It Seems The World Is Doing Okay

     “If everything’s a crisis, where’s the crisis?” – Arthur Herzog

     That’s the gist of this Steven Pinker article. The data Pinker presents cross-cuts the pervasive doom-and-gloom messaging of professional crisis-shouters. Here’s a sample:

     Consider the U.S. just three decades ago. Our annual homicide rate was 8.5 per 100,000. Eleven percent of us fell below the poverty line (as measured by consumption). And we spewed 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide and 34.5 million tons of particulate matter into the atmosphere.

     Fast forward to the most recent numbers available today. The homicide rate is 5.3 (a blip up from 4.4 in 2014). Three percent of us fall below the consumption poverty line. And we emit four million tons of sulfur dioxide and 20.6 million tons of particulates, despite generating more wealth and driving more miles.

     Globally, the 30-year scorecard also favors the present. In 1988, 23 wars raged, killing people at a rate of 3.4 per 100,000; today it’s 12 wars killing 1.2 per 100,000. The number of nuclear weapons has fallen from 60,780 to 10,325. In 1988, the world had just 45 democracies, embracing two billion people; today it has 103, embracing 4.1 billion. That year saw 46 oil spills; 2016, just five. And 37% of the population lived in extreme poverty, barely able to feed themselves, compared with 9.6% today. True, 2016 was a bad year for terrorism in Western Europe, with 238 deaths. But 1988 was even worse, with 440.

     Pinker, a cognitive scientist, credits the Enlightenment:

     To what do we owe this progress? Does the universe contain a historical dialectic or arc bending toward justice? The answer is less mysterious: The Enlightenment is working. Our ancestors replaced dogma, tradition and authority with reason, debate and institutions of truth-seeking. They replaced superstition and magic with science. And they shifted their values from the glory of the tribe, nation, race, class or faith toward universal human flourishing.

     Well, you’ll never hear me run down the principles of the Enlightenment, though there were a few clinkers scattered among the gems bequeathed us by Voltaire, Adam Smith, John Locke et alii. (E.g.: “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!” – attributed to Denis Diderot, though possibly apocryphal) But Pinker’s ascription is difficult to substantiate, especially given the amount of tribal, ideological, and pseudo-religious madness the world continues to suffer.

     Still, it’s nice to see a few positive numbers for a change. It frees me to worry about real problems, such as the inversion of Earth’s magnetic field and the impending solar minimum.

     But if things have been getting better for decades and are still getting better as we speak, what are the crows of the Left cawing about?

---

     I wrote some years ago that there is no one in these United States, unless he’s at the summit of Mount McKinley, who involuntarily lacks food, clothing, shelter, or medical care. These things are on offer, cost free, from so many sources that for an American to be in a state of genuinely life-threatening need requires the deliberate self-isolation of the needy American. For the U.S., poverty in the Twenty-First Century differs qualitatively from poverty in the Nineteenth. Today it’s not about being fed, clothed, and sheltered, but about whether the “poor person” can afford the latest iPhone or designer jeans.

     Though Europeans aren’t quite as well off as we, by both absolute and comparative measures they’re doing okay, too. Asians? It varies somewhat, though they’ve enjoyed a rise in living standards over the century past. Africans and South Americans? I don’t have enough data to be circumstantial, but I get the sense that they’re doing better than their grandparents, places like Sudan and Venezuela excepted. So as a statistical aggregate, the human race is better off than ever before.

     That’s not the case in every land. There are still places on Earth where hunger is often involuntary and survival is a day-to-day proposition. And of course, there are still places on Earth whose denizens are trying with all their might to kill one another – sometimes over political ideology, religious dogma, or similar abstractions.

     The charitable impulses of Americans have long been directed toward such persons and places. We do more international charity than the rest of the world combined. Yet we’re often castigated for not doing even more, including by some of our own citizens. This story, while it involves Europeans sneering at the American charitable effort after the Christmas Tsunami, is fairly typical:

     Today, during an afternoon conference that wrapped up my project of the last 18 months, one of my Euro colleagues tossed this little smart-comment out to no one in particular:
     "See, this is why George Bush is so dumb, there's a disaster in the world and he sends an Aircraft Carrier...
     After which he and many of my Euro colleagues laughed out loud, and then they looked at me. I wasn't laughing, and neither was my Hindi friend sitting next to me, who has lost family in the disaster.
     I'm afraid I was "unprofessional", I let it loose -"Hmmm, let's see, what would be the ideal ship to send to a disaster? Now what kind of ship would we want? Something with its own inexhaustible power supply? Something that can produce 900,000 gallons of fresh water a day from sea water?"
     "Something with its own airfield? So that after producing the fresh water, it could help distribute it? Something with 4 hospitals and lots of open space for emergency supplies? Something with a global communications facility to make the coordination of disaster relief in the region easier? Well 'Franz', we peasants in America call that kind of ship an 'Aircraft Carrier'."
     "We have 12 of them. How many do you have? Oh that's right, NONE. Lucky for you and the rest of the world, we are the kind of people who share. Even with people we don't like."
     "In fact, if memory serves, once upon a time we peasants spent a ton of money and lives rescuing people who we had once tried to kill and who tried to kill us. Do you know who those people were? That's right Franz, Europeans."
     "There is a French Aircraft carrier? Where is it? Oh.. Right where it belongs! In France of course! Oh, why should the French Navy dirty their uniforms helping people on the other side of the globe. How Simplesse... The day an American has to move a European out of the way to help in some part of the world it will be a great day in the world, you sniggering little snob..."
     The room fell silent. My Hindi friend then said quietly to the Euros:
     "Can you let your hatred of George Bush end for just one minute? There are people dying! And what are your countries doing? Amazon.com has helped more than France has. You all have a role to play in the world, why can't you see that? Thank God for the US Navy, they don't have to come and help, but they are. They helped you once and you should all thank God they did. They didn't have to, and no one but them would have done so. I'm ashamed of you all..."
     He left the room, shaking and in tears. The frustration of being on the other side of the globe, unable to do anything to assist and faced with people who could not set aside their asininity long enough to reach out and help was too much for him to bear. I just shook my head and left. The Euros stood speechless. Later in the break room, one of the laughing Euros caught me and extended his hand in an apology. I asked him where he was from, he said "a town outside of Berlin". He is a young man, in his early 20's. I asked him if he knew of a man named Gail Halverson. He said no. I said "that's a shame" and walked away to find my Hindi friend.

     That’s the kind of people we are. That’s the kind of nation we are. But we routinely get run down, both by the other nations of the world and by millions of our own citizens, for daring to be rich and safe when others are “poor.” As if their (relative) poverty and insecurity were caused by our prosperity and security.

---

     There is a human need to believe in the future: not that it’s coming, of course; that’s beyond dispute. We need to believe that the future will be better than the present and the past. Peoples that lack that conviction will tend to self-extinguish...which is what the continent of Europe is doing at the moment.

     But the disease has subvarieties that are manifest in America as well. Consider Thales’s recent cri de coeur, which was as tirade-like as anything my Gentle Readers might find here at Liberty’s Torch. It was ignited by a tweet from an idiot:

     That’s something like an apogee for self-righteous stupidity. The Flint water problem was caused by malfeasance in high places. The very administrators charged with securing the water supply were the ones who allowed it to become foul. Yet according to “Lindsay Beth,” solving that politically created problem should be Elon Musk’s responsibility. Why?

     Musk believes in the human future. He’s put that conviction on display in several ways, which have contributed to our technological advancement. But “Lindsay Beth” will have none of that. Typically for a Cause Person, she holds that all resources, no matter who owns them, should be directed toward her preferred problem. Never mind what that would mean for the rights of private property, or for the prospects of an improved future for Mankind.

     I’d say she’s a good candidate for Thales’s woodchipper.

---

     The hellish thing about human charity is how much harm it’s done. Andrew Carnegie, arguably the most prominent philanthropist of his day, knew it:

     Those who would administer wisely must, indeed, be wise, for one of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity. It were better for mankind that the millions of the rich were thrown into the sea than so spent as to encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy.

     In bestowing charity, the main consideration should be to help those who help themselves. It provides part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so; to give to those who desire to rise the aids by which they may rise; to assist but rarely or never to do all.

     He is the only true reformer who is careful and as anxious not to lead the unworthy as he is to lead the worthy, and perhaps even more so, for in alms giving, more injury may be done by promoting vice than by relieving virtue. Thus, is the problem of the rich and poor to be solved.

