Seeing Much And Understanding Little

We live in an interesting age.  Daily, it seems, the news brings details of a society in which satire no longer has a place, because reality is far sillier and stranger than anything that the mind of even the cleverest satirist could conjure into being on paper.  It is a world in which the outrageous and stultifying have become so commonplace that even the most cynical among us are left with only a barely uttered “Of course…” when presented with the latest manifestation of the counterintuitive, and cognitive dissonance.  It is a situation which has often reduced my own reactions from what might otherwise be some form of analysis to silence in the face of what would have seemed inconceivable or laughably absurd a decade ago.

The expression du jour of this is the latest round of OUTRAGE!!!111!!!eleventy!! over the shootings in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, last week.   Once again, we were inundated with the predictable misdiagnosis of the issue, and the inevitable cries for the wrong solution.  What made this different is the added layer of “Huh?” laid over the now ubiquitous knee-jerk reaction in the form of the other hysterical outbursts of the same people slobbering out their calls for “commonsense gun control”, their hyperbolic insistence that President Trump is a fascist out to deny them all the freedoms.

This hue and cry was already turned up to 11, with the stubborn clinging to a narrative that the President “colluded” with Russians to influence the 2016 Presidential election, and the shrill characterization of this imagined skullduggery as “treason”.  This, we are supposed to believe, is the reason for Hillary Clinton’s loss, and not the fact that she was a terrible candidate who couldn’t be bothered to travel to Wisconsin and Michigan, and adopt the standard pose that she actually gave a damn about being the President for the people who live there.  Under normal circumstances, this would be an inexplicable reaction, but when the candidate herself still blames everyone but herself for this failure, it would at least explain some of this reaction.  The now revealed evidence of just how many people were involved in trying to fix the outcome in her favor, and her party’s own “collusion” with the Russians in compiling a salacious and incredulous “dossier” on her competitor brings some of this into focus, and at the same time, the astonishing degree of projection, and the obvious nature of it, causes the casual observer to wonder why it is that we are still investigating the President, and how after more than a year, we have found nothing to support the claims against him, while ample evidence of his opponent doing what he has been accused of has been laid bare, with nary an eyelash bat among the chattering classes, and her supporters.

Into this environment, we have such breathless exhortations such as “Democracy Dies In Darkness” emblazoned on the mastheads of blatantly partisan newspapers, whipping their ideological kin up into great frothy declarations of how this President is a fascist and a threat to freedom.   And then, in a society where mental health issues are encouraged, and celebrated, rather than treated, for the safety of the sufferer and those around them, we have a mentally ill person lash out and kill people.

The usual suspects are as predictable as the sunrise in the East with respect to these events.  Sadly, they cannot wait until the bodies are cool to start blaming the instrumentality, rather than the perpetrator, and waving the bloody bodies in their repetitious demands that the Constitution be abrogated because people who were deliberately made helpless were killed in the condition forced upon them by the state.  The second-tier foot soldiers in this assault on freedom quickly change their protests over from “Trump FASCIST!!!111!!!” to “WE MUST BAN ALL GUNZ NAO!!!111!!  AND IF YOU DON’T AGREE WITH ME, YOU HATE CHILDREN!!!111!!!”

This occurs without a single thought to the distance between the gears they have just shifted between.  Most people with normally functioning self-awareness might take the time to consider the logic of calls to disarm citizens while at the same time decrying the current administration as one characterized by fascistic tendencies so pronounced that it requires a “Resistance” and the constant drumbeat of how every action it takes will kill people.  But then, as I observed at the beginning of this piece, we live in interesting times.

It is a conundrum which I have been mulling over for a while.

And then, this morning, I read Scott Morefield’s excellent post at Townhall.com this morning, pointing out that context matters.  And it got me thinking, which then sent me back to re-read the account of Jesus’s arrest in the Gospels.  We know that the three synoptic gospels were all written for slightly different audiences, and that as a result, their accounts of the events of Christ’s life differ slightly, with emphasis on different aspects.  I myself have always been partial to the gospel of Luke, because he describes Jesus’s empathy with the human condition in a way that makes clear that he walked in the flesh, the same as you and I.

While Mathew and Mark describe Peter cutting off the ear of one of the mob come to arrest Jesus, they do not tell us which one, or what Jesus did for this man.  Luke gives us the missing details…that Peter cut off this man’s right ear, and that Jesus responded by saying “Permit even this.”, and touched the man’s ear, healing it.  All the Gospels state that at this point, Jesus chastised this crowd for not acting in this fashion, and instead sitting at his feet and listening when he was teaching in the Temple.

I can hear the more patient among you asking “Fine, fine, Blackiswhite… you have pondered something in the gospels.  This is relevant because…?”  The answer is very simple.  The mob was there to arrest Jesus because he had the temerity to present himself as who he was.   They came with the intent of causing him to answer for it, and yet he SHOWED them who he was with this simple act, and when this occurred right before their obviously lying eyes, it changed nothing.  Apparently not even the man who had his ear restored gave a second thought to what they had witnessed, and what it said about their purpose.  This speaks volumes, to know that such occurrences are not new, or that they can happen in the face of real evidence of the contrary.

And it is sad…that people can know so much, be so “woke”, and yet understand so very, very little.

