Morality

The Lies are the Problem

Mark Noonan22 Comments

Today the Supreme Court heard a couple cases related to government efforts to suppress dissenting views of Covid information. It is a rather big First Amendment case and how the Court rules will be important going forward. During the back and forth Justice Jackson expressed concern that allowing people to speak completely freely could restrict the government’s power. This was ripped into because of course the purpose of the First Amendment – as well as all others in the Bill of Rights and plenty of other provisions in the Constitution – is to limit the power of government. It seemed to shock people that a Justice on the Supreme Court could say such a thing.

To which I said: why in heck are you surprised?

Ketanji Brown Jackson is the completely conventional product of the American education and judicial systems. We need not trouble ourselves about whether or not she was affirmative-actioned into her positions; it doesn’t really matter. Whether she did it on merit or by box-checking, the result is the same. And anyone else who is a product of the American education and judicial system is going to be the same unless somewhere along the line they stepped out of it and learned something they weren’t supposed to. The small percentage who get off the ranch are the “conservative judges” that we pin our hopes on – only to all too often find that for all their ability to some times get it right, their default position is still the Establishment (only Clarence Thomas, the late Antonin Scalia and a very few others up and down the judicial line have completely freed themselves from Establishment orthodoxy). The Establishment Mill turns out Establishmentarians. It is what it is for; if there was a happy time when we had colleges and judges who were for thinking, that time is long past.

With all the back and forth about the First Amendment today, something occurred to me early on: there is a crucial issue at stake here. Two questions, really:

  1. Do lies have First Amendment protections?
  2. If not, who determines what is a lie?

I’ve talked about this before and I have come to the very firm conclusion that lies are not protected speech. In fact, can’t be protected speech. That we’re downright stupid if we think that we should fight and die for the right of someone to lie to us. But I’ll also note that no matter how you answer those questions, you are on treacherous ground. If you say “yes” then you’re plagued with liars. If you say “no” then you have to figure out how to suppress lies while retaining liberty.

In the end, there is no 100% “right” answer. This is pretty common in human affairs, actually. Hard and fast rarely works out that well no matter how stable you might think it is. It is rigid and rigid things tend to collapse. But balance is also precarious as you might recall from the last time you tried to walk on a narrow beam – there is just that perfect position where you don’t fall but just a little bit off either way and over you go. But, not being rigid, you can continually adjust yourself as you go along and so navigate the peril. Just as an aside, we are not here discussing the Laws of God, which are immutable. We are discussing human affairs; that is, how to we twist and weave with the mass of contradictory humanity towards an approximation of Justice?

To get back to Justice Jackson. As noted, she’s Establishment. In fact, bi-partisan Establishment. Uniparty, that is. When she was first put up for the Federal bench, she was introduced by Paul Ryan. She’s related to him by marriage. Ryan praised her character, intellect and integrity. And she’s been praised like that her whole career. And, hey, don’t get me wrong: maybe she’s the nicest person in the whole, wide world. I don’t know: I’ve never met her and probably never will. But her intellect and integrity? So, what Ryan was telling me back in 2013 was that he knew her, loved her, respected her…and never got around to finding out that her reading of the First Amendment was 180 from the intent of the Amendment? That’s a kind of crucial thing, don’t you think? This isn’t a variation on an obscure aspect of law. This is the First Amendment. Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech. Pretty clear, no? But Ryan never had that discussion with her? I mean, with the family. Over Thanksgiving. Little back and forth about differing views…she being a liberal jurist and he (at the time) being a Conservative House member. Never came up?

I guess that is possible but, honestly, figure the odds. Could it be that Ryan was that incurious about her views? Well, then why was he out there touting her as being this excellent person if he didn’t know anything about her? He was either lying out of ignorance (saying good things about her that he had no idea about) or lying out of malevolence (he knew she was a judicial Maoist but didn’t want to alert the people to this fact). In either case, when Ryan introduced her in 2013, he was lying. And so, it turns out, was she: she went through the confirmation process many times in her trek to the Supreme Court and never did she let us know that she felt there was a legitimate reason for the government to censor speech. That, in fact (per her questions today) she felt that it was wrong to stop government censorship because that would make us all unsafe. This is a rather crucial bit of information, don’t you think? Its also not an opinion you arrive at all of a sudden…either you thought about it for years or it was drilled into you for years. There is no way you just suddenly look at “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” and go, “know what? Congress shall make that law – I don’t care what the Constitution says, in certain instances I think that freedom of speech should be abridged all to heck and gone. And if Congress won’t, then the President unchecked by any authority can go ahead and do it.” It doesn’t matter that nobody asked her directly about it: we have an obligation to tell the whole truth. You are a liar if you leave crucial information out as much as if you relate false information. If a bank robber said “I went to the store and then came home” when he actually went to the store, robbed the bank, and then came home, then he’s a liar in addition to being a bank robber.

