Why Study History?

“Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”

– C.S. Lewis, Learning In Wartime, 1939

Auron MacIntyre On Nick Land On Acceleration

This entry is part 7 of 7 in the series Accelerationism.

What we used to call the “reactosphere” has added some fine younger contributors over the last few years. One of the best is Auron Macintyre, who does podcasts (both on his own and with guests), YouTube videos, and a column at Substack (you can also follow him on X). I give him my highest recommendation: he reads broadly, understands what he reads, and everything he puts out offers clarification, useful synthesis, and good common sense. (He also seems to be a likeable fellow.) In a recent video (you can watch it here), he discusses the idea of accelerationism, as described in Nick Land’s 2017 essay A Quick-And-Dirty Introduction To Accelerationism.

In Land’s essay, the focus is not on whether we should ourselves be accelerationists (MacIntyre, like me, has concluded that we oughtn’t), but on a key feature of the process itself: namely, that as the rate of change increases, and things happen faster and faster, while the time it takes for us to think about them, especially in distributed political systems, remains constant, the result is that our “decision space” effectively “implodes”.

Land connects this “implosion” to the “explosion of the world”:

Accelerationism links the implosion of decision-space to the explosion of the world – that is, to modernity. It is important therefore to note that the conceptual opposition between implosion and explosion does nothing to impede their real (mechanical) coupling. Thermonuclear weapons provide the most vividly illuminating examples. An H-bomb employs an A-bomb as a trigger. A fission reaction sparks a fusion reaction. The fusion mass is crushed into ignition by a blast process. (Modernity is a blast.)

I’ve been commenting on this for more than a decade now, with the difference that I characterize what Land calls “the explosion of the world” as an implosion as well: namely, that the exponentially accelerating interconnection of everything with everything else has had the effect of making the world drastically, and very rapidly, smaller, in a way that can be modeled with surprisingly deep metaphorical accuracy by the compression of a gas inside a piston. I wrote about this first in these pages in 2013, and then published a condensed version at American Greatness in 2020.

Here was how I described, in 2013, the “implosion” of “decision space”:

In short, the smaller and hotter the world is — in other words, the more likely it becomes that any two “particles” will impinge on each other in a given time — the more volatile, reactive, unstable, and “twitchy” it becomes. As volatility and the rate of change increase, it becomes more and more difficult for systems and institutions that operate at a constant pace — the legislative processes of large democracies, for example — to respond effectively to innovations and crises.

At the same time, however, the shrinking distance between any two points in the world-network makes it possible for governments to monitor people and events, and to exert sovereign power, with an immediacy and granularity that is without historical precedent. This creates a powerful centralizing influence: the more a government can see, the more it will want to control, and an accelerating trend toward consolidation of government power at the expense of local control is evident everywhere in the developed world. The result is that modern democratic governments are able to supervise their subjects far more closely, and extend their power over them far more directly and individually, than even the most autocratic despot could have managed a hundred years ago. Our smaller world may well provide increasingly fertile ground for technological tyrannies of the sort foreseen by Orwell (although ubiquitous access to communication networks may also make it easier to organize an effective resistance).

… We now see governments expanding and centralizing, due to the exponentially increasing coverage and immediacy of all forms of monitoring and communication. As this happens, the scale and scope of government, and the depth and breadth of the administrative and legislative tasks that government must perform, increase rapidly as well. But the capacity of a finite number of human legislators, administrators, and civil servants to operate this expanding hierarchical apparatus, across all its parts in real time, does not “scale up” at the same rate, and so the ability of these increasingly vast hierarchies to respond flexibly and effectively to accelerating change falls farther and farther behind.

Something, sooner or later, has to give. What might happen?

I went on to describe various possibilities: collapse, disaggregation, and “Butlerian Jihad”. One that I did not dwell on, but which is far from implausible, is sharply tightening totalitarian control (although that might not be so easy to engineer, and might still not solve the problem of collapsing decision space).

That was eleven years ago, and we can see, by now, that the problem is only worsening (and may get very much worse indeed, very soon). But for those of you who haven’t really thought much about this, I recommend you put on some headphones, go outside for a walk, and have a listen to Mr. Macintyre’s excellent overview, here.

In A Nutshell…

Victor Davis Hanson, move over. It doesn’t get any more concise than this:

Looking back over the past decade or two, I’m reminded of Churchill’s remarks in 1938:

I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends. A little further on there are only flagstones, and a little further on still these break beneath your feet.

Blast From The Past

Something I ran across online earlier today reminded me of a project I worked on long ago (late 1985), when I was a staff engineer at Power Station. It was a record by the great Japanese pianist and singer Akiko Yano, and I hadn’t heard it, I think, since the album came out in early 1986. So I dug it out for a listen, and thought I’d share the memory here.

There was a time in the mid-80s when a lot of Japanese artists came to New York to work with elite American studio musicians, and during that period I ended up at the console for a lot of these sessions. (Usually they’d take the projects back to Japan for mixing, but sometimes they’d mix in New York as well, and in 1987 I even ended up going to Tokyo for a month for an album by Ryudo Uzaki.)

Even though Akiko wasn’t well-known in the States, she was a big star in Japan (she still is), and was very well-respected by New York’s session players. She was also married to Ryuichi Sakamoto, who even then was internationally famous. (Ryuichi, A.K.A. “The Professor”, died in March of last year; I’d worked with him too, on a live album also released in 1986. A talented couple!)

Anyway, Akiko came to New York to spend a few days doing overdubs in what I still think is the best recording room in the world: Power Station’s Studio A. Here’s a picture of that room, if you’ve never seen it (click for larger view):

It was all a long time ago, but what I recall is recording drummer Steve Ferrone, contrabass guitarist extraordinaire Anthony Jackson, and guitarist Eddie Martinez (you may not know these names, but believe me, you have heard their playing, as you’ll see if you check the links).

One thing that stood out in my memory has to do with the way we recorded the drums. Back in the 80s we were experimenting with all sorts of weird processing for drum-kits — and in particular, a fashion of the time was to do something called “gated reverb”: you’d dial up a long reverb to put on the snare, but then rather than letting it decay naturally, you’d run it through a “gate” that would shut it off right after the beat. The result was a big and strangely unnatural sound, and we all used it to death for about ten years or so; it’s probably the most distinctive feature of that “80s Sound”.

I knew Akiko’s record was going to be mixed back in Japan, but while we were tracking the drums I fiddled around a bit to set up a gated reverb in the monitor mix just to give everyone some idea of what the final processing might sound like — and just for fun I also ran the snare-drum reverb through a pair of rack-mounted MXR flangers as well, to produce a goofy stereo effect. Akiko liked it so much that she asked me to print the reverb on a separate pair of tracks, so that the mix engineer (I think it was Ryuichi himself who supervised the mixing) back in Japan could add it to the mix. (I was flattered, and when I heard the record I was surprised to hear how much of it they’d used.)

Anyway, I found the album on YouTube, so here it is. (Headphones or good speakers, please!) You can really hear the drum-reverb effect I’m talking about on the first track, “A Girl Of Integrity”. (The lead vocal on that tune, by the way, isn’t Akiko, but a singer named Yosui Inoue.)

The whole album is, at this point, a “time-capsule” — nobody makes music quite like this anymore — but the talent of Akiko Yano and Ryuichi Sakamoto really shines through, I think. It was also a real pleasure working with both of those lovely people. (Akiko, if you should somehow happen to read this, I hope you are well!)

In The Belly Of The Beast

I love the Outer Cape, where I live, but the prevailing ideology out here is as “blue” as it gets. (Aside from the occasional reactionary like me, there is also a subclass of people around here who build and fish and dig and pave and fix things — in other words, who earn a crust by coming into daily contact with the stubborn and concrete realities of the world — but these folks mostly keep to themselves, do their work, and quietly prepare for the day when the Gods of the Copybook headings “with terror and slaughter return”. We recognize one another almost instinctively — there is a type of “gaydar” that helps such “deplorables” spot one another out here, and there are in fact quite a lot of us. But as far as the visible local culture and politics are concerned, this might as well be Portland.)

Here’s a recent opinon piece from my local paper. The item bears the title “Choosing Between Democracy And Theocracy”:

The Wellfleet Community Forum met on Feb. 26 to discuss how we might bring more civility and efficiency back to our town. Moderator Dan Silverman reminded us that conflict and disruption were as much a part of our town history as civility and community. At the same time, the fact that we had that forum is an indication that what is happening to the nation at large filters down to our local community and that even here we need to vigilantly defend our basic values.

Ten days before that meeting, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are persons and hence enjoy the protection of the state. At roughly the same time, the court’s chief justice, Tom Parker, said in a podcast that “God created government. And the fact that we have let it go into the possession of others, it’s heartbreaking for those of us who understand.”

Parker is part of a national movement to overturn our understanding of the nature of legitimate government. His view flies in the face of our nation’s founding documents. The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence states: “…governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed.” The founders were positing that government did not come from God, as was argued by those who believed in the divine right of European monarchs, but was a human creation.

The U.S. Constitution, which does not include the word “God,” begins with “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, … do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.” The writers made it clear that it was the people, not God, who ordained and established the nation.

Judge Parker would have failed a beginning civics class, but his ignorance is his personal shame. What is more disturbing is that his comment reflects a larger historical shift. Even in the religious upheavals of the Second Great Awakening of the 1830s and 1840s or the fanaticisms of the Ku Klux Klan era of the 1920s, the nation was not at as great a risk of losing its meaning and ideals as it is today. Parker’s comment must be seen in the context of a Supreme Court whose majority favors fundamentalist Christian ideals over long-established secular values.

It should also be seen in the context of the presidential contest. For the first time in our nation’s history, we have a major-party candidate who has been found guilty of sexual assault and has been recorded talking about grabbing women’s genitals, and who openly attempted to thwart the peaceful transition of power. Even the Federalists did not do that, though they feared and detested Jefferson and believed he would destroy the country.

Such a candidacy would have been inconceivable a decade ago. The political landscape is littered with candidates who failed because of far milder accusations. And so we must ask ourselves what has changed in the country, and what does it tell us about the future?

The change is that Donald Trump has managed to forge an alliance with a right-wing Christian movement singularly focused on gaining power in order to transform the nation from its liberal (in the classical sense of that word) and secular ideals into a theocracy. Trump has managed to pull together white discontent, nativist hostility to immigration, male fear of female equality, and a general anxiety about sexuality into a movement centered on his persona. Despite the fact that Trump the person is a corrupt, racist sexual predator, the persona behind Trumpism is the manifestation of a march toward a nation dedicated to white male hegemony and secure in its righteousness.

Trump’s ultimate success will depend not only on his mobilized base but also on the inaction, indifference, exhaustion, or petty differences of those who have not drunk the Kool-Aid. If you do not think this is a serious threat, look closely at today’s Republican Party and at the number of people who a decade ago would have been seen as conservative institutionalists and are now bending their knee to an anti-institutionalist theocrat. And consider that 676 of our neighbors in the four Outer Cape towns voted in last week’s primary for an authoritarian sex offender.

This wildly pugnacious and overwrought essay is pretty much “par for the course” around here. I was unable to refrain from sending a brief note to the editor:

It was awfully disingenuous for [the opinion’s author] to quote the Declaration’s observation that “governments are established among men” without mentioning why the Founders believed that should be so, as explained in that document’s preceding passage — namely, the “self-evident” truth that men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”, and that the purpose of government, therefore, is to “secure these rights”: an understanding that, far from excluding the Creator from government, simply places him directly upstream.

Regarding the Constitution, moreover, John Adams had this to say:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

(It strikes me that currently we are neither, which goes a long way toward explaining why we have been so poorly governed for so long now.)

