The Remora’s Worst Mistake

     Before I attack today’s subject with my leaden rapier, allow me to notify you about a crisis of sorts. Mike Hendrix, the redoubtable master of Cold Fury, is in financial trouble. He’s been hit with a large car repair bill, and as he makes his living with his car – he works for Lyft – that had to come before all else. Unfortunately, Hosting Matters, where his blog is sited, is impatient about his arrears and has suspended his account.

     If you appreciate Mike’s stuff and have the means, please consider sending him a few dollars. His email address is tommygunmike@gmail.com

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     A parasitic organism cannot afford to do its host lethal damage. That “should” be “obvious,” but as with many similar propositions, the power of wishful thinking can conceal it from us at the worst possible moments.

     An economic parasite that manages to kill its host will sometimes continue on for a while in seeming independence, but unless it secures a new host in short order, it’s doomed to penury and extinction. This is what appears to be happening in the field of fantasy and science fiction.

     The Phantom sets the stage for us:

     Saw this gem today. Everything wrong with science fiction is John W. Campbell's fault.

     Campbell was basically a racist garbage-person.

     Campbell supported slavery. And segregation. And believed black people were inherently intellectually and culturally inferior to whites. You know that whole, "But how could you possibly expect readers to empathize with a black protagonist?" thing? Something Campbell quite famously told Samuel R. Delany, in quite possibly its first documented incarnation. That whole "I don't care if they're white, black, or polka-dotted" thing white people say when they're trying to pretend they're not being racist? Campbell, while making apologetics for slavery no less, which was something he got up to a lot.

     It goes on and on like that. Campbell was a RAAAACIST!!! Heinlein was a RAAAACIST!!! Asimov, Hubbard, Clarke, all RAAAACISTS!!! Sure, baby. Sure they were.

     If you aren’t familiar with the name John W. Campbell, he was the highly influential editor of the great SF pulps Astounding and Analog for many years. He was personally responsible for mentoring (and bringing to prominence) Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and several other greats of the field. He was politically conservative, as far as I can tell from his editorials. Therefore, the SJWs who now dominate traditional F&SF publishing, professional organizations such as the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), and the Hugo Award-granting World Science Fiction convention hate him with a white hot passion and are determined to make him an unperson.

     They’ve already set to work on Asimov, Heinlein, and other luminaries of the Golden Age, and have substantially scrubbed them from the awareness of younger F&SF readers, so why not Campbell? After vaporizing the great writers of the field, taking down an editor shouldn’t be much of an exercise.

     There’s probably no stopping them from carrying on with their pogrom. What will ultimately stop them is the economic consequence of their campaign. You see, they can’t tell a decent story. The lot of them are slowly discovering that no matter who or how indulgent your publisher is, or how many awards your fellow travelers award you, if you can’t or won’t entertain the reader, giving him at least some of what he reads F&SF for, he won’t be back.

     It’s not really about their politics. There’ve been left-wingers in F&SF for half of forever. It’s because along with doing their best to anathematize the old greats, they’ve made political propagandization their one and only aim. Their relentlessness about their politics –especially as regards that contemporary shibboleth “diversity” – has drained the entertainment value from their stories. Were writers in the Right to do likewise, they would be equally unreadable. Heinlein trended that way in his last few years, with the same consequences for the entertainment value of his novels.

     So younger readers are growing ever less inclined to scan the F&SF racks at Barnes & Noble for their entertainment.

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     As usual, Sarah Hoyt has a pithy observation about the above:

     The vultures are fighting harder and harder over tinier and tinier scraps. And even they can’t convince themselves that they compare in any way, shape or form to the greats of the genre’s past. Hence the screaming. It’s akin to a child covering his ears and shrieking, so as not to hear the denial of his fantasies.

     Indeed. And you can bet your last dollar that the infighting, the finger pointing, and the recrimination will all get steadily worse as the scraps dwindle in number and size. The SJWs made the parasite's worst possible mistake – they succeeded in capturing SF's traditional publishers, professional groups, and award-granting organizations, and drove out the capable, properly focused writers who kept those organizations worthwhile — and they're paying for it in the most appropriate way.

     The independent writers movement will eventually eclipse traditionally published F&SF. Capable storytellers are available there; these days, I go nowhere else for my entertainment. Yes, it’s necessary to filter out a lot of crap, but indie pricing makes that an endurable undertaking. Moreover, indie writers are gradually adopting practices that make it straightforward to avoid most of the crap without having to pay for it, in particular posting substantial snippets of their books free of charge, just as Amazon has done.

     Meanwhile, the SJWs who’ve colonized and conquered traditional publishing, the Hugo Awards, and the Science Fiction Writers of America have some starving and dying to do. It’s what happens when you kill off your host with your poisonous excretions. They could have learned that by watching the demise of Venezuela, or for that matter the ongoing auto da fe of the Democrat Party, but it appears from here that those examples of their folly were of no interest to them.

The Washington Post plumbs new lows.

In an editorial Friday, the Post goaded Trump, calling his response to Assad’s ruthless recapture of his country "pathetically weak." To stand by and let the Syrian army annihilate the rebels in Idlib, said the Post, would be "another damaging abdication of U.S. leadership."^[1]

The Post does in fact weep tears for the actual jihadis (poor souls) but it's part and parcel of the now-official view of Pompeo and Haley who want to broaden the "trigger" for American action to include military operations that involve civilian casualties from any cause, not just supposed Syrian plans to use chemical weapons.

Maybe time has clouded my memory but wasn’t the U.S. ruthlessly attempting to annihilate the “rebels” in South Vietnam? I certainly hope we were, let me just say. To our credit – and contrary to the fond imaginings of the execrable American left – we were, however, acutely sensitive to the possibility of civilian deaths and Johnson inflicted ridiculous rules of engagement on our troops to avoid them, particularly in North Vietnam. In the end, however, we were insufficiently ferocious even under those ROE and stopped just days short of a North Vietnamese capitulation. Thank you congressional Democrats whose like-minded successors infest the Congress of today.

I’ve written of Bruce Catton’s observation on the progressive grimness of the American War of Southern Independence. Writing of the Union Army, Catton noted that the congenial election of leaders at the outset of the war gave way to men being spread eagled on wagon wheels and lashed for disciplinary infractions. No more democratic ordering of affairs. Message: war is serious business. (Lincoln inflicted his own special brand of tyranny on the home front to dampen down mutterings about the war, but that's another story.)

The realities of lining up and facing ranks of the enemy and hails of small arms and artillery fire became well known to the troops. My great grandfather’s Illinois regiment faced Confederate regiments deployed in a solid wall at Stones River and it simply dissolved in the ensuing battle. Same thing at Chickamauga. Swept away by Confederate infantry.

Sherman’s march to the sea more resembled criminal excess than military operation but it was murderously effective in ending Confederate resistance. WWII involved little of the concern for civilian deaths that so exercises the Post now. The Dresden bombings, the Tokyo fire bombings, and our nuclear strikes in Japan were similarly more vengeance than military necessity (not to mention the latter's subtle hints to Stalin about new realities).

So this sudden hand wringing over civilians in one Syrian war zone oozes with hypocrisy. Clearly, the U.S. doesn’t give a fig about civilian casualties in Syria (or Yemen or Mosul or Fallujah or Raqqah) but only about its strategic objectives to (1) destroy Syria and (2) destroy Iran.

Annihilating “rebels” inside national borders is what sovereign governments do. How they do it is especially no concern of the people who have done their utmost to enable “rebel” death, destruction, rape, theft, and torture. We who have facilitated, directly and indirectly, the death of over 500,000 Syrians are not in any position to preach to a leader and an army who are dealing with the Islamic scum involved and who are clearly strongly supported by the Syrian people. A hypocritical daintiness on the part of the Post, Pompeo, and Haley and official ________ coming from the U.S. are demeaning a serious effort to crucify Syrian terrorists whom, SHMG, we are and have been supporting.

