Plunder by Proxy
Leonard E. Read
Saturday, September 01, 1956
“They who employ force by proxy, are as much responsible for that force as though they employed it themselves.” Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, 1865
The popularity of Robin Hood derives from the fact that he robbed the rich to aid the poor. Let it be acknowledged that he was popular not with the few he robbed but with the poor he aided, they being the more numerous.
Robin would not have been popular even with the poor had he robbed the rich to aid himself. Nor would the poor have been popular had they robbed the rich to aid themselves.
However, the rich were no less robbed by reason of Robin’s doing the robbing. Nor were the recipients of stolen goods any the less thieves because someone else did their stealing.
The issue in this fiction is not robbery, for that has been established. The issue is: Why, when someone else does one’s stealing, is there an absence of a guilty conscience, a sense of absolution? Can anything be done about it?
The analogue to this Robin Hood fiction is the taking-from-some-giving-to-others reality of our own political establishments. The recipients of subsidies, for instance, have no more sense of guilt than did Robin’s “beneficiaries.” Absolution is assumed, and for the same reason: Someone else—in this case, the government—does the plundering and the bestowing.
As long as this blind spot prevails, it will induce a feeling of absolution; and as long as this false feeling persists, political plunder will be increasingly embraced as proper national policy.
What can be done to replace this blind spot with understanding?
A bit of imagination may suffice. Take the recipient of a farm subsidy as an example. Let the government policy of subsidization remain exactly as it is. It is decreed that Farmer Jones (he may be rich or he may be poor) is to receive $1,000 as payment for taking some of his acreage out of production. But instead of the government forcibly collecting this amount in taxes, Farmer Jones is assigned a policeman and authorized by the government to call personally on all American families, rich and poor alike, and forcibly collect from each a specified amount. Disregard, please, the inefficiency of this type of plunder. Think only of Jones personally doing the collecting, with his policeman in tow, of course.
One can readily see what would happen the moment such personal plunder replaces impersonal government plunder. The blind spot would cease to exist. Guilt would stand where absolution had stood. Farmer Jones would no more use force to collect one penny from Widow Doakes or 50 cents from Mr. Gotrocks than he would steal his neighbor’s cow.
It isn’t necessary to adopt this collection plan to be rid of spoliation. It is only necessary to understand that morally there is not an iota of distinction between the collecting and disbursing method now in practice and the one here depicted.
The difference between the impersonal and personal methods is not moral but psychological, an unwholesome gap in thinking. The impersonal evokes a false absolution; the personal, if merely imagined, compels us to see that we would act solely on our own integrity and moral scruples. []
The Field of Personal Responsibility
It must be remembered that 95 per cent of the peace, order, and welfare existing in human society is always produced by the conscientious practice of man-to-man justice and person-to-person charity. When any part of this important domain of personal virtue is transferred to government, that part is automatically released from the restraints of morality and put into the area of conscienceless coercion. The field of personal responsibility is thus reduced at the same time and to the same extent that the boundaries of irresponsibility are enlarged.
Government cannot manage these fields of human welfare with the justice, economy, and effectiveness that are possible when these same fields are the direct responsibility of morally sensitive human beings. This loss of justice, economy, and effectiveness is increased in the proportion that such governmental management is centralized.
Clarence Manion, The Key to Peace
under the gun of the concentrated interest
Government by the people seems to be our problem. States, Feds, Regulators, and Planners stand ready for manipulation by interest groups for the institutionalization, legalization and ossification of rules to benefit the health, safety and welfare of the majority.
A veneer of honorable partisan politics provides cover and election rhetoric to periodically move the needle left or right, and re-order the primary beneficiaries under successive elected administrations.
Consent of the governed is a myth. We will be governed one way or another as opportunities for acting freely outside of the rules of our free society shrink each day.
Got an interesting idea with attractive optics that speak to the health, safety and welfare of Americans? Can you generate funding for communications, contributions and legal process? Then you will get to direct the legal machineries at whatever level of government to write some law that must be obeyed.
The tautological requirement is that each new law must be a consistent development from the law already on the books. Our great construct of reasoning grows each day. No human behavior is immune from its reach. More importantly, no human behavior will be permitted to frustrate its objective.
The beneficiaries of whatever class, corporate interest, or personal feature, benefit. The rest provide at least obedience, indirect funding, and implied consent.
I’m sure this is not the system the Founders intended.
The Civil War Is Here
The left doesn’t want to secede. It wants to rule.
by: Daniel Greenfield
A civil war has begun.
This civil war is very different than the last one. There are no cannons or cavalry charges. The left doesn’t want to secede. It wants to rule. Political conflicts become civil wars when one side refuses to accept the existing authority. The left has rejected all forms of authority that it doesn’t control.
The left has rejected the outcome of the last two presidential elections won by Republicans. It has rejected the judicial authority of the Supreme Court when it decisions don’t accord with its agenda. It rejects the legislative authority of Congress when it is not dominated by the left.
It rejected the Constitution so long ago that it hardly bears mentioning.
It was for total unilateral executive authority under Obama. And now it’s for states unilaterally deciding what laws they will follow. (As long as that involves defying immigration laws under Trump, not following them under Obama.) It was for the sacrosanct authority of the Senate when it held the majority. Then it decried the Senate as an outmoded institution when the Republicans took it over.
It was for Obama defying the orders of Federal judges, no matter how well grounded in existing law, and it is for Federal judges overriding any order by Trump on any grounds whatsoever. It was for Obama penalizing whistleblowers, but now undermining the government from within has become “patriotic”.
There is no form of legal authority that the left accepts as a permanent institution. It only utilizes forms of authority selectively when it controls them. But when government officials refuse the orders of the duly elected government because their allegiance is to an ideology whose agenda is in conflict with the President and Congress, that’s not activism, protest, politics or civil disobedience; it’s treason.
After losing Congress, the left consolidated its authority in the White House. After losing the White House, the left shifted its center of authority to Federal judges and unelected government officials. Each defeat led the radicalized Democrats to relocate from more democratic to less democratic institutions.
This isn’t just hypocrisy. That’s a common political sin. Hypocrites maneuver within the system. The left has no allegiance to the system. It accepts no laws other than those dictated by its ideology.