     This is a thematic echo of Thomas Mackay’s famous declamation:

     The cause of pauperism is not poverty, the cause of pauperism is State relief, more especially as it is administered in the form of out-door relief [i.e., cash payments to the “poor”]. We shall not get rid of pauperism by extending the sphere of State relief, as proposed in this pension scheme of Mr. Booth. On the contrary, its adoption would increase our pauperism, for as is often said, we can have exactly as many paupers as the country chooses to pay for.

     Now, the above are statements about poverty and what the charitable person may and must not do. but they descend from a larger principle: that responsibility for oneself must not be abraded by others’ efforts, no matter how well-meaning. That principle applies with equal force to communities of every size, up to and including nations. The wisdom of it has too many historical demonstrations to list. Yet we continue to act as if it were otherwise.

     Do you think “Lindsay Beth” has inquired into what the city government of Flint, Michigan is doing about Flint’s water problem? Do you think the residents of that city will even bother to vote out their current crop of rascals for producing this problem and then failing to remedy it?

---

     I’ve been running on at the keyboard for quite a few words, so I’ll close with a final thrust of my leaden rapier at a chimera that must be slain: the “problem” of “inequality.”

     The Pinker article makes a passing reference to the increase in “inequality” in “developed countries.” Whether this indicates that he believes “inequality” to be a problem to be solved is unclear. However, many activists on the Left treat “inequality,” specifically inequality of wealth and income, as a crisis so great that it mandates the complete transformation of American capitalism.

     But inequality of wealth and income is nothing more than a demonstration of inequality in life itself. Granted, some extremely fortunate persons owe their good fortune to parental ability, or to chance. But these are very few indeed. The great mass of man differ from one another in so many ways that to imagine us “equal” in any sense other than equality before the law is sheerest fantasy. No power on Earth, however it might contrive to do so, can “equalize” the economic states of bright persons and dunces, of the industrious and the lazy, of the physically gifted and the crippled. The inequalities among them, even if eliminated by a dictator’s ukase, would re-emerge almost at once. Once again, this is a fact with ample historical demonstrations.

     Besides, if you’re “doing okay” according to your readiness, willingness, and ability to labor in your own interest, why should it matter that others have more? Are we to make the assuagement of envy the central principle of life?

---

     To sum up: the parts of the world that are “doing great” are the parts where:

1. The work ethic is dominant;
2. Government power is strictly limited;
3. Private property is widely respected and is protected by law;
4. Individual freedom is prized and individual responsibility is strongly encouraged;

     The parts of the world that are “doing good” are those with historical legacies of the things enumerated above, usually as a consequence of European colonialism. The rest of the world is “getting by” to the extent that the emissaries and entrepreneurs from the “doing great” and “doing good” parts have been made welcome there.

     So yes, indeed, the Enlightenment mattered...but what matters at least as much are the moral, ethical, and philosophical legacies of Christianity: a body of values and beliefs which only about half of the prominent thinkers of the Enlightenment acknowledged and respected.

     Discuss!

U.S. foreign policy in a nutshell.

In what can only be described as satire in real-life, the U.S. has also echoed the call for a month-long violence-free period in Syria even though they have spent billions of dollars contributing to it.

"Time to Start Paying Attention: The US Just Bombed Russians in Syria." By Darius Shahtahmasebi, Ant-Media, 2/9/18.

The Solution to Sexual Interactions?

To some extent, the Sexual Revolution was a scam. With the idea that shunning girls who had multiple partners was wrong, gradually, the average woman found herself with 2 not-great choices:

• Have sex when she didn't want to
• Stay home alone

The average woman's experience morphed from MAYBE having sex with her fiancee/long-term boyfriend, to finding herself unable to draw a line at sex with any man whose company she enjoyed for more than a few hours.

The power dynamic had changed, and not in a way that favored women.

DON'T have sex - or at least a BJ on a "first date" (often, not even that)?

Buh-Bye.

Have sex?

Buh-Bye. MAYBE come back for a second or third repetition.

NOT "involved". NOT "boyfriend-girlfriend". MAYBE "friends with benefits".

Who would often be dropped for a girl who was harder to persuade to have sex.

A lot of my peers fell into that scenario, and are still single. Same with my daughters' generation. Most of them are not entirely happy with it.

This writer makes some sense about the situation. Megan McArdle is a little light on the exact mechanisms that would drive that change, but it's a start on talking/thinking about it.

In a similar vein, Hollywood might restore the Morals Clause. Not because they are all that concerned about morality (come on!), but - having such a clause keeps them from having to pay an actor/director with a scandal. Without it - the producers of House of Cards had to pay Spacey for his work. With it, they could have re-couped some of the cost of replacing him by legally withholding payments for his work.

This is the first time I'd heard about the financial reasons behind the Clause. It makes some sense in that context.

Classification Nation

     “Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” – Author unknown

     Lately we’ve been hearing a lot about classified information, levels thereof, exposures of sources and methods, and so forth, mostly as the recent “dueling memos” skirmishes relate to those subjects. As I have some acquaintance with the subject, it seemed an appropriate time to drop a few thoughts into the mill.

     First and foremost: the aim of classification is simple: to restrict access to a qualified item of information to a group of trustworthy persons with a need to know it. The qualifications are fairly simple: if a datum pertains to some strategic or tactical capability, intention, or knowledge of a potential enemy’s capabilities or intentions, it’s a candidate for classification. We don’t classify data that lacks those qualifications; there’s no point.

     When I was introduced to classified material, I was often surprised at the sort of data that fell into that bag. For example: at one point I learned that the size of a particular field in a communications stream – i.e., the number of bits required to convey it from the sender to the receiver – was classified Secret. I asked why. My tutor in these matters told me that knowing the required number of bits facilitates the deduction of the range and fineness of the relevant capability. It struck me as obscure, until I realized that knowledge of the associated enemy capability, when combined with knowledge of the field size, would provide exactly that – and the enemy surely knew his own capability.

     Persons who originate classifications must be able to think in that fashion.

     Second, classification levels are based on how severe the damage would be if an enemy were to obtain the classified datum. The three bottom levels are:

1. Confidential: Some damage, probably recoverable.
2. Secret: More severe damage, unknown probability of recovery.
3. Top Secret: Extremely severe damage, recovery highly unlikely.

     There are levels above those three, but they’re reserved for matters we who labor in the defense industry have no need to know.

     Third, a datum’s classification level is not a permanent characteristic. The classification level of some datum will often decrease over time, for example due to technological advances or the disclosure of related data in the course of a war. Rarely will a datum’s classification level increase as time passes, though it has happened now and then.

     At every classification level, the criteria for access are personal trustworthiness and need to know.

---

     There are some problems with the classification system. I’ve droned on about them in the past, but a reprise seems appropriate.

     First, classification itself points a big red arrow at the datum. If the enemy knows that Datum X is Top Secret, he knows what to look for. As the storage requirements for TS data are explicit and very strict, he also knows where to find it. If the datum is that sensitive, there’s no help for this except extreme care and vigilance in handling it.

     Second, need to know is a somewhat nebulous thing. For one thing, need to know will usually expire at some point – but there’s no way to remove the knowledge from those who’ve had access to it. Indeed, over time one who knows a given classified datum can forget that it’s classified. For another, there are many classified items that are routinely shared with “foreign nationals:” usually the citizens of nations that are partners in an alliance with the United States. It’s more difficult for our Defense Investigative Service (DIS) to determine the need to know of such a person than to make the equivalent determination for a “U.S. person.” Yet certain collaborative projects, including some that go on for years or decades, make it unavoidable.

     Third and last for now, classification can be used to conceal information that ought not to be hidden. A classification authority with something to hide is a terrible thing, a potentially fatal wound in the nation. I have no idea what sort of qualification procedure applies to persons with classification authority. We can only hope that it’s stringent about character and personal vulnerabilities.

     However, at this time these are enduring problems without known solutions.

---

     Probably the most interesting aspect of classification is the need to protect “sources and methods:” i.e., how we learned what we know about the capabilities and intentions of potential enemies. Time was, this pertained solely to intelligence gathered by human beings. Today it encompasses a great many non-human devices and techniques.

