White Rights

     These days you can visit a considerable number of places on the Web to hear racial rants, taunting, denunciations, and calls for this or that sort of “action.” The “Black Lives Matter” whores are only the currently most visible examples. Nearly all such sites are contemptible. But not all: some are worse. Clearly, this is an imbalance that demands to be redressed.

     Our esteemed Colonel Bunny has posted a statistics-laden piece that utterly refutes one of the most important lies currently bedeviling American society: the canard that American Caucasians of European descent, who will henceforth be referred to as whites, despise and are attempting to destroy the members of other races and ethnicities. The truly stunning thing about this deceit is that not only is it untrue, it’s the exact reverse of the truth:

• Crimes against whites by others utterly overwhelm crimes by whites against others.
• Whites have extended a hand of friendship and assistance to others, and have usually had it spat on, bitten, or swatted aside.
• Peaceful white neighborhoods have ceased to be peaceful when non-whites have moved into them – and not because the whites have tried to drive them out.
• Non-white racial and ethnic groups, though not united on other points, are utterly unanimous on this one: the “white devil” must be dispossessed and destroyed.
• Despite all the above, any hint of protest, much less counter-organization by whites is denounced as illegitimate, inherently racist, and an expression of hatred.

     This isn’t exactly new. More than thirty years ago, a young woman of no small intelligence nor achievement told me that should my neighborhood experience racial admixture of the sort well known to promote disorder and loss of property values, it would be my moral duty to remain here and endure it, because...well, just because. She could not articulate any objective reason; it was entirely a matter of her opinion.

     At one of his recent campaign appearances, Democratic presidential aspirant Martin O’Malley was shouted down for suggesting, in response to the chants of “Black Lives Matter” agitators, that all lives matter. Bernie Sanders has had to cope with something similar. Persons who dare to suggest that contemporary whites have no responsibility for the statistical differences between whites’ aggregate wealth and achievement and the wealth and achievement of other races and ethnicities are routinely branded as racists, haters, and persons who want to bring back slavery.

     This mick-wop honky has had quite enough.

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     We on the Right have often complained that we lack conservative politicians with actual spines. In reflecting on that notion, it struck me that our politicians, while not a perfectly representative sample of our ranks, nevertheless are drawn from it. Thus, an increase in our overall Backbone Quotient – BQ? – would surely elevate that of our elected officials. (At the very least, we should be trying our best to raise the “lower end” of the bell curve.)

     Racial/ethnic matters are a significant venue for such improvements. Today, virtually no one in public office or seek to enter it is willing to say, publicly, any of the following:

• Violent crimes and crimes against property are overwhelmingly committed by non-whites.
• Neighborhoods characterized by disorder, squalor, and violence are almost always non-white.
• The quality of local schools is inversely proportional to their attendance by non-whites.
• Non-white communities routinely shelter the lawbreakers among them against public justice.
• Demands for “free stuff” emanate almost exclusively from non-whites and their mouthpieces.
• Non-whites who point out such facts are demonized: “Oreos,” “Uncle Toms,” “race traitors,” etc.

     Despite all that we have the phenomenon of black racialist groups demanding that a few states be separated off into a new all-black nation...which, however, would be supported by funds from the rest of the country. We have groups such as Aztlan and La Raza demanding open immigration from the south, and that the American Southwest be returned to union with Mexico. Newest on the scene are the exclaves dominated by Middle Eastern Muslim “immigrants” and “refugees” where the writ of law does not run and it is unsafe for whites to tread.

     But don’t you dare to say that white lives matter...that the Knockout Game, a.k.a. “polar bear hunting,” is a real phenomenon...that illegal aliens from south of the border commit huge numbers of violent crimes, whether against one another or against whites...or that the degradation of our public facilities correlates strongly with the invasion of nearby neighborhoods by non-whites.

     It’s been said more times than anyone could count that it’s impossible to address a problem you aren’t willing to name. Someone must name it. It appears that the mantle has descended on me:

     The problem is non-whites.

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     It’s time for a countermeasure. Indeed, it’s possible that we’re already too late. Nevertheless, I propose a blatant, in-your-face approach that makes plain that American whites will stand for no more:

Restore The Rights Of American Whites!

     Those rights include all the following:

• Freedom of association, including the freedom to discriminate in buying and selling.
• Freedom of enterprise, including the right to hire, fire, promote, and demote upon arbitrary criteria.
• Repeal of all laws that distinguish any racial, ethnic, or religious group from any other, regardless of context.
• The elimination of “stakeholder” laws and judicial presumptions that award privileges to recognized groups.
• The right to form proprietary communities protected by enforceable covenants, including covenants that restrict residency according to race or ethnicity.

     Note that none of the above propositions would create legal privileges that only whites would enjoy. Indeed, the condition of the country at this time is such that only whites are, de facto, denied any of the above rights. Blacks and Hispanics can form race or ethnicity-based groups and associations without fear of legal penalty. Black employers can hire blacks exclusively without worrying about what the EEOC will say, and of course the same is true for Hispanics and Muslims. Though the laws would appear to weigh as heavily on non-whites’ discrimination against whites as the reverse, they’re not enforced when the target would be a non-white business or organization.

     It’s time not merely to halt the locomotive of racial-ethnic degradation, but to reverse it. If non-whites want the fruits of the American blessing that whites experience, let them earn those fruits on the same plane as we did. Those who’d prefer not to make the effort can choose among the other continents of the world...assuming those lands would have them.