Democrats have become radicalized by the left. This doesn’t just mean that they pursue all sorts of bad policies. It means that their first and foremost allegiance is to an ideology, not the Constitution, not our country or our system of government. All of those are only to be used as vehicles for their ideology.
That’s why compromise has become impossible.
Our system of government was designed to allow different groups to negotiate their differences. But those differences were supposed to be based around finding shared interests. The most profound of these shared interests was that of a common country based around certain civilizational values. The left has replaced these Founding ideas with radically different notions and principles. It has rejected the primary importance of the country. As a result it shares little in the way of interests or values.
Instead it has retreated to cultural urban and suburban enclaves where it has centralized tremendous amounts of power while disregarding the interests and values of most of the country. If it considers them at all, it is convinced that they will shortly disappear to be replaced by compliant immigrants and college indoctrinated leftists who will form a permanent demographic majority for its agenda.
But it couldn’t wait that long because it is animated by the conviction that enforcing its ideas is urgent and inevitable. And so it turned what had been a hidden transition into an open break.
In the hidden transition, its authority figures had hijacked the law and every political office they held to pursue their ideological agenda. The left had used its vast cultural power to manufacture a consensus that was slowly transitioning the country from American values to its values and agendas. The right had proven largely impotent in the face of a program which corrupted and subverted from within.
The left was enormously successful in this regard. It was so successful that it lost all sense of proportion and decided to be open about its views and to launch a political power struggle after losing an election.
The Democrats were no longer being slowly injected with leftist ideology. Instead the left openly took over and demanded allegiance to open borders, identity politics and environmental fanaticism. The exodus of voters wiped out the Democrats across much of what the left deemed flyover country.
The left responded to democratic defeats by retreating deeper into undemocratic institutions, whether it was the bureaucracy or the corporate media, while doubling down on its political radicalism. It is now openly defying the outcome of a national election using a coalition of bureaucrats, corporations, unelected officials, celebrities and reporters that are based out of its cultural and political enclaves.
It has responded to a lost election by constructing sanctuary cities and states thereby turning a cultural and ideological secession into a legal secession. But while secessionists want to be left alone authoritarians want everyone to follow their laws. The left is an authoritarian movement that wants total compliance with its dictates with severe punishments for those who disobey.
The left describes its actions as principled. But more accurately they are ideological. Officials at various levels of government have rejected the authority of the President of the United States, of Congress and of the Constitution because those are at odds with their radical ideology. Judges have cloaked this rejection in law. Mayors and governors are not even pretending that their actions are lawful.
The choices of this civil war are painfully clear.
We can have a system of government based around the Constitution with democratically elected representatives. Or we can have one based on the ideological principles of the left in which all laws and processes, including elections and the Constitution, are fig leaves for enforcing social justice.
But we cannot have both.
Some civil wars happen when a political conflict can’t be resolved at the political level. The really bad ones happen when an irresolvable political conflict combines with an irresolvable cultural conflict.
That is what we have now.
The left has made it clear that it will not accept the lawful authority of our system of government. It will not accept the outcome of elections. It will not accept these things because they are at odds with its ideology and because they represent the will of large portions of the country whom they despise.
The question is what comes next.
The last time around growing tensions began to explode in violent confrontations between extremists on both sides. These extremists were lauded by moderates who mainstreamed their views. The first Republican president was elected and rejected. The political tensions led to conflict and then civil war.
The left doesn’t believe in secession. It’s an authoritarian political movement that has lost democratic authority. There is now a political power struggle underway between the democratically elected officials and the undemocratic machinery of government aided by a handful of judges and local elected officials.
What this really means is that there are two competing governments; the legal government and a treasonous anti-government of the left. If this political conflict progresses, agencies and individuals at every level of government will be asked to demonstrate their allegiance to these two competing governments. And that can swiftly and explosively transform into an actual civil war.
There is no sign that the left understands or is troubled by the implications of the conflict it has initiated. And there are few signs that Democrats properly understand the dangerous road that the radical left is drawing them toward. The left assumes that the winners of a democratic election will back down rather than stand on their authority. It is unprepared for the possibility that democracy won’t die in darkness.
Civil wars end when one side is forced to accept the authority of the other. The left expects everyone to accept its ideological authority. Conservatives expect the left to accept Constitutional authority. The conflict is still political and cultural. It’s being fought in the media and within the government. But if neither side backs down, then it will go beyond words as both sides give contradictory orders.
The left is a treasonous movement. The Democrats became a treasonous organization when they fell under the sway of a movement that rejects our system of government, its laws and its elections. Now their treason is coming to a head. They are engaged in a struggle for power against the government. That’s not protest. It’s not activism. The old treason of the sixties has come of age. A civil war has begun.
This is a primal conflict between a totalitarian system and a democratic system. Its outcome will determine whether we will be a free nation or a nation of slaves.
Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266197/civil-war-here-daniel-greenfield
widespread deep state surveillance
Newsmax – Sunday, 19 Mar 2017 01:04 PM
Nunes Must Ask FBI’s Comey About Montgomery Mass Surveillance Case
By: Larry Klayman
The old expression about Washington, D.C., is that if you want a friend, get a dog! In the case of President Donald Trump, this is a lesson he has undoubtedly learned in his thus far short tenure as the commander in chief. Nowhere is this seen more than over the current controversy concerning the president’s claims that he was wiretapped, that is, illegally spied upon, by his predecessor’s administration, former President Barack Obama.
As I have written in this Newsmax blog and elsewhere particularly of late, my client, former NSA and CIA contractor Dennis Montgomery, holds the keys to disproving the false claims of those representatives and senators on the House and Senate intelligence committees, reportedly as well as FBI Director James Comey, that there is no evidence that the president and his men were wiretapped.
Montgomery left the NSA and CIA with 47 hard drives and over 600 million pages of information, much of which is classified, and sought to come forward legally as a whistleblower to appropriate government entities, including congressional intelligence committees, to expose that the spy agencies were engaged for years in systematic illegal surveillance on prominent Americans, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, other justices, 156 judges, prominent businessmen such as Donald Trump, and even yours truly. Working side by side with Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence (DIA), James Clapper, and Obama’s former Director of the CIA, John Brennan, Montgomery witnessed “up close and personal” this “Orwellian Big Brother” intrusion on privacy, likely for potential coercion, blackmail or other nefarious purposes.
