that a few hundred AntiFa thugs called out by the government can't deal with. Someone at Oberlin College should write a term paper on the paving stone as an adjunct to the democratic process.

The Swedes positively grovel at the feet of the scum who rape their women. The Italians use their navy as a taxi service for the invaders who will destroy their country.

Another take by Stanislav:

Europe is flooded, flooded by the people of the third world, to such a degree that there is absolutely zero chance of ever assimilating them. This is in part because the people who are flooding in, through the happenstance "walls and fences" are not coming for the better life through hard work and becoming part of a better system, but are coming as a wave of parasites to leech off of the system that can not in any rational mind, support them without buggering its own people to death. Further, in this mass of humanity is an army of terrorists Hell bent on the destruction of this very body, swimming like fish in a pond of humanity which will in turn defend them and hide them and many of whom approve of them, even as they themselves will suffer when their host is pulled down.

"Is Europe [Too] Dead to Revive?" By Stanislav, Mat Rodina, 11/14/15.

The U.S. really is allied with the loathsome ISIS.

In summing it all up, it also becomes evident that the Syrian "civil war" never really was one. Rather, the terrorists were supported by the West from the very beginning, for the purpose of overthrowing Assad’s government (as I’ve written in previous articles). When faced with a terrorist defeat, the sponsors will throw all their political weight behind the terrorists, no matter what it costs.

Ultimately, this is proof that the hegemonic ambitions of the US / the West in this region were the reason behind the creation of IS. It was never a fight against IS. It was the targeted, planned, intentional creation of Islamic extremism, in the form of the Islamic State.^[1]

Thus the most loathsome group of humans on the planet are a creature of U.S. policy, no doubt devised at the behest of the equally loathsome Saudis and Qataris.

Mr. Lehner has an interesting insight into the Russian and Syrian strategy. Apparently the Syrian army controls the border east of the Euphrates River and Russian attacks on ISIS supply convoys coming from the border crossing town of Öncüpınar in NW Syria are thus attacks on ISIS's remaining supply line.

Map courtesy U.S. Air Force, Office of Public Affairs.

Lehner thinks U.S. alarm over this development is the reason for the Turkish attack on the Russian aircraft. That the U.S. requested this Turkish action is more plausible than that the Turks decided to risk Russian retaliation on their own. It just is.

Do read Lehner's thoughts on the likely Russian-Syrian strategy which will sever the ISIS supply line so deviously left intact by the U.S.^[2]

This flow of "aid" from Turkey into Syria has been well known to the U.S. (or "NATO" if you prefer). JSTARS aircraft were used in Libya and it beggars the imagination that they have not been used in Syria a mere 1,300 miles away (or a mere 67 miles from Incirlik AFB). These were the aircraft used during the Gulf Wars that clearly could track every bicycle and jackrabbit on the roads of Iraq.

Even without that, it's rumored that the U.S. has pilotless drones, as well as an extensive network of surveillance satellites on the moon that surely could not have missed the extensive truck traffic necessary to supply a terrorist "army" of, what?, tens of thousands of troops. Don't mind me. I'm just an amateur intelligence analyst here, but isn't the scale of that kind of resupply effort classifiable as "noticeable"?

Unless you've been in a coma for the last two years, it's sort of obvious that the fix was in:

• low-level U.S. intelligence analysts' reports were doctored at higher levels to show a success against ISIS that was a fabrication;
• U.S. pilots over Syria have been ordered to "stay silent" about "oil tanker convoys 4 lanes wide at times";
• Russian planes destroyed ISIS-to-Erdogan oil tanker trucks at a rate 800 times that of the U.S. "effort" to destroy them;
• U.S. pilots have been prevented from attacking oil trucks because (no laughing!) of Obama's concern for "environmental damage";
• U.S. planes dropped leaflets on ISIS oil truck drivers warning of imminent attack "to kind of shoo people away without harming them"^[3];
• Turkey, without protest from the U.S., is in league with ISIS; and
• where assessing allegiance and combat capability is concerned, the U.S. foreign policy establishment is clueless ($500 million wasted).

Vladimir Putin put the kibosh on this Punahou kabuki con job and it will now soon appear that he is the new Hitler bent on world domination. And Bill O'Reilly can go back to calling him Pooty Poo. To Charles Krauthammer's great relief.