If Ryan had said, “Kentanji is a very nice lady and a wonderful part of my extended family but, my goodness, she’s a commie fanatic; don’t let her near a court”, then he would have told the truth. And it is what he should have said in 2013. But that would have made her mad. Other parts of Ryan’s family, too. And, of course, the larger Establishment which was already clearly grooming her for the judicial heights, if not the Supreme Court at that time. And when she did her first confirmation hearing, she should have told us that her judicial philosophy was warmed over Leninism with a side of Maoism. That her judicial view was to rule in conformity with her desired ideological outcome, law be damned. Had she done that, though, she wouldn’t have been confirmed. But it is more than that.

The Senate reviewed her several times, right? Plenty of time for people to dig into her background; find out her views. And as she advanced, we even started to have judicial actions and rulings showing where she was heading. All of that should have been brought to the floor of the Senate. On both sides. Friends and enemies should have been completely forthright about just who she is and what she’d do. That didn’t happen. A gigantic conspiracy of silence was created about her philosophy so she could coast into one position after another…and now she’s got a lifetime seat. She’s 54. Twenty years from now she could be part of a 5-4 Court eviscerating the First Amendment. And all because starting in 2013 everyone lied about her.

Do you start to see it? How bad lies are? And the lies to get Justice Jackson are just tiny, little lies. Mostly of omission. But, my friends, we are awash in lies. There is an ocean of lies infecting very aspect of modern life. We here on the Right perceive them pretty well (the Left gleefully engages in lying) but even we don’t really see how overwhelming it all is. Everything is shot through with lies. And it is very hard to face up to: as the late Neil Peart put it in his song Distant Early Warning:

Who can face the knowledge
That the truth is not the truth?

That is what we’re really facing: for most of the people, a pack of lies is the truth. They’ve been told for so long and so incessantly that, just as Hitler said it would, the lie has become the truth. To see that – to react to it – is very hard. It is to give up a lifetime of certainty. But we must see it. We must react to it. And we must stop it. If you wonder why we’re such a mess these days, it is because almost everything we do is based to one degree or another on a lie.

We’ve got rafts of laws on the books based upon lie after lie after lie. What we saw today was that raft running up against something true – that is, something written by the Founders more than 200 years ago. It is written in very simple English. Anyone even barely literate can understand it. The modern Establishment looks at it; they are puzzled and then angry. It doesn’t fit! If someone can say I’m wrong about mask wearing, then people might not wear masks! How can this be endured? So, they want it gone. Justice Jackson just said the quiet part out loud today. Make no mistake about it, they all feel like that. And don’t forget that a least a majority of the GOP/Conservative “leadership” also wants it gone. When McCain denigrated us as silly Hobbits he was also speaking the quiet part out loud: why can’t you dumb peasants just do as you’re told? He, too, looked at the First Amendment and found it an obstacle (remember, he of McCain-Feingold campaign finance law). And as lies have been piled up to get us to where we are today, they’ll just use more to get rid of the last threads of truth…they’ll simply lie one day and say, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” doesn’t mean what it means.

All our problems, every last one of them, is based upon a lie. We have found out over the past 50 years or so what happens to a society when it says that lies are protected speech. All that did was allow lies to worm their way in, take over and now go after Truth, as such. It has to end. Whatever is required, we must do it. We must find the means – judicial and social – to utterly destroy those who lie. We must make lying a shameful thing again; something that mortifies the liar when caught and causes all to reject the liar and the lie. This could take some very stern action, my friends. Liars won’t go quietly. But we have to do it.

It is either that or drown in lies.

A Revelation

Mark Noonan28 Comments

As it is written in Isaiah the prophet:
Behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you;
he will prepare your way.
A voice of one crying out in the desert:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight his paths.”
John the Baptist appeared in the desert
proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
People of the whole Judean countryside
and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem
were going out to him
and were being baptized by him in the Jordan River
as they acknowledged their sins.
John was clothed in camel’s hair,
with a leather belt around his waist.
He fed on locusts and wild honey.
And this is what he proclaimed:
“One mightier than I is coming after me.
I am not worthy to stoop and loosen the thongs of his sandals.
I have baptized you with water;
he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” – Mark 1: 1-8

That, of course, is today’s reading. You did go to Church, right? Even if you didn’t, if you are Christian you have heard it a thousand times. But today it struck home to me…rolling around in my head through the Homily and then, just before I took communion, it was a blast of light. The world is immersed in lies. All lies…and here was Truth, right before me.

I noticed the altar servers – two fine young men and one little lady. And I pondered that I had once been that young and then, when I got a little older, I was beset by lie after lie after lie and, God forgive me, I fell for a lot of them. I prayed that those youngsters would resist them. If there was one bit of advice I could give them it would be just this: keep going to Church. Never stop. Pray constantly. Yeah, a lot of your friends are going to say, “do this!”; “be cool!”; “come on, its just a bit of fun!”. Ignore them! Go to Church. Pray! Be the odd man out. Rely on it, forty years from now when you look back on it all, you’ll be much happier if you remained steadfast now. Make straight his paths.