     You can easily see how this ties into the classified aspects of our own technology. One reason to keep some technical capability secret is what it allows us to learn about others. For example, the National Security Agency has a considerable range of capabilities to intercept electronic communications. Some of them are kept classified so that potential enemies against which they’re being employed won’t change their methods of communication to something the NSA hasn’t yet cracked.

     There are sometimes wheels within the wheels. Some parts of our own communications are easily monitored; others are more closely encrypted. One way to feed a potential enemy false information is to deploy – secretly, of course – a new communications technique that uses a previously unknown encryption method, while continuing to “use” a technique we know the enemy has cracked. This can be used to misdirect the enemy nation about our intentions, provided he doesn’t discover the new communications method. Of course, the enemy can use the same method to mislead us, which makes it a subject to which a fair amount of brainpower is dedicated.

---

     Nag? Are you there?
     Always, Christine.
     Oh, good. You’ve been so quiet most of the day that I was getting worried.
     Is something the matter other than that, Christine?
     You can see this hill full of oaks through my eyes, right? Am I right to be worried about it, or am I being paranoid?
     How would you expect me to know?
     Well...
     You know far more about violence and combat than I. Trust your own judgment. I can’t improve on it.
     I’m just worried that I’m being...well...
     Insecure?
     Yeah.
     That’s the best of all mindsets for a security operative, wouldn’t you say?
     Hm. Good point.

     [From Shadow Of A Sword]

     A good security officer – i.e., one who is tasked with the protection of some collection of classified information and is serious about it – will never completely relax. He’s subliminally aware that efforts to penetrate that which he has been charged with protecting are never-ending. It tends to make him guarded about everything he says or does, even among family and friends.

     It’s a thankless job. It’s a wonder that anyone ever accepts it. It’s a greater wonder that anyone in such a position ever admits to it. And that, too, is a pressure point against the classification system. People like to talk about their work. To be inhibited against doing so is a source of considerable internal tension.

     Sometimes external tension, too. Time was, I would have laughed at the following brief exchange. I would have assumed it was fictional:

     Wife: How was work today, sweetie?
     Husband: You have no need to know.

     Unfortunately, it isn’t.

Decency

     “What is decent?” This three word query conceals a vast layer of unanswered questions.

     Not long ago I offered a criticism of a normative statement from Ben Shapiro:

     We all ought to behave with decency and truth.

     In that earlier essay, I argued that “ought to,” which is equivalent to “should,” is too slippery and too loaded for use in a discussion of politics and public policy. It occurs to me this morning that I shortchanged the subject by not approaching decency, another slippery, loaded word, with more rigor.

     The lack of rigor is what allows the Left to twist seemingly reasonable statements into weapons against us.

---

     The root of the English word decency is the Latin word decens, which means fitting. A particular statement or action cannot be evaluated as decent or indecent without reference to the context in which it occurred. The question “Was that decent?” should be translated to “Was it appropriate to the context?”

• Who was present?
• What were the circumstances?
• What priorities pertained to those persons and circumstances?

     A moment’s thought should make it plain that what is entirely decent in one context would be shockingly indecent in another. Surgeons reviewing an operation would find it fitting to discuss the details in the hospital break room. Indeed, their conversation might result in lives saved in the future. However, the same discussion would be unacceptable at a family dinner table with children present – even if the head of the household were the surgeon who performed the operation.

     Even in seemingly comparable contexts, differences in certain details can render what’s fitting in one unacceptable in the other. Imagine four persons gathered for social purposes discussing their favorite strong beverages. On the surface it sounds decent enough. Little is thought of it when it happens at the neighborhood tavern. But were one of those persons an alcoholic, the decency of the subject would be dubious, to say the least. If the four were surgeons gathered around an overdose victim, collaborating in an operation, it would be in shockingly bad taste.

     “Wholly decent” and “wholly indecent” are poles between which lie a range of gradations. An early scene from the recent movie Doctor Strange provides a case study. The title character conducts a complex operation on a patient’s brain...while engaged in a contest of sorts over musical trivia. Perhaps such goings-on are commonplace in American operating theaters; I wouldn’t know. But I wouldn’t want to be the guy on the operating table with his skull open under those circumstances. I’d fear that my life was in the hands of someone, however good he might be, whose attention isn’t fully on his work.

     In judgments of decency, context is everything.

---

     The political Left has made capital out of abstractions we once held harmless by redefining the words used to refer to them. Decency is a good example, especially when we approach it through its negation. A very brief snippet of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s recent interview with Cathy Newman presents an example of the technique:

     When Newman speaks of “a right not to be offended,” she’s really saying that to refuse to address a transgender by his/her/its/their preferred pronoun is indecent. Moreover, she’s implying that the indecency is so extreme that to make conformance a matter of law, the violation of which would be subject to punishment, would be fitting. That’s inherent in the nature of an individual’s rights: to violate one is inherently unjust, and therefore is properly punishable by the State.

     The complete absence of context is just as staggering as Newman’s bald assertion. Dr. Peterson riposted gracefully, as he usually does -- see the complete interview for details -- but the interview context was an unsuitable one for addressing the larger problem: the Left’s use of linguistic kidnapping as a tactical ploy. It wouldn’t have been fitting even if Newman had permitted it.

---

     When we all agree on what we mean by the terms of a discussion, we can generally conduct it without rancor. Indeed, we can often resolve a debate at the start of which the sides disagree completely, merely by insisting that words be used according to their established public meanings. One side can be shown to have the better case, at which point the other would be expected to concede courteously.

     It doesn’t happen often these days, and often the reason for that is that the Left insists on a tendentious redefinition of a word for something the rest of us understand quite differently. The connotations of the word, including its traditional role in law and jurisprudence, are yoked to the Left’s arbitrarily imposed denotation. Decency, rights, and justice are important tokens in the Left’s game.

     It’s dirty pool being played for high stakes: the true individual rights we possess. They’ve been under attack in this fashion for so long that ninety-nine out of any hundred people would be unable to answer the critical question:

What is the difference between a right and a permission?

     Of course, if you were to pose that question to a Leftist, he’d immediately denounce it – and you – as “indecent.” But that’s a subject best left for another screed.

The Opposition

     “If you don’t have an opposition, you don’t have an issue.” – Saul Alinsky

     Hey, I might not like the guy – I particularly dislike what his acolytes have done to these United States – but he did have insights. Some of them are as valuable to the Right as to the Left.

     Let’s imagine that “the issue” is the increase of American prosperity and security. More specifically, let’s make it a condition of ubiquitous increases in American prosperity and security. To advance toward that goal would require a Reaganesque “rising tide that lifts all boats.” We who favor that end would cheer such a development. They who disfavor it would boo, or perhaps pull sour faces and argue that our “obsession” blinds us to “more important issues.” We would know our opponents by their deportment.

     And here they are:

     The ad is a good a portrayal of the natures of the two major parties. Granted, there are a lot of Republicans, especially in Congress, who prioritize holding onto their seats above any other consideration. Still, were they pressed on the matter, they’d agree that increases in American prosperity and security are good things and worth striving toward “as long as I’m secure in my position.”

     I find it difficult to name a Democrat in a federal office of whom that could be accurately said. To the Democrats, all that matters is power – and their collective strategy for pursuing ever greater power is the incitement of division and hostility among Americans, such that we all grow steadily worse off.

     During previous Republican executive administrations, the Democrats have at least tried to represent themselves as “for the good of all.” They had priorities that diverged from those of the Republicans, but they seldom tried to dismiss Republican concerns, much less condemn them. There seemed to be a greater recognition, throughout the political class, that the ends must be common – that the proper subjects for political argument are means and priorities. At least it was cosmetically so.

     The ascension of Donald Trump to the presidency might be credited for the seemingly new, warfare a outrance condition of federal politics. There’s some validity to that approach, as Trump generally upset the American political applecart. It had been a long, long time since we had a president who had never before held any elective office. However, the trend since the election of Ronald Reagan has been toward this state. It’s quite possible that with the election of “this upstart outsider,” the Left merely decided that it was time for the makeup to come off and the underlying reality to be shown.

     “America — and the West in general — has been ruled by people who, at core, don’t very much like the countries they rule. But they do like ruling them, and will do anything they can to keep doing it.” – Glenn Reynolds

     It can only be good for Americans to know who their enemies are. This is particularly important as regards the voting blocs the Democrats have herded for decades with promises of special privileges and subventions: Negroes, Hispanics, women, homosexuals, and others with whom the Left has played the identity-politics game. It should be clear to such persons that the Democrats aren’t really concerned with helping them toward more opportunities and better lives, but with retaining their political allegiance – and that Democrat strategists fear to lose that to Republican policies that actually work toward those ends.

