Mayberry’s Meltdown: Whiny Males and Shrill Harridans

The year 2020 doesn’t seem particularly apocalyptic on its surface, but I doubt that many of us who survive it will remember it as one of our best.  I was already having first-in-my-lifetime health problems when “the lockdown” slammed certain medical doors in my face… so that hasn’t gone well; and none of us who has children can be very happy about trillions of bucks more being added to the debt which they will all inherit from us.  Yet somehow we must blunder on.

One of my preferred escapes is baseball—which isn’t being played this year, thanks to the Wuhan Black Death; but then, I’m less a spectator than an excavator.  I research long-lost ways of hitting and throwing a ball, and I try to distill something that may help boys of smaller stature find a means of winning a place on the team.  I’m convinced that boys, especially, need a sense of physical achievement to develop a healthy outlook.  Call it “toxic masculinity”, if you wish; but far more toxic, to my mind, is self-defeating surrender to unopposed obstacles.  Which of us wants our son to grow into a living exemplar of that feminist construct: the unmotivated, irresponsible, adolescent, forever excuse-tendering couch-vegetable?

I’m in the process of trying to upload a second edition of a hitting manual based upon “Deadball days “ (c. 1900-1920), although the designers of Amazon’s software apparently do not conceive of anyone’s ever producing a second edition and are scarcely easing my task’s fulfillment.  I won’t even name the book here: publicity is not my aim.  I will, however, reproduce the final paragraph, unique to this latest edition:

The best of luck to you! Play hard, play smart… and play fair. No one who cheats will ever pile up enough lucre to buy self-respect, nor will he ever be able to counterfeit it from all the cheers he’s suckered from his adoring fan club. Playing this game, ultimately, is about winning respect for yourself as someone who did all he could with what he was given. Believe me, not many people ever get that trophy!

I’ll return to the sentiments contained in those few words.  Bear with me now as I shift to a different scene.  Most of us have wiled away a few minutes in lockdown by sitting through some fare on the idiot box that we ordinarily wouldn’t tolerate.  My wife and I tentatively explored Roku (never a very inviting experience before, since HughesNet can’t vanquish the tendency of shows to “buffer” for minutes at a time)… and we eventually settled on a British comedy (as it was teased) titled Doc Martin.  The serial seems to have run a full decade across the pond.  How bad could it be?

The narrative pretext is that a brilliant London surgeon, having discovered that he can no longer stare into people’s bleeding viscera without panic attacks, retreats to a vacation spot called Portwen off the Cornish coast.  Absurdly overqualified to treat runny noses and soothe upset tummies, he nonetheless longs to settle his nerves in peace and poverty.  Surprises await him, though… and this story, you know, has been told a thousand times, so my wife and I presumed that we knew what was in store for us as viewers.  The old Andy Griffith Show that our parents watched must have devoted dozens of episodes to “flatland touristers” who go half-crazy when they discover the hidden complexities of small-town life in Mayberry.  Portwen would surely be something in the same genre, with Doc Martin (who hates both ends of his popular rechristening) forced to abandon his big-city assumptions and navigate the quirks of colorful local characters.

Well… yes and no.  We laughed through three and a half episodes—kind of—until we agreed that our laughs were uncomfortable and wrongly timed.  The trouble, as we saw it, was that Doc Martin wasn’t the bookish, introverted, urbanized boy-wonder having to make adjustments to the human race, such as was clearly intended of his character.  No: the problem was that, for all his abrupt and stodgy ways, the doc was actually more sensible, civil, and mature than the nasty little islanders into whose midst he had plunged himself.  Locals ran him off the narrow, winding roads with a shrug, as if he didn’t know how to drive, and never reduced speed, moved over, or peered back to see what wreckage they had caused.  Lazy, incompetent workmen destroyed his property yet received his frowns with indignation.  Gossips and malingerers flooded his waiting room to gorge on tea and “biscuits” (cookies, we call them), then bristled when he shooed them out.  A need-burdened, impertinent teenaged receptionist (she certainly acted teenaged, anyway) virtually hired herself and wouldn’t do any part of her job efficiently; yet when her runaway sloppiness almost cost a life and stirred the Doc to dismiss her (for a day or two), the incensed townspeople immediately boycotted their one medical professional as if he’d been caught setting cats on fire.

These pastoral Arcadians, in a few words, were arrogant, self-important, indolent, “entitled” (in their minds), undependable, unaccomplished, unconscientious, intrusive, cliquish, clannish, and often downright boorish.  None of the Old School mannerliness that one expects to find out in the boondocks was detectable in them; no Old School reluctance to embrace city life in the moral fast lane restrained them.  In fact, the snapping point for me (when buffering just wouldn’t come often enough) was midway through Episode Four, when it became apparent that everybody on the island would potentially copulate with anybody else and that the good doctor, thanks to all his hang-ups, was some kind of “nun” (pronounced to rhyme with “noon”).  His wizened—but less than wise—auntie, intended to be a kind of Sibyl on his Other World Journey, iced a sleazy country cake by offering a few details of her extra-marital affair and sneering at her nephew’s prissy Puritanism.  I was reminded of many a grad-school confrontation in Austin during my own youthful transit through the corridors of Hell.

And that’s the point, really, I guess: Austin or Berkeley of the Eighties is now picturesque rural Europe of the twenty-first century.  The God-is-dead, guaranteed-minimum-income dystopia of simmering socialism has now softened the spines and brains of every yokel in the pot.  Everyone has rights, rights upon rights.  Everyone is constantly offended if he or she isn’t accorded special favors while doing nothing that might appear energetic or exceptional.  “Everyone belongs to everyone,” in the phrase piped through the cradles of Huxley’s Brave New World.  With what dismay would that extraordinarily clairvoyant prophet have viewed an “entertainment” in which his countrymen can’t perceive the grim irony of “everyone being everyone’s”, but instead milk idiot laughter from the isolation of a single resisting individualist!

I need hardly observe to anyone who labors through my paragraphs that this reformed ethos now belongs to our shores, as well.  What was His Excellency Judge Eric Moye telling Shelley Luther in a Dallas courtroom other than that “everyone belongs to everyone” and that her individual concern for feeding her children was obscene?

The irony here—one fully worthy of Huxley’s pen—is that Ms. Luther showed us a rare display of “manly fortitude” as a tinpot dictator nanny-wagged his finger at her and sent her into time-out.  It’s no accident, I think, that the fictional Portwen abounds in outspoken, aggressive, sarcastic female characters and invertebrate, whiny, directionless males.  The Brave New World we have fashioned for ourselves is an effeminate one—a place where competency is insensitive, where honesty is rude, where independence is anti-social, and where objective logic is “mansplaining”.  Doc Martin embodies all of these despicable male attributes… and, of course, he must be brought to his knees to beg forgiveness of the communal idol, the mute stone Moloch of conformity.  Just like Shelley Luther, who apparently possesses more courage than the typical American man within the age of discretion, he must confess publicly that he has been “selfish”.

