The Whip Of The Week

"'Dzhokhar Tsarnaev' is Chechen for 'Bill Ayers'."

(Seen in Facebook)

"QUESTION OBEDIENCE"

Nathan Stocker came with that in Facebook.

If this stoopid country had about sixteen brains per capita, those two words would corner huge percentages of the T-shirt and bumper-sticker market.

In Dealings With Them

There is a ghastly ahistoricity in these complaints against the antiquity of the Second Amendment. What very few understand is the power-relations of the progression of arms in the past five hundred years. In 1789, the flintlock musket was the "assault weapon" of its day. It was every bit as dangerous and menacing then as the AR-15 is now. Anyone who doubts this need only reflect upon the fact that civilians took their weapons into battle against the greatest military power in the world, and prevailed.

"End Game"

In a discussion of the gun-control hysteria, I was told, "So I leave it to you to propose the endgame."

This is what I wrote:

I don't know what you mean by that, but I can tell you this with all the authority of a lifetime of study and observation:

This is a cultural problem about the existence of values. None of this is -- at this point -- a dispute over which values to hold, but about the very existence of values to begin with: what they are and why they are necessary to human life.

Taking Adam Lanza as only one extreme example of the cultural psychosis, now: that kid was somehow brought to an adult age without ever having been taught what values are. There are teeming tens of millions of specimens like him, now, at the dead-end of a cultural procession that began long before he was born. Not all, or even many, will run to the extent that he did, but their lethality is every bit as real over the long run, in their casual nihilism.

You don't understand: Adam Lanza is "the end game".


Whether you or anyone else likes it or not, that is the problem in its entire scope. That's how big it is, and that's why these complaints about the guns is just so much rubbish. If cars were the social menace here, you people would be arguing about what colors to prohibit.

There is no way that resort to non-essential trivialities is going to address this matter.

That Terrible Autumn Thing

It's just terribly sad to watch all this voting going on. All this pride in an unaccountable huddling around un-human ideas -- ideas which never integrate the crucial attribute of human individuality and everything that means -- in order to distribute raw force upon every each-other of a people indignantly clamoring for peace and brotherhood; these contradictions and evasions cannot but work to deaden the soul with gloom for any broad-stroke of an American future.

A man might steal such moments as he can which reflect the passing light, late in the day, but sensitivity to trails of history can only bring melancholy at watching otherwise very worthy individuals indulge this rot.

It gets expensive to say so, and it's hard to remember why it was ever important to try.

Have No Doubt...

...the zombies are here, already.

The Whip Of The Week

"Poor Obama. He was prepped and ready to debate a conservative Republican and he instead found himself in the Democratic primaries."

(Kim Shady -- cited by Kyle Bennett, Facebook)

Where They Were

By the first decade of the twenty-first century, people who lived in the United States were voting for their lives.

By then, too many of them had no way of knowing how evil this could be, because they had never lived what had been lost; a middle-aged person could recall vestiges, at least, of a common-sense approach to life communicable to nearly everyone around him in any matter of everyday conduct, where many a grown man or woman in their early twenties or even thirties could not. There were millions of them. They had been reared by people who had grown -- themselves -- soft in the head over what reality was and whether it could be "socially constructed", in any of myriad ways. The lot of them were intellectually and psychologically adrift on tides of sensation (they would always state how they felt, even or especially in matters demanding thought, and they could not tell the difference) constantly afire with activism, advocacy, struggle, reports, investigations, studies, organizations (and associations), mandates, orders, parties, leaders, special interests, and democracy. And the central (if not only) thing that was true about them was that they were herds.

It's terrible to say it, of course, but it must be said that the bovine analogy is very apt at analyzing these straits of the early twenty-first American century. This was a mass of humans whose lot had fallen well below its nature in the metaphysically general aspect: individuals in wholesale numbers had evidently lost command of principally human faculties such as language, and this does not refer to the niceties such as pronunciation and syntax, but more importantly to the function of the language itself, which is to transmit concepts (the fruit of cognition) among individuals. This was a creeping debility, whose final manifestations in political matters could not explain to its sufferers what was happening to them as it happened. Their cognitions generally ran to the sideways glance at the flow of the mass and common pleas to "have a nice day" amid general mayhem.