Read Full Post »

Offending the Barbarians

Well, this week brought another series of murders in the name of “The Religion of Peace”.  These acts of savagery have become regrettably commonplace, but the reaction was different this time, because our betters, the relativist preachers and lecturers of the media were kin to those brutally murdered to avenge the honor of a god and prophet too impotent to tend to his own vengeance.  The chaos and confliction endemic to our “thought leaders” was telling.

We witnessed  large media outlets publicly take pains to be careful how they reported the story, out of fear of offending people who have a nasty and largely unchecked habit of killing anyone who offends them…in other words, pretty much anyone else.  Despite the near toxic irony of these media outlets being in a business that relies of the freedom of expression, including the freedom not only to offend, but to gore sacred cows with impunity, this was unsurprising, as these same outlets have been willing participants in a movement to shame, ostracize, and ultimately silence others who “offend” those who have been deemed by our betters to be beyond the reproach, criticism, questioning or mockery of others.  While the New York Times, MSNBC, and social justice warriors in every walk of society haven’t yet taken to killing those who have offended their delicate sensibilities with words, they have displayed absolutely NO reluctance to use their fainting couches as bludgeons against anyone who dares to utter anything that they deem unworthy of being said.  While cries of “racism” are the general default silencer, they have been unafraid to use “intolerance” and “white privilege”, and “______phobia” as well.

I would like to say that I’ve enjoyed seeing the bludgeon of “offense” used against the very people who have brought this perversion of our fundamental freedoms into favor, but I can’t.  Instead, I’m infuriated.  As a white Christian male, husband, and father, it has been open season on me, in my own culture, for most of my life.

And in response, I HAVE KILLED NO ONE.

I haven’t killed sitcom writers, who portray me as a bumbling idiot, worthy of derision from my wife, and contempt from my children.

I haven’t killed self-designated feminists, who seek to blame me for the oppression of women in a society in which I could, and have, worked for women, and in which I have known them as intellectual and spiritual equals.

I haven’t killed African-Americans, despite the ubiquitous claims of my personal practice of oppression, or enjoyment of it because “racism” and “white privilege” from racist grievance pimps, race hustlers, and their willing accomplices in academia and the media.

I haven’t murdered schoolchildren and other innocents, or suffered a massive psychotic break, despite believing in the Second Amendment and deeply resenting government’s numerous violations of it, and intrusions on to my right to bear arms, and the portrayal of myself and others who hold such beliefs by opportunistic politicians, media figures, and “academics”, as a wackjob and loon.

I haven’t killed those who maintain that I, and others like me are “bitterly clinging” to our Bibles and guns, and that we are members of an oppressive religion.  In fact, for a member of an “oppressive religion”, I am a failure, a characteristic I share with many others like me, as we haven’t “persecuted” anyone, despite continued infringement of our First Amendment rights by our own government, and a judiciary determined to ignore history, re-write the Constitution, and impose an interpretation of ten tortured words that would be completely foreign to those who penned them, and the man misquoted and misapplied to invoke this bizarro conception of what they had wrought.

If we were to compare grievances, I’ve just demonstrated that the “offences” to me, and others like me far exceed the followers of Islam, who “unexpectedly” are at the heart of every act of bloody savagery committed for the honor of a religion or its prophet in our world today.  And yet, here I stand, not yet having beheaded a single person, or not strapping on a bomb, and detonating it, and myself in a public place,and not attacking another religion’s house of worship…such as a Buddhist temple, synagogue, cathedral, or even  the offices of NPR or the New York Times ( I wouldn’t want our secular humanist brethren to feel left out).  This isn’t an accident; this is by design.

Because our betters have been so successful in using the fainting couch to cow us into creating a right “not to be offended” out of whole cloth, and elevating it to a position where it is far superior to all other rights, they have created their own gag, and contributed to the Barbarian’s belief that they are entitled to act like Barbarians, without thought or concern to consequences for doing so.  They have contributed to the “easy” response.  I’m not shocked, in the era of hashtag “diplomacy”, that I’m seeing “Je suis Charlie” all over the web.  But I’m not impressed.  The Fourth Estate surrendered its legitimacy, and surrendered its duty as a stalwart defender of freedom of expression.  It did this when it tried to stifle speech, rather than engage in it.  It did this when it tried to shut down the marketplace of ideas, rather than compete in it.  It did this when it exceeded its authority and tried to make a new right, not defend the ones central to their purpose.  And because they did this, they conceded our rights to the Barbarians.  They gave the enemies of civilization a veto.  And if civilization is to survive, we are going to have to step up, and do what our self-appointed betters no longer have the courage to do.

If your god commands that you kill to defend his honor, he’s a pretty impotent god.

If your god tells you that anyone who doesn’t believe in you is worthy of any punishment you care to make them suffer, he is a petty and impotent god.

If your god demands that you kill anyone who leaves his service, he’s a bloodthirsty and impotent god.

If your god has offered to reward murders in his name by giving you other humans for your pleasure in the afterlife, he is a barbaric and impotent god.

If you believe that it is your duty and obligation to behead those who insult Islam, then you are not worthy of the company of human beings.

And if you would use the tolerance and conventions of civilization as a means to infiltrate and undermine society until you have the numbers to assert yourself by bloodshed, then you deserve an extreme segregation from civilization that must be exacted to make it happen…until you learn, or until you aren’t a threat to others.

Read Full Post »

On the Coronation of Our Nation’s First Monarch…

What I learned from Barry the Usurper’s speech:

1. Progressivism sees the ultimate aim of government as the removal or mitigation of consequences for those it has deliberately enslaved with gilded shackles.

