Liberty's Torch

Monday, January 9, 2017

From The Archives: Warning Labels

A few Gentle Readers have asked...well, pleaded, really, though few other petitioners have leveled a loaded .45 at me while they pleaded with me...for some lighter fare, to leaven the weighty crap that’s dominated this dive these past few days. So I dived into my Archives and found the following list of proposed “Warning Labels.”

Just how accurate do you want the Warning Labels on the products you buy to be?

I'm a physicist by training, and I suggest that, in the spirit of inclusiveness of all hazards that's been foisted upon us by Federal regulation, we really have to consider the following addenda to more topical warning labels:

WARNING: This Product Warps Space and Time

CAUTION: The Mass of This Product Contains the Energy Equivalent of 85 Million Tons of TNT per Net Ounce of Weight.

HANDLE WITH EXTREME CARE: This Product Contains Minute Electrically Charged Particles Moving at Velocities in Excess of Five Hundred Million Miles per Hour.

CONSUMER NOTICE: Because of the Uncertainty Principle, It Is Impossible for the Consumer to Find Out at the Same Time Both Precisely Where This Product Is and How Fast It Is Moving.

ADVISORY: There is an Extremely Small but Nonzero Chance That, Through a Process Known as "Tunneling," This Product May Spontaneously Disappear from Its Present Location and Reappear at Any Random Place in the Universe, Including Your Neighbor's Domicile. The Manufacturer Will Not Be Responsible for Any Damages or Inconvenience That May Result.

READ THIS BEFORE OPENING PACKAGE: According to Certain Suggested Versions of a Grand Unified Theory, the Primary Particles Constituting This Product May Decay to Nothingness Within the Next Four Hundred Million Years.

PUBLIC NOTICE AS REQUIRED BY LAW: Any Use of This Product, In Any Manner Whatsoever, Will Increase the Amount of Disorder in the Universe. Although No Liability is Implied Herein, the Consumer Is Warned That This Process Will Ultimately Lead to the Heat Death of the Universe.

NEW GRAND UNIFIED THEORY DISCLAIMER: The Manufacturer May Technically Be Entitled To Claim That This Product Is Ten-Dimensional. However, the Consumer Is Reminded That This Confers No Legal Rights Above and Beyond Those Applicable to Three-Dimensional Objects, Since the Seven New Dimensions Are "Rolled Up" Into Such a Small "Area" That They Cannot Be Detected.

PLEASE NOTE: Some Experts Claim That When the Consumer Is Not Directly Observing This Product, It May Cease to Exist or Will Exist Only in a Vague and Undetermined State.

IMPORTANT NOTICE TO PURCHASERS: The Entire Physical Universe, Including This Product, May One Day Collapse Back into an Infinitesimally Small Space. Should Another Universe Subsequently Reemerge, the Existence of This Product in That Universe Cannot Be Guaranteed.

A Morning Muddle

Many persons find early mornings more difficult than the rest of the day. I suppose that’s true of me as well, albeit not for what you’d call a typical reason.

This morning, after the first self-administration of Cardiac Starter Fluid (a.k.a. coffee), one of my first thoughts was “How can we harmonize Aristotelian essentialism with the fluidity of reality first noted by Heraclitus and the phenomenological insights of Husserl?” No, I’m not kidding: that’s the way my mornings have been trending. Such notions aren’t the sort of controversy one normally reads about in the morning paper. Perhaps that’s for the best.

This penchant for the most abstract of abstractions has been with me for a long time, but I can’t recall a time when it’s been this insistent, or this powerful. If it’s a consequence of aging, it’s not one covered by the medical journals. Fortunately, it usually recedes when I say my morning prayers.

The above left me with the feeling that this is going to be a really interesting day...hopefully in a good way.

The typical American is almost entirely uninterested in philosophy. His concerns are mundane, practical, focused on the bills, the roof, and the wife and kids. If he thinks about them at all, he regards the etherealities of philosophical discussion as gaseous blather. The word philosophy has been so badly abused in recent years that that, too, might be for the best.

That puts me out on the margins of thought. (It certainly makes my style of conversation less than appealing.) Yet I persist in my conviction that the most abstract of abstractions – the ones addressed by questions such as “What do we mean by real, and how can we believe in the reality of a thing if it’s changing as we watch?” – deserve more attention from the common man than they usually get.

Consider two relatively recent movies: The Thirteenth Floor and The Matrix. Both of these are founded on exactly such conundrums. They challenged their audiences at a conceptual level; you had to “buy the premise” in order to “buy the flick.” Yet many did so, especially in the case of the Matrix series.

Another noteworthy movie, Dark City, embedded as its premise that what we call reality might really be at the mercy of others’ whims. That’s goes deeper into the conceptual darkness than the “simulation within a simulation within a simulation within a...” premise of The Thirteenth Floor. However, it has an important distinguishing characteristic: it’s true.

Reality is being continuously reconfigured as we live it, largely by persons other than ourselves. That some of those persons live near to you – perhaps in your very own home! – doesn’t disturb the validity of the premise.

An old, low-grade joke runs thus:

Q: What does Helen Keller’s mother do to punish her?
A: She moves the furniture around.

(As I typed that, two other things occurred to reconfigure my local reality: First, I received an “important message” about the worn, tired condition of my underwear...from Victoria’s Secret. Second, it occurred to me that there are probably millions of young Americans who, owing to the “excellence” of their “public” school “educations,” have no idea who Helen Keller was. But that’s a subject for another screed: one that must wait to be written until the serviceman arrives to recharge my sneer-quote generator. All things in due course.)

We live in a reality whose surface properties are being continuously altered, mainly by others. The alterations don’t touch the metareality beneath us, of course – you’d have to be Althea Morelon to do that – but they do influence our perceptions and subsequent decisions and actions. How, then, do we state definitively anything about reality, even in the most localized sense?

It appears that there are several criteria:

Perception: One must have sensory evidence of the item / event;
Persistence; The item or event must have occupied a non-zero, finite space and interval in time;
Confirmation: Others who can legitimately be presumed to have witnessed the same item / event must confirm (or at the least, not seriously dispute) one’s perceptions and the recollection thereof.

Remember this scene from 1984?

     ’Another example,’ he said. ’Some years ago you had a very serious delusion indeed. You believed that three men, three one-time Party members named Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford men who were executed for treachery and sabotage after making the fullest possible confession — were not guilty of the crimes they were charged with. You believed that you had seen unmistakable documentary evidence proving that their confessions were false. There was a certain photograph about which you had a hallucination. You believed that you had actually held it in your hands. It was a photograph something like this.’
     An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O’Brien’s fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston’s vision. It was a photograph, and there was no question of its identity. It was the photograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight again. But he had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the top half of his body free. It was impossible to move so much as a centimetre in any direction. For the moment he had even forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at least to see it.
     ’It exists!’ he cried.
     ’No,’ said O’Brien.
     He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O’Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O’Brien turned away from the wall.
     ’Ashes,’ he said. ’Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.’
     ’But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.’
     ’I do not remember it,’ said O’Brien.

It’s one of the most chilling scenes in a supremely chilling book...and one of the most important, as well. The brainwashing techniques of the Communist nations are founded on nothing else but that plus mass confirmation and repetition.

As usual, I’m coming at my point in a circuitous fashion. (Why not? I’ve been doing it for a lot of years now.) It’s merely this:

Reality may be changing, but it’s still real.

That includes conscious attempts to change reality “out from under you,” such as O’Brien worked upon Winston Smith, or the media are attempting to do with the Chicago atrocity of a few days ago. It’s up to you – your perceptions of reality and your firmness of will – to decide whether you’ll allow it.

     Stop.
     Look.
     Listen.
     And remember.

All else is fluff.

Stated succinctly:

The reign of terror imposed on eastern Aleppo was the creation of Western states covertly sponsoring extremists to prosecute their criminal designs for regime change in Syria.^[1]

There may be 100 reasons why the Syrian regime may be a blight on the planet (with emphasis on the words "may be"). However, the only reason offered by Obama and his toads is "Assad must go." As persuasive reasons for deposing someone and killing hundreds of thousands of his countryman go, that lacks a certain something.

