Social Issues

The Truth is Hard to Desire

Mark Noonan29 Comments

We got Twitter Files Part II tonight – and it was all about shadow banning.

Twitter documents clearly showed that Twitter employees were suppressing the reach of right-of-center accounts. All officially because they were spreading “hate” and “misinformation”, but the reality was because they were telling the truth and that cut against the Democrat Narrative – especially in 2020 when they needed the Covid Narrative to work against Trump. That did work, by the way.

Among the accounts suppressed was that of Dr Jay Bhattacharya who was warning that the lockdowns and masks were doing more harm than good – something that all but the most devoted Covid Cultists now admit. The guy is a professor as Stanford – MD and PhD. His skillset include infectious disease. Now, that set of credentials doesn’t mean he’s automatically right – but he’s clearly someone who should have a seat at the table. If he’s saying something, we should hear it and bounce it against what other people are saying.

But none of that from Twitter – or, indeed, from social media in general. It was all that Covid is a uniquely horrific disease and we need to mask and lockdown.

The mask thing was always bizarre to me. I mean, come on: the reason why a surgeon wears a mask isn’t to protect himself against the patient, but to protect the patient against the doctor. Surgeons actually got very good and slicing and dicing people early on. It is, after all, mostly a matter of mechanics. Once you know where the parts are, you’re good to go. But, of course, in olden days they didn’t know about bacteria and so even the most successful surgeries would fail because of a post-operative infection. Once that was known, doctors started to scrub up and wear gloves and masks – to keep bacteria from the doctor entering the patient’s wound/incision and making all medical efforts moot. Masks are to stop bacteria – which are massively larger than a virus. Comparison? It takes a thousand nanometers to make a micrometer. Most viruses are about 20 nanometers. Bacteria can come in at 2 micrometers. We’re talking hole in the ground vs Grand Canyon, guys. A mask is sufficient to stop most bacteria…but it might as well not even be there when it comes to a virus.

And we all knew this. Or were supposed to know this. I learned the basics of it in High School biology. But I guess most don’t know…or were easily bamboozled by the TV. The call for masking to stop a virus should have been met with contemptuous laughter…but, as it turns out, I lost a friend of 20 years when I pointed out that masks were useless. She was sure they worked! Because the TV said so.

I guess, thinking back on everything, I should have realized we would have this problem when, years ago, I found that people were demanding – and doctors were prescribing – antibiotics for colds and flu. Antibiotics do absolutely zero against a virus. They can’t do anything against a virus. Bacteria and viruses are entirely different species of problem. But there is was – and now Covid hysteria does make some sense.

We’re really stupid as a people.

But we’re also highly propagandized. Huge amounts of what people think they know is actually just an ad campaign which got drilled into the brain by a corporation or a bureaucracy. Solzhenitsyn noted this in the USSR – that history isn’t what happened but what the government chose to hammer into the public mind. It takes an act of will to go beyond the Narrative. first to ask if the Narrative makes any sense and then, if it doesn’t to figure out what might have happened. Example:

The Official Story of WWII had it had it that the Soviets, by a miracle of organization and work, moved most of their heavy industry out of the Donbas in front of the advancing Nazis and set up shop in the Urals where they then produced what was needed to win the war.

Well, sure enough, there were a lot of factories set up in the Urals…but we’re supposed to believe that in the chaos of defeat and retreat, with the limited Soviet transport system giving priority to the armies at the front they yet found the manpower and means to move whole factories a thousand miles to the east. Yeah, sorry: no, that didn’t happen. On their best days the Russians couldn’t pull that off. With the Nazis at the gates, they sure in heck couldn’t.

The reality is that American and British arms, munitions and material keep the Soviets in the war. We sent, for instance, something like 400,000 trucks to the USSR. 13,000 tanks. About 120 tanks made up a Soviet tank corps (roughly equivalent to an armored division for other European military forces). Thirty one tank corps were formed by the USSR during WWII. Do the math: most Soviet tank corps were equipped to one degree or another with American tanks. Sure, they did build T-34’s. Lots of them – in factories in the Urals where US-made machine tools and US-supplied materials made it happen. But the bottom line is that without our help, they simply wouldn’t have enough to fight a war with.

Once you think about how ridiculous it is to move, say, a steel mill a thousand miles then the whole fantasy falls apart…and that makes you look up just what we sent to the USSR during WWII and you find it was a simply staggering amount of everything you could possibly need from boots to to fighter planes.

But we all believe it! The TV said so. Or some such.

The truth, as the catch-phrase goes, is out there. And it is pretty easy to find. But I think that most don’t desire to find it. Most these days prefer that others do their thinking for them. I think people by now are simply afraid of it – afraid that if they seek the truth and find it, they’ll be forced to act.

Our Grim New World

Mark Noonan25 Comments

So, it turns out the bald guy in a dress that Team Pudding Brain hired to look after nuclear waste is a weirdo who steals women’s luggage.

Who could have guessed!?!?!?!?

Saw an ad for a clothing store or maker – didn’t look to closely at that aspect of it – which was lauding assisted suicide in Canada. It is really bad up there – basically, if you’re a depressed teenager or a soldier suffering from PTSD, killing yourself is offered early on. Part of this is driven by bureaucratic cost-saving: each dollar spent on treatment is one less dollar in the health budge for pay and benefits, after all. But it is also the Culture of Death writ large – and they are trying very hard to bring this to the United States. It is, of course, already here in various States and localities…but if we ever get single-payer, offing yourself will quickly become part of the basic plan.

It must be kept in mind that forgetting about God doesn’t make you a happy pagan doing blow off a hooker’s a**…it makes you eventually into a miserable, greedy, narcissist who hates everyone who can’t bring immediate comfort. That is the thing about God. Or, more accurately, what God cannot be – He cannot be your salvation in sin. Only your salvation out of sin. If you live in sin – and I mean really wallow in it, like our Leftists do – then you find that all you have is sin. God is good – He is Joy, Hope, Charity, Courage…all that. If you reject God then you reject what God has to give…and what’s left? Sorrow. Despair. Greed. Cowardice.

I know that various Saints have told us they have seen visions of Hell and most of them accord with the popular vision of fiery pits and, of course, Our Lord used words about burning to describe Hell. But I think it may be a bit different front that. The damned will, indeed, burn. But they’ll also freeze. They won’t be able to move. Or see. Or remember joyful things. All these things are good and all good things come from God…and if you are completely absent from God, you can’t possibly have the least good thing. All those who have completely separated themselves from God have is what God isn’t – hate, fear, loneliness, crushing cold, burning fire. It is very sad to contemplate – and more sad to contemplate those who are still alive and day by day are separating themselves from God. Damnation isn’t easy to obtain – salvation is easy, damnation is hard. You just have to ask for salvation, but you’ve got to work at being damned. And all these people with their assisted suicide, abortion, tolerance of objective evil, their thievery and lies…day by day building hell for themselves.