The author of the article quotes, as an obviously religious absurdity, the Alabama Court’s position that “frozen embryos are persons”, which is in fact a view that can be reasonably asserted and defended without invoking any religious assumptions at all (and far more reasonably and self-evidently, I might add, than current orthodoxy mandating the denial and obliteration of obvious natural categories, which seems to have at least as much of the odor of “theocracy” as anything realistically on offer from the Right).

Finally, can anyone really imagine that Joseph Biden — Joe Biden! — can lay any claim to moral superiority over his opponent?

I realize that this post is nothing more than a groan of exasperation; I know how these things are, and none of the above is anything out of the ordinary these days. American political life is now stripped to its essence, precisely as Carl Schmitt describes (my emphasis):

Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable. The question then is whether there is also a special distinction which can serve as a simple criterion of the political and of what it consists. The nature of such a political distinction is surely different from that of those others. It is independent of them and as such can speak clearly for itself. The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.

Never mind the vital importance, for the structural stability of the nation, of belief in a transcendent metaphysics as the philosophical bedrock of America’s founding axioms. Never mind Joe Biden’s serial plagiarism, his hair-sniffing, his constant lying, his obvious caducity and cognitive enfeeblement, the plausible accusations of rape, the classified-document crimes disclosed by the Hur report, his catastrophic border and energy policies, and the growing, reeking pile of evidence of bribery, perjury, and influence-peddling by his personal crime-syndicate. None of that matters now. All that matters is who is the friend, and who is the enemy. And if you have any doubt about that, well, just pick up a newspaper.

A Scruton Sampler

The great Roger Scruton would have been 80 this past February 27th, and to commemorate the event, Jash Dolani, a poster on X, put up a list of 11 Scruton quotes, which I repost below:

1. Scruton on the fundamental right-wing impulse: “Conservatism starts from the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.”

2. The hypocrisy of liberals: “Liberty is not the same thing as equality, and that those who call themselves liberals are far more interested in equalizing than in liberating their fellows.”

3. Scruton on when to ignore a writer: “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t. Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.”

4. It’s impossible to even have a personal identity without social relations: “We are not born free, nor do we come into this world with a self-identity and autonomy of our own. We achieve those things, through the conflict and cooperation that weave us into the social fabric. We become freely choosing individuals only by acquiring obligations to parents, siblings, institutions and groups: obligations that we did not choose.”

5. In 1998, Salon asked Roger Scruton about censorship. He said: “Yes, I am in favor of censorship, but it has to be conducted by people like me. And that’s the difficulty.” Then he laughed. (He was talking about censoring porn.)

6. Tribes need Gods: “Tribes survive and flourish because they have gods, who fuse many wills into a single will, and demand and reward the sacrifices on which social life depends.”

7. Love is the source of the conservative worldview: “The real reason people are conservatives is that they are attached to the things that they love, and want to preserve them from abuse and decay. They are attached to their family, their friends, their religion, and their immediate environment.”

8. Tradition is never arbitrary: “In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions.”

9. Real art is always meaningful: “Art moves us because it is beautiful, and it is beautiful in part because it means something. It can be meaningful without being beautiful; but to be beautiful it must be meaningful.”

10. Liberty inevitably leads to inequality and people obsessed with equity have no answer to this conundrum. Scruton: “If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead?”

11. The entrepreneur who builds matters more than the bureaucrat who manages. Scruton: “The important person in a free economy is not the manager but the entrepreneur – the one who takes risks and meets the cost of them.”

Power, Meet Truth

Hunter Biden’s former business associate Tony Bobulinski testified today for the House Oversight Committee’s impeachment inquiry. I haven’t had a chance to review the testimony itself — but hoo-boy, his opening statement is a corker. (Some clips from the hearing are here.)

(Don’t get too excited, though, or start imagining there will be actual consequences. After all, what do you think this is, the United States of America?)

Tony Bobulinski is a brave man, and he has put himself in a world of danger for our sake, and for the nation he loves. I sure do hope he’s taking sensible precautions against falling pianos, brake failures, and unexpected suicide.

Service Notice

We’re away in NYC for a few days. Back soon. (Will be glad to get home.)

It’s A Hell Of A Town

A man has just been fatally shot on a crowded A train in Brooklyn, during rush hour. The videos I’ve been seeing (I’m not posting them here, but you can find them in seconds on Twitter) show people cowering afterwards in the train, which was stopped at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn. (I can’t count the number of times my family and I were on that train, at that station, during the forty years we lived in Brooklyn before Nina and I sold the house and moved out in 2021.)

This happened as the city moves gradually toward martial law, with National Guard troops deployed to the subways to search peoples’ bags. I noted a week ago that this was not likely to be effective:

Will this make people safer? Let’s say that you are an armed criminal, seeking to commit violent crime on the subway. Will you now carry your knife, or your gun, in your backpack, or will you secrete it elsewhere on your person?

Forgive me if this seems radical, but I’m starting to think that it simply isn’t enough just to make violent crime illegal. I’m beginning to believe that to solve the problem, it needs to be frowned upon.

This And That

I haven’t been able to do any substantial writing for a bit – I’m still foggy from this virus I’ve had (though I’m recovering now, it was a nasty bug, with fatigue and cognitive wooziness to rival the Wuhan Red Death itself). I also had to make around trip from Wellfleet to JFK on Monday (about twelve hours in the car) to pick up my Nina, who had been in Hong Kong for two weeks visiting our daughter and the grandsons.

I did watch the SOTU, but I had nothing to say that wasn’t obvious, i.e., that it was shockingly angry and strident, packed wall to wall with lies, and that Joe Biden was obviously seriously hopped up on some sort of speedy drug cocktail. The one time he told the plain truth — that the killer of poor Laken Riley (whose name he couldn’t even get right) was an “illegal” — got him in so much trouble with the Democrat Party’s Jacobin base that he had to spend the whole next day apologizing for it. (If he’d been smart about it, could could have used even more accurate language during the speech, such as “human cockroach” or “vile demon-spawn”, which might have picked him up a few votes from normal, decent, undecided Americans, and then walked it back to “illegal” the next day.)

I’ve been reading a really fantastic book:Seeing Like A State, by the Yale anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott. I’d heard for years that it was a must-read on a par with the work of, for example, Burnham and Higgs, and boy is it ever. I will have more to say about it when I’m done. I’ve also just read another really remarkable book, on the pathology of modernism, that I’ve only now got around to, though it’s been influential since its release (under unusual circumstances) in 1995. I’ll write a post about that as well, sometime soon.

There’s lots more going on that I’d normally be commenting on, but for now I’ll just leave this item from X, and ask you to imagine where all this will be in another five years:

Back soon.

Any Questions?

“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.”

– Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs

What To Do?

Commenter “Landroll” asks, in response to my previous post about the incremental militarization of the New York City subway system:

Like the line from the song says, “Whatcha gonna do about it?”

I don’t know what song that is, but:

So far, what I’ve done about it has been to move out of New York, to secure my own position, and to do what I can each day to sound the alarm and wake people up.

We should all, however, be doing a great many other things as well:

We should be connecting with groups of capable and dependable people in our communities, and to the extent that we can, we should try to make a difference in local government. We should help our neighbors.

We should be preserving knowledge that may soon be lost, especially physical books. Teach others what you have learned.

We should notice the extent of our dependence on complex and brittle systems, and try to reduce it.

We should be doing what we can to take good care of ourselves, physically and mentally. We should build and sustain normal, healthy families. We should reconnect ourselves with nature, including human nature. Get outside. Take walks. Fight laziness.

If you are the sort of person who can fight, if necessary, to defend what must be defended, learn to do so. Strengthen and train your body. Understand that you have a duty to do your part if things really fall apart, and acquire the equipment and skills to do so.

Don’t consume rubbish, of either the cultural or alimentary variety. (Be careful with the impressions you allow in: they are a kind of food, and can be just as unhealthy.)

Stay curious. Never stop learning.

Seek truth.

Stop lying.

Learn to get out of your own way so as to open yourself to the higher influences that are always trying to reach you. Remember that the best way to improve your life, and the lives of those around you, is to improve yourself.

Be civil to others.

Cultivate gratitude, every day. Cherish the people you love, and the blessings of this astonishing civilization you’ve inherited: built by ancestors long dead, working for the future, working for you.

Play. Have fun. Listen to music. Get together with friends. Laugh. Expose yourself to beauty, and drink it in. Remember that this life is short, and don’t waste it.

Do what needs doing.

Take responsibility for your actions, and your situation. Someone said that “if you make yourself small enough, you can externalize everything.” Don’t do that.

My mother, whose maiden name was Calder, grew up in Scotland. The motto of her clan, Campbell of Cawdor, is short and good:

Be Mindful.

Work on living more consciously. Whenever you can manage to do it, remember yourself. Stop for a moment and examine your present state. Notice your posture, your point of tension, the rhythm of your breathing, the contents of your thoughts. Feel yourself inhabiting your body, here, now. Sense your feet on the floor, or the weight of your body in your seat. Do this as often as you can remember — which won’t be often, until you manage to make a habit of it.

A saying I recall from an esoteric school is “your being attracts your life.” Think about what that might mean.

I could go on and on; really, instead of a blog post, I could make this a book. But that’s enough for now.

Thanks for asking.

Over There

Our reader and commenter ‘mharko’ has left some excellent remarks on a thread at Bill V.’s place about our worsening political situation. Go and have a look, here.

(Sorry not to have responded myself, mharko. I’m still quite foggy and unwell with this damned respiratory virus I’ve been battling, and it’s been all I can manage to get a few words on the page over here every day or two.)

Breach Of Contract

In response to an extraordinary rise in subterranean crime over the past few years, New York Governess Kathy Hochul has announced that she will be deploying National Guard troops and State Police in the NYC subways in an attempt to make the system safer, or at least to seem safer. They will apparently be conducting mandatory, random bag-checks.

So: the military will now be in the subways, with the power to detain and arrest, rummaging through women’s purses and through whatever else riders might be carrying. The Governess, when asked whether citizens had the right to refuse to be searched (perhaps you have some personal item in your bag that you don’t want soldiers to be pawing at), said “Yes, and we can refuse them. They can walk.”

Will this make people safer? Let’s say that you are an armed criminal, seeking to commit violent crime on the subway. Will you now carry your knife, or your gun, in your backpack, or will you secrete it elsewhere on your person? With this in mind, will there also now be pat-downs?

What about profiling? In order to avoid charges of Discrimination, the vilest sin imaginable, will these “random” checks mean that seventy-year-old grandmothers will be spread-eagled against the wall while disheveled, gibbering young men with the flame of predatory madness in their eyes walk by? I guess we’ll have to see.

Meanwhile, on Long Island, the discovery of scattered body parts, beginning with a woman’s head and a man’s arm, led to the arrest of four people:

The gruesome foursome allegedly tried to conceal the corpses in a scheme so grisly that the drains, toilets, sinks and showers stopped working in the Amityville home where three of the accused had just moved weeks earlier, prosecutors claimed in Suffolk County court.

They have been released without bail.

Political thinkers from Hobbes to Schmitt have understood that the fundamental principle that legitimizes the power of the State is the reciprocal obligation of obedience and protection. We cede to the State the awesome power of coercion by threat of violence, and in return we expect a guarantee of our public and personal security. This means that when the State abandons its side of that obligation, it is the right, and the duty, of the citizenry to secure their own protection.

In related news, a judge has refused to dismiss manslaughter charges against Daniel Penny, who valiantly subdued a menacing lunatic on the subway last year. (Penny is, of course, white, and the violent madman he restrained, with fatal consequences, was black.)