Normality Versus Hegemony

     Quite a long time ago, I read a semi-humorous article written by a man who was left-handed. The thrust of the article was that “it’s a right-handed world:” i.e., that commonplace devices and the conventions of the world cater to right-handed persons, and that left-handers must cope as best they can. Being rather young at that time, I was somewhat intrigued by this revelation. It set me on a kind of quest: I went looking for ways in which ordinary things embedded the assumption that their users would be righties rather than lefties. As you can imagine, I found a multitude of them.

     However, the discovery did not cause me to infer that the world is prejudiced against lefties, nor that lefties are treated unfairly. It did accentuate the importance of normality – conformance to the most common patterns – in easing one’s journey through life.

     Left-handedness is not normal. That’s not to say that it’s “unnatural,” or “perverse,” or bad in any other sense. It’s merely uncommon. Lefties constitute about 15% of the population of the United States, according to recent surveys. Thus, one who is pursuing a “mass market” for his new device will more likely orient it toward righties, if handedness matters to its use.

     This is not wrong or evil; it’s merely good sense. It does mean that lefties will have to cope with burdens righties don’t. But that’s also the case with persons distant from the norms for height, weight, and general intelligence. More, there are specific occupations in which left-handedness is a valued asset; pitching and orthopedic surgery are two examples.

     This highlights the difference between normality and hegemony.

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     In our time, attempts to conflate normality and hegemony are rife. It’s normal:

• To be right-handed (~85%);
• To be heterosexual (~97%);
• To have two arms and two legs (~99%);
• To have the “normal” five senses (~99%);
• To prefer the company of those who share one’s race, religion, or ethnic heritage (~100%).

     None of these conformances to various norms confer privileges beyond a degree of convenience. Yet they matter. The lefty, the homosexual, the amputee, the blind and the deaf, and the member of a minority race, creed, or heritage must all find ways to cope with their minority standing. It’s no one’s “fault;” it’s merely the way things are. Yet there are activists determined to impose those minorities’ preferences upon the rest of us by political means, as if not Nature but the State had decreed their disadvantages.

     And far too many of us let them get away with it, most commonly in the name of “compassion.”

     It’s not that long ago that the overwhelming majority of Americans would have known how wrong that is without needing time for reflection. But the conflation of normality with hegemony has penetrated so deeply into the public consciousness that many of us react in precisely the opposite fashion – by reflex conditioned in by the relentless propagandization of those aforementioned activists.

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     This is on my mind this fine July morning due to a phrase I first encountered quite recently: “sundown segregation.” It refers to the natural human tendency to prefer the company of others like oneself when there are no overriding considerations (e.g., one’s occupation). That tendency is why America has “Chinatowns,” “Germantowns,” “Little Italys,” and the like. It’s also the main reason why American Negroes tend to concentrate geographically, despite racialists’ claims that they’ve been “herded into ghettoes.”

     Political initiatives to combat that wholly natural tendency are, in a word, unnatural. It takes no more than ordinary intelligence to realize and deplore this, just as it would take no more than that to condemn a State decree that 50% of all marketed devices be oriented toward the convenience of the left-handed. Yet such initiatives have multiplied. They receive a truly unnatural degree of acquiescence.

     What too many good-hearted persons fail to realize is that the overt rationale for such initiatives is nothing more than a cover for the all-important covert motive: the desire of the power-hungry to assert absolute hegemony over every aspect of human life.

     In some cases, it starts innocently. Just as it’s normal to have two arms, two legs, and five senses, it’s normal for a person so equipped to feel sympathy for the plight of the amputee, the blind, and the deaf. Just as it’s normal for an American to be self-supporting (or a member of a family with an adequately functioning “breadwinner”), it’s normal to feel sympathy for those who aren’t, whether by reason of incapacity or tender age. Power-mongers have learned how to latch onto such sentiments and politicize them. Thus “programs” are born to redress such “iniquities,” so the “afflicted” can feel “included.” Note that such programs tend to be eternal, by reason of the natural existence of such persons...and that they swell in a fashion detached from the prevalence of the “afflictions” they purport to relieve.

     In other cases, there’s nothing innocent about it. I hardly need to tell any Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch about the inroads black racialist mouthpieces, homosexual activists, and flacksters for “undocumented immigrants” have made into America’s politics. The salient thing here is that those inroads were paved with propaganda: ceaseless beratings of the majority about supposed “injustices” done to those minorities. Power-mongers and members in good standing of the political class have exploited them to the hilt.

     Were we to stipulate that some true injustices have been inflicted on members of minority demographics, wouldn’t it still be a far greater injustice for the State to penalize the overwhelming (and wholly innocent) majority of us to redress them? Wouldn’t that constitute a perversion of the very idea of justice: the punishment of the guilty without penalty to the innocent?

     You know the answer full well.

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     The above might seem too obvious to emphasize...which is why I repeat so frequently that obvious means overlooked. The gulf between the claims of “rights” and “injustices” and the cupidity and malice of the grievance-mongers that make them should be highlighted, yet it’s far more often ignored. Given the Main Stream Media’s swiftness to seize on exploitable occurrences to feed the grievance-mongers’ furnaces, coupled to politicians’ readiness to leap onto podia and trumpet “causes” in which we should all be compulsorily enrolled, the importance of reversing the tide has never been greater.