2. Logic has no place in the actions of government. You MUST believe that deportation is physically impossible, but verification of tax status and criminal background checks for the very same people can be accomplished with the wave of a wand.

3. “New tones” and “civility” only apply to discourse directed toward the monarch and his prerogatives; he will be as insulting, as condescending, and as reckless with the truth as he likes. He may impugn the character of his opponents, and assassinate any character he choses without acknowledging that he never had a right to claim the moral high ground that he has. And if you expect something different, that’s your problem, not his.

4. Breaking the law should never be rewarded, unless the Monarch deems it proper to do so.

5. Redefining terms and words in order to rhetorically spin dross into gold is acceptable linguistic alchemy.

6. Claiming cover based on the actions of predecessors whom you have reviled and disrespected at every turn isn’t despicable and toxically ironic when the Monarch does it.

7. If Congress doesn’t pass a law that the Monarch wants, the Monarch can refuse to enforce the law that exists…and such a trick is capable of repetition.

Read Full Post »

“UNEXPECTEDLY”

When I was a young man, about a week or so out from high school graduation, my friends and I piled in a Suburban and went up north to Hammond Bay for a few days of sailing and fishing.  On the second day, we all woke up, and everyone was eager to get on the boat and do some sailing.  Except me.  I could smell rain, and I suggested that we wait.  After some grumbling back and forth, we agreed to go over to the port, and hang out there for a while.  I grabbed my fishing pole and went to the end of the pier.  I sat there, casting my line out, and slowly reeling it in, while watching the sky along the coastline to the north.

After about ten minutes, one of my friends sat down next to me and was doing the same.  We sat there, casting, reeling, and looking north, while listening to the sound of the reels and the rising waves.  Twenty minutes later, we could see a wall of rain about a mile off to the north.  The wind picked up, and a small power boat came into the middle of the harbor, dropped anchor, and zipped everything up.  “It’s raining pretty hard up there.” my friend observed.  “Yup.” was my only reply.  The casting and reeling continued for another twenty minutes.  The wind was blowing harder, the temperature had dropped, and the wall of rain was only a half mile or so away.   My friend looked up and said “It’s raining pretty hard up there.”  I looked up, and said “Yup.”, and continued to cast and reel.   Ten minutes passed.   Two more boats came in, and tied up, their passengers rushing off to their cars waiting in the parking lot.  The wall of rain was now less than a quarter mile away.  My friend stopped reeling, and stared at the rain as he said “It’s raining pretty hard up there.”  I stopped, and shivered in the wind as I regarded the rapidly approaching wall of rain.  “Yup.” was my only reply.

Three minutes later, a raindrop the size of a half-dollar slammed into my forehead, followed by another.  And another.  We got up and ran as hard as we could for the Suburban, but in the minute or so it took us to get there, we were drenched.

Why am I telling you this story?  Because our government is doing the same thing.

Just as it was utterly predictable that we would get wet if we didn’t react to the obvious threat, our government refused to react to the obvious threat of a terrible disease, and suspend air travel from the affected area in west Africa, and the inevitable happened.  It flew in with a passenger from the affected area.  And while that passenger has since passed, he didn’t do so without infecting Americans with a disease that has a 70% mortality rate, according to the new data from the World Health Organization.

The government, facing the obvious question, has decided that rather than stopping the flights now, it is imperative to keep these flights going, because stopping them will make us less safe from the virus.  This causes anyone with three brain cells and the knowledge that England and France (FRANCE!!!) believe otherwise to stifle a collective “That’s quite possibly the dumbest thing we’ve ever heard.” , but actually, this makes a perverse sort of sense when you consider that this excuse originates in the same town where not spending more on an agency or program than we spent last year is somehow a “cut”.

The fact is that a travel ban from West Africa would lead to questions about other immigration…and those questions would lead to questions about Enterovirus 68, which has killed several American children, and the emergence of which corresponds to the resettlement of all the “children” from south of border. (Unexpectedly!) and then people would be questioning an ideological touchstone of this Administration for reasons that could not logically be defined as “racist”.  And they can’t have that.  The illusion of the naked emperor’s resplendent garb is simply too precious, especially to the emperor himself.  Protecting the first failure, which ignores the wisdom of previous generations who saw the wisdom in health screenings as a condition of entry into this country, means committing more errors, which will, in turn, cost more American lives.

To combat this obvious failure, which would even cause Helen Keller to say “What the hell…?”, the meme has been floated that being  concerned about this silly, given that tobacco, alcohol, and obesity kill tens of thousands more in this country annually, so being concerned this government’s stubborn insistence to continue to allow people from affected areas to travel to this country and potentially infect Americans with a dread disease with a 71% mortality rate that heretofore was unseen among our population is somehow foolish “panicking”.  “Panic” is of course, hyperbole.   Panic is afoot in this nation today, but it is found in the offices of Democratic incumbents seeking re-election to the United States Senate, not among the average American who realizes that common sense and logic are being deliberately suppressed in favor of purely political considerations that have already needlessly cost the lives of Americans, and place countless others at risk

It isn’t panic that most Americans feel about this, it is ANGER.  Justifiable, controlled, and focused ANGER.