But that need not concern us directly: as far as salvation or damnation, each person is ultimately on their own: you will ask God for it, or you won’t. But it seems to me that we do approach a breaking point. Another thing I saw recently was this head of marketing for some fancy clothing line and the images this person uses are clearly of a sexually abusive nature towards children. It has caused some controversy…but not a lot of people dropping their contracts with the clothes maker. Lets not get silly here, right? Sure, Nike (or whatever) had to drop Kanye like a bad habit…but he said Bad Words. How can you compare that to gross images of abused children? Kidding aside, we’re seeing our Ruling Class clearly out to normalize sexual activities with minors. Partially this is to get ahead of possible indictments…but it is mostly, in my view, the final progression from the Sexual Revolution. Once disconnect sex from marriage and children – once, that is, stop having it for what it is – and you’ve pretty much removed any argument against any sort of sex. One commentator asserted that in ten years Disney will have a movie featuring and adult-chlld relationship and I won’t bet against that. The only taboo left is against forcible sex…and that will be a high hill to climb, but the Left will gamely do so…because its the last step in normalizing adult-child relationships. Remember, they don’t have to square the circle: they’ll just assert that normal male to female sex even with consent is always rape but anything else, consensual or otherwise, is just part of a person’s sexual identity. Think I’m kidding? They’re already on the assertion that you can’t have free speech if people are able to speak freely.

Depressing, huh? But I’m really not depressed. Concerned! Very much so. But mostly because I know that the collapse and reaction on such things tend to be exceptionally violent. I’d rather we didn’t have that – but with Congressional GOP getting ready to sell us out on amnesty and Ukraine aid, I don’t think we have in place a mechanism to even put the breaks on the Culture War at the federal level. Betting is that the weirdo luggage thief won’t see jail time – probably won’t even have security clearance pulled. The Ruling Class can’t risk having their first non-binary (or whatever) in that position come a cropper, right? Desantis fights against it. Abbott a bit, as well…but this is hardly enough to really turn the tide. And we’re running out of time to turn it!

On the plus side, I am starting to see even a few on the Left realize that it has all gone too far – San Francisco is ok in its place, but when you try to shove it into Omaha, it can get very dicey. We’ll see, I guess!

The Death of Thought

Mark Noonan31 Comments

Saw a Tweet by Tom Nichols – you know, The Expert who deplores how we stupid people just don’t get it – bemoaning that America is being burned to the ground by people like Trump because the Elite never accepted them. Now, to be sure, there would be a bit to that – even when everyone officially loved Trump, he was considered a boor. A flashy, crude bull in the Ruling Class china shop. His family was rich, but still very nouveau; the Trump family started to pick up some money with Donald’s grandfather, but it was dad Fred Trump who got them rich. Basically, the Trump’s haven’t had their money long enough for it to have the stench of work removed.

Nichols isn’t rich – he does well enough, but he’s not one of the rich people who probably despised Trump all along. But while not rich, he is of the class. That is, the Ruling Class. He’s got his degrees and he’s got his positions in the Establishment and, dammit, he’s mad at us for not doing as we’re told – just as the upper class of New York City couldn’t stand Trump for not trying to be like them. But what got me thinking was how Nichols is claiming that Trump, et al are trying to burn it all down. In a flash it came to me what Nichols’ real problem is: he’s never once thought about things.

If you get an engineering or medical degree then, at the end of the day, you had to show you could do some engineering or medicine before you got it. There’s just no other way to do it. On the other hand, if your degree is in history or philosophy or such like, you don’t have to show the faintest thought about the subject: to get the degree, all you must do is repeat back what the professor told you. This doesn’t mean a person with a liberal arts degree can’t think, but it does mean that such a person doesn’t have to think in order to get the degree. And, these days with all the dumbing down, you can get all the way to doctorate without showing the least spark of original thought. My bet, actually, is that most degree programs in the so-called liberal arts these day are designed to discourage thought: they want people who regurgitate information but they don’t want anyone questioning the facts or drawing an unapproved conclusion from the facts as presented.

Man has no alternative, except between being influenced by thought that has been thought out and being influenced by thought that has not been thought out. — G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton there was discussing specifically why we study philosophy, which he admitted can be a bit of a bore. But do keep in mind that in Chesterton’s day, he was talking about the educated people in this matter. He wasn’t expecting the store clerk to take the time to learn Aristotle and Descartes. Be ok if he did, of course, but Chesterton knew that most common people don’t have the time nor inclination for such things. But society, as a whole, is going to be ruled by one or the other – thought that has been thought out, or thought that hasn’t been. It was and remains the duty of those who rule us – by fate, inheritance or transient political victory – to be those who have thought their thought out. Because if we are ruled by people who haven’t thought things out then you’ll get…well, you’ll get what we’ve got.

Over in New York, governor Hochul is in some trouble – may even get beaten on the 8th. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Even in a GOP wave year, New York – really New York City – is so reliably Democrat that the particular conditions wouldn’t matter. There would be so many Democrat votes that the Democrat will win. But there’s a problem and it is particular, especially, to New York City. Crime is rampant. Now, the MSM tries to tell us that because the murder rate is still lower than the peak about 30 years ago, this complaint about crime is just a GOP psy-op designed to fool people into voting for them. It is another example of the MSM’s willingness to say things not only divorced from reality, but from the reality the reporters know from personal experience. The regime propagandists of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia weren’t this compliant! The MSMers know. They live in NYC. They can see it with their own eyes: people waltzing into stores to rob/trash them. Goods in stores increasingly locked up to prevent wholesale looting. The feeling of being unsafe on the streets and the subways. Everyone in NYC feels it. They know it. And while the MSMers are going to loyally carry that water, the voters of NYC are under no such obligation. To be sure, if Hochul is booted on Tuesday it won’t be because NYC went red – but it could because a lot of Blue NYC just stayed home rather than ratify the homeless bum pissing on the curb outside.

And the problem in NYC stems from the imposition of certain policies: most notably the end of cash bail. If you haven’t paid attention to it, you should, because ending cash bail has become the mark of Leftist justice reform. They’ve put it on mute the past six months for political reasons but make no mistake about it: ending cash bail is something they are determined to do. The theory behind this is that cash bail unfairly burdens poor people who are disproportionately minority. This is absolutely true. I mean, no duh: the poor person, whether criminal or just some poor schmuck who got picked up, doesn’t have the money for bail nor for good lawyers who can get bail lowered or removed. Obviously, any system of bail is going to hit against the poor vastly more than against any rich person.

But the solution – ending cash bail – is obviously something which was not thought out. I can totally dig trying to find some way to lower the burden on the poor, but blanket removal of bail requirement was going to have that effect: petty criminals would feel invincible. They wouldn’t even have to spend the night in jail. And people of low moral character would be encouraged to start engaging in crime – especially theft – for that same reason: no real sanction. They can figure: how likely is my trial for stealing $500.00 worth of stuff from CVS even going to happen? And that is if they even bother making an arrest. After all, what cop is going to bother arresting someone – taking that risk and that extra work – just to see the guy walk out of the precinct before the cop has even written up the complaint?