Notes
^[1] "Is Trump Going Neocon in Syria?" By Patrick J. Buchanan, AntiWar.com, 9/11/18.

Chekhov’s Law

     (No, not that everything was invented in Russia!)

     You’ve seen me discourse about it before:

     “Everything not essential to the story must be ruthlessly cut away. If in Act One you say that a gun hung on the wall, then by Act Two or Act Three at the latest, it must be discharged.” – Anton Chekhov

     Anton Chekhov was principally a writer of short stories and plays. His sense for the constraints that apply to those forms animated his Law. He applied it as ruthlessly as he commanded the rest of us to do, even in his longer works.

     Myself, I prefer Mikhail Bakunin’s two rules for anarchists:
     Rule 1: There are no rules.
     Rule 2: Rule 1 is not binding.

     Nevertheless, I do appreciate the thought behind Chekhov’s Law. It pertains to dramatic unity: the sense that everything the reader has encountered will figure in the ultimate climax of the tale. And in the construction of a short story or novelette, it’s a far, far better thing to abide by it rather than to imagine oneself free of such a requirement.

     But hearken to one of the foremost storytellers of his time, the late, great Roger Zelazny:

     [A]ny story we tell is as much an exercise in omission as inclusion. Our death sentence reflexes normally take care of this, so that we hardly think of the bits of scenery, stray thoughts, passing faces, unimportant physical details we are leaving out.

     Somewhere, sometime early I came to believe in tossing in a bit of gratuitous characterization as I went along. It seemed to add something to the story as a whole if – by means of a few extra sentences – a stock character could be shown to have an existence beyond his walk-on role. I remember doing this with the civil servant Briggs – and showing something of the bureaucracy behind him – in Isle of the Dead. This I suppose to be a corollary of the Hemingway principle – an indication of the presence of things perhaps important in their own right but not essential to the story itself – actually the reverse of cutting an essential item and hoping that its light shines through. But I believe the effect is similar – in making people feel something more than they understand. It works to expand the setting of the entire piece and to provide evidence of the larger reality surrounding the action by giving the reader a momentary, possibly even subliminal, feeling that there is something more there.

     [“The Parts That Are Only Glimpsed,” in Unicorn Variations]

     Today this matter of “giving the reader a feeling that there is something more there” is pursued mainly by crafting interminable series of novels that feature a gaggle of characters the writer can’t seem to stop writing about. You know, like the Onteora Canon.

     So we have two great writers, separated by many years, on opposite sides of a critical “rule.” One tells us to abide by it; the other says it can be broken to good effect. Where, then, is Truth?

     I’d say it's here, in Uber-Rule Zero:

Carry yourself with enough brass,
And you can get away with anything.

     Note that this rule is far wider of application than Chekhov’s Law.

     I’ve been dancing around the edges of Uber-Rule Zero ever since I started writing fiction. I’ve played with implausibilities of many kinds. I’ve used themes that nearly never appear in contemporary fiction written for a general audience. I’ve contrived plots to which Rube Goldberg would say “Aw, c’mon!” I’ve crafted characters that will strain any reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief: immortal supermen, great geniuses, priests of great wisdom and benevolence, and politicians with consciences to which they actually pay attention. And I’ve done my best to act as if it’s utterly natural, “all in a day’s work.”

     Because the one and only true requirement of fiction is that the reader buy it and derive entertainment from it. That requires that the writer maintain a seamless pretense of auctorial nonchalance, as if his decisions are so swift and unstressed that he need say nothing about them...except for the story, of course.

     A caveat about the above: It’s not a prescription for the novice fictioneer to discard all the wise precepts successful writers have set down for him. Craftsmanship matters. So does a keen sense for the way people really act and speak. A coherent plot requires respect for the motivations of your characters. And of course, you must have a story to tell.

     Still, once you’ve mastered a certain degree of craftsmanship and have learned enough about people to be able to construct plausible stories about them, there’s a sense of liberation about it all. After all, fiction writing, as Lawrence Block has told us, is about “telling lies for fun and profit.” It’s very much like that greatest of all characterological assets for real – i.e., non-fictional – people, sincerity: if you can fake that, you can get away with anything. Really!

Feel the love.

Osaka explained to The New York Times that even though she’s lived in Florida since she was three years old, she made the decision to play tennis for Japan primarily because of funding opportunities: Japan had more money to sponsor her.

Of growing up in a multi-cultural heritage household, Osaka has said, “I don’t necessarily feel like I’m American. I wouldn’t know what that feels like.”

Of her Japanese culture, Osaka said, “Japanese culture? I love everything about it. . . . America, I live here. I train in Florida. . . . And Haiti, if you’ve ever met a Haitian person, they are really positive, and literally if you’re friends with them, then they will do anything for you. That’s something that is a really good trait, and I’m really happy that my grandparents and my dad’s side of the family is like that.”

"Naomi Osaka’s Family: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know." By Caroline Burke, Heavy, 9/8/18 (emphasis added).

Never forget.

Black Panther Mark Essex burst into a New Orleans hotel, shouting, “I want the whites!” He murdered a young honeymooning couple, hotel guests and staff members, and a number of police officers. Stokely Carmichael praised Essex, saying, “We should study and learn from the actions of Brother Essex. We should understand that Brother Essex carried our struggle to its next quantitative level, the level of science.”

"Senator Booker Quotes Violent Racist Who Urged Murder of Jews, White People." By Daniel Greenfield, Front Page Magazine, 9/10/18.

Pearls of expression.

Everyone I don't like is a Russian-backed NeoNazi, and everyone to the right of Chairman Mao is a far right extremist.

"What's Next For Sweden After Election Nailbiter." By Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge, 9/10/18.

Pearls of expression.

Spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, Maria Zakharova:

We have killed, we are killing and we will kill terrorists…whether that be in Aleppo, Idlib or other parts of Syria. Peace must return to Syria …

Commenter Gary Sellars:

The US version is “We have funded, we are funding and we will fund terrorists"

"Russia: We Have Killed, Will Kill Terrorists In Syria." By South Front, 9/6/18.

State of the art M.E. strategic analysis.

Israel REALLY wants Iranian forces and rocket bases out of Syria.

The Saudi's REALLY want that Syrian pipeline route to deny it to Iran.

The US REALLY wants the Russians out of their naval facilities in Tartus.

...So, another "False Flag" by CIA controlled FSA/ISIS forces is coming up.

Comment by Charlie Seattle on "US Says Assad Has Approved Gas Attack In Idlib, Setting Stage For Major Military Conflict." By Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge, 9/9/18.

Reductio ad Trumpum.

Future history:

"Assad was on the verge of victory, but being pure evil that he was he just really wanted to gas people, no matter how irrational, or counter-productive his generals kept telling him it would be. If it wasn't for that fatal flaw, maybe Syria could have won against the last few brave freedom fighters selflessly guarding the people of Idlib. Assad gassed a hospital of extreme strategic importance full of orphan children, young women and babies killing 47. Twenty five brave white helmets happened to be close by and caught the whole thing on camera. The white helmets then risked their lives trying to save the women and children but were too late. Luckily none of the white helmets were injured. The world would not stand for this outrage from such a man of pure evil. 137,000 evil Assad supporters died in the invasion that followed."

Comment by Quesnay on "US Says Assad Has Approved Gas Attack In Idlib, Setting Stage For Major Military Conflict." By Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge, 9/9/18.

American political vengeance.