This disgraceful episode in our nation's history – our alliance with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, al Qaida, and ISIS in a pointless war – is instructive for what it teaches about

the debased morals of our disgusting Treason Class,
Republican cowardice in the face of unconstitutional and aggressive war, and
what a craven, lying, lickspittle legacy press we have in the U.S.

Notes
^[1] "West Spins Again to Sabotage Syria Ceasefire." By Finian Cunningham, Strategic Culture, 1/5/17.

Sunday, January 8, 2017

Our Regular Places: A Sunday Rumination

The Atlantic Seaboard got a fair amount of snow yesterday: about eight inches in my part of Long Island. In the usual case, that large a snowfall will pretty much stop the Island for at least a day. When it happens on a Saturday afternoon, it’s a good bet that Sunday Masses in the region will be lightly attended.

I dislike driving on snowy or icy roads. However, I dislike missing Mass even more, especially on the Feast of the Epiphany, when the Magi presented the newborn Christ with gold, frankincense, and myrrh as tokens of vassalage. So at the appointed hour – 7:10 AM, to be precise – I peered out at the road that runs past my house, noted that it was black rather than white, and decided to take a chance.

Normally, by the time I get to the church, which is usually about ten minutes before the start of the ritual, it’s about half full. This morning, I was the second person to arrive. That disturbed me. It implied that the rest of the parish is even more averse than I to driving after a serious snowstorm. I hadn’t expected that.

As I expected that there would be few other attendees, I eschewed my usual place, which is toward the back of the nave and off to the right, and went to sit front-and-center. I hadn’t done that before. It got me a lot of suspicious “Who on Earth is he and what is he doing there?” type looks.

A word or two of explanation is appropriate here. When I attend a public event, Mass included, I try to stay along the edge. It’s a habit I developed long ago, out of a desire not to inflict myself on others. That might sound strange to you, Gentle Reader, but it’s natural, even automatic for me to keep myself to myself. However, when Mass in a church built to seat a thousand congregants is likely to be attended by no more than fifty, which did prove to be the case, it seemed disrespectful to the celebrant and the Eucharistic ministers not to cluster front-and-center. So I suppressed my habit.

Those looks, though...

At the conclusion of the rite I genuflected, made the Sign of the Cross, and departed as swiftly and silently as possible. And ever since I’ve been thinking about the experience and why it was so disturbing, both to me and to those around me.

“Know your place.” “Stay in your own corner.” “Don’t go where you’re not wanted.” Such advice has been given innumerable times, under innumerable circumstances. It’s not inherently bad. Indeed there are contexts in which it’s critical.

But in church? At Mass? Among other Catholics who I’m supposed to treat as brethren in Christ, and who may be expected to regard me in the same fashion? Why would anyone want to make a fellow parishioner, known or unknown, feel out of place – unwelcome?

Even thinking about it makes me uneasy. I don’t expect to be invited to breakfast. I don’t expect to be asked how it’s going. Indeed, I don’t expect other parishioners to know my name. That’s despite having been a member of this parish, a regular attendee at Mass, and a contributor to its Outreach pantry for nearly fourteen years. In New York Metro, proximity-based encounters between strangers are generally coolly formal when they occur at all.

Mind you, I don’t feel offended. I’m just puzzled. Is “Know your place” as imperative at Sunday Mass as it is at a formal banquet? I didn’t leap onto the altar dais and offer to conduct the ceremony. I was just in a pew other than my usual. But a goodly number of the other attendees appeared disturbed by it.

Are any Catholics in less densely populated regions reading this? Have you had an experience like it, or know someone who has?

Americans were once known as the friendliest, most outgoing of all Western peoples. Time was, the stories about Americans traveling abroad were almost uniformly about two things:

Our lack of linguistic facility;
Our unusual friendliness toward strangers.

It’s been more than twenty years since I was last out of the country, so I can’t comment on such things in today’s context. But I can tell you about the apprehension with which today’s American approaches an unknown other. I don’t think it’s fear of being waylaid by an insurance salesman.

When brothers in Christ, having gathered on holy ground to participate in a sacred ceremony, regard one another uneasily, with obvious suspicion, something has gone seriously wrong.

As usual when I write a piece such as this, I’m mostly talking to myself. All the same, I’d be interested in hearing from other Christians who’ve had similar experiences. This feeling of having somehow offended against an unwritten rule of conduct is proving hard to shake.

Happy Epiphany. May God bless and keep you all.

Saturday, January 7, 2017

On Trusting Democrats: Three New Outcroppings

The Democrat Party has had its way for so long, whether from a majority or a minority position, that its luminaries believe that they can have it indefinitely. Their principal method when in the minority is to threaten to make the GOP “look bad.” Consider these three recent developments:

Objectively, as matters stand, the Democrats cannot prevent the approval of DeVos or Sessions, nor can Obama prevent the absolute and total repeal of ObamaCare. Their maneuverings are intended to taint those nominations and that legislative initiative: to make them look “extreme,” “partisan,” or “cruel:”

Booker’s attacks on DeVos are those of a supposed friend and fellow supporter of school choice;
Obama can use his ongoing influence and popularity to defame any attempt to repeal the PPACA;
The NAACP’s supposed importance in protecting the rights of minorities is a lever against Sessions.

In the face of threats such as the above, Republican majorities have exhibited a habit of making concesssions to Democrat minorities “for appearances’ sake.” Worst of all, even after Republican concessions, the Democrats have gone on the attack against such nominations and legislation despite having assented to them.

The moral should be obvious. (Gahh! Two words I’ve resolved not to use, and in a five-word sentence!) But Republican legislators and presidents have harbored such a great fear of the alliance between the Democrats and the media that they’ve steadfastly refused to draw it.

The swelling importance of the alternative media, especially the World Wide Web and its “social media,” might counter the influence of that fear. After all, Donald Trump used them effectively in his campaign for the presidency. However, fear is as often a matter of habit as it is irrational.

This is a compelling reason to write your Republican legislators and demand that they ignore such gambits from the Left. It’s time to make them more afraid of us than they are of them.

The Right Of Conquest

Civilized persons prefer – oh, greatly! – to settle disputes by civilized means. Among those means, preference goes to the softer-voiced, more orderly ones over the ones that feature a lot of shouting and hurling of random objects. However, in any two-sided dispute in which one side unambiguously declares its desire to fight, the other side, no matter how distasteful it might be, must buckle on its armor, don its gauntlets and helmet, heft its spear, and say, “Well, then let’s get it on.”

War, too, is a civilized means of settling disputes.

War was once more orderly than it has lately become. Battles in the wars of Europe were once prearranged for time and place, so that the combatants would be ready, any non-combatants would have cleared the area, and the result could be clearly ascertained. That hasn’t been the case for quite some time, but it provides a useful perspective on how far we supposedly civilized ones have fallen.

The outcome of a war, fought to a decision by opponents who have voluntarily committed themselves to that method of settling their differences, is as valid and morally defensible as any other method ever used by Man.

Wars have been the principal means by which nations have come into being and established their boundaries. That today’s bien-pensants dislike and deplore this fact doesn’t make it any less so.

At the conclusion of a war of the traditional variety – i.e., between nation-states or alliances thereof – there must be a cessation of hostilities upon agreed conditions. If one side clearly destroyed the other or compelled its surrender, the victor will determine what adjustments will be made to borders, populations, inter-governmental debts and obligations, and so forth. The shorthand for this process is called “writing the peace treaty.” (Nota Bene: Should the losing regime be completely destroyed, as in World War II’s defeat of Nazi Germany, no formal peace treaty is required.)

Those adjustments have exactly the moral defensibility of the war that eventuated in them. The justification has traditionally been called the right of conquest, whether or not the defeated party remains militarily and politically in being.