Here’s another story you might have missed (my italics):

Thanks to an ongoing Center for Immigration Studies Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the public now knows that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has approved secretive flights that last year alone ferried hundreds of thousands of inadmissible aliens from foreign airports into some 43 American ones over the past year, all pre-approved on a cell phone app. (See links to prior CIS reports at the end of this post.)

But while large immigrant-receiving cities and media lay blame for the influx on Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s busing program, CBP has withheld from the Center – and apparently will not disclose – the names of the 43 U.S. airports that have received 320,000 inadmissible aliens from January through December 2023, nor the foreign airports from which they departed. The agency’s lawyers have cited a general “law enforcement exception” without elaborating – until recently – on how releasing airport locations would harm public safety beyond citing “the sensitivity of the information.”

Despite the shameless gaslighting about crime we are about to hear in this evening’s State of the Union address, it should be clear to all Americans that the ancient contract between ruler and ruled has not only been broken, but willfully so, and “with malice aforethought”. Does this make you angry?

If it doesn’t, God help us.

Good Riddance

I note with grim satisfaction the retirement of the maleficent Victoria Nuland, the meddlesome witch whose machinations in Ukraine gave us the Maidan revolution in 2014, and everything that has happened since. In my opinion she has the blood of hundreds of thousands, the collapse of the Ukrainian nation, and the useless expense of many scores of billions of American taxpayers’ dollars on her talons.

Her withdrawal as the disaster she created enters its terminal phase is her tacit acknowledgement of what we’ve been saying here all along, namely that Ukraine’s prospects in this war were hopeless from the beginning. Having wrecked the place beyond recovery, and having sent the flower of its manhood to be maimed and slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands, she will now simply walk away — which seems to be business as usual for our State Department these days — to a well-padded life in corporate boardrooms, ivied campuses, and excellent restaurants. Rest assured that the Imperial Court, and the Mouth of Sauron, will assign the blame elsewhere.

Who Knew?

Get ready for a shock: men and women have different brains.

Axioms And Theorems

Imagine a large-scale mathematical society whose aim is to work together to broaden the scope of demonstrated mathematical truths. The way they would go about this is by building upon the theorems that have already been proven: finding new relations and isomorphisms between existing theorems, and proving new ones. They wouldn’t all work on the same problems, of course; there would be a division of labor, with different individuals or groups tackling a wide variety of questions and projects. What would make this distributed effort possible is that they will all be building on the same foundation of previously established theorems — so they know that as they strike out in new directions, whatever results they come back with will, if they have done their work carefully, will be consistent and coherent with each other’s work, and with the great edifice of mathematics that already exists.

The reason this sort of distributed cooperation is possible is that the entire framework is built, brick by brick (i.e., theorem by theorem), upon a consistent set of axioms. These axioms are few in number, and they are by definition unprovable. (If they could be proven, then they wouldn’t be axioms, but theorems, and they would in turn have to rest on even more fundamental, and ultimately unprovable, assumptions.) In other words, the regress has to stop somewhere, and where it stops is with a bedrock of postulates whose truth, although unprovable, is self-evident.

This means that for our imaginary mathematical society to be able to hang together and do useful work, its members have to agree on its axioms. (This is also what makes it possible for them to check and correct each other’s results.) If they cannot agree on axioms, they might as well split up, because they will disagree about everything else they try to accomplish, and the whole thing becomes at best a waste of time, and at worst an arena of bitter conflict.

The same is true of societies. If there is a shared framework of moral and civic axioms, then policy-making can proceed in a generally orderly and productive fashion. There will of course be disagreements, sometimes lively ones, about balancing priorities and choosing methods, but in broad terms the goals of the work will be in general alignment, because everyone involved is working from the same set of axioms.

In our ongoing conversation over at the Maverick Philosopher’s website, commenter Joe Odegaard offered a short list of aims that, throughout American history, have been our sturdy, and axiomatic, foundation:

• Strengthen the family
• Return self-governance to the people, and reduce the administrative state
• Defend national sovereignty and borders
• Secure liberty and freedom.

He then directed our attention to an article at Salon that decries each and every one of them as a wickedness to be resisted, as horrifying manifestations of “Christian nationalism”.

Lincoln, quoting Matthew 12:25, said “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The truth of that postulate should be self-evident as well — and if isn’t already, I believe it soon will be.

Repost: On The Taxonomy Of Civil War

In the course of the ongoing conversation about America’s prospects over at Bill Vallicella’s website, Bill mentioned two of the various types of civil wars (in my view, there are at least three). Having written an article about exactly that at American Greatness four years ago, in the runup to the last election, I posted a link to the article in Bill’s comment-thread. It seems relevant enough today that I’ll take the opportunity to repost it here as well.

You can read the essay here.

Say Her Name

Today in the small town of Woodstock, Georgia, there will be a funeral for Laken Riley, a University of Georgia student who was brutally murdered by a Venezuelan man here in the country illegally.

Four years ago the nation tore itself to pieces in a summer of violent rioting over the death of George Floyd, a career criminal and drug addict who died of a heart attack, brought on by obesity, cardiac disease, and a fentanyl/methamphetamine overdose while violently resisting arrest by a police officer who was using standard restraint procedures. The officer, Derek Chauvin, was crucified in a kangaroo court and sent to prison, where he was recently stabbed nearly to death.

George Floyd’s funeral — with his corpulent remains solemnly paraded in a white, horse-drawn hearse — was broadcast with reverence by all of the nation’s major media outlets, and his coffin then went on a national tour to lie in state in several of the nation’s major cities, as if he were a martyred saint or a fallen national hero, rather than a recidivist hoodlum who, among his other crimes, had once robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint.

As far as I can tell, none of our broadcast media are paying any attention at all to the funeral of Ms. Riley, a young nursing student who had her head smashed to a pulp by a murderous alien who should never have been here at all. She had been jogging on the UGA campus when she was attacked.

When I was a schoolboy, we pledged our allegiance to “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.” Are any of those still true?

Service Notice

I’ve been nursing a surprisingly debilitating cold (or flu, or something) for the past few days. It makes it difficult to summon up the energy to do much of anything, and I’ve been unable to concentrate the little grey cells enough to write anything worth reading. (I did manage another comment or two in that thread over at Bill’s place, but am unfit for anything more substantial.)

Back soon, I hope.

Krugman vs. Krugman

“One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation.” – Eric Hoffer

With that observation in mind, have a look at this item from Michael Lind.

Why There’s a War In Ukraine

American media consumers have been soaking for years in a poisonous marinade of lies about our role in Ukraine.

With a hat-tip to Dave Benner at Twitter, here is RFK Jr with an antidote: a history lesson that is brief, concise, and accurate.

Service Notice

On the road. Back Tuesday.

Update, Tuesday evening: I’m back home, but after dropping the lovely Nina at JFK last night for a 1:35 a.m. flight to Hong Kong (to visit our grandkids), and then driving five hours back to Wellfleet, getting to bed just before sunup, and sleeping fitfully for a few hours, I’m feeling more than a little “under the weather”. (I am, apparently, not quite as young as I used to be.) Will resume normal operations soon.

P.S. I did manage to add a couple of comments today to a post over at Bill Vallicella’s place, if you’re interested.

Concentric Circles

Bill Vallicella has a fine post up at Substack today, in which he responds to the complaint that for an American president to speak of “America First” is, as Bill Kristol put it a few years back, “depressing and vulgar”.

My only quibble with the piece is that Bill didn’t unpack, for those who might not be familiar with it, the etymology of “vulgar”. (It comes from Latin vulgus, meaning “the common people”.)

Read it here.

Four More Years!

At this point it hardly seems worth mentioning, but the Daily Mail reminds us today, in painful detail, of what a frail and feeble dotard our President is.

What times we live in!

Bloody Shovel 4

My friend “Spandrell” has a new version of his blog up and running. I’ve linked to several of his posts over the years, in particular his 2017 three-part essay on what he calls “Bioleninism”. (You can read that here.)

Span is a very smart guy, and he’s one of the OGs of what used to be called the “Dark Enlightenment” — as you can see from this diagram from 2012 or so (you may also see another familiar name or two on there as well). Click the image for the full-sized version:

Go and have a poke around.

As I Was Saying…

Cellphone outage hits AT&T customers nationwide; Verizon and T-Mobile users also affected

 
Don’t look at me, Feds; I assure you all I’m just a humble blogger.

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

A Lowell, MA High-school girl’s basketball team had to forfeit their game yesterday after three of their players were injured by a mentally ill young man playing on the opposing team. The male player, who is over six feet tall and has facial hair, says he’s female. The triumph of subjective fantasy over objective reality in the collective madness of our collapsing civilization now means that we all must pretend to agree, and so we must let him go out on the court and hurt some girls. (Because what’s more important, really?)

The only comfort here is that this destructive lunacy cannot possibly go on forever, and so, as Herbert Stein observed, it will stop. (How soon, though, and in what manner, are yet to be determined.)

The Bonfire Of The Sanities

Here’s a news story. I’d say it was “shocking”, or “amazing”, but at this point it really isn’t.

It’s bad, though.

In brief:

New York City has signed a no-bid contract with a “W/MBE” company (i.e., not run by white men) to make debit cards to be issued to “migrants”. The cards will have no names attached, can be loaded with up to $10,000 at a time, and will be given to city officials to hand out at their own discretion. No ID or other credentials will be required of those receiving them. The cards will be loaded with city funds, and the issuing company, MoCaFi (headed by a black man who started the firm back when the violent criminal Michael Brown tried to steal a police officer’s weapon and got ventilated for it), will get a percentage of any funds the city deposits on the cards.

We read:

So, to sum up so far, the Adams administration, with no oversight, no consultation with the city council, and no public discussion, has given itself the flexibility to launch a massive parallel benefits program, alongside — not replacing — traditional welfare cash assistance and (for New Yorkers legally in the country long-term) federal food stamp benefits.

But those traditional programs, at least, come with reasonable, if not fail-safe, fraud protections. People must prove eligibility for these programs, including providing identification.

SNAP food stamp cards are not debit cards. They’re programmed only to pay for specific food items.

Adams’ potential multibillion-dollar debit card program, by contrast, has no such built-in protections.

As the contract with MoCaFi clearly notes, “cardholders will not be subject to ID verification,” and “the city shall be responsible for the accurate delivery” of cards to “consumers.”

And, “after delivery of [cards] to the city, the city shall be responsible for the security of the [cards] until delivered … to the cardholders.”

Under the contract, upon request by the city, MoCaFi will simply dump off hundreds, or more, of blank debit cards with no one’s name on them, with unknown amounts of money to be loaded on them — up to “$10,000 per card” at any one time — by the city.

The city may even issue debit cards to children: “if [cards] are to be distributed to any person under the age of 18 … the city … shall confirm that the minor cardholder’s parent or guardian has consented to the minor’s acceptance and use of the card.”

So, city employees and shelter contract workers are going to be in charge of handing out cards to be loaded and regularly refilled with untraceable cash, to people who have no forms of identity acceptable to the American financial services system, under a program with no eligibility or verification policy.

What could go wrong?

To list one potential problem among many, gang members will know that people staying in adjacent rooms, including vulnerable women and minor children, are in possession of these debit cards.

And potential card recipients will quickly learn who is in a position to make the decision of whether they can get a card.

Someone just posted on Twitter:

Eric Adams: “Why are they all coming to New York?”

Also Eric Adams: “Here’s a Free Hotel, Free Food and a Debit Card with Free Money”

I was having dinner with a friend last night — a capable man in his mid-thirties who might be described, in current parlance, as /ourguy/ — and he told me that younger folks of his acquaintance these days are what he called “clownpilled”: the insanity of the world they now have to make their way in is just taken for granted.