And when the response is to draw comparisons to other causes of death, such as from alcohol, tobacco, and obesity, they have a right to be even angrier, as the lyric “One of these things is different from the other/One of these things is different from the rest.” plays loudly in the radio of their minds.  The fact is that we are all dying, a  little bit each day, and for most Americans, these causes are also incremental.  They kill, but because they are patient, and slow, they feel like they are contributing factors, and not direct causes.  And more importantly, they are the result of choices WE make, not choices that our government refuses to make.   That is the difference, and it is an even greater irritant when we consider the steps that government takes to “protect” us from these incremental harms.  Minimum ages in order purchase the products.  Taxes to discourage purchase.  PSAs.  Fitness and nutrition programs.  Millions and millions of dollars spent annually to “protect” us from cutting off the years we would otherwise spend in wheelchairs, warehoused in a “home” somewhere, staring off into space, exhausting our resources, and more commonly, the taxpayers’ money, and yet this same government, afraid to threaten a source of new votes purchased with our money refuses to take common sense measures to reduce the number of Americans exposed to and infected with a disease that will cause fever, liquefied internal organs, seizures, and death while bleeding out of every orifice, all in a span of days.  That kind of dual-mindedness would hopelessly confuse Bob Arctor.

And when the government decides to do “something”, it is to appoint a political hack to “take the point” (and the blame) for an executive who’d rather be golfing, until it’s time to blame someone for the inevitable failures.

We have a right to be angry.  And they are the ones who should be panicking.

Read Full Post »

Modern-Day Incantations and the Failure of “Reason”

The most powerful word in the country today is… “Offensive”.

The words of a Facebook acquaintance hung there on the group page, taunting my mind away from a more basic Sunday morning meditation.   It worked, and my mind started milling the words, prompting my immediate rejoinder “If that were true, it would work for everyone, non?”

But the more I thought about it, the more I came to consider the “wrongness” that lead to the statement being made in the first place.  I realized that it isn’t about the rank hypocrisy that sees nothing wrong with an entitlement for some people to invoke “offense” as a means to stop discussion, debate, questions, behavior or beliefs they do not like, but is incapable of even considering that other parties might be offended by the discussion, debate, questions, behavior or beliefs of the those invoking “offense”, let alone capable of invoking “offense” themselves.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think being able to end all discussion, debate, questions, behavior, or beliefs by claiming to be “offended” is unhealthy for a free society, offensive to liberty, and childish in the extreme.   As long as it is impossible to have an honest conversation, because it will almost certainly “offend” someone, it will be impossible to address any issue of import.  It doesn’t take long before this will lead to financial impairment, social impairment, and impairment of national security. (See President Obama, Second Term)

But the really, really odious part if this is that I often hear “Offense” uttered like an incantation from many of the same people who speak of “reason” being superior to faith, and a basis for them to assume an intellectual superiority that they clearly haven’t earned, while they often put faith in “facts” that have expiration dates due to constantly changing nature of scientific paradigms.  The illogic of presuming that rights which are guaranteed by law are subject to override if only they can apply their completely subjective responses to the exercise of those rights would be laughable if it wasn’t pursued with such zeal and dedication.  Orwell himself couldn’t have conceived of the sheer scope of the vanity and delusion that have combined to impose a bizzaro-world rhetoric to such a degree that sincerity and directness are relegated to criminal status.

The saddest aspect to this current state of affairs is that too many of us allowed ourselves to be cowed by this practice, as if offending someone, or at least those granted a de facto privileged status by the arbiters of acceptability, is a combination of the worst sin and the worst crime that a person can commit.  The fact is that this extraordinary power and cancer on society wouldn’t be powerful at all if we didn’t let it.  But this requires a boldness to push back, that too few have the backbone to exhibit.  Start responding by saying “SO???”  Ask them to explain why they are suffering from the alleged “offense”.  Put the onus on them to prove why it should matter to you, and to everyone else, rather than giving what has morphed into a generic and reflexive complaint the presumption of legitimacy without the burden of proving it.  It is your duty as a citizen and a member of society to engage people who don’t want you to engage in an honest discourse.  It is your birthright to be able to do so without the threat of sanction by government, or those who want to destroy the very way you live, and censor your very thoughts.

STAND.  BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.

Read Full Post »

The Walk Of Shame

So I heard President Sub Par on the news at lunch making all sorts of demands in relation to the Malaysian Air shoot down…a cease fire in the area between all parties, access to the crash site for investigators, blah, blah, blah blah, and all I could think was “Who does he think he’s kidding?”

During his tenure in the Oval Office, he’s squandered any authority that the Presidency  might have still carried over from his infinitely more qualified predecessors, and has done his best to ensure that he has built none of his own.   I physically cringe whenever I hear this pretender adopt the manner of an irritated professor, and presume to lecture anyone, let alone foreign leaders who have already tested him, only to learn that the force of his conviction will never take him any farther than he can comfortably hear his own voice and the approval of his reality-challenged sycophants.