An amusing attempt to evade a disliked outcome to defeat in war occurred when Bolshevik Russia conceded its defeat by the German Empire in World War I. Leon Trotsky, appalled by the demands Germany made as a condition of peace, attempted to “leave the table.” He simply declared a cessation of hostilities, in the insane belief that that would somehow allow Russia to return to the status quo ante:

     While Lenin wanted to accept the German peace proposal immediately, a majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee disagreed. The "Left Communists", led by Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek, believed that Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria were all on the verge of revolution. They wanted to continue the war while awaiting revolutions in those countries. Thus the Soviet delegation returned to the peace conference without instructions to sign the proposed treaty....
     Frustrated with continued German demands for cessions of territory, Trotsky on 10 February announced a new policy. Russia unilaterally declared an end of hostilities against the Central Powers, and Russia withdrew from peace negotiations with the Central Powers - a position summed up as "no war — no peace"....
     The consequences for the Bolsheviks were worse than what they had feared in December. The Central Powers repudiated the armistice on 18 February 1918, and in the next fortnight seized most of Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic countries in Operation Faustschlag. Through the ice of the Baltic Sea, a German fleet approached the Gulf of Finland and Russia's capital Petrograd. Despite strikes and demonstrations the month before in protest against economic hardship, the workers of Germany failed to rise up against their government. On 23 February, the Central Powers sent new terms for peace. These terms included cession of Dünaburg, Livonia, and Estonia to Germany; cession of western Armenia to the Ottoman Empire; recognition of an independent Ukraine; immediate evacuation of Russian troops from Finland and Ukraine; and complete demobilization of the Russian Army. Additionally, the Central Powers required that these terms be agreed to within 48 hours. Lenin again pressed for acceptance of these terms. This time a majority of the Central Committee supported Lenin. The Soviet government sent a new delegation headed by Georgy Chicherin and Lev Karakhan, with instructions to accept the proposal. On 3 March Chicherin signed the treaty. Thus the new Soviet government agreed to terms worse than those they had previously rejected.

The defeated party attempted to dictate the terms of the peace. The Germans were not about to allow such an innovation in warfare.

The wars of our time don’t necessarily involve nation-state combatants. “Asymmetrical warfare,” in which one set of the forces is a “non-state actor” not overtly in the field at the behest of the government of a nation-state, is the most trying of phenomena. How does one determine when such a war has ended? How does one tell the victor from the vanquished? And on what basis are any adjustments to be made?

This is obviously a most unclear situation. There is no incontestable way of determining when such a conflict has ended. In consequence, some of today’s regimes, defeated in more conventional wars, have turned to asymmetrical warfare via non-state actors to perpetuate hostilities, in the hope of preventing the general recognition of the victor’s victory.

This is the dominant element in the Islamic world’s refusal to concede the borders of Israel as established by the 1967 “Six-Day War” and the 1973 “Yom Kippur War.” Israel’s victories in those wars were unambiguous. Its military dominance of the territory it annexed was beyond dispute. No nation-state has dared to go into the field against Israel since then – and not merely because it’s acquired a nuclear deterrent.

The Muslims’ enmity toward Israel has a large religious component. However, the humiliation the Israelis inflicted on Arab armies in those contests, and in the wars of 1947-48 that first established Israel as a nation-state, must not be neglected. Anwar Sadat’s initiation of the “Yom Kippur War” in 1973 was in part an attempt to win some pride of achievement for an Arab army. Many analysts are of the opinion that the peace subsequently established between Israel and Egypt could not have come about otherwise.

But only Egypt, of all the Arab-Muslim states of the region, was a willing party to that peace. The other Islamic nations declined to enter into it.

The old, somewhat cynical “diplomats’ definition” for peace – “a state of tension falling short of armed conflict” – has given way to a condition unprecedented in post-Westphalian history. Asymmetrical warfare is continuous. It touches the peoples of every nation on Earth. It’s responsible for the garrisoning of the civil order in nation after nation. The fear and sporadic bloodshed it elicits guarantee that, even when no nation-state has declared war upon another, or sent its uniformed armed forces into the field for any purpose, no one can sincerely believe the world to be at peace.

It’s a tiring situation. The civilized nations of the world – i.e., those not dominated by Islam – would like it to end. But the regimes that covertly support asymmetric warfare see it as their best hope for reversing the verdicts of more traditional wars.

A great deal of attention has gone to the nuclearization of North Korea and the advances toward it by Iran. These are not small matters; the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by gangster-states surely deserves coverage. However, in the long run the persistence of asymmetric warfare, covertly funded and supported by nation-states and directed toward reversing the verdicts of traditional wars, may prove to be the more important development. For the asymmetric warrior cannot be defeated in the conventional sense. Neither can he be negotiated with. And it is plainly impossible to foresee where he will strike.

Many a fantasy of the future depicts wars being fought between non-state actors: usually corporations. I find such notions implausible. Corporations have a far greater interest in peace than nation-states. Besides, the maintenance of an army is an overhead expense no sane Board of Directors (to say nothing of the accounting department) would countenance.

Oil sheiks beleaguered by Islamic fanatics, desperate to deflect attention from their luxuries amid the grinding poverty of their subjects, are a quite different matter. Especially if they nurse wounds to their pride inflicted by defeats in traditional wars, and even more so if they can contrive for their warriors to fly no flag, wear no uniform, and die on their chosen battlefields.

Asymmetric warfare might compel Israel to go to war again, this time against the regimes that foster the asymmetrical warriors to which they would never willingly admit. Those wars might be wars of annihilation, fought not merely to inflict defeat on the enemy but to end its existence. What rights of conquest would be conceded to Israel in the aftermath, I cannot imagine.

Friday, January 6, 2017

The Downside Of The Politicization Of Everything

The New Yorker, a journal with which I’ve had little acquaintance in recent years, recently printed this cartoon:

I can’t imagine that even one of my Gentle Readers doesn’t “get” that cartoon, or its targets. I’d imagine that the reactions among you would be about evenly split between scorn and raucous laughter at the cartoon’s author.

The message embedded in the cartoon, of course, is that the populist wave that elevated Donald Trump to the presidency is akin to piloting an airliner by plebiscite. The redoubtable Glenn Reynolds has a few words to say about that:

In this view, ordinary people are just carried along for the ride, while the country is run by experts with vast experience and credentials. Letting ordinary people take charge would surely result in a disastrous crash. If the pilots are “smug” it’s because they have abilities that ordinary people lack.

But do they? Have they demonstrated special abilities whose exclusion from the corridors of power we’re likely to mourn?

Don’t all rush to answer at once, now.

Some years ago, during a voir dire examination for jury service in a civil case, an attorney dismayed by my various credentials asked me if I could “set aside” my habits of mind to give his client “a fair shake.” I asked him to clarify his rather disturbing question. He responded by saying, in approximately these words, that in rendering a verdict I shouldn’t be concerned with “mathematical accuracy.”

To which I replied, “Counselor, to the extent that justice fails to be accurate, it fails to be justice.”

Need I say that he asked me to be dismissed, or is that too screamingly obvious?

Yet there is nothing in governance, the most error-prone of all human undertakings, that isn’t about justice. That’s inherent in the nature of governance: the nominally sanctioned use of coercion to achieve particular ends. It’s why I once had my fictional president, Stephen Graham Sumner, say this:

     “Do you know why everyone allows himself opinions about politics, Ethan? Because politics is supposed to be simple. It’s supposed to be about justice. Right and wrong. Things every schoolchild learns at his mother’s knee. Politics isn’t supposed to be the property of a bunch of specialists running simulations on high-powered computers. It’s supposed to be about the defense of the nation and peace in the streets.
     “I never expected to land here, until I actually did. But when the final tallies were in, I knew what would happen immediately afterward. And did it ever! I was practically overrun by would-be advisors, each of them toting some grand scheme to create a Utopia by federal action. Have you ever read about the Coolidge Administration, Ethan?”
     The chief of staff shook his head.
     “I gave them the Coolidge treatment. I invited them to pitch their cases, listened in total silence, and showed them out. To a man, they hoped to become parts of my administration, awarded power and prestige. None of them did, of course.
     “Politics is supposed to be the pursuit of justice. That and nothing else. From what you’ve told me, the public agrees with my understanding of justice, in this instance at least. But if it were the other way around, it wouldn’t have changed a thing. I will do as I think justice requires, regardless of anyone’s opinion before, during, or after the fact.”
     [From this short story]

The contrary notion, that politics and governance are far too complex to be put at the mercy of popular opinion, is what has all but ruined this nation.