     A final thought: normal does not imply good or better. Majorities have no rights nor privileges as such, all pseudo-democratic notions notwithstanding. Assertions of hegemony through demography ought always to be resisted and refuted, no matter what demographic might claim it. It’s merely the irony of our place and time that minorities – groups outside the norm and distinct from it – should be waging a largely successful campaign to wield hegemony over the rest of us.

The True Dimensions Of Egalitarianism

     “Equality.” We’re all for it, right? Old Tom Jefferson put it in the Declaration: “All men are created equal.” That must mean we should all be equal, in every way and at every instant from birth to death, right? Besides, our pastors teach us that we’re all equal in the eyes of God, right? Right?

     That’s the Gospel of Egalitarianism. Perhaps it’s better stated as an Eleventh Commandment:

“Thou Shalt Not Differ From Others.”

     It lacks a certain something, though: an enforcement mechanism. As matters stand, people vary all over the map. What to do, what to do...hmmm...wait, I have it! We’ll have the State make us all equal, like in that Kurt Vonnegut story! With the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful State to watch over us, no one would dare to be better than anyone else at anything!

     At last: there would no longer be any reason for anyone to envy anyone else! A magnificent Utopian vision! The dream of the Left in glorious Technicolor! There are just a few wee problems:

     It would be totalitarian;
     It would occasion an unprecedented bloodletting;
     And no matter how much force you use, it can’t be done.

     You already had an inkling or two about that, didn’t you?

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     Certain totally insane notions simply refuse to die. Egalitarianism is conspicuous among them. Contrary to what many think, it’s not that such notions are genuinely beautiful, dreams we would truly love to achieve if only it were possible. It’s that they’re useful to those who seek power over others.

     No two individuals are equal in any way.
     No two races are equal in any way.
     The two sexes are not equal in any way.
     No two ethnicities are equal in any way.
     No two cultures are equal in any way.
     No two religious creeds are equal in any way.
     And they cannot be made equal by any application of wishful thinking or force.

     However, the notion that X and Y should be equal – in political terms, that such equality is a God-given right -- justifies the use of State power over them. If your goal is the expansion of the State and its powers, egalitarian claims and those making them are weapons in your arsenal.

     Are you happy with the way American government has used its powers to this point, Gentle Reader?

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     Courtesy of Sara Noble, have a gander at a recent outcropping of egalitarian thought:

     Retirement USA is a national initiative that is working for a new retirement system that, along with Social Security, will provide universal, secure, and adequate income for future retirees. The initiative has developed 12 Principles for a New Retirement System, which provides a framework for a future system in which employers, workers, and the government would share responsibility for the retirement security for all American workers.

     Make sure you have a look at those “principles.” Then make sure you have a quiet place to lie down until the shakes subside.

     What, precisely, is the rationale behind this new socialist initiative? Why, that a “secure retirement” is a right. Never mind that only recently, in historical terms, has anyone but the very wealthy been able even to contemplate retirement. Never mind that other socialist gestures toward “secure retirement,” such as the one currently destroying Greece, have all eventuated in failure at best, disaster at worst. Never mind that the American step in that direction, Social Security, is on the verge of collapse and cannot be saved without either means-testing it – i.e., changing it from a form of insurance to a form of welfare – or tax increases so massive that working Americans would essentially be made serfs laboring for the leisure of retirees.

     It’s not the first stroke in this direction, of course. Congress has already entertained the suggestion that private pension funds and savings should be confiscated:

     RALEIGH — Democrats in the U.S. House have been conducting hearings on proposals to confiscate workers’ personal retirement accounts — including 401(k)s and IRAs — and convert them to accounts managed by the Social Security Administration.

     Triggered by the financial crisis the past two months, the hearings reportedly were meant to stem losses incurred by many workers and retirees whose 401(k) and IRA balances have been shrinking rapidly.

     The testimony of Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economic policy analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York, in hearings Oct. 7 drew the most attention and criticism. Testifying for the House Committee on Education and Labor, Ghilarducci proposed that the government eliminate tax breaks for 401(k) and similar retirement accounts, such as IRAs, and confiscate workers’ retirement plan accounts and convert them to universal Guaranteed Retirement Accounts (GRAs) managed by the Social Security Administration. Ghilarducci’s plan first appeared in a paper for the Economic Policy Institute: Agenda for Shared Prosperity on Nov. 20, 2007, in which she said GRAs will rescue the flawed American retirement income system (www.sharedprosperity.org/bp204/bp204.pdf).

     The current retirement system, Ghilarducci said, “exacerbates income and wealth inequalities” because tax breaks for voluntary retirement accounts are “skewed to the wealthy because it is easier for them to save, and because they receive bigger tax breaks when they do.” Lauding GRAs as a way to effectively increase retirement savings, Ghilarducci wrote that savings incentives are unequal for rich and poor families because tax deferrals “provide a much larger ‘carrot’ to wealthy families than to middle-class families — and none whatsoever for families too poor to owe taxes.”

     In a radio interview with Kirby Wilbur in Seattle on Oct. 27, 2008, Ghilarducci explained that her proposal doesn’t eliminate the tax breaks, rather, “I’m just rearranging the tax breaks that are available now for 401(k)s and spreading — spreading the wealth.”

     Private pension funds, IRAs, and 401(k) accounts hold approximately $18 trillion in assets. That’s almost exactly the size of the federal debt. More than coincidence? Your Curmudgeon reports; you decide.

     Then decide whether “retirement equality” strikes you as a noble goal or just one more scheme of State theft under a wholly deceitful veneer of good intentions.