No one suggests Richard Nixon was without sin in trying to cover up the Watergate break-in. But no one should delude himself into believing that the overthrow of that president, not two years after he won the greatest landslide in U.S. history, was not an act of vengeance by a hate-filled city that ran a sword through Nixon for offenses it had covered up or brushed under the rug in the Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson years.^[1]

As the anti-Trump coup attempt is showing, viciousness is part and parcel of American politics and Nixon was as hated as Trump is now for having taken on Alger Hiss. Joe McCarthy was also crucified for merely asking, reasonably enough, why so many communists were employed by the federal government.^[2]

FDR made no mention of his ultra-revolutionary intentions in his first campaign and, in fact, campaigned on a platform that was the polar opposite of what he dumped on America afterwards. He did his utmost to provoke the Japanese attack and the suspicious lingers on that he knew the attack on Pearl Harbor was coming. Saint Franklin. Kennedy liked to pick up prostitutes on 13th Street, NW, in his presidential limousine and screw young women in the White House pool, but he was presented to America as the dernier cri of elegance and class. Camelot indeed. His father’s purchase of critical votes in Chicago is well known but perturbed no known Democrat. Nixon, the patriot and statesman, chose not to put the country through the turmoil of an election challenge but his subsequent common sense “Southern Strategy” made beautiful people apoplectic. How dare that brute appeal to people who thought they were being sold a bill of goods!

Note amazing similarity.

Johnson too rose to the Senate with the help of vote fraud and, while president, did nothing about the deliberate Israeli air and naval attack on the USS Liberty. His disgusting habits in dealing with subordinates in the WH are well known. No incessant outcry about Johnson’s crassness was heard but Trump’s private conversation with some slime ball was splashed across the air waves and a salacious, manufactured “dossier” has been used to portray him as a lowlife caricature of a man. The fires of Hell are not hot enough for a man like him who has called attention the elites' sellout out of the back bone of America!

So what crimes and scandals bubble to the surface in our national politics are the result of a highly partisan and selective process, the spear point being leftist media hyenas crying about contrived garbage like (1) Russian collusion, aggressive expansion, and inhuman military tactics, (2) the Iranian threat to Lubbock, Texas, and (3) Trump obstruction and mental instability. As ever, the real story is in what isn’t demonized. Think open borders, Living Constitution, Propositional Nation, Nation of Immigrants, AntiFa, queer agenda, black dysfunction and crime, legal discrimination against whites, media monopoly, tech giant manipulation and suppression, H1-B visa abuse, vote fraud, feminist lunacy, university capitulation to mob idiocy and malice, illegal and unconstitutional wars, Islamic subversion and savagery, and the gargantuan federal government. Yes, pilgrims. It's "the Russians."

And looking at the process as a whole, as Buchanan does, is instructive in understanding the outrageous, selective attack on our political system that is underway at this moment. Not against any real threat to the Republic but only against threats to the ultra-left, sell-out Deep State.

Notes
^[1] "Regime Change—American Style." By Pat Buchanan, Chronicles, 9/7/18.
^[2]  Jack Cashill describes the uneven application of federal criminal law for smaller fry. Sandy Berger stole as many classified 9/11 documents as he could stuff into his underwear but got a slap on the wrist but Martha Stewart and Scooter Libby took it in the neck for far less serious conduct. People whose names are very familiar to us today were involved back then as well.

Toodle-Loo!

I'm packing - fast - to take off later this afternoon for Cleveland on a one-way flight. I'll be driving my husband's stranded van (Lord, I HATE driving that oversized thing!) back to SC on Monday.

So - likely not blogging, will be working on my own writing - air travel is good for that.

My plan is to use this time to focus on planning and outlining.

This is a Draft - Not a Letter That is Ready to Go

If you look at the 'letter' in the post, you will clearly see that it is NOT a 'all but the signature' letter. It's an early draft - meant to suggest POSSIBILITIES (please excuse the CAPS - I feel that the fools at CNN don't get the point unless they see the emphasis).

So, no - this was NOT a letter ready to be signed - just one that would serve as a basis for discussion.

The Democrats Are Crazytown

     As a public service, I urge all my Gentle Readers to view and popularize this 42 second video:

     How many unaffiliated and weak-liberal voters see that video could determine the results of the 2018 midterms. Spread it far and wide.

“We’re All Disconnected”

     If you’re old enough, you might remember the days of telephone monopolies. The various companies that offered phone service were all part of the “nationwide Bell System,” and had carved the nation into zones where only one Bell subsidiary was permitted to offer service. That ended with telecom deregulation, more than thirty years ago, but the memories linger – especially of how BLEEP!ing costly it was to call someone outside one’s own area code.

     New York Telephone, the Bell subsidiary in my area, is survived today by Verizon. Verizon still has some clout other companies don’t have, but it no longer has a regional monopoly. Back when it was NYTel, one of its ads featured the stirring phrase “We’re All Connected:” by implication, through NYTel’s telephone services.

     Relax, Gentle Reader; this won’t be a piece about telecommunications. I just wanted to share that memory with you as a counterpoint to the title of this piece.

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     Today, Dr. Helen Smith has a brief piece about loneliness:

     If a person has negative thoughts about being lonely, then it can be a health concern, but if they are happy being alone or content, it is not. Half of all Americans are now unmarried and I wonder how this plays into loneliness.

     Ignore the poor grammar. The above is the meat of the loneliness problem: If you’re alone, are you unhappy about it? If so, you have a problem. How did it come about?

     No one is born alone. So far at least, we’re all born from mothers. If we omit consideration of the wretches who abandon their children at birth, that means we start life in company. Perhaps there’s a father available too, though that’s getting to be a problematic thing all by itself. He who has siblings has even more company...though let it be admitted that not all siblings are the sort of company we’d choose for ourselves.

     He who is involuntarily alone must first lose the company of his family. How does it happen?

• Death;
• Separation or divorce;
• The “family diaspora;”
• Deliberate disavowal of or by one’s family members.

     Except for death, those developments can be combated, though the outcome is not guaranteed. The maturing child can also compensate for those forces by acquiring friends. But friends, too, can be lost: through physical or emotional separation, the development of serious incompatibilities, and the extra tensions that arise from marriage and choice of occupation.

     A friend one can retain lifelong is a treasure. Few Americans manage to do so – perhaps fewer today than ever before in our history.

     Time was, the companion one could most confidently rely on retaining was one’s spouse. But mating among Americans has become extremely problematic, in large part because of the plague of willful offense-taking.

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     Solitude is my lifestyle. I spend virtually my entire waking day alone. It’s not burdensome to me; I became accustomed to it long ago as the proper course for a thinker and writer. But then, I have a wife whose company I can enjoy at least an hour or two per day.

     Consider the plight of the unmarried American man. How shall he acquire a wife? The traditional methods have all fallen into disuse. Those that have arisen in their wake are anything but reliable. And then there’s the sociopolitical toxin called feminism.

     In a culture in which the sexes are seen not as complements to one another but as competitors for money, status, and power, even tentative gestures toward the development of a romance and a marital bond can be viewed as attempts at a “hostile takeover.” Moreover, the Left’s militant-feminist adjunct has worked tirelessly to promote and intensify the conviction among women that men are “the enemy.” That conviction is wholly compatible with the vision of the sexes as competitors over commercial and political achievements.

     While there are other causal factors involved in the decline of marriage rates and the dwindling resilience of existing marriages, this one deserves particular attention. At a time when other sorts of friendship and companionship are badly threatened, the reduction of marital prospects is especially significant.

     Many Americans, especially the older ones among us, would spend their lives entirely alone if not for their spouses. Those parted from their mates relatively early in life have many sad tales to tell.

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     Human nature has provided us with natural connections. We have the capacity to forge other sorts of bonds, but those that arise from love and family are paramount. He who lacks such bonds is in greater danger of protracted miserable loneliness than anyone else. A great deal more could be said about this subject – a lot of it has been said eloquently by Dr. Jordan Peterson – but I’ll allow it to rest here for the nonce.

Propaganda theme of the week.

That is to say: deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian casualties as moral show stopper.

Trump, Pompeo, Keane, and assorted trolls have escalated the rhetoric from “we won’t tolerate an chemical weapons attack” to “we won’t tolerate Syria’s clearing out terrorists from its own sovereign territory because they and the Russians deliberately attack civilians to achieve their goals.”

