Friday, November 30, 2012

Poverty, Christianity, and Freedom

It’s not often, lately at least, that I decide to promote a book here at Liberty’s Torch, so take note—especially those of my Gentle Readers who are Christians.

True Charity—Replacing Flypaper with Freedom

Mike Melin makes a brilliant, Christian case for casting off the veil over our eyes as it concerns poverty, for “poverty” as the world defines it is a mirage. True poverty is poverty of the mind...the identity...the soul.

One way to summarize the message of this indispensable little book is that the world, in assessing “what we’re doing to help the poor,” resolutely totes up material inputs while ignoring characterological outputs. But “help” of that sort literally imprisons the poor in true poverty. It does nothing to make the poor man other than poor, and gives him additional reasons to remain so!

The legions of Hell sing a seductive song in our ears: “Help the poor! Don’t trouble yourself about their characters. Just cut them a check.” And as Reverend Melin writes, it will be their acolytes among us who’ll howl loudest when we turn from that path and resolve instead to free the poor man from his true poverty: the conviction, whether conscious or not, that he cannot or should not try to help himself, and must become comfortable in his dependence upon other men.

With God, all things are possible...but look: God is no longer welcomed at the charity-kitchen table! And we wonder why, with all the largesse our society showers upon the “needy,” their number always grows.

Highly recommended! Thank you, Reverend Melin.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Banking as a Rent-Seeking Enterprise

A little bit back, Gene Callahan favorably quoted economist Hyman Minsky in support of the argument that the banking/finance industry benefits from market instability ... --

Why Investment Banks Like Having Booms and Busts


... the veracity of which was questioned by commenter Prateek by pointing to a break-down of operating profits at Goldman-Sachs --


Gene stood by his assertion, but declined to elaborate -- I suspect mostly because he didn't feel like it at the moment, not because he actually couldn't.

I think Prateek raises an interesting objection, though.  If trading only accounts for 20% of revenue, then how much can Goldman-Sachs really be profiting from unstable markets -- which would presumably put a big dent in the sectors of their business that actually make most of their money?  Since Gene declined to take on this objection directly, I thought I'd take a stab at answering it myself.


In general, when someone persuaded of the Austrian take of things says something like "banks are parasitizing the economy," he will be talking about inflation, and how extending credit through expansion of the money supply allows the bank access to what is effectively 'free income.'  They get to collect interest on money which they printed themselves -- nice gig if you can get it.  I won't go into the details here, as you can find them a million other places.

But a bank like Goldman is not really a money-issuing bank.  It is an investment bank, not a commercial bank (though, as I recall, it temporarily re-designated itself a commercial bank in order to qualify for bailout money back in '08...), so it does not really profit through this mechanism.  I contend that it does profit, however, from many indirect effects of this process -- for one, market instability -- and that this is mostly a matter of reaping a rent-seeking profit.

Maybe the best way to see how this works is to think in terms of a similar market that is intrinsically unstable and therefore has come to incorporate a great deal of financial risk-mitigation -- agricultural commodities.  Farmers generally use two main financial arrangements to mitigate risk:  insurance and futures contracts.  Crop insurance allows the farmer to protect himself from the vagaries of weather and other matters of chance that might have the effect of destroying large portions of his crop.  By purchasing an insurance policy, he ensures that he will at least receive some income, come what may.

Futures contracts allow the farmer to sell his crop far in advance -- before the crop is even produced, and before the price of his crop at harvest time is known.  Many crops are highly perishable, and nobody knows for sure just how much will be produced until the time to harvest comes.  At this point, if the market is glutted with his particular crop, he will not get a good price and will probably be faced with tremendous losses.  By selling his crop in advance with a futures contract, he will know ahead of time exactly how much he will make -- again, come what may.

I go through all of this to show how the arrangement has a real effect of contributing actual utility to markets.  People employed in insurance and futures market speculation perform a valuable service by inquiring into and researching possible future conditions, providing valuable information to markets.  This allows farmers and other agricultural workers to plan their production strategies to better optimize their efforts and use of resources and avoid waste -- such as by producing way too much of one crop and not enough of another.

Contrast this with, say, your own experience buying groceries at the grocery store.  When you go to the store, you probably do not spend too much time worrying about how much prices will change from one moment to the next, or from one location to another.  You pretty well know that prices are generally uniform from one place to the next, and generally stable over time.  You probably do not employ people to track the prices of things to try to get a better deal, because this would be a waste of your money and the employed person's time. 