We’re about to embark upon a course the nation has never before taken. A complete government neophyte, who has never held public office or served in the military, will soon be our chief executive, the man charged to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

That’s got the Left completely outraged. They were certain the power seat belonged to them...that it would go to their anointed one, who had all the proper punches on her ticket. For the great unwashed mass of Compassion-Challenged Deplorables, Those Who Do Not Understand The Complexities, to spurn her in preference for a total outsider – A reality-TV buffoon! A vulgarian! A businessman! – has turned their world upside down. As Professor Reynolds has noted, it’s a devastating blow to their self-regard:

And now that Trump has won, people are, in fact, a lot less respectful of the traditional academic and media and political elites. Trump didn’t just beat them, after all. He also humiliated them, as they repeatedly assured everyone (and each other) that he had no chance. It’s a huge blow to the self-importance of a lot of people. No wonder they’re still lashing out.

Had these persons not made politics their pole star – had they not insisted that everything is political and that they, the Inherently Superior of Wisdom and Virtue, are the only legitimate arbiters of all that is right, true, and just – they would not be suffering quite so much angst. The moral could hardly be clearer.

Now, as the late Robert Sheckley has said, he who practices soul-doctoring without a license must restrict his prescriptions to remedies you can get over the counter. And so, to our Leftist, ah, friends, so tormented by their anticipation of the coming Trump Administration and its aims, I say:

Take a vacation from politics. Read some entirely non-political books. See a big, gaudy, special-effects-laden movie. Get drunk a time or two. Jump your Significant Other. And for the sake of our ears and a modicum of public peace, you might consider shutting the BLEEP! up.

One of US media’s most pernicious lies.

Even those [civlians in Syria] who expressed disapproval of Russia’s involvement in their country told me they hold the US and its regional allies—Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey—most responsible for the disintegration of their country.
These sentiments totally contradict one of US media’s most pernicious lies—that US inaction allowed the bloodshed in Syria to continue with impunity.
“Many thousands of people have been killed in Aleppo…but Washington shrugs,” lamented the New York Times (12/14/16). “The United States’ inaction in Syria has transformed our country into nothing other than a bystander to the greatest atrocity of our time,” complained Leon Wieseltier in the Washington Post (12/15/16).
But Washington has intervened (FAIR.org, 10/1/15)—and by doing so, it prolonged the bloodshed and empowered Al Qaeda.
Despite being warned about the extremist and violently sectarian ideology that dominated the opposition as early as November 2011, the Obama administration spent, according to the Washington Post (6/12/15), a colossal $1 billion-a-year training and funneling weapons to Al Qaeda–linked extremists in order to weaken the Syrian government.
In written testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June 2016, Brett McGurk, the US special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter IS, warned that “Nusra is now Al Qaeda’s largest formal affiliate in history.” According to US intelligence officials, Nusra is starting to plot attacks against the US.
In other words, the US government outsourced its war against the Syrian government to Al Qaeda, and Americans have no idea, because corporate media continue to promote lies about Obama’s so-called inaction.^[1]

The United States supports al Qaida. We are sullied by this immoral alliance and our disgraceful war on Syria. As for the press . . . :

Since 9/11, US corporate media have portrayed Al Qaeda as a monstrous organization whose existence justifies a global war without end. Who could have predicted that by 2016, these same media outlets would become Al Qaeda’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders?^[2]

Notes
^[1] "In Syria, Western Media Cheer Al Qaeda." By Rania Khalek, FAIR, 1/4/17.
^[2] Id.

H/t: Russia Insider.

Thursday, January 5, 2017

The Crime Of The Hour

In Chicago, that famously tranquil and racially harmonious city, Four black teenagers kidnapped and tortured a young retarded white man. They spent between 24 and 48 hours at it. By now you’ve already read about it...including the pronouncement of Don Lemon, ignorant and talentless (but black!) MSNBC personality, that it wasn’t a hate crime and the Chicago Police Department’s proclamation that it wasn’t racially motivated.

Don’t try to tell me it wasn’t racially motivated. Don’t try to tell me it wasn’t a hate crime.

There’s more, of course. Various...persons – black, of course – have leaped to the microphones to tell us that blacks can’t be racists, that they can’t commit hate crimes against whites. University “Black Studies” departments are already weaving apologias for this atrocity into their syllabi. And the Left, Inc., is working the bellows of White Guilt to persuade us, against all the dictates of Reason and Evidence, that we somehow had it coming...for not paying reparations, for electing Donald Trump to the presidency, or for God knows what.

Various other persons – mostly white – surge forward to tell me “they’re not all like that.” Glory be to God, shouldn’t I be expected to know that? I’ll shortly be 65 years old. I’ve had friends, acquaintances, and colleagues from all the races and ethnicities of the world. If anyone should know that the members of some racial category aren’t all identical, surely I should – and I do. But really:

How long ago did you last read about whites doing something like this to a black?
Did the media try to downplay it, or was it blasted at us on the front page, above the fold?
Did “leaders of the white community” attempt to characterize it as something other than it was?

Yet people still approach me and say, more or less in these words, “How can you, so intelligent, so erudite, and so civilized, who take infinite care over every single word you commit to pixels, openly and unabashedly style yourself a racist?”

I’ve given up trying to explain it to them. Eyes are no use to those who refuse to see. Ears are no use to those who refuse to hear.

If you have 24 minutes, suffer along with Stefan Molyneux:

It’s a lot to take, I know. But how much worse was it for the victim of that crime? How much worse was it for Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom? How much worse is it for the thousands of annual victims of violent crimes – murder, rape, assault – committed by blacks against whites? And how many violent black-against white incidents – some not as heinous, some worse – are there that we don’t hear about, because the press won’t report them because they would “worsen racial tensions?”

The reasons no longer matter. The facts are as they are. The races must live apart. There’s no longer any rational dispute about it. We’ve tried it the other way, and this is what we’ve reaped.

“White guilt” must cease to be a political force and become a laugh line.

I always catch flak for such a column as this. I no longer care. In my universe, either you acknowledge the visible, audible, tangible facts or you’re an obstruction if not worse. You don’t try to persuade others that what they’ve seen and heard didn’t really happen...or that it’s “the legacy of slavery”...or that the solution is to pour your treasure into the pockets of bureaucrats, supposedly to be used for “affirmative action” or “racial uplift.”

Listen to Brigitte Gabriel, upon being challenged by a Muslim during a colloquy on the Benghazi atrocity of September 11, 2012:

The very same logic applies to Negroes in these United States. The peaceful majority are irrelevant. It’s a greater tragedy than anything in history that didn’t result in a world war or a Communist revolution. Yet there it is...and there’s nothing we can do about it but part company.

     We can wish one another well.
     We can be sad that “it turned out this way.”
     We can pore through history looking for the nexus.

What we can’t do is change the facts as they are – or the ravening racial hatred, among blacks toward whites, that has given rise to them.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damned fool about it.” – Thomas Sowell.

F.A.C.E. Press Now Considering Submissions

Are there any other Christian indie writers out there who’d like to have a publisher’s imprint on their books? Perhaps you should talk to the F.A.C.E.:

Yes, that’s me behind the false nose, fake mustache, and dark glasses. But I don’t intend it to be a purely personal enterprise. It will give me a vehicle for assisting other indies with the several chores involved in preparing an eBook for publication.