Why this is as rational as the idea that pointless chemical attacks targeting civilian are the way to go is beyond me. Terrorizing civilians is a feeble, worthless tactic which does little to nothing to interfere with actual enemy troops and it sure as hell doesn't do much for building loyalty to the regime.

On top of which, deliberate bombing of civilians is a waste of ordnance which, hard as it may be to believe, does not materialize cost-free out of the ether every time you use some of it. Killing 10 jihadis is better than killing 100 civilians for no rational reason and keeping your expensive ordnance for the former purpose over the long haul is the way to go.

And, CW use is about as suicidal as you can get when you have lying, hysterical, arrogant hypocrites outside your country just looking for the slightest excuse to attack your forces and infrastructure.

The CW/civilian bombing idea is absurd, like everything else about our involvement in Syria.

And here's a little reality check:

Russia is now preparing to support the upcoming attack of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) on the militant-held areas in northwestern Syria. Many Western countries criticized Russia because of this and claimed that such an attack will threaten the lives of millions of civilians there. The problem of these statements is that they ignore the presence of tens of thousands of terrorists.^[1]

Oh. Them.

A trivial consideration. And while you’re at it, ignore U.S. methods in the reduction of Fallujah, Mosul, and Raqqah. Namely, indiscriminate use of artillery and aerial bombardment. Nothing to see there. Oh, no. Let’s indulge instead in “Let no sparrow fall” posturing. The U.S. never unleashes ordnance from the skies unless a red laser dot from an orbiting satellite lights up a jihadi forehead. The U.S. military never, ever causes "collateral" damage. Our hands are clean.^[2]

The caption to the above picture reads “Paratroopers engage ISIS militants with precise artillery fire in support of Iraqi and Peshmerga fighters in Mosul, Iraq, July 6, 2017. The paratroopers are assigned to Charlie Battery, 2nd Battalion, 319th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division. (Sgt. Christopher Bigelow/Army)”^[3] The piece may be an M777A2 lightweight 155mmm towed howitzer which has a “2 meters miss distance regardless of range” out to 24km, 30km, or40 km depending on whether the projectile is unassisted or assisted. Whether the 2-meter accuracy is available when the projectile has no GPS receiver I do not know. Suffice it to say, this (and follow on) systems are indeed enormously accurate, especially as the guns can self-locate by means of GPS.

The problem with any weapons capable of such amazing precision is that a human observer still must designate the target. In urban warfare, the photo below is basically what all observers see absent that rare, fortuitous situation where intel knows what pocket the jihadi keeps his wallet in and exactly where he is:

Spot the jihadi scum, please. Avoid civilian areas. Easy, right?

And witness this airstrike:

Any civilians in harm's way there? Air strikes don't always involve laser-designated targets but, even if they do, you've still got the problem of flawless target designation. No by-guess-or-by-golly decision making. No blatant disregard of who suffers at the other end of these weapons. Ever. Right?

Well, of course that's the way it goes down in the vast, vast majority of cases. Lots of guesswork and focusing on getting the slaughter over with as soon as possible (unless you are the U.S. and are waging a life-and-death pretend war on ISIS and your top priority is kissing al-Nusraqaida ass). "Collateral damage" is a concept notable for its casual acceptance. Too bad. So sad. We're exceptional but you all are animals.

This greasy sanctimony about Russian and Syrian deliberate targeting of civilians and effortless avoidance of civilians is just garbage.

Notes
^[1] "Russia: We Have Killed, Will Kill Terrorists In Syria." By South Front, 9/6/18.
^[2] "U.S.-Led Forces Said to Have Used White Phosphorus in Syria." By Anne Barnard, New York Times, 6/10/17.
^[3] "Commentary: Iraq endures the crucible, and emerges transformed." By Lt. Gen. Paul E. Funk III, Army Times, 7/9/18.

Noise As A Tactic For Political Destabilization

     From this article by self-proclaimed “expert on everything” Tom Nichols, one could easily get the impression that President Trump is a borderline lunatic, and that the Trump Administration is a pressure cooker about to explode. Such impressions are easily fabricated with the use of the right rhetoric. Nichols’s piece, a pure exercise in what was once called agitprop, is a perfect example.

     The astute Richard “Wretchard” Fernandez puts the proper coloration on it in this Twitter thread. The meat of the matter:

     The new liberal strategy is not to argue but to confuse. Create phantom objects, devise imaginary plots, sow intrigue, all with the view of giving Trump "a taste of his own medicine". They reckon that by reducing the battle to pure noise output the Mighty Wurlitzer will win.

     The problem with this approach is that it multiplies chaos and essentially fries the normal comm channels. Nobody gets the "word" because there is no word, unless that word is Noooooooo!!!

     There is a second component to the liberal strategy: a deliberate attempt to be unpleasant, increase anxiety and induce an atmosphere of crisis. The goal is to inflict deliberate pain, a pain that will only go away if you give them what they want.

     I would add to Wretchard’s observations that “frying the normal comm channels” is to the advantage of that side whose internal (and therefore protected) communications network is better established. The Left believes that it has an edge in that regard. It could well be so. Whatever the case, the Right needs to buttress its own communications networks. Else persons disposed to support the Trump Administration and its essentially libertarian-conservative thrust could be winnowed away from like-minded others. While that might not expose them to subversion, the Right needs all the support and supporters it can muster. The gloves are off, and they won’t be put back on at any time in the foreseeable future.

Does Anyone Remember “Anonymous?”

     Today, concerning the “anonymous” author of the New York Times’s recent op-ed by a self-described “senior administration official,” Byron York writes:

     Anonymity is good marketing. What if the author had simply identified himself? Not only would everyone be able to evaluate his position, they would also look into his background and try to draw connections between his past and his role as self-appointed, in-house Trump resister. Instead, by remaining anonymous, the author — and the Times — have not only avoided scrutiny but have added an irresistible element of mystery and suspense to the story. That means more attention.

     But York concludes his piece with the following:

     We'll know more soon enough. The Times wrote that it granted the author anonymity because his "job would be jeopardized" by disclosure of his name. It seems hard to believe the author truly thinks he can remain anonymous — and keep his job — in the white-hot public attention his article will attract. One way or the other, his identity will likely come out, probably sooner rather than later. And then the story could become even more interesting.

     Indeed. Joe Klein couldn’t keep his identity secret for as much as half a year, and publishers have a much stronger incentive for securing an author’s secrets. The author of the Times piece, if he’s what he claimed to be, will be exposed in short order. When that occurs, we’re likely to get quite a bit of information that was strictly sub rosa within the author’s circle of collaborators.

     Of course, the possibility exists that the piece was a fabrication by someone sufficiently skilled to persuade the Times of his elevated stature, despite being no more than an under-deputy assistant junior attendance trainee in the Department of Thinking Good Thoughts. In that case, we may have a good laugh at the Times’s expense...and President Donald Trump, who continues to make good on his campaign promises and to inspire millions to whom politics had become nothing more than a carnival of impotence married to corruption, will have the biggest laugh of all.

Working My Way Through "Clinton Cash"

It's about time. Before, during, and immediately after the 2016 election season, I was just flat-out too busy. I was working through June, 2017 at a full-time job. With the normal household activities, church, and family, I was stretched pretty thin.

I've begun a serious reading program - I still do read thrillers, suspense, science fiction, and the occasional murder mystery, but I've decided to broaden my reach into more non-fiction. Most of my energy is on shoring up my weak spots - conservative philosophy, history, and military/war history. I'm allowing myself to take an occasional side trip into quirky/fun stuff (For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History - quite eye-opening as to the impact of trade on politics, history, and international relations).

I just finished Three Felonies a Day, which gave me a good grasp on how politicizing the Justice Dept. has led us back to the arbitrary prosecutions of the Tudor Era - with similar results (cementing the party/king in power, and both politically and financially destroying its enemies).