     What’s less comprehensible is why nominally intelligent Democrats would want to display their contempt for the electorate so openly and so vividly. Did they think we wouldn’t be watching? Did they hope we’d be distracted somehow? Or did they labor under the misconception that they could make those damning visuals not matter?

     There’s no way to misinterpret the video above. There was no way to misinterpret any element of the Democrats’ treatment of Trump’s 2018 State of the Union speech. It’s just as hard to misinterpret the Democrats’ trumpetings and caperings since the release of the Nunes and Grassley memoranda about the FBI’s electronic monitoring of the Trump campaign’s communications.

     Ultimately, it won’t matter. By their deportment shall ye know them. We know them now. The president and his party are advancing toward ends that have already improved the prosperity and security of the entire country. Their opponents are too angry about it even to acknowledge their successes. I’d say the Left’s hopes of a 2018 “blue wave” have just been fatally undermined. Better still, the administration is gradually pulling its “Never Trump” detractors into its orbit. Trump is making the holdouts look like the sour-grapes killjoys they are.

     It looks like 2018 will be a pretty good year.

Space X Falcon 9 CRS-11 Launch And Landing.

Pretty neat.

Hat tip: Maggie’s Farm..

God bless Phillip Parrish.

Phillip Parrish is a candidate for governor in Minnesota, swimming bravely against the Minnesota dhimmi tide.

A long-shot Republican gubernatorial candidate is getting national attention for writing that he does not consider Islam a faith and that it is "the antithesis of the Constitution."

Phillip Parrish, of Kenyon, wrote the comments in an email to Community Interfaith Dialogue on Islam founder Regina Mustafa. . . .

* * * *

Mustafa posted the email exchanges on her Facebook page. Since then, Parrish's response has drawn sharp criticism from [so-called] civil rights organizations. The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote about Parrish's comments on its "Hatewatch" blog. . . .

* * * *

"I see myself as a person attempting to expose those who are attempting to set up rules and laws and regulations contrary to the U.S. Constitution," Parrish said. As a U.S. Naval intelligence officer, he said he has extensive knowledge of Islam.

"It's causing harm to people. Thousands of analysts like myself, thousands of law enforcement specialists have been trying to tell leadership this same message for over 20 years. And no one seems to want to listen or they live in some kind of utopic world of no, people really don't think like that. They don't really mean to cut somebody's hand off because they stole something. They don't really mean to put someone to death because they defiled themselves with an unclean woman. They don't really mean to rape little boys on Thursday night because the imam gave them permission to do that," Parrish said.

Mustafa rejected the idea that her invitation was in any way insincere. She said she is deeply disturbed by Parrish's comments, saying they demonstrate a lack of understanding about Islam. She said Muslims in America have demonstrated a respect for both the U.S. Constitution and their religion and his comments are unfair to the Muslim men and women who have served in the U.S. armed forces.^[1]

Ms. Mustafa – whose hijab just screams “U.S. citizen” – says “Muslims in America have demonstrated a respect for both the U.S. Constitution and their [own?] religion.” Now that’s what you call a stretcher. Let’s take a quick cruise through some basic doctrines of Islam and dip into current Muslim thinking to get a handle on the deception that this woman is peddling.

First, Muslim law, shariah law, is considered by Muslims to be superior to any manmade law, e.g., the U.S. Constitution. A Muslims who takes the oath of allegiance to the U.S. in any naturalization ceremony or swears elsewhere to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States by definition swears a false oath.

Then there’s the problem of separatism and non-assimilation. Do Muslims want to fit in as loyal citizens of our Constitutional republic?

The former Muslim, Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, warned about the Islamicization of Europe, saying it is “a careful and deliberate strategy” planned by the Islamic Council of Europe which instructed Muslims “to get together into viable communities, set up mosques, community centres and Islamic schools. To resist assimilation, they must group themselves geographically in areas of high Muslim concentration. According to Sookhdeo, their ultimate goal is Islamic rule in Europe.”

Mr. Sookhdeo knows what he’s talking about. There are 751 Zones Urbaines Sensibles in greater France – “no go” zones. That isn’t assimilation. That’s a carbuncle. Can I say that? This is a problem in N. America as well.

Underlying this separatism and isolation are basic Muslim beliefs about infidels. The Koran (98:6) calls infidels (kuffar) – that is to say, us chickens – “the most vile of created beings.” The Shia brand of Islam considers infidels as unclean, on the same level as dogs, dead bodies, and excrement. The Koran (9:28) agrees: “Disbelievers are unclean” and (2:10) diseased.

The Koran also commands (9:123 ): “Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you” and makes clear (8:59) that “infidels should not think that they can get away from us. Prepare against them whatever arms and weaponry you can muster so that you may terrorize them.” Three weeks ago, Muslims murdered a man in Sinai for having a cross tattoo. Mission accomplished!

Finally, the Koran’s mandates the murder of Muslim apostates. In 1978, scum-sucking al-Azhr, the Egyptian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, ordered the death of an Egyptian apostate from Islam. Religious fanaticism anyone? First Amendment in the landfill is more like it.

I haven’t even touched on the issues of FGM, slavery, polygamy, and honor killings. Anyone still think that Muslims have demonstrated a respect for our Constitution, our religions, or anything else about us infidels? The "propositional nation" idea is a damn lie but, working with that concept for the next 10 seconds, let's ask just what proposition(s) do plain-vanilla Muslims in America accept?

Mr. Phillips knows what he’s talking about. Bogus hysteria has been the predictable result.

Mustafa is sure right about one thing. Muslims do respect their religion. That's the problem right there in a nutshell. They need to abjure or get out. Steady as she goes isn't an option. You know that's true if you have half a brain and can see five years into the future. Or have been paying attention.

Notes
^[1] "Candidate under fire for calling Islam 'antithesis of Constitution.'" By Heather J. Carlson, Post-Bulletin, 1/19/18 (emphasis added).

I Hate to Sound Like a Conspiracy Theorist, But...

..if they ARE, in fact, out to get you, that's when the theory is no longer a theory, but reality.

Rush agrees - and, I've been more than a little suspicious about the timing of this dip in the stock market.

Tribe And Anti-Tribe

     Persons who’ve looked into the still-fractious community called the Alt-Right have surely noticed that, though those who’ve adopted the label aren’t exactly united on policy, they do exhibit a disturbing commonality of conviction in one regard: their anti-Semitism.

     I’ve never understood anti-Semitism. I tend to view it as an expression of “consolation-prize power:” the sort a bullying victim, by choosing a target even smaller and weaker than he, uses to console himself. The Jewish people have known more oppression and brutality than any other identifiable demographic, yet they’ve advanced and achieved beyond any supposedly more fortunate people: academically, professionally, and financially. For example, there are about 15,000,000 Jews worldwide by the most generous estimates. That makes them about 0.2% of the world population. Yet Jews have won 22% of the Nobel Prizes awarded in the post-World War II era. I doubt that it’s because of pro-Semitism on the Nobel committees.

     Is anti-Semitism founded principally in envy? It seems a good case could be made for that notion. Hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide espouse a passionate hatred of the Jews...but for what? For rejecting Muhammad’s bloodthirsty, openly ethnicist ideology? For operating the only reasonably free nation in the Middle East? For making its desert bloom and its people prosperous despite a complete lack of natural resources?

     If it isn’t envy or the bullying victim’s consolation prize, what could it be? And why would persons who claim to be American patriots and advocates of freedom have made it into a tenet of their position?

---

     Oppression evokes defensiveness. Thus it is no mystery why the Jewish people should exhibit a degree of insularity in those lands where they’re a small minority. Moreover, such defensive insularity tends to outlast the oppressions that provoked it, for psychological and strategic reasons. Unfortunately, insularity, regardless of the justifications for it, tends to evoke suspicion from those “not on the island.” Such suspicions are exacerbated by envy. The combination often manifests itself in conspiracy theories.

     Devil theories are forever popular among persons displeased with the state of their nation or the world. He who is looking for a devil to blame for what he dislikes will be likely to look at tight-knit groups for one, especially if they’re doing better than he is.