But suppose that prices were somehow artificially made quite volatile, from place to place and time to time, and in a manner that was rather complex and not easy to predict.  It might actually make sense for people to get together to employ someone to spend all of his time studying the 'grocery market' to get the best deals while his clients were away at work or spending time with their families.  When things are straightforward and simple, people are mostly able to take care of themselves without too much additional effort.  But when things get hairy, they must resort to the division of labor, employing labor and resources to deal with the instability.

Enter Goldman-Sachs.  To the extent that its activities profit its clients by mitigating real risks inherent to a market economy, it is generating income for itself by performing a valuable service that contributes utility to the marketplace.  But to the extent that the 'risks' they are mitigating are merely a creation of a dysfunctional financial system -- which is to say, they are artificial and not intrinsic to the market itself -- their efforts are actually a waste, but necessary to their clients who must deal with the system as it is.  It would be more efficient overall to have a functional financial system and less labor and resources spent trying to cope with all the chaos. 

To the extent that this is the case, Goldman-Sachs is like a tire repair shop located right outside the nail-and-screw factory.  There may be some necessary repairs in any event, but it is not helpful that the drivers for the factory deliberately strew some of their cargo about the road.  90% of the repairs -- and the income derived from them -- are actually just 'make work' and wasted resources.


The other money-making activities could be subjected to a similar analysis, with similar results.  Certainly, there is utility to be derived from public issue of stock, mergers and acquisitions, and the like, but only under a limited range of conditions.  To the extent that these conditions emerge naturally, intrinsic to the market dynamics in play, the services of an entity like Goldman-Sachs are providing real utility in return for real income. 

But to the extent that such conditions are produced artificially -- such as through the centralizing effects of inflation -- these incomes do not represent contributions to the economy, but mere rent-seeking in response to conditions which are the product of dysfunction.  And again, such volatility is going to be centralizing for the reasons described above -- it encourages an elaboration of the division of labor, much as convoluted regulatory structures encourage larger company sizes so that compliance costs can constitute a smaller share of revenues.

So, even though very little of Goldman-Sach's revenue derives from actual trading, I would suspect that market volatility contributes very heavily to their ability to 'earn' income.

Principles And Politics




But what substantive recommendations does Caddell offer?





Apparently not...or at least, not yet:






Give that a moment's thought.





The answer is principle.




  1. There must be a Supreme Law;
  3. All other law must conform to it.

Compare that to the principle of democratic / majoritarian government:


...and to the principle of authoritarian government:



  • "This is something the Founding Fathers didn't foresee."









    He panned the crowd left to right and back again.
    “America is in bad shape.




Tuesday, November 27, 2012

The Time Is Now Part 3: The Critical Battlefields Part 2


Today, let's discuss communications.







The communications problem may be decomposed into these elements:

  • Organizing for whatever action is appropriate;









  • Messages must be kept short,
  • The keys must be changed frequently,

Other approaches are all too vulnerable to trust.



More anon.

Friday, November 23, 2012

This Must Go Viral

Yes, we lost the election. In large measure, we lost it by nominating candidates who are afraid to stand by our supposed philosophy.

Bill Whittle tells us all how it's done -- and he's right in all particulars.

Spread it around.


"All my friends are trying to make me paranoid, but I'm onto them, and I'm not going to let them!" -- a college buddy.

(This compulsion to write can be really annoying, especially on an overfull stomach.)

Bob Owens's PJ Media series ridiculing the persons portrayed in NatGeo's "Doomsday Preppers" series has drawn sharp criticism, and some condemnations, from his commenters. I shan't speculate on how many of those commenters are themselves preparationists -- "preppers." But I do find it amusing how near to absolute the commenters' verdicts are against Owens's supercilious snarkery.

I should mention, in the interests of full disclosure, that:

  1. I'm closer to agreement with the commenters than to Owens on this subject;
  2. In some sense, I, too, am a "prepper," as you might deduce from the following discourse.

An article such as Owens's leaves me thinking about an old semi-humorous quip:

What if the purpose of your life is merely to serve as a warning to others?

It's not impossible -- and it should give pause to anyone who's tempted to make a single, barely possible future calamity the focus of his existence.