It scares me that he can walk out in front of cameras and the presstitute corpse, and pretend that he’s really felt all along that the shoot down was an “outrage of unspeakable proportions” when yesterday, while in campaign mode, he spent all of less than a minute to pontificate that it “may be a terrible tragedy”, before launching back into a scripted speech that contained a number of attempts at jokes.   Anyone observing the Great Narcissus for any period of time at all would have to wonder if he at least waited until he got off the podium before he could concentrate on how Presidential and Important he looked, or how he could get his golf handicap down.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.  As a President, he is most unserious man to ever hold the office.  His ME-centric approach to all things domestic and foreign is embarrassing, as is his contempt for the America that was worthwhile and a beacon of hope to people all around the world.  When he offered his unsolicited opinion on the events in Israel, I was not surprised by what I heard.  Much like his criticism of the Cambridge Police revealed his willingness to weigh in on that matter without having a clue what he was talking about, his comments about the need for Israel to “show restraint” revealed to the world that he either hasn’t bothered with his security briefings (something REAL Presidents get out of bed in the morning and attend before going to do actual work), or that he didn’t pay attention to any briefing given.  Either way, he is an embarrassment and the primary reason for our current tarnished prestige in the world today.  I find myself somewhat disheartened when I hear some pundits try to craft an analogy that would serve to make the situation clear to anyone capable of logic independent of ideology.  “What if it was Mexico lobbing missiles in at U.S cities?”  they ask.  I just shake my head.  “How is that different from allowing passage through their country to ours by a wave of people utterly willing to break our laws as if it is their right to do so?” I ask in reply.   If President Selfie didn’t want to go see the chaos on the border himself when he had a chance, because he didn’t “want a photo-op”, why do you think that other threats to this country would affect him in any meaningful way?  He doesn’t understand America.  Whether it’s been “at some point, you’ve just made enough money” or berating citizens who “bitterly cling to their Bibles and guns” or his curiously selective recitations of the Declaration of Independence or his fundamental mischaracterization of American exceptionalism, he revels in demonstrating that he doesn’t get this country.   If it were Mexico lobbing missiles at American cities, I’m sure that he would summon members of La Raza and Mecha to the White House so he could publicly and abjectly apologize to them “on behalf of all Americans” and then try to find a way to surrender to them.  For him, the only times tragedies happen is when someone asks him a real question and he just wants to finish his waffle, when he is asked a question he’ll pretend is above his pay grade, despite his previous expressions of clear opinions addressing the matter from another side, or when his subjects expect him to do his job and he just wants to enjoy his taxpayer-funded Hawaiian vacation.

Like previous expressions of outrage, and breathlessly declared red lines, I expect nothing will come today’s remarks.  After all, we’ll soon be paying for yet another lavish vacation on Martha’s Vineyard for him and his family, far away from the relocation centers all over the country where the last stage of ICE’s “Catch and Release” kabuki theatre is being played out.  Besides, he has more important things to worry about.  Like the nagging grocery carts his wife wants to put in our grocery stores around the country…because it would be impossible for us to properly feed ourselves without her enlightened guidance.  They only have to make sure we do what they say, and not what they do.

Read Full Post »

Because Being On One List Isn’t Enough…

I’m ashamed to admit that I was amused for a bit.  When the Hobby Lobby decision was first handed down, the deluge of butthurt and really bad analysis from the Left was entertaining.  It offered a glimpse into a mindset that has been wrongly conditioned to think that religion was something confined to various buildings dotting the landscape of the country for a few hours a week…a diversion for people not smart enough to take advantage of an opportunity to sleep in, rather than a deeply held conviction that guides the actions of those who believe, and that as such, will be expressed in the actions taken by the holders of those beliefs, including what they do, and what government may try to force them to do, with their own property.

But the howls continued.  The vitriol continued.  And expressions of hatred were aired without restraint or condemnation, once again giving lie to the Left’s own sermonizing about civility and tolerance.

As a student of history, I wasn’t disturbed by the Hobby Lobby ruling, because it brought about the correct result.  I was disturbed by the fact that it wasn’t a unanimous ruling, which in and of itself shows just how far we have strayed from first principles.  And as the wailing and gnashing of teeth continued to grow into a low roar, fueled by ignorance and indigence that someone should be allowed to dissent and not participate in the high holy sacrament of killing unborn children, I saw yet more confirmation of a clash of beliefs being perpetrated by a creed that is still inexplicably permitted to masquerade as value neutral, when it is nothing of the sort.  Secularism as practiced today has death at its heart, and as such it can be nothing but a cancer that is embraced and nurtured by too many in society until the tumor in our collective head has grown so large that it threatens the very nature of who we are as a people.  Our society still utters the expressions of freedom, but does so in contradiction to the convictions that inform our actions.  These soulless supplications are offered both as ruse, and rebuke, intended to convince the less vigilant among us that there is no cause for alarm, and to portray the watchmen as hysterical and ridiculous.  And in this climate, usurpations and entitlements are magically and mystically transmogrified into “rights”,while real rights, which government is obligated to protect and defend, are consigned to wither and fade in the shadow of the “rights” “given” (and protected by nothing other than) by the artifice and caprice of government, which is more interested in redistributing private property and the bounty earned by it, than in defending it.

A healthy society is one that understands that morality is a cultural necessity.  No society has long lasted when every man has done right in his own eyes, without a common frame of reference to which everyone can refer.  Government works best when it accepts and codifies those guard rails which delineate the boundaries between what is acceptable and what is not.  It is an unhealthy society which rejects what has been shown to have value, and provide a framework that allows society to grow and thrive, in favor of a government that assumes the mantle of moral authority based on what it determines is true, is right, and is acceptable, because there is no anchor for any of these determinations other than the desires of 50% +1.  Some may say that this sickness is a product of the 20th Century.  I’ve come to understand that the body politic has been infected with this particular hubris from much longer, but I do think that it accelerated, at an exponential rate, in the 20th Century.