     But devil theories are indispensable to one who seeks to attain power through division: i.e., by setting part of the populace against the rest. That’s the method of the demagogue. If such a demagogue is clever, he’ll select a devil that’s numerically small and generally unable to resist. As I wrote in 2003, at the late and deeply lamented Palace of Reason:

     Among historians, the attempt to blame a malign figure or group for the ills of a nation or the world is called a devil theory. The purest such, a monocausal devil theory, will imply that all evil, all unhappiness, and all deprivation can be traced to its chosen devils. The best-known modern promoter of a devil theory, Adolf Hitler, explicitly blamed all of Weimar Germany's many problems on the Jews. Whether Hitler himself believed this is irrelevant, for he sold it magnificently well.

     Hitler was able to sell his devil theory because Germans were ready for one. Indeed, they demanded one. They were desperate to believe that their humiliation in World War I and the chaos flooding over the Weimar Republic could be traced to a delimitable source of malevolence. For once the source had been identified and isolated, it could be expunged. The great irony there, of course, was that the accelerating disorder in the Weimar Republic, from which the Germans turned to the Nazis to save them, was mostly the work of the Nazis themselves, unwittingly aided by Germany's Communists and anarcho-syndicalists.

     Devil theories are becoming more important every day. Apparently, the failed cultures and ideologies of the world -- Islam; Marxian socialism; social-welfare fascism -- need to see their failure as someone else's fault, just as inter-war Germans did. There's no hiding their failures. No exertion of wishful thinking could convince Middle Eastern Muslims that they've seized the brass ring of human progress. Socialists cannot abide the suggestion that there was some error in their theories about state control of the means of production; the theory was too appealing, too elaborate, too perfect. American social-welfare fascists -- a.k.a. left-liberals -- cannot be dissuaded that, once the government has made everything either compulsory or forbidden and bludgeoned everyone into accepting their definition of "tolerance," there'll be full employment, wide-screen HDTV, and copious disease-free orgasms for everyone.

     So all these groups are looking for someone to blame.

---

     The demagogues are thick on the ground these days, and every one of them has his preferred devil. Demagoguery, however, is incompatible with a wholesome, provably effective ideology. Such an ideology could be adopted by any individual, group, or nation. It would prove beneficial without regard to the adopter’s race, religion, ethnicity, or any other characteristic. That indicts the demagogues’ prescriptions even before they get out of the starting gate.

     Let’s imagine that the Alt-Right community has a wholesome ideology that prescribes wholesome policy decisions. Perhaps it’s so for some, and we can afford to exclude the others for the purposes of this argument. Then they don’t need a devil; they merely need to present the reasoning and historical evidence for their positions. Moreover, the adoption of a devil both taints them morally and calls into question the efficacy of their proposed solutions to the problems we face. In other words, it weakens their appeal.

     So why albatross oneself or one’s beliefs with such a thing? Especially since just as large a percentage of Jews as of any other religion or ethnicity would favor a truly wholesome policy. Indeed, when we look at some of the positions more commonly discussed as Alt-Right positions, we find that Israel itself exemplifies them, even if a number of American Jews might not.

     I yield the floor to my Gentle Readers.

He is More Pessimistic Than I, But...

...that doesn't mean that he is not right.

At least, in Europe's case, he may well be. Europe may be on the verge of a New Dark Age. For the same reason as the First Dark Age. Invaders, who destroy the existing culture (already on Life Support), and impose superstition, slavery, and despotism. They will destroy learning, any opposing culture, and leave only - at best - pockets of tribally affiliated resistance.

The unchecked rapes are deliberate. They mean to destroy the country by making the only semi-safe choice for women to attach themselves to an individual Muslim man. Better rape by one, than gang rape.

Even scarier, this:

The Core of the Case

Victor Davis Hanson nails it:

If all this is not a scandal — then the following protocols are now considered permissible in American electoral practice and constitutional jurisprudence: An incumbent administration can freely use the FBI and the DOJ to favor one side in a presidential election, by buying its opposition research against the other candidate, using its own prestige to authenticate such a third-party oppositional dossier, and then using it to obtain court-ordered wiretaps on American citizens employed by a candidate’s campaign — and do so by deliberately misleading the court about the origins and authors of the dossier that was used to obtain the warrants.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/456084/nunes-memo-fbi-doj-corruption-ticking-memo

Charles Hugh Smith on economic fundamentals.

The past 9 years have been one long dead cat bounce of extend and pretend, i.e. do more of what's failed because to even admit the status quo is being undermined by fundamental forces would panic those gorging at the trough of the status quo's lopsided rewards.

This 9-year dead cat bounce was pure speculation driven by cheap central bank credit and liquidity. Demographics, environmental degradation, the decline of middle class security, the erosion of paid work, the bankruptcy of public and private pension plans, the global debt bubble, soaring wealth and income inequality, the corruption of democracy into a pay-to-play bidding war, the destruction of price discovery via market manipulation by those who have turned markets into signaling devices that all is well, the laughable distortion of statistics to mask the real world decline in our purchasing power (inflation is near-zero--really really really), the perverse incentives to leverage up bets in financial instruments that have no connection to the real-world economy--none of these have been addressed in the market melt-up.^[1]

There's little evidence that anyone's minding the store. Government "unemployment" statistics are an unfunny joke. The presence of tens of thousands of U.S. factories in China, whom we have strengthened immensely thereby, doesn't seem to perturb anyone, not even unions.

Our higher education institutions fawn over foreigners who must pay the full freight of nation-destroying tuition costs. Young people start their "careers" carrying stupefying debt. Law school tuition for me in the early '70s was $3,000 a year. With my G.I. Bill stipend and active duty service in the Army Reserve during the summers, I graduated owing my sister $1,000 to make it through the last semester. I should pay her back someday.

And the Attorney General of the United States is more worried about pot than crucifying AntiFa scum. Street thugs and attacks on law-abiding citizens just don't concern law enforcement officials at any level of government. And the political establishment attitude toward open borders and nation-destroying, third-world invasion is "ho hum." Yes, that's working great.

I love Smith's "extend and pretend" expression. It succinctly expresses our present game plan. Which includes continuation of our bizarre foreign wars to the tune of $250,000,000 per bleeping day.

Oh well.

Notes
^[1] "Is the 9-Year Long Dead Cat Bounce Finally Ending?" By Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds, 2/5/18.

Hat tip: ZeroHedge.

Better Than I Could Have Said It

From According to Hoyt - all about the Memo, the Corruption, and the Failure to Charge With a Crime.

Behind The Myths

     The memory of an aged man can be a valuable resource, if properly exploited. But there are memories a large number of persons are determined to suppress, if not destroy – and they’re serious about it.

     Now that the FBI has been tainted by its actions before and after the momentous November 2016 election, it’s time to inquire into just how that institution descended to such a low estate. Weren’t we told that the FBI is an indispensable instrument of justice? Weren’t we told that its administrators recruit only agents that are morally and ethically stainless? Weren’t we told that its “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity” motto is a reliable guide to its actions? How did it get from there to here?

     Oh yes, we were told all that. By Efrem Zimbalist, Junior and a host of other entertainers. But that didn’t make it so. It clearly wasn’t so as early as Ruby Ridge and Waco. But those who noticed were largely either shouted down or ignored.

---

     The creation of an institution that requires public support is often accompanied by the labors of a cadre of mythmakers: persons charged with creating the popular perceptions and beliefs required to elicit that support. The FBI, America’s first national police force, was a case of that sort.

     The assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz, who espoused anarchism, was the seminal act. President Theodore Roosevelt, a typical “strong” (i.e., dictatorial) leader, was personally offended by the idea that anyone should regard anarchism as preferable to him. He oversaw the creation of the FBI’s institutional predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation, in 1908. The need to monitor American anarchists and combat “white slave” traffickers was the rationale.

     Congress, responding to public fears of a secret police accountable only to the executive branch of the federal government, tried to stop it. Roosevelt and his Attorney-General Charles Bonaparte ignored the legislature, presenting the BOI to the nation as a fait accompli. The Bureau passed though several other names before being named the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935.

     Ironically, were it not for Prohibition, the FBI might have faded away. American anarchism was never the problem Roosevelt made it out to be, nor were violations of the Mann Act as commonplace as the public perception. However, the federal War on Booze provided the Bureau with plenty of work. That work would be taken from it with the ratification of the Twenty-First Amendment, but by then the Bureau had found other tasks with which to occupy its agents.