Meanwhile, the rest of us shoot and post selfies of our now de-individualized faces wearing their communally supportive masks (the best of which are seldom more than half effective against microbes, by the way—and then only if they are discarded and replaced after each outing).  We are somehow saving lives… my life, your life, our own lives and other lives… if we do so, while we are no better than perpetrators of manslaughter if we refuse.  And we know this because… because it is repeated endlessly around us, in Huxleyan fashion.  We know that when medical opinion argues otherwise, it isn’t real science, because it’s rude: it doesn’t put the collective front and center.  All science must begin in the promotion of the collective, because… because people like Judge Moye (and Xi Jinping, and Mao Tse-tung, and Joseph Stalin) tell us so.

God help our boys!  Was there ever a time when a fella needed more courage of conviction, more dedication to objectives outside himself but not defined by the herd?  In a small but not insignificant way, a boy might learn such courage by turning his natural liabilities into assets—his short stature into productivity, for instance.  That’s why, in my leisure, I love to imagine some passed-over kid at batting practice elbowing the big guys aside and saying, “Watch me shoot line drives through infield!  You’ll strike out twice a game and homer once, maybe.  I’ll be on base for you all afternoon!”

Was there ever a moment when the block cast aside by the builder was more essential as a cornerstone?  God created every little thing and every person to reach up to Him in some special way—to flower in that manner darkly caricatured by Darwinian evolution, but much more accurately portrayed as resistance against the Domination of the Bully.  There is no greater bully than the herd, nor any more loathsome crystallization of herd will than those individual bullies who appoint themselves herd-interpreters.  Our mission in this world is to prevail over the great Downward Pull, a vector that perversely becomes “progress” in the grubby, squalid scramble to survive.  The florition of the unique, the surpassment of mere physical parameters through a burst of inspired intelligence—of spirit: this is why we are alive.

And this is what the dark force among us has always sought to throttle.  This is why he or she who will not bend a knee to the collectivist’s design has always become a scapegoat.  It’s why Mayberry and Portwen become Deadworld without new generations of boys who play hard, and play fair.  May God have mercy on the throngs of us who allow ourselves to be led like sheep!  We may be assured of this: He will have no mercy at all on those who lead the children to destruction.

I Have No Answers. I Don’t Understand.

Apocryphal “news” stories, insane (or just inane) narratives, names swatted like tennis balls around Twitter… I could retrieve a few, but to what end?  You’ve heard most of them.  East Indians are saying that they can see the Himalayas for the first time in years as their city streets lie comatose.  New Yorkers say they can see fish now in the Hudson as Long Island lies embalmed.  Something about Englishmen and their nightingales—the size of their wings… I couldn’t quite make it out, but in the same genre.  A CNN mouthpiece publishing a letter to his newborn son or toddler (who obviously can’t read, and hence is obviously not the letter’s true target) celebrating the collapse of the U.S. economy as a vast obstacle removed from the Green New Deal’s Juggernaut.  And the prep-school Ocasio girl-woman who masquerades as a hyphenated traditional Latina from the barrio saying… well, basically that it’s a good thing all structure is collapsing around us, because we’re really going to love (those of us who survive) life in Naked-and-Afraid Land.

I hate cars and car culture.  Always have.  I hate the racket, I hate the razed acres of concrete and glass, I hate the stop-and-start enforced focus on material circumstances that won’t allow your thoughts to stray without deadly risk.  I walked six hundred miles of Irish and Scots backroad in a month on two separate occasions in my twenties.  I permitted (not purposely) my driver’s license to lapse as a graduate student in Austin, where I walked to classes and to the grocery store and to the laundromat—and then walked dozens more miles per week for pleasure.  In retirement these days, I aspire to grow nut and fruit groves on my North Georgia 25 acres, and I seldom have either the need or the want to leave my property.  But… but I do have to travel to the grocery store once a week, and I could scarcely hike that sixteen-mile round-trip with a backpack and bring home what my wife and I require to survive.  Much of what I unload from the truck also goes into a refrigerator—and, no, I can’t run that from the turns of a windmill.

I “get it”, you see: I mean, that our high-tech, progressive economy’s artificial world is often a noisy, tasteless, stinking, hectic, sometimes poisonous sprawl.  I’m all for reducing those horrid qualities.  I’m doing what I can on my own to subtract from them.  But…

But I don’t understand the ambition to exterminate the human race, or large parts of it, in order to achieve some sort of green silence.  Even if nothing were at stake but my own suicide, who would look after my saplings if I checked out?  The deer and wild blackberry would gnaw and choke them to nothing within a season.  Mother Nature doesn’t favor diversity.  She gives the victory to the swift, and she allows the strong to throttle everything weaker around them.  Pope Francis says that Mother Nature doesn’t forgive, implying that the human foibles which once found leniency before God’s throne have now grown insufferable before the universe’s new ruler (whom he seems to hold in higher reverence).  Quite right: Mother Nature is best pictured as a ravening animal, a T-Rex.  Without my human hand, the cherry trees would never bear fruit, the bluebirds would have no houses, and the whole forest would eventually go up in smoke after lightning ignited a conflagration in uncleared brush.

So maybe I should live, and others should die in my place.  Maybe all the capitalist car-drivers should go.  What gives me the moral authority to pass a death sentence upon them?  Why, my self-evident virtue, of course!  So let millions starve as we shift all power to solar panels and wind turbines (which will purge more avian species from the earth in less time than any extermination event since the Dinosaur Asteroid), let a PRC-style board of central planning keep my dole coming because I’m one of the faithful (credentials verified by a chip that Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci have planted in my head), and let “the others” shelter-in-place until they rot as squad cars and Humvees cruise the streets.  To make an omelet, you have to break some eggs… or whatever version of Pope Lenin’s holy writ Ms. Ocasio thumbed before deleting it.

Would I be safe then?  With Big Brother enfolding me deep in his warm data bank, would I finally see a quiet dawn gild skies unplowed by any contrails?  Huawei 5G is supposed to combine with the Gates microchip to keep me apprised of any abnormal fluctuations in my vital rhythms.  Rising blood pressure?  I receive a kind of Amber Alert on my cellphone.  Irregular heartbeat?  The same.  Marcus Welby, M.D., will have fused with SuperNanny (in Gestapo apron) to tweak, instantly and minutely, any slightest menace to my good health.  The invasions of privacy pouring in from all directions need not worry me; after all, as that profound ethical philosopher, Andrew Cuomo, has lately opined, nothing is worse than death.  (Or as Claudio answered his sister Isabella’s appeal to his honor, “Death is a fearful thing!”)  And why will the supreme technicians sitting at the invisible nexus of the planetary network take such interest in my prolonged survival?  Why?