But when Montgomery came forward as a whistleblower to congressional intelligence committees and various other congressmen and senators, including Senator Charles Grassley, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who, like Comey, once had a reputation for integrity, he was “blown off?” no one wanted to even hear what he had to say. The reason, I suspect, is that Montgomery’s allegations were either too hot to handle, or the congressional intelligence and judiciary committees already knew that this unconstitutional surveillance was being undertaken. Moreover, given the power of the NSA, CIA, and DNI, for congressional committee heads to take action to legitimately and seriously investigate and if necessary recommend prosecution of officials like Clapper and Brennan could, given the way Washington works, result in the spy agencies disclosing and leaking (as occurred recently with General Michael Flynn), the details of their mass surveillance, ruining the careers if not personal lives of any politician who would take them on.
After Montgomery was turned away as a whistleblower, he came to me at Freedom Watch. With the aid of the Honorable Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who I had come to respect and trust over the years of my public interest advocacy, we brought Montgomery forward to FBI Director James Comey, through his General Counsel James Baker. Under grants of immunity, which I obtained through Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Curtis, Montgomery produced the hard drives and later was interviewed under oath in a secure room at the FBI Field Office in the District of Columbia. There he laid out how persons like then businessman Donald Trump were illegally spied upon by Clapper, Brennan, and the spy agencies of the Obama administration. He even claimed that these spy agencies had manipulated voting in Florida during the 2008 presidential election, which illegal tampering resulted in helping Obama to win the White House.
This interview, conducted and videoed by Special FBI Agents Walter Giardina and William Barnett, occurred almost two years ago, and nothing that I know of has happened since. It would appear that the FBI’s investigation was buried by Comey, perhaps because the FBI itself collaborates with the spy agencies to conduct illegal surveillance. In landmark court cases which I filed after the revelations of Edward Snowden, the Honorable Richard Leon, a colleague of Judge Lamberth, had ruled that this type of surveillance constituted a gross violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. (See www.freedomwatchusa.org for more information.)
A few months ago, given FBI’s seeming inaction in conducting a bona fide timely investigation of the treasure trove of information Montgomery had produced and testified to, I went to Chairman Bob Goodlatte of the House Judiciary Committee, as I had done earlier with Senator Grassley, since Montgomery had revealed that judges had been spied upon, and asked his staff to inquire of Director Comey the status of the investigation. I have heard nothing back from Goodlatte or his staff and they have not responded to recent calls and emails.
So last Thursday, I traveled to Capital Hill to personally meet with Chairman Devin Nunes (RCa.) of the House Intelligence Committee and, when his scheduler claimed that he was “unavailable,” forcefully pushed for a meeting with one of his committee lawyers, Allen R. Souza, and fully briefed him about Montgomery and the FBI’s apparent coverup. I told this staff intel lawyer to inform Chairman Nunes of the facts behind this apparent coverup before the committee holds its hearing on the alleged Trump wiretaps and questions Comey this Monday, March 20, in open session. My expressed purpose: to have Chairman Nunes of the House Intelligence Committee ask Comey, under oath, why he and his FBI have seemingly not moved forward with the Montgomery investigation.
During my meeting with House Intelligence Committee counsel Allen R. Sousa I politely warned him that if Chairman Nunes, who himself had that same day undercut President Trump by also claiming that there is no evidence of surveillance by the Obama administration, I would go public with what would appear to be the House Intelligence Committee’s complicity in keeping the truth from the American people and allowing the FBI to continue its apparent coverup of the Montgomery “investigation.”
And, that is where it stands today. The big question: will House Intelligence Committee Chairman Nunes do his job and hold FBI Director Comey’s feet to the fire about the Montgomery investigation?
Please watch the House Intelligence Committee hearing closely this Monday.
Larry Klayman, founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch, is known for his strong public interest advocacy in furtherance of ethics in government and individual freedoms and liberties.
the Left have no justification
This is why the media and the Left have ramped up anti-Trump mania. He threatens to disembody the soul of socialism by forcing the deep state to justify itself, and deep state actors know they cannot.
Presidential Executive Order on a Comprehensive Plan for Reorganizing the Executive Branch, May 13, 2017
(excerpt)
(d) In developing the proposed plan described in subsection (c) of this section, the Director shall consider, in addition to any other relevant factors:
(i) whether some or all of the functions of an agency, a component, or a program are appropriate for the Federal Government or would be better left to State or local governments or to the private sector through free enterprise;
(ii) whether some or all of the functions of an agency, a component, or a program are redundant, including with those of another agency, component, or program;
(iii) whether certain administrative capabilities necessary for operating an agency, a component, or a program are redundant with those of another agency, component, or program;
(iv) whether the costs of continuing to operate an agency, a component, or a program are justified by the public benefits it provides; and
(v) the costs of shutting down or merging agencies, components, or programs, including the costs of addressing the equities of affected agency staff.
A rational fear is not phobic
Know-Nothing Catholics on Muslim Immigration
“In order to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles.” ? Executive order: Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States
It can be expected that Catholic bishops will respond with dismay to President Trump’s order banning immigration from seven Muslim nations. When Trump first proposed banning Muslims from entering the U.S., Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, the president of the USCCB issued a statement repudiating “the hatred and suspicion that leads to policies of discrimination.” At about the same time, Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore said Catholics could “not possibly countenance” restricting entry to the U.S. solely on the basis of religious affiliation. It can also be expected that bishops will employ an argument they have long used against opponents of Muslim immigration—namely, that Catholic immigrants were once treated with similar suspicion.
Catholics and non-Catholics alike now laugh at the anti-Catholic prejudice of the Know-Nothings (aka The American Party) and other groups who were opposed to immigration from Catholic countries in Europe. The anti-Catholics based their objection on the belief that Catholics owed allegiance to a foreign power (the Vatican), and thus, Catholics could never be truly loyal to America and its Constitution. More than that, there were dark rumors about a papist plot to take over America, and about an undersea tunnel that connected the Vatican to New York. This view—that Catholics could never assimilate to America’s democratic culture—persisted in some quarters up until the election of John F. Kennedy.