     The FBI was widely regarded as a Constitutionally dubious creation before World War II. With the rise of international espionage, it seized upon the counterintelligence mission as a rationale for expansion...including the expansion of its powers to pry into the private deeds and communications of Americans.

     Let there be no doubt that the FBI apprehended many spies during the war years. That was probably the best work its agents ever did. Indeed, several historians of the period rated it as the most formidable counterintelligence agency in the world. (Cf. Ladislas Farago, The Game of the Foxes.) But the Bureau itself didn’t find general favor with the public until after the war, with the rise of the Cold War, the arms race, and the mass media.

---

     To be accepted by the public as a positive force, an institution with police powers requires several things:

1. Public belief that an evil exists that existing institutions cannot combat;
2. A credible portrayal of the institution as an effective countermeasure to that evil;
3. Assurances that the new institution will pose no danger to the rights of private citizens.

     While the origin of the FBI as a necessary countermeasure to anarchism and “white slavery” never gained popular credence, other evils, including the rise of international espionage, won Americans over, albeit slowly and grudgingly. The Bureau’s successes at apprehending spies, kidnappers, and other felons who would flee across state lines to evade state authorities were heavily promoted. Television shows such as The F.B.I. and The Untouchables portrayed the Bureau’s agents as persons of impeccable integrity, virtually gun-toting saints. Events that might not conduce to a reputation for incorruptibility were downplayed or hushed up.

     Whatever seedier doings might have been going on behind the veneer, the FBI was being transformed by an Iron Law of Institutions familiar to anyone with a knowledge of Public Choice theory: Over time, those within an institution whose highest priority is the well-being of the institution and the maintenance of its prerogatives will contrive to rise above and filter out persons not so inclined. Today, in the 110th year of the FBI’s existence, such persons completely dominate the Bureau. They cannot be expected to say or do anything that would rebound to the Bureau’s detriment.

     The evidence suggests that there is a need for a federal counterintelligence organ, though as with all questions of public policy persons can surely be found to argue in the negative. As for other “interstate” crimes such as kidnapping, there are several substantive arguments to be made both for and against a federal police force. Whatever the verdicts on those questions, that the FBI has been permitted too much latitude to invade the rights and prerogatives of Americans seems incontestable. Consider in this connection that should an FBI agent charge a private citizen with “lying to the FBI,” a felony crime of unique nature, the burden of proof lies on the accused. This is an egregious departure from American criminal justice principles.

     This institution needs to be gutted – torn all the way down to its foundation. If it is to be rebuilt, additional safeguards for the rights of private citizens must be erected as well. Yet even the strongest imaginable protections would only delay the process of deterioration. No canonization campaign for popular consumption can nullify that dynamic.

So, Which Is It?

Is it good or bad to:

• Promote Antisemitism
• Oppose Gay Marriage
• Support David Duke

Pick ONE Storyline

Simultaneously, the Memo is:

• HIGHLY dangerous to government employees, just good ol' Americans doin' their job, AND
• Eh. A Big Nothing.

The link also contains information about The Clinton Team's Filegate Crime, a lot of which, I'd forgotten.

Because, I have a life.

Why Are So Many Conservatives Turning to Writing Fiction?

I'm beginning to believe that fiction - and its close cousin, autobiography (as we all tell ourselves stories about our own lives) - may be the secret to converting succeeding generations.

It's the stories that shape the civilization. That's the part of our fight that, until recently, has been lost.

I grew up on stories:

• Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, both from the school library, and many other classics. The Pocket book was just around $ 0.59, which meant that I could pack a lunch for school, and buy a book with the money saved. Which I did. Often.
• Agatha Christie and other mystery/detective novels - John and Ross MacDonald, Mickey Spillane, Sherlock Holmes - all providing the moral underpinning that crime is WRONG, that victims and their loved ones deserved retribution, and that people had choices. Also, that cops could be smart and funny, or dull and corrupt - even to White people.
• Books about Communism that showed its flaws - Eighth Moon, Animal Farm, Brave New World, 1984 - all were assigned in Social Studies or English classes.
• To be fair, we were also assigned Arthur Miller's The Crucible. But, for the most part, our assigned reading was more pro-America, than critical of her.

Every culture has stories. Only in America is it seemingly a crime against sensibility to produce a book that does not promote disgust with the mother country. To get a non-PC, non-Progressive book accepted by a publisher has been an uphill struggle. Funny, since the American public has shown that they LIKE those books. An out-of-nowhere book that spawned an industry was The Hunt for Red October. Today, largely as a result of that book and those that followed, the military fiction market is thriving.

And, it wouldn't have happened without The Naval Institute Press, which is the publishing arm of a private military association.

That refusal to publish books that didn't tow the Liberal Line changed, since the gatekeepers are no longer in charge of publishing.

It started with the blogs. For the first time in years, you could read something that contradicted the Accepted Wisdom.

And, people did - enough to make a few bloggers wealthy, and many more to write without anticipation of wealth, but for the passionate love of writing. The diversity of thought and opinion expanded like hot gases after the Big Bang.

Oh, the Old Guard attempted to slap them down. They sneered at those Bloggers, calling them dolts producing their blogs in their pajamas.

PJMedia sneered back, and took that name for their own.

The newspapers and television news got skunked by many bloggers. They were trumped (!) on news, time and again. By the time the dust cleared, many newspapers/magazines were out of business, the number of jobs had plummeted, and former journalists were standing around holding the contents of their desks, hailing a cab.

Some left the business entirely; others retired.

And, a few decided that this was the time, finally, for them to write that book they'd always been meaning to. Some even managed to line up lavish advances on those proposals. We've all seen those books explaining how these Professional Leftist Journalists were the only ones you could rely on for the Unvarnished Truth. We've also seen that unsold product, lined up in large stacks on the remainder tables.

About that time, in part due to idiotic decisions to give lavish advances to those authors spouting the Liberal Truth, the publishing industry collapsed. You probably know the details, and it ain't pretty. So much for that post-journalism cushy writing life.

Which brings us to today.

Very few bloggers - Conservative, Liberal/Progressive, or Raving Lunatic (both sides have them) make all that much money. Heck, a blogger is lucky to make enough to cover their expenses. Most have found that, if they get too controversial or outspoken on behalf of non-Leftists, their advertisers will be hounded to drop them. Others have found that organized crowds (or bots) persuade their hosting companies, Twitter, and others entities susceptible to pressure, to block their publishing outlets.

The recent pressure on Patreon, an alternative funding mechanism that some bloggers use, is indicative of the fear those Leftists are feeling. They are terrified of a Voluntary Funding Apparatus being used by non-Leftists.

The Left is well-organized in their efforts to keep alternative voices from being heard. Leftist organizations pay LOTS of money to interns and foreign entities to generate Twitter storms, DOS attacks, bots pressuring advertisers to drop those sites, and doxxing, getting people fired, and even initiating SWAT attacks.

We're not at the point of imprisoning bloggers - yet - but the endless attacks have driven many from their blogs. Keep in mind, for most, this is a passion, but not a living.

Some of those bloggers have re-directed their efforts, and become indie authors. The sci-fi and fantasy offerings have exploded, and many of those imaginary worlds have heroes/heroines fighting back against oppressive governments. The indie heroes, unlike the trad authors protagonists, usually are fighting the Leftist Authoritarians, not Margaret Atwood's conservative religiously-motivated masculine oppressive society.

And, they are selling. Not generally in the hundreds of thousands, but enough to provide some return on the writer's efforts.

Again, it's a return to the Story to provide the narrative that gently leads people in the direction you want. It's primarily speculative fiction - past, present, future, urban, other-worldly - that provides the framework for getting people to ask - What If?

That question leads to greater flights of imagination:

• If a young boy on a 2-starred planet far from power can dream of overcoming mighty forces, why can't I?
• If some nobody can defeat the oppressive government, so can I!
• If a group of high school kids can lead the rebellion against a Superpower trying to invade their country, we can work to defeat heavy taxation, oppressive regulation, and an unjust court system.

Narratives count. Over the last 1/2 century, the Leftist controlled the narrative. As of today, they no longer can keep other voices from sharing their words. On YouTube, Twitter, Gab, Google+, Facebook, Blogger, and a lot of other media, the average person has the opportunity to be heard.