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     Whenever some noisy interest group starts prattling about “equality” or “rights,” a smart man puts one hand on his wallet and the other on his sidearm. The Rights of Man are laid out plainly in old Tom Jefferson’s magnum opus:

     We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

     Though many argue otherwise, the “equality” Jefferson had in mind was equality before the law: i.e., that the law cannot justly distinguish among men according to their identities, their assets, or their origins. That stands in sharp contrast to the egalitarianism of the Left, which seeks to use State power to coerce us all in the name of various unattainable “equalities.”

     But there’s a simpler way to cut away the nonsense, buried in that innocent-looking phrase “the pursuit of Happiness.”

     Does a right to pursue something imply a right to catch it?

     Isn’t a secure retirement merely a material goal some of us pursue, on the grounds that it would make us happy to be able to retire after spending forty or fifty years laboring?

     What about the trades in which there has never been any possibility of retirement, such as farming? Did the innumerable legions throughout history that labored over the land, coaxing from it the food we require to sustain our lives, have a “right” they never knew about? Or was it that the way they chose to “pursue Happiness” simply foreclosed that possibility, that they were aware of that from the outset, and chose to work the land even so?

     And should we grant the smallest groat of respect to a claim of “rights” that infringes upon others’ right to “pursue Happiness” peaceably and as they see fit?

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     In closing: I have no equals. Neither do you. Keeping that constantly in mind would armor us against nearly all the various claims of “rights” being bandied about today. For in truth, there is only one right that can be defended without contradicting oneself: the right to be left alone, so long as one honors others’ right to be left alone. All other claims amount to nothing but a power grab.

     There’s no limit to the power-mongers’ ability to claim new “rights.” They haven’t gotten around to claiming that “an equal right to life” prohibits some persons from living longer than others...but it might not have occurred to them just yet.

     Give them time.

“Compelling Government Interest”

     Time was, I wrote more than I do today about the abstract ideals that undergird freedom. These days, my attention is more focused on current events and what they portend. I’m not sure why that should be, except that it’s clear that, as Jubal Harshaw said in Stranger In A Strange Land, wallowing in the troubles of others can make you seriously neurotic.

     Back in the old Palace Of Reason days, and during the Eternity Road era that succeeded it, the subject of rights – what they are, why they exist at all, and what they imply for government in a society that respects them – was frequently on my mind. Of all the brief, powerful things ever said on the subject, my favorite is this one, from a Nineteenth-Century French politician and historian:

     Either rights exist, or they do not exist. If they exist, they involve absolute consequences...Furthermore, if a right exists, it exists at every moment. It is absolute today, yesterday, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, in summer as in winter, not when it pleases you to declare it in force. [Louis Thiers]

     When Thomas Jefferson wrote the birth certificate of the United States:

     We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

     ...he had that concept of rights – the peaceable individual’s possession of absolute moral trumps that prohibit infringement for any reason – firmly in mind.

     Clearly, the Jefferson / Thiers concept of rights differs from that of a permission or a license, which is granted only when the State pleases to do so and may be qualified or withdrawn at any time. Which brings us to this morning’s question:

Are Americans accorded any rights whatsoever?

     Not de facto, mind you, but de jure. In other words: does an individual possess any absolute protections against State coercion? Protections that cannot legally be abridged, infringed, or set aside on the grounds of a “compelling government interest?”

     Think it over.

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     “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Jefferson’s original phrase was “Life, Liberty, and Property,” but after some wrangling with the rest of the convention he agreed to substitute “the Pursuit of Happiness,” probably because the assertion of an absolute right to one’s property would thwart the later assertion of a power to tax.

     Yet Jefferson was sincere about property rights. One of the accomplishments of his first term as president was the cessation of direct federal taxes:

     At home, fellow citizens, you best know whether we have done well or ill. The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes. These covering our land with officers, and opening our doors to their intrusions, had already begun that process of domiciliary vexation which, once entered, is scarcely to be restrained from reaching successively every article of produce and property. [ Second Inaugural Address ]

     Every tax, regardless of its nature or its rationale, is an infringement upon property rights. This is true even of an indirect tax, for it infringes upon the right of buyer and seller to trade their rightful property. Jefferson’s dedication to property rights led him to eliminate direct federal taxation – taxes that fall upon individuals and institutions – out of the federal exchequer, leaving indirect taxes – taxes on imports, exports, and particular kinds of commerce, which can therefore be avoided – as Washington’s sole sources of revenue.

     What persons or institutions escape direct taxation – federal, state, or local – today? In these post-Kelo years, what item of real or tangible property is safe from arbitrary confiscation? Is it safe even to have cash or other valuables on your person?

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     Jefferson’s conception of liberty embraced the freedom of choice and movement he deemed every peaceable individual to possess. An American’s self-ownership, in Jefferson’s view, was absolute; he could therefore do whatever he pleased, subject only to the constraint that he not interfere in others’ equal right to do likewise, and the State could do nothing to hinder him. Nor could the State force him to labor for its sake, which would constitute the most direct imaginable “tax” on his unalienable rights to himself and his freedom of choice.

     The writ of habeas corpus, mentioned specifically in the Constitution, is an expression of Jeffersonian liberty. An individual’s freedom of movement could only be constrained by the State if it could make a “valid reply” to a petition for habeas corpus. In the early years of the Republic, few replies were deemed valid: chiefly imprisonment subsequent to a criminal conviction by a jury of one’s peers.