That having been said, being reasonably well prepared for certain kinds of disturbances and dislocations -- events that, while not certain to occur, are both more than barely possible and foreseeably destructive -- is difficult to criticize. Let's consider a single example: an acceleration of inflation, caused by the Obama Administration's ceaseless borrowing and spending.

When inflation hovers around the 2% to 3% level, few people give it much thought. The pot is being heated slowly enough that the frog won't become alarmed and jump out. But as we who experienced it remember from the Carter inflation, when it rises to 7% or more, the effects are sufficiently compressed in time that Americans will react specifically to it:

  • Some will go on credit binges;
  • Some will spend their deteriorating dollars at once;
  • Some will begin to speculate in the equities market;
  • Some will belatedly buy hard assets that have a chance of keeping up with the inflation;
  • Some will do all the above, and perhaps more.
Now, at this juncture in history, we can foresee that at some difficult-to-predict point in the near to intermediate future, there's likely to be a sharp -- perhaps even convulsive -- increase in the prices of consumer goods. The huge cash balances in the accounts of major American financial institutions seem to me to guarantee it. Is it a lead-pipe-cinch, bet-the mortgage-money certainty? Not quite, but it's beginning to look much more likely than not. He who reads the tea leaves this way has only two plausible reactions:
  • "Well, there's nothing I can do about it. Besides, there's still a chance it won't happen."
  • "I'd better brace for impact as best I can."

The more probable one thinks that future convulsive surge in prices, the more likely he is to adopt the second attitude. He'll put an appreciable fraction of his savings into precious metals. He'll eschew credit exposure, particularly to variable-rate obligations. He might build himself a pantry and stock it with nonperishables, to hedge against the possibility that the supports of life might become hard to get at any price. He will become, in the broad sense of the term, a "prepper." Those who differ with him about the likelihood of the financial upheaval he foresees will deem him a bit silly about it, perhaps even mentally unbalanced. Probabilities being what they are, the disagreement won't be resolvable by argument.

The whole thing is about probabilities. Just how likely is that inflationary surge? Opinions vary widely -- and those at one end of the distribution consider those at the other end paranoid or imprudent. This is the attitude I take toward preparationism. I can't predict the future with absolute certainty; I can only try to assess the probabilities from what I can see, and from my knowledge of history. So I shan't attempt to prepare for a global nuclear war, but I most certainly will brace myself and my family against calamities that seem to be likely enough to be worth some effort and expense: accelerating inflation; a rise in racial violence and gang-related predation; sharply reduced availability of medical services; consumption quotas or price controls on oil, gas, and electric power; and the too-awful-to-contemplate possibility that the NHL might never have another season.

I'd consider anyone who fails to take the appropriate measures against those developments excessively optimistic about the American future. I don't trouble myself about what they might think of me.

But let's put a somewhat sharper focus on that NatGeo series and the persons it chooses for its subjects. I must admit that those folks do strike me as unbalanced, in the strict sense of the word: that is, they're putting the lion's share of their efforts and assets into bracing for calamities that seem highly improbable. What is NatGeo's aim in spotlighting such persons?

It could just be about entertainment. We do like to laugh, and when the object of laughter is someone to whom we can feel superior for some reason, it adds an edge that many people enjoy greatly.

It could be about the range of possibilities these out-of-the-mainstream people have considered: calamities many of us would never have conceived of on our own, such as the sundering of North America into two continents by a fracturing of the tectonic plate. People who enjoy imaginative fiction might get a kick out of such speculations for themselves, whatever they might think of the wisdom of trying to prepare for such an event.

Or it could be that NatGeo has a darker motive: a desire to spread the attitude that "preppers" of all sorts are really too ridiculous for us "sensible" types to consider their contentions at all. I don't think that's terribly likely, but just as I must admit that North America might "tear along the dotted line" some day -- Pangaea, anyone? -- I must admit that it's at least possible that NatGeo has some sort of institutional interest in defaming preparationism to the larger American populace. A number of Owens's commentators have broached that possibility.

Whatever the case, I'm not a big TV watcher, but I think I might start watching the show. Who knows? I might pick up some good ideas, if not for my sub-basement survival bunker, then perhaps for my next novel.

Calhoun on terminal madness.