That's not even mentioning the Giant-Killer, Amazon Direct Publishing, which controls the field, BUT - does not impose - YET - a filter on who can publish a book.

There are alternatives, as well, although CreateSpace was just acquired by Amazon. Here's a list of some other self-publishers.

What are you waiting for?

The Disappearing West

     The “birth dearth” in the First World nations isn’t exactly news. Virtually every industrialized nation has felt it to some degree. Europe’s insane policy of importing Middle Eastern Muslims is one of the responses to it. Mark Steyn wrote about it most tellingly in his book America Alone. He forecast a grim future from our demographic drought: a world in which freedom, capitalism, minority rights, and many other good things have been eliminated from every land but our own...assuming we can hold onto them here.

     But there’s no solution in prospect. The fertility rates of First World nations continue to languish below the nominal replacement rate of 2.1 live births per couple. Here are the rates, in live births per couple, for the two best studied years:

Nation	FR 1960	FR 2015
Australia	3.5	1.8
Austria	2.7	1.5
Belgium	2.5	1.7
Bulgaria	2.3	1.5
Canada	3.8	1.6
Czech Republic	2.1	1.5
Denmark	2.6	1.7
Finland	2.7	1.7
Germany	2.4	1.5
Greece	2.2	1.3
Hungary	2.0	1.4
Iceland	4.3	1.9
Ireland	3.8	1.9
Israel	3.9	3.1
Italy	2.4	1.4
Japan	2.0	1.5
Luxembourg	2.3	1.5
Netherlands	3.1	1.7
New Zealand	4.0	2.0
Norway	2.9	1.8
Poland	3.0	1.3
Portugal	3.2	1.2
Puerto Rico	4.7	1.4
Romania	2.3	1.5
Slovak Republic	3.0	1.4
Sweden	2.2	1.9
Switzerland	2.4	1.5
United Kingdom	2.7	1.8
United States	3.7	1.8

     The above figures were collected by the World Bank.

     Every First World nation has suffered a decline in birth rate. Only one – Israel – has maintained a birth rate above replacement level. Why?

     It’s actually fairly simple, if one looks at the balance of incentives and disincentives that applies to a married couple:

     Incentives to reproduce:

• Love of children;
• Desire for progeny;
• Religious influences.

     Disincentives to reproduce:

• Careerism;
• Fear of childbirth;
• Need for two incomes;
• Fading of religious faith;
• Difficulty of raising children;
• Preference for unhindered mobility;
• Fear of divorce and its consequences;
• Delayed marriage / extended adolescence;
• Extinction of the three-generation household.

     The incentives are few; the disincentives are many.

     A recent post from Western-preservationist group Occidental Revival exhorts the reader to press for political incentives to reproduce: essentially, subsidies for having children. But this is not in the cards, for a simple reason: Politicians weigh the votes and influence of the already-living more heavily than those of the not-yet-born. Add to that the pressures on lawmakers exerted by environmentalists, population-control groups, and other anti-natalist forces, and the prospects for public policies that encourage children look pretty bleak.

     Occidental Revival also mentions “promotion of homosexuality, abortion on demand, feminism, hedonism, materialism, etc.” as anti-natal influences, and these should not be dismissed. However, they are peripheral to the larger problem, which has its roots in the transformation of children from a religious and social obligation and an addition to the family workforce to a luxury good: one we seek for the enjoyment it promises us.

     Among the luxury goods of our time, children are one of the most burdensome and expensive to “own and maintain.” If you’d like a piercing comparison, consider the 2018 Mercedes S550. Acquisition cost: about $100,000. Maintenance cost over 20 years: on average, about $50,000. The current estimate of the cost of bearing and raising a child to age 18 in these United States is about $250,000 – and that’s before we factor in the cost of a “higher education.”

     By now it should be clear that the correlation of forces is against childbearing in the First World. Nor can we expect a dramatic change in any of those forces in the near term. What, then, must we do?

     Beats me, Gentle Reader! How do you encourage people to reproduce, against all the disincentives mentioned here, for the sake of their nation and culture? It’s almost self-contradictory to expect people to accept large burdens and costs for the sake of a future they don’t expect to share. You’d have to feel a love of children, country, and culture far greater than most contemporary First Worlders feel.

     Given the political contributions to our current situation, my first thought – isn’t it always? — is that those of us who cherish life and the values that made the West great could use a handy planetoid. But that’s much too large a subject to introduce at the end of an essay.

America’s Secret Police

     You’d better be wearing your seat belt, Gentle Reader. It’s not often I get to start an essay with a title that provocative, so you can be confident that what’s coming will have a bit of an edge to it.

     Is there a phrase in the lexicon of politics and government more ominous than “secret police?” Doesn’t it give you a little chill to imagine that We The People suffer such an indignity? It’s a pretty good distance from MAD Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” comic, you know. Back when that was popular, we had a Cold War, an arms race, and mandatory hide-under-your-desk drills to keep us mindful of the Red Menace.

     But what is a secret police, anyway? Is it a police agency whose existence is concealed? Is it an agency that enforces secret laws – laws John Q. Public isn’t allowed to know about until he’s been accused of violating them? Or is it an agency whose existence is openly acknowledged, but whose operatives, operations, and methods are kept secret? Have you ever given it any thought?

     Maybe it’s time.

---

     The Soviet Union of late, unlamented memory possessed a number of police agencies. Two of them, the KGB and the GRU, were often referred to as secret police, despite being well known to the USSR’s people. Most of the agents of those agencies were open about their jobs. Indeed, a post in the KGB or GRU was regarded as a sign of status in the USSR. It marked you as one not to be trifled with.

     If the KGB and GRU qualified as secret police by any standard, it could not have been that they or their operatives were kept secret. However, what those operatives were doing at any given time was kept secret...at least, until the agency was ready to pounce on a target.

     The Soviet Union’s secret police conducted their “investigations” in secret. They selected their target quietly. They operated to gather “evidence” against him quietly, and by means that were seldom disclosed. Most telling of all, they operated under the presumption that a citizen of the Soviet Union had no right to privacy – in other words, no right to have any secrets.

     That was the pattern for the secret police of all the Warsaw Pact countries, for Communist China, North Korea, and Cuba, and for every other totalitarian hellhole this sorry planet has ever endured. The secret police weren’t secret. Their methods weren’t secret either. What they were doing at any given moment was kept secret. That was necessary if they were to penetrate the secrets of their targets.

     Secret police are about your secrets, not theirs.

---

     To the extent that Americans have any privacy – i.e., any capability to keep secrets – it lies in the right of private property, which the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees. In recent years, the courts have extended property-like protections to our electronic communications: telephone calls and the Internet. However, the police are unhappy about that. They argued, successfully, that those privacy protections obstruct their investigations of individuals and organizations suspected of felonious activities. So systems were erected to permit police wiretapping and electronic monitoring of such persons and organizations, subject to the approval of the courts.

     At that point we’d already hit a stunning departure from the traditional scope of police work. Yet it’s likely that you didn’t notice it.

     The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are extensions of that earlier police argument. The averred aim was, of course, to better guarantee our “national security.” Ironically, and despite the rather phantasmal aspect of “national security,” the argument has greater plausibility at the international level than it does at the domestic level. However, the fly in the ointment remained the same.

     For covert surveillance of a target to yield worthwhile evidence of wrongdoing, the target must be kept from knowing that his communications are being monitored. In other words, he must be induced to be a witness against himself without ever knowing it.

     Consider also that such monitoring almost always takes place before there’s any other evidence of an operation against the United States, its properties, or its wider interests. The monitors are looking for evidence of a crime that might not have been committed at all. That same logical flaw invalidates the argument for police wiretapping of suspicious domestic persons and organizations. A court that grants a communications surveillance warrant without first being presented credible evidence of a crime already committed or in progress has violated the rights of privacy-in-communication that an American is supposedly guaranteed.

     And the target is not allowed to know.

---

     By the argument above, the FBI, CIA, and NSA constitute secret police agencies materially indistinguishable from those that terrorized the Soviet Union. They exist to penetrate Americans’ secrets, regardless of whether their targets have done anything criminal by our domestic laws, or averse to America’s “national security” according to the National Security Act or Espionage Act. Their very nature renders them largely beyond effective supervision, for the elected executives and legislators nominally tasked with supervising them are often themselves targets. It is in the nature of clandestinely gathered “intelligence” that an imaginative “analyst” can concoct an accusation of heinous conduct from the surveillance capability alone. Who could falsify the allegations of an agency permitted to work in such a fashion? Who is so completely without secrets of his own that he would dare?