Notes
^[1] "Washington Is Panicking That Putin Is Breaking the ISIS Supply Line." By Michael Lehner, Russia Insider, 12/2/15.
^[2] We were "shocked" to find out ISIS resupply operations were freely running up and down Syria's sparse network of roads. I mean, who the fuck knew that ISIS trucks would stay on the one asphalt road instead of stealth drive overland through the desert in the sand? Or is it two roads? Whoa. A 100% increase in the complexity of the intelligence assessment! I'm thinking the Russians read the Journal of the North American Sunbathing Association and had it all figured out on the back of an envelope within two days of the mobile officer's club serving its first drink in Latakia. Za zdorovie, bichez!
^[3] People who drive trucks for an organization that burns captured pilots alive, rapes hostages, makes sex slaves of Yazidi women, and revels in chopping off heads of captured soldiers and shooting them are not "innocents" but that's just me. But not in the view of the U.S. government. By their standard, Obama and the U.S. political leadership who have created misery and destruction in aid of their unclean "regime change" campaign in Syria are innocents as well, which is not likely to be discussed by the MSM anytime soon. I suppose we should be thankful the drivers weren't offered a green card and an Earned Income Credit if they file by April 15.

Original article here: NEO Presse.

Correction (12/23/15): Öncüpınar is in NW Syria not the NE as I wrote initially. Corrected to NW.

Quickies: Cautionary Words

From Oregon Muse at AoSHQ:

     Personally, I've always distrusted "the cloud". The point of having your own computer,personal computers they used to be called, is that the computer is your property that you own, therefore you control it. But now, I think, they're boiling the frog: little by little we're ceding final control over our personal information and e-texts to whoever is running the cloud. And if one fine day some Obama-fueled agency pounds on Microsoft's door (or Apple's or Google's) demanding all the files stored on their servers for you, do you think they'd put up even token resistance? I think you can bet that your data would be in the hands of the feds faster than you could say "enthusiastic voluntary compliance".

     Oregon Muse, whoever he is, has the right of it. The entire appeal of “cloud storage” is being able to access files when away from your computer...yet a flash drive or pocket disk drive would be far better for the purpose, without compromising your files or your property rights in them.

     Smart people eschew the “cloud.”

The Party’s Over...?

     Is it?

     If there was any question about the relevance of the Republican Party, this week’s budget deal removes all doubt. The Republican Party might as well close up shop and merge with the Democrats. Not as a merger of equals, but more of a capitulation, a surrender, a sellout. There is no need for two parties in Washington DC as only one party is relevant in terms of advancing an agenda. The irony is that the agenda driving party is in the minority and despite losing badly in two midterm elections, the Democrats are still running Congress.

     Author Brian Joondeph provides “a long train of abuses and usurpations,” all of which can be found in the omnibus spending bill that just passed Congress. He closes in a very dark fashion:

     If the [Republican] establishment manages to destroy Trump and Cruz, then it’s lights out for the Republican party. The base will stay home and the Founding Fathers will roll over in their graves. As for any future support for the GOP, my answer will be a Mrs. Clinton refrain, “What difference does it make?” The Republican Party will be six feet under and we will have one-party rule in Washington, DC.

     That “Clintonian refrain” is indeed the question of the day.

---

     How did one-party politics get this far advanced? The events of the Twentieth Century suggest two principal geneses:

• The demise of the original Constitutional constraints on the powers of Congress;
• The rise of perpetual warfare and unlimited American involvement.

     Before the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments and the creation of the quasi-private Federal Reserve system, federal politics was not a particularly enticing avenue toward personal power or wealth. Granted that there were career Senators and Congressmen even before 1913, their ability to porkbarrel in their districts’ and states’ favor was sharply limited. Similarly, there was essentially no regulatory “fourth branch” to support the favored tactic of the federal legislator for securing the support of his constituents: “constituent service.”

     Before the fatal amendments and the Federal Reserve, the sort of blatant vote-buying federal legislators practice today was almost entirely confined to the state legislatures, whose constitutions and charters allowed them, in Madison’s classic phrase, “numerous and indefinite” powers. Neither could governmental overreach be concealed by lodging it in an alphabet agency whose faceless functionaries could not be made to answer for their sins. Not coincidentally, the staffs of federal legislators were small...when they existed at all.

     The Great Depression and the two World Wars firewalled the accelerator. In his fine study of government growth Crisis and Leviathan, Robert Higgs delineates the emergence of the “crisis Constitution:” the proposition that in the midst of a “crisis,” however determined, the federal government acquires powers far beyond those delegated to it in the Constitution. Those powers did not lapse at the ends of the “crises,” despite adverse popular expectations. More, they gave Washington an incentive to “go looking for trouble.”

     If, pace Lord Acton, power tends to corrupt, its corrupting influence surely increases as the power itself increases – and if the evidence of the Twentieth Century is on point, much faster than linearly. Thus, the Nightmare Century produced America’s first true class structure:

• The federal political elite, whose positions became ever less vulnerable as their power swelled;
• The “insiders” who could bargain effectively with the political elite for federal favor;
• The rest of us.