     When Abraham Lincoln decided to institute conscription for the purpose of fighting the Civil War, he found it legally necessary to suspend the applicability of habeas corpus. Though there is provision for this in the Constitution:

     The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it. [Article I, Section 9]

     ...it is a specifically Congressional prerogative to do so. Lincoln bypassed Congress and issued an order on presidential authority that habeas corpus petitions were to be ignored by his military commanders.

     Today, habeas corpus can be answered by a slew of “valid replies.” Most of them would have horrified Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers. Given that a man can be stopped for “questioning” without pretext or charge, and can be detained arbitrarily for 72 hours, entirely on police say-so, in every state in the Union, is there freedom of movement in America today?

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     Ah, the “right to life.” You’d think that one, at least, would still be respected. After all, the State can’t just kill you as you’re walking along, can it? Surely it can’t come into your home and kill you, just because it decides to do so?

• Ruby Ridge
• Waco I
• Waco II
• No-Knock SWAT raids
• Other Executions by Cops

     Oops. Sorry. My mistake.

     So much for your “right to life.”

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"Rights are an archist concept. Rights have no meaning except when confronted with superior power. They are what is left to the people after the government has taken all its wants. Your country's Bill of Rights defines your most cherished freedoms how? By limiting the legal power of government to encroach upon them." [Eric L. Harry, via fictional anarchist theorist Valentin Kartsev in Harry's novel Protect and Defend.]

     It would appear that “superior power” acknowledges no rights. The rationale is almost always “compelling government interest:” that is, the State’s interest in...what? How can the State, a fictional creature made up of individuals such as you and I, hired to do the relatively simple jobs (NB: “simple,” not necessarily “easy”) of keeping the peace in the streets, operating a court system, and defending the territory of the United States, have “interests?” It’s a BLEEP!ing hireling, and hirelings have no interests; they have responsibilities and delegated, enumerated powers, nothing more.

     The State’s “interests” are nonexistent. However, the individuals at the levers of power don’t see it that way. They want power, and as much of it as they can grab. Your “rights?” Sorry, buddy, they were just an Eighteenth Century philosopher’s idle fancy. Just a few words on a scrap of parchment. At any rate, we shan’t concern ourselves with them today. There’s oppressing work to be done!

     “Your government’s” work.

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     I’ll close this tirade with a snippet from a work of fiction. It comes closer to capturing my cynicism and fear than anything else that currently comes to mind. The book it’s from is about an unusual family. All three of its members possess psi powers...and all three of them have the State’s crosshairs on their backs:

     “Once upon a time there was an experiment in which twelve people participated,” Quincey said. “About six years ago. Do you remember that?”

     “I remember it,” Andy said grimly.

     “There aren’t many of those twelve people left. There were four, the last I heard. And two of them married each other.”

     “Yes,” Andy said, but inside he felt growing horror. Only four left? What was Quincey talking about?

     “I understand one of them can bend keys and shut doors without even touching them.” Quincey’s voice, thin, coming across two thousand miles of telephone cable, coming through switching stations, through open-relay points, through junction boxes in Nevada, Idaho, Colorado, Iowa. A million places to tap into Quincey’s voice.

     “Yes?” he said, straining to keep his voice level. And he thought of Vicky, who could sometimes turn on the radio or turn off the TV without going anywhere near it-and Vicky was apparently not even aware she was doing those things.

     “Oh yes, he’s for real,” Quincey was saying. “He’s—what would you say?-a documented case. It hurts his head if he does those things too often, but he can do them. They keep him in a little room with a door he can’t open and a lock he can’t bend. They do tests on him. He bends keys. He shuts doors. And I understand he’s nearly crazy.”

     “Oh ... my ... God,” Andy said faintly.

     “He’s part of the peace effort, so it’s all right if he goes crazy,” Quincey went on. “He’s going crazy so two hundred and twenty million Americans can stay safe and free. Do you understand?”

     “Yes,” Andy had whispered.

     “What about the two people who got married? Nothing. So far as they know. They live quietly, in some quiet middle-American state like Ohio. There’s maybe a yearly check on them. Just to see if they’re doing anything like bending keys or closing doors without touching them or doing funny little mentalist routines at the local Backyard Carnival for Muscular Dystrophy. Good thing those people can’t do anything like that, isn’t it, Andy?”

     Andy closed his eyes and smelled burned cloth. Sometimes Charlie would pull open the fridge door, look in, and then crawl off again. And if Vicky was ironing, she would glance at the fridge door and it would swing shut again—all without her being aware that she was doing anything strange. That was sometimes. At other times it didn’t seem to work, and she would leave her ironing and close the refrigerator door herself (or turn off the radio, or turn on the TV). Vicky couldn’t bend keys or read thoughts or fly or start fires or predict the future. She could sometimes shut a door from across the room and that was about the extent of it. Sometimes, after she had done several of these things, Andy had noticed that she would complain of a headache or an upset stomach, and whether that was a physical reaction or some sort of muttered warning from her subconscious, Andy didn’t know. Her ability to do these things got maybe a little stronger around the time of her period. Such small things, and so infrequently, that Andy had come to think of them as normal. As for himself...well he could push people. There was no real name for it; perhaps autohypnosis came closest. And he couldn’t do it often, because it gave him headaches. Most days he could forget completely that he wasn’t utterly normal and never really had been since that day in Room 70 of Jason Geameigh.

     He closed his eyes and on the dark field inside his eyelids he saw that comma-shaped bloodstain and the nonwords COR OSUM.