On and on like that, all across the nation and in every aspect of our lives we are burdened by the results of policies imposed by people who are sure they are right, but clearly never thought about what they believe. Sowell has been writing about this for decades. I’ve read those books but only just now am I fully understanding what his main complaint was and is: nobody is thinking. It is all very mindless what goes on. All of our problems – our lack of industrial capacity, or lack of energy production, our food shortages, our crumbling infrastructure, our crime rate, our collapsing education system, our drug addiction, our homelessness, our open border…all if it, every last bit, the result of the ruthless imposition of policies nobody thought about. Nobody sat down and said, “so, what will happen if we do this? It was all just done.

And people like Tom Nichols want us to stick with that. And for a long while I thought that it was, perhaps, pettiness or some other normal, human emotion preventing his like from seeing that Trump really isn’t all that bad (I mean, my goodness, compared to Joe Biden!) and that some good things come from ruthless rejection of Liberal/Left certainties. But then you see that Tweet and you remember that people like him are all-in on fighting Putin over Ukraine and then it really hits you: they’ve never thought about one darned thing.

We have to defend Ukraine!

Why?

To save Democracy!

If Ukraine falls I’ll lose my right to vote in the USA?

Putin stooge!

No matter what what way you ask about it, you won’t get an actual answer. We’re backing up Ukraine – at the risk of WWIII – to save Ukraine from Russia, or NATO from Russia, or Democracy from Russia…and blah, blah, blah. But no explanation of how, say, changing the Russian flag over Donetsk for a Ukrainian flag will actually benefit us. We just have to do it! Russia is bad, don’t you know! Don’t you remember Reagan!

Yeah. As I recall what Reagan wanted was to stop the USSR from expanding outside the USSR via proxy wars and, of course, to get a real nuclear arms reduction treaty with them. He got that. How is that similar to stopping Russia from taking over ethnic Russian territory governed from Moscow prior to 1991?

You’ll never get an answer to that. Nor to why we would, say, defend Germany from Russia rather than Russia from Germany. I mean, on the whole, the Germans are working against us in foreign affairs. They are also major economic competitors who don’t have to pay for an army because we’re there for them. Any chance we should reassess this situation?

No! You Putin Nazi Puppet!

Note that I’m not saying that defending Ukraine is wrong – I’m merely saying that no thought is happening behind our efforts and any attempt at thought is immediately shouted down. And the shouts are led by the people who supposedly have the superior education and thus can think things out better than us.

Until we clear all these people out – not just the politicians but the corporate bosses, the bureaucrats, the generals and admirals, the professors – everyone in charge, we’re not going to fix this. I would seriously expect better results at, say, Defense if I randomly selected some sergeant and made him Chief of Staff. I’d have some confidence, that is, that our four star sergeant might think about things before he made a decision…you know, like what might be the long-term effects of lowering physical requirements so that girls can be in combat outfits. Same with everything – put a plumber in charge of Harvard’s Department of Philosophy and there’s just that chance he’d crack open some of the books and think about whether or not what they’re saying is worth any human being knowing. They really do all have to go. I don’t care what they do, but they must leave. Anyways, might be fun to watch them try to tackle a job which requires results. But, more importantly, once they’re gone, we might be able to openly think about what we want.

What Do We Really Know?

Mark Noonan32 Comments

A Twitter friend went into the way back machine and reminded me of the Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980s. I guess you’d have to be at least 50 to have any memory of it at all: so, a lot of the youngsters in the world wouldn’t know what it was about. Of course, you could Google it – but if you did that, you almost certainly won’t find out about it.

Oh, you’d read a lot about it. And what you read would be almost invariably praising it to the skies. But what you probably won’t read about it is that it was nothing more than a Soviet front organization. We were about to build and deploy a type of nuclear weapon the USSR (a) couldn’t build and (b) couldn’t defend against. Our having these weapons while the USSR didn’t would put us in the driver’s seat – the USSR would essentially be forced to throw in the towel on Cold War competition. So, the USSR did the one thing it was actually good at: call forth the Useful Idiots of the West to ensure the USA shot itself in the foot.

I remember it, now, very well. Especially one of the leading voices of it: Dr Helen Caldicott. She was just about everywhere during the time. Highly in demand for your Soviet inspired peace march and conferences around the world. And she was an Authority on it! She knew was she was talking about! After all, she’s a doctor.

Well, a pediatrician…who never had any experience dealing with either nuclear power or weapons…but she fit the bill: someone who seemed oh, so nice and had Smart credentials and how can you argue against her? You can’t hug your kid with nuclear arms!

The drivel almost worked – huge pressure was placed on Reagan and Thatcher to ditch the new weapons. But, they didn’t…and then the weapons (along with other Reagan tactics) did precisely what they were supposed to do: force the Soviets to the table at a disadvantage and eventually unravel their Empire in Europe (the fall of the USSR was really just a bonus that nobody could foresee).

But that isn’t our issue for the moment – the real issue is that a pack of ridiculous lies nearly sunk Reagan’s USSR policy and even though the lies failed at that, they still managed to implant into the public mind that nuclear power is somehow extra dangerous and that the only safe thing to do with nuclear power is have nothing to do with it. By this time in our history, almost all our electricity production should come from nuclear power. A whole series of plants all across America should be humming with cheap, clean nuclear energy providing far more than our greatest need. We’re not because of people like Caldicott got themselves fooled and then managed to fool enough other people.

And, heck, I have to admit – back there in the late 80s and early 90s, I was wary of nuclear power. I still figured we should go for it, but I had this mental image of it being extra dangerous and we had to take extra care around it…and this was after I got out of the Navy, when I had literally stood next to an operating nuclear power plant aboard a submarine. How could I have been so stupid?

Of course it had to be operated properly – but so does any device. Operate a solar plant incorrectly and you’ll cause a lot of problems. We got into our minds, though, that nuke was Super Dangerous! Thousands of years must pass before it is clean! For goodness sake, at no point did people stop living in Hiroshima. A few days after the bomb went off and all the bodies were cleared away, the people were already starting to rebuild. It is a city of nearly 1.2 million people: far larger than it was when bombed in 1945. Here’s the photo of the iconic dome of Hiroshima. Tell me, what immediately leaps out here?

That is doesn’t quite look like the wasteland of 1945…the trees really take away from the whole End of the World vibe we’re supposed to get here.

Obviously, nuclear weapons are very destructive and nuclear power is something that you have to be careful with…but there is clearly a bit of a mental psychosis in the popular imagination about it which is not supported by things we can easily observe. Things we can know just by knowing them. I doesn’t take special knowledge or insight to know that Hiroshima is a thriving city…but we, in a sense, don’t know it…and so we fear nuclear power and think that using a nuclear weapon is unthinkable.

And then you start to ponder: what else are we refusing to know? How much of what we “know” are lies?

You can do this yourself: just take some subject and think about it. Think about what you know but then take the crucial step: pretend you don’t know it and think about it for a bit. Does what you “know” match up with what you think? Like this:

One of the things you’ll find asserted – in books, movies, documentaries, everywhere – is that the Anglo-American alliance could not have defeated Nazi Germany without the USSR. This is an article of faith. It is true and may not be questioned. If you do, you’re an idiot. I mean, think about it – at least 5 million German and Axis soldiers fell against the USSR. If the USSR hadn’t killed them, then they would have all been turned against us and we never could have won!

Makes sense, right? I mean, that is a lot of dead Krauts and it would have taken us a powerful long time to off them, ourselves. But when examined, it simply falls apart.