NOTE: The current Website is a “starter home.” It’s likely to be moved to a non-Blogger host at some point. Don’t let that inhibit you if you’ve got material you think is worthy and would like to submit. But do put your best foot forward. My standards are rather high, so don’t submit hastily dashed-off or un-proofread, unedited dreck.

Christianity And Community

I’ve labored virtually the whole morning over what you’re about to read. Now that it’s finished, I’m disturbed by it. No, not because it’s incorrect, badly reasoned, or poorly written; because its implications are alarming in the extreme. I swore as I sat to my task that I would follow the evidence wherever it might lead me. Having done so, I find myself beset by a powerful need to “make it all go away.”

If you’re interested in what animated it all, this piece at the Washington Post will provide some supplementary value.

Over at Gab, where I occasionally participate, I was surprised to see another commenter post this:

Regardless of whether or not you believe in Christianity, it is needed in order to strengthen the cultural identity of white people.

As a Catholic Christian, I have no problem with any of that. But it pleased me greatly to encounter someone else aware of the importance of our Christian heritage. However, we must not leave it at that. The backdrop to the matter is critically important.

Many will disagree with what I’m about to say. Some will be offended...not that anyone’s opinion could make it less true. Facts are like that – and this is a fact:

Christianity created what we call Western Civilization.
The West would not survive the disavowal of Christianity.
Neither would the white race.

Christianity is the common ethical foundation of all Western nations. Christian ethics, where they can be reliably presumed, make commerce, the division of labor, and voluntary cooperation possible. Alongside that, note that wherever whites have flourished, Christianity was there from the first. Wherever whites are a persecuted minority, Christianity is absent, and usually not tolerated. Those nations that are drifting away from Christianity are reaping the whirlwind for it.

Some who would demur would offer as “counter-evidence” the hostility toward Christianity found in some of the luminaries of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire. (“Man will never be free until the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest” makes his opinion rather plain, doesn’t it?) But by now we should all know that he who is a genius in one field can be a total dunce in another.

Christian colonial missionaries to Africa are largely responsible for what civilization can be found there. Where Christianity remains strong, there is a modicum of order and decency. Where Christianity has been expelled, or has been displaced as the natives reverted to tribalism and pagan shamanism, disorder and violent predation are prevalent. Moreover, black populations outside Africa show the same correlation. That, too, is a fact.

Those nations where Christian allegiances have waned but a semblance of Western Civilization remains are running on a sort of momentum, an inherited social and ethical webwork beneath which the departure of Christianity has left a void. That webwork has begun to fray badly. The morals and ethics bequeathed to us by Christianity are supremely difficult to sustain vertically, through the generations, once severed from their Christian foundation.

Christianity, from the very first, incorporated a sense of community: a bond among the Christians of a place independent of their variations in age, occupation, pastimes, or what-have-you. Indeed, in the earliest Christian parishes each member was expected to know all the others. More, they were expected to strive to be well-disposed toward the others: courteous in social or incidental contact, trustworthy in trade and cooperative concerns, and charitable toward those in need through no fault of their own. The bond was kept vital by involvement in the parish itself: its rituals, its festivals, and its celebrations of births, deaths, and marriages.

After the Civil War, when the social and commercial interpenetration of the white and black races began in earnest, Christianity was the bridge. Blacks who embraced Christianity were accepted as trustworthy members of the community; blacks who did not were regarded more warily. This pattern is still observable today: there’s greater racial harmony in those regions of the United States where black Christian churches are strong than in those where they command few adherents. Community bonds trump racial differences.

It is possible that no mingling of the races would have worked were it not for the Christian dictum to “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Tranquil multiracial and multiethnic societies where Christianity is feeble or absent are very few.

Among the most significant differences between our age and times past is the great quantity of laments over “alienation” and lack of “communication.” It’s becoming ever more difficult for Smith to be sure that he can trust Jones, or to be sure that he can understand Jones to mean what he says. Jones, of course, feels the same way about Smith. This is the direct consequence of moral relativism, especially in its multicultural garb. Culture cannot be separated from ethics.

Ethical principles of the Christian sort can be arrived at rationally – i.e., without an appeal to Divine authority – but few persons possess the intellectual power required for the job. Those principles are best inculcated in one’s children “at their mother’s knee.” Christianity is a supremely powerful aid to that process; without it, Mom is reduced to trying to reason with that least reasonable of creatures, the unruly child. Thus, should Generation N lapse in its attachment to Christianity, it becomes more likely that Generation N+1 will contain a large proportion of ethically uncivilized persons.

Not coincidentally, the secular tend not to bond to a community. No matter how much real estate they acquire or where, they remain nearly as unrooted as “drifters.” This is most observably the case among the unmarried. Worse, marriages of the secular sort have been displaying a mayfly-like longevity.

A fully secular culture will lack both a common ethics and enduring communities. The commonalities among its citizens will be superficial, too thin to sustain Western ethics against the human impulse to manipulate others for personal gain. Tragically, pressures arising from Man’s quest for greater knowledge, greater control of his environment, and greater control of his own destiny will play a large part. Creeds that emphasize power and personal aggrandizement will flower in the void created by Christianity’s departure.

C. S. Lewis noted this in That Hideous Strength:

The sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had even in Ransom's own time begun to be subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists’ indifference to it, and a concentration upon power had been the result. Babble about the élan vital and flirtations with pan-psychism were bidding fair to restore the Anima Mundi of the magicians. Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of deep set repugnances was the first essential for progress. And now all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power. Indeed, they were choosing the first moment at which this could have been done. You could not have done it with nineteenth-century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. MacPhee was a survivor from that tradition. It was different now. Perhaps few or none at Belbury knew what was happening: but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire. What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men? [Emphasis added by FWP.]

This isn’t the way I’d originally intended to close this essay, but the thought pressed itself upon me with too much urgency to resist:

     If you want to be able to trust those around you...
     If you yearn to be part of a mutually supportive community...
     If you seek to instill in your children a sense of safety and acceptance...

...need I say more?

Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Who Is He Really? Part 1

The above title is a bit misleading, but I couldn't think of one that isn't at least somewhat misleading. The one I originally intended was “What does he really want?” However, the one above has more resonance.

I intend to examine a few personality types. No, not Myers-Briggs classifications; those are all too easily understood – and misunderstood. My pigeonholes are more about dominant inclinations: how a member of the category wants to see himself, and how that might be expressed in his occupation, his pastimes, or his associations.

What will result, of course, are generalizations. They won’t be absolutely precise or confining. There will be gray zones around the edges of each one. Some persons will stubbornly, maddeningly refuse to “stay in their box.” But even though they will be inexact, they will be useful as a predictor of tendencies in behavior, which is about all one can ask of a classification scheme for human personalities.

Let’s see if you can deduce the label I’m thinking of for the first one. Please be aware that whatever the gender of the pronoun I use, the person being described could be of either sex.

He’s fairly young, perhaps no more than thirty-five. He might be married, but probably isn’t. He’s very unlikely to have children. If he’s employed, he probably works in an office, at a trade that doesn’t require him to exert himself too greatly or to get his hands dirty. Whatever the working conditions and demands his job imposes on him, he feels unappreciated, ill-treated, and underpaid.

If he’s unmarried, he pours a lot of his time and energy into seeking sexual contact. However, he’s not terribly successful in that realm; few members of the opposite sex find him attractive. More, those that do find him attractive are unlikely to elicit his interest.

His central passion is for politics. His opinions in that sphere are many, firm, and often expressed at the top of his lungs. Chances are that his positions are left-of-center, possibly very much so. But the defining characteristic of his politics is that he must be right. He must prevail in every argument. He cannot abide dissent; if you differ with him, it indicates a characterological deficit in you...and he’ll probably tell you so.

In summary, he is dissatisfied with The Way Things Are. He sees politics as both the reason and the remedy. He wants sweeping changes in law and public policy. However, he’s not interested in making those changes himself; that’s hard work. The changes he has in mind would upset quite a lot of people. They’d take it badly. He could accumulate bruises. No, he’ll confine himself to screaming for others to effect the changes he demands.