I'm just beginning Clinton Cash; I'm about 18% of the way through it. The focus of the book is the practices of the Clinton Foundation, and how dedicated efforts to overlook its abuses have made Bill and Hill rich. And, contributed to their political entrenchment.

Don't think they are out of power forever. Either they, or their closely associated cronies, will be stuck like burrs to America's butt, until we finally get the guts to boot them out.

One of the names to look out for is Giustra, a Canadian whose appetite for mining concessions in 3rd-world countries is only matched by the Clinton's avarice.

What a combo! Giustra's desire to get mining contracts - cheaply, Bill's complete amorality in both sex and money matters, and Hill's dogged determination to do whatever it took to get the deals made.

Oh, and her matchless ability to smile blandly and spew lies before the camera, coupled with her supporters to spring into attack dog mode whenever she snaps her fingers. Jim Jones was a piker, compared to Hill! His followers largely killed themselves; Hill's followers would commit felonies, and fall on their swords for a woman who callously ignored her husband's and friends' predations, then claimed to support vulnerable women.

Hill and Russia were made for each other - both completely immoral, greedily grasping for all the cash they could stuff in their pockets, and willing to allow Russia's Putin to extend his oligarchic reach throughout the world.

The overall scheme to control uranium sources is thoroughly detailed:

• Control by Giustra's UrAsia Energy Ltd. of the merged Uranium One. He and his cronies control 60% of the new company. Keep that in mind when Uranium One comes up.
• Russia plans (still) to both dominate the world's uranium production, and to capture ownership of the resources - EVEN those in Canada and the United States.
• The role of Russia's atomic energy agency - Rosatom. It controls both civilian and military use of nuclear.
• The Iranian reactors were built by Rosatom, but supplied with uranium, as well.
• "Rosatom also operates in North Korea, Venezuela, and Myanmar."
• Hillary was thoroughly briefed on nuclear and Russia. She was not just some dumb broad who relied on the kindliness of strangers. She knew what she was doing. She just didn't care.

I'm still reading. I'll post more as I get further in the book.

Administrative Changes that Trump COULD Make

The first one - no one gets a tax credit if they use a Taxpayer ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number). If you are a citizen, you have a Social Security Number. If you are a LEGAL foreign resident, you have a ITIN - but, should NOT get a tax credit for having low income.

If you are illegally residing in the USA, you shouldn't even BE here, let alone get money for not earning enough.

It may not be CALLED welfare, but that's what it is. Money, not because you earned it, but because you are broke.

There's more on the link, including the fact that the LAW already says that you are not entitled to get that money, under PRWOA - the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 (passed while Bill Clinton - that AWFUL Conservative Republican - was in charge). In addition to barring welfare benefits, it also forbids "any other similar benefit for which payments or or assistance are provided to an individual, household, or family eligibility unit by an agency of the United States or by appropriated funds of the United States".

That denial of the UNEARNED tax credit would ALSO include those foreigners who were given amnesty by Obama - about 700K of them. It shouldn't take much work to identify them, and flag their irregularly-obtained Social Security number as "ineligible for any benefits/assistance".

Seems to me that covers an awful lot of goodies that illegal aliens are currently getting. It may include a lot of the money that is going to resettling the incoming aliens - much of the cost is ultimately borne by the taxpayer, although many of the agencies are all over themselves about their 'charitable work'.

If you take money from unwilling taxpayers to cover the cost of that work - it ain't charity!

It will take some time to implement all of this, with Democrats/Leftists screaming at Trump all the while. MUCH of this is an administrative decision - what we call properly part of the Executive Powers.

Remedies for Illegal Immigration

Some of these - there are 25 - have real promise. Even better, they do not require a new law, just an administrative interpretation.

Gravity is Overrated | Weightless.

In the Run-Up to the Election

...keep in mind the many methods the Left is using to swing - if not falsify - the vote.

Facebook 'Influence' - Glenn Reynolds is FAR more generous than I am.

The Election Year 'October Surprise' - more Business As Usual - and, now, even more so. However, the timing of the NYT Anonymous op-ed makes it clear that they aren't waiting this year. They're mounting a Full-Court Press, NONSTOP, until the election is over (IF they stop then).

Fight back. Get off social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook, which have declared War on Trump. Make an announcement, stick to it, and detach yourself from the Forces Working to Dumb-ify You. Set your Feed to No Notifications, which will assist you in detaching.

BTW, read about election interference in previous years at the link above. I'd honestly forgotten about most of the shenigans that worked to throw the election to Bill Clinton. Remember, it takes not only a dedicated effort to finagle public opinion, but YOUR cooperation, as well.

Take heart - fortunately, the average American is a lot smarter than the Left HOPES they are.

Does A Headline With A Question Mark Imply Its Own Answer?

     You could certainly be forgiven for getting that impression. But in the meantime, such headlines beckon to us in tones of sweet reason that isn’t consistent with the record.

     Flash back to 2009. A number of Republicans, stunned by Obama’s election as President, begin a grass-roots movement to take back their party. The movement gains momentum and, over the next several elections, Republican officeholders find themselves in the fight for their political lives. Except it’s not against Democratic rivals but against members of their own party. Voters took to the polls and long-term incumbents soon found themselves tossed out of office. Sound familiar? It should. Except it isn’t Republicans seeing their party torn apart. This time, it is the Democratic Party, thanks to the Democratic-Socialists. It’s time to get out the popcorn and to sit back and watch what happens in the next installment of “How the Democrats Turn”.

     No one batted an eye when Bernie Sanders, self-described “independent” and hero of democratic-socialists around the country, ran for president on the Democratic ticket. Not even the Democratic National Committee seemed bothered, In fact, it embraced Bernie, offering him up as their sacrificial lamb to the anointed one, Hillary Clinton. What they didn’t foresee was that, by giving Bernie a national platform, they gave his political ideas legitimacy. In doing so, they brought on their own form of the Tea Party and, if you don’t mind my saying so, it couldn’t happen to a “nicer” political party.

     But the Tea Party – supposedly the “Tea” was an acronym for “Taxed Enough Already” was fiercely resisted by the GOP Establishment. Republicans in high office had been defaulting on their promises to restrain and (hopefully) downsize the federal Leviathan. The Democrats’ analogue, if such persons as Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez really do represent an “uprising” among Democrats, merely exhorts the party to go further, faster, in the direction in which it’s been headed for a century.

     I rather suspect that the “Not Taxed Enough Party” -- Thank you, Sarah Hoyt, for that translation – is a fabrication by the Democrat Establishment. They could well be using it to slide the Overton Window further to the left. Such a leftward shift of the window of acceptable public discourse could be seen as a way to limit the ambitions of the Trump Administration and to pre-constrain those of its successors.

     A great part of the art of politics, including the machinations of its media handmaidens, is prestidigitation: luring the public’s attention away from what’s really being plotted and planned with well timed distractions of all sorts. For politics is the pursuit of power. Ordinary people don’t like it when others assert power over them, no matter how high-minded the representations of the power-seeker might appear. Therefore, those who seek power must constantly work to disguise their intentions. As we mathematical types like to say, Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

Shaming - The New Puritan Ethic Among Elites

For all that they revel in dressing up like Oppressed Handmaidens, the SJWs use shaming as a tactical weapon.

I see this happening all the time on social media. Many people (OK, it's mostly women and younger, more emotional men) jump on a posted "outrage", and use it to declare themselves NOT LIKE THIS SINNER.

It's like the worst combination of middle school and a religious revival. But, without the "icky" Christian thing.

Just public shame. LOTS of shame.

The screams of WITCHCRAFT! Er, I mean RACIST, HOMOPHOBIC, H8r.

I blame schools - they're the ones that insisted on assigning The Scarlet Letter. Too many girls imagined themselves as a Hester Prynne (well, not ACTUALLY like the heroine - she accepted that she was wrong, and took all of the blame to herself).