     Today, that class structure dominates politics, government, and everything they touch. There seem to be no bounds to it that anyone can rely on. Given the ease of re-election enjoyed by federal legislators of both parties, it is inarguably more important than any federal politician’s party affiliation.

---

     The evidence is unambiguous. We must accept that things are as bad as they seem:

• That the GOP has annexed itself to the Democrat Party for the sake of the power, pelf, and prestige of its members;
• That the nominal separation of the two merely gives the illusion of an opposition, without the substance;
• That therefore, as matters stand the Republican Party is not a true friend to freedom or the Constitution.

     Can anything be done to restore electoral efficacy to the two-party system?

     One suggestion, which hasn’t yet been tried on any great scale, is to vote exclusively for Democrats regardless of any other consideration, so that the Republican Party would perish from irrelevance. That would clear the way for a new party, though there would be no guarantee that the new party would be any better. Indeed, it might well be merely a revenant of the GOP. There’s also the possibility that once the Democrats came to believe themselves powerful enough, they could erect legal barriers to prevent the emergence of a new, Constitutionally oriented party. Neither outcome would be a pleasant one.

     Another explicitly political approach some have recommended is complete electoral disaffiliation: to refrain from voting in any election, and to encourage others to refrain as well. The reasoning is that aura of legitimacy enjoyed by the existing major parties flows from the willingness of the majority of the electorate to cast ballots; without that support, disaffiliation from them would follow naturally. This runs up against the incentives in place to keep people voting. Former New York Libertarian Party chairman Bill McMillan reported the prevalence of this response in his efforts to popularize the LP in New York State: the dairy farmers in continental New York would routinely ask him “What about my subsidies?” Retirees want to know about the Social Security payments; welfare clients want their dole to be secure; government employees and vendors to governments have rice bowls to protect; and so on. When so great a part of the electorate is a net beneficiary of the regime, it’s effectively impossible to persuade enough people not to vote.

---

     Some, disgusted with the uselessness of electoral politics, have recommended what Glenn Reynolds calls “Irish democracy:” simply to ignore the political class and the regime generally. This is practical on the small scale, but it has an atomizing tendency: one must constantly be on guard against infiltrators and quislings. On the large scale – i.e., organizations of sufficient size to be unable to conceal themselves or their operations – it fails. Granted that the corporations that dominate the American economy today – roughly speaking, the Fortune 5000 – are clients of the political class and deserve to fail, perhaps half of the population of the U.S. is economically dependent upon their viability.

     While it is true that there have been cases of whole cities going “underground” in Italy and some other Latin countries, it’s unclear whether the results justify the tactic. Those cities are effectively owned by the large criminal organizations that make possible their de facto invisibility to the national government. Granted that there’s clarity in being ruled by criminals who make no pretense of being anything else. However, the practical aspects of the situation differ little from more orthodox arrangements.

---

     I assume that the true goal is not merely to have two markedly distinct political parties, whose turns in power are easy to distinguish. The true goal, at least among us in the Right, is freedom: whatever kind and degree of government is necessary (if any) to protect individual rights, national sovereignty, and public safety, bounded by constraints it cannot break. The above segments list the non-violent approaches I know of. All of them look like longshots at best. If we assume that there are no electoral or quasi-electoral approaches with a higher probability of success, what follows?

     The approaches that remain are to flee or to fight. Geographical flight is impossible at this time, though “virtual” flight – i.e., taking one’s life and enterprises underground – is possible for some. We know by direct observation that as bad as things already are, not enough Americans are willing to “take the musket down from the mantel.” How much worse things would have to get to change that condition, no man can say – but whatever the threshold might be, carnage would surely follow.

---

     In the above, I’ve largely repeated or rephrased arguments I’ve made in other places and at other times. It doesn’t matter; there are always persons unfamiliar with such ideas, and who are ready, perhaps even eager, to make their acquaintance. All the same, it often saddens me that they should be familiar to so small a minority in a nation that calls itself the Land of the Free.

     Quite a long time ago, libertarian writer Todd Seavey argued that the government-dominated mixed economy / welfare state might be much more stable than freedom advocates have assumed. The empirical evidence for his argument is distressingly copious; the de facto Democrat-Republican alliance in maintaining that state while railing against one another pro forma is the most ominous item of all. However, there’s no such thing as perfect stability. Even baryons decay. Freedom and tyranny are both temporary conditions, as is each of the possible states between them.

     If “the party’s over” for those of us who’ve hoped to use the Republican Party as a vehicle for restoring Constitutional government, we must either look in other directions or surrender our hopes. Though I’ve said it often enough and about enough other things, I find myself reluctantly compelled to say it again today: We shall see.

In case it wasn't clear.

Business days for processing are Monday-Friday. Please note Saturday, Sunday and holidays do not count as business days.