At the end of the war, more than 21 million Americans and Brits were in the armed forces. This does not count British Empire forces: even excluding Britain’s Indian Army, this probably worked out to two or three million more. But lets just go with the Yanks and the Limeys.

By 1945, the Brits were at maximum strength: 5 million was about what their population could sustain in the field. The USA could still call up three or four million more than we had, though that would be pushing it. The Germans, if they strained every nerve to the breaking point, could maybe get 10 million into uniform. Starting to see something here? Just the Anglo-Americans, alone, vastly outnumbered the Germans. Throw in the Italians and minor Axis allies and you still have a big advantage for the Anglo-Americans. When you add in that the UK/USA had vastly more economic capacity than the entire Axis (including Japan) and had open access to all the resources in the world what you conclude is that regardless of how any particular engagement went, the only question on defeating Germany was how long it was going to take? Having the USSR in got the job done in 1945, rather than 1946 or 1947. That’s it. Good thing, of course; but certainly far different from “we must be thankful because without the USSR we couldn’t have won the war.”

And who likely floated the idea that we had to have the USSR? The USSR – and their useful idiots in the United States. Starting with those who gave away the store at Yalta in order to get Russia into a war against Japan we had already won.

That is just one mental exercise which, once concluded, lays to rest a myth which is believed really for no other reason than it has been repeated over and over again. But I think we all have to start doing this – start thinking entirely fresh. Roll it around in your. They say this happened: well, does it make sense that it would happen, or happen that way? They say we must do this: why? They say we have retain this policy or alliance: are we sure?

Last night I posted a Tweet where I asserted that the US government must keep no secrets. That a Republic must do her business in the open for all the citizens to see as it is done. Very smart people said we can’t have that – even George Washington believed in keeping diplomatic secrets! Well, sure: if Washington was President today, I’d probably trust him to keep some things confidential. But we’ve got Pudding Brain and his merry band of morons running the show: you really want them to be able to keep what they’re doing secret from you?

But I came to this conclusion by a bit of a winding intellectual road and it just flashed in my mind that secrets are for con artists You don’t keep secret honest dealings – you keep a con secret because if your con gets out into the open, enough people will see it in time to warn your mark off. Heck, even God doesn’t really keep secrets from us – He’s got some Mysteries, but He has shown them to us: we just can’t fully understand God. Go figure. But secrets are just not good – and in government, they are downright bad. And so, the whole FBI/CIA/NSA “National Security” apparatus, in my view, has to be ditched. It is keeping secrets mostly to hide its incompetence. But I only got to this view by thinking anew about everything – by taking nothing for granted. I got here by thinking – and we really do have only two ways to live:

  1. By thought that has been thought out.
  2. By thought that hasn’t been thought out.

For nigh to a century, we’ve been going on “not thought out”. I think we need to change that. We need to find out what we really know.

The Rich, Not the Left, are the Enemy

Mark Noonan7 Comments

Saw this on Twitter:

And it is real. They are paying people to stop farming. You know: growing food. As has been pointed out: you are the carbon they want reduced.

You see this and then you take Sri Lanka in mind, see all the fast food corps trying to market “beyond beef” products, endless articles about how we can eat bugs instead of meat…deliberately pushing up gas and oil costs while pushing electric vehicles while mega corps buy up residential property to rent it out. Sorry, but I see a plan: reduce human population and have what remains jammed into mega-cities where common folks eat bug paste in their life pods while getting around by bicycle or electric train. Did some group of rich people sketch this out? Not sure: but the various rich people NGO’s are all singing from the same Green hymnal and it all comes out to regular people having less, with the subtext being there will be fewer regular people.

Leave aside whether this is or isn’t a global conspiracy and you’re still left with the fact of what they are doing: in the name of “saving the planet” they are proposing we completely restructure our society to be Green – and no matter how you slice it, Green gives you less food and energy. With seven billion people on Earth, the wheels of agriculture, manufacturing and transport must turn rapidly in order for everyone to get their daily bread. If you interfere with that, there simply won’t be enough to go around. And rely on it, if there are shortages, the rich people telling us to go Green aren’t suffering them. Went to the store today to get yellow peppers and they didn’t have any. Hardly any red peppers, either. This isn’t odd food – this is staple stuff for the modern American diet. Bin after bin where the peppers normally are sit empty. But I guarantee you that if Gates wants some yellow peppers with his dinner tonight, he’s got them or will have them within the hour.

So, in my view, it isn’t the Left that we really have a problem with. They’re just kooks who don’t know anything – the problem comes in when the rich adopt Leftist views and seek to implement them. As to just why billionaires want to impose the ideals of ignorant Marxists, I don’t know for certain. It is probably a variety of reasons: but the underlying issue is that the Masters of the Universe want to remain Masters…and they are more than happy to change title and Party Line as long as they stay rich and in charge. Chesterton pointed this out more than a century ago when he noted that the British Ruling Class would have no problem changing over from being Duke of Norfolk to being Administrator of Norfolk. Because at the end of all plans of the rich, they remain fabulously rich, immune to law and firmly in control. What matters to you if the mass of people are crammed into stinking, crime ridden cities? You’ve just flown out to your private island after another Geneva confab and you’re getting ready for you and your buddies to abuse some young men and girls.

We have to cease worrying about absurdities like AOC or the latest Tik Tok Progressive weirdo who is grooming kids to be trans – these are problems and they’ll have to be dealt with, but the way to deal with them is to get rid of the rich people. Get rid of those who fund, promote and protect the Marxist fruitcakes. The Marxist numbskulls would be powerless and ignored except for very rich people funneling them money so they can attack not the rich, but you and me with our suburban homes, cars and our weekend trip to the beach (and the Rich hates that – hates that right next to their zillion dollar beachfront home are regular folks just being there). And do keep that in mind: for all the Left’s “eat the rich” rhetoric, their practical policy demands are for you and me to have less…less money, less property, less freedom. And who want us to have less? Those who have the most – their wealth is sacred, ours is Destroying the Planet. The footsoldiers of the Left are just too stupid to see how they are being manipulated…but that is no surprise because you have to be monumentally stupid to be a Leftist to begin with. But they are still not the enemy – the most aggressive BLM/Antifa rioter is not your enemy. He’s an idiot. He’s a tool. And he’s sent out against you by people who have fabulous fortunes, almost all inherited or recently acquired via political connections.

Unless and until we make this mental shift and realize that the rich are our enemies, we’re really not going to get anywhere. Any victory will be temporary in nature. Defeated in one field, they’ll just use their money to open up another one…and it doesn’t take them much money. Just a few million dollars can fund all sorts of people and programs to attack us. And what is even a billion dollars to someone with tens of billions? It is chump change – and for chump change, they will destroy you. Unless you take all their money away.

I’m not talking about taxing and redistributing – I’m talking about straight up confiscation. The Ruling Class does it to us all the time via asset forfeiture. Turn about is fair play – their money is forfeit one fine day. We just take it, leaving them with nothing – and then we pass it out to our people in some set increment so that the net wealth of our side increases.