Because that is what it means – the path to your heart. Make it straight so God can get on in there and keep you safe and bring you to salvation. I had honestly never looked at it that way before. But I do think that my recent yammering on about how bad lies are has been part of the process which reached its climax just this morning.

Because another part of it happened last night. I was scrolling through X and I came across a post from Jill Stein. You remember her – the Green Party candidate from 2016. I think she’s running again in 2024 because that’s what people like her do; that is, she’s going to save us, guys. Anyways, she had posted that because of our veto of the UN ceasefire resolution, the USA was now the sole obstacle to peace. Get it? It isn’t Hamas. Not the rape/death squads. Not the obvious fact that if Hamas is spared via a ceasefire they will just rebuild their forces and send out more rape/death squads. It is the USA. We’re at fault. We’re stopping peace. What sort of evil upon evil person thinks this way?

Turns out, its the sort of evil that was born of upper class Jewish parents in Chicago and then went on to graduate from Harvard medical. Rich, privileged and sheltered, Jill plied her very profitable trade as a doctor and then decided to “give back”. Not the money, of course. But give back in the form of taking up the standard of Progressive reform. If you look at her views, she checks off every last Progressive box. Her views on the Gaza war are just the latest thing; it is hip in Progressive circles to be for the river to the sea right now. That she’s Jewish makes no matter because Progressives are first and last Progressives…their nationality, ethnicity and religion takes the back seat at all times.

People like Jill are the very worst of the worst. The most evil people in the world. Even more evil than Hamas rape squads or Cartel hitmen. How can I say that??? She’s this nice, even-toned, educated woman who just wants peace, justice and equity! Yeah, whatever. I know what her words are…but her words are just mindless repetitions of lies she’s been told…and as a doctor she should damned well know better. She should investigate things and think about them. She doesn’t. She never has. She just accepts and then quite mindlessly promotes. And it is people like Jill who promote the Progressive policies which create, in turns, Hamas rape squads and Cartel hitmen.

Things don’t happen in a vacuum. On October 6th some Hamas guys didn’t just say, “hey, lets rape some girls” and have at it. No more than Mexican drug cartels just all of a sudden start beheading people. It all built up over time. Decades of time. Decades of time where Progressive ideology has been dominant in the West even when particular Western nations might have had an officially non-Progressive government. Essentially since World War One the Western world has done whatever Progressives told it to. There has been hardly any resistance to it. And it was all sold with the same level of intellectual validity as that guy in high school who urged you to smoke a joint: “come on, man; it’ll be cool!”.

Another passage in the Bible relates how those who lead others astray would be better off having a millstone tied ’round their necks and be tossed into the sea. Hamas and Cartel murderers will have much to atone for at Judgement Day, but people like Jill are those who are leading these little one’s astray and it’ll go a lot harder for them. It is especially incumbent upon those with wealth and power to do the right thing. Some poor SOB born into grinding poverty who gets suckered into a gang or movement is a lot more forgivable than the people who simply ought to know better.

Tolkien understood this and he put it in The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn complains a bit about how those dependent upon his protection scorned him…but he doesn’t grudge it. As he says, if simple people are free to be simple, then he’s done his duty. That is what nobility is for – what it is supposed to do: shield the common people. Instead, our nobility deliberately leads the people astray. They in turns encourage barbarism and then discourage fighting against it. They urge us into moral disintegration and call us racists when moral disintegration breaks down the social contract.

Make straight those paths, guys. We’re in for a long, dark night of suffering. It is coming. Only the very oldest among us are going to be able to skip out on it. But the world must be turned upside down. What is must be destroyed and a new society erected on the ruins. It is Fall of Rome II – and just like the first time, it will be those who have faith in God who will inherit the ruins.

We Live in a Progressive World: It Sucks

Mark Noonan55 Comments

You might have heard about Ryan Carson getting killed in New York – a Progressive activist, it appears he was killed by a random lunatic over nothing; the lunatic likely being high at the time. After reading the story my reaction was to post on X that I simply felt no sympathy. Trying to express it, I brought up that scene at the end of The Cowboys where the boys are standing around the bad guy pinned under his horse with a broken leg; my reaction is like that. Not hating. Not gloating. But not caring; the person on the ground chose this.

It ended up being one of the most engaged posts I’ve ever done on X. As of this moment, it has more than 155,000 views; 20 reposts and more than a thousand likes. And lots of comments. The basic Left comment is that I’m a horrific bastard; un-Christian (always amusing to get that comment from avowed Marxists!); evil; hate-filled. I shouldn’t cheer death. Which, of course, I didn’t. I merely pointed out that I had no sympathy. Most of the Left comments got no response from me (a huge numbers of comments were blocked). But I did engage some people who seemed to be trying to say something. Unfortunately, in the end, they had nothing to say and were just doing polite variations on “you bastard” that the less articulate went with.