We [Americans] think we may now indulge in everything with impunity, as if we held our charter of liberty by right divine—from Heaven itself. Under these impressions we plunge into war, we contract heavy debts, we increase the patronage of the Executive, and we talk of a crusade to force our institutions of liberty upon all people. There is no species of extravagance which our people imagine will endanger their liberty in any degree. Sir, the hour is approaching—the day of retribution will come.
~ John C. Calhoun, speech to the U.S. Senate, 1/4/1848.

Most people I know believe in fairy tales when it comes to matters of liberty. To them, our vastly diminished liberties, such as they are, are there like oxygen or green buds on trees in the spring. Liberty happens and no one's pet projects or sure-fire nostrums will ever singly or together work to undermine liberty and, if they do, well, so what?

Asinine, treacherous Supreme Court opinions that relentlessly destroy federalism are a matter of indifference. As is our first president who despises traditional America. As is our Congress that can only decrease the rate of increase of spending and spend only because of the willingness of the Chinese to lend us money.

As the Cuban woman I quoted a few months ago said. She never saw a people who are so willing to give their country away.

In what way can it be said that we deserve our liberty? When we say our troops have fought for our "freedom," to what freedoms does that refer exactly?

Americans simply aren't up to being free. American exceptionalism? Puleez. I just ate.

"A Message From A Renowned War Hawk To the “War Parties” of Today: Peace Out!" By Frank Weathers, Why I Am Catholic 1/10/12.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Whirlwind courtship.

Married on the 12th, inst., by the parties themselves, the Rev. J. D. Maxson, and Miss Elizabeth Maxson, after a long a tedious courtship of about one hour.
"Marshall County Illinois Marriages." Extracted from the Henry Courier, 12/18/1857.

A Pre-Thanksgiving Assortment

1. Attack of the Highway Totalitarians.

Among the less tolerable nuisances of this age are the self-righteous who arrogate the privilege of running your life for you. Not all of them work for the government...yet. Some can be found on Long Island's major highways, every weekday morning and afternoon.

Some drive Priuses or Smart ForTwos, but not all of them. Some sport revealing bumper stickers about saving the Earth, but not all of them. And some stay strictly in the rightmost lane...but not all of them.

Some of them insist on driving in the leftmost lane -- the fast lane -- at 40 or 45 mph.

This is unacceptable, especially during commuting hours. Our road system is strained to its breaking point; the slightest disturbance from bad weather or an accident can lock up the Long Island Expressway for hours. As for New York City "gridlock days," please, let's not go there. That seems to bring all the crazies onto the roads, contrary to what the warnings are hoped to elicit.

In his arrogance and supercilious self-righteousness, the Highway Totalitarian presumes to limit others to the speed he deems most suitable for the advancement of his chosen Cause. Preventing "climate change?" Opposing "waste of resources?" Undermining "predatory capitalism?" All these Causes, and many others, seem to require slowing the rest of us down to his preferred rate of travel.

Such persons have no idea how many accidents they cause, by provoking poor behavior from drivers who have to get somewhere.

The only countermeasure is to get ahead of the Highway Totalitarian somehow, and then slow down still further. Eventually he'll become irritated with you and move to the right, freeing the lane of his autocratic rule. Sometimes it's only temporary, but that's better than nothing.

Given that most automobiles these days are "drive by wire" -- almost completely software-controlled -- a remote-control of some sort that would compel the Highway Totalitarian's car to speed up, change lanes, or explode spectacularly as a warning to others would be a big seller. Perhaps America's favorite marketer could come up with something along those lines. It really would make a fine Christmas gift, though it's too late for this year's holiday shopping and max-traffic season.

2. Insights Of Great Value.

The worthy Ace of Spades has written a column of unusual insight and value, which I exhort all Gentle Readers to read and absorb. Like Andrew Breitbart before him, Ace has grasped one of the central truths about conservative political outreach: It's too explicitly political.

The haymaker:

One of the problems with the right's attempts at media is that it is always -- or almost always -- expliclity political, and ergo argumentative (argumentative in the "good" meaning, but also often in the bad one). We're always trying to persuade in conservative media. Thus, conversion can only happen when people tune into us when they're in the mood to be persuaded that everything they used to think is wrong, and these other people have been right all along.

You know how all often people tune in to discover how wrong they've been about everything? Rounding off to the nearest integer, zero. Zero percent of the people tune in zero percent of the time to be told how very wrong they are about everything.