Or, you can adhere to some tired theory which holds that private property includes fortunes of hundreds of billions which are being used to undermine the very basis of normal, human life. Up to you. Pick what you want. I prefer we get rid of those who propose to desrtoy us.

They Want You to Lie

Mark Noonan17 Comments

You might have seen the exchange between Senator Hawley and Professor Khiara Bridges. Bridges is absolutely insane. Stupid, too. Someone who knows absolutely nothing but whatever Marxist drivel was shoved into her…and then she was advanced in the legal career because as a POC who could regurgitate the Party Line on command, she was just what Diversity demanded. But there is a very sinister aspect to her – and I’ll be generous and say she, herself, might not understand it. Mindless mouthpieces like the Professor are such because they are mindless, after all. But consciously or not, what she is demanding is that we all become liars.

In the exchange, what the Professor insists upon is that saying only women can get pregnant is transphobic and is violence against transgender people. Think about that – she’s saying that if you state a biological fact (“women get pregnant”) then you are killing people. It is an absurd thing to say. It is insane. But, it is crucial to the Left’s agenda – because sane, tolerant people don’t like to get into confrontations. We like peace and quiet. And, so, faced with someone like Bridges, we start to trim our sails…maybe not all at once going along with it, but carefully editing our own words to cause the least offense possible. But, folks, we’re trying to cause the least offense to people who are insane liars. I don’t think this effort has an upside to it.

The crucial thing for the Left – all the time and on every issue – is to get people to lie. To get them to concede, even if only partially, that the Left’s lie is true. Think about it – when the Floyd issue exploded the Left’s Party Line was that racist cops were hunting down unarmed black men just for the racist heck of it. Not wishing to cause offense, people on the right hemmed and hawed about it – instead of just calling such claim what it is (an insane lie), there was an attempt to not be confrontational. You know how it went, “sure, there are racist cops and there is much racism in America and all of us are saddened by the unjustified death of George Floyd, but…”. And everything after “but” was pointless…because the lie had been agreed to. Maybe not exactly in Leftist terms, but enough of it to make any policy response to the Floyd death in line with Leftist ideology. Had we true courage on our side, we would have said the truth: Floyd died because he was a stupid, high as a kite and passing funny money. Had he not be stupid, high or breaking the law, he’d still be alive. That a cop was involved in his death was pure happenstance – Floyd was going to an early grave, cops or no cops. The example in my mind while this unfolded was my late elder brother: died because of a stupid drug-addict fight at the age of 50…because he was stupid and got high and then got into a fight and so he passed out on asphalt in the summer sun and his brain cooked to death. It could very well have been an interaction with a cop that killed him…but, it was another drug addicted bum who did him in. And it didn’t matter – my brother is dead because he was stupid and high; the particular circumstances of his death are irrelevant.

And I know that seems harsh and perhaps it is – but it isn’t like my brother didn’t have any agency. He had a thousand chances to alter course. He was given aid by family and friends over a many year span of time…all he had to do to live a nice life was stop being stupid and getting high. Lots of people have successfully navigated this and gone on to happy, productive lives. It isn’t a miracle: it is an act. A choice. A decision. Some people never make it and pay the price for their folly. George Floyd and my brother: same/same.

But the Left doesn’t care about that. Didn’t and doesn’t care that Floyd is dead, either. Floyd was just what was necessary for the lie: a black man who died in custody of a white cop. Once that fact was established, all the Left did was tell as story based on the Left’s lie – that racist cops hunt down black people. And it worked – by and large, almost the entire Western Establishment went along with it. But do keep in mind that the Floyd case wasn’t just to advance a false Narrative of racist cops…it was to make it impossible for cops to police our cities and thus allow for an explosion of crime which the Left will then use to advance their biggest goal: the breakdown of American society as “proof” that a free market system governed by people who believe in God doesn’t work. Crime, in the Left’s view, is the result of an unjust system…and by getting the cops out of the equation, they can now proceed to the social destruction which, in their minds, will force people to turn to the Left for a solution.

And it isn’t just one lie – it is a lie about everything. Racist cops, men can get pregnant, illegals are mere migrants, etc, etc, etc…are all designed with the same purpose, to get us to go along with the lies and so make us defenseless as society falls apart…after all, if we’re liars, how do we call out the Left and demand they stop? Can’t: not if you’re a liar, too. But the Left is making it so that just to live in society, you have to lie.

Put the breaks on it – concede nothing. Whatever the Left is saying is a lie. It can’t be other because the Left’s ideology is based on lies. Push back against the lies – this will take some courage and some of us who do so will suffer social and economic pain. But it must be done. The Leftist Emperor has no clothes and if we can merely say that, the Left will lose.

Quid est veritas?

Mark Noonan19 Comments

The famous question of Pilate to Jesus: what is truth? Now, we Christians answer that by saying Jesus is the Truth…and that is true and sufficient for all events. But as we are no longer a Christian civilization, perhaps we need to expand on it a bit more? For the heathen…and, maybe, a lot of those who call themselves Christian but live as practical pagans.

The basic issue of truth has been rolling around in my head a lot lately, but Team Pudding Brain setting up a Disinformation Governance Board gives the matter urgency. To absolutely no surprise to you or anyone on our side, there are already Never Trump squishes trying to explain or explain away this board – which cannot but have a nefarious purpose of suppressing dissent. The way NT writes it up, there is a need for someone to clamp down on “misinformation”, though when pressed they’ll admit that a board inside the Department of Homeland Security isn’t the best place for it. There is, naturally, no best place for it – there is no place for it, at all.

We know that when the Left says “misinformation” what they mean is anything they disagree with. It is why they say “misinformation” rather than “lies”. Keep in mind that Leftist fact checkers will take someone which is 100% true and call it “partially false”, based on what they say is the relevant context. Meanwhile, bald faced lies by the Left are held to be “mostly true” because once you think about the whole situation, that Leftist lie speaks to a larger truth. You see how it goes: anything we say is false, anything they say is true…and so even when we say factually true things, we’re spreading “misinformation” and that has to be stopped. Now by Pudding Brain’s Cheka inside DHS.

But the larger problem we have is that a lot of people don’t know what truth is any longer. We’ve been conditioned for decades to think that divorce (ie, breaking a promise) is ok and that we have to tell “little while lies” just to get on in society. It was under Bill Clinton that this was rammed home. It would have eventually been rammed home by the Left but Clinton gave it urgency because just about everything he said was false…but as it was all in the service of the greater good (ie, advancing the Left) we all had to be taught that some times lies are good.

There is a poll out there were people were asked questions like “what portion of the population is gay?” and “what portion of the population is white” and the overall results show that people haven’t a clue about their own nation. The question about gay was very revealing in that the “vote” for gay was about 20 percent when the actual gay number is 3 percent. People are walking around thinking that one in five are gay. But, who can blame them? Turn on popular culture and it is shot through with gay characters. It seems that every move and TV show has to have a significant number of gay people in it when, in reality, most Americans might personally know one or two gay people because there simply aren’t that many out there (for myself, I personally know two gay people – and one of them is only distantly known via a second party mutual friend). People think America is barely majority white when the reality is that we’re seventy percent white. People think that twenty percent are millionaires when it is less than one percent.