I think the reaction all stems from the fact that the Left in general but also many people on the right don’t know what morality is. Basic right and wrong is very confused in their minds. You see – and this is especially true in a Republic – everyone bears responsibility. None of us ever get to stand aside. What we choose as individuals – both by action and omission – goes to make up the corporate decision of the whole body politic. We are not – at least in theory – ruled. If we were, then we could assign blame for many things to our rulers. Such is not the case; we are free (pro tempore). As such, we must ensure that as far as possible our choices tend towards furtherance of liberty, peace and prosperity. You woke up this morning and you decided not to get drunk. Because of this decision, you went to work instead of passing out on the floor. Because you went to work, your job got done which allowed other people to get their job done and so on. Just that one, small decision rattles on and on through our society for good or ill.

So, too, the bad decision. Had you decided to get drunk, your job doesn’t get done and so on. And there’s no excuse. Unless you are a minor incapable of reason or verily insane, you know very well what you are supposed to do and you also can understand, if you but put some effort into it (said effort you are morally bound to make), the likely results of your decisions. The drunk knows full well – or, if he doesn’t, he ought to know; he has an inescapable obligation to know – what bad things are likely to result from the choice to drink rather than go to work. This is why when the drunk loses his job and house and the Mrs leaves him we’re not terribly sympathetic, if at all, to his plight. What on Earth did he think was going to happen?

Well, it goes like that for every decision. One of Carson’s pet projects – one of the things he advocated for – was “safe” places for drug addicts to get high. From what I can determine, he asserted this as a merciful and kind service to drug addicts. Here’s where a lot of people will reject what I say: Carson was lying when he made that assertion. He knew full well that the only proper course of action to take with someone who gets high is to get them to stop. To be sure, none of us may be able to stop any particular person from getting high, but if we can’t actively stop it, we must certainly not abet it. Because we all know what happens when people get high; they ruin their lives and wreck destruction on the lives of everyone who comes into contact with them to a greater or lesser degree. There is no upside to drug addiction. It is all downside. Every person who gets high makes life for everyone else in society worse. If Carson were to be able to assert to my face this very day that he thought it was good to give a “safe” place to get high I would not take the coward’s way out and go, “well, your heart is in the right place”. His heart was not in the right place. It was in an evil, wicked place. I would call him a liar because as a mentally competent adult he knows you can’t properly help someone get high.

So, too, with a host of other Leftist nostrums: de-fund the police; ending cash bail; de-criminalizing looting; false accusations of racism. These are not the actions of people who have their heart in the right place. These are the actions of evil people who know full well they are doing evil. Their only way out of being wicked is to proclaim themselves simpletons and surrender their franchise. If they aren’t idiots, then they know you can’t do things like de-criminalize looting and expect anything other than more looting to occur. Looting is bad. There is never any justification for it. Society cannot function if the products of labor can be taken without compensation. Carson, from what I can tell, backed all of these Leftist programs. Given he is of the Left – and the way the Left enforces ideological conformity – we can with great certainty assume that every aspect of Leftist ideology was supported by Carson. And what this means – as small time as he was in the grand scheme of things – he was a willing, knowing participant in policies which are obviously evil. Policies which make life miserable – and especially for poor people who are not insulated from the results of Leftist policy.

So, when Carson was killed by a crazed person likely high, all I saw was a bit of poetic justice. Just like the bad guy in the movie now suffering…the bottom line is he was suffering because of what he tried to do. People like Carson – upper class, white, urban Progressives – have mostly been insulated from the effects of their policies. But that insulation crumbles as civilization at last crumbles under the Leftist assault. We’re now several generations in; the inculcating of barbarian ideals into the minds of people has taken its toll. Its why we see those videos of people getting into brawls over nothing or packs of feral children mercilessly beating a weaker person. This is what Leftists wanted. Heck, they told us it would be great – if we just got past our old, Christian hang-ups and embraced a society of free flowing drugs and sex everything would be wonderful. This world we live in is a Progressive world. It is what they wanted. We never approved of it. We warned repeatedly what would happen. We were ignored on the best days and viciously slandered on most. And, so, when a cog in that Progressive machine runs afoul of his own actions…sure, I’m going to watch impassively. I’m not going to shed a tear. Why should I? Should I shed a tear for the drunk who is killed driving his car into a telephone pole?