Well, why not?  Why wouldn’t they?  They are the People’s Government.  The People’s Government loves the People, by definition.  They will see that I’m cared for in all circumstances.  If I need to stay home in a mask with a can of Lysol, then I will do so as long as They command.  If my job disappears and I have no visible means of support, then They will send a check.  They know what’s best for me—and for you.  For all of us.  They are experts.  Why would you be so selfish as to attempt to frustrate their mapping of our safest course?  Why should you have the right (again channeling philosopher Cuomo’s wisdom) to precipitate my death through your non-compliance?

And so we surrender our collective future, in this swooning vision of the Earthly Father (loving husband of Gaia), to the kind of elite which has deliberately stockpiled 1,500 varieties of corona virus, which specially cultivated one strain in an insecure Wuhan lab to infect humans, which locked its own citizens indoors with infected family members until entire buildings became death traps, which ordered survivors back to work in patently unsafe conditions lest the GDP suffer further, which destroyed documentation and silenced medical professionals lest the truth of its lethal incompetence leak out… which, by the way, has been forcing self-sufficient farmers of the sort I aspire to be off the land (no longer their land, but the People’s land) and into overcrowded cities for decades… this is the paradigm of our Uncle Li who will ensure our long, healthy lives.  This is the new pater patriae, the upgraded and non-slaveholding (merely slave-ruling) George Washington.  This is the collectivist Nurse Practitioner whose service to humanity in the Wuhan Institute of Virology was financed by 3.7 millions of donated Fauci money, its sister facility in the same city pursuing the same redacted mission statement with more millions from Saint William of Gates.  This is the colossus whose gaze blank and pitiless as the sun will save us from our own childish, destructive behavior.  This is what CNN reporters and Governor Cuomo and Ms. Latina-Campesina would put at the helm of the good ship New Green Deal.  This defoliator of the African continent and heaviest polluter of Earth’s atmosphere in the planet’s history is supposed to redeem us from our great capitalist garbage dump.

I have no answers to such stupefying idiocy.  I don’t understand.  I cannot comprehend how tens of millions of pampered, college-educated upper-crusters eagerly, even fanatically long to pull the plug on the system that has lofted them to the lap of luxury lest the haunts of their hazily recalled Spring Breaks slip under water in ten years—how this is their Awful Horror, yet they don’t give a damn about an unsecured power grid whose toasting in an inevitable solar storm will leave nine in ten of them dead within months.  It’s as if the dismantling of something high-tech can somehow save their puny lives, but the simple, cheap supplementation of the technology on which they tweet and chirp and insta-blather every day must not happen.  They must live, cowering under their beds with chips in their heads: they must live at all costs.  But… but if only the Great Satan may die, then a weedy, viney planet prowled only by insects and rats is a small price to pay.  If anyone lives, then they must live; but if there’s a chance of wiping humanity off the earth, then they’ll volunteer their lives as deliriously as the zealous of Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate.

You can call it childish, or stupid, or insane.  Columnists, bloggers, and commentators do so all the time.  But that doesn’t explain anything.  I’m not interested in marking tallies on a scorecard: I’m trying to understand.  Why are full adults more emotionally retarded than toddlers?  Why are Ivy League graduates duller than a frozen egg?  How can people who design websites and compile spreadsheets leap out a twelve-story window thinking they’re Superman?  It’s not a laughing matter, inasmuch as it’s likely to kill our children and grandchildren.  What exactly is it?  Why is it happening?

Is it a response to the hyper-technologizing of society?  Young people texting each other across the table on dates have become an endless stock of jokes… but our capitalist economy, after all, has created them.  They can’t be very happy in their state.  Is “it” a reflexive attack upon the Dr. Frankenstein who gave them the life of a mute, neutered freak?

Or are we seeing some more specific kind of technological conditioning?  Have “social media” and all the rest—the screens, screens, screens that mediate between the human mind and material reality at every turn—produced a freak insufficiently self-conscious to appreciate its freakishness?  Do these cyber-human hybrids quite literally not know how to evaluate human nature or to calculate human happiness?

Would they have turned out better if we’d had them read great literature in school?  Generations of Westerners used to acquire an immense amount of self-knowledge at an accelerated rate by reading literary classics—as opposed to the propagandistic screeds ramrodded into the curriculum by a corrupt academic establishment.  But what, then, corrupted the academic establishment?

Was it our abandonment of the land, of nature—of the daily tutorial in natural limitation which repelling grasshoppers from the garden and keeping foxes out of the henhouse provided?  Did we lose our common sense when we all migrated to the city and achieved a much higher lifestyle by spinning basic facts to favor deep-pocketed scoundrels?

At this point, does the ultimate cause even make any difference (to paraphrase yet another great thinker of our times, Ms. Clinton—always pronounced “Missus Clinton”)?  Science analyzes causes with a view to comprehending complex chain-reactions and, perhaps, intervening at critical links to forestall catastrophe.  Yet we’ve already arrived at the last link; and the chain, in any case, appears to be a “one and out” proposition.  You can protect your peanut patch better next summer if you figure out what devastated it last summer.  Once civilization’s wagon trundles over the cliff, however, there’s no restraining its free fall for a try at a better outcome.

Maybe I’d just like to know, for my personal satisfaction.  I’d like to understand the race of cowering, wired-up inepts lining up—with masks and observing strict social-distancing—outside the door of the slaughterhouse.  If the unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates insisted, then maybe the examined life offers modest rewards.

But when examination brings no insights… then I suppose we must await enlightenment from a source that Socrates but dimly divined beyond this valley of shadows.  In the meantime… I have no answers.  I just don’t understand.

 

What Millennials Hate (Unwittingly) About Capitalism IS Socialism

Those who throw up a stop sign before the ill-considered remark, “This nation is a democracy!” tend not to follow with a very helpful qualifier, it seems to me.  “No, it’s a democratic republic,” they amend.  Well, okay; but the distinction can be almost pedantic.  Certainly the risks of democracy do not disappear just because popular will is channeled through a series of narrowing chutes.  In some ways, those risks are magnified.  How is it that blackguards ranging from Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters to John Cornyn and Lamar Alexander rule their electoral fiefdoms year after year without challenge?  Because “elections”, in their case, are mere formalities.  “The people” have grown as used to seeing these timeworn names in print and hearing them on local TV as an Irish tenant of two hundred years ago was accustomed to having Lord Clanricarde’s bailiff demand the year’s rent.