Invasion Of The Mind Snatchers

I’ve had nothing, so far, to say about Donald Trump’s show-trial for “fraud” in New York, which the other day resulted in a guilty judgment, and a fine of $355,000,000. I’m still having difficulty.

The process was a sham, of course, from start to finish. There was never any crime, any complainant, or any victim. The only thing on display was the personal will of a political faction to harm and intimidate a powerful enemy. The prosecutor, Letitia James — who had campaigned for office on the promise to go after Donald Trump — found an eager partner in Judge Arthur Engoron, and together they used the power they shared to inflict as much damage as they could on a man, and a vision of America, that they both fear and despise. Jonathan Turley, commenting on this unholy persecution, points out also that even to file an appeal will require Mr. Trump to put up a bond covering the full amount of the damages awarded. (Also, because the ruling blocks Mr. Trump from doing business in New York, my understanding is that to borrow money to cover the bond, he must find a lender that doesn’t do business in New York either.)

That such a thing could result from a private business dealing in which both parties were perfectly happy with the execution of their contract will of course have a chilling effect on anyone thinking of doing business in New York. In response, the state’s governor, Kathy Hochul, publicly tried to reassure investors that they had nothing to worry about, because this was all just about Donald Trump, and nobody else. In other words: this was a nakedly political assault, and as long as you don’t threaten the Democratic machine, you should be fine.

I’ve been around long enough to know that for ruling parties to use state power to harm political opponents is nothing even remotely new in history. In the first century B.C., for example, the Roman statesman Cicero had his home seized and burnt, and in the end his severed head and hands were displayed on the Rostra. (In Mr. Trump’s case, as of this writing only his property has so far been taken, while the fate of his head and hands remains uncertain.) What’s different now, in America at least, and quite suddenly so, is the extent to which it’s all just done right out in the open, and that so many people either think it’s now acceptable to behave this way — or manage to convince themselves, somehow, that this isn’t really political persecution at all. While it’s bad enough to imagine that our national ethos has become so badly degraded that this level of acceptance of “dirty work” is just how things have to be nowadays (we must destroy our enemies, by any means necessary), frankly I find it even creepier to think that so many of the decent and intelligent people I know can be so taken in by 24/7 propaganda that they could actually believe that all of this is anything resembling “impartial justice” or the “rule of law”. But many of them actually seem to. How can this be? It’s no longer frustrating to see this any more; it’s horrifying, like watching a zombie movie.

This is going to be one hell of a year, folks. I hope you are ready.

Nothing Is Easy

It’s remarkable how complex any topic — especially anything to do with society and law — can be when you examine it closely.

Take, for example, drunk-driving, which on the face of it seems simple enough. We know that driving drunk is dangerous — I’ve had friends who have died from it, and I nearly did myself, fifty years ago, when I was hitchhiking in New Jersey and was picked up by someone who, I quickly realized, was very drunk indeed.

So, you pick a limit, and when you find people behind the wheel who’ve had more than that, you arrest and charge them. But it turns out that not only is the actual practice of DUI enforcement far more complicated and arbitrary than that, it turns out to be an area in which even the Constitution itself seems to break down.

Learn more here.

Uh-Oh

I’ve just watched this guided tour of the new Apple Vision Pro, a new VR headset.

These are still early days, and the thing is, for most ordinary people, prohibitively expensive so far — but there is no way, in my opinion, that this will not be as addictive, and disruptive, as cell-phones, or perhaps even personal computers.

Mark my words: when people get used to living inside this thing, they will never want to take it off. When they aren’t wearing it, they will be aware of their nakedness.

Perhaps there’s more to the name “Apple” than I’d realized.

Sound And Fury

As I write, the House has impeached Homeland Security secretary Mayorkas: a pointless gesture, a little kayfabe for the fans.

Yes, he’s lied to us, and to Congress. Yes, he’s an enemy who hates us. But he’s an underling, a myrmidon, a stooge, an infantryman, a dogsbody. His impeachment will die in the Senate, like the Amu Darya evaporating in the desert, and even if he were to be convicted and removed in a sensational public spectacle, it would have absolutely no effect on anything at all. He is what the military calls “chaff”, and all of this is a nothing more than a fizzy little distraction, a tale told by idiots, signifying nothing.

Focus, people.

An Evening Well Spent

On Saturday the lovely Nina and I found ourselves in Woods Hole, at the far end of the Cape from where we live, where we had been invited to attend a living-room performance by two extraordinary musicians: violinist Darol Anger and mandolinist/guitarist Mike Marshall. (Their websites are here and here, respectively.)

It was music the old-fashioned way: a live performance in an intimate setting. And not just any performance: Anger and Marshall are a duo of virtuosi who have been playing together for so long that they seem to resonate on a single wavelength. It really was, simply put, as good as it gets — and trust me, readers, I’ve been around.

For this lifelong “soundbender”, it was not just a musical treat, but a sonic one as well: in particular, the sound of Mr. Marshall’s 1924 Gibson mandolin and his exquisite John Monteleone mandocello were stunningly beautiful. (He has used this mandocello to record Bach’s cello suites; do yourself a favor and have a listen, here.)

In December 2021, this duo performed a concert in Germany, with my friend, the great tenor player Bob Mintzer (of the YellowJackets) leading the WDR Orchestra in a set of arrangements he’d made for Anger and Marshall’s music. Here’s an excerpt:

And here’s the duo on their own, playing one of the tunes we heard on Saturday.

Whew!

Well, the site’s all fixed up; I just spent hours recreating all the old linked-series entries in a new plugin (fortunately I was able to pull all the info I needed from the backend database, though it’s been six years since I’ve had to write any SQL, so it took me a minute to remember how to write the queries).

One thing that was interesting about this task was going back over some of my old posts about mind-body dualism, free will, political theory, and religion. I used to write about those topics often, and my views have changed a lot over the last fifteen years. I’ve been writing here since 2005, and apparently I have written 5,477 posts (5,478 if you count this one). The blog, then, is becoming an extended record of a man growing older, and I hope wiser, as he slides from middle age into geezerhood.

It’s also poignant to see conversations with commenters who are no longer with us, like David Duff, Bob Koepp, and Bill Keezer, as well as some who are still “on the sunny side of the sod”, but who just stopped coming around as the blog became more concerned with political topics.

Ah well — we keep moving forward! Back soon.

Service Notice

I’ve been having some backend issues with the website: page links, comments, etc. aren’t working, and for a while today the site was completely inaccessible. I’m trying to get it all fixed, but until I do things won’t be working properly, and the site may be down from time to time.

Update, 2/11: I’ve had a talented PHP expert working on the site since yesterday (details to follow), and things are nearly all fixed.

Further update: On my son Nick’s recommendation I went to a freelance-gig website called Fiverr, and found a top-rated WordPress/PHP developer named Muhammad Ali, who works out of Pakistan. This WordPress site uses a custom theme that was written by a friend ages ago, and some things had fallen so far behind the latest versions of WordPress and PHP that the site finally crashed. Within hours (and in the middle of the night over there) he had found and fixed all the problems. The only lingering issue is with a completely obsolete plugin called “In-Series” which is what I’ve been using to create linked series of posts (such as my “Pilgrim’s Progress” series, and the series of posts covering our exchanges with Michael Anton). At the moment those series links no longer work, but I have the necessary information in the site databases to recreate them once I find a more modern post-series WordPress plugin, so I ought to be able to fix that myself.

I highly recommend Muhammad if you have need of services like this. His Fiverr profile is here.

Letting Go Of Brandon?

Special Counsel Robert Hur has released his report on Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. I don’t say “alleged” mishandling, because the second paragraph of the report states the following:

Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen. These materials included marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods. FBI agents recovered these materials from the garage, offices, and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home.

If you have any familiarity with the way “justice” is administered in the former United States these days, you will know that this would be more than enough to bring charges against any member of the Deplorable faction — or, in the case of a sitting president, would immediately trigger a resolution to impeach.

Ha! That won’t happen, of course. But what’s interesting is one of the reasons Mr. Hur gives for declining to prosecute. After referring to Biden’s “severely limited” memory, and “limited precision and recall”, the summary goes on to say:

Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.

Referring to Biden’s collaboration with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer on Biden’s two memoirs, we read:

Mr. Biden’s memory also appeared to have significant limitations — both at the time he spoke to Zwonitzer in 2017, as evidenced by their recorded conversations, and today, as evidenced by his recorded interview with our office. Mr. Biden’s recorded conversations with Zwonitzer from 2017 are often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.

Further on:

In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.

In a case where the government must prove that Mr. Biden knew he had possession of the classified Afghanistan documents after the vice presidency and chose to keep those documents, knowing he was violating the law, we expect that at trial, his attorneys would emphasize these limitations in his recall.

Okay, so Biden won’t be prosecuted for any of this. (Did any of you imagine for a moment that he would be?) But what’s key here is that the Democratic Party and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself) have spent long years assuring us, despite the evidence of our own eyes and ears, that Joe Biden’s cognitive faculties were still in good working order. This report makes that position indefensible.

If this weren’t ghastly enough, in the wake of this report Mr. Biden gave a triumphal presser last night, in which he tried to spike the ball. Insisting that his memory is fine, he then went on to say that he had persuaded the president of Mexico to open its border with Gaza.

The question is now inescapable: if Biden’s mental faculties — which were famously unimpressive even in his prime — had “significant limitations” even in 2017, what kind of shape will they be in by the end of a four-year term that won’t even begin until nearly a year from now? If he isn’t even fit to stand trial, how can he possibly be fit to be re-elected as president? There is no simply way forward here, even for the current administration’s staunchest defenders.

What does this mean? If Biden is already manifestly incompetent to hold the nation’s highest office — especially at a time of accelerating tension and chaos both at home and abroad — there is zero chance, even with all hands on deck for election-rigging and propaganda operations, that he will be re-elected. If it is impossible for him to be re-elected, then he will have to be put aside, and the people in charge will have to find some other plan for the coming election.

What will that be? I don’t know. Kamala Harris may ascend briefly to the Oval Office, God help us, but it’s hard to imagine that she has any political future beyond this year. Perhaps Michelle Obama will be thrust forward, although I still think that won’t happen either. Who else have the Democrats got? Gavin Newsom? Gretchen Whitmer? Pete Buttigieg? A rehabilitated Andrew Cuomo? That’s a pretty thin bench. Al Sharpton?

Faced with this grim prospect, no doubt there is now an even-more-intense focus in the halls of power on the only other way to level the field: the neutralization, by whatever means necessary, of Donald Trump. (I hope he is beefing up his personal security.) We may also see some titanic upheaval, some sort of “black swan” event that changes the rules altogether.

As of today, though, I think I can say with high confidence that, whatever else may happen, Joe Biden will not be the Democrat nominee.

Invention, The Mother Of Necessity

Imagine for a moment what a collapse of the modern communication grid would be like. All of a sudden, you can no longer make or receive phone calls, emails, or text messages. You try to go to the Internet — news services, social media, etc. — to find out what’s happening, but you can’t. You ask Alexa, but she’s dropped dead. This being 2024, your family is likely scattered all over the country, or the world, and suddenly you have no way to check on them. You drive to the grocery store for supplies, but they cannot process electronic payments. You go to an ATM to get cash, but of course that doesn’t work either, because the banking system is completely disabled. If you had an old-fashioned radio, you might get some information — and you remember there’s one in your car. There’s nothing on the air, though, because everything that’s used by radio stations these days to create and distribute content also relies on the Internet. Whatever you do for a living, the chances are that you aren’t able to do it. Air and rail travel is paralyzed. You might be able to drive around a little, until you run out of gas — because with payment-processing shut down, the gas stations probably are too. (How much cash have you got handy?)