Sure it is bad that he’s dead. I’d rather he hadn’t died. I am going to do my best to build a world where such things don’t happen. But, guess what? In fighting for that world, I’ll have to battle through a host of people like Carson who will fight tooth and nail to keep the system which killed him. It is still what they want. They are still lying; still saying that if we just get more Progressive, it will at last get better. They know it won’t. They don’t care; no person with the least bit of humane feeling can be a Leftist. It is how they become Leftists; they kill genuine sympathy; they kill off anything resembling love. They come to view all people are entirely utilitarian…and that is why they can say, “hey, lets help junkies get high”. They don’t see a suffering soul who will spread suffering…they see a block of wood with appetite, just as they see themselves. And as their only measure is to feed their own appetites, so their only reaction to another person is to figure out how to feed their appetites. You want drugs? Here are some drugs. You want sex? Here is some sex. Never for a moment is there the thought of repenting because, indeed, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

So, thanks very much, I’ll save my sympathy for the real victims – the usually poor or middle class people who have been suckered by the Left and who are diligently ruining their lives because of it. They still have agency, of course; but at least they aren’t actively destroying society. So when one of them runs afoul of our dying Progressive society, I will shed a tear – I will express sympathy. But for one of the Leftist architects of destruction? Not a chance. They got what they wanted – that what they want sucks isn’t my problem.

As a side note; after more than a day of Leftists calling me an insensitive bastard for not expressing sympathy for Carson’s demise it came out that in his own X account he was free with advocating violence against his opponents and had gloated over the death of Rush Limbaugh. I did not know this at the time I wrote my post. It does not surprise me in the least. As I’ve said: the Left is wicked. They are not nice people with misguided programs to get to peace, freedom and prosperity. They are wicked people doing evil things to destroy society…and they do it because they are wicked. You really don’t have to explain it beyond that.

Lies Must be Punished

Mark Noonan44 Comments

We found out a while ago that the 50 intel people who signed the “Hunter’s laptop is Russian disinfo” letter were lying when they signed the letter – but what we’re finding out now is what we’ve suspected all along…the “Russian disinfo” story was concocted by Team Pudding Brain as a deliberate and malicious lie to protect Joe’s electoral prospects. The current Secretary of State was a lead person in this effort to deceive the American people. To, as our Democrats like to put it, interfere with Democracy.

It needs to be understood that the laptop was a career-ending event if the people found out about it. To this day, most Americans are still not familiar with the contents of the laptop. The normal course of events – in a sane society – when something like that laptop appears would be the 24/7 coverage which would reveal the info and drive it into the public mind. Had that laptop belonged to one of Trump’s children, that is how it would have been covered and by election day Trump would have been lucky to get to 35% of the vote. It is that bad – it details horrific crimes, some of which were clearly known by Joe and some which also implicate him in the criminal activity. The reason Team Biden went into damage control mode was because of the devastating nature of the information. And that action, of course, doesn’t really upset anyone all that much. We do expect politicians to lie when they get caught. We wish they wouldn’t. We wish they would repent, confess and then go away. But we also know that doesn’t happen.

What we do expect to happen – what we demand must happen – is that the MSM and the officials of government not help the politician lie. Team Biden was only able to bury the story because of the active cooperation of the MSM and America’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies. What happened in 2020 was a conspiracy between the Democrats, the MSM and the American government to lie their favored candidate into office. This is absent any concerns about voter fraud – even supposing the vote was totally legit, the fact remains that Biden would not have got nearly enough votes had the truth come out. And everyone familiar knows this to be the case.

We have a very serious problem here – not that people lie. People have always lied. The problem is that everyone with power is lying. All the time and about everything. They do this because it works. The other day Biden’s press secretary said that Florida law now bans a gay teacher from placing a photo of their spouse on their desk. This is complete fabrication. A bald-faced and quite shameless lie. But it is said. And it works. Such a lie, by the way, isn’t meant for you and me: it is meant for suburban white women who still get their news from the MSM. It works splendidly to keep such people on side. But here’s the kicker: the lies work because nobody is ever punished for the lies.

A society buried under a morass of lies will die. It can’t be sustained. Eventually everything falls apart. We must develop the means to punish lies. To make those who lie suffer a great deal – perhaps even in the most extreme cases with their lives. But certainly with their money – all of it. It is the only way to make it stop. Lying must come with such grave penalty that they’ll be afraid to lie. In the States we control, we should be seeking means to punish lies. If we gain trifecta power in DC again, we must do it at that level, too. The lies must stop and only force will get them to stop.

Perhaps We’ve Just Been Living Wrong?

Mark Noonan18 Comments

Scott Presler opines that for the GOP to have long term success, it is going to have to become the natalist party – that is, the party in favor of family formation. This is true. Attentive readers of the Mirrors series have probably figured out that Queen Caelestine is pro-natalist; always trying to get people married and wanting everyone making babies at a rapid clip. This is, of course, a bit of my philosophy being inserted in a small way to the narrative. But I don’t think we’ve really thought much about how this would come about.

It seems to me that our problem here stems from our too-long adolescence and too-long education.