In a democracy, “the people” sometimes haul off and make very foolish choices.  The classic Hollywood Western features a preeminent example of popular will in action when the concerned townsfolk get liquored up and then storm the jail to lynch Injun Joe.  On the other hand, democracies can grow paralyzingly torpid, as I have just suggested.  Voters can be hazed and herded into uninquisitive, even fatalistic habits due to the cumulative effects of despair.  In recent years, I myself have tried—with mixed success—not to be one of those who just stays home and doesn’t vote.  What’s the use?  Obamacare versus Romneycare… open border versus a few miles of border wall and skyrocketing numbers of H-1 visas.  Why waste gas and stand in line for choices like those?

Communist dictators, of course, draw heavily upon the latter kind of “support” to retain power in their ongoing crusade of megalomania, having exploited the former “lynch mob” kind, usually, to vault into the authoritarian saddle.  As has been known since the days of Plato, a tight correlation exists between a riotous mass uprising and the ascendancy of a dictator.  Mussolini and Hitler were both put in power by a majority vote; they both stayed in power because the majority saw Stalin’s nihilistic, cutthroat brigades as the lurking alternative.

In the case of our republic, democracy (i.e., a one-man-one-vote selection of local representatives) worked well as long as people enjoyed the freedom to market their talents.  We all had a real stake in daily events, and so we formed communities of distinct individuals rather than a restless mob.  If you loved to bake cookies and cakes, you could hang a sign before the ground level of your home on Main Street and open the door to customers.  If I enjoyed tooling leather, I could hoist my own sign across the street from you and strew my front room with belts, boots, and baggage.  You and I, and all our neighbors up and down Main Street, didn’t need government at any level to do a whole lot for us.  We needed police to keep thieves from breaking our windows at night and snitching our cash.  We needed garbage collectors to keep litter and refuse from piling up noxiously.  We didn’t mind paying a small tax for such services.  Just as we gave value for the prices we sought from customers, so we willingly paid the costs of security and stability.

It’s been said that industrialization, soon accelerating into high-tech uniformity, tragically undermined this pastoral idyll.  I’ve said it myself several times in the past.  On those occasions, I’m afraid I may have oversimplified.  Yes, the Industrial Age wreaked havoc on quaint rural communities: witness Oliver Goldsmith’s long poetic indictment, “The Ruined Village”.  In the British Isles, the Enclosure (which Thomas More’s Utopia had roundly condemned early on) forced crofters into congested cities as monied interests sought to turn acreage to greater profit.  Similar imbalances resulted on our side of the pond, though less plainly (at first) an opposition of landlord to tenant or of robber baron to factory worker.  Railroads and canals determined how quickly farm produce could reach lucrative urban markets.  More remote locations tended to struggle unless a new industry (mining, smelting, railheading cattle, etc.) could reanimate the not-quite-self-sustaining township; and such transformation, of course, would have turned any small-town economy on its ear.

For a while, the agricultural South offered a fairly coherent contrast to the industrial North… but even though Spartanburg and Athens weren’t buzzing with steam engines and telegraphs in 1850, the cost of doing a more native kind of transaction had soared.  The influence of Yankee ingenuity and industry did not remain up-river.  Items that required artificial processing were seldom local products, and grew pricey.  Class distinctions were magnified by a more complex marketplace.  Many of the largest plantations, for instance—with their huge rosters of slaves—were founded by Northern transplants who had shifted their wealth to exploit cheap land down South.  The generator of this inequity was the protectionist tariffs demanded by the industrial North to favor its infant enterprises, whose captains as yet had far less interest in exporting than in staving off competitive imports.  The little-attended consequence was diminished receptivity in foreign markets to the relatively unprocessed riches of the South—as well as, paradoxically, higher prices on manufactures now shipped from Ohio and Indiana rather than Europe. (Interstate freighting expenses often exceeded those of foreign importation.)  Our Civil War, frankly, rooted much more deeply in such disruption of local harmony than it did in slavery (though to say as much is to contradict “public school mythology”).

Though I lay no pretensions to being an economist and have sketched out a complex historical situation very crudely above, I’ve seen the effects of national trends in industry and technology on Southern landscapes with my own eyes, over and over.  No, I wasn’t personally present to observe the post-war degradation of early Southern townships: vibrant communities once sustained by small farmers (few of whom had owned more than two or three  slaves, if any) that collapsed into “mill villages” of helots—wage slaves white and black—ruled by one or two elite families.  Yet I have lived and worked in and around many such mill towns.  Most of them, significantly, had already shut down their special industry by the time I arrived, their economy having been undermined a second or third time by interests with deep pockets that chose to move plants (now to Mexico or China).  I could usually discern just enough lingering ancient history to appreciate what had been lost from long, long ago: congenial lanes of tiny shops catering to farmers who might visit town twice a week—on market day and Sunday.  A smattering of these, most boarded up, hadn’t been worth the cost of razing when the carpet mill or the meat-packing plant came to gobble up 60 percent of the workforce at a paltry, unstable wage.

The moral of the story?  That macro-economic movements can topple the intricately balanced, serenely purring micro-economies of peaceful communities in a million ways… well, let’s call it a dozen.  A great stone plunging into a lake can capsize a small boat along the far shore in mere ripples.  This phenomenon, indeed, continues to be repeated sometimes as once-coherent settlements struggle to revive after each dousing under the hand of external exploitation; and every revival, it seems to me, is a little less convincing, a little closer to final, irresistible lapse into the swamp.

As a child in post-war Texas (post-World War Two: I was alive for some of the Eisenhower decade), I remember a Fort Worth where we could easily, quickly drive to the zoo or Will Rogers Coliseum or Safeway on Camp Bowie or Carswell Air Force Base.  That day is gone forever.  I can recall, too, an Austin where my grandparents could walk me from their home on West 14^th and San Antonio to the Toy Palace (just beyond the Austin School of Beauty), thence another couple of blocks to the capitol grounds, and perhaps from there to Lamme’s Candies and a movie theater (not to mention innumerable haberdasheries and jewelers) up Congress Avenue.  All gone now… except for Lamme’s (which may or may not still occupy that corner across from the Capitol—but the patented praline pecan formula sells very well on Amazon).

Why did those streets of individuals, tending their fathers’ businesses or starting their own, yield to lofty bank buildings, parking decks, and international franchises?  Not because of the Internet: the reference points of my childhood had vaporized by about 1970 in downtown Austin, and probably before that in greater Fort Worth.  Why?