Can you even really imagine what that would be like? Now reflect on how things once were, even in living memory of geezers like me: no Internet; news delivered mostly by radio or print; a single phone in each household, rarely used, with no answering machine. No cell-phones, no email, no social media, no texting. The concentric circles that bounded our lives fell away sharply with physical distance; nearly all of our daily interactions were with people, problems, and obligations in our home or neighborhood. We did arithmetic with a pencil and paper (which meant we had to know how). To pay for things, we used coins and bills, or wrote a paper check. The area around where we lived we generally knew very well, because it was where, mostly, everything of any practical importance in our lives happened; when we wanted to travel farther, we got hold of a paper map, and knew how to use it. If you needed to know something, you had to learn it, and then keep it available in your head. The way we found out things we didn’t know was by asking someone who might know, or, if you were lucky enough to have such things at home, by getting an encyclopedia or dictionary or other resource off the shelf. If that didn’t work, you went to the local library; if it didn’t have what you needed you need to go to a bigger library in a nearby city, or write a letter to someone. Once you’d gone to all that trouble, though, you’d tend to remember what you’d learnt, because things that actually cost you something have value.

All of this shaped the way our minds and our personalities developed. It was a way of existing in the world that had, as one of its chief features, the fact of physical embodiment in a particular place. This grounding in the local and physical was the foundation upon which everything rested; even abstract things, like money or music or written words, presented themselves to us as physical things. To play music, we used objects made of wood and metal that vibrated and made sound; to hear what others had played elsewhere, we put a vinyl disc on a rotating platter. To learn things, or immerse ourselves in stories, we read books made of paper or cloth. To have a meeting with someone, we went and sat in a room with them. To go to school, we went there, and sat in a classroom. To have a photograph of something, we bought a roll of film, put it in a camera, took a few pictures (usually twenty-four or thirty-six pictures to a roll), then carried the film with us to a place where it could be developed, dropped it off, then came back a week or so later, gave the proprietor some bills and coins, and went home with a packet full of physical copies of the photographs we’d made.

Now, on the other hand, everything is completely dematerialized. (I could write another long passage that contrasts what I’ve described above with the way we live now, but there’s no need; anyone reading this knows very well how all these things are done now.) The cost of many of these things — sending mail, taking pictures, listening to recorded music, for example — has fallen, effectively, to zero, and not only in monetary terms, but in terms of the physical efforts and interactions we no longer have to make. We can live, if we like, with hardly any contact with the physical world at all — including physical, or even spoken, interactions with other people.

The masslessness of everything in this new, dematerialized world, combined with the revolutionary effect of immediate global connectedness, means that distance no longer equals time, and so everything is equally connected to everything else. This in turn means that the “concentric circles” that used to bound our lives no longer really exist at all; a dematerialized person in Kuala Lumpur is no farther away than a dematerialized person a mile down the road. Locality, and the fading-away with distance that used to limit what might affect and concern us in our everyday lives, have mostly disappeared; the circle now includes, all at once and with buzzing, pressing immediacy, everyone and everything in the whole, wide world.

This has all happened quite suddenly (I consider the span of one man’s lifetime “sudden” for changes of this magnitude), but for all its rapidity, the change in the way we live has been enormous. It is a testament to our adaptability as a species that we have managed to keep up at all, but frankly I fear that we have only done a partial and superficial job of it, and that in doing so we have wrenched much of what we really are inside badly out of whack. But adapt we have, and eagerly so.

To live in this radically different world, and to take full advantages of the tempting conveniences it offers, we have built an astonishing new framework — a globe-girdling network, with a powerful computer at its every node, that encompasses nearly every aspect of our lives. What this universal dematerialization has made possible would have seemed quite unbelievable to any of us when I was a boy — so much so, in fact, that nobody, not even our most imaginative sci-fi writers and think-tanks saw it coming; we were too busy thinking about how our physical selves would be zooming around in rocket-ships and flying cars. So immense were the powers (and conveniences) we gained that we never looked back, not even for a moment; we switched off the headlights and pressed the pedal to the floor.

Having built this thing, it would be too much to expect, in our feverish excitement, that we’d proceed with caution and try to hang onto the old ways “just in case”: it was all too wonderful. (And don’t get me wrong, it is: in so many ways, it’s a dream come true.) So we went “all in” on it, for decades now, and here we are.

It’s hard not to think that we are almost a different species now than we were just that short while ago. I mean that in the sense that what creates evolutionary speciation is a change of environmental conditions, and with it a change in “selection pressure”: the climate changes, a food source dies out or a new predator appears, and after some winnowing-out the descendants of the original species are fully adapted to the new habitat, and would very possibly not survive in the old one. In our own case, we have largely cast away our old skills and tools for managing the old, physical world we used to live in, and have made our new, non-local, dematerialized selves wholly and utterly dependent on our new, artificial habitat. We wouldn’t remember how to wield the old skills and tools even if we wanted to — and we don’t want to.

The problem, though, is that I think most of us have no idea how fragile and how brittle the infrastructure of our new habitat really is. Unlike the robust infrastructures of the past (Roman viaducts are still standing, after all these long centuries of neglect), our new world isn’t made of stones, but of bits, while the physical system it all rests on is anything but durable.

In 1859, there was an exceptional solar flare — a “coronal mass ejection” that blasted the earth with a titanic pulse of electromagnetic energy. It was so powerful that it set telegraph equipment on fire. It was called the “Carrington Event“, and while it was unusual, such things aren’t all that unusual. If it happened today, it would instantly wipe out our communication and power grids. These networks are also vulnerable to natural disasters, man-made electromagnetic-pulse weapons, other forms of physical sabotage, and dematerialized threats in the form of software attacks.

If that isn’t enough, the global span of this interconnected network means that everything is tightly coupled to everything else to an extent that means that any large-scale failure may have cascading effects that can crash the whole system. Once upon a time, a catastrophe on one side of the world might have little or no effect on the other; that is no longer the case. The world is very small now, and amid all our comforts and conveniences we forget, I think, what a risk we have taken by having made ourselves so completely dependent on moving little packets of electrons and photons through wires and cables.

So: if the grid collapses, what will you do? Things will suddenly get very local, and very physical — like they used to be, but with the difference that we don’t have any idea any longer how to live in such a world. Have you thought about this?

Time Capsule, 79 A.D.

Here’s some good news, for a change: clever application of advanced technology is now making it possible to read ancient Roman scrolls that were carbonized in the devastating first-century eruption of Vesuvius, making them too fragile to unroll.

Learn more here.

Believe It, Or Not

This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress.

Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has just posted an excellent essay at Substack on why he is inclined toward theism. Longtime readers of this blog will know that this is a topic I’ve been wrestling with for ages, so I’m always glad to find essays like this latest offering from Bill.

Bill asks: why are some people amenable (in some cases, driven) to belief in God, while others simply can’t get there, or even reject the idea with disgust? It seems to require a particular disposition; a nagging intuition that there has to be something beyond and above the physical world we find ourselves dropped into — that there must be something more than just “atoms and the void”. Gurdjieff referred to this disposition as “magnetic centre” — a dissatisfaction with the idea that the physical exhausts the real, and an intuition that higher influences are trying to reach us.

Merely to be dissatisfied with our current reductionist model isn’t enough, though; as an example of this, Bill mentions the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who, despite rejecting materialist “explanations” for the existence of consciousness, said that “I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.” (Nagel remains an atheist.)

Many smug and brainy atheists flatter themselves that it’s simply a matter of intelligence: if you’re smart enough, you’ll see right through the whole theism thing as a defense-mechanism against our natural fear of death and extinction. Not so, says Bill, nor is it any of the other obvious possibilities:

This has nothing to do with intelligence or knowledge or upbringing. Not intelligence: there are both intelligent and unintelligent theists and atheists. Not knowledge: there is no empirical knowledge that rules out theism or rules in atheism. Not upbringing: some are raised atheists and becomes theists, and vice versa. What you need is a certain sort of spiritual depth that is present in, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein, but absent in, say, Daniel Dennett. If you are ‘surface all the way down’ religion won’t get a grip on you. You will not be able to take it seriously. It will strike you as superstitious nonsense, make-believe, wishful thinking, unconscious anthropomorphic projection . . . .

What’s curious to me here is that I’ve been on both sides of this for as long as I can remember. My mother was the daughter of a Scottish minister, but as far as I can recall she never expressed any religious belief at all, and had a feisty antipathy to the idea of any sort of hierarchical or authoritative Church (which might in part be due to her father having been a Congregationalist, though I never discussed it with her). My own father, who grew up in London, was raised as an Anglican; his father, though, was a non-practicing Jew. Both of my parents were scientists, and used to joke that they had had me baptized (I’m not even sure as what), and had kept my younger brother David unbaptized “as a control”. We never went to church, and religion was no part of our lives, but two of their closest friends (I called them Uncle Horton and Uncle Bob) were serious Christians: Horton Davies was a distinguished scholar of the history of the Church, and Robert Montgomery was the minister of the big Presbyterian Church on Nassau Street, and the chaplain of Princeton University. My father certainly had the “magnetic centre”, though, and despite his distinguished career in medical science he never turned his back on the idea of the transcendent. His belief in God seemed to deepen as he aged.

My father also had been introduced, in postwar London, to the ideas of G. I. Gurdjieff (and to the man himself: Gurdjieff, who lived in Paris, used to visit groups in London from the end of the war until his death in 1949). Growing up, I can remember seeing some curious books on the shelf: In Search of the Miraculous; Meetings With Remarkable Men; Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, and others. I knew that my father believed there were difficult and important truths in these books. I never read them myself until quite a bit later.

My own position, through much of my adulthood, was hard-core scientism: the Universe was a cosmic accident; life the product of some lucky chemical event, followed by billions of years of mutation and Darwinian selection; consciousness just some sort of quirk of nature, its mechanism not yet understood but sure to be in the future; and our sense of a hidden magic behind it all no more than a comforting illusion. I’d read Asimov as a boy, and Wells, and later Gould and Dennett and Dawkins. In his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (which by the way sparked a bitter feud with Gould), Daniel Dennett quotes an old song, Tell Me Why:

Tell me why the stars do shine,
Tell me why the ivy twines,
Tell me why the ocean’s blue,
And I will tell you just why I love you.

Because God made the stars to shine,
Because God made the ivy twine,
Because God made the ocean blue,
Because God made you, that’s why I love you.

Being Dennett, he then devotes an entire book to smashing this worldview into atoms. I recall also that Isaac Asimov, a secular materialist to the core, had in one of his zillions of books offered his own take on that second verse:

Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine,
Tropisms make the ivy twine,
Rayleigh scattering make skies so blue,
Testicular hormones are why I love you.

I generally agreed.

Nevertheless, behind it all, and despite all my naturalistic bravado, that magnetic centre, that “disposition” Bill refers to, kept nagging at me, and little by little I found my faith — my antireligious faith — beginning to waver. (Encounters with highly intelligent theists, such as Bill himself, were an important influence as well.) I began to realize I wasn’t compelled by reason alone to choose either position.

In Bill’s post he names some of the factors that impel him toward theism. One is that naturalism simply fails to provide answers to several critically important questions, among others why anything exists at all, how life arose, and what gave rise to consciousness. These and others have vexed me as well for a very long time; I used to accept the “promissory notes” given by scientism assuring that they would soon be answered, but became more and more dissatisfied as the years went by. (I have written in some detail about these and other problems in an essay of my own called Pilgrim’s Progress, the first of the linked series of posts that now includes this one.)