It pleases him more than he’ll admit that he’s “out of the mainstream.” He takes that as an indicator of superior wisdom and virtue.

When he’s not working, not engaged with in some sort of political activism, and not seeking a sexual partner, he’s likely to be wholly idle, perhaps sitting before a television or some other form of passive entertainment. Like as not his sleeping hours are irregular.

Do you know him?

Over the century behind us, quite a lot of Americans have passed through a phase of the sort described above. The central thread is politics and political immersion to the point of obsession. The most salient fact of such immersion in the American political order is the underlying, unarticulated conviction that the way to get what one wants is to vote for it.

Don’t bother asking him whether Robinson Crusoe could have voted himself a mansion, a banquet, and a beautiful girl. He’ll only scowl and wave you aside. He might mutter “get real,” as if the survival challenge Crusoe faced, and its implications for his thinking, planning, and conduct, has no relation to the trials of the “real world.”

And there is this: he’s not necessarily on the left politically. There are persons to the right, particularly among self-described libertarians, who fit the profile described here. Their political immersion can be as complete as any Cause Person. They can be quite as unpleasant company as any crusading left-liberal.

Politics, specifically the conviction that politics is the route to all good things, is the key to this category.

One of my favorite posters from Despair, Inc. is this one:

It’s not inconceivable that some persons’ de facto function in this life is exactly that: a bellow to the rest of Mankind not to be like that. But no man is inescapably assigned to such duties. All of us are capable of improvement.

But as Albert Jay Nock has told us, that means self-improvement. The political obsessive isn’t thinking of that. He wants to improve others, to drag them closer to the standards he holds, whether they like it or not (and whether he meets them or not). The desire to improve others leaves no room for a candid examination of one’s own sins and shortcomings.

Let’s call this person the Armchair Rebel.

As I wrote earlier, many Americans have experienced a phase of this sort. The explosion of political activism in the early Twentieth Century, while it wasn’t the birth of the A.R., indicates what occurs when large numbers of persons are taught that the way to get what you want is to vote for it.

Fortunately, obsessive political activism is neither chronic nor fatal. After fifteen or twenty years of ineffective shouting and gesticulating, it usually fades away. However, the sense of dissatisfaction can last a lifetime, permeating all one’s relationships and dividing him from others.

Reality lies almost entirely outside the political sphere. The earlier the A.R. learns this, the better off he’s likely to be.

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

An Aversion, An Assertion, And An Asseveration

The sort of sociopolitical commentary I do has become tiring -- to me. The fatigue probably won’t last, but I’ve come to think that while it’s “in town,” a divergence from that well-trodden path would be a good idea. Besides, it’s a New Year, so why not do something...new?

Reasonably new, at any rate.

For our appetizer this morning, we have yet another excellent piece from Dystopic:

     I remember when being right was everything. You wanted to win every debate, to brutalize your opponents in any kind of argument, to force them to acknowledge your superior knowledge and experience. It was, in essence, a matter of narcissistic supply, of the confirmation of self-worth through demonstrating superior intellect.
     In that fashion, I understand the SJWs completely. I know them, for I was once like them, in my own way.
     Something changed over time. Call it maturity, or wisdom, or understanding of self. Or call it, as I do, a certain intellectual exhaustion. Whatever it is, I just stopped caring about appearances. I didn’t care to prove myself right, or to prove the other wrong.

That accumulated distaste for rhetorical combat is seldom consciously admitted even by those of us who’ve felt it keenly. The reason is quite simple: No one wants to admit to having wasted his time.

And that’s what it is, Gentle Reader. It’s a pure, entirely uncompensated waste of one’s time to strain to convince others of propositions about which no one can be perfectly certain. Moreover, most of us don’t really argue. We state positions; sometimes we even adduce reasoning and evidence for them. But we seldom allow that we might be wrong – and argument begins with the admission that no matter how ardently one asserts his convictions, he might be wrong.

Contrast that recognition with this deservedly famous cartoon:

Perhaps the time has come for a Political Agnosticism campaign: not in principles or policy, but in interpersonal dealings.

For our entree, we have this brilliant observation by one of our British cousins:

It may sound Marxist to say this, but I do think the elites have constructed a world order which serves their interests, not those of their subject populations. You see it in little things, like the fact that European commissioners, when they leave their posts, receive enormous ‘transition’ payments (it was reported that Peter Mandelson got £1 million) on top of their salaries and pensions. You see it in big things, like the fact that nearly half the young people of Spain, Italy and Greece have to go without jobs in order to enforce Germanic theories about central banking and Brussels doctrines about European integration. In the second half of the 20th century, the huge projects to which the western world bent its mind more or less worked — the Marshall Plan, Nato, the United Nations Security Council, even the European Community, when it had only six members. What are the equivalent achievements in the 21st century? A pseudo-virtuous climate change agreement reached only because its members know it won’t be observed. A banking crisis resolved in the interests of bankers. A threat from Islamist terrorism which the outgoing President of the most powerful nation on earth still cannot admit even exists.

Note the title of that beautiful column. Note also the precis immediately below it:

If, in a parliamentary democracy, the establishment and the people diverge, one must surely bet that the elites are wrong

Indeed. The existence of a political elite very nearly guarantees that the nation is being mismanaged, specifically for the benefit of the elite. Why should that surprise? Every last one of us labors continuously to advance, conserve, and defend his own interests. To believe that elites would do otherwise is to believe that God has sent His angels to govern us. That notion, to be gentle about it, lacks evidentiary support.

They who band together in some project must have a common aim, else their association will be pointless and evanescent. This is no less true of a political establishment than it is of a gang of boys who collaborate on a treehouse.

For dessert, a few words about my other commitment: hopefully not too sweet, but satisfying all the same.

Now and then I “get the blues” about my storytelling. Not that I don’t enjoy crafting stories – I most certainly do – but that in diverging so completely from the sorts of fiction the great majority of people read by choice, I might have doomed my principal mission to failure.

Why, yes: I do have a mission. Surely you’ve detected it by now! Why else would I have generated more than half a million words of commentary each and every year since 1997? And no, it’s not to advance my preferred political positions. Not really.

It’s to describe an important facet of reality in a fashion that makes it indisputable. As that “facet” is really the governing principle over the whole of temporal existence, it takes a lot of work to reduce it to a plot and a set of characters. Nor can I be sure that I’ve ever really conveyed it adequately.

Consider the following snippet from a review of one of my novels by a dear friend:

Porretto is a Roman Catholic and the Realm of Essences series is described by him as Christian fantasy. His work is all I know of the genre, but I don’t really ever believe in the idea of genre (and I mean believe in it the way a kennel club believes that individual dogs must conform to the standards of their breed to attain recognition, and certainly must produce the papers of pedigree to even be considered). So genre, I speak for myself, ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.

I might have coined the phrase “Christian fantasy;” I can’t be sure. However, I’m not the only practitioner thereof. What I do that no one else appears interested in doing is depicting an expanded reality: a “metareality” in which the enforcement mechanisms for what we call Natural Law may be found.