Because of zoning laws.  Because of city taxes.  Because of all that local government was now “doing for” every resident over and beyond mere policing and cleaning (duties which, indeed, were increasingly neglected).  Because of state and federal regulations, as well, that would have required small operators to supply wheel-chair access, multiple exits in case of fire, a minimum wage, insurance for employees… not to mention the exploding urgency of being covered against all varieties of lawsuit, imaginable and unimaginable.  Would your grandma baking cookies for her little storefront on Broken Antler’s Main Street ever have dreamed that she might be sued for not creating “gay” wedding cakes, or perhaps (as happened lately to a decades-old German bakery) for applying chocolate-icing smiles to her macaroons in a way that reminded someone of “black face”?

Do you see the pattern?  It took me years to make it out—and we can hardly blame our children, who’ve lived so much less of life than we and have been water-boarded in so much more “education” of such polemical furor, for not suspecting it.  Capitalism, it turns out, doesn’t grow from a tadpole to a trout to an all-devouring, self-devouring Loch Ness Monster.  No.  Prepare thyself.  Capitalism eventually morphs into Nanny State socialism; socialism is the torpid, horrid final phase of capitalism.  Marx’s dysfunctional utopia (a.k.a. dystopia) is not the new day that dawns over a hellish night of capitalist tycoons slaughtering each other: it is the long, pitch-black sleep that receives capitalism’s greedy, suicidal dusk.  Big businesses drive small businesses under by banning your bakery from your residence, by condemning my leather work for employing tools too sharp for OSHA standards, by fining Peter’s Tax Service for not having wheelchair access, by shutting down Paul’s casual for-cash computer repairs because the kid didn’t get an EIN.  Big business loves big government.  Bill Gates loves it when federal bureaucracy mandates Microsoft programs for use in the public school system.  Jeff Bezos loves it when Homeland Security elects to incorporate Amazon’s network for its binges of information-gathering.  What CEO of what mega-corporation wouldn’t want to be locked into a long-term contract with a national government whose audience is captive?

But what has this late-stage capitalist empire-building to do with free enterprise?  It has everything to do with a micro-managing Big Brother state that will require all to have flu shots (happy pharmaceutical companies!) paid for by mandatory insurance (happy, happy insurers!).  It has nothing whatever to do with freedom: with consumer options, with rewarded innovation, with competitive market forces, with daring maverick start-ups.  It’s the very antithesis of our pioneer tradition and our individualist ethic.  It’s what makes the corporate elite and the ruling elite fabulously wealthy out of the same slop-bucket… and, I believe, it’s a major part of what young people see when they claim to hate capitalism.  What they really hate is socialism operating covertly through final-stage capitalism—which may, alas, be the same thing.

We need to recognize, at least, that the two are close enough to the same thing—the Loch Ness Monster’s ravenous, filthy teeth and his stinging, excreting tail—as to justify our going on high alert.  Trust neither teeth nor tail.  Fight the creature by resisting all government intrusion into our personal lives.  Millennials, you know, have a strong libertarian streak.  We tend to associate their “lawless” streak with a craving for free weed… but consider, for that matter, just how well our avuncular government is policing the flow of marijuana right now, and extrapolate the effects to the fully legal, hyper-regulated mega-industry that Bernie Sanders longs to create.  A Vietnam War’s worth of our children die each year now of drugs smuggled in by Mexican cartels whose toxic impurities result from their manufacture in China.  And our federal government… is not securing the border, is condoning “sanctuary cities” through insistent inaction, and is deploring Donald Trump’s (periodic and inconsistent) efforts to minimize our dependency on Chinese products.  The open border supplies Big State capitalists with an limitless stock of slave labor, Chinese “interdependency” supplies them with limitless markets for their gadgets and gismos, and the presence of illegal residents by the million supplies them with assured electoral victories in the future for their congressional stooges.

What’s not to love about such capitalism?

Our kids just need to learn, somehow, that this stinking cesspool of the soul is not merely the look of capitalism without make-up: it’s also the carefully concealed face—the Janus/Judas flip-side visage—of socialism.  We older types need to learn that, too.  After all, if we’ve had longer to ferret out the truth, we’ve also been exposed much longer to the pious lies concealing it.

(See my video introduction to a series of forthcoming talks about libertarian alternatives at this YouTube location.)

How We Elect: A Decaying Republic’s Broken System (Part Two)

It’s a commonplace in American politics to ascribe corruption to every elected official.  They’re all crooks, we say… and the system makes such sweeping condemnation credible.  You can’t get elected without publicizing your candidacy, you can’t publicize without advertising, you can’t advertise without campaign contributions… and you can’t elicit meaningful contributions unless a body of deep-pocketed donors has reason to believe that you favor a certain agenda.  So… there you are, bought and paid for in the eyes of the casual cynic.

As I ponder the misery of conservative Americans, forever watching their government slide farther left by promising more and more goodies to possible voters, I share in the cynic’s disgust.  We who just want to be left alone (How about a “Back Off” party, with the Yosemite Sam who used to appear on trailer mud-flaps as our mascot?) are constantly being served the challenge, “Well, look at what the other side’s offering!”  We have to be content, then, with a slower rate of drift into the national debt chasm that yawns as millions of ne’er-do-wells sell their vote to the highest bidder.  Or we don’t have to be content, of course: we can sit out elections and opt for a straight nosedive.  Maybe the more abrupt catastrophe will be more fruitful—maybe those who survive it can get about piecing something together from the rubble sooner.

I’ve grown so familiar with both sides of this Hobson’s Choice over the years that I can argue for and against either one with equal vigor… and equal despair.  I don’t know how we find and promote candidates who genuinely wish to save the republic rather than feed off her decaying carcass—or, in the unlikely event that we elect them, how we keep them from going flabby within their first term.

Lately, though (and maybe thanks to a steady water-boarding in cynicism), I’ve begun to envision a new kind of candidate.  This worthy would already have amassed a small fortune, would already have very broad “name recognition”—and, most importantly, would already have experienced mistreatment at the hands of the info-tainment industry.  For the last criterion is essential: it’s what is permanently, fatally missing in our patriotic, clean-cut saviors who turn two-faced during their freshman term.  Someone—I think it may have been Chris Putnam—explained recently on Daniel Horowitz’s Conservative Review that mere surrender to the barrage of media criticism is a major cause of our champions going Judas.  It makes sense, if you consider the following picture.  Just who is this bright young star of ours?  A pleasant man or woman who’s very used to pleasing—who has known nothing else since being class president for several years running in high school.  This person has the smile, has the wave, has the walk.  He’s always charmed everyone… until now.  Now, alarmingly, the magic is gone.  That has to be terrifying.  How to get the magic back?  What does Orpheus do when the trees no longer uproot themselves to dance to his sweet lyre?  One has to suppose that he lets the strangely unmoved audience call the tune, and the tempo.