The fact that some Americans once mistakenly considered Catholicism a menace is now used as an argument against critics of Muslim immigration. Just as the Know-Nothings of days gone by were wrong about Catholicism, so also will today’s “Know-Nothings” be proven wrong about Islam. Or, so it is claimed. The open-borders advocates within the Church assure us that Islam will turn out to be as Americans as apple pie: give Islam a chance, and you will discover that the local Iman is just Bing Crosby’s Father O’Malley with a beard—a mellow fellow whose biggest concern is to pay off the mortgage on the mosque.
But what if all the things that were once falsely charged against Catholicism are actually true of Islam? The nineteenth century anti-Catholics mistakenly thought that Catholicism was a theocracy, but Islam really is a theocracy. The anti-Catholics wrongly questioned the loyalty of American Catholics, but numerous polls show that a majority of Muslims consider their primary allegiance to be to the ummah (the worldwide community of Muslim believers), and not to whatever nation they happen to reside in. A Pew Research survey of Muslim-Americans under thirty revealed that sixty percent of them felt more loyalty to Islam than to America. The Know-Nothings worried needlessly that Catholics would be subject to foreign influence, but when you consider that 85 percent of fulltime, paid imams in the U.S. are foreign born, then foreign influence on American Muslims does seem a legitimate concern.
What about the anti-Catholic fear that Catholics would be bound by Canon Law not Constitutional Law? There was, of course, little need for worry. The scope of Cannon Law is largely restricted to internal Church affairs, and most Catholics have only the vaguest acquaintance with its requirements. On the other hand, sharia law governs almost every aspect of daily life for Muslims. Moreover, many tenets of sharia law directly contradict the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Sharia law permits cruel and unusual punishments; the open-ended sharia blasphemy laws makes free speech highly problematic; and the apostasy and dhimmitude laws more or less cancel out religious freedom.
How seriously is sharia regarded in Muslim lands? In many Muslim nations sharia law (or Islamic law) is the law of the land. For example, it is written into the constitutions of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Iraq. The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam which is the Islamic response to the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights was ratified by all 57 member nations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Article 24 of the Declaration states “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Sharia.” Article 25 states “The Islamic Sharia is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification of any of the articles of this Declaration.” All of which sounds a bit like the fine print in a warranty which tells you that your product is completely covered for 10 years except for labor and all the working parts.
But how about Muslims in America? You may think that American Muslims pay no attention to the thousand-year-old requirements of sharia law, but polls show otherwise. A nationwide survey conducted by The Polling Company for the Center for Security Policy reveals that 51 percent of Muslims agreed that “Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to sharia.” In addition, 51 percent of those polled believed that they should have the choice of American or sharia courts. Only 39 percent agreed that Muslims in the U.S. should be subject to American courts.
Take over the country? That’s what some of the anti-Catholic nativists thought that the Catholics were planning to do. There is no evidence, however, that any Catholic groups, whether lay or clerical, ever entertained notions about subjugating America. On the other hand, numerous Islamist leaders have, in no uncertain terms, expressed a desire to conquer America. And the crazy talk is not confined to terrorist chiefs hiding out in the deserts of Libya or Iraq. “Death to America” is now the unofficial motto of one large and well-armed Islamic nation (Iran). Moreover, subjugating nations to Islam is not simply something that Muslims like to talk about. It’s what they have done throughout history. The spread of Islam is the raison d’être of Islam.
How should it be spread? Not necessarily with bullets and bombs. Prominent Islamic spiritual leaders such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi have expressed confidence that Islam can conquer Europe through immigration and through higher birth rates. 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed has expressed similar sentiments about the defeat of the U.S. Although not at all adverse to the use of violence, KSM revealed that al-Qaeda’s plan to crush America was more subtle than that. According to James Mitchell, the CIA contractor who interrogated him, KSM told him:
The “practical” way to defeat America was through immigration and by outbreeding non-Muslims. He said jihadi-minded brothers would immigrate into the United States, taking advantage of the welfare system to support themselves while they spread their jihadi message. They will wrap themselves in America’s rights and laws for protection, ratchet up acceptance of Sharia law, and then, only when they were strong enough, rise up and violently impose Sharia from within.
It is that possibility, and not a D-Day type invasion that worries serious critics of Islamic immigration, and it is that possibility that the new executive order is meant to forestall. More to the point, the ban on Muslim immigration is not based in bigotry, but on a realistic assessment of Islam. If, as Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other Islamists have said, the plan is to conquer the West through immigration, then putting restrictions on Muslim immigration is the logical thing to do.
Last February, San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy gave a speech which rehashed all the old clichés about “anti-Islamic prejudice.” He reminded his audience about the anti-Catholic bigotry of the past; he cautioned them about a “new nativism”; he advised them that they should view with repugnance the “repeated falsehoods” that Islam is inherently violent or that Muslims seek to replace the Constitution with sharia law; and he told them that Catholics must speak out against “distortions of Muslim theology … because these distortions are just as devastating in the present day as the distortions of Catholic teaching … which were disseminated in American society in the nineteenth century.”
Except that the “distortions” of Islam that McElroy talks about are not distortions at all. They are established facts. And the fears that many in the U.S have about Muslim immigration are well-founded fears. Rational discrimination against Muslim immigration in the twenty-first century is not the same as irrational discrimination against Catholic immigration in the nineteenth century. Unless, of course, you are naïve enough to believe that all religions are basically of the same peace-loving sort.
The term “Know-Nothings” originally referred to its members’ habit of responding to every question about its activities with the reply “I know nothing.” The moniker also captured the ignorance of its nativist members. Their opposition to Catholic immigrants was largely based on misinformation. Today, however, the situation is reversed. It’s not the opponents of immigration that are ill-informed, but its proponents. Today’s equivalent of the Know-Nothings are not those who have fears about Muslim immigration. In general, their fears are based on facts about Islamic beliefs and Islamic history—facts which are easily accessible to anyone who bothers to look. The “Know-Nothings” of today are those who think Muslim immigration can only be a good thing—those who are so ignorant of Islam that they proudly proclaim their solidarity with it. The Know-Nothings of today are all those willfully blind groups and individuals who refuse to look at the facts about Islam, and prefer instead to cling to the fantasy Islam of their own imaginations.