They commonly called themselves Americans and claimed all sorts of alien nonsense as "American", meaning: values (mainly ideas) which are contrary to the ethics and politics of individualism which brought their nation imperfectly into the world but which were all that could ever sustain or save it. That their forebears had erected a polity whose merest administrations were executed at theoretically popular command was bad enough (even after Benjamin Franklin had warned whether they could "keep it"). That this instrument of power had devolved to such naked graspings as they had since the turn of the twenty-first century was really only the basic logic of the thing extended to its integral conclusion: the political power which is a necessary element of government always finds its way to the hearts, minds and hands of individuals in the name of the masses. The masses, having been groomed to their place per se, became militantly supplicant to individuals who made their livings at pretending to know how everyone else should live and strutting that basic pretense into positions of command authority.

Many people in the United States who might have read this would also have balked at the concept of "masses" before counting themselves as constituents. What was most important to their history, however, is that that small revolt was of no import. Once again, as in the ringing complaint of Thomas Paine centuries before but on the dawn of something new in history, the fugitive "freedom" was hunted 'round the world. This terrible fall in the standing of an idea was the whole cause of world misery on scales never conceived by their forebears, but people living in the United States were treated to -- and indulged to the extent of their crippled mentation -- terrible insults of cynicism drafted from questions whether "freedom" was any sort of value, or even existed at all. This, within less than a lifetime after the greatest conscious ideological crusades of the previous century had rallied Americans to its standard.

What mattered, then, was the right of might, and that's why people who lived in the United States were voting for their lives.

The Fatal Defect of The Democratic Republic

No republic can stand the realizations of evil men that democracy is a natural market for lies.

Studies In The Fundamentals Of Futlity

"So you're OK with people suffering needlessly? And you're OK with killing 17,000 people a year? Because if you are, admit it. Don't hide behind 'we can't afford it.'

Sure, that's a viable position. Darwinian, but viable. 'Decrease the surplus population' is Scrooge-like, but viable. If you'd rather not raise taxes on the fortunate and on health care freeloaders, that's a viable position. If you want to continue to allow people to be sick and to die needlessly, that's a viable position.

But tell us face-to-face. Tell us they have to die because you just flat don't care."

(Tony Messenger -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

~~~~~
Oh, Tony... You sit there on your ex cathedra pose, you sausage-fingered mook, and peer up your nose with your dainty insinuations of others' guilt, that sneer of yours ever-cocked for the poor bastard who wanders into it. You just can't believe that anyone would dare take you up on it.

And there is so much now that I don't care about. Like: I really, really don't care whether you like me or not. Guess what, fool: even when I account for the rank silliness of your analysis (that mad equivocation with Stalin, for instance, or your grotesque misgrappling of the verb, "killing"), I don't care.

And this is the really crucial part of it, you see: you can't make me care. You can howl in your dinosaur newspaper until the commies come home or you go out of business: whchever comes first. You can vote for commissars -- and even elect the bloody savages -- for the rest of your life. You can hire them to threaten me, or throw me in prison or even kill me, but you will never make me "care", as you so greasily put it.

I can't afford to care, you see. You and your kind have priced me straight out of the ethical market.

Your move.

(link: The Other McCain)

In This Awful Hour

"How many divisions does the Supreme Court have?"

One Day...

...you rotten sonofabitch, you and your kind are going to confront someone ready to meet you on your own premises.

There will be no mercy.

Field Marshal Rodham

"That statement is key. Hillary herself stayed out of all meetings dealing with strategy...Hillary's absence would give the impression that she had no connection to the scheme while making sure that her views were represented by Steinberg and Shapiro, both of whom were fully complicit with the details that developed concerning how to pad statistics on U.S. guns in Mexico..."

What if she played the whole thing discreetly as she could from the sidelines at State, waiting for it to blow up in Obama's face?

She's that sharp.

Never take your eye off her. Never, ever.

~~~~~

"This meshes perfectly with your previous pondering about Holder calling the shot on Exec. privilege as well."

(Facebook commenter)

Holy shit. Now, I wish I had some old-school AC-ECW talent around. I'd like to review in detail whatever anyone has on the precise relationship of Holder to the Rodham half of The Bunker, back in the day. I've already mentioned the Magaziner affidavit (with -- as always -- Vince's bones rattling about). Very few have any idea what that's about, but take a look at this --

"On Dec. 21, 1994, Lamberth dismissed the suit against the government, but he asked U.S. Attorney Eric Holder (now deputy attorney general) to investigate whether Magaziner should be held in criminal contempt for supplying false information in his affidavit, filed March 3, 1993. The investigation turned on a single sentence in which Magaziner states, 'Only federal government employees serve as members of the interdepartmental working group.' Lamberth insisted that this sentence contradicted indisputable evidence that private citizens attended the working groups, and that some of them played supervisory roles. The judge was especially irritated by the presence of executives from managed-care conglomerates who stood to profit from the new legislation--exactly the sort of conflict of interest FACA was intended to check. Judge Lamberth says that the appeals court took at face value Magaziner's 'only federal government employees' declaration when it ruled against the request for a temporary injunction.