     “Yes, it’s a good thing,” Quincey went on, as if Andy had agreed. “Or they might put them in two little rooms where they could work full-time to keep two hundred and twenty million Americans safe and free.” “A good thing,” Andy agreed.

     “Those twelve people,” Quincey said, “maybe they gave those twelve people a drug they didn’t fully understand. It might have been that someone—a certain Mad Doctor—might have deliberately misled them. Or maybe he thought he was misleading them and they were deliberately leading him on. It doesn’t matter.”

     “No.”

     “So this drug was given to them and maybe it changed their chromosomes a little bit. Or a lot. Or who knows. And maybe two of them got married and decided to have a baby and maybe the baby got something more than her eyes and his mouth. Wouldn’t they be interested in that child?”

     “I bet they would,” Andy said, now so frightened he was having trouble talking at all. He had already decided that he would not tell Vicky about calling Quincey.

     “It’s like you got lemon, and that’s nice, and you got meringue, and that’s nice, too, but when you put them together, you’ve got...a whole new taste treat. I bet they’d want to see just what that child could do. They might just want to take it and put it in a little room and see if it could help make the world safe for democracy. And I think that’s all I want to say, old buddy, except...keep your head down.”

     [Stephen King, Firestarter]

     Know of any convenient planetoids, Gentle Reader?

Naughty Words Part 2: "But"

     The study of how expressions of any sort give rise to meaning is called semantics. Meaning, of course, arises in the mind of the recipient of a communication when he has received and interpreted it. It might be identical to what the speaker / writer / cartoonist intended to convey, it might vary somewhat, or it might be so far from the originator’s intention as to bear no relation to it. This leads us to a question central to all communication studies:

How Do I Know That’s Exactly What He Meant?

The answer is massively frustrating: You don’t. It’s impossible in the nature of things. All you can do is approach confidence in your interpretation asymptotically. With a handful of important exceptions.

     This essay is about one of the exceptions.

---

     First, a particularly piercing Bill Whittle video:

     Whittle has nailed one of the iconic obscenities of our time: the expressive pattern that goes as follows:

[Declarative clause], but [clause that contradicts declarative clause].

     In the matter of freedom of expression, the template goes thus:

“I believe in freedom of speech, but [insert exception here].”

     An analogous, structurally parallel version can be observed in discussions of freedom of anything. However, let’s not stop with a statement of revulsion; let’s consider what meaning the speaker really wants us to derive from his words. I can think of the following possible interpretations:

• “I believe in freedom of speech, except for this one case of it.”
• “I believe in freedom of speech, except for a range of cases that offend me.”
• “I believe in freedom of speech, except for a range of cases to be decided by ‘authority.’”
• “I don’t believe in freedom of speech; I merely want to weasel-word my way around it.”

     Got any others? The point, of course, is that the use of but negates the preceding sentiment.

     To say that one is free in some regard is to say that he has a right to do as he pleases:

1. With no possibility of being punished by any organ of government;
2. Should a private party or organization attempt to punish him, the attempt would be a criminal act.

     Very few persons actually grasp this critical concept. At least, nearly everyone I know wants to make exceptions:

• To freedom of speech;
• To freedom of assembly;
• To freedom of association;
• To the right to keep and bear arms;
• To property rights;
• To freedom of commerce;
• To the right to face one’s accusers in a trial before a jury of one’s peers;
• Even to the right to feed, medicate, and generally use one’s own body as one pleases.

     It’s a better gauge for America’s political devolution than anything else I can come up with at this hour of the morning.

---

     Semantics has a hard time coping with “but” expressions. I don’t. When I hear one, I immediately lower my opinion of the speaker by about 50%. I have to strain against a powerful inclination to go on the attack. It’s one of the reasons I tend to keep to myself.

     Government in our time is 99% “buts.” It’s whittled freedom away completely, such that the typical American’s reaction to a proposed course of positive action is to find someone to ask for permission. Yet his great-grandfather would have embraced the idea without a second thought, never imagining that he needs to beg a license from any institution, governmental or otherwise.

     Here’s a pungent example: Is your money really yours? Most persons would immediately reply in the affirmative. But if so, why aren’t you permitted to move it about without being spied upon? Why, if you should arrange your affairs to avert such spying – currently, any transfer below $10,000 is nominally exempt from federal “reporting requirements” – are your funds then subject to arbitrary confiscation, on suspicion of “structuring?” If the test of ownership is whether you’re free to do as you like with your property so long as you refrain from injuring others, why aren’t you free to move your money around as you please?

     Don’t all rush to answer at once, now.

---

     George Orwell wrote:

     In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible....Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

     While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

     ....But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

     He who makes a statement about freedom / rights is making a political statement. He might not command the many Latinate circumlocutions and periphrases that Orwell condemns in his essay. He might merely say but. That one word is enough to induce the sort of cognitive dissonance in a typical hearer’s mind to make him think he’s heard a reasonable conclusion from a man who’s given the appropriate amount of thought to a weighty matter. That could not be further from the truth. Yet such a statement often becomes gospel among persons disinclined to think through basic propositions about individuals, their rights, and the social order – that is, to think about principles.

     There is no right – no sort of freedom – that admits to exceptions. Either it applies to all persons and at all times, or it is merely a conditional grant of permission from some authority, whether formally or informally constituted. The jihadis who tried to murder Pamela Geller deemed themselves an authority with jurisdiction over her speech and activities. Yet they differ not at all, in principle, from a supposedly “legitimate” government.