Today’s Know-Nothings are smug in their assurance that they hold the moral high ground. Hence they absolve themselves from examining the evidence on which moral judgments should be based. They are sure that the conventional wisdom of yesterday is adequate to understand today’s radically different situation. In their own way, they are as much of a threat to American society as the terrorists who plan to take advantage of their ignorance.
Source: http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/know-nothing-catholics
Obama swung the pendulum far Left
“[T]hose who remain faithful to Marxism are getting reinforcements from all sides. They no longer pretend that Communism as an economic system was good in itself, in the absolute sense, nor that it remains an ideal to be concretized. Communism’s merits are gauged in relation to the execrated capitalist system, the old adversary against which it wages eternal warfare. Thereby it has gained this definitive advantage: it does not have to exist in order to be true.”
“The American campus phenomenon, which extends also into some American newspapers, magazines, radio and television channels, is a reminder that the Marxist mentality can flourish and have considerable effect on public debate even in nations where Communism did not succeed in forming a party with electoral clout or influence in the unions. Communism can be an ideological presence even where it has never been a political player.
With regard to Communist crimes, the American moral dilemma differs fundamentally from that of Europe. In the United States, the deeds of Stalin and Mao never drew the active complicity or the massive approbation that Europeans bestowed on them. Today, in the American circles where the Marxist delusion still flourishes, it is for the most part theoretical and abstract, or the posture of a minority of “liberal” intellectuals.”
from: Jean-François Revel, Last Exit to Utopia
The above was published in 2000 and Revel passed away 10 years ago, prior to the resurgence of Communist and Marxist ideas mainstreamed by the Obama administration. Let’s not kid ourselves that the current state of the nation at the beginning of the Trump administration is in some political balance. America went far Left under Obama. The signs abound–street actions, speech suppression, wilding thugs, government occupation of the healthcare market, entitlements off the charts, a Leviathan regulatory monster over head, and the Left fighting tooth and nail lest any of it get rolled back.
what Indivisibles are diverting attention from
Assange describes a reality that the Left desperately seeks to obscure and overwhelm with diversions since it completely incriminates Obama, Clinton, and the foreign and domestic interests that funded them.
“I got the answers, I’m bona fide!” Ulysses Everett McGill
The best thing about the Left and about Islam is they have all the answers to all of the problems in the world. How do we know? Just ask them. They’ll tell you exactly what the capitalists and the Christians are doing wrong. Poverty, disease, inequality, unemployment, injustice, and immorality exist because the capitalists and the Christians failed to do something about them.
If only we would follow Leftist and Islamic principles, all of these human scourges would be eliminated. All you have to do is look at . . . and then there’s . . . um . . . hold on, I just had it . . . um . . . crap . . . well . . . um, no matter.
Still, socialism works and Islam is all about peace. I just can’t think of any examples right now. I know hundreds of millions of people over more than a millennium have tried these approaches, I just can’t think of one that worked. But at least it’s a good thing that the Left and Islam have all the answers.
It must be the faults of capitalists and Christians that Leftism and Islam haven’t solved any of mankind’s big problems yet. Yeah that’s it.
The least common denominator strikes again
Elbert County Democrats will be pleased to learn that the Facebook group Elbert County Republicans has torn a page from the Elbert County Citizens Facebook group and begun ejecting members with whom the moderators disagree. This practice infuriates me as it completely discredits the whole point of being a Republican, a political philosophy built on a foundation of reasonable and defensible ideas.
When a Republican must resort to high school clique antics to defend a position, then he should not be in a position of power over the publication of other’s ideas, Republican or whatever. Censorship is a notorious Democrat tool. A Republican who uses it has signed up for the wrong party.
~
—for if Men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences, that can invite the consideration of Mankind; reason is of no use to us—the freedom of Speech may be taken away—and, dumb & silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.
From George Washington to Officers of the Army, 15 March 1783
the battle space
A local Indivisible, Elizabeth Haymond, wrote today, “It is not enough for us to simply win enough votes, we must use this as an opportunity to condemn bigotry and xenophobia across our state. This is our moment to control the narrative. . .”
The noble motives that Haymond wants to virtue-signal to the world through her political action get undermined in the very next sentence. She is good, and there will be no dissent about that.
Who are the bigots and the xenophobes? That’s easy. They self-identify by opposing Haymond or voting against the way Haymond wants.
Not only is a political disagreement with Haymond impermissible, it constitutes an offense personal to Haymond on spiritual and metaphysical levels.
What if the purported bigots and xenophobes have a good reason for voting against the act of government that Haymond supports? Doesn’t matter. The narrative is under Haymond’s control and she’s not interested in debate.
This is just one example of the Left’s paradigm. You could take all of the social pathologies the Left virtue-signal about and pair them up with policies and actions the Left have assigned to the domain of government. They reinforce each other in tautological circles of reason.
The election of Donald Trump catalyzed the Left on a metaphysical level. The Left didn’t just lose an election. They watched, and continue to endure, insults to all that is just and holy in their world. The string of hate-proxy social pathologies the Left obsess upon are all in a high state of excitement right now, and will apparently remain so for the foreseeable future.
The Left seek something big and invasive–they want your mind. An election for the Left is just a step in a direction, a weapon in the broader battle for your head space.
They won’t admit straight out that they want control over your thoughts because that would put people off. But look at Haymond’s political construct above and do a little deductive reasoning. See if you can find any space left over after she’s through.
And consider this is just one of a whole basket of the Left’s political vectors, all motivated by meta-level social pathologies that must be justly resolved, but in reality can never be finalized until utopia is achieved.
They leave no room for any individual thought in your brain after they get done with you.
To be fair, conservatives have meta constructs of a religious nature too. God-given rights described in the Declaration of Independence codified into legislative and constitutional enforcements may be considered as metaphysical in nature as the Left’s basket of social pathologies.
Both sides’ metaphysics can be distinguished by; those that support the collective and those that support the individual, those that expand the domain of government and those that empower the individual against the usurpations of government, those that control your mind and those that set your mind free to create, those that are tautological and those that are unconstrained.
Free cultures award virtue on the basis of what one creates. Collective cultures award virtue to people who talk about it. Obviously, one of these paradigms leads to more tangible progress, and it isn’t the one that calls itself progressive.