Taking it to three significant digits like Nate Silver, The Model projects that zero point zero zero percent of the populace searches for websites and magazines to tell them they are 100% wrong about everything zero point zero zero percent of the time.

The left doesn't do it like this. The left infiltrates non-political media and stuffs them full of political assumptions.

We say on the right we have better arguments. We do. Guess what? It doesn't matter. Because an assumption -- something you've grown to believe without even realizing you've been programmed, by dint of repetition, to believe -- will beat an argument every time.

Ace is dead on target. We're swimming against a cultural tide in which political messages -- left-leaning ones -- are subtly embedded, and so pervasive that they've descended into the unquestioned-assumptions stratum of most Americans' minds. Unless and until we take the initiative to assert a pro-freedom, pro-responsibility culture as the normal and preferred social matrix -- and learn to do it as subtly as the Left has done it to us -- we'll be trying, if I may borrow a phrase from John Hersey, to "beat bullshit with buckshot."

Ace's column is must-read stuff for anyone serious about wanting to help return the United States to a regime of freedom.

3. Killer Robots?

This piece at Fox News got me giggling at first, owing to the obvious "Terminator" reference...but I soon sobered up:

The government should ban autonomous, gun-wielding robots before it’s too late, Human Rights Watch is warning.



Grant, first of all, that giving a machine "the power to decide who lives and dies" would indeed be a frightening thing. But inasmuch as such machines don't yet exist, I see this as an entering wedge, aimed at the U.S.'s current arsenal of armed drones under the control of human pilots at a distance. Such drones keep human beings off the battlefield, and as such are life-preserving devices. If we have to go to war, I'd greatly prefer that we fight that war with machines to the maximum possible extent, rather than with fragile human flesh and bone.

If Human Rights Watch's true agenda is to inhibit the U.S. from going to war at all -- it's a notably left-leaning group, so that's not much of a stretch -- I'd bet heavily that this protest against completely autonomous war robots, which don't yet exist and might never exist, is nothing more than a stroke indirectly aimed at further crippling American military power. We're already so casualty-averse that the prospect of major combat terrifies us almost into immobility. Removing one of the most promising devices for minimizing casualties would paralyze us still a time when the enemies of freedom are on the march literally around the world.

4. A Reprise From Long Ago.

Have a pure Thanksgiving thought from a more reflective moment:

Time is the ultimate gift.







Happy Thanksgiving to you all. I'll be back after the holiday weekend. Stay safe.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

The New Segregationists: A Coda

The pieces below, which I wrote more than six years ago, had several consequences. First came the barrage of email, divided between strongly supportive and strongly derisive in roughly a three-to-one ratio. Second came the requests for further direction: just how do we combat this pernicious trend? And third came the pleas for some sort of explanation of why the Left, especially its annex in the Mainstream Media, would want to perpetrate such a thing.

I chuckled over the negative email. Many of the condemnations were so completely, obscenely content-free that they might have been generated by an auto-scatology program. None of them were at all creative. But that's what you get from persons whose egos have swollen so greatly and whose minds have been pressed so flat that they can't even acknowledge a factual argument without suffering a catastrophic cranial implosion.

Further direction proved a major challenge. After all, what can one say beyond what I said in those essays?

  • We're being denied information we desperately need.
  • These are the persons denying it to us.
  • They feel it's for the best, and are therefore unlikely to change their ways.

There are attempts in progress to build independent sources of critical reportage that can be trusted even on racially and ethnically sensitive topics. May they all succeed, swiftly and brilliantly. But most of us can contribute little if anything to them.

That third set of inquiries -- into the "why" of the thing -- is where my thoughts are today.

"Adults almost always act from conscious 'highest motives' no matter what their behavior." -- Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

There is no community of "thought" -- why, yes, those are "sneer quotes" -- more focused on "good intentions" than the American Left. (I omit that small fraction of the movement that regards social-fascist politics solely as a route toward power and its perquisites.) Leftists insist that their intentions are what matter. They want to "help" the poor, the oppressed, the unfortunate, the historically excluded, the tragically misunderstood, and so forth. That's the foundation of their belief in their moral and intellectual superiority to us Neanderthal conservatives. Therefore, it must be protected against any abrasion from reality.