But Me No “Buts!”

This was a comment on another site

And it put me into some seriously deep thought about what is happening in this nation today:

THE WRATH OF THE AWAKENED SAXON
by Rudyard Kipling
It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late,
With long arrears to make good,
When the Saxon began to hate.
They were not easily moved,
They were icy — willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the Saxon began to hate.
Their voices were even and low.
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show
When the Saxon began to hate.
It was not preached to the crowd.
It was not taught by the state.
No man spoke it aloud
When the Saxon began to hate.
It was not suddenly bred.
It will not swiftly abate.
Through the chilled years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the Saxon began to hate.

That really made me sit and think. You?

Thoughts On Torture

"If hooking up one rag-head terrorist prisoner's testicles to a car battery to get the truth out of the lying little camel shagger will save just one Canadian life, then I have only three things to say: Red is positive, black is negative, and make sure his nuts are wet.” – Don Cherry, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation commentator and retired head coach of the Boston Bruins

Given the appearance of the Feinstein-led Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee report just this week, it occurred to me that a few words about torture, in both its historical and contemporary guises, might be appropriate.

The various “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed by the CIA and condemned by the Feinstein report skate an uneven surface, historically. They were certainly meant to cause fear and suffering. They were certainly not meant to permanently injure nor kill the victim. In that regard, they were a far cry from torture as practiced by other cultures and times. But then, our culture is a far cry from those others: it concedes certain matters of principle as being beyond rational dispute.

The point of torture isn’t always interrogation. Sometimes the point is to demonstrate to the honoree’s comrades what could happen to them: i.e., pour encourager les autres. And sometimes – especially in the case of many historical instances of torture – the point is merely to enjoy another person’s suffering and degradation.

The American agents who employed those techniques appear to have been interested solely in information extraction. However, were the techniques deemed licit for continued use, the resulting dynamic would attract genuine sadists to such positions: persons who care only about the pain and terror they can cause. Thus, it was probably for the best that, once the immediate crisis was comfortably behind us, such techniques were ruled to be beyond the pale.

However, the striking contrast between the context of the CIA’s coercive interrogations and the historical use of those (and much worse) techniques should remind us of something:

Quite a lot of persons were eager to do the same and worse to every last American.

---

“Savages have no rights.” – Ayn Rand

Savages torture. Indeed, they maim, mutilate, and kill without moral scruple. Their ignorance and / or dismissal of individuals’ rights is the defining characteristic that sets them apart from civilized men.

They who have chosen to make war against us – against all of us, not merely our government or our military – are savages by that definition. As they grant us no rights, they cannot claim any rights. That frees me of any conscience qualms about what our forces might find it productive or expedient to do to “Islamic fighters” who’ve strained with all their might and cunning to kill us.

Sometimes it’s a good thing for Americans to be reminded of just how high a civilization we’ve built and inhabit. But such a reminder is nearly always by contrast with another, less advanced culture. In the Islamic movement of today, we confront a culture that’s willfully adopted norms 1400 years behind those of the First World, in obedience to the most vicious totalitarian creed ever circulated among men.

Yes, I meant that last sentence exactly as it sounds. Not even the Nazis or the Communists can equal the barbarism and bloodthirstiness of Islam. Those other totalitarianisms were at least animated by a positive-seeming goal. Islam’s goal is exactly and only the reduction of Mankind to uniform seventh-century squalor in submission to an imaginary god opposed to all freedom and temporal happiness.

Islam meets the definition of savagery in all particulars, without qualification.

---

It is often the case that a fictional character will say what a real man would never dare to express, no matter how ardently he might believe it:

    Souhi watched, ashen, as the crew was laid out on the deck. Many of them were dead and others were screaming in madness, trussed up with duct tape.
    “So,” the man who appeared to be the leader said, walking over to him, “I have a few questions.”
    “Go fuck a goat,” Souhi said, spitting at him. “What are you going to do? Send me to Guantanamo? I sleep, I eat, I wait for your Amnesty International and ACLU to free me so I can kill you like the goat dick sucker you are.”
    “No, I’m not going to send you to Guantanamo. Those poor boys and girls have enough dickheads to deal with including, yes, the ICRC, AI, and ACLU. Are you the diver or the assistant driver?” he asked, turning to Kahf.
    “You are a man who licks the cocks of camels,” Kahf said.
    “Oh, wrong answer,” the man said, drawing his sidearm and putting a bullet through the diver’s brain. “Oleg, got your first customer.”
    A winch was lowered down and Kahf’s feet secured to the winch. Then the diver was lifted up and lowered over the side.
    As that was happening, the dead crew were being lifted up, their feet secured to ropes, and then dropped over the side to rest in the water. A spotlight was turned on and two large men lifted Souhi up so he was forced to look at the water.
    “The sharks around here are notorious,” the man said, smiling. “Let’s see how long it takes one to turn up.”
    ...
    “Wanna talk?” he asked mildly. “Let me tell you something, you Islamic fuck. A woman I dearly loved was killed by your kind about two months ago. I can’t really be said to be over that. Now, I dearly want to add you to the frenzy, just push you over the fucking side and be done with it. But, as I said, I won’t kill you. If you tell me the coordinates. If you tell me now, you can leave this ship with all your limbs intact. But when I tell them to lift you up, you are going into the water. So you want to tell me? Come on, it’s just a few numbers. I know you know them. You’ve got them memorized. You punch them in and erase the track after you’ve done the pickup.”
    “No,” the driver said, whimpering.
    “God, you people are sooo stupid.” He straightened up and gestured.
    “Please!” the driver said as he was lifted into the air. “You cannot do this to me!”
    “Did I listen to any of the rest of them?” Mike asked as the driver was lowered over the side. “Do you listen to the pleas of your victims? To the men whose throats you cut? To the little girls that get raped for the sins of their brothers? Do you care for those you’re starving to death in the Sudan? Did you listen to the pleas of the pilots you dragged through the streets of Mogadishu? Did you jump for joy when the Towers fell? Did you, YOU CAMEL-SUCKING FUCK?”