Remember that back in the day, a girl and a boy getting married at 16 or 17 wasn’t at all unusual…with the young couple then either working on the family farm/business or striking out on their own. It is a bit of a shock to the modern mind to think of that – in fact, we probably think of it as tragic. But the bottom line is that we become physically capable of bearing children at a pretty young age: and if one wishes to argue against biology, that is fine – but the reality is that our physical being is ready for childbearing a lot younger than we find acceptable in the modern world.

Right after I read Presler’s Tweet the Rush song Subdivisions came on the playlist and the refrain just leaped out at me:

Subdivisions
In the high school halls
In the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out

Subdivisions
In the basement bars
In the backs of cars
Be cool or be cast out

All of us, I think, can remember back to our middle and high school years and remember how out of sorts and out of place we felt. That sensation is what Neil Peart was writing about in the song. But what, really, was the problem? That we were 16 or 17 years old and felt we had no proper place in the world. That we didn’t know what our lives were for or what we would do. By that time we had already been in school ten or eleven years, had at least a year or two left to go…and then the prospect, pushed massively by society, that we would do at least four more years of school after that and then start our career…and don’t get married! You’re “too young”. You’ve got plenty of time for that! Get your education. Get your job! And, hey, the old morals are gone so just find someone to have sex with…its ok. Nobody will judge you.

Except yourself, of course. The mind rebels against what is wrong even if that mind can’t articulate it.

I conclude – and this literally just flashed in my head earlier today – that the increasing alienation of youth since, say, World War Two is based upon this lifestyle of 12-16 years of education followed by career and then marriage and children if convenient. The final result of this is kids who are saying they are non-binary or what have you: we’re so long down this path of essentially denying biology – denying our own humanity – that the latest generation is rejecting the very idea of biology and what it means to be a human being – what it means to be male or female. We’re getting here – and it is likely to get much worse – because we have tried to craft a lifestyle which is not adjusted to humanity. We’re trying to be cool so we aren’t cast out…but what we’re not trying to be is human. And even the adults who get through this to become functional members of society are still awash in divorce, anti-depressants and pathetically going to fertility clinics at 35 in a desperate bid to push out a kid before the clock expires.

We forgot that the Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath. We’ve been going about it backwards – trying to rework humanity to fit a certain sort of society when sanity lies in making society conform to human needs.

Laying aside the animal need for food, water, shelter and clothing, the primary thing a human needs is community. We are a social species. We literally cannot survive as a species without others of our kind around…and even individual survival is gravely threatened when we are on our own (break your leg on a hike with friends and you’ll probably make it – break your leg hiking alone and there’s a good chance you’re going to die). Biology commands – and we Believers hold that God also commands – that we engage in sexual relations. Anyone who remembers being 15 knows this – the urge was persistent and insistent. It was so strong that all of us did wonder for a bit just why there was a moral code against rampant sexual activity. But especially as we aged, we understood the wisdom of confining sex to a committed relationship. But I think we get it wrong – backwards – when we say, “hold off on that urge until you’re 25! Gotta get that education and career, first!”. We’re also kinda stupid – the sex urge will not be repressed for that long. I do believe that if we really want to fix what is wrong, we’re going to have to really think about what we want.

I do think we spend too much time on education. Don’t know about you, but high school was mostly pointless for me. They weren’t teaching me anything new – and in the things I was actually interested, I was rapidly far in advance of what the school was teaching. It might very well be that adding high school to the education mix for 90 percent of us is a waste of time. And if high school is pointless for most of us, college even more so.

Plus when we take a kid of 14 and say, “hey, just 8 more years and you’re done with school”, we’re telling someone who wants to get rolling on life right now that they’ll have to wait. That they have to stay in leading strings for years longer and then, if the behave, they’ll be allowed to start doing the Adult things.

I’m not saying there isn’t a need for higher education – but what I am saying is that almost nobody needs it and, in truth, it has long become counter-productive. First off, on account of it being dumbed down. In order to keep up the fiction of Education – Career – Marriage we’ve routinely lowered the standards for higher education to the point that a mediocre 12 year old from a century ago knew more than doctoral students at Ivy League universities today. You can only keep the fiction going, after all, if it is for everyone. But, of course, everyone isn’t suited to higher education – and nor should they be. A healthy society has a certain number of artists and thinkers…but usually less than 1 percent. And they are only able to create art and thought because almost everyone else is busy making things happen.

And after community, the next thing a human needs is to be needed. We are built to contribute – to do something useful for ourselves and our community. It is, as I’ve noted, the only way we can survive. Except for short periods and baring physically debilitating accidents, we can’t even feed ourselves without the assistance of others.