Source: camera merchant's web site.

After stealing much lunch money from school kids and cash from old ladies at the ATM, as well as engaging in disability (Dx: bad attitude) fraud, the Colonel will soon be receiving a dandy Panasonic FZ1000 camera with which to document the decline of Western civilization, the coming civil war in America, and, hopefully, numerous parties with women of loose morals. Pictures will be posted.

Or not.

Pearls of expression.

They hold us in contempt. They hold our values in contempt. They hold our belief in tolerance and decency in contempt. They hold our democracy, the means by which we will make our decision tonight, in contempt.

I had no idea I had so much in common with ISIS.

Comment by kulak on "What do they really think?" By Irish Savant, The Irish Savant, 12/17/15.

Decay.

These quotes are from a beautiful article^[1] about a part of Russia that is dying off:

Vasily Rasskazov is the only person who lives in in the village of Vorobevo, which is located in the Vologda region. "The village council used to be here. There was a feeding base here for 300 calves here. I was a herder here, during the Soviet years. Now everything has gone to rot and fallen apart. Somehow this all could have been done more gently. I understand that it shouldn't be like it was in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union didn't do a single goddamn good thing; it collapsed. But everything could have been a bit more gentle," Vasily says.

And this about

Sergey Filenko from Karelia leads his boat along the waters of the Sukhona river. In 2002, Filenko in his boat left Lake Onega and sailed down the Vodla river, retracing the routes of medieval fur traders in the Ob River basin. His boat might be the only one in history to travel from Lake Onega to the Arctic Urals by oars alone. "Stalin used up Russia," Sergey says. "The Russian people used it up. And everyone else finished off the village. And now no one is left. It's the pyramids that can stand 40 centuries, and then another 40, and nothing happens to them. But a wooden house, Russian culture, the village—these things depend on the people. Without people, it all disappears in a matter of years. It burns down, rots, and in five years all you've got is forest again. And nothing more."

The photos, also by Denis Sinyakov, are beautiful.

Nothing is forever.

State-of-the-art Western politics.

Draw your own conclusions about whether Western people are being as improvident as the Soviets. They played with preposterous notions of changing government and man for the better and succeeded mostly in murder and waste.

In the West, globalism, multiculturalism, and sheep-like acceptance of Totalitarianism Lite are on the menu now. People seem to like it. The fairy tales. And being someone's bitch.

We shall see.

Notes
^[1] "A civilization built on rivers Russia’s increasingly deserted countryside and the rivers that once were its lifeblood." Denis Sinyakov, Meduza, 9/9/15.

H/t: Russian Insider.

Day Off

     The week has been busy, and I’m way behind on Statesman. So please forgive me, Gentle Reader, for not providing an essay today...at least, not just yet. Perhaps later on something will raise my Bile Quotient high enough to emit one.

Total control through "climate change."

This article brilliantly illustrates the lies and cheesy semantic distortions and evasions that stick to progressives. Mr. Jonescu strips away the dishonest words and lays out the progressive's goals:

In other words, the real problem the globalists are trying to solve is not excessive CO2, but excessive freedom, which is an intrinsic threat to the only kind of sustainability a ruling establishment cares about, namely the sustainability of its privilege.

* * * *

The globalists are elated because they know they have taken their greatest leap forward, with the world's most powerful government, having access to the world's biggest cookie jar, now officially on board and fully committed to the goals of supra-national government and global redistribution. This really is historic. It symbolically ends progressivism's long struggle against all national resistance to its twin goals of global rule by an unelected elite and the gradual dissolution of national sovereignty. This is the breakthrough progressives of every stripe have been yearning for. Climate change may finally fulfill its promise as the vehicle whereby traditional nationhood -- the ultimate bulwark against the universalist dreams of tyrannical souls -- is weakened beyond repair.

* * * *

. . . When they say they want to save the planet, they mean they want to protect their power and wealth. When they say "people over profits," they mean all people other than themselves should live without profits. When they talk of peace, they mean universal submission. When they speak of sustainability, they mean coercively restricted growth and development for "the masses."

"Global Tyranny Just Getting Warmed Up." By Daren Jonescu, American Thinker, 12/18/15.

The Flood

     A great many persons have written to ask my opinion of the most recent trends in politics and economics. Apparently, the omnibus bill that just passed the House of Representatives has agitated a lot of folks on the Right. They seek reassurance. Though I know only the outlines of that bill, from here it looks like they have good reasons to worry.

---

The Rich arrived in pairs
And also in Rolls Royces;
They talked of their affairs
In loud and strident voices.

(The Husbands and the Wives
Of this select society
Lead independent lives
Of infinite variety.)

The Poor arrived in Fords,
Whose features they resembled,
They laughed to see so many Lords
And Ladies all assembled.