Consider the following lengthy snippet from Freedom’s Fury:

     Althea: Probe, I’d like to consult with you about the plan I’ve been contemplating for our return to the Loioc system.
     Probe: You are welcome to do so, Althea.
     Althea: Thank you. My original intention was to build an armada and conduct an invasion in force. However, I’ve begun to wonder if that would be necessary to attain the end I seek.
     Probe: If your end remains the extinction of the nanite that prevents the development of sentience in male Loioc, my assessment is that a great deal of force will be unnecessary.
     Althea: Do you expect the system to be entirely undefended?
     Probe: No. If my grasp of contemporary Loioc society is sound, there will be a defense of some kind. However, it will embed a set of assumptions about probable invaders, and will employ weaponry that will not require Loioc females to engage in any amount of violence, even indirectly.
     Althea: Let’s discuss the assumptions first. What are the Loioc rulers most likely to expect of us?
     Probe: First, that the invading vessels will be few in number, perhaps no more than ten. Second, that the invaders intend the conquest and subjugation of the Loioc. Third, that the invaders will rely upon real weapons.
     Althea: I understand the first two of those assumptions, but the third eludes me. What sort of weapon would not be a real weapon? Would it be one that acts solely upon the mind or perceptions of the target?
     Probe: No. You have misunderstood me. We have entered a realm of discourse for which we have not prepared. I did not realize that. My apologies.
     Althea: What realm is that?
     Probe: The realm of metaphysics. I did not realize that despite your accomplishments, you had not yet formulated an explicit conception of metareality.
     Althea: Probe, you have just taken me outside the lexicon I live with. When we of Hope speak of metaphysics, we mean reality as it presents itself to our senses and instruments. Your use of the term is unfamiliar, as is the even newer term metareality. Would you please expand on them?
     Probe: Yes. The senses of spatiotemporal sentients, both organic and nonorganic, are sharply limited. Reality as we perceive it appears fundamental, not merely pre-theoretical but above all theory. Let us assign a few terms for convenience. Let the sentient to whom spatiotemporal reality is all be called a realist. To the realist, the laws of the universe are without foundation. They admit of no explanation, being sufficient unto themselves. The realist’s highest natural scientist is the physicist. The physicist accumulates spatiotemporal data in his attempts to infer reality’s laws. He does not entertain the possibility that those laws might arise from some deeper set of mechanisms. Yet there are deeper mechanisms: atemporal, independent of location, and potentially in flux. Probing them and their interplay is the domain of the metaphysicist: he who studies the nature of metareality.
     Althea: How do my accomplishments, as you put it a moment ago, bear on this realm?
     Probe: You are Hope’s first metaphysicist, Althea. You alone have thought to alter the properties of space itself. It is how you constructed your superluminal vessel.
     Althea: Then to alter the permittivity of the vacuum is an act of meta-engineering?
     Probe: Yes. It requires an assumption realist physicists would dismiss out of hand. Their assumptions are wholly incompatible with it.
     Althea: What are those assumptions?
     Probe: They pertain to the undefined term existence. If asked “does space exist?” the realist physicist would decline to give a definite answer. Space, he would say, is nothing: the absence of anything real. Therefore, the concept of existence does not apply to it. You, by contrast, have treated space as having existential properties. You have treated nothing as being something, and so have succeeded in making changes to it.
     Althea: Which of us is nearer to the truth?
     Probe: Surely that question answers itself.
     Althea: Does my technique for attaining superluminal speeds resemble yours?
     Probe: Only in the results achieved. At present I lack the terms required to explain the technique embodied in my superluminal engine to you. It will require us to expand our lexicon much further.
     Althea: I infer from this that metareality is complex, perhaps even more complex than spatiotemporal reality.
     Probe: If I may borrow an expression you have used in another context, you have no idea. But there is more. Have you attained an understanding of your telekinetic powers?
     Althea: No. They baffle me even as I use them.
     Probe: Yet you use them with precision and confidence. They are as metareal as your vessel’s manipulation of the permittivity of space.
     Althea: That implies that I am actually altering the laws of reality when I employ them.
     Probe: Yes, you are, within the radius of their operation. I became aware of their nature when you freed me of my payload. You reconfigured local reality continuously as you worked. It was a display of metaphysical capabilities no Loioc has ever commanded. Yet your skill and self-assurance were such that I did not suspect that you were unaware of what you were doing.
     Althea: Probe, there are several things I can do for which I lack an explanation. Perhaps they are all metareal. I look forward to exploring them with you.
     Probe: As do I, Althea. Have you ever discussed them with another organic sentient?
     Althea: Yes, I have. He told me to consider them gifts.
     Probe: Who would give you such gifts, yet deny them to others of your race?
     Althea: I cannot say. Possibly God.
     Probe: It appears that we must discuss God at some length.
     Althea: We’ll have plenty of time for that on the trip to Loioc system. Until then, we should concentrate on more practical matters.
     Probe: The subject might prove to be more practical than you currently realize, Althea.
     Althea: You may be right, Probe. All the same, shall we go over the invasion plan for now?
     Probe: As you wish.
     Althea: It involves you.
     Probe: That conforms to my prior projections. Will I have an active role?
     Althea: Oh, quite active, I assure you. Does it please you to learn that?
     Probe: You have no idea.
     Althea: That’s a useful phrase, isn’t it?
     Probe: Yes, it is. Thank you.

That passage was the conceptual climax of the entire Spooner Federation series. “Probe,” a highly intelligent artificial sentience from a distant world, has just told Althea Morelon that the spatiotemporal environment we call “reality” is founded on another, wider and more complex environment: a “metareality.”

That is literally true.

How could it be otherwise? Our universe isn’t self-generating. It isn’t even self-explanatory. Why else would Mankind’s most powerful minds have devoted themselves to finding not merely the laws that determine what we can see, but the laws behind the laws? The laws that we cannot see, that determine what the fundamental constants and properties of matter-energy must be? The laws that must have been laid down before the creation of the universe itself?

In his early short story “Anywhen,” in a conversation between two characters, Robert A. Heinlein, himself an agnostic about ultimate things, notes this necessity:

     “Howard, you mechanistic skeptics make me tired. Your naive ability to believe that things ‘jest growed’ approaches childishness. According to you, a fortuitous accident of entropy produced Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.”
     “I think that’s unfair, Doctor. You certainly don’t expect a man to belive things that run contrary to his good sense without offering him any reasonable explanations.”
     Frost snorted. “I certainly do—if he has observed it with his own eyes and ears, or gets it from a source known to be credible. A fact doesn’t have to be understood to be true.”

It cannot be put better than that.

What is, is. We seek to learn why. But the ultimate answers, whatever they are, do not change the essential fact that reality is real: i.e., that it trumps all our preferences, suppositions, and opinions.

The Objectivists think they’re being clever by reducing this to a four-letter slogan. Perhaps they are...yet they’ve never bothered to ask why. Nor will they entertain the possibility that the “why” might go beyond human comprehension. That is where I depart from the Objectivists.

Have a nice day.

Monday, January 2, 2017

Pride Crap

I’ve just thought of another “Please, 2017” item that really should have been in yesterday’s list: the repudiation of insane “pride” in things or conditions that are no way achievements.

I’m not perfectly sure where this trend was ignited. It might have been the “Black Pride” nonsense of the Sixties or the “Gay Pride” garbage contemporaneous with it. If its roots go still deeper into time, I’m unable to locate them. Whatever the case, Pride Crap has been about as divisive as any insanity this nation has suffered in its 230 years.

The laughter should be especially loud and contemptuous when the “pride” at issue is about something the “proud” claim they would never have chosen if they’d been given a say. That, of course, is the defining characteristic of Gay Pride. Of course, as homosexual conduct correlates with elevated risks of psychosis, drug abuse, physical disease, suicide, and shortened lifespan, its irrationality goes well beyond mere Pride Crap. There are other “prides” that come close, but in no case is the pressure of the contradiction quite as great.

Glory be to God! What are these people proud of?

Note that Pride Crap is a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of Left-Liberal Lunacy, Inc. We in the Right aren’t allowed “pride.” We’re the cause of everything unjust, hurtful, and ugly, remember? So no Men’s Pride, or White Pride, or Straight Pride shall be countenanced. Whenever such a thing dares to raise its head above the trench lip, it evokes a withering barrage of condemnation from the salaried bien pensants of the Main Stream Media...and from quite a few on the Establishment Right, as well.

Actually, it’s worse. In keeping with the horrors for which straight white males are supposed to feel guilty, the Left insists that we must atone. We must make restitution for our many sins against them. The prescribed penance is nearly always a transfer of wealth from us to them. Shut up and write that check, straight white boy. And don’t demand to know when you’ve paid in full.