And this is all because the people have been lied to and they have been conditioned to accept and repeat lies.

Here I would like to point out that a lie does no have to be false. In fact, a lie can be entirely factually correct and still be a lie. Like this:

Here are your facts. Jack went to the store where he pulled out a gun and shot the clerk and stole fifty dollars. He then went home and had a beer and told his wife he loved her.

Here is your news report: Jack came home from the store and after having a beer, told his wife he loved her.

There is nothing false in the news report, but it is a completely false story all the same. It is a fact that the most effective lies adhere as close to the truth as possible in order to transmit the lie. Recently, Marjorie Taylor Greene was accosted by an MSMer who tried to ask her why she brought up the possibility of martial law to prevent Biden from becoming President. She stopped and asked the MSMer to read the actual text (all the while refusing to confirm it was even her text – my bet is that it isn’t, but she didn’t want to get drawn into an argument on that level). Once she really pressed, the MSMer (not facing the camera while he did so) read the whole text and thus we found out that it wasn’t MTG saying we needed to go to martial law, but someone saying that some people are talking like that. And some people were – but some people talking about a thing doesn’t equate to anyone advocating for a thing.

But there was the MSM, trying to slander MTG into being an insurrectionist. And the lie was merely the MSM not reporting the whole text – they just latched on to a word and then started asking everyone “why was MTG advocating martial law?”. Now, MTG ably destroyed the MSMer – calling him a liar to his face – but you can bet on it that if any of the video is shown in the MSM, it won’t be the parts where MTG calls the MSMer a liar or the MSMer having to admit that the text doesn’t verify MTG calling for martial law. Whatever gets into the MSM show will, by selective use of words and facts, work out to the MSM viewers being told that MTG favored martial law to stop Biden. And it will have the true things in it that MTG was part of a text thread where martial law was mentioned…and that will sound oh, so ominous! But it will also be a lie.

I think our first step here is to define a lie – and it isn’t just the statement of a falsehood. It is the attempt to deceive which differentiates a lie from the truth. And while it is possible to deceive someone with an outright falsehood, the reality is that the most effective deceptions use truth as their foundation. It is the difference between an adult pulling a toddler’s leg by asserting the Moon is made out of green cheese and the con artist trying to sucker the unwary out of their money. The adult isn’t really trying to get the kid to believe the Moon is made out of cheese…but the con artist is definitely trying to get the money. This is why Trump grandly saying that Mexico will pay for the wall (implying to the unwary – or the malicious – that Trump was saying Mexico will cut us a check for wall construction) wasn’t an attempt to deceive, but Obama saying “if you like your doctor, you can keep him”, was. Trump was trying to drive home a rhetorical point about the necessity and benefit of the wall…Obama was just bald faced lying to save his political bacon because if he had come out and told us what ObamaCare was going to do, he would have lost the 2012 election. Obama lied to fool us into keeping him in power, Trump exaggerated to make a point – there is a gigantic difference here.

“Safe, legal and rare”: remember that? This was the supposedly centrist Democrat answer to the problem of abortion in the 1990’s. It sounded so good, but it was an attempt to deceive. And it by and large worked. It sounded so right. “Hey, I don’t like abortion, but as long as it is rare, then I’m ok with it.” Democrats went with that angle because saying “federally funded abortion on demand to the moment of birth” (their actual position at the time and now) would have been politically disastrous. But it has been lies like that which have kept the Left in power because the lies, which all contain aspects of truth, are so relentlessly hammered home by the MSM and popular culture, help people make a coward’s bargain. That bargain is: I’ll pretend you’re not lying, if you’ll leave me alone.

But that bargain never works, long term. The trouble is that the liars never stop lying: they just see if you’ll swallow the next one as readily as the last. And I think the Left has gone too far – and the trans issue seems to be the dam buster here. Trying to get people to agree that men can get pregnant and that kids are old enough to decide if they should transition was just a step way too far. But even with the rising pushback here, we have a long way to go. Many other lies have been very firmly implanted into the American mind. People – large numbers of of them – believe complete drivel because it has been endlessly and slickly imparted to them in popular culture for decades.

To take an example: Columbus. Once such a hero that we named our capital city after him, he’s now nearly universally despised, and by extension every explorer, pioneer and colonist despised with him. Most people, if you query them on the subject, will at least go along with some concept of Columbus and his successors being bad. Never mind that they recently dug up 1,000 female skulls in Mexico and, after first thinking it was a mass grave of Cartel victims, discovered it was instead a 1,000 year old site of mass female human sacrifice. Had Columbus and the Conquistadores not come along, that stuff would have just kept on going.

So, too, with all of it – there is no indication that my Irish ancestors, left alone, would have set in motion a train of events which got me to sitting in my air conditioned home in the desert with a pool out back and a pantry stuffed with food that I didn’t have to sweat in the fields to obtain. Sure, there were probably some ancestors back there who were hung for stealing a sheep and I am firmly against hanging sheep thieves…but the bottom line is that absent the Limey bastards, I wouldn’t be living nearly as well as I do today. So, thank God for the colonists!

But we can’t even have that discussion these days because the lies have been so deeply implanted that most wouldn’t know what you were talking about and a determined minority would seek to socially destroy you for pointing out relevant facts which place the Current Narrative in a bad light.

We have to get back to truth – the real truth. Telling the story which places all relevant information in the public square in a timely manner so that people can react properly to events. To do this, lying – intentional deception – is going to have to be punished. The liar,when caught, can’t be allowed to give us a “my bad” and move on. There has to be pain involved. Lots of pain. So much pain that people might start to think that honesty really is the best policy.

Hey, its either that or get ready for a future where you die of easily treatable diseases as your doctor in his ignorance throws up his hands – not knowing the simple treatments because after a century of lies, it was decided that being a doctor doesn’t require knowledge of human physiology. But he’s dead certain that men can get pregnant.

The Lies We Contend With

Mark Noonan71 Comments

When Andrew Yang announced he was leaving the Democrat party, I commented to him that nearly everything he believed was a lie, but also noting that huge amounts of what I used to believe were lies as well. That I now could see the whole system of lies, right and left, which have been used to keep we, the people compliant. Then someone asked me when did the lies start?

To be sure, there have been lies since the Garden. But I do believe what we’ve dealt with these past decades is unique in human history: a whole series of lies maintained at all costs by people who do know better. And while it grew out of a host of factors, I pinpoint the need for a system of lies to the Korean War, specifically to the Truman Administration decision to not seek victory.

We were all told – and we all believed – that when Truman fired MacArthur it was the right and brave thing to do. That MacArthur was off the ranch and threatened not merely a Third World War, but the very Constitutional structure of the United States. Like all good lies, this had a kernel of truth: as a military officer, MacArthur was bound to obey the orders of his civilian Commander in Chief. But that bit of truth was used to blind us to the fact that in a cold blooded and cruel manner, Truman and his Administration had decided that people would continue to die, with no hope of victory, until the Communists decided to end the killing. That was the issue. It always was the issue. And it isn’t even mentioned, for the most part. When it is, it is quickly passed over. No one wants to really consider this. Most of the people who died in the Korean War – Koreans, Chinese and Americans – died after Truman made his decision. They died fighting it out on an arbitrary line of no moral or strategic value. Truman did this. And then slept soundly at night. So did the Defense officials and the generals. The soldiers on the line slept less soundly. And they died. Truman’s decision wasn’t made to spare lives, but merely to sustain the decision he had made to enter the war when he had lost the will to win the war. He lied to the American people in order to save his political prospects.