Consider, by way of example, the current game of rope-a-dope that “wise Latina grandmother” Sonya Sotomayor is playing with Chief Justice John Roberts.  She’ll get results; she usually does.  Roberts is more concerned over his acceptance by the beltway intellectual elite than he is about preserving the Constitution.  Ironically, his new compatriot Brett Kavanaugh is cut from the same cloth, despite a take-no-prisoners confirmation hearing that duped most of us into supposing our rock-bottom values to be the stake.  Kavanaugh is another prep-school party boy, though admittedly (hopefully—please-God-surely) almost as wise now as a Latina grandmother.  Sotomayor was correct in her snarky talking out of school to this extent: we do tend to preserve bits and pieces of the prejudices in which we were raised.  For Kavanaugh, the corrosive residue upon his judgment is one of wanting to please, of expecting to be praised.  It’s what he has always known.  (For Sotomayor, it’s a default retreat to the “Latina” trump card that has always won the hand in the past, even though her confidence in that strategy utterly undermines—patently contradicts—her sworn duty to consider all human beings as individuals equally endowed with rights.)

So… so who, then, is our superhero candidate capable of leaping over such obstacles in a single bound?  What about a figure from the world of professional athletics whose gilded reputation provides a breastplate against media slings and arrows?  What about Curt Schilling, the should-have-been (perhaps soon-to-be) Hall of Fame pitcher?  What about New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick—or his protégé, quarterback Tom Brady?  Wrestling superstar Tyrus has established his political gravitas on Greg Gutfeld’s show, and enjoys the additional advantage of being black.  Does that matter?  Am I really clinging to the notion of identity politics?  Why, yes: inasmuch as the name of this new game is vanquishing the propaganda machine at work behind news desks everywhere, any contradiction of the simplistic profiles spewed over our air waves is welcome.  We’re playing a game, precisely.  Our society is in a degenerative stage which its founding fathers would have recognized as fatal.  We can no longer merely rely upon sound arguments made by honest people—for a shocking percentage of the electorate reasons by pure association, and elected representatives of routine qualifications soon lose their honesty.  Those are the game’s ground rules.

The new candidate, therefore, needs an “in your face” attitude.  And his defiance has to be such that the public credits it to his established “bad ass” persona.  He must be able to jump down Jim Acosta’s throat, come back out with a fistful of viscera, and throw them in the impudent punk’s face.

Albert Pujols: he’ll be retiring soon.  First-ballot Hall of Famer.  The most terrifying batsman of the new millennium’s opening decade, and a giant of a man (a Latin giant) who silenced questions about his possible steroids use with little more than a scowl.  What sticks in my mind about Alberto’s political inclination is a proud remark I once heard Glenn Beck make about the world’s mightiest clean-up hitter being one of his fans… and also a much more recent, very understated regret voiced by Pujols about California taxes.  He’s Latino-wise enough, I’m sure, to keep his mouth shut on more hot-button issues until the Cooperstown vote is recorded.  He doesn’t want to get “schillinged”.  Wise, very wise.

But you see how this plays, anyway.  Would an actor also meet our specifications?  Maybe.  Dean Cain has played Superman, and doesn’t appear (in truly Superman fashion) to fear the Twitter spittle drawn by his conservative views.  Our man Ronaldus Magnus seemed to have mastered the art of ignoring flights of rotten eggs and tomatoes thanks to his screen career.  One could wish that Schwarzenegger had been a little less impressed with social engineering… but he, too, serves to sustain the main point.

Which is simply this.  Our broken system is preserved in constant shambles primarily (speaking from a purely mechanical perspective) by the unremitting slanders that educational institutions and broadcast media heap upon non-progressive, “back off” candidates.  We look for new faces who have “done things”: created jobs, served in the military, fought infanticide in the courts… and these tyros keep getting themselves shot down or captured in the first sally.  (Oh, by the way… yeah, how has Martha McSally worked out?)  It’s time now to pay attention to character rather than accomplishment—and when I say “character”, I don’t mean church attendance and fidelity to one spouse.  Maybe I should have said “personality”.  We need tough guys.  We need people who will stuff the slanders in their mouth, chew them into nails, and spit them back where they came from.  We need not to put nice guys on the ballot, guys like you and me.  We need a bad-ass.

Okay, so I’ve been describing Donald Trump… I guess.  I could argue with you about that.  For my taste, Trump spends too much time tweeting intercepted missiles back where they came from and too little time actually attending to policy.  (There’s an enormous amount of matter, for instance, capable of exposing the Swamp in all its stench that he could declassify tomorrow; why, oh why, doesn’t he do so?)  Imagine Bill Belichick giving the State of the Union instead of the Donald.  No celebration of Jevonka’s “jailbreak” bill, nor even a Medal of Freedom for Rush (though I’m fine with that: hell, Barack Obama dished out 123 of the things to people like Isabel Allende, Barbra Streisand, and Bruce Springsteen).  No, I picture Bill at the rostrum quietly, almost monotonously detailing all the duties not performed by the House, the Senate, the courts, the media, the universities, the banking sector… and then he raps his thin stack of notes sharply on the mahogany, turns to leave, and leans into the microphone for one last, very dry comment.  “Just do your job.”

Will I leave to hear those words from that stage?

Why We Must Push Back Against “Climate Change” Hysteria

The other day I filmed a short video catalogued in my website archive (semperluxmundi.org) under “A Culture of Slanders and Slurs”.  The library of about two dozen videos now addresses topics related to religious faith in a straightforward manner: no virtue-signaling allowed.  I thought it was time in this particular series to call out the unscrupulous among us who abuse language in such a way as to sequester defenders of certain views from consideration as human beings.  Of course, “racist” is now such a slur, and I am about to dedicate another video to the word “Nazi”.  “Climate-change denier” has never really caught on, thanks to being quite unwieldy—but the notion behind the phrase is the same: those who “deny” climate change deserve whatever mistreatment comes their way.  Not only must we not give them a hearing; we should entertain giving them jail time, or maybe shooting them like dogs.

I placed the word “deny” in quotations above because denial isn’t even what’s properly at issue (any more than is “climate change” per se; the mandatory article of faith is really that global climate is rapidly, radically changing due to manmade influences).  My talk—and you can do just so much in fifteen minutes, alas—began by stressing that, as a lifelong enemy of the automobile and of our congested urban environments, I have left considerably lighter carbon footprints behind me than most people.  I then spent several minutes emphasizing that mere measurement of relevant climatic data is an enormously complex task.  Readings must be obtained at uniform geographical and chronological intervals from around the world, a requirement which undermines confident conclusions at our point in history right out of the gate.  Perceived changes in weather during one human lifetime qualify as evidence neither by the spatial nor the temporal standard; for none of us spends an hour per month at a hundred locations equally spaced around Earth’s sphere, and none of us lives the many centuries necessary to uncover a meaningful pattern.