How useful does a 20 year old in college feel? And there’s your answer to why the purple hair, nose ring and a sudden assertion that they are a different gender. They are doing nothing. They aren’t really learning anything – save for spoon-fed Marxist drivel. Small wonder they get a little kooky…like a junior league Nero or Caligula…the real difference being that Rome in ancient days could only carry the freight on a few of them at a time…while our overly wealthy society affords millions nominating their horse to the Senate. And here’s the real kicker – almost all 20 year olds in college are incapable of higher education. It is supposed to be for the 1 percent – maybe the top 5 percent if you’re being really generous in giving out passing grades. These poor kids are uselessly doing something they are entirely unsuited for. Lunacy does result. BLM/Antifa riots, as well – not for nothing did fascists, Communists and Nazis find their most ardent spirits among 20th century college students…a collection of increasingly mis-educated kids unsuited for higher thought but who were also being quit useless…and here comes The Cause to give their existence a point.

As Chesterton pointed out, we have to begin all over again at the start. If a house is built so that it knocks a man’s head off as he comes through the door, it is built wrong. You can’t reform it – you have to tear it down and build it again. Properly.

There was a little joke meme I saw the other day which went along the lines of “me who had my kids at 18 and 20 watching from the beach as my 40 year old career-first friend deals with her 4 year old”. Lot of truth in that. It really comes down to how we will spend the best years of lives.

Do you remember being 20? My goodness, the energy. As I was in the Navy at the time this manifested itself in my ability to spend weeks at sea in a four hours on, four hours off rotation, hit the beach in a liberty port, party with the shipmates for 24 hours straight and then immediately go back to sea. We all had it. We were inexhaustible and indestructible. We could eat and drink all we wanted and it just fueled our ability to do more and more and more.

Do you remember being 35? You had stayed out until just a shade after midnight the night before and had that third drink and now, bleary eyed and exhausted, you faced the grim task of going to work and, dang it, why does my back hurt?

Question: which you was better suited to chasing around after a rambunctious 2 year old? Which of you could better deal with screaming kids, household chores and putting in a 50 hour week at work without complete mental and physical collapse?

Life is for youth, boys and girls. And we’ve been doing it all wrong. What we should have been doing is giving our kids 8 years of basic education, siphoning off the cream of the crop for higher education and sending the rest to trade school while positively encouraging early marriage and children. This is much more in line with human needs than our current model – and given our advances in production and medicine, it doesn’t preclude anything. Suppose at 45 you decide to move off from the construction job that paid for your house and raised your kids, now moved out, and take a stab at a college degree? You can do it. Nothing to stop you. And zero chance of regrets – you’ve already done the most important part of living. You took a man or woman’s place in the world. You already proved who and what you are.

I am open to dispute here – I don’t know if I’m completely right. I only know for certain that we’ve been doing it wrong. And if we want a healthy society, we are going to have to change how we’re doing it.

It Is the Moral Collapse, Stupid

Mark Noonan27 Comments

This one has some staying power. The most recent massacre, I mean. We might be talking about this all the way to, you know, like next Monday.

And I know that sounds dismissive of tragedy but it isn’t really: it is dismissive of the official response to tragedy. A little earlier today I saw that the Yankees and Rays will forgo their game broadcast and will, instead, broadcast several hours of DNC gun control propaganda. They didn’t call it that, but that doesn’t change what it is. As I read the Yankee’s statement is just became blazingly clear what they could actually do to bring an end to this:

Fire the next top flight player who gets a girl pregnant and doesn’t marry her.

Because that is what this all is: what is wrong with our society is entirely the result of society deciding not to enforce standards. Sure, one ball player not doing the right thing didn’t cause this all to happen, but thousands of professional sports stars over decades acting like pigs in the off season played a huge role. They taught the young men of America – and especially poor, young men – that it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you can deliver the goods. That only your ability to make money matters…everything else will be covered up, paid off and forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Years ago I wrote about Mick Jagger and his life and I pointed out that his persona, especially as young, was an act. He was a middle class kid. Nice, respectable life. His mother was a Tory. He did very well in school and had he not become a rock star, probably would have had a long and successful career in some square employment. But the persona, crafted to sell records, was of a wild, party man. A street tough telling it like it is via his music. Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll! But it was, indeed, all an act. A very successful act: Jagger is worth about $500 million. And I considered Mick Jagger, and many like him, and wondered how many people took it at face value and decided to live that life – live the act, that is. But by actually doing it and not having an army of people to keep things squared away and hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up all mistakes?

Given the popularity and endurance of the Rolling Stones, it was probably several million people around the world who wanted to be like Mick. Or like any one of scores of other famous rock acts…which were (and are) acts. Make believe. Those few in the business who really lived that life – Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Keith Moon, etc – ended up dead at very young ages. Because living that life is suicidal. Neil Young sang about it being better to burn out than fade away – but he sang that in 1979 and he’s 76 now and very much fading away rather than burning out.

Let me quickly think of the people I know – friends and family – who are six feet under because they went along with all that: George, Todd, Rob, Pat, Jeff, Alex…that’s just top of the head. How many people can think of that many in a few seconds? Then we can add those who are simply a mess: a good dozen that I can easily think of. And then there’s their kids! Also a mess – though some of them have managed to rise above.