The standing complaint of human degeneracy remains against us.  Causes have been operating—and of late years with fearful rapidity and strength—to produce a state of moral obliquity and practical atheism among us, appalling in magnitude and of alarming consequence.  It has become of late quite customary to sneer at the Puritanism of our fathers, and to speak with contempt of the severity of their manners and the bigotry of their faith.  This impious treatment, by the present corrupters of society, of a generation of men whose lofty principles and illustrious virtues they seem utterly unable to comprehend, is well adapted to not only arouse the deepest indignation, but to excite the most lively concern.  There are two quarters from which these evil influences chiefly proceed.  A class of men without conscience, and reckless of all moral restraint, have gained ascendancy in the public favor, and assume from their prominent position to mould and direct the public sentiment of the nation.  Their general influence upon the public morals has been like the wind of the desert, –poisonous, withering, and destructive.  Another and very large class of men moving in the lower walks of life form a significant element of our American population, whose hard and vicious instincts , gratified without compunction and paraded everywhere in the most offensive manner, would seem to render them well-nigh incapable of reformation.  Apparently insensible to all the nobler sentiments of public morality and virtue, and ever ready to perform their congenial part in the general demoralization the demand that all the higher classes shall pander to their depraved appetites, as the price of their patronage and support.  In this reciprocal play of the baser passions the common principles of morality are daily sacrificed, and the strong and the weak join hands in carrying down the nation to the very verge of ruin.  No man can observe the conditions of society in our country, and the obvious impulses of human conduct, without feeling that the perils against which the fathers warned us, and which have so faithfully and constantly pointed out ministers of religion, have, not withstanding, increased at a fearful rate, without seeing the most alarming departures from the standard of individual rectitude and social integrity have occurred among us within the century that is past.
—Byron Sunderland, Washington D.C., April 14, 1863.

And now we have come to a point where a vocal segment of society have decided that a recognition that someone else’s right to not participate in the use of a substance or device that they personally find repugnant to their faith should be subordinate to government’s “ability” to make them pay for another’s choice to use such substance or device.  We have come to that point where a recognition of the right of conscience is considered to be a “denial of access” and abridgement of the recipient’s “right to choose” with their benefactors money.  And those who protest loudest because they see in this recognition a threat to a river of blood money so long and casually extorted from the taxpayer feel absolutely no guilt in their perversion of terms and concepts in their efforts to gin up outrage against the affirmation of the obvious, which is still obviously stated, and has remained such in a more than a century’s worth of a campaign of deception and subversion by their own design, because honesty in their intentions never would have obtained the support they otherwise enjoyed.

Read Full Post »

Lessons I Learned From the Obama Administration

1.  Getting up early and being informed is for suckers.
The nice thing about being President is that your daily calendar is published for God and the whole world to see.  The bad part is that everyone can see that the current occupant of the West Wing doesn’t do that much.  Maybe everything George W. Bush’s fault six years into the new administration because he actually started his day before 10 am, and actually attended security briefings.

2.  At no time was anyone in the Obama Administration actually aware of what the Obama Administration was actually doing.
It doesn’t matter what the issue is.  Gun running to narco-terrorists south of the border?  Nope, they knew Nussink! One-size-fits-none “health care” in the VA being rationed to the point of death? Thank you television news for bringing it to our attention.  IRS targeting of groups with opposing political affiliation? The Devil you say! (These aren’t the emails leading to the White House that you’re looking for) An ambassador and his defenders attacked and a President MIA while those brave Americans died calling for help?  Damn that film maker for posting a movie that the jhadis probably didn’t have any means to watch anyway!  We took over a car maker in bankruptcy, but at no time were we aware of any mammoth manufacturing defect for which we fined the car company a record fine for attempting to cover up, while we were the ones owning the company.

3.  Every situation and scenario can be adequately addressed with a furrowed brow and a stern condemnation.
No matter the crisis, no matter the problem, no matter the failure of the person who asked us for the job twice, the answer is the same.  Words of outrage, a furrowed brow, an empty gesture.  I’d pay real money to hear someone, anyone in the White House Presstitute Corpse ask Spokesclown Jay Carney why the empty suit who keeps saying “I will not rest until…” has to take so many vacations and starts his day so close to Noon every day.  What would be better is if that is followed by another member of the Presstitute Corpse following up by channeling Inego Montoya by saying “He keeps saying “I will not rest until…”, but I don’t think that phrase means what he thinks it means.  I don’t see bags under his eyes, and they don’t appear to be bloodshot, either.”

4.  If a problem isn’t solved by throwing money at it, then the only answer is to throw more money at it.
The pResident who campaigned on fixing the problems with the VA made sure that more money got put into the VA, and in the face of some questions from the Presstitute Corpse on the continuing failure of the VA, his spokesidiots are quick to point out that he’s made more spending on the VA a priority throughout his tenure.  That’s it.  The only tools in their toolbox are to say that they are “Mad as hell” and throw more money at the problem.

5.  Accountability is a word to be spoken when campaigning and in front of microphones when your failure can no longer be concealed.
But at no time does it ever mean that someone should actually lose their job because things went wrong and people died on their watch.   Because if such a thing were to happen, someone might get the idea that the buck should actually stop with the occupant of the Oval Office, and then he’d have to pay for his family’s extravagant lifestyle.   But as a famous member of this administration once famously asked “What difference does it make?”