This doesn’t make me a “denier”; it makes me a voice of restraint before those who insist upon rushing to unjustified conclusions.  I wish I’d had time to handle more adequately the dubious motives of many at the “movement’s” fore who busy themselves stirring the rush into a stampede.  Peter Helmes has often offered analyses of that caliber through his site, Die Deutsche Konservativen. One of his posts a couple of weeks ago noted that Greta Thunberg’s father has grown rather wealthy off of two concerns dedicated to marketing his eerily wooden and humorless “Green Joan of Arc” daughter; and the post concludes, all in boldface, Um es nochmals klar zu sagen: Dahinter stehen keine Idealisten, sondern knallharte Großkapitalisten. Wo deren Interesse liegt, dürfte jedem normal denkenden Menschen klar sein. Translation: “To say it plainly, there are no idealists standing behind [climate change hysteria], but hard-boiled capitalist tycoons.  Every competently thoughtful person should be clear about where the interests of such types lie.”

When I still possessed a small soapbox in academe from which to prod freshmen, I tended to proceed very cautiously into the realms of chemistry and atmospheric science.  Those weren’t my field.  Some of my students could have diagrammed complex molecules while I was still trying to figure out how carbon dioxide can poison plants.  (Can it?  An intrepid investigator probing a volcanic lake on the History Channel made that claim within my hearing… but the minute rise in global CO2 seems to be feeding plants handsomely in locations that aren’t fuming with sulfur.)  Behind my rostrum, then, I always contented myself with making a few very basic, even “dummy” observations.  1) Carbon dioxide is less than one half of one hundredth of one percent of the earth’s atmosphere; it’s hard to see how fluctuations in thousandths of a percentage point spell Armageddon.  2) Of that tiny amount, only about two percent arises from manmade sources.  3) Of those manmade sources, India and China are by far the most prolific contributors—and neither of those nations is in the least interested in curbing its industrial growth.

If the West, and the U.S. in particular, were to fragment its industrial/technological foundation for the very doubtful purpose of reducing CO2 emissions by .00003%, the following disastrous environmental consequence would therefore follow.  The “People’s Republic” of China would have a path free and clear to dominate utterly the world’s economy, and hence to determine in large measure the social and political organization of every individual society. In other words, the single greatest environmental poisoner in our planet’s history (with the possible exception of the post-Chernobyl Soviet Union) would be calling all the tunes globally.

Is this what we want?  Is this what any person sincerely concerned about life on Earth would want?  For several decades, we have seen (if we have eyes to see) how much the Chinese oligarchy cares about its own citizens.  I’ve noticed in reading the testimonies of Chinese citizens who speak out too daringly and are “invited for a cup of tea” at police headquarters that practically all detainees, when they know they’re not going home for several weeks, worry about not having their meds.  Everyone in urban China is on meds!  That’s because the air is poison to breathe.  (Remember a few years back when a massive effort was made to cleanse to skies temporarily over Beijing for the opening Olympic ceremony?)  We’re getting a refresher course right now, if we need one, on just how highly the PRC elite value the lives of ordinary people.  To the Party’s chosen few, handling the Coronavirus is primarily an exercise in public-relations damage control.  If the disease isn’t diagnosed, then ensuing death cannot be attributed to it… and only about one patient in ten was being tested for infection even in the early days of the outbreak, before resources gave out.

These are the people to whom we will surrender the planet’s health, should we throttle all fossil-fuel consumption, refuse to build nuclear power plants, and wait for the wind to turn blades on the high plains.  This is the “green” plan to save us all!

I also used to stress to my students, as I stress in the video and continue to underscore, that pointing all solutions in the direction of a more intrusive government smells very, very fishy.  It is especially so inasmuch as big government created most of the problem, to begin with.  After World War II, our federal government, favoring certain players in the transportation sector over others, pumped millions into producing a national car- and airline-dependency among us while leaving our substantial railways to languish.  (Trains move loads about fifteen times more cost-effectively, by the way, than trucks… but the Teamsters’ Union had a louder voice.)  On a local level, municipalities of the Fifties rigorously began to zone out your corner drugstore, your handy barber shop, your neighborhood school and pediatrician—which, of course, created real estate and building booms as well as forcing Middle America to invest heavily in cars, in gas and oil, in insurance, and so forth.  Meanwhile, lawyers, lawsuits, regulations, and inspectors converged upon Plainville, USA, the way vultures compete for a carcass.  Federal bureaucracies like OSHA hounded small-business owners even after they had duly shifted their shingle from Laurel Lane to Main Street.  Many of these hard-working people surrendered, dissolving their business and entering the daily rush-hour file of traffic to get to a corporation’s megalopolitan plant or office tower.

If we simply eradicated these zoning restrictions and micro-managing bureaucracies, we would preserve immense amounts of oil, reduce incalculable volumes of traffic-related stress and injury, almost nullify the crime endemic to periodically emptied neighborhoods, foster an environment where citizens were much happier thanks to a much more human level of contact with each other… but no.  No.  More government, more regimentation—that’s worked so well for us in the past! Let’s just amp it up.

Meanwhile, merely for raising your hand and daring to ask a question about any aspect of the “climate change agenda”, you make yourself a target for doxing, canceling, incarcerating… you’re a public spittoon.  This is your reward for suggesting that, if the emperor’s new clothes are invisible, maybe it’s because they don’t exist rather than because you’re blind.  This is our current level of insanity.  This is how well we’ve been groomed for rule by the idiot-producing ideologues controlling our classrooms, and by marketplace and political despots ranging from George Soros to Xi Jinping (who both turn out to be financing much of what happens in our classrooms).

Indeed, my ultimate question of our “social conscience” warriors—far down the list, and not an item that I would ask in a townhall meeting—nags at me more than any uncertainty I have about science.  How many of these self-declared moral beacons, I should like to know, who lead the chanting chorus of, “Climate-change denier!” as the mob gathers, are being remunerated rather directly by Soros, Xi, Robert Fink, or the Rothschilds’ Bank of England?  Conspiracy theory?  Why, hell yes, it’s conspiracy theory!  Have you not yet awakened to the fact that all truth in these “post-fact” times is suffocating under the bedsheets of conspiracy-theory quarantine?