That’s as good a statement of the rationale for torturing terrorists as I’ve encountered anywhere.

Note that “Souhi” was beyond any rational dispute a terrorist. He had just been captured while attempting to deliver a weapon of mass destruction – nerve gas – to the U.S. mainland, where it would be used by other Muslim terrorists to perpetrate a mass slaughter. He had no claim to any right a civilized man might invoke, having forfeited all his rights when he elected to participate in such a heinous program.

With the lives of unimaginable numbers of innocents at stake, would you hesitate to torture such a man for the information in his head?

---

Islam and its adherents aren’t the only such monsters in the world today. There are others, driven by other ideologies, that would deal death to innocent Americans with equal ruthlessness:

    "Your certainty is impressive," Ryan said. "It allows you to justify your faith in mass murder."
"It's not murder," she said, "when the violence is justified by the revolution. The bourgeois regime being attacked is criminal and inhuman and all who are obedient to it are complicit in its interminable violence. In acts of revolutionary violence against the enemy anyone complicit with the enemy who is killed is guilty of the crime of the enemy. It is not murder."
    "So riding a subway train to work," Ryan said, "is a criminal act punishable by death?"
    "When seen in its true historical context, it certainly is," she said confidently.
    "Everyone on the subway is equally guilty," Ryan suggested.
    "No, not if you go person by person, a maid or janitor is not carrying the same level of guilt as a stockbroker or corporate executive, but revolutionary violence sweeps with an inclusive broom. The statement it makes is bold and absolute and is a warning to all...."
    "And what do you believe in, soldier boy? Gawd?"
    "In the individual and his liberty," Ryan said, rising to the bait."
    "Oh dear, an American. You people are so charming, so quaint," she said, "always the perpetual football players running onto the field to the roar of the crowd and the bouncing breasts of the cheerleaders."
    "You're an American, aren't you, Ms. Garvin?" he asked.
    "Ah, no," she said. "I stopped thinking of myself as that, as an American when I was a teenager. That's what we call 'the normal maturation process' these days, soldier boy. Sorry you missed it."
    "So you're not an American," Ryan said. "What are you?"
    "I'm a citizen of the world," she said.
    "That's a big concept," Ryan said.
    "It's basic," she said. "You must have missed it while you were attending your ROTC meetings."
    "I guess I did," Ryan said. "That would explain why I'm still just an American with a silly belief in freedom."
    Garvin laughed.
    "Freedom? You think this America is free? You've got ninety percent of the people glued to their couches gazing like zombies into their televisions and eating non-stop. And then they jump off their couches for five minutes of history when a couple of tall buildings are knocked down in New York. That's the America I see. That's the America the revolution sees. This freedom thing you believe in, soldier boy, is a fairy tale, just like Gawd. History is unfolding right before your eyes and you're running in the opposite direction after the fairies of freedom and the goblins of terrorism. You should run in the direction of revolutionary violence, all of you should, get out in front of it, get off this America thing, because it is dead, a thing of the past. America no longer exists. You just haven't realized it. None of you have....
    "What you people refuse to understand," Garvin said, jumping into the silence that had fallen over the room, "is that this freedom of yours is no more than pitiful self-indulgence at the expense of others. What the revolution does is take the anger and frustration of those who hunger for justice in the world and shape that into purposeful violence. You try to deny that by calling it 'senseless violence' and "mass murder,' but I'm looking at your faces now and I can see those old defenses and the lies that support them draining out of you. You all look like children who have just been told that there is no Santa Claus, and you had really known that all along. You just needed an adult to make it official for you. Well, here I am, kids, giving it to you straight, what you already knew."

[From Martin McPhillips’s extraordinary thriller Corpse In Armor.]

Other ideologies have, of course, demoted persons opposed to it to subhuman, rightless status. In every such case, the inevitable consequence is open, bloody warfare. The rules of war as civilized nations have codified them in the Geneva Conventions are of no interest to such ideologies. In their worldview, much like that of Islam, there are no rights and no noncombatants.

Were you to capture an Allison Garvin, knowing that she was a participant in a plot to detonate a nuclear weapon in a major American city, would you hesitate to torture her for whatever strategic or tactical information she might possess?

---

The efficacy of torture is questionable. There have been documented cases of men confessing to crimes they had never committed simply to get the torture to cease...and torturers aware of that possibility who resolved to continue on to the point of death. But that goes to the utility of torture rather than whether it’s ever morally justified.

When you know...
...that the person you hold is beyond doubt a terrorist...
...that he’s complicit in an ongoing plot to commit mass murder...
...that he would do whatever he pleased to you were your statuses reversed...
...and that he would derive both enjoyment and satisfaction from watching you suffer and plead...

...would you hesitate to torture him for whatever shreds of useful information he might possess?

I wouldn’t.

Think about it.