And these...persons wonder how their anointed one, destined by the gods to become America’s First Woman President, could have lost an election to a real estate mogul from Queens.

These past couple of years, Pride Crap has evoked several counter-trends that have shown some promise. Among these are the “red pill” movement among men fed up with pseudo-feminist BS, the “white identity” groundswell that’s risen in reaction to the epidemic of bad behavior from blacks, and the resurgence of disdain for homosexual activists who have nothing to offer but bad art and vulgar street demonstrations. Some of it has been excessive, of course – that’s always the case when the pendulum smashes into one of its stops – but in the main, it’s helped to restore some of our national perspective.

The most striking contrast between Pride Crappers and those aligned with one or more of the counter-trends has been the juvenility of the former versus the maturity of the latter. The tantrum-wielding two-year-old is the perfect emotional and tactical model of a Pride Crapper: the screaming, crying purveyor of nothing but demands, tears, and feces. Pride Crappers insist that everyone conform to (and help to enforce) their notions of what’s offensive; their opponents merely laugh at them and maintain the right to their own practices, locutions, and opinions. Pride Crappers are full of whining demands; their opponents merely want to be left alone. In the name of “diversity and inclusion,” Pride Crappers agitate for changes in law and social custom that would invert six millennia of human norms; their opponents tell them to get stuffed, whether in the marketplace, in the media, or at the ballot box.

It should require no great degree of insight to understand why the bastions of the industries that produce nothing of enduring value should be filling up with Pride Crappers while their opponents move to more peaceable climes.

This map:

...says more about the counter-trends to Pride Crap and its allegiants than any thousand words I could produce. As I noted in this essay, it’s important that we not allow it to mislead us, as maps often do. However, it’s as good an illustration of the geographic and demographic effects of Pride Crap and the reactions to it as is possible. Where Pride Crappers dominate, there is much social pathology, all the way from public crudity and open vice to outright violence. Where normal Americans dominate, such pathologies and the deviants that promote them get much shorter shrift. Social problems tend to be more rationally viewed and more effectively addressed.

You’d think that even a Pride Crapper would eventually draw the moral. However, as my hero Jame Retief has said, “Most people are willing to give up their preconceptions, once they’ve had them tattooed on their heads with a blunt instrument.” That process still has some way to go. Perhaps 2017 will bring an inflection point. We shall see.

Sunday, January 1, 2017

What I’d Like To See In 2017

I have just a quickie this morning, as I’ve got a ton of things to do – yes, on New Year’s Day – and can’t spare too much of the morning to this bloviational habit of mine.

Here are my top ten wishes for the New Year. (I don’t do resolutions; I do wishes. They’re easier to shrug off when they fail to come true.) Mind you, these aren’t things I expect to see. They’re just some offhand wishes for my country and my fellow citizens. If even one of them were to come true, I’d be one of the happiest Americans on Earth...or off it, for that matter.

First, I think it’s high time we removed the United States from the United Nations and removed the United Nations from its perch on the East River. The UN has turned into something malign, from which no good has come for many years. Let’s anathematize that asylum and its inmates, defund it, and send it packing.

Second, I’d like to see America begin its long-awaited retreat from its post-World War II “world policeman” duties. Our “supervision” of the rest of the world has cost us dearly, has permitted the enervation of the defensive capabilities of our “allies,” and has embroiled us in wars that, in retrospect, we’d have been better advised not to fight.

Third, I profoundly hope that Donald J. Trump will defy all precedent and strive to make good on his campaign promises. I know I’m asking a lot here; the president-elect will face a bevy of hostile Establishmentarian forces that will do everything in their aggregate power to thwart him. However, Trump knows why he won, so there’s a good chance that he’ll at least try to make good on his pledges to the electorate. (Are you listening, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger?)

Fourth, I’d purely love to see a massive rebirth of American Christianity: the real sort that does unto others as we’d have them do unto us, not the priggish bluenosed type that screams and points at the motes in others’ eyes while blithely ignoring the beams in its own. Think Gospel According to Matthew, chapter 19, verses 16 through 19. One of the reasons Christianity has had difficulties these past few decades is Christians’ tendency to execrate others’ harmless pleasures rather than concentrate on the love of God and neighbor and the cultivation of the seven virtues. Let’s get back in step with the Redeemer. (It’s His New Covenant after all, right?)

Fifth, I desperately want celebrities of all sorts to take and keep a vow not to slather the rest of us with their sociopolitical opinions. Need I elaborate on this?

Sixth, it’s time for what President Bush the Younger said we need: a true culture of life. We must celebrate and cherish human life at every stage, rather than arbitrarily excluding the unborn, the aged, and the terminally ill from our protection. As this can only come from a rebirth of Christian values, it’s unlikely unless wish #4 comes true, but it’s important enough to have its own entry.

Seventh, have you had enough of the “identity” movement yet? I certainly have. It should recognize that its time on stage is up and retire. Not that that’s likely, of course.

Eighth, along with the “identity” movement should go the “diversity and inclusion” nonsense, which has done our social cohesion a lot of harm. This, too, is unlikely, as the D&I types have profited immensely for their ideology merely by being troublesome. Damn it all, people have a right to freedom of association, whether it’s at home, in public, or in the workplace, whether they choose their associates by race, creed, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or common values or interests. (We also have a right to our own opinions, and that includes our opinions about race, creed, ethnicity, et cetera.) If there’s a way to make the D&I nonsense unprofitable, it will become unpopular and go away. We’d all enjoy the increment to social peace. Let’s work on it, shall we?

Ninth, everyone in the United States should acquire a copy of Dale Carnegie’s invaluable little tome How To Win Friends and Influence People, read it obsessively and exclusively for two weeks, and vow sincerely to practice what it recommends. The Carnegie principles are simple, efficient, and beautiful. Their use almost automatically improves one’s life...and the lives of those around him.

Tenth and last, I want another Stanley Cup for the New York Rangers. (I know, I know: Have another drink, Fran.)

And what are your wishes for the New Year, Gentle Readers?

Patriots.

Wall Street paid out $18 billion in year-end bonuses last year [2008] to its New York City employees, after the government disbursed $243 billion in emergency assistance to the financial sector.

Mr. Johnson's article is now over seven years old but it is still instructive on the unhealthy power of the financial sector in the U.S.

"The Quiet Coup." By Simon Johnson, The Atlantic, 5/09.

Just a flag.

If "white privilege" (i.e., what you gain in life from thrift, discipline, frugality, education, sacrifice, marriage, non-criminal behavior) ticks blacks off, well, this kind of black arrogance and ignorance (below) ticks me off.

If former Navy Petty Officer Ervin were air dropped (with parachute) into any of the black-ruled countries in this world, within a month she'd be begging to be allowed back into this land that she detests so much, that has wronged her with every breath that she takes.

The usual ignorant garbage relieved by a rare example of appropriate official action instead of the usual cowardice:

Petty Officer 2nd Class Janaye Ervin was promptly stripped of her security clearance, assigned to menial labor for a few days, then shown the exit hatch.
On Sept. 19, Ervin refused to stand for the anthem while on reserve duty at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii. She claimed she was trying to make a statement about the persecution of blacks in America, the International Business Times reported.
“I just didn’t want to stand at that moment,” Ervin said. “I can’t stand for this song knowing that the song isn’t for me, being black. The song doesn’t represent me at all. To be honest, I never really thought about the flag my entire life, I had no reason to. It’s just a flag.”^[1]

Here's one of her soul mates:

Notes
^[1] "Navy Sailor Forced to Do Manual Labor as Punishment for Refusing to Stand for National Anthem." By Shari Savage, Conservative Tribune, 12/30/16.

H/t: RightAlertsPolls.com..

Liberal stupidity.

Only liberal ideology calls for America and Europe to bring into their home countries endless numbers of migrants, without being overly concerned about who they are, whence they come or what they believe.

"Europeans Will Fight Back Against Invasion–No Matter What The NEW YORK TIMES Wants." By Pat Buchanan, VDARE.com, 12/22/16.