Another thing that might tilt a person toward belief — and perhaps the most compelling — is personal religious or mystical experience. Bill mentions two of his own. I had such an experience myself, decades ago. I’ll try to describe it:

At the time I had been impressed enough by the description of Man’s predicament in the Gurdjieff material (I’d finally got around to reading those books my father had on the shelf — combatively at first, but with a growing sense of astonishment at the depth and coherence of the ideas they contained) that I had gone so far as to begin attending weekly meetings at the Gurdjieff Society in New York. We were given exercises in self-observation, in meditation, and in curious, difficult “sacred dances” that were meant to cultivate a peculiar state of attentive self-awareness. It was all very hard work, and nothing much seemed to come of it other than a growing realization of how habitually mechanical and unconscious most of life usually is. We were told, though, that at some point our efforts would be rewarded with a glimpse of what was possible. One night it actually happened.

I’d woken up in the wee hours and gone to the bathroom. While I was in there about my business, I suddenly became fully, astonishingly, Awake — wholly conscious of what I was, and of my relation to, well, everything. I saw with pure clarity the mechanicalness and disarray of my ordinary life, and I saw also, but completely without fear, the fact of my death, and the urgency of using my brief span of life to put myself in the proper orientation to everything around me. I felt a great wave of joy and love and understanding, and knew at once that this was what all the prophets had spoken of, that Buddha and the bodhisattvas were trying to lead us to. I had long heard the phrase “state of Grace”, but suddenly I knew what it meant.

And as soon as this happened, I felt the old thoughts arising – my “monkey mind” trying to claim this miraculous moment as its own, to freeze it, to analyze it, to write a story about it — and it all slipped away and was gone. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than a couple of minutes — but it was absolutely unforgettable.

These things, being a matter of purely subjective experience, are useless as objective, third-party “proofs” of anything at all — but for all our bluster about the shared material world, subjective experience is the closest and realest thing of all, and is the actual bedrock of our existence. Nobody who has an experience like that can be quite the same afterward.

Finally, Bill talks about the rational arguments for belief in God. They cannot compel — if they could, this would all have been settled thousands of years ago — but they can, at least, put the possibility of God on as solid a foundation of reason as any that atheism can claim. We are free, equally reasonably, to choose to believe as to deny — and in another in this series of posts, The Parallel Postulate, I consider what that freedom can mean.

Read Bill’s thought-provoking essay here.

Excelsior!

I know that many of you may have been worrying lately about the possibility of some sort of national, or even civilizational, decline. But you should always remember that, as bad as things may seem economically and politically, our popular culture continues to raise the bar for excellence in the fine arts.

So, to lift your spirits a bit, here’s musician ‘Ice Spice’, performing her latest composition, “Think U the Shit (Fart)”:

I know you’ll want to sing along, so here are the lyrics:

[Intro]
What the fuck I’ma say in the intro?
Hahaha
You want me to say somethin’ so bad
(Stop playin’ with ’em, Riot)
Can you, please?

[Chorus]
Think you the shit, bitch?
You not even the fart (Grrah)
I be goin’ hard (Grrah)
I’m breakin’ they hearts, like
Bitches be quick, but I’m quicker (Like)
Bitches be thick, but I’m thicker (Like)
She could be rich, but I’m richer (Damn)

[Verse 1]
Take-takin’ her man (Takin’ her man)
Don’t give a fuck (Don’t give a fuck)
Out in the Yams (Out in the Yams)
And I’m keepin’ one tucked (Keepin’ one tucked)
I make me some jams (I make me some jams)
Unlock that advance (Unlock that advance)
I said four hundred bands (I said four hundred bands)
Just to do my lil’ dance (Grrah)
Bitch, I’m a brand (Like)
Bitch, I’m a baddie, I get what I want (Damn)
All in Balenci’, I look like a bum
I got the jatty, he just wanna hump (Hump)
Walk through and start shakin’ my hips
I’ma dip when I stack all my chips (Like)
Strip a dummy, I want the whole ‘fit
I got a French nigga sendin’ me tips, grrah

[Chorus]
Think you the shit, bitch?
You not even the fart (Grrah)
I be goin’ hard (Grrah)
I’m breakin’ they hearts, like
Bitches be quick, but I’m quicker (Like)
Bitches be thick, but I’m thicker (Like)
She could be rich, but I’m richer (Damn)

[Verse 2]
His bitch at home playin’ dress-up (Huh?)
She must’ve thought she could catch up (Grrah)
I got my foot on they necks, I can’t let up (Grrah)
She all on the floor, told her get up (Get up)
She my son, but I ain’t her mammy (I ain’t her mammy)
Bitches can’t stand me (Bitches can’t stand me)
Eat through my panties (Eat through my panties)
Hard knock life, no Annie
I need a vacay, I’m losin’ my tan (Damn)
I’d lose anything before my man
I’m a pretty bitch, I don’t like fightin’
On the beat, I’m goin’ Super Saiyan (Grrah)
I said, “Mirror, mirror, who the fairest?” (Huh?)
Leave a bum nigga lookin’ embarrassed (Like)
Spent a hundred-fifty on some carats (Grrah)
That shit cray like them niggas in Paris

[Chorus]
Think you the shit, bitch?
You not even the fart (Grrah)
I be goin’ hard (Grrah)
I’m breakin’ they hearts (Like)
Bitches be quick, but I’m quicker (Like)
Bitches be thick, but I’m thicker (Like)
She could be rich, but I’m richer (Damn)

Jim Kalb On Inclusiveness

I’ve just read Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It, by James Kalb.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the name, Jim was the original proprietor of the influential blog View From The Right (archived here), which he then handed off to the late Lawrence Auster. (It’s hard to believe Larry Auster has been gone for over a decade now; many of us considered his daily analysis indispensable. But as Degaulle once pointed out, “the cemeteries are filled with indispensable men”.)

Jim is a trenchant critic of our crumbling modern culture, and he writes with clarity and intelligence.

On the absurdity of identifying discrimination with “hate”:

Proponents of inclusion often claim that discrimination based on non-liberal criteria has to do with irrational fear and hatred. No less unreasonably, they could make that claim about almost any choice or reason for choosing. People who join clubs for graduates of State U must hold alumni of other institutions in contempt. Those who take their coffee breaks at Joe’s Diner must hate and fear Bob’s Coffee Shop. Such claims would be silly. They become no more sensible when transposed to considerations of sex, ethnicity, lifestyle, and so on. My innate and acquired tendencies, my manner of life, and the tastes, values, connections, loyalties, and expectations with which I grew up, determine how I am to deal with at least as much as my formal qualifications. There is no reason people should ignore the former but not the latter, even when the former bring sex, culture, and other innate or inherited connections into the picture. [p. 23]

On the narrowing effect inclusiveness (see also my own take on this, here):

An inclusivist society denies the freedom to associate and forces religious and social conservatives, as well as ethnics attached to inherited ways and loyalties, to treat their religion, ethnic culture, and moral traditions as irrelevant to everything that matters. [p.55]

… Liberalism is power that hides itself. In order to make good on its claim to achieve equality and combine it with freedom and democracy, it must keep the people from causing problems by exercising their freedom. “Celebrating diversity” helps it do so by insisting that all beliefs and cultures be given equal credit. The result is that none of them can be allowed to affect anything that matters. All significant decisions must be made by someone who can pass himself off as an outside authority applying neutral standards of human rights, economic efficiency, and administrative effectiveness. [p.58]

Every total State must control or break apart forms of association that compete with it for loyalty and power. Typically the family is at or near the top of the list:

Family life provides an example of the effect of inclusiveness on informal local structures. Men and women differ, and connections between them that build on those differences are basic to all societies. To forbid sex discrimination is to forbid responding to the differences coherently and unaffectedly. It also makes it impossible to provide social definition and support for settled relationships between the sexes. Such relationships become a private matter no different from any informal connection among individuals. The result is to deprive marriage and the family of specific structure and function. They become names for a variety of arrangements, none of which has any authority, because none can be treated as better than any other. The consequence is destruction of definite family responsibilities, fostering distrust between the sexes, fragmented and dysfunctional families, impoverished adults, and badly raised, often abused, children. The official response to such problems, apart from further attacks on sexual and other distinctions, is extension of bureaucratic social welfare systems that displace local arrangements and networks. This response further undercuts family and community life by depriving them of their functions and so makes matters worse in the long run. [p.80]

On the suppression and negativization of culture:

The antidiscrimination principle forbids any particular culture to be authoritative, since this would discriminate against those with a different cultural background. The logical effect is the abolition of culture as such. What cannot be public and authoritative is not culture, but private habit and taste. [p.104]

… the abolition of culture gives prominence to the crudest and most antisocial impulses, and, in the absence of social ties and an attractive conception of the good life, the basis for social cohesion can only be negative. The cohesion of the advanced liberal state therefore depends on hatred of its presumed enemies: racists, sexists, bigots, and homophobes. [p.120]

There is much, much more. The book is already a decade old, but its analysis is even more pertinent now. Get a copy and read it.

Asymmetrical Warfare

In America, we hear a great deal about the “rule of law”. We flatter ourselves that we have managed, by the genius of the Founding, to find a way to be ruled, not merely by the vector-sum of the will of powerful men, but by a set of abstract principles. We imagine that in this way we have achieved what Carl Schmitt called the “neutralization of the political”. And so we subordinate ourselves to an apparatus — the State — that implements these neutralizing abstractions.

We now see all around us that all of this is failing. Why? For two reasons.

The first is that, as Schmitt made clear, you cannot escape the political. Any abstract legal system must rest on moral and philosophical axioms, and given the inevitable diversity of human opinions about such things, and the conflict of human interests, there are only two possible outcomes: either that which can be “neutralized” is simply the unimportant residue that remains when all of those differences are excluded; or there will be strife and struggle over what those axioms are, and how they should be expressed in law.

The size of the residue that can genuinely be neutralized depends upon the commonality of opinion and moral intuition among the people to be governed: the more commonality, the more can be abstracted away from the political. With high diversity, or bipolarity, of these opinions and intuitions, the residue that can be “neutralized” shrinks to the point that it includes nothing that really matters, while everything else is subject to the “friend/enemy” distinction that is the essence of the political. (While we can in principle imagine a society so coherent, so perfectly unified in axioms and opinions, that everything can be neutralized and politics vanishes, such a society has yet to exist, and you shouldn’t hold your breath.)

This difference in the inherent limit of the possible attenuation of the political is why homogenous nations tend more to be ruled by law, while in radically diverse nations, in which political conflict potentially engrosses every aspect of society, order must usually be maintained by a central authority powerful enough to suppress the political, or by physical separation of groups and factions, with some local autonomy, or both.

In a divided society, there are two ways in which a political faction can express itself through the ostensibly neutral medium of the “rule of law”: first, by controlling the creation and content of the laws themselves, or second, by controlling the application and enforcement of the law. To the extent that the law embodies disputed principles, it ceases to be neutral, and becomes political. It becomes an arena of struggle between friends and enemies — and the smaller the area of actual neutrality, the more bitter and existential the struggle becomes. The “rule of law”, at that point, becomes nothing more than a pretense, a façade to mask what is actually only a contest for power. At this point the law, stripped of neutrality but retaining its power, becomes a weapon.