Now they've got that bizarre and twisted story by Margaret Atwood to use for their protests. I read it when it first came out - even then, I thought it was lacking coherence, and imagined a world that was both sexually weird, and not logical.

I mean, in REAL LIFE, women who are infertile, and want to take the children of poorer women, just adopt a foreign kid (fewer questions and background checks). If a woman wants to have her husband's child, but can't, she just outsources it. Preferably to a 3rd World country, where she can pretend the mother is just incubating the kid. Which the lawyers are advising couples to do - use the egg from another women, and implant it in the 'breeder'. If there is no genetic connection, she can't take the kid back.

******************************************************************************

On a lighter note, I've been watching - with some astonishment - the CRAZY frothings of SJWs who see a White Power Signal in a folded set of arms.

No, really.

Although, to be fair, that's NOT OK, but O-Tay!

Another WP member signaling his allegiance.

OK. This MAY be getting crazy.

Crazier?

When even the ADL - Anti-Defamation League - says you're nuts, it may be time to reach for the Prozac.

Conspiracy Theorists - How Are They Different?

One way they are different from the average person is that they DON'T put more trust in "official" sources than they do in less "vetted" ones.

In other words, it's not that they are more believing of "fake news" sources. It's that they are LESS believing of official sources - who, after all, can lie.

Study finds that so-called conspiracy theorists are NOT paranoid. Although they share some characteristics with paranoids, they clearly are not suspicious of everyone. They differentiate between those they cannot trust to tell the truth, and those who they accept as generally reliable.

In other words, there is a distinct difference between the mental condition of paranoia, and the response of people who have learned - often through had experience - that many in government or industry are untrustworthy.

These are, however, psychological studies - a general category that often has major problems with replication (ability to duplicate the results). So, take what they say skeptically.

Episodes In Identity Politics, Part 1

     We hear the phrase identity politics often enough. We’re told – mostly by persons in the Right – that it’s toxic, something that’s slowly but steadily destroying the social and political cohesion of our nation. However, we seldom get a clear explanation of why that is so.

     Here’s one, from the Web’s favorite Bookworm:

     I’ll start with a phone call I had the other day with another lawyer who is an ardent Progressive and a good friend. I usually find his Progressivism amusing because, both personally and professionally, his every instinct is conservative. It’s just that, being gay, he is marinated in a toxic Leftist soup and fails to recognize the cognitive dissonance that permeates his life. [emphasis added by FWP]

     Bookworm has noted, en passant, the corrupting effect of submersion in a fully colonized and conquered group. Let’s call this lawyer Smith for convenience, since Bookworm didn’t mention his name. If Smith’s personal and professional instincts are conservative, how did he come to embrace Leftist political precepts and positions?

     Through his identity group.

     Homosexuals have been encouraged to make their sexual orientation and political concessions to it the heart of their existence. It’s been going on for a while, of course: since the Fifties at least. Just as with the “civil rights movement,” the Left decided that it would “own” the homosexual-rights issue and use it to colonize that group. Northern California homosexuals have been a particular target of the Left, as they’re disproportionately numerous in that region and tend toward close associations.

     When a man begins to see one aspect of his life, character, or personality as central to his identity, and is regularly immersed in a group of similarly minded persons, he will tend to absorb the other postulates and convictions of that group. This influence in especially strong when the group is essentially uniform about its postulates and convictions. That makes the political subversion of an identity group a huge win for the Left.

     I’ve ranted in the past about the dangers of joinerism. Consider this another link in that chain – a chain that can be used to drag the unsuspecting away from practices and convictions that are to his benefit, and toward an abyss from which escape is problematic at best. Verbum sat sapienti.

42,000 Pages?

     The way this story is being reported, it sounds like dirty pool:

     WASHINGTON — Chaos broke out at the start of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, as Democrats demanded an immediate adjournment while protesters interrupted with shouts and were dragged out by police.

     Just as Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) began his opening statements, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) asked that the hearing be adjourned to review the 42,000 pages of documents dumped on senators late on Labor Day.

     “We cannot possibly move forward, Mr. Chairman,” Harris pleaded.

     “You are out of order,” Grassley responded.

     But appearances can be deceiving:

     “We will continue as planned,” Grassley said as the room erupted in boos and jeers.

     “Most senators would not agree to turn over their staff’s communication to anyone,” Grassley said, citing attorney/client privilege.

     The documents in question had nothing to do with Judge Kavanaugh’s record as a jurist. Rather, they pertained to his prior time as a lawyer in private practice – materials to which the objecting Democrats had no legal right nor claim on the basis of the diligence expected of a Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Indeed, Kavanaugh could have withheld them under the rules of attorney / client privilege. Why he didn’t, I cannot say.

     It has become indisputable that the left will do anything and everything to impede the Kavanaugh confirmation, or any other element of the Trump agenda. No doubt the strategy has been meticulously planned out. The question remaining is whether Congressional Republicans can withstand the pressure the legacy media will bring to bear on them. So far the indications are promising...but stay tuned.

More Stuff I Hadn't Seen in a List Before

It's long, but VERY worth reading. After reading, I realized - The Donald really does lead a charmed life.

The Pope on the Death Penalty - What Does it Mean?

A lot - and, yet, not binding.

Read about it here.

And here.

I'm generally of the idea that only the cruelest offenders should die by state hand - those that torture, imprison, pick on the helpless and those who were put under their protection - and LWOP for the rest of the 1st degree and repeat 2nd degree murderers.

In fact, to keep the chuckleheads from trying to release those LWOP guys on 'compassionate' grounds, I'd favored a sentence of death - with the proviso that the execution be delayed permanently - UNLESS that person seeks to be freed on any grounds except actual innocence or prosecutorial misconduct of substantial degree. In which case, the full sentence kicks in immediately.

I do believe that testimony by someone who is accepting a plea bargain should never be used for death penalty cases. The opportunity for skewing testimony is too great.

Question: Where’s your job description?

Since before he took office Trump was besieged within his own administration by a hostile phalanx of Democrats, almost all of the GOP establishment, the federal law enforcement and intelligence nomenklatura, and the media. It doesn’t help that his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, seems to think he has nothing better to do than crank up the civil forfeiture machine and give states a hard time for playing fast and loose with federal marijuana laws, while a criminal anti-constitutional conspiracy operates under his nose at the Department of Justice and the FBI in cahoots with elements of the US and British intelligence agencies.^[1]

U.S. government.

I once had a job in the Army to meet and escort a visiting general who came around periodically to inspect our unit. I asked him what he looks for and he replied simply that he looks to see if people are doing their jobs.

It’s not complicated but now, however, good luck seeing it asked What is your job and are you doing it? Police won’t shut down AntiFa but collude with it instead. Teachers teach fairy tales. College presidents won’t defend free speech. Politicians won’t control spending. The media promotes absurdities and will not warn against the Muslim threat, call attention to black refusal to get a grip, or point out all the negative aspect of immigration. They sure as hell won’t crank up a thimbleful of skepticism about chemical weapon attacks and our crazy warmaking wherever it pleases us to force foreigners to act like people in Lincoln, Nebraska, the gold standard for sensible human thinking.

Trump won’t put U.S. troops on the border at home but ensures they’re on the job on the Afghan border. He’s supposed to be president but he acts like he has no more constitutional power than a visiting journalist from Bulgaria when he complains about Sessions and Rosenstein. Simply ensuring that the dangerous phenomenon of an “independent” counsel stays within the bounds of his marching orders seems beyond his capabilities. Do we even know if there is any limit on what Mueller can investigate?

Trump simply conveys no strategic or constitutional awareness. The extent of his pushback against the Deep State appears to be nothing more than his Twitter output and his periodic rallies where you will hear no precise analysis of the forces arrayed against him and us.

Still, that said, Donald Trump was the only presidential candidate who communicated an awareness of fundamental problems and any kind of anger at America’s being everybody’s bitch. Nonetheless, more people in our country got to do what they’re paid to do and more managers need to do the managing that they’re paid to do.