The People in Between
Looked underdone and harassed,
And out of place and mean,
And horribly embarrassed.

For the hoary social curse
Gets hoarier and hoarier,
And it stinks a trifle worse
Than in the days of Queen Victoria, when

They married and gave in marriage,
They danced at the County Hall,
And some of them kept a carriage.
AND THE FLOOD DESTROYED THEM ALL.

[Hilaire Belloc, “The Garden Party”]

     Few men of his stature are known as asymmetrically as Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc. Today he’s remembered mainly for his children’s verse and stories, while his extensive work in politics, economics, and moral theory is the precious possession of a fortunate few. In particular, he was a scathing critic of Twentieth-Century Anglo-European society, which he viewed as foredoomed by its own successes.

     Perhaps Belloc was fortunate to be ignored by the powerful of his time. Others who were not ignored sometimes suffered badly for it. The highly placed of Europe, had they given adequate attention to The Servile State, would have striven to exterminate him for “giving the game away.”

     Belloc’s politico-economic insight was unique in that while he clearly saw how corporatist capitalism would be suborned by political infiltration, he avoided the great mistake of Marx and similar socialist thinkers, who imagined that corporatism’s fatal flaw could be corrected by destroying the rights of private property. However, to be fair his Distributism, though it found favor with C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton, was not a solution either, for it was as susceptible to political subornation as the guild system of medieval Europe, whose principles it embedded.

     There’s an irony here, for Belloc’s great strength lay in his ability to spot the dynamic flaws in popular systems and nostrums. He was eager to get off the corporatist road to Mishnory, for he saw clearly where its terminus lay: in a shrinking circle of plutocrats and hyper-rich organizations collared and chained by The State. He could see that the socialist path leads there just as inexorably as the corporatist one. What he failed to see was the perniciousness of coercive power once it’s been allowed to operate on the economy.

     All the same, it’s right to honor Belloc. He tried his best to show his contemporaries where they were headed; other, more widely known and applauded thinkers did far less. Though he failed, his foresight and clarity continue to be valuable.

---

Maybe you think, a lot like me
Of those who live beside the sea
Who feel so free, so I surmise
With their comfortable homes, with wives
Who end up drinking tea together
In the afternoon of their lives.

They build their homes upon the seashore
The quicksand castles of their dreams
Yet take no notice of the North wind
Which tears their building at the seams.

In their dismay and blind confusion
The weeping widows clutch their shawls
While as the sea mist ever deepens
The sailors hear the sirens' calls.

And in the maelstrom sea which follows
Their lifeboat sinks without a trace
And yet there still remain survivors
To bear the shame of their disgrace.

[David Cousins, “Down By The Sea”]

     If we accept Man for what he is, there are probably no perfect solutions. We are fallen creatures. The best men must fight down innumerable temptations every day of their lives...and even they succumb now and then. The worst temptations bedevil the best of the best: the brightest, most generous and idealistically inclined. Power dazzles them from afar, and they reach for it, thinking that if only I can master this gem, its power would at last be put to the service of the Good. Few indeed are those who realize, as Tolkien did, that just as power over others crushes all it subjugates, it consumes all who embrace it, without regard for the nobility of their intentions.

     The seductive glow of power cannot be extinguished. The very best men will seize it to keep it out of anyone else’s hands, blind to power’s slipperiness, to its growth dynamic, and to the finity of their lives. From them it might pass to merely good men, who hope to use it for good. Eventually it always arrives in the hands of a Stalin or a Mao, just as Hayek has told us. There is no escape from the progression.

     They who tether their fortunes to power believe they have made an alliance of equals. In point of fact, their “ally” holds their chains. The flood will destroy them both.

---

     In his last post before his current hiatus, a valued colleague expressed an opinion I share:

     Like many of my compatriots, I have come to understand that there is no political or social solution for the problems that face our nation. We are caught in a hurricane-force gale of lies and tyranny, and being sucked into a maelstrom of slow-motion economic collapse, while normalcy bias whispers from every quarter, "Peace, all is well!"

     But it is not well.

     He coupled it to a sentiment any good man must endorse:

     All I and my family can do now is try to weather the storm the best we can.

     Those are the words of a man who sees the onrushing flood. He’s tried his best, like so many others, to call out a warning, but has concluded that the waters are too great, and too near, to be held back much longer.

     The election of a new president will not hold back the waters.
     Neither will a rebound in the economy.
     Neither, as much as we’d like it, would a return to the Constitution.

     The implications of “a century of socialism and war” (Herbert Spencer) must be played out. Many will suffer terribly. If there remains hope, it lies in God’s mercy toward those who turn their faces toward Him.