Once this happens, those who continue to believe, by a habitual or sentimental attachment, in the neutrality of the law become vulnerable to its use as a weapon, and those whose aim is to dominate by any means necessary can use this to their advantage. The late Saul Alinksy, in his influential manual of subversion Rules for Radicals, understood this well, and enshrined it as his Rule #4:

Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

We see in today’s news just how this weapon works. A litigious front organization calling itself the Satanic Temple exploited our commitment to religious tolerance to erect a statue of Baphomet — an overt and ostentatious display of reverence to the Devil — as part of a Christmas display at Iowa’s state Capitol. A man by the name of Michael Cassidy was outraged enough at this desecration to take the bait, and beheaded the thing. He has now been charged with — can you guess? — a “hate crime”.

That this is a pure example of Rule #4 — a wholly malicious exploitation of a “neutral” loophole intended to allow Americans to pursue the holy in their own way — is evident in the Satanic Temple’s description of itself:

Founded in 2013, the Salem, Massachusetts-based Satanic Temple says it doesn’t believe in Satan but describes itself as a “non-theistic religious organization” that advocates for secularism.

This, then, is the fundamental weakness of a system like ours: it was designed centuries ago for a homogeneous society that shared not only a heritage and history, but also an anchoring and unifying belief in a transcendent moral order. It provided a degree of individual liberty that could only succeed if the people who were to live by it were able to govern themselves according to principles upon which there was broad and basic agreement. As John Adams put it:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

In Aristotelian terms, it was a form that was suitable only for a particular kind of “matter”. But that matter now is not what it was. Gone, in large part, are the shared heritage and history, and the commonality of language and culture — the horizontal ligatures that bound the founding generation together as a nation. Most corrosive of all, though, is the loss of our “anchoring and unifying belief in a transcendent moral order”.

These losses mean that the “rule of law” is now no longer a neutral thing at all. We see in its asymmetrical application that it is now only a bludgeon, and it is in the hands of the Enemy.

Here’s one more thing to think about: it has been understood at least since Hobbes that there is a mutual relationship between obedience and protection. If we are to grant to the State (or any entity) the power to rule us, then we are entitled to insist, in return, that it protect us. Now look at our cities, at our border, at the chaos of 2020, at the fate of Daniel Penny, at the overt legal harassment and persecution of political opposition, and ask yourself: how’s that contract working out? Still feeling obedient?

– PS: If you have the time to listen to a podcast, see Auron Macintyre’s rousing commentary on the Iowa story, here.

Science vs. “Science”

With a hat-tip to our reader and commenter, the indefatigable JK, I offer you a detailed essay by Dr. Roy Spencer about climate modeling. (Dr. Spencer’s CV is here. Keep it in mind next time somebody tells you the scientific consensus among Actual Climate Scientists is “settled”.)

One of the key ideas in this article is that for the Earth’s average surface temperature to vary over time means that the energy lost to space must be greater or less than the energy it receives from the Sun. For it to remain constant, solar energy and radiative heat loss must be in perfect balance, and that this state of equilibrium is assumed to be Earth’s default condition — despite obvious (And enormous) fluctuations in the past that could not possibly have been caused by human activity.

We read:

The average rate of energy gain by the global climate system from sunlight is variously estimated to be 235 to 245 Watts per square meter (W/m2), so, for purposes of discussion the assumption is 240 W/m2. For global temperatures to remain approximately constant over time, the rate of energy loss by the system to outer space, which occurs through infrared (IR) “heat” radiation, must also be approximately 240 W/m2.

But just how well do climate researchers know these numbers, and what is the evidence that there is a natural balance between them? The best satellite measurements from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System’s (CERES’s) instruments are only accurate to a few W/m2 (about 1 percent of the average energy flows). To estimate the level of global energy imbalance, researchers use long-term measurements of the gradual warming of the global average oceans to estimate the energy imbalance. From the observed rates of warming of the deep ocean it is straightforward to compute that the current energy imbalance is only about 0.6 W/m2, which is a tiny fraction of the approximate 240 W/m2 natural energy flows. This imbalance is thus considerably smaller (by about a factor of four) than the accuracy with which one can measure global average rates of energy gain and loss in and out of the climate system using satellites.

This is important because it means that some portion of recent warming could be natural. But since climate researchers do not understand natural sources of climate change, such as those that caused the Roman Warm Period of about 2,000 years ago, the Medieval Warm Period of about 1,000 years ago, and the Little Ice Age several centuries ago, most climate researchers simply assume that a similar event is not happening today.

Instead of admitting that natural processes could be at work in causing climate change, “energy equilibrium” is what is assumed by the mainstream climate research community for the natural state of climate system unaffected by humans. The members of this community assume that the rate of energy input into the climate system from the sun is, on average, exactly equal to the rate of energy loss to outer space from IR radiation when averaged globally and over many years. The current, small roughly 0.6 W/m2 imbalance in the approximate 240 W/m2 energy flows in and out of the climate system is then entirely blamed on the burning of fossil fuels.

But this energy balance assumption for the Earth is a statement of faith, not science.

Climate models, then, begin with this assumption. But this means that they have to build it, somehow, into the model: in order to make sure that the CO2 concentration is the only variable that can actually tip this otherwise-static balance, the model has to be designed so that all the other effects add up to a net warming of zero. But because the complexities of the climate system are not fully understood, these simplifying models require some bits — “fudge factors” — that are simply put in by hand to make everything neatly cancel out.

Even once this is done, the various models don’t agree:

The large number of climate models produce global warming rates which vary by about a factor of three between them (1.8°C to 5.6°C) in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 (2 x CO2). In 2023, Earth’s atmosphere was about 50 percent of the way to 2 x CO2. Amazingly, this factor-of-three range of warming projections has not changed in the more than 30 years of climate-model improvements. This proves that climate-model forecasts are not, as is often claimed, based on proven physics. If they were, they would all produce about the same amount of warming.

This disagreement is because the Earth is not simply a ball absorbing and radiating heat according to the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases; it is, rather a chaotic system that involves all sorts of positive and negative feedback — and the very essence of chaotic, nonlinear dynamic systems is that they are “algorithmically incompressible”: there is no model of lower complexity than the system itself that can accurately predict its future state. So every climate model is necessarily based on guesses and intuitions in the places where, in a God’s-eye view, the chaos would be. And so they vary in their predictions. Nearly all of them have overpredicted warming so far — and of course the direst predictions are the ones that make the news, and that our institutions seize upon for fearmongering when seeking money and power.

There is much more. Read the whole thing here.

Bob Zimmerman of the space-sciences website Behind The Black comments here.

Meanwhile, here is a report that claims there is good reason to suspect a significant warming bias in our surface-temperature measurement stations.

Also: not mentioned in Spencer’s essay is natural variation in solar output. I’ve mentioned over the years a book called The Neglected Sun, which discusses this in detail.

Finally, here’s a ten-year-old post of my own, outlining my view of this “crisis” at the time. All that’s changed in 2024 is that I think the ulterior motives are vastly more obvious now, and the social and economic havoc wrought by this fanaticism has only accelerated.

Dean Brown, 1955-2024

I’m saddened today by some bad news: the death of guitarist Dean Brown, who was a beautiful, gifted musician and a hell of a nice guy. He had for several months been battling a mysterious form of cancer, and on January 26th he lost the fight.

My deepest sympathies to his wife Ruth, and his family.

Aristophanes, Call Your Office

Making the rounds today is a graph taken from the Financial Times, showing that there is a widening gap in political outlook, across the developed world, between males and females aged 18-29. The source article is here, but it’s paywalled, so I’ll sum it up for you: women are moving sharply to the left, while men are moving to the right.

Here, for example, is the graph for Germany:

And here’s South Korea:

The FT is aghast, but the only thing that’s surprising to me about this is that it’s taken this long. The triumph of feminism, the rapid ascension to power of women in the decades since the 60s, and the relentless feminization of every institution high and low, have had ample time now to show their destructive effect: not only on society as a whole (low wages, expansion of the welfare state, mass immigration, etc., would be nowhere near the problems they are today had all of this not happened), but also on women themselves, who consistently report declining happiness. (This is always referred to as a “paradox“, although there’s nothing at all paradoxical about radical social engineering, and wholesale disruption of natural and traditional roles, having unintended consequences.)

In particular, the intensifying effeminization of everything has, since the Great Awokening of a decade ago, led to increasingly strident denunciation of masculinity itself as a toxin to be flushed out of our social and political systems. I think that what’s happening here is a different kind of “awakening” — more in line with the actual meaning of the word, which connotes becoming conscious of reality again after sleeping and dreaming — in which young men are beginning to understand the consequences, both for themselves and the communities they live in, of this decades-long experiment in reinventing the world. (And, of course, after a while you also grow tired of being called out as a focus of evil just for being a guy, and you start wanting to push back a little. About time, fellas.)

We read:

Korea’s is an extreme situation, but it serves as a warning to other countries of what can happen when young men and women part ways. Its society is riven in two. Its marriage rate has plummeted, and birth rate has fallen precipitously, dropping to 0.78 births per woman in 2022, the lowest of any country in the world.

This has it exactly backward. Nobody who sees what should be self-evident to all would ascribe these low birthrates to the sexes “parting ways”; it is, rather, because we’ve made them too much alike. It’s the perfectly predictable effect of having spent decades turning everything upside down to make women be more like men, and men more like women. But just as with magnets, it’s the opposite poles that attract. This should be blindingly obvious! — but it stubbornly isn’t. (Here’s me, commenting on this ten long years ago.)

“But why”, you ask, “if things are indeed going so badly for everyone in the estrogen-drenched longhouse of our brave new world, are women doubling down, and getting even woker?”

I’ll leave that as “an exercise for the reader”.

Here There Be Monsters

With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here is a sickening dispatch, posted in a Disqus comment-thread at Powerline, by “Diego Palma“, who says he lives in Arizona at the Mexican border.

Is this real? I have no way of knowing. The place Mr. Palma describes certainly is; it’s at 31°20’3.81″N, 110° 8’53.86″W, and if look at those coordinates in satellite imagery you can see the dry riverbed he describes below. And the nearby Mexican town he mentions, Cananea, is most certainly a dangerous place.

Read the story he tells below, and then ask yourself whether evil is real, and who you would rather have in the Oval Office a year from now.

The disaster on what used to be the southern border has become such a catastrophe that even a large percentage of clueless nitwits among the citizenry are starting to take notice. I appreciate the seemingly increasing interest on the part of the owners of PLB to address and report on the invasion.

Most people outside of Arab immigrants to America and anti-Semitic Democrats were horrified at what happened in Israel on October 7th and what has been happening to the surviving hostages.

I want to tell all of you plainly, clearly and forcefully that there is a terrorist organization, equally as savage and barbaric as Hamas, that is in total control of our southern border with Mexico. Not only are they in control of our border, but they are venturing further and further into the interior of the United States. They are richer than Midas, numerous and armed to the teeth.

On our land here, there is a wash which extends almost to the town of Cananea in Sonora. A wash is similar to a dry river bed. It only contains water after a decent rain. The Narco coyotes used to use this wash as their “highway” into Arizona. One morning I was out checking on the livestock and at the point where the wash enters from Mexico was something I thought I would never see in real life. The Sicarios had taken mesquite limbs, sharpened both ends, put one end into the ground and impaled the heads of 7 illegals who had tried to enter Arizona without paying their fee to the narcos. I rode to Cananea, got the chief of police and took him to see what I had found. The man bent over and threw up for almost a half hour. He returned to Cananea, drove to Nogales, Sonora, and got the head of the Federales and some of his men to return with him to the scene. Our own CBP had neither the time nor the resources to investigate as Biden has them too busy ushering illegals across the border into our country.