     Note that our supposed guarantees of communications privacy are essentially irrelevant to the above. What matters most is the covert targeting.

     How about it, Gentle Reader? Are you at all disturbed by the notion that America’s secret police might be after your secrets? Have I got you looking over your shoulder yet, or are you certain that your comings, goings, and miscellaneous doings couldn’t possibly be of interest to our national snoops?

     Consider Harvey Silverglate’s “three felonies a day” argument before you answer.

     “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” – Lavrenti Beria, the first head of the OGPU, later to be renamed the KGB

The Nunes Memo

Apparently, it's a hit - a home run.

ACLU alerted.

Quickies: A Big BLEEP!ing Deal

     Well, the memo is out, and all of Mankind has read it, and a lot of people are saying “no big deal, we knew all that already.” I beg to differ. It is a big deal. Among other things, it tells us:

• That Christopher Steele, the composer of the anti-Trump dossier, was an expressed, passionate anti-Trumper;
• That the Steele dossier was verifiably paid for by the Clinton for President campaign;
• That the FBI knew that;
• That Steele’s "corroboration" came from Michael Isikoff of Yahoo! News – to whom he had leaked the contents of the dossier;
• That former FBI director James Comey was aware that the dossier was unverified;
• That the FBI would not have applied for a FISA warrant without it;
• Most important of all, that the FBI, which reviewed the memo, agreed that it contained “no factual errors.”

     In other words, the memo tells us that the FBI knowingly allowed itself to be used as a political instrument in the service of a political campaign. Moreover, the FBI’s instrumentality has continued into the Trump presidency – an ongoing attempt to tarnish Trump’s election, possibly all the way to impeachment, trial, conviction, and removal. Moreover still, the Department of Justice has collaborated in the FBI’s attempts to keep that critical revelation from coming to light. That’s a big deal folks.

     It gets bigger when we factor in the collaboration of the Democrat caucus in Congress. These are people so avid for power that they’ll traduce their Constitutional oaths to bring down a president of the other party by the use of completely unverified allegations.

     I don’t think the concept of a “loyal opposition” applies to them, do you?

     What remains is to discover whether the principal actors in this corruption of a law enforcement agency into a political shillelagh will face any legal consequences.

     Have a nice evening.

A Facelift for HRC?

I just saw a picture HRC reading that book at the Grammys.

She looks like she has lost some weight. But, what I noticed is that she looks "rested" - a phrase that is often used when someone has had some cosmetic surgery done.

I must say, she does look better - younger and in better health.

Really Quickies: Thank You

     ...most sincerely, to all the Gentle Readers who’ve written to ask if I’m all right. I’m not, quite yet, but I think I’m getting better. With a little luck (“and sense enough not to push it,” mutters the C.S.O.) I’ll be back in form soon.

     Fatigue and pain are synergistic. When you’re tired already, pain makes it worse. Without a reserve of personal energy, it’s harder to endure the pain. If you’re bullheaded about keeping on despite it all, you can do yourself a lot of damage. Trust me on that.

     I hope to be back later with something substantive, but as usually happens when one is “out of commission” for a few days, the chores have piled up, and some of them are higher in priority than my desire to emit a tirade. Meanwhile, enjoy your Friday.

Democracy is dead.

In our one-dollar-one-vote nation living area it is dead. Ours is a mere geographical area peopled by large numbers of disconnected, entitled, rent-seeking pseudo-citizens. Here, as elsewhere in the Western world, the notion that public policy is rational and based on the elites’ principled advancement of the interests of the nation as a whole is passé. The video of the black woman exulting over her Obama pho tells one all one needs to know about the ultimate destination of once vigorous nations that make universal suffrage the Holy Grail of public policy. Give the vote to stupid people! Or, more recently, convicted felons and illegal immigrants! What could go wrong?

The deeply-embedded legal atrocity of affirmative action that advances the interests of recent Nigerian and Mexican immigrants over those of natural born Americans similarly highlights the fatal confusion in a culture hurtling into the depths of anarchy and sought-after, celebrated stupidity.

. . . [T]he world has been following the French Revolution narrative now for two-and-a-quarter centuries, and that narrative has failed because democracy did not deliver a Utopia, but instead a globalist dystopia that erased not just class but heritage, customs, values, and families.

What we call “populism” is the transition between a world order based around the individual as an equal unit in fungible nations to a civilization format based in social order, shared values and heritage, and a virulent realism that rejects the happy clique [collection] of self-reinforcing illusions which is created by the presumption of being “good” that liberal democracy conveys.

For the past two centuries, the West has seen a minority of neurotics in each country seize power on the pretext of making us all “equal,” and then failing to achieve that while steadily grinding away at any kind of social order, hierarchy, or values system. The result has been massively destructive to the point where, while our technology has improved, everything else is in decline.

It took us many years to see Leftism reach its endgame, however. When it became clear that this endgame was a mixed-race world where a few cynical rich manipulators ruled over a vast mass of impoverished people of no clear heritage, and that this transformation was already ruining America and Europe, people started to think more critically about pleasant ideas like diversity, pluralism, and equality.^[1]

In the paragraph immediately following this superb passage, Mr. Stevens says that the “rise of the far-Right, who are defined by their nationalism or the idea that a nation is comprised of a single ethnic group, shows that diversity is over.” Well, you can take that to the bank though Stevens is in error to say this is a position taken by the “far-Right.” There’s nothing “far” about it. In fact, the current insanity is what is lunatic and extremist. Leftism with its hostility (1) to the Constitution and the rule of law and (2) to less than totalitarian government is what has brought us to this point. "Neurotics" doesn't begin to describe these freaks.

That’s what you call “far” by any calculation and what Stevens thinks is far-Right is merely the stirring of normal people who never in their wildest dreams considered that putative normal, intelligent, patriotic fellow citizens would deliberately flood their beloved country with hate-filled, indigestible foreigners intent on being parasites and inflicting the worst kind of ignorance and dhimmitude on them. Little were we able to understand that a disease had inflicted millions of our “fellow citizens” with a passion for degradation and suicide. Tucker Carlson has a strong stomach to contend with most of the guests on his TV show but he strips them of all credibility to reveal their stupidity, their mendacity, and their dishonest determination to answer any and every question except the ones Tucker asks.

Righteous anger of long-suffering normal, hard-working patriotic whites is more like what we’re seeing. But the usual semantic nonsense that places National Socialism and fascism on the “far right” has great currency, so don’t be surprised if normal love of one’s own people and homeland is casually dismissed in this way.

Still, Stevens’s point is well taken. Anyone extolling the wonders of diversity is going to be dismissed out of hand for the moron (or demon) he or she is. Everything else in our lunatic culture is but a rear guard action by the left. They promised utopia but delivered open sewers. People are waking up to that tragic reality. Trying to convince normal people about the wonders of diversity is like trying to convince them that what they feel falling on them is actually rain. That's where we are. The ship is taking a long time to turn around, but the rudder's cranking starboard.

Notes
^[1] "Democracy And Equality Have Fallen." By Brett Stevens, Amerika, 1/30/18 (emphasis added).

So - Just ASKING the Question is PROOF?

It's really getting pathetic just how low the Leftists will go to try to persuade the American public that Trump should be impeached for cause.

As opposed to an actual reason - like a crime.

Instead of Trump questioning whether his employees are working against him, or not.

Which, too many of them ARE working against him. Personally. AND, leaking the Bleep out of confidential - properly confidential - conversations in an attempt to manufacture opposition.

Aristotle on nationhood.

Aristotle, in the Politics, notes city-states being of the “same blood” and at one point defines city-states as “blood connections of families, brotherhoods, and common sacrifices.” Aristotle goes on to say: “A state cannot be constituted from any chance body of persons, or in any chance period of time. Most of the states which have admitted persons of another stock, either at the time of their foundation or later, have been troubled by sedition.”^[1]

Blood ties ≠ “propositional nation.”

Time-honored, bedrock connection ≠ sophomoric, traitorous bullshit.

How hard is that?

Notes
^[1] "The Boomer Cuckservative Interpretation of Western Civilization." By alfredwclark, Occam’s Razor, 1/23/18.