Last night I lay in bed
And held myself
Trying to remember
How it once was with you
How your hands were softer.

Yesterday I found myself
Staring into space
Rather like the sailor
In my own home surroundings
I'm not sure I know me.

If you were me what would you do
Don't tell me I don't need you to
It won't help me now.

[David Cousins, Ibid.]

Transparent government – Sen. Mitch "Take no prisoners" McConnell in action.

I'm not victorious over video embeds today so we have to make do with a mere link to Sen. McConnell's speech here. In this way are vital issues considered in the world's greatest deliberative body.

This speech by Sen. McConnell is further discussed by Neil Munro at Breitbart, for which h/t.

McConnell's talking about the latest gigantic spending bill. It's an equally-gigantic sellout by the GOP. He knows it. They know it.

The maneuvering you see is designed to do one thing and one thing only -- to prevent the American electorate from knowing anything about this 2,000-page bill. "It's all good. Good luck reading it yourself, bitchez."

Congressman Rep. Curt Clawson, (R-Fla., Tea Party extremist), above, gets it that:

• the debt-GDP ratio is approaching that of Spain and Italy;
• a great opportunity to do something about our fiscal madness was passed up by agreeing this massive spending bill;
• Republicans shouldn't roll over every time;
• there's no point in caving on important issues so you can fight the really good fight later on if you never fight later on; and
• it's no use saying the presidency in 2016 is the great prize if you give up your values in the process of trying to attain it.

Instead of a fight now we got, of course, a love fest with the execrable Obama and funding for sanctuary cities, tax credits for illegal immigrants, and bringing in more Syrian refugees.

If I ever called the French cheese-eating surrender monkeys I hereby apologize sincerely. I don't think I ever did, but, just in case I did, I'm very sorry. Nikolas Sarkozy looks like that molon labe guy compared to Ryan and McConnell.

I couldn't retrieve the embed code for the video for some reason so here's the link to the Cavuto interview with Rep. Clawson. It's concentrated fiscal and political sense well worth your time (3m54s).

It's distilled far-right-wing extremism but try to get past that.

Sen. Sessions on voter disenfranchisement.

The appeal of Trump.

Trump supporters are giving “the establishment” a giant middle finger. In some ways they are like the 60s white girls who dated black guys just to piss off their parents.

Trump supporters have had it with the Demosocialists and the RINOs. They know there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Rodham and Jeb/Rubio/Kasich/Christie/et al. So they figure they may as well have some fun tossing some Trump/Molotov cocktails while they watch the nation collapse.

They have had it with political correctness, welfare, fake disabilities, ObamaCare, the Fed’s money-printing, Wall Street, Jon Corzine, Michelle’s vacations, Obama’s golf, deficits, “holiday trees,” Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner, Hollywood hypocrites, Chevy Volts, clock boy, pajama boy, mattress girl, and on and on and on. They believe none of the “regular” candidates are listening to them, and Trump is their way of saying, “Screw you, Hillary Rodham Rove Bush!”

If Trump loses and Rodham wins, so what? She won’t do anything Jeb or Rubio wouldn’t do. All of them would be caretakers, watching over the collapse of the nation.

If Trump wins, Congress won’t let him do anything too stupid anyway. It’s not like it will roll over for him like it did for Barry Soetoro.

Comment by colony14 on "The Daily Sunny – Ep 6 – Suicidal Tendencies and Donald Trump." By Sunny Lohmann, House of Sunny, 12/10/15.

A brief respite from the "Assad the Butcher" hysterics.

The tyrant stuff is frankly overblown. Context is key here. Bashar Assad was born into the ruling family, but by all accounts, the last thing Bashar Assad ever wanted to do was rule Syria. He became an eye doctor, of all things. He was doing his ophthalmology residency, living in London with his attractive wife, when the call came that his older brother who was being groomed to take over, had died in a car accident.

If you're Bashar Assad, what do you do? Do you stay in London and hope for the best? That may not be a great strategy even if that was his inclination, because if the regime were to fall, he probably wouldn't have a nice life in London like nothing ever happened. No, he'd probably be hounded like Gaddafi's sons. So he took the job.

Then your father dies and you're appointed president. Now what do you do? Just call free elections? Not that simple, because there are a lot of vested interests in Syria other than your immediate family -for example the military. You do that, and there could be a military coup the next day.

So he charted an extremely cautious course -limited reforms, all the while rightfully wary of extremist elements that could bubble up from just below the surface. And of course mindful of the fact that there's a simmering destabilization campaign funded by the United States. Did he crack down too hard on the protesters? Maybe. But if he didn't crack down hard *enough*, he risked Gaddafi's fate. In the end he was proven right that extremist elements would come to the forefront of the Syrian opposition.