Although Holder chided government lawyers for formulating a 'sloppy,' 'overly aggressive' response to the AAPS lawsuit and took Magaziner to task for using ill-defined legalistic language supplied him by White House counsel Vincent Foster, he concluded his investigation by declining to prosecute Magaziner for criminal contempt. He found no factual errors in Magaziner's affidavit, and no evidence that he had intended to willfully mislead the court. Indeed, deep into the affidavit, Magaziner volunteers the information that consultants who were clearly not government employees played a prominent role in the working group."

(Franklin Foer -- Slate, January 10, 1998)

Now, you can see some of the patent Holder bullshit developing in that. If this guy hadn't been on the team before that case, he surely must've been down for cigars on the inside when it was over. Hillary had once screamed, "Just fix it, Vince!" Well... maybe he did and maybe he didn't, when he ended up in Ft. Marcy Park. The point is that all the cleaning help would have been welcome, and Holder was probably damned useful around the house.

What's he playing for in this gun giveaway deal?

Who's Got The Arm On Whom?

What if Eric Holder was able to succeed at demanding Executive Privilege cover from the president?

"A Tiger By The Tail"

"It is, however, rather doubtful whether, from a long-term point of view, deflation is really more harmful than inflation. Indeed, there is a sense in which inflation really is infinitely more dangerous and needs to be more carefully guarded against. Of the two errors, it is the one more likely to be committed. The reason for this is that moderate inflation is generally pleasant while it proceeds, whereas deflation is immediately and acutely painful. There is little need to take precautions against any practice the bad effects of which will be immediately and strongly felt; but there is need for precautions wherever action which is immediately pleasant or relieves temporary difficulties involves greater harm that will be felt only later. There is, indeed, more than a mere superficial similarity between inflation and drug-taking, a comparison which has often been made.

Inflation and deflation both produce their peculiar effects by causing unexpected price changes, and both are bound to disappoint expectations twice. The first time is when prices prove to be higher or lower than they were expected to be and the second when, as must sooner or later happen, these price changes come to be expected and cease to have the effect which their unforeseen occurrence had. The difference between inflation and deflation is that, with the former, the pleasant surprise comes first and the reaction later, while, with the latter, the first effect on business is depressing. The effects of both, however, are self-reversing. For a time the forces which bring about either tend to feed on themselves, and the period during which prices move faster than expected may thus be prolonged. But unless price movements continue in the same direction at an ever accelerating rate, expectations must catch up with them. As soon as this happens, the character of the effects changes.

Inflation at first merely produces conditions in which more people make profits and in which profits are generally larger than usual. Almost everything succeeds, and there are hardly any failures. The fact that profits again and again prove to be greater than had been expected and that an unusual number of ventures turn out to be successful produces a general atmosphere favorable to risk-taking. Even those who would have been driven out of business without the windfalls caused by the unexpected general rise in prices are able to hold on and to keep their employees in the expectation that they will soon share in the general prosperity. This situation will last, however, only until people begin to expect prices to continue to rise at the same rate. Once they begin to count on prices being so many per cent higher in so many months' time, they will bid up the prices of the factors of production which determine the costs to a level corresponding to the future prices they expect. If prices then rise no more than had been expected, profits will return to normal, and the proportion of those making a profit will also fall and since, during the period of exceptionally large profits, many have held on who would otherwise have been forced to change the direction of their efforts, a higher proportion than usual will suffer losses.

The stimulating effect of inflation will thus operate only so long as it has not been foreseen; as soon as it comes to be foreseen, only its continuation at an increased rate will maintain the same degree of prosperity. If in such a situation prices rose less than expected, the effect would be the same as that of unforeseen deflation. Even if they rose only as much as was generally expected, this would no longer provide the exceptional stimulus but would lay bare the whole backlog of adjustments that had been postponed while the temporary stimulus lasted. In order for inflation to retain its initial stimulating effect, it would have to continue at a rate always faster than expected."

(F. A. Hayek: "A Tiger By The Tail" -- published originally as Hobart Paperback No. 4, 2nd Edition, Institute of Economic Affairs [1974], included as Chapter 1: "Economic Freedom", 1991, IEA, pp. 70-71)