Notes
^[1] "Will Someone In Washington Play The Ace Of Spades Before November?" By James George Jatras, ZeroHedge, 9/2/18 (links removed).

Like never?

When have western governments and media ever demanded that the so-called international community “do something” to save a non-Muslim population – anywhere?

"Will Someone In Washington Play The Ace Of Spades Before November?" By James George Jatras, ZeroHedge, 9/2/18.

The Doctrines Of Men: A Sunday Rumination

     And there assembled together unto him the Pharisees and some of the scribes, coming from Jerusalem. And when they had seen some of his disciples eat bread with common, that is, with unwashed hands, they found fault. For the Pharisees, and all the Jews eat not without often washing their hands, holding the tradition of the ancients: And when they come from the market, unless they be washed, they eat not: and many other things there are that have been delivered to them to observe, the washings of cups and of pots, and of brazen vessels, and of beds.
     And the Pharisees and scribes asked him: Why do not thy disciples walk according to the tradition of the ancients, but they eat bread with common hands? But he answering, said to them: Well did Isaias prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written: This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. And in vain do they worship me, teaching doctrines and precepts of men. For leaving the commandment of God, you hold the tradition of men, the washing of pots and of cups: and many other things you do like to these.
     And he said to them: Well do you make void the commandment of God, that you may keep your own tradition.

     [Mark 7:1-9]

     There have been many changes in Christian practice over the centuries, but one thing has continued from the time of Saint Paul all the way to the present day: the tendency among clerics, starting with Paul himself, to substitute their own preferences for the teachings of Christ.

     Jesus of Nazareth did not demand much. The Two Great Commandments, and the Ten that Moses received on tablets of stone, were all He asked of anyone. Yet just as politicians have strained to “reinterpret” the words of the Constitution to prescribe and proscribe as they prefer, so also have clergy of all Christian denominations meddled with the teachings of the Redeemer, such that the behavior they prefer to prescribe and proscribe somehow becomes what He wants.

     Jesus was quite willing that His followers should cast off the traditions of which the Pharisees were so protective. He and His disciples performed various labors on the Sabbath. They ate without first performing the ritual washing of hands. And He twice told those who would listen that His Father wants “mercy and not sacrifice:”

     And when Jesus passed on from hence, he saw a man sitting in the custom house, named Matthew; and he saith to him: Follow me. And he rose up and followed him. And it came to pass as he was sitting at meat in the house, behold many publicans and sinners came, and sat down with Jesus and his disciples. And the Pharisees seeing it, said to his disciples: Why doth your master eat with publicans and sinners?
     But Jesus hearing it, said: They that are in health need not a physician, but they that are ill. Go then and learn what this meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice. For I am not come to call the just, but sinners.

     [Matthew 9:9-13]

     At that time Jesus went through the corn on the sabbath: and his disciples being hungry, began to pluck the ears, and to eat. And the Pharisees seeing them, said to him: Behold thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do on the sabbath days.
     But he said to them: Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and they that were with him: How he entered into the house of God, and did eat the loaves of proposition, which it was not lawful for him to eat, nor for them that were with him, but for the priests only? Or have ye not read in the law, that on the sabbath days the priests in the temple break the sabbath, and are without blame? But I tell you that there is here a greater than the temple. And if you knew what this meaneth: I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: you would never have condemned the innocent. For the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath.

     [Matthew 12:1-8]

     Christ did not command Man to suffer. Yes, we grow old. Yes, we fall ill, or are injured. Yes, every one of us must die. But between birth and death there is no sort of privation or suffering which we are commanded to accept and endure for God’s sake. If privation or suffering can be averted or ameliorated – without breaking either of the Two Great Commandments or any of the Ten of the Book of Exodus – it is entirely within God’s law that we should do so.

     You could hardly discern that message from the traditional stories of the lives of the saints, nor from the preachments of Christian clerics, with few exceptions even today.

     The tales of the lives of saints are often filled with “penances,” even “severe penances.” Seldom are we told what these holy men were doing penance for. Indeed, we are often encouraged to believe that God is pleased when one of us performs a “penance,” regardless of whether he has sinned and requires expiation. While other Catholics might find this shocking, I will argue that to inflict privation or suffering upon oneself for any reason other than expiation of a sin is contrary to the will of God. For God designed Man’s life – body, mind, and soul – to be lived in accord with that design:

• To seek the good things: learning, achievement, prosperity, love, progeny, wisdom, serenity, happiness;
• To avert or ameliorate the bad things: poverty, pain, suffering, injury, loneliness, blasphemy, cruelty, injustice;
• And to be grateful for the faculties He has given us for those purposes, and to praise Him for His blessings!

     But just as the easily understood words of the Constitution don’t make enough room for the ambitions of the venal and power-seeker, “Live in the fashion for which God has designed your body, mind, and soul, and give thanks to Him for His blessings” doesn’t leave enough room for the clerical power-seeker. Emanations and penumbras, anyone?

     Beware the man who seeks to persuade you otherwise. And may God bless and keep you all. Enjoy your Labor Day weekend.

Until You See the Whole List in One Place...

...you really don't realize just how much they hate you.

They really do. They want anyone - no matter how young, innocent, or determinedly non-oppostional to their plans - dead.

Dead.

Dead.

It's not everyone in that column. The go-alongs, who are sucked in because that side is the "nice, compassionate group", mostly are against your death.

Mostly.

Although, they WILL stand by, making sure that you haven't the means to avoid it, helping those that DO want you dead to keep you confined until such time as your death can be arranged.

They would prefer this - assumption of body temperature - takes place out of their sight. Like in the abortion facilities - they are REALLY against those icky pictures that show what is happening. God forbid that the 'reality-based' lifeforms face the cold reality of the consequences of their principles.

But, they want you dead more than they want to have to face up to the fact that they cooperated with Evil. If only they can - um - eliminate your inconvenient shouting of the facts, they can rest easy - sort of - at night. They are not pro-death, exactly.

They just prefer to have these necessary deaths occur out of their sight, and with euphemistic words hiding the reality. So they can still think of themselves as good people.

I pity them. I really do. Most of them have gone along for so long, built up their friendships and alliances, that, if they walked away now, they would be sadly adrift. No friends. No emotional support for a difficult future. They would have to face their complicity with no soft phrases to soothe their conscience.

Instead, they are hanging together, telling themselves comforting stories, bolstering up their fragile sense of decency.

Whistling in the wind.

God help them when the truth becomes so evident that they can no longer lie to themselves.

Being A Proper Authoritarian

     No, this will be an entirely nonpolitical piece. What’s on my mind this morning is a phenomenon I’ve long wondered whether any other writer shares: the sense that we lack complete authority over our own works-in-progress.

     The late Florence King, in one of her book review columns, wrote that it’s the role of an author to be an authoritarian. However, I don’t remember what she was commenting on at the time and can no longer find the link. What I’m thinking of is the curious authority of the words themselves, once they’re in the manuscript.

     There are several necessities involved in putting a novel together:

1. Settling on a theme;
2. Imagining a plot that would dramatize it;
3. Conceiving of characters suited to acting out the plot;
4. Composing a series of events to generate the necessary clashes;
5. Setting those events in a timeline that’s both plausible and compelling;
6. Working out both the resolution and the pointers forward into the unwritten future.

     Yes, it’s a lot of work – and after you’ve managed all six of those steps, you still have to write the BLEEP!ing thing. So it’s understandable that a writer will be reluctant to do it, or any significant parts of it, more than once in a given novel-project. But sometimes it’s imperative...yet at those moments it can be even harder to face than usual.