You play with the cards you're given. It's easy to criticize Assad as a tyrant, but if any of us were born with his set of cards, I'm not sure we'd play them any differently. And if we did, things might be worse.

Comment by Greg on "'Free Syrian Army' on the Verge of Total Collapse." By Slobodan Lekic, Russian Insider, 12/17/15. Originally published at Stars and Stripes, 12/13/15.

Quickies: Connecting The Dots Dept.

     One of the reasons the Main Stream Media continue to be a highly useful asset to The Left is their ability to steer people away from making critical connections. They achieve this by framing their coverage in preferred ways, and by strategically separating their coverage of connected events. Have a look at a recent, profoundly disturbing case:

     Missouri just became ground zero for some intense evolving events that have occurred there recently. In the last week, six Walmarts were visited in the wee hours of the morning by at least two Middle Eastern men. At each stop they purchased 60 burner phones. They couldn’t be arrested because technically they did nothing illegal. Cell phones can be used for communications in terrorist cells and as detonators for bombs. ISIS just released a snuff film in Syria showing rebel prisoners who had explosives placed underneath them. The thugs stood off and detonated the bombs with their phones and rebel bits went everywhere. Just think what they could do with over 360 phones and those are just the ones we know about.

     As concerning as those events were, it gets even worse. Over the last two weeks in Missouri, dozens of propane tanks have been stolen from various locations. As with the cell phones, the FBI says they are not concerned. Really? I’m sure they realize you can make bombs from propane tanks. Not to mention, you can empty them, pack them with explosives and plant them back in stores of propane tanks and set them off remotely. Yep, there are all kinds of nifty, evil uses for propane. There was also a sighting in Florida of several Muslim men buying propane tanks in bulk. Gee, wonder what they intend to do with them? That would make for one hell of a barbecue.

     It would also make for some pretty snazzy artillery:

     If this country were fully awake to the Islamic threat, its retailers would refuse to sell anything to an obvious Muslim. But we’re not even sufficiently roused to chastise our “journalists” for downplaying the developments Terresa Monroe-Hamilton cites above.

     Please read the linked article in its entirety. Then, should you be in retail yourself, contemplate what you would do were a Muslim – of either sex – to attempt a bulk purchase of burner phones, propane tanks, or – God help us – propane at your place of business. Yes, the Almighty State would frown upon your refusal to make such a sale. But would the State’s favor compensate you for the knowledge that you’d passively enabled terrorists to reap human lives by the tankload?

     How do you feel about our Legacy Media’s flaccidity in this regard? More to the point, since there’s only one acceptable answer, what do you propose to do about it?

A Special Treat

     YouTube is the home of a lot of garbage, which is the usual fate of any open forum. But there are also jewels there...and sometimes they pop out at me quite by surprise.

     The young pianist in the following clip is named Johannes Johansson. He records both original pieces and covers of others’ compositions. This is his most recent upload.

     If you enjoyed the above, I urge you to look into his YouTube channel, under the handle Akmigone. I count myself lucky to have stumbled over his work.

Getting Religion

     The consistently excellent Dystopic’s most recent screed contains a bit I simply must excerpt:

     [W]hile the Bill of Rights continues to exist, free speech is fast becoming a de jure right, not a de facto one. The same is true for religion. Christians have felt for a long time that something was off in America, that the perception of them had shifted. Oh, it’s nothing official. You won’t find a law that discriminates against you. There are no official papers to declare a de jure persecution of you.

     But, again, the signalling of the Pavlov’s Progressives is against you. Try the experiment yourself. Post something openly and strongly Christian in any place where Progressives congregate in numbers. Choose something innocent like Christ preaching to love thy neighbor or something.

     Invariably, someone will come out to ring the bell against you. You’re a homophobe, they will say, because you are Christian. Or maybe you hate brown people, or women, or abortion. Whatever. The message will be negative. Now, perform the same experiment, but post something from the Quran and observe the difference. There will be positive messages in solidarity with you, or perhaps they will ask how you survive in a white-christian-male world full of bigots. Whatever.

     It’s remarkable how uniform the conduct Dystopic describes above has become. I’ve received some of it, though less than others who refuse to hit back. (I always hit back; I consider it a moral imperative.) And sad to say, some of it has been from persons whose politics marches with mine.

     More than anything else, it illustrates how hard it is for some folks to “get” religion.

---

     A religion must have two components:

• A mythos: The supernatural “backstory” the believer accepts as the higher aspect of existence.
• An ethos: The ethos’s implications for behavior: what the believer must and must not do.

     Each of these aspects of a religion can be found, separately, in other creeds. For example, the Army has a definite ethos, but there’s no mythos behind it, merely the certainty that your platoon sergeant will kick your ass into next week if you should “sin.” Conversely, addicts of Buffy the Vampire Slayer adhere to a mythos about vampirism, demons, and the soul, but without an associated ethos to govern their behavior.