Certainly the sudden massacre of 19 kids in school is a shock – but in the grand scheme of things, in this War Against Decency we’ve been waging for 70 years, it hardly counts as a skirmish. More than 100,000 people died of drug overdose in the United States last year. That about 5,200 school shootings. And they passed almost unnoticed. Not dramatic enough. Can’t make a good DNC political point about it. And, heck, I actually saw pictures of NYC billboards which are telling drug addicts not to feel shame, but just use the drugs properly. But dead is dead – whether from a bullet or drugs. Or any other of the social ills which are causing people to die (I think I read that 28 people were murdered in Chicago last weekend…and not too long ago an adorable little girl was gunned down in a McDonald’s drive through…but, hey, she was black and so was the shooter and it was over gangland crap so nobody gonna do a major news story about that).

We can change and we will change. This cannot endure. Bad as it is – and looks to get worse – the strength to cure this will be summoned. The longer we wait, the more brutal the reaction. But it has to be. Civilization is necessary in order for 90% of us to live. When our backs are really against the wall, you’ll be surprised what people are capable of. But until then, I’m going to keep pointing out what is wrong and who contributed to it.

So that when retribution comes, the right targets will feel the heat.

We Wanted This Culture of Death

Mark Noonan15 Comments

In the aftermath of the latest school massacre, the Democrats have brought up what they always bring up – gun control. You know the usual: universal background checks, things like that. Nobody, as far as I can tell, has even asked whether the shooter would have passed the background check (my bet: he would have). It is all so patently ridiculous – performative theater, though Democrats are looking here to goose their base for November. Don’t know if it will work – they tried it with Roe but the bottom line is that people care far more about what it costs to fill the tank than a theoretical end to abortion.

But people were killed, does that make a difference? Perhaps, but probably not. I think that we’ve become rather numb to this, and that is sad in itself. But it is what we asked for.

Earlier today, I came across a Tweet which said that it may be that the cops didn’t charge into the building but instead isolated it before moving. I don’t know if that is 100% accurate but I think that would be in keeping with normal police procedure. You don’t know what’s out there and until you’ve got some intel, any move you make might make things worse. But the point of the Tweet was that the cops should have just charged in supreme disregard for their own lives. To which, you answer: yeah. But.

And the “but” is that by what standard should a cop selflessly sacrifice himself? I mean, I know the standard. John 15:13, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” But there’s a problem here – that’s a Christian standard. It is, to be sure, shared to some extent by other faiths, but the highest expression of it is Christian. To go to certain death for the benefit of others is something Christ did, and all Christians are supposed to follow the example of Christ as far as they are able. But this standard isn’t shared by people with no faith – and keep in mind that “no faith” runs from the most irritating atheist you’ve ever met all the way up to the weekly Church-goer who lives the other six days of the week as a practical pagan. The chances that any particular person – let alone any particular cop – will be a Christian hero are rather small these days. I’d guess that its about one in four Americans who actually take a stab at living a Christian life these days.

And as I said, this is what we wanted. Not like we specifically voted on it, but we passed in silence as it happened. I mean that as a people, of course: some of us objected vigorously and we were told to shut up. But a school shooting is a bum defecating on the street is a child being sex trafficked is a starlet being used as a sex toy is an activist getting rich off tragedy is a corporation turning a blind eye to his Chinese supplier’s slave laborers is a twelve year old being told he’s genderfluid by his teacher and so on. You get the picture. The shootings gather more notice because they are dramatic (and the Democrats hope to wring political advantage out of each corpse), but the rest of it is just going on right in front of us…and in the course of a year causes vastly more deaths than all the gun violence combined.

As I’ve said before, there is a cure for this. It is the same cure used the last time barbarians inundated the West: extreme violence. What we call cruelty these days because, not being Christian (or any sort of faith, really), we have lost sight of what real cruelty is. Civilization is not innate to humanity. The normal course of humanity is to grab whatever it can with no thought to others or the future. To be a person who cares about others and takes a thought for the morrow is a learned quality. We, as a people, learned it over a thousand year period and via the lash, the branding iron, the headsman’s axe and the gallows. We were forced, by those who wanted civilization, to knuckle under to required norms of behavior. And we became so used to this that we forgot that our custom of being decent was force reduced to routine and hiding it’s claws. We began to believe that decency was the norm and that we could release our instincts and everything would work out not just as well as we had it, but much better.

We believed this because people can be very, very stupid.

So, we’re now getting to the point where we’ll have to choose and I believe we will choose incorrectly. That is, we will refuse to apply the violence necessary to restore decent behavior. And because we make this choice, we’ll then find a small group of people who will make it for us and so we’ll get the same result. Civilization will not completely die – it can’t. People will want to eat in safety. Right now, they don’t see how large the threat is but a day will come when they do, and then those who threaten the safety will find things starting to go very badly for them.

But, meanwhile, we’ll just keep going on – stepping around the sh** on the sidewalk as we walk from one mass shooting to another.