Sound familiar?

When the Chinese intervened we had two morally acceptable courses open to us: fight it out to victory, or to capitulate. We chose the immoral path: keep fighting, but only to provide cover for a coward’s decision to neither win nor quit. Rely on it: they sized it up. They knew that with our absolute command of the sea and our aerial superiority that the Chinese could not force us all the way out of Korea. They could calculate: this many dead and wounded per month, this large a pool of draftees to send: presto, we could sustain the line indefinitely. All it would take is lots of people – mostly poorer people the leaders never met – dying. The Western Front is held up as the immoral waste of lives, but it wasn’t: as many mistakes as the Allies made, their goal was always total victory. The lives weren’t to be expended to no point. In Korea, they were to be expended pointlessly. And to do this, they had to lie. They had to tell us that if we went for victory, it would lead to WWIII as the Russians would go to war with us and we’d all be nuked. End of the world! If we don’t have Johnny from Akron and Li from Shanghai blow each other to bits over and over again, we’re all gonna die!!!!

Too bad for Johnny and Li: but, hey, at least 24 hour round the clock nuclear holocaust was avoided.

Flaw in the theory: Russia only exploded her first nuke in 1949 and the best they had for a strategic bombing was the TU-4, a reverse engineered B-29 which was incapable of reaching most of the United States from Soviet air bases. Even we didn’t have a real nuclear bomber until the introduction of the B-36 in 1948. Nuclear war as in total wipe of humanity simply wasn’t in the cards during any point of the Korean War. Additionally, there was very little chance that an aging Stalin would bring his country into another World War as Russia was still rebuilding from WWII (it would be the mid-60’s before Russia was fully recovered from the destruction of WWII).

In short, a cruel calculation was made to not win as that seemed more difficult and then a series of lies were generated to explain why we wouldn’t win but the dying would keep going. That, in my view, is when our government became a web of lies…and when all sides of the political spectrum (except a few put down as kooks) became wedded to the web of lies.

In the end, we built up a massive, national security State in service to this concept that at any moment now the Russians would nuke us and so we had to have a massive nuclear force on hair trigger alert, a gigantic Army ready to fight (but not win!) anywhere in the world and a whole bunch of what we were doing kept secret from the people, who were to be monitored and manipulated. By the 1960’s, in my view, the thing was feeding on itself. Just getting ever more crazy and using ever larger amounts of BS to justify itself. Because after a while, people were invested in it. Defense contractors, think tanks, universities, media companies: a whole host of individuals and institutions essentially made their living by sustaining the fiction that we can’t win a war, but we needed a massive military and secret police (FBI, CIA, NSA) to fend off defeat. Nobody was ever allowed to do two things which would cut to the chase:

Drive the Marxists out of America

Directly confront the USSR with a “war or quit” ultimatum.

We couldn’t do these things because they would solve the problem. Getting rid of the American Marxists would end the internal threat and challenging the Soviets to fight or back off would either get them to back off, or get them to fight (they would have backed off: the balance of forces all through the Cold War was overwhelmingly in our favor – they knew it, and so did we).

We had to pretend that having Che Guevara wanna-bees in our schools and bureaucracies was just the price of freedom. Even so-called Conservatives said we had no right to push such people out. We had to allow America to be flooded with a series of corrosive, anti-human Marxist ideologies which sapped our will and warped our sense of right and wrong. And we had to do this simply to sustain lies. In this case, the lie that if we didn’t let our enemies subvert us, our enemies would win. And still all based on the first lie: the Korea Lie – that we can’t win a stand up fight to simply end this once and for all.

Here in 2021, it is all self-sustained. We’re not even allowed to win a fight with rag tag Islamist militias. And we’re appointing Marxist economists to positions in our government.

Reject it all: reject all the lies. You don’t have to fund your enemies. You don’t have to sustain the National Security State. You don’t have to protect those who hate you and want you enslaved. You are sane. You want law and order, sound economics, your people come first: these are normal, sane attitudes and anything against them has to go down. Your laws are for you: for sanity. Not for them, the insane. The liars. The laws do not protect evil. They do not foster insanity. Anyone who says they do is lying to you. Ignore them and take what is yours by right: take back, that is, your citizenship in the Republic and insist that the Republic exist for you, not for those who hate you and lie to you and wish to plunder you.

The Real World is Knocking at the Door

Mark Noonan13 Comments

Wow! Two in a day. When was the last time I did that? But, I’m kinda at an impasse in figuring out the last chapters of Book VII in the Mirrors series and, also, I’m rather furious. So, here we go!

I upset a friend today – don’t know her personally as she’s a Twitter friend but she’s a nice, interesting, right-of-center lady with a fascinating background and lots wise and insightful things to say. What I said was this:

Guys: if you’re not willing to do a bit of shooting pour encourager les autres, this won’t get fixed. Only the thought that they may be shot in a fortnight will concentrate the military mind and get them off working a lobbying gig and back to learning how to fight.

And:

Why does the general who screwed the pooch get let off when the private he ordered to die in a badly planned and executed op is dead or legless? You want to be a general? Cool. Win or die. If it’s a defeat, better die in the battle or by your own hand. Don’t come back.

A bit harsh to modern sensibilities, but I think it needed to be said. I intend to say a lot more of it. We’re not quite at the point of aux armes, citoyens, but we’re pretty close. I was advised to not be so worried about it…and that law, Constitution and Courts will get us through.

Bad news: they won’t.

And that is why I am, indeed, worried. We don’t have a functioning government. The Media are mere regime propagandists. We have, in short, no way to fix this prior to the 2022 and 2024 elections and the part most at risk at the moment – the Executive – not before 2024. We don’t have people in charge – and we can’t get people in charge – who understand the gravity of the situation or, if they did, have the desire to help the United States out of it. The only calculation any of them are making is how to retain their own political viability. They have not, ever, had a thought for the United States or her people and they aren’t suddenly going to have one now.

And I know that seems a rather bleak assessment, but it won’t be the first time its happened. The most recent time it happened in a major power was France in 1940. Do you want to know what the Prime Minister of France, Paul Reynaud was concerning himself with in the last days before the French surrender? Getting his mistress and a suitcase full of government cash into Spain while angling for an ambassadorship to the US from Petain. At a time when the PM should have been bending every effort to defend France, he was making sure he had money for himself and his side piece and maybe a sinecure from the incoming collaborationist regime. And, mark this, Reynaud was in the PM’s office because it was thought that he was the most energetic French leader who would put up the best fight against Hitler. Compared to the other people in the council, he was a lion of defiance…the rest were even mores so into figuring out how to wind up in power and wealth even if it was under Nazi rule.

The collapse of France in 1940 stunned the world. But it had been in the cards for decades – all it took was Hitler to push open the door and it all fell apart. It was only, after all, kept together because the French people, who largely despised their government and leaders, couldn’t coalesce around a sole option to do away with the Ruling Class. Sound familiar?