But reality is filled with rough surfaces and jagged protrusions. Among the most distressing of these is the simple fact that collectivities, no matter how defined, exist mainly in one's mind. Internally, they can display upsetting variations and divergences...and they usually do.

If some set of "good intentions" require a collectivity for their exercise, some of the "help" administered to it will fall upon persons:

  • Who don't need it;
  • Who don't deserve it;
  • Who don't appreciate it;
  • Or who will exploit it in a destructive fashion.

Such uncritically distributed beneficence encourages the worst in its beneficiary class. The more civilized members will see what their less civilized colleagues are getting away with and say to themselves, "Why not me? What's the percentage in being honest and forthright?" Over time, the handouts flow ever more to people who ought not to be "helped." This is especially the case when the "help" is packaged as a government program, for reasons that would require another screed for their elucidation.

Therein lies the catch for the Left: Its methodological preference is for collectivities and government action. Leftists prefer to think in those terms -- another subject that deserves its own, separate exploration -- rather than in terms of individuals helping other individuals whom Fate has dealt an unearned blow.

So it seeks collectivities and rationales for deeming them "in need of help."

The obvious collectivities in any society are based on simple differences: race, sex, religious creed, ethnic heritage, education. If one of these can be segregated off as inherently in need of (and deserving of) "help," it constitutes a political target. To "hit the target" has two additional prerequisites:

  • The members of the targeted collectivity must embrace their collective identity as their most important attribute;
  • Persons outside the collectivity must be inhibited against seeing its members principally as individuals.

That, in summary, is the process of segregation.

As I said in the pieces below, word gets around. Sometimes it takes a while, but information people want or need is information they will have, sooner or later. The Soviet Union fell to that effect, among others.

When word gets around about the exploitation of unearned benefits or legal privileges by members of a collectivity designated for "help," those who are being mulcted or disadvantaged for that "help" tend to become very angry. However, the inhibition against seeing unworthy or vicious individuals within a "protected" collectivity can be made strong enough that the result is rage against all the members of the collectivity: the decent, responsible, and moral ones right along with the dissolute, the ne'er-do-wells, and the thugs.

When such a reaction begins to gather, the Left, which proposed and rationalized the nurturance of the designated collectivity, senses a threat to its moral position. The original motive power for "helping" that collectivity was a sense of moral obligation successfully imposed on the rest of society. They come to fear that their self-concept will be wounded, perhaps fatally. When the facts of the matter are immovably against their policy prescriptions and collectivist moral exhortations, the only possible means of defense is concealment: delaying the exposure of the evidence as long as possible.

The Mainstream Media, as anyone can see for himself, are politically biased toward the Left. Leftist political orientation, being so focused on "good intentions," tends to gather in persons whose strongest response to any scenario is emotional -- and emotionally-oriented persons have always dominated the communications-intensive trades. Thus, journalists are naturally inclined toward alliance with the explicitly political Left, and will assist the Left in bending the news "narrative" away from inconvenient truths. The growth and gradual predominance of a predator sub-class within a collectivity nurtured by the Left is such an inconvenient truth.




I'll leave the summing-up to the late Keith Laumer's inimitable "interstellar diplomat," Jame Retief:

    "Count me out. Groups give me an itch."
    "Uh, huh," Retief said. "That's what I mean."

Monday, November 19, 2012

Socialist comity.

We now know that in East Germany, up until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, political prisoners under control of the Stasi, the secret police, were being forced to make furniture for IKEA, the Swedish furniture company.
No communist regime is too vile for leftists to deal with. And E. German was one of the most vile.

Mention Franco or Pinochet to a leftist, though, and they'll spit nails and sparks. Men who actually fought to win against communist takeovers of their countries are true 20th-century monsters to the left. Pinochet even survived a communist ambush. Apparently, after the communist filth targeted his country, he was just supposed lie down like a whipped dog and surrender.

Let's see. Where was I? Oh, yes. IKEA. Quality furniture at prices that can't be beat.

"Merkel meets Putin: not so easy as meeting a eurozone invertebrate." By M.E. Synon, MailOnline, 11/19/12.

The New Segregationists



You have been warned.






















Apparently, these persons could:





What would undermine that conviction?



























Lynching writ large is genocide.



  • Blacks routinely receive preferential treatment from educational institutions;










The American left-liberal is the new segregationist.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Whose Side Is God On?