Consider the educational malpractice of legions of young people taught in public school each day the language of the Left’s social pathologies. Will they grow up to be Haymonds?
the funny thing. . .
Late night comedians went from stand ups to standing jokes.
In high dudgeon, obsessive raves, compulsive attacks, hypersensitive over-reactions to anything and every thing, desperate over the end of their civilization, they present their nightly farce under the rubric of entertainment, inspiring the useful tools swarming under the guidance of new community organizations—innocents who think late night TV is the real news.
Late night writers gave up jokes for bathetic propaganda. The laugh tracks ring as hollow as their hosts’ feigned self assurance. Worst of all, their desperate hysterical ravings aren’t funny.
The big lie, the yuge lie, is all of this instant umbrage materialized after the election. The Left went from zero to please-pull-over in the time it took for the returns to come in. Everything was fine while the headlights pointed Left when all of a sudden the focus changed and the nightmare began.
For over a year the Republicans broadcast their candidate selection process. Conservative ideas were discussed, almost ad nauseam, while the Left remained silent. They were sure the fix was in and nothing could derail the Clinton—except as it turned out the Clinton herself.
The Left’s panic reaction now consumes cable, the airwaves, and the internet. If this onslaught were a bona fide concern over their policies, the Left had over a year to make that case. But they were too busy goose stepping around Obama’s pen and phone to show much concern.
Now, after the election, suddenly it’s the end of the world.
Well, it’s not the end of the world. But it seems to be the end of late night comedy, at least for a while.
Boldfaced American propaganda
Speech and ideation control targeting young Americans
Reported by: Discoverthenetworks.org
“Indivisible is an organization that seeks to persuade Americans – particularly young people – to believe that big, centralized government can benefit society in a multitude of ways that the private sector cannot. In short, Indivisible’s objective is to “energiz[e] and infor[m] Americans about government’s potential” to ensure “a safe, healthy, just and prosperous future” for all. Asserting that “too much time is taken up debating big government versus small government,” Indivisible contends that “what we need to be discussing is how our government works well,” and why it is indispensable for “accomplishing big things.”
In an effort to “inspire a cultural shift in how Americans think about the role of government in America,” Indivisible is committed to “disrupting and reframing negative media discourse about government,” “creating a network of champions to change the conversation about government in their communities,” and “training the next generation of civic-minded leaders.” Toward these ends, the organization has created an Indivisible Institute that administers a leadership-development program for young people “who share a passion for reclaiming government as our unique tool for addressing tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities.” These “emerging leaders” are taught how “to help … build a new American culture” wherein “the potential and promise of government” is axiomatic.
One of Indivisible’s major projects is its “Pave the Way” video contest, whose name derives from the notion that government is “literally paving our way with road construction and interstates.” This contest offers cash prizes to young people who produce quality videos of interviews wherein small-business owners tell “how government paved the way for their business’ success” by means of things like the GI Bill, the Affordable Care Act, Small Business Administration loan programs, and infrastructure spending.
Another key initiative of Indivisible is its “I Love My” program, which offers information and talking points designed to highlight the many benefits of government. On the premise that “it’s amazing how much government is doing behind the scenes to make our lives better every day,” Indivisible argues that the media should make a special effort to “show [that] our public systems and structures [are] usually so well run that we don’t notice them at all.” One such structure, says Indivisible, is the U.S. Postal Service, which “makes our businesses better,” “helps our communities function,” “makes our democracy work,” and “is the reason our country works at all.”
Similarly, another section of the “I Love My” program teaches people to how to speak about taxes in a way that emphasizes their usefulness in helping government to serve “the common good,” rather than in a way that casts them in a negative light. “Don’t talk about taxes as a ‘burden‘ or something from which we need ‘relief,’” Indivisible advises. “These [terms] are inherently negative and they cue up the dominant thinking that taxes are bad. Instead, talk about taxes as ‘loads’ to be carried or shared.” Moreover, says Indivisible: “Don’t call people ‘taxpayers‘ – it limits the conversation to only one side of the ledger (costs, not benefits). Instead, talk about people as ‘residents’ or ‘citizens’ or ‘member[s] of our community’ – it highlights that we are all people who both contribute to and benefit from public systems and structures.”
Indivisible’s “My Take” program features interviews where “real people” are asked to articulate “their feelings [about] government” and their various interactions with it. For example, the interviewees are asked: (a) “What is your favorite thing that government does?” (b) “Who is your government hero who is not an elected official?” (c) “What thing that government does do you think would surprise most Americans?”
Indivisible’s “Reality Check” program seeks to “expos[e] the reality behind myths and misunderstandings about government,” which ultimately serves as “our tool to help us solve big problems together.”
Reclaiming Government for America’s Future is an Indivisible research project consisting of reports, videos, and webinars that aim to counter the popular notion that government “is too big, intrusive, untrustworthy, and controlled by powerful elites” who have little interest in using it as “a tool for the common good.” Topos Partnership conducted this research on behalf of Indivisible, Public Works, and a number of partner organizations in Oregon, North Carolina, Nebraska, Michigan, Arkansas, and Colorado. The overarching objective of the project is to spell out ways in which progressives can effectively “shift conversations and begin to change the cultural common sense about government.”
Politics of the Swarm
“Indivisible” groups across the U.S. take inspirations from the success of the previously-reviled “astroturf” Tea Party, from the militant ANTIFA Left wing who practice violence to preclude counter revolutionary messages from being heard, from the Occupy campers, and all of it underpinned by a love of Marxism, sympathy for communism, hatred of capitalism, and revulsion over the evil counter-revolutionary Republicans.
But that’s not the message they present to the rest of the world—the Dar al-Harb [House of War]—the U.S. became for them after the recent election.
In the new battle space, forget philosophy, argument, cases, constructs, reasoning, laws, precedent, decorum, and civil behavior. Enter the swarm—used to be called the mob. But where the mob was random and uncontrolled, the swarm is targeted and strategic.
The swarm intends to overwhelm, not through a Cloward-Piven system-saturation strategy, but through crowding out the head space, the message space of the public domain, from the opposition—the illegitimate non-communist counter revolutionaries currently holding public office.