No institution in the United States is respected. None can be trusted. We all know for certain or at least strongly suspect that everyone in the upper reaches is merely feathering their nests and doesn’t give a damn about the people of the United States. Our military is proving itself, in front of our eyes, incapable of mounting operations. We can’t even be sure that if we placed our troops into battle that they would know what to do. I hope they can. You do, too. But how much training have they really been doing since 2009? Sure, Trump for 4 years…but none of us suspected the rot we’re seeing and so Trump might not have, either. All it takes, now, is for someone to push in the door.

And that is foreign and domestic. Our government lacks legitimacy and not just because of the vote in 2020 – but because no one really believes it is representative of what the American people want. Are you going to fight for them? But our bigger worry is in the foreign sphere: what enemy of the United States is going to have the least fear of us right now? The only calculations they are making in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran is how much money it would cost them to do whatever they want. China’s leaders are thinking terms of, “if we invade Taiwan, global markets will probably drop 25% in a day or two and that will cost the exchequer X yuan: but we gain Y yuan by taking Taiwan’s assets.” If Y is greater than X, they’ll move. They have no worry about our response because we’ve just shown we can’t make one. Today Team Biden is fumbling around trying to explain away what might be thousands of US citizens still stuck in Afghanistan…with the underlying statement being that we can’t get them out. We lack the means to do so.

We won WWII and then we immediately entered a fantasy land and the more the world started to fall apart (and it has been falling apart since 1956) the more the Ruling Class gave us the functional equivalent of Bread and Circuses. I hope everyone enjoyed 50 years of pretending the bill will never come due, because it just has. The real world is back and it isn’t even pissed off…its just the real world where things happen and you have to deal with them, or die.

Good luck to all of us! Say your prayers. Hope that nothing really bad happens until after January 20, 2025.

Enlightened Insanity

Mark Noonan16 Comments

Do you realize why there was an Inquisition? That is something I think most people don’t ponder much. Most just consider it to have been a uniformly horrible thing which we happily dispensed with as the Enlightenment instructed us in the value of tolerance. To a certain extent, there is some truth to such a view, but it doesn’t cover the entirety of it.

That which we call the Inquisition started in response to the Albigensian heresy in the 12th century. If you read secular history about it, you’ll find that the poor Albigensians were horribly persecuted by the Church because they simply wanted to practice their simple faith. Ok, fine. But they also believe that sexual reproduction was inherently wrong – that the physical world was something created by an evil god and it had to be renounced so that the human spirit could unite with the good god. In other words, if the heresy had been allowed to continue, it would have ended civilization. The Church, of course, was also concerned with what happened to human souls – being rather interested in their winding up in heaven rather than hell and so looked in horror upon a sect which pretty much ensured via its beliefs a one-way trip to hell. So, there were two reasons to go after these guys: they’d imperil your soul and end civilization. That is why there was an Inquisition – to root out people preaching insane, destructive ideas.

To be sure, any institution run by human beings is going to mess up. It is in the nature of things because we’re human. Whether or not the attempt should have been made or whether or not the right methods were used in the attempt is a matter for debate. But the fact that lunatic ideas which bring death should be stopped is not something I will debate about. Lunatic ideas bringing death are bad. And bad things are to be held at arms length to the best of our ability.

But, in the event, those who argued against the Inquisition and in favor of tolerance won the debate. The Enlightenment – so called – happened. And people were free to express themselves in any way they chose. This did have the benefit of giving us the Declaration of Independence…but it also gave us the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. Bit of an up and downside on that – and the Declaration of Independence could easily have been written by St Thomas Aquinas…the Manifesto and the Kampf, not so much…because both of those were heresies and St Thomas would have seen right through them.

Now, why do I bring this up? Because earlier today I saw a Twitter thread by a Muslim which expressed the view that Islam needs an Enlightenment. There is much merit to such an argument on the face of it. But I also immediately had my doubts.

First off, of course, is my belief that Islam is itself a heresy – Mohammed taking various aspects of Christianity (and a little Judaism) that he liked and dispensing with the bits he didn’t like. The classic heresy model – leaving something or things out. Be that as it may, if it started as a heresy, it developed rather rapidly into its own thing. And as a Christian I can and do take various issues with it. But whatever one wishes to say about it, for quite a long time it was just another part of the world tapestry. Violent as all things can be, but also beautiful, as all things can be. Yes, I can list for you a large number of Muslim sons-of-bitches but any Muslim out there can come up with a list of Christian SOBs to match – but in neither case were the SOBs the thing about the religions or the civilizations they created. I’ve read quite a bit of history of Islam and I do have to say that something changed over the ages – and the change was rather recent.

Some time in the 19th century or maybe a little earlier, the historical records start to document people of the Muslim faith acting in ways which they simply had to know were wrong. Not just in Christian ideals, but in Muslim ideals. There is a difference between fighting for your side – however brutally you may do it – and committing acts of cruelty. One early example of this is the massacre of about 50 British captives in Delhi during the Mutiny of 1857. But it got worse as time went on – acts of supreme cruelty which had no justification and which the perpetrators knew were wrong when they did them (on the simple fact that they would never want such things done to them). It wasn’t, after all, backwoods Muslim peasants who set the bombs which started the Battle of Algiers in 1956 – it wasn’t, that is, regular, old fashioned Muslims who came up with the idea of setting a bomb off specifically where children gathered so as to cause the most horrific death and injuries to people who could have in no way caused offense.

That takes a modern, Enlightened mind to come up with.

You could say that the things like the bombing in Algiers was provoked – and, to a certain extent, that is correct. The French, far more than the British, could be very brutal overlords when challenged. There were plenty of reasons for the Algerians to be displeased with the French. But it should be noted that the first serious effort of the Algerian rebels wasn’t so much to go after the French, but to kill those Algerians who were friendly to France. And kill them quite brutally, without sparing women and children. That sort of thing isn’t done in response to provocation – that is a cold blooded act of murder. So were the bombings. So, later, were acts like the Munich attack and the Avivim school bus bombing (seriously: what sort of a sick person even thinks up a target like that?). Muslims were involved in these things, but to deliberately seek to murder – usually very cruelly – people who specifically can’t fight back…no, sorry, I’m not going to say that is a Muslim thing. That is an Enlightened thing – that is what happens when people are allowed to pursue insane ideas to their logical conclusion.

Given things like bombed school buses and, well, Treblinka, I’m going to have to come down a bit against the Enlightenment – the idea, that is, that everyone should be able to proceed unchecked wherever their thoughts take them. I’m going to assert that there needs to be a corrective, here and there, which will tell the insane to sit down and shut up – before they get gas chambers or bombed buses into their heads. I think that I’d rather have to deal with the most deeply orthodox Muslims around as they deal with me, a deeply orthodox Christian. I think we’d probably get along better than modern, Enlightened folks. Even if we ended up fighting each other, it wouldn’t be a contest to see who could be the most merciless.

Anyways, this is where my thoughts are leading me these days. A sort of Endarkenment…where being a lunatic gets you a padded room rather than a tenured position or a promotion to Dear Leader.