"Never go to a religious war without your religion." – Tom Kratman

The national news media are largely ignoring the largest and most ominous development of the past fifty years: the escalating religious war in the Middle East, which has outcroppings in such out-of-the-way places as Britain and Canada. Your Curmudgeon is, of course, unsurprised. After the recent display of "puppet fellatio" by the Mainstream Media toward The Won, the notion that they might ever report candidly on something that so dramatically contradicts the Obamunist narrative is absurd.

And it is a religious war. Disabuse yourself of any contrary notion. Islam is only "one more Abrahamic religion" in the minds of the uncritical. Its ludicrous theology is mere window dressing for a program of military expansion and totalitarian dominance of the world. Muslims are leaguing against Israel because it's a non-Muslim nation in the midst of what they regard as their Waqf. Incidentally, they regard Spain the same way. Fancy that.

Israel, as doughty as she is, cannot withstand the combined assault of all the Muslims in the Middle East without the assistance of the United States. Given Obama's demonstrated hostility toward Israel these past four years, would you be willing to bet that such assistance is forthcoming?

Now ask yourself why Obama would jettison America's most reliable Middle Eastern ally, and the only democratic state in that region. Might there be an influence, from somewhere in Obama's past, that has prejudiced him against the Jews? Might there be more than one?

Not much of a puzzler, this one.

An unfortunate consequence of the secularization of the West is a propensity to see religious controversies as weightless and inconsequential. This is not the case, has never been the case, and will never be the case. For the atheists and agnostics in the audience:

  • Every religion represents itself as the Divine Will for Mankind.
  • Every religion includes an ethos: a set of rules that define mandatory and prohibited acts.
  • To go against the ethos is to condemn oneself to Hell.
  • Cancer of the genitals is nasty, but Hell is worse and lasts much longer.
  • Some religions (e.g., Islam) attach extra afterlife rewards to particular deeds in life.

Thus, for those who adhere to one, there is no more potent motivating force than their religion -- and if their religion commands them to "do unto others until the rubble glows in the dark," that's what they'll do.

That the war in the Middle East is religiously animated principally on one side is particularly ominous. The Israelis have been secularized almost as thoroughly as the rest of the West. Many of them see themselves not as Jews defending their ancient and honorable faith, but merely as persons struggling to survive an onslaught from inexplicably hostile neighbors. What did we ever do to them? is a reasonable precis of the prevalent mentality. For combatants in a religious war, it is not enough.

"Soldiers in a holy war win or die. They do not seek new wars." -- Larry Niven

Your Curmudgeon will forbear to elaborate further about the religious character of the assaults on Israel. But he will note that the Muslim mindset is as hostile toward Christianity as it is toward Judaism.

Imagine, if you prefer and are sufficiently depraved, that the United States could buy itself a few years of relative peace by throwing Israel to the Islamic wolves. Imagine further, though it takes little imagination at this juncture, that the Obama Administration is willing to do so. What would follow in that train?

There are more Jews in the United States and Canada than there are in Israel.
Muslims have flowed into North America in large numbers these past thirty years.
And it is a religious war.

You will find very few mosques in this nation where hatred of the Jews is not preached continually and assiduously. You will find copious hate literature at every one of them, naming the Jews as "descendants of apes and pigs," as drinkers of the blood of Muslim children, as the architects of a scheme of world conquest of their own. You will find recorded sermons, in Arabic and English, from "respected" Islamic authorities in many lands, denouncing the Jews, the "Zionist entity," and the United States for the support it has lent Israel. Is it possible to believe, should Islamic madness succeed in destroying the Jewish state, that it wouldn't swiftly retarget onto Jews in Europe and North America?

You cannot argue a man out of the dictates of his religion without changing his religion. The only force that can countervail Islamic hatred of the Jews -- indeed, of everything not utterly conformant to Islam -- is force itself: the taste of defeat; the sting of the lash. You must not deceive yourself that persons whose convictions are in no way the fruits of reason or evidence can be persuaded by those things to change their ways. This is a religious war, and unless you're willing to see it that way, you will lose.

And you will not succeed in achieving the required mindset until you agree to "make war against a religion."

The ideas expressed in this afterword to John Ringo and Tom Kratman's novel The Tuloriad are congruent with the ones above.