With what content, one might ask, and here’s the new twist. It’s nothing. Or something. It does not matter! The message is irrelevant except as a temporary placeholder to crowd out the opposition message. Counter revolutionaries are so far beneath the Left’s contempt, they’re not even worth an argument.
Instead, they get short, shouted, repetitive, symbolic phrases, fitted to sound bites. No conversation, no debate, because no one wants to be seen talking to a counter revolutionary dhimmi.
The swarm intends to foreclose discussion and provoke suppression. If they get lucky, maybe create a few martyrs for the movement. They intend to exacerbate normal human relations by politicizing everything to foreclose peaceful constructive communications. Peace does not serve their interest in revolution.
Any form of engagement aggravates the swarm. Proximity or adjacency feeds it with targets to focus outrage upon.
So how should civil society, the descendants of our Western intellectual heritage, live alongside these extremely unpleasant, and sometimes outright destructive, swarming communist agents?
It seems prudent to keep a safe distance from them when they’re in outrage mode. Perhaps if enough people stop enabling them and leave them alone to burn through their tantrums among themselves, they’ll eventually burn themselves out and settle down.
There’s plenty of advice on the internet for dealing with tantrums in children, advice that might inform a rational approach to political tantrums by Leftist adults.
Meanwhile, the political adults in the room should carry on with the constructive chores that come with adulthood. To this end they should continue to publish their constructive ideas, present their solutions using reasonable persuasion, and most importantly, stop taking the Left’s tantrums as serious political statements.
To elevate the swarm’s messaging to the level of our core constitutional structures, besides being an absurd equivocation, seriously undervalues the work product from the Founders who built our republic, and we should never forget that hindsight.
The Rule of Law?
“Connected by leadership”
Milo Yiannopoulos
M.Y. is rude, crude and explicitly true. Sure, his message could be delivered in a sanitized non-blue format, perhaps appealing to more conservative audiences. But why bother? Those audiences already understand the paucities of the Left. Anyone who’s been to a comedy club will recognize Yiannopoulus’ edgy method. And given that most Leftists lack the necessary DNA to laugh at themselves, Yiannopoulus’ comic acerbic style seems fitting to the enormity of the task–skewering a decades-entrenched protected set of holier-than-thou Leftists.
Comparative advantage
Consider two sets of shops.
This set in Denver: https://elbertcounty.net/blog/2012/04/14/things-change/
This set in Shanghai: https://elbertcounty.net/blog/2012/06/08/on-1-block-of-fujian-road/
A place has an economic comparative advantage if its opportunity costs for providing a good or service are greater than the opportunity costs for providing that good or service in another place.
Put less obtusely, a place has a comparative advantage for a given good or service if it can be produced for less cost in that place, than in another place.
People who are allowed to trade freely with each other can utilize their comparative advantages to provide the least cost goods to each other, and thereby maximize their combined wealth.
Maximizing wealth of the people ought to be the primary goal of any government involved with regulating or controlling international trade.
Obviously, our government has not been interested in maximizing the wealth of its citizens for some time. Various social, political, and government revenue objectives have long been put first. It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration will try to remedy that situation.
But what do you do about a people who would rather get high than make things? For Trump to succeed at making America great again, Americans are going to have to want to do something more than get stoned.
Dreams on MLK day
On this MLK holiday, I have dreams too:
. . .that another more violent, more outrageous, expression of Leftist or Islamic rage will not happen.
. . .that the Left will learn the history of German national socialism’s policy details, and how most modern Leftist demands of government have ancestry in national socialist programs, tried and failed, almost a century ago.
. . .that the Left will realize that national socialism and communism are, in proven effect, indistinguishable totalitarian systems, and that both inexorably lead to mass slaughter of their own citizens.
. . .that the Left will learn that our American constitutional system is based on volitional consent, and that militancy and the projection of force are repugnant to our value system and our way of life.
. . .that the totalitarian Left will end its marriage of convenience with political Islam.
. . .that civilization will return to America and render the hardening of our society, infrastructure, law enforcement, and systems that became necessary to prevent random political, religious and criminal harm, obsolete.
With due respect to the memory of MLK, we have bigger problems to dream about solutions for than race.
America has been had
President Trump, whatever else you do, you must get the Muslim Brotherhood OUT of our government, military and federal agencies.
http://unconstrainedanalytics.org/resources/
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263921/our-catastrophic-failure-jihad-denial-daniel-greenfield
El Paso windmills
a bonanza of federal spending to cut
Seems like a good place to cut spending => where the Feds are just giving away money.
https://www.cfda.gov/
The pdf download to describe these programs is 3,277 pages long.
https://www.cfda.gov/downloads/CFDA_2015.pdf
Public Cyber Security
The most far reaching issue to surface in the recent election was raised by the Wikileaks disclosures. Not one of the documents they released to the public has been disputed or shown to be a forgery.
This mechanism pulled the covers off the communications of public officials to reveal unethical, criminal, fraudulent, self-dealing, graft, and corruption, by the scolds who, even today after all the disclosures, continue to lecture the rest of the country on a host of issues in order to lasso some future votes.
Imagine what’s in the communications of the rest of the political class. I’m sure some of it’s ethical, public spirited, selfless, and lives up to the highest expectations of the electorate. Just as I’m sure the character of the Clinton camp disclosures is not unique.
Wikileaks showed us what the Founders knew very well—the corrupting influence of power. They designed our system to frustrate this ubiquitous feature of human nature by creating a Constitution of limitations on government power, complete with a rigorous amendment mechanism to change that Constitution. They didn’t want it tampered with lightly, and they certainly didn’t want unelected judges to be able to effectively modify it with case decisions.
So, our government invests billions to keep the communications of public officials secret, and at the same time, to de-cloak the secret communications of citizens. If the secret communications of public officials could be relied upon to be ethical, public spirited, selfless, genuine, and in good faith, such expenditures might be justified.
But that is not human nature, not when the Founders wrote the system, and not now, thank you Ms. Clinton for reminding us. We must not lose sight of this important lesson.
Moreover, since it’s been shown that government communications can be used to hide the self-dealing of public officials from the purifying sunlight of disclosure, the goal of government cyber security must encompass this reality.
Public security without public accountability is a license to steal from the public treasuries of governments all over the world. This is a much bigger issue than who won the election and what their rhetoric promises.