6.  There is no lie too big, too stupid, or too insulting to say in an attempt to deflect deserved criticism and anger.
At no time has this administration ever acknowledged the first rule of being in charge, which is that EVERYTHING is your fault.  In the magical world of the Obama Administration, government is the answer to every question, and when government fails, it is:

(a) George W. Bush’s fault;

(b) Your fault, because you have some misguided notion that government’s authority is actually limited because it cannot hope to do many of the things it attempts in a responsible and efficient manner;

(c) ATM’s;

(d) George W. Bush’s fault; and

(e) Someone, anyone else’s fault…be it a film maker, or 1/2 of 1/3 of government…anyone but the person who asked to sit in the big chair and be the chief executive.

7.  Laws are for other people.
I’ve written extensively about the lawlessness of this administration, and how we are only a nation of laws when they can be applied to opponents, not members of the administration, and their own ultra vires activities…a legacy that is corrosive to society, because it correctly creates the impression of selective enforcement and punishment, and because it fosters a contempt for the law and legal processes as a means of peaceful dispute resolution.  These are hallmarks of a banana republic, not a constitutional republic.

8.  You don’t have to deliver results.
All that matters is that you convince people that you just care more than the other guy.  Which is why this administration doesn’t deliver results (well, that and the fact that they have no idea how to do so), but they do a hashtag selfie better than any other government in the world.

Read Full Post »

The Tragedy Of Hashtag Diplomacy

When I was still a mushy-headed youngster working on my B.A. in Political Science at the University of Michigan, the department’s resident Communist got to assign a bunch of reading to me (I’ve forgotten more about the history of the Soviet Union then I ever wanted to know) but she also had to get her licks in with works that were also critical of the US.  One of those books was The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, by William Appleton Williams.  I won’t bore you with a synopsis of what it was about.  Rather I’ll simply admit that I modified the title for this post.

I wrote a while back about how society has been seduced by a show of emotion, rather than actual action, and the sacrifice that it requires.  In that piece, I was pointing out how it had become in vogue to demonstrate the nouveau “moral” superiority, which doesn’t require the courage that characterizes actual morals.  But, as we are wont to do, we have upped our game.  How?  Hashtag diplomacy.

It started a few weeks ago, with people from the State Department tweeting messages about Ukraine with hashtags intended to be catchy.  Sure, it was ridiculous, and stupid, but I guess the relative lack of change to Russia’s intentions and actions in the wake of yet another speech from President Wonderful caused some desperation at Foggy Bottom.  And as every highly trained and experienced diplomat knows, aggression and indifference to once-great powers will ALWAYS be stopped dead in its tracks by a really smart person tweeting a bon mot coupled with a super-serious hashtag.

But this weeks round of hashtags in response to the kidnapping of hundreds of schoolgirls in Nigeria by members of Boko Harem (a terrorist group that another super smart diplomat named Hillary Rodham Clinton refused to classify as a terrorist group when she headed the State Department) were both irritating and infuriating.

It started with the First Lady making a duckface frown and holding a sign with a #BringOurGirlsBack.  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  The idea that people who kidnap girls, slaughter entire villages, and engage in slavery will somehow be swayed by such a moronic photograph led me to wonder…is she really so arrogant to think that this will change ANYTHING, or is this just more posturing…showing just what a great person you are and how much more YOU care, because you sacrificed a moment of your precious time being a scold to us to take a picture with a sign?  But when the celebutarded got in on the act, it was unmistakably clear how they took the message.

The worst part of this isn’t the arrogance of a First Lady who fancies herself to be the second coming of Evita Peron. It isn’t professional diplomats who act like they’re twentysomethings who like fresh out of community college and stuff.  It isn’t celebrities making useless and empty gestures that make me want to punch them in their smarmy little faces.  It’s the fact that bothering to say anything at all when you clearly aren’t willing to DO anything about it, and take the risk that come with really making a stand tells the rest of the world that we’re a nation of weak and ineffectual navel gazers, which is really only true of our cultural and political elites who congregate on either coast, but in so doing, they invite attacks, which will sooner or later, require the rest of us to put our lives on hold to fight the threats that this shallowness invites.  And it is the fact that such nonsense will require an even greater sacrifice from those who don’t engage in it that is the real tragedy of hashtag diplomacy.

#IWantToHaveAdultsInChargeAgain

Read Full Post »

Heresy Against Society’s Secular Religion and the Pharisees Who Make Sure You See It

Once again, the greatest shibboleth of our time is front and center in the news again.   “RACISM!!!11!!!” has once again been brought to the attention of society by the high priests of the Tyranny of Nice, and their crusade to punish the perpetrators of thoughtcrimes that the members of this exalted secular clergy have deemed worthy not just of shunning, but of stripping the offenders of all dignity, and even their property rights.