After this incident, I most every night go out and keep watch. It’s sort of hard to sleep knowing such monsters are prowling very close to where one sleeps. One night as I was headed to my normal lookout. I heard crying and whimpering which I was certain was coming from women. I crawled up to look over a rise and there in a small sand clearing were a group of women tied up, The men were laying on the ground, and I later found out they had all been stabbed to death. The Coyotes were one by one gang raping these women and girls. As I was alone, there wasn’t too much I could do other than fire one of my guns into the air. I rode home in the pitch black as fast as I could and called my friend in Cananea. He notified the federales and we led them to where it had happened. We found the bodies of the men and several of the women. They had been brutally murdered.

Your government is betraying you. Your Republican senators eager to make a horrible deal with the government for the sake of expedited aid to Ukraine are betraying you.

I really don’t know what else I can say to you people. I look at most of the politicians in Washington and I see bird brains. Nikki Haley, the darling of the neocon GOP establishment wants to bring one million Arabs from Gaza to live permanently in our country. What is wrong with this woman? What is wrong with the people who know what is going on and look the other way? What is wrong with the people who don’t even want to look at all? One of these days these monsters will be looking you in the face. What will you do then?

One Nation, Divisible, Under Nothing Much At All

In yesterday’s post about the looming showdown between Texas and Washington over securing the border, I wrote:

The so-called “rule of law”, and obedience to the formal structures of government, are all that stand, in a vast and divided nation, between order and chaos; they are the load-bearing walls that support the great (and trembling) edifice of American civilization. Every crack in them weakens its structural soundness, and puts more strain on other parts of its frame and foundation; and as the little fractures multiply, they lead to bigger and bigger ones, until the whole thing comes crashing down. (I’m not making this up, mind: this is, over and over again, how nations die.)

A commenter posting as “Max” (writing, I believe, from Germany), had this to say:

Your use of “nation” is hard to comprehend for a European. Outside of the US, a nation is usually understood as a people having common ancestors as well as a common language, culture, and religion.

From my perspective, the US is lacking all that. Hence, there are several nations inside the territory of the US rather than just one. The word “empire” is therefore a better fit than “nation”.

So far empires have not nearly been as durable as nations. What you describe is how empires die. Nations are not held together by rule of law. Empires are held together by rule of law or — as you might find out soon — by brute force.

Max is right. I’ve written for years about the importance of a shared culture to nationhood, and about the plain fact that America, by that criterion, hardly exists as a nation anymore. See, to offer a few examples, my posts The Narrowing Effect Of Diversity (2017); Simple Common Sense About Diversity And Immigration (2013); Gradually, Then Suddenly (2015); Commonality Of Atoms (2015); and Is America A “Proposition Nation”? (2019).

In the last of these I quote John Jay, writing in Federalist #2:

With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people–a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

So, yes, I have long understood that commonality of heritage, language, folkways, etc., are essential for nationhood. Given that, then, I have to ask myself: why did I still use the term “nation” to describe the United States? Max’s term, “empire”, is really far more apt (and I have used it often to describe America’s position in the wider world).

The best answer I can give is that I am old, and that I can still remember the Before Time, when we really did, despite our small amount of baked-in diversity, still think of ourselves as “One nation, under God, indivisible”. When I was a child, America’s composition was roughly 90% white people of European descent, just under 10% black, and a fraction of 1% anything else. It was also unabashedly Christian, with a sturdy sense of the transcendent and of the role of Providence (as noted by Jay, above) in our fate and fortune. As a schoolboy I put my hand over my heart each morning, along with every other child in America, and pledged allegiance to what we genuinely believed was “one nation”. In that America of the Before Time, from sea to shining sea we honored our founders, and our shared national mythos, with a reverence and gratitude that was deep and genuine. Yes, we had our troubles and disagreements, but even so we always felt that they were more like family quarrels, and that despite them we were all in it together. We knew that our history, like any family’s history, was stained and imperfect, but beneath it all we still thought America was fundamentally — exceptionally! — good, and we were proud to be part of it.

None of this is true any longer. That core American family still exists, mostly outside our major cities — but its numbers are dwindling, and as it fades into minority status, so does its political and cultural power. What exists outside that shrinking circle is nothing that resembles a “nation” in any meaningful sense at all, but rather a congeries of squabbling tribes and factions from everywhere on Earth, who form loose political coalitions when it suits them, but who are bound together in commonality and reciprocal duty by nothing at all. Above it all, doing whatever it must to retain its grip, is our ruling class, sitting astride the colossal Federal behemoth. They divide to conquer:

Their vision of America is a rootless, deracinated, atomized people, cut off from tradition, heritage, religion, and all reverence for the past; they seek to encourage this not only by reviling and denouncing America’s past in education and mass media, but also by flooding the country with uncountable millions of aliens who share none of America’s traditions, folklore, culture, byways, or mythos, thereby making any reliance upon such things for the preservation of social cohesion — and without such shared values and beliefs there can be no more social cohesion within a nation’s borders than there is in an airport lounge — an act of “bigotry”, “xenophobia”, and “exclusion”. The aim is to eliminate altogether the “civil society” and horizontal ligatures that have throughout all of human history bound people into organic and healthy communities, leaving behind a flattened and stifling two-level hierarchy: below, a solipsistic, radically individualized populace, stripped of everything but the appetites of the present moment, and severed from the extension in time, and thereby the deep sense of duty and connection to the dead and the unborn, that has been the hallmark of healthy societies always and everywhere; while above them squats a vast, tutelary, managerial bureaucracy.

And just as the horizontal bindings of the former nation are withering away, so is its extension in time:

Until now, every generation of every civilization saw itself as a living bridge between past and future — as heirs and beneficiaries of the productive labor of their forebears, and stewards of that treasure for children yet unborn. But now, having pulled up our roots (and salted the earth from which they sprang), we have no inheritance to cherish and preserve; that which we have not simply squandered, we have taught ourselves to despise. We have, therefore, nothing to offer our posterity, and so if we think of it at all, it is only to turn away in guilt, and to focus on what we can take for ourselves right now. If that weren’t enough, we also find ourselves in a time of exponential social and technological change. Even those of us who do seek to preserve our inheritance can hardly imagine how.

It’s often been said that civilization is, at bottom, the organization of “low time preference”: the deferral of present consumption to take advantage of the increase of the relative value of future goods. But in order for that strategy to work, one has to be confident in a stable future. When things change too rapidly, and we can no longer be sure that our efforts today stand a reasonable chance of bearing fruit in later years, it drives time preference toward the present. And that, in turn, undermines the very foundation upon which civilization is erected.

So when a civilization becomes unstable, or when the pace of change becomes too rapid, there is a cascading time-preference effect, a kind of negative-feedback loop that begins to take hold.

All of these things, then, work together: multiculturalism, through a process of historical “stenosis”, severs the past; this loss of heritage, in turn, diminishes a society’s sense of obligation to its ancestors, and stewardship for its descendants; rapid technological and social change diminishes the surety of the future. All of this drives time-preference toward the present — which manifests itself in hedonism, present consumption, loss of social cohesion (why pull together when there’s nothing to pull for?), and declining birth-rates. Finally, the foreshortening of time-preference attacks the bedrock of civilization itself, in an accelerating, destructive cycle.

In conclusion: I stand corrected. For me to have called the America of 2024 a “nation” was, as much as it grieves me to accept it, a sentimental inaccuracy.

A Higher Duty

Yesterday, five justices of the Supreme Court (the obvious ones, plus Barrett and Roberts) decided to lift an injunction against the Biden administration’s attempt to force open the portions of the national border in Texas that Texas had unilaterally decided to seal off with razor wire and other barriers.

Think about that; the administration appealed to the high Court to prevent Texas from securing the border — a thing that, if the government in Washington has any obligations to the nation at all, should be paramount: to defend the nation against invasion. And five of the justices agreed.

Preventing invasion being a thing that absolutely must be done, the government of Texas, seeing that Washington has abrogated its most essential responsibility, has taken it upon itself to stymie the invaders. Now it faces a terrible choice: abandon that sacred duty, or defy both the Supreme Court and the Biden administration. So far, Texas refuses to allow Federal agents to destroy the barrier: it chooses duty over obedience. I reluctantly, but wholeheartedly, support them in this.

Why “reluctantly”? Because when the cables that hold a constitutional republic together begin to snap, then chaos, disintegration, and very often war, are never far behind. Already many American cities had decided to annul, by refusing to enforce, our immigration laws, and more recently president Biden has decided to push ahead with student-loan “forgiveness”, despite having been admonished by the Court that he had no authority to do so. Now Texas is defying the Court as well.

The so-called “rule of law”, and obedience to the formal structures of government, are all that stand, in a vast and divided nation, between order and chaos; they are the load-bearing walls that support the great (and trembling) edifice of American civilization. Every crack in them weakens its structural soundness, and puts more strain on other parts of its frame and foundation; and as the little fractures multiply, they lead to bigger and bigger ones, until the whole thing comes crashing down. (I’m not making this up, mind: this is, over and over again, how nations die.)

Why “wholeheartedly”? Because when a ship is holed below the waterline, the crew have to close the watertight compartments and man the pumps, regardless of whether the captain gives the order or not, is too drunk or otherwise incapacitated to do what’s needed, or even if he is bent on sabotage. It’s better to face a court-martial than to drown — and after all, there are the passengers to think of as well.

As Andrew Jackson once said, speaking of the Chief Justice: “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it!” This time around, it’s Greg Abbott and John Roberts. What will happen in the coming days? Who will blink? We’ll see.

Are We Loving Modernity Yet?

Look at this sickening video:

This is a technology still in its infancy. The drone you see pursuing and killing this terrified man was guided by someone sitting comfortably in perfect safety far away.

It’s possible that the person at the controls felt, for a moment at least, the mortal panic of the doomed soldier that he (or even, God help us, she) chased down and blew to pieces. In a few years, though, even that won’t be necessary; onboard computers running “intelligent” software will hunt their targets entirely on their own. There will be no act of killing, let alone torture by mortal desperation, by anyone involved. At every level there will be moral distance and deniability.

We’ve been moving in this direction since the invention of the stirrup. Every advance in the technology of warfare has been an incremental chipping-away of the personal responsibility of murder in conflict: from the arrow-storm of Crécy, to the bombardment at Borodino, to the grapeshot at Antietam, the sausage-grinder of the Somme, the incineration of Dresden, and the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (I might also add the pandemic of 2020.) Compare this with the greatest story ever told of the personality of war, the Iliad of Homer.

Is this “progress”? I don’t know. On the one hand, perhaps we must pass through these stages of horror — a kind of reductio ad absurdum — before something essential, some sort of sacred reaction, is awakened in us that will lift us to the next level of consciousness. Or perhaps there really is no meaning to anything at all, and this is just where things have got to, and we are simply more and more dead inside.

I’m aware, of course, that the awfulness of war is nothing new. (Have you read Junger’s Storm of Steel?) This particular species of horror, though — guided, personal pursuit by an implacable, inanimate killer — is something new in the world.

In Churchill’s “Finest Hour” speech of June 18th, 1940, he warned that if the Allied cause failed, “then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

We won that war. But the Dark Age, with its perverted science, seems to be upon us nevertheless.

Update, 1/23:

Above, I wrote:

…perhaps we must pass through these stages of horror — a kind of reductio ad absurdum — before something essential, some sort of sacred reaction, is awakened in us that will lift us to the next level of consciousness. Or perhaps there really is no meaning to anything at all, and this is just where things have got to, and we are simply more and more dead inside.

Yeah, I got a little cosmic there. Just to be clear: nothing is about to “uplift the consciousness” of the great, hulking mass of humanity, so don’t hold your breath on that one, folks. War will always be with us. That doesn’t mean, however, that “there is no meaning to anything at all”. Really my point here is that the depersonalization and dematerialization our accelerating technological advances are causing are taking us to dark places we never meant to go, faster than we can keep up.