The fabric of our constitutionally limited system has been breached. Securing the breach is a bandaid that may scab over the lesion, but not cure the underlying disease—because it’s human nature and incurable!
The answer that the Founders came up with was to not trust the government to cure itself. Their system created a tension of balancing interests to keep the various power centers in check.
Public cyber security introduced the ability for public officials to create new power centers not anticipated, or subject to balancing, by traditional constitutional devices.
So, how do we allow our government officials to keep bona fide secrets, while at the same time, not provide communications shelter for public official malfeasance? In other words, how do we fix what is happening right now?
That’s the most important issue we should be discussing after this election. We have a constitutional crisis already. This noise about the electoral college and the legitimacy of candidates is a sideshow.
the futility of debating the Left
“A perennial misapprehension distorts virtually all discussions about the competing merits of socialism and [classical] liberalism: Socialists like to imagine that liberalism is an ideology. Reared on ideology themselves, they cannot imagine that any other form of intellectual activity exists, so they constantly detect in others the same propensity toward abstract and moralistic systematizing by which they themselves are possessed. Socialists are convinced that opposing doctrines are an inverted imitation of their own, and these opposing doctrines must likewise be promising absolute perfection, albeit by a different route. And liberals, reflexively compliant as always, have too frequently accepted this grossly mistaken view of their own position.
If a liberal asserts, “In practice, the market seems to be a less inefficient means of allocating resources than top-down, planned distribution,” a socialist will immediately shoot back, “The market is not a solution to every problem.” Of course not. Who has ever maintained such an absurdity? But since socialism was conceived in the delusion of being able to resolve every problem, its partisans project the same ambition onto their opponents. Fortunately, not everyone shares their megalomania. Liberals have never aimed to build a perfect society. They are content to compare the various types of society that exist or have existed, and to draw appropriate conclusions from studying those that have functioned the least badly. But many liberals, hypnotized by the socialists’ moral imperialism, fall into the trap of debating on the socialists’ terms.
…
Liberalism has never been an ideology, by which I mean a theory based on a priori concepts; nor is it an unchanging dogma divorced from the course of events and outcomes. It is merely a set of observations on facts.
…
Contemporary socialists—“light” totalitarians in mindset and vocabulary—go wrong when they imagine that liberals are busily planning the perfect society, the best that is possible in the world, but of opposite sign to their own. Therein lies the essential futility of post-Communist debate.”
Jean-Francois Revel, Last Exit To Utopia
idle threats
Democrats & media : an “unholy alliance”
Jill Duvall echoes national Democrat behavior => morphs electoral defeat into media spokesperson for the majority vote she didn’t get…
buyer’s remorse
political climate change
The election made it okay to disengage from the Left. What a relief to just walk away from screaming social justice warriors, in-your-face diversity police, marching millennial militants, and all those attempting to divide, dissolve, and destroy American exceptionalism and Constitution-abiding Americans.
To be sure, the last 8 years of Leftist forceful projections of their menu of self interests down America’s collective throat have been a bit of a slog. And since the Left keep attempting to delegitimize everything about the election they just lost, it appears they won’t be embracing reason and reality any time soon.
Still, the election gave us the real measure of things – free markets, limited government, low taxes, freedom, growth, and constructive behavior.
Now I can turn off the Left’s propaganda and stop enabling that ridiculous fringe by granting them the credibility of serious argument. Turns out they were never really serious about America or any of the phony multicultural ideals they claim to uphold. Even today they keep showing that when they don’t get their way they go animalistic.
Well, our free country allows the Left to express their petulant diversity and me-first social justice within civil limits. But the recent vote reminded us that no one has to chase that hot mess around to try to make sense of it. Sense can never be made from nonsense.
The Left spent their moral capital – showed everyone what selfish children hide inside those hideous masks.
Maybe some day they’ll grow up. It could happen. Until then I am free from having to take them seriously.
post privacy
It seems like the world has quietly slipped into a technological status that is post privacy. The 4th Am. protects Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures, but as that constitutional protection has been re-litigated over time, it turns out the definition of what is reasonable is contextual to current technology. As technology expands, the domain of a reasonable expectation of privacy shrinks. This shifting context is, intrinsically, neither good nor bad. It’s just a fact of technological advancement.
The Clintons recently discovered, much to their chagrin, that their reliance upon the privacy of their unsecured email server was a mistake. Despite their attempts to scrub their email record from the servers they owned, at some point their email traffic went through an internet tunnel that allowed their communications to be copied and saved by persons unknown.
As it turned out, those persons evidently became offended over the unethical Clinton’s documented behavior, and released those emails to the public in time for the American electorate to vote in a more fully informed manner. Subsequently the majority of Americans did the right thing and voted against the pair.
An argument certainly exists about whether this diminished expectation of privacy should hinge on the discretion of unknown parties who come to possess ostensibly private communications.
But extensive systems of encryption and decryption exist precisely because the internet is a known system of public communications channels. The information highway is open to all traffic. Someone listening at any number of junctures will be able to see and copy unencrypted traffic that flies by with very little effort.
Moreover, from the Snowdon disclosures the public now knows of numerous devices and software programs that monitor the internet and continuously capture all communications therein. And many formerly secure encryption methods still in use have been defeated.
All of this leads to a prudent conclusion that the great majority of internet users probably have no reasonable expectation of online privacy. The 4th Am. became somewhat obsolete.
Shifting gears slightly, it appears that the same prudential concern extends for smartphone users. And as smartphone sensors advance – some now do 3D digitizing of nearby physical surroundings – many of us will soon carry around data collection tools that can be remotely controlled to capture audio, video, GPS position, owner biometric and legal information, local 3D matrix data, friend and associate contacts and email addresses, histories of our communications through various social media and browsing tools, even records of our travels.
We line up to buy the latest and greatest of these devices because they do so much. And much if not all of what they do can be exploited on the internet without our awareness. The digital map of our entire existence is constantly built, refreshed, saved, and viewed. We are data origin points and we produce tons of data.
Taking things a step further, predictive artificial intelligence engines exist to use this data and issue alarms when the signals indicate the potential for alarming events to occur. Who reads these alarms, in what public agencies, what anticipatory machineries get switched on when the signs come in, these questions and others like them are probably worth exploring.