Last week, it was the comments of Nevada rancher Clive Bundy, who has allegedly failed to pay grazing fees to the Federal Government, which may or may not be due them, and which has, with their nonsensical regulation, made it impossible for all other ranchers in that part of Nevada to continue business.  For this, the Bureau of Land Management thought it appropriate to show up with an army of well-armed rangers and contractors, to start stealing and euthanizing Mr. Bundy’s cattle.  When other Americans took exception to the Federal Government’s heavy-handed approach (because everyone would be hunky dory with the police sending a SWAT team to your house over unpaid parking tickets), Mr. Bundy’s upstanding Senator, the estimable Harry Reid proved he could be counted on to do the right thing:  He called Bundy and his supporters “Domestic Terrorists”.  After the Federal presence was withdrawn, Bundy made the mistake of speaking to the New York Times, and committed the heresy of suggesting that black families might have actually been better off in other times, even under slavery, as even then, families were kept more intact than under a welfare system that disincentives families staying together in lieu of replacing fathers with government. (Or as I said at the time, LBJ gave them the “Life of Julia” 40 years before forcing it on the rest of us.)  Yes, I’m paraphrasing, because Mr. Bundy, being a lifelong rancher and not an attorney or professional spokesperson made his remarks in an inartful way, including using the “other” N-word (“negro”), which certainly didn’t help the knee-jerk reaction and scramble to make the words uttered so radioactive that no one, least of all those being so tragically victimized by a political party that only gives a damn about their votes, would actually consider the substance of what he was saying.

The reaction from the media was predictable and expected.  What I wasn’t prepared for was the sheer number and strength of the reaction from those on “our side” who adopted the instant condemnation usually reserved for those on the left, and used it to great effect to give the impression that it made anything that had ever issued from his lips unworthy of any consideration, and any action he had taken instantly invalid.  But at least they were public in the condemnation, and were seen by all the right people doing so, thereby maintaining the illusion of “reasonableness” with those who still do not respect them or their opinions, and would be happy to do the same to them in order to avoid any honest discussion about real issues that might make someone, somewhere “feel bad”.   This is how the right to not be offended is transformed into a cultural norm, that is held dear by a culture that celebrates everything that used to spark shame, and that abandons values that helped build a strong and vibrant society.  This is how a people who reject God in their deeds and God in practice, as an outmoded and “superstitious construct” cultivate a secular religion rooted in a vague and nebulous concept of “nice” that only believes that offense is a worthwhile endeavor when its own high priests decide that something offends THEM.

I confess that I was slow to come to this understanding.  I watched the reaction on “the right” last week to Mr. Bundy’s remarks with disappointment and alarm.  It was clear to me that something was wrong, but it was like walking through a fog bank…you can make out shapes, but not see your surroundings clearly.  But as I have listened and read about this week’s “MOMENT OF RACISM!!!11!!”, centered on the remarks, in private, by billionaire and L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling to his girlfriend, this understanding started to take root.   First, there is Matt Walsh’s excellent piece on it, with this money quote that started me thinking about it in a way that I hadn’t before:

We permit and even celebrate most forms of evil and debauchery in our society, so our Moral Outrage energy is stored, ready to be unleashed anytime an old white guy utters something untoward about minorities. Having removed sins like baby-killing, pornography, sex-trafficking, and infidelity from the ‘Things to Get Upset About’ column, this seems to be among the only universally-recognized evils remaining.

Indeed.  For all the Progressives like to mouth about “evolving” and “changing”, society hasn’t gotten rid of moral outrage, and the ugliness it sometimes breeds.  It only changed the focus.  And it allows us to ignore the ugly things that are celebrated daily, ugly things that we all end up lending our sanction to, willingly or unwillingly, as we give even more ugliness free rein while patting ourselves on the back and telling ourselves how nice we are for doing so, and what good persons we are because we feel that way about the offense or offender du jour.  It’s an ersatz replacement for a real morality which is rooted in something far more permanent than what our thoughleaders tell us we should be angry about today, which, by some coincidence, never seems to settle upon their own activities, and it is why a President who sat in the pews at Reverend Wright’s church for years, and who is on record talking about “typical white people” and “That’s how white folks’ll do ya.” can pretend at profundity in response to the old rich racist without burdening himself with a scintilla of self-awareness about the sequoia jutting out from his own eye.  It’s a moral authority that isn’t, and yet is immune from challenge.  And this displays one of its most glaring errors: the entirely inconsistent application of its central precepts and and practices.

But the final piece fell into place for me when I listened to this op-ed  from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the way home, and these two quotes brought my blurry perception into sharp focus:

Moral outrage is exhausting. And dangerous. The whole country has gotten a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome from the newest popular sport of Extreme Finger Wagging. Not to mention the neck strain from Olympic tryouts for Morally Superior Head Shaking.

and

What bothers me about this whole Donald Sterling affair isn’t just his racism. I’m bothered that everyone acts as if it’s a huge surprise. Now there’s all this dramatic and very public rending of clothing about whether they should keep their expensive Clippers season tickets. Really? All this other stuff I listed above has been going on for years and this ridiculous conversation with his girlfriend is what puts you over the edge? That’s the smoking gun?

Exactly.  It isn’t that we want to be moral as much as we want to be publicly seen conforming to the secular morality of the moment… to be seen by all the right people, sharing in the accord of a group superiority over not just the actions, but the very thoughts of another.  And all with no greater justification than the avoidance of offense.   A public piety that demands neither sacrifice, nor effort, and neither contemplation or reflection.  Only the self-assurance of those, who like it says in the song, have partaken of  “that wonderstuff  that let’s you look up from a nod, smile and say “Thank God that wasn’t us.””

Donald Sterling’s greatest sin wasn’t being a racist.  It was that he dared to believe that he could express doubleplusungood thoughts  in private with the expectation of them remaining private, when that, more than any of his other actions by far, would be the most grievous of his multitude of sins.  Or at least so the modern-day Pharisees of the One True Secular Religion would have us believe.

Read Full Post »