     An example: I submitted my first draft of On Broken Wings to an excellent free-lance editor – Rafe, if you’re out there anywhere, I hope you’re well and happy – who gigged the manuscript for a number of minor blemishes and one major one. The major one involved a love scene, which had cost me enormous effort to write. Rafe criticized it as unbearably sappy. While I eventually came to agree with Rafe’s assessment, I was massively reluctant to resculpt that scene. Indeed, it seemed impossible.

     Why? For a supremely bizarre reason: it was there. It was “in the past.” My characters had already acted it out. That alone made it seem immutable.

     Pretty weird, eh, Gentle Reader? I mean, you already knew that I’m fairly strange, but...well, never mind. My reluctance to excise the offending scene and write a replacement was stronger than you can imagine. I eventually did, of course, to the considerable improvement of the book. Still, that bizarre sense of the author’s lack of authority over his own work has recurred on several subsequent occasions, including in my most recent novel, Innocents, and in Experienced, the sequel under construction.

     It probably has something to do with the characterization process. If your characters are “strong” – i.e., if you have a vivid, nicely detailed conception of them that propels how they respond to the crap you put them through – substantially altering a particular scene can make you feel as if you’re being untrue to them. It can be tough to retain your conception of your characters, especially your Marquee characters, when you have to put a scene significant to your vision of them “under the knife.”

     What is more valuable to a novel than vividly conceived characters? You certainly wouldn’t want your major protagonists and antagonists to be weakly colored. Yet the “stronger” they are in that sense, the more likely it is that you’ll need to do major surgery on one or more scenes in your first draft: not merely rewording a few sentences here and there, but removing the originally narrated action and replacing it entirely. And that requires being a proper authoritarian: declaring to your characters that “Thou shalt not behave the way I originally had you acting,” and redoing their deeds and / or the scene in which they occur.

     It strikes me that this is less likely to be a significant concern to short-story writers. In a short story, the animating idea is all; the characters can’t be allowed a lot of room for hijinks. However, we do have one classic and very funny case available: the famous “tandem story” of Laurie and Carl:

Rebecca and Gary
English 44A
SMU
Creative Writing
Prof Miller

In-class Assignment for Wednesday:

     Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right. One of you will then write the first paragraph of a short story. The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story. The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on back and forth. Remember to reread what has been written each time in order to keep the story coherent. The story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached.

     At first, Laurie couldn’t decide which kind of tea she wanted. The camomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked camomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So camomile was out of the question.

     Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. “A.S. Harris to Geostation 17,” he said into his transgalactic communicator. “Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far...” But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship’s cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.

     He bumped his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. “Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel.” Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth—when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no newspapers to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. “Why must one lose one’s innocence to become a woman?” she pondered wistfully.

     Little did she know, but she had less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu’udrian mothership launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through Congress had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empires who were determined to destroy the human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu’udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop them they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion which vaporized Laurie and 85 million other Americans. The President slammed his fist on the conference table. “We can’t allow this! I’m going to veto that treaty! Let’s blow ‘em out of the sky!”

     This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic, semi-literate adolescent.

     Yeah? Well, you’re a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium.

     You total $*&.

     Stupid %&#$!.

[Professor Miller: A+ I really liked this one!]

     I would have loved to be a fly on the wall the next time those two encountered one another. But back to my main query: Are there any other writers out there who’ve had the sense of lacking the author’s proper authority over your own work? The public wants to know!

The GOP’s inner dweeb army.

Once he won the election, the political establishment adjusted its tactics. Paul Ryan rallied the dweeb army inside the GOP to basically ignore Trump’s agenda. That’s why nothing happened on the border wall, immigration or infrastructure. The point is being made that working with Trump would be death for any Republican. In fact, the leadership went out of its way to make sure nothing Trump wanted was in the last budget. The message was being sent that the people in charge saw Trump as a hostile outsider to be resisted.

Even as the evidence of a sedition plot to alter the 2016 campaign mounts, you’ll notice that the grandees of the House GOP are stone silent on the matter.^[1]

Silence of the grave. Where is the outrage?

My severest criticism of Donald Trump is that he appears not to know that he’s president. He complains about Sessions and Rosenstein but does not remove them. Karl Denninger’s trademark “take no prisoners” take on that is great.

The Republicans in the House are doing yeoman’s work to get to the bottom of what can only be seen as a constitutional crisis but Trump lifts not a finger to force the release of unredacted documents or punish bureaucrats who stonewall congressional subpoenas.

Adam Lovinger, a whistleblower formerly with DOD, is hung out to dry by Trump even though he has exposed the payment of enormous sums of money to an odd Cambridge professor who’s been a “consultant” to the FBI on the Trump presidential campaign. Any lights going on in the presidential noggin? Not so’s you’d notice. Good luck Mr. Lovinger in your new career. Don't delude yourself that the president has your back.

There’s this strange black hole into which presidential awareness falls so that we have this strange circumstance of Trump doing great work on trade, goosing the Eurotwerps on NATO (though there’s still the question of whom NATO is defending humanity against), talking to Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un, and deregulation but yet a complete lack of outrage, energy, and interest over tech giant censorship, attacks on free speech (as de facto government entities a la Caitlin Johnstone), media monopoly, defiance of ICE, and a near-total abdication of law enforcement at all levels on the matter of AntiFa street thuggery, a descriptor that hardly begins to express my hatred and contempt of such slime. AntiFa scum were even interfering with his campaign rallies but still no residual awareness of their threat to civil society.

But, it’s the same in the GOP as a whole. It seems more invested in the Never Trump phenomenon and even actively obstructs Trump as witness the last appropriation act that was nothing less than a studied insult to Trump. True to form, though, Trump meekly rolled over with only feeble protest.

The left is deranged and conniving to bring the whole house down around us, and the GOP and Trump act like they have not the slightest awareness that we’re in the midst of a constitutional crisis. No one can be counted on to do his or her job and it's only the Arpaios, O'Keefes, Fittons, Nuneses, Jordans, Beesleys, Johnstone's, Coulters, Bartletts, etc. and such magnificent people who seem to be holding the line. Welcome to America on autopilot and busted hydraulics.

Notes
^[1] "The Encirclement." By The Zman, The Burning Platform, 8/27/18.

Subversion fatigue.

If you suffer from it, here’s an excellent take on the whole two-year nightmare of the snipe hunt known as the hunt for Trump’s Russia collusion: "The Truth Will Set Us All Free." By Victor Davis Hanson, The Burning Platform, 8/31/18.

I still marvel at the vagueness of the Mueller charge. What the heck are the limits of his partisan probe into the dusty attics and overgrown graveyards of America? By all appearances he’s got carte blanche to investigate even global warming climate change denial. This is mixed with federal prosecutorial power and blatant partisanship into a nasty cocktail that is no good for anyone. Is there any other nation on earth that in the name of fastidiousness and objectivity that periodically looses such cannons on the deck of a ship in heavy seas?

Active sabotage of the executive.

From an interview for Serbia Today with Srdja Trifkovic:

[ST:] Within Trump’s team, including Pence, Mattis and Pompeo, you have people who do not agree with his desire to establish a new modus vivendi with Russia’s President Putin, and are even trying to sabotage such policy.

Let me give you a specific example. When Trump met Putin for the first time in Hamburg just over a year ago, and said that he wanted a new era in mutual relations, his UN Ambassador Nikki Haley declared, “we don’t trust the Russians and never will!” This is nothing short of torpedoing executive policy-making from within.

Likewise, in the tsunami of hysterical rage following Trump’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki on July 16, we have been told any number of times that there existed a “consensus” of U.S. intelligence agencies on the Russian interference in American elections. That is simply not true! There are 16 Federal intelligence agencies in the United States; yet Obama’s select top operatives in just two of them, Brennan (CIA) and Comey (FBI) handpicked analysts to prepare a fact-free report which concluded that there was a high probability of Russian interference. The NSA did not accept this finding, it insisted on a far lower level of certainty. The other 13 agencies were kept out of the loop altogether.

"Multiple Pincers Against Trump." Chronicles, 8/27/18.