     (Apropos of nothing much, the metacosmology behind the “big bang” could be said to constitute a mythos, since by postulate it preceded all that exists in Nature and cannot be probed by natural means. But as a former student of cosmology, I would never stoop to such a slander of my fellow cosmologists.)

     There’s a critical premise behind all of this, one that far too many persons have overlooked. More, it stands behind my contention that Islam is not a religion:

The acceptance of a religious creed
is an individual commitment.

     The believer must accept the mythos of his own free will. He must conform his behavior to the ethos similarly, though the possibility of punishment in the afterlife might factor into it. Any creed that relies upon temporal force to gain “converts” fails this requirement.

     From here, we turn to politics.

---

     These days, a left-liberal activist is more likely to be an atheist than a theist. He’s highly unlikely to adhere to any Christian denomination. Indeed, as Dystopic has said, he tends to treat Christians – sincere ones, at least – as if they were sinners against the dictates of his pseudo-religion. That’s understandable, as the left-liberal activist is nearly always a politics addict.

     A political stance isn’t a religion, regardless of its tenets. Politics is specifically about the acquisition and use of power over others: coercive power. But coercion is the exact antithesis of religious affiliation. The “believer” coerced into a political position doesn’t really believe; he’s there to avert the temporal consequences of not being there.

     There is a continuum between outright coercion – the threat of punishment for non-compliance – and the kind of social and economic pressure the Left tries to exert upon those it targets. By the strictest standard, the sort of campaign homosexual activists waged against Brendan Eich was not coercive; they merely mobilized a significant number of angry voices against him, with the implied threat of a boycott against Mozilla Corp. should he remain as its CEO. But consider this statement from Tony Bradley at Forbes:

     I think the backlash against Eich and boycott of Mozilla were misguided and completely unwarranted. There is a case to be made for calling it intolerance when a coordinated campaign is mounted against an entire company because a group of people disagrees with the personal beliefs of one employee.

     Turn that scenario around for a second. What if a conservative organization mounted a campaign to boycott an entire company because the CEO is gay? I’m fairly sure most of those who took up torches and pitch forks against Mozilla would find such behavior inexcusable, bordering on criminal.

     The Left is famous for this sort of “it’s okay when we do it” hypocrisy. Nor would its activists dissent from the statement that in encouraging the boycott of Mozilla they were trying to punish it for employing Brendan Eich. He who dissents from the Left’s decrees must be punished by temporal authority.

     The Left sees no difference between their “gospel” and that of Christianity.

---

     Let there be no mistake about it: I am a Catholic Christian:

• I accept the assertions of the Nicene Creed.
• I accept the Gospels as accurate accounts of Christ’s time in flesh.
• I accept Christ’s two Great Commandments and the Ten that derive from them.
• I hold that certain behaviors that are tolerated by the law are sinful despite their legality.
• I cleave to all the above as elements of my own convictions and my own personal conscience.

     But all of that is my choice. I don’t claim the authority, as the Left seeks to do, to punish others for disagreeing with me in thought, word, or deed. If they are to be punished, it will be the decision of a Higher Authority than any here on Earth.

     Some objectors would question a couple of “gray regions” commonly linked to religious belief. Abortion and euthanasia are examples. I do hold that those things should be criminalized, at least in egregious cases (e.g., “partial-birth” abortions). But those are political positions. I don’t claim that I, or any arbitrary gaggle of Christians, should have the authority to mete out punishment for those things. If legal processes should someday return abortion and euthanasia to felony status, it will be the political authorities that will do so, and a politically constituted apparatus of courts, juries, and prisons that will decree and inflict punishment.

     Therein lies the difference between religion and all other kinds of belief. Inasmuch as the left-liberal cannot abide dissent, his inability to abide Christianity, whose Founder Himself forbade temporal punishment for sin:

     But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he came to the temple courts again. All the people came to him, and he sat down and began to teach them. The experts in the law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught committing adultery. They made her stand in front of them and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of adultery. In the law Moses commanded us to stone to death such women. What then do you say?” (Now they were asking this in an attempt to trap him, so that they could bring charges against him.) Jesus bent down and wrote on the ground with his finger. When they persisted in asking him, he stood up straight and replied, “Whoever among you is guiltless may be the first to throw a stone at her.” Then he bent over again and wrote on the ground.
     Now when they heard this, they began to drift away one at a time, starting with the older ones, until Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?” She replied, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “I do not condemn you either. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.” [The Gospel According To John, 8:1-11]

     ...it becomes plain why they don’t “get” the Christian religion but have no problem whatsoever with Islam.

     Food for thought.