How to Take a Wrong Turn on the Climb to Heaven

Ever since I passed along to him a short anthology of Near Death Experiences compiled by a practicing physician, my son has sustained a lively exchange with me on the subject.  Being young, he is impressed by such “hard evidence” of life beyond the reality we know.  (Our nation’s school system, from bottom to top, certainly hasn’t given his generation any aesthetic or philosophical inkling of an empirical approach’s inadequacies—so empirical testimony against mere empiricism becomes very powerful.)  Personally, I’m always just a bit leery of the NDE.  It’s not that I’m an incorrigible skeptic.  On the contrary, I’m one of the few people you’re ever likely to know with years of grad-school conditioning in his past who believes that extra-terrestrial life (or its projection through an ingenious fleet of robotic minions) has probably visited our solar system.  I don’t think I’m particularly narrow-minded.

No, the problem I have with the typical NDE is the implications that over-excited chroniclers tend to draw from it.  The surrounding discussion often has the tone of boundless, almost delirious optimism.  “You see?  All is really sweetness and light!  It’s all love—love for everyone!  All is forgiven!  It’s just one great warm embrace!  All is swept up into the… the cosmic All!”  Okay, let’s stop and ponder that.  No justice for mass-murderers like Stalin and Mao (add Hitler if you like… but don’t forget Pol Pot, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, and King Herod).  No motive to try harder in this terrestrial existence—to “seek the kingdom”.  No reason why sincere sorrow and repentance are anything but wasted time.  Lighten up!  All you need is love!

In their defense, I will say of most NDE witnesses that their encounter is brief, dazzling, and (by definition) limned by the incomprehensible.  They’re not the ones who seek to graft sweeping metaphysical conclusions onto their out-of-clock-time ecstasy (a word which literally means “standing outside of”).  They were abruptly jolted from their body… and then they found themselves bathed in light and soothed by predeceased friends and family.  As far as I know, most of them haven’t borne back a message about how the universe is put together.  They merely reiterate with John the Gospelist, “True love hath no fear.”

Dr. Eben Alexander’s kerygma from the Beyond is not so modest.  My son forwarded this YouTube link to one of the good doctor’s many public presentations.  Alexander’s case has received special attention, apparently, because 1) he himself was a neurosurgeon who had practiced for two decades when a seizure caused his brain activity to flatline, 2) he was thoroughly agnostic at the time of the incident, and 3) his brain was so very moribund for days that no sort of short-circuiting or “flame-out” could have accounted for his visions.  Clearly, something very extraordinary happened in this man’s return to corporeal life, if not in his hours of unverifiable transit through another life.  He should have been dead—quite dead.  The feeding tubes had actually been removed from his body for days before his recovery.  His revival was miraculous.

And, yes, Eben Alexander experienced virtually all of the classic NDE moments: the dark tunnel (in more static form), the indescribably bright light at its end, an angelic chorus, the warmth and limitless love of innumerable figures… but he claims to have been entrusted with uncharacteristically specific information, besides.  He was told (in a degree of detail that Dante would have envied) that the universe is unfolding according to a great plan—and that this plan involves reincarnation.  We are to return to life in better-informed stages that, collectively, will set our planet—and other planets in other galaxies, eventually—on a hyperbolic path of intersection with heaven.

An unimaginably beautiful woman (who was plainly not some morph of the divorced Mrs. Alexander) was the doctor’s Beatrice during this revelation.  I note in passing that I’ve never read of any other NDE where Miss Universe puts in an appearance and spiritually fondles her visitor.

I’m being a bit facetious now.  It’s a way to send some of my irritation through an escape valve.  In my opinion, Dr. Alexander had a fully legitimate encounter with the unspeakable bliss that awaits us beyond this Vale of Tears… and he proceeded, consciously or otherwise, to finesse some of its contours into a form more marketable than the raw material would have been.  His book has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for years.  His speaking honoraria have likely dwarfed his surgeon’s income (which, in itself, constitutes a small miracle).  He has chatted intimately with Oprah before a global audience, and he routinely gives presentations even for medical personnel thanks to his lab-coat cred.  I gather that he is involved in some sort of cutting-edge tech company that aspires to point the medical-scientific community’s nose more directly into metaphysics (or its ears: the technology has to do with harmonious sounds and healing).  Life has become pretty good for Eben Alexander—and, of course, I mean life on “this side”.

How many of these dark terrestrial tunnels would be beaming with warm gold-and-silver light at the end if Alexander’s testimony had remained (as NDE’s usually do) within confines of direct personal experience, without the peek at a cosmic playbook?  Wouldn’t that more typical result have smacked of… well, Christian orthodoxy?  Didn’t the “reincarnation” message sweeten it sufficiently that Oprah would line up to drink the Kool-aid?

On the one hand, I fear that my response may be too caustic.  After all, Alexander’s narrative is not so very far off the track of other NDE’s.  Maybe he just misspoke at key points, or maybe I have misinterpreted something he said.  I myself believe that the afterlife must surely be an occasion for “linking up” with innumerable other souls—for begging and granting pardons, for getting the whole story of what happened, for healing and growing strong as something yet more magnificent emerges.  Perhaps the abuse of the word “reincarnation” was this man’s clumsy metaphor for a reality whose approach to God is so near, and so ever-more-near, that only the notion of an utterly regenerated body in an entirely different life can convey the thrill.

And yet, that higher, deeper life cannot be entirely different.  This life matters.  Morally—spiritually—it must matter.  What we do is what we are: it is the “here” from which we must depart to reach “there”.  It’s not a prison, or need not be.  God’s will is not that we suffocate forever within the folly of the narrow walls we build around ourselves.  In the recognition of our folly, however, lies the key to the gate.  We cannot become better than our fleshly form—that temporary cast in which we have so distorted God’s image—if we turn out never to have existed physically, in the first place.  Our human individuality must not become an irrelevancy.

Such cancellation of our individual worth as creatures is where I see Eben Alexander wandering dangerously off the track.  He sings off-key.  His hymn sounds to my ear like secular progressivism with a mystical tingle in the background.  The confessional note—the admission of past error that signals true growth, and also the joy of dissolving another’s guilt over injuries done—isn’t audible.  Instead, we are ushered into a no-fault vision of things getting better and better and better… things on this earth, since reincarnation is the engine driving the ascent.  Alexander even offers the Gnostic heresy’s hint that souls are reincarnated as justification of his thesis, and he tosses in the rumors of Christ’s day equating John the Baptist with the resuscitated prophet Elijah.  A proper Christian faith, apparently, ought to become more Hindu.

The first time I encountered this infatuation of the theoretical scientist with the most ancient religions on earth was, I suppose, in Carl Sagan.  It probably goes back much farther.  Its pedigree, at any rate, must surely transmit a load of progressivist DNA through every branch of the family tree.  The better here-and-now’s the thing—not heaven, not metaphysical bliss: no, bring it down here, and put us now on a path to reach it!  That’s a slightly more spiritual version of launching the Starship Enterprise (but not really—just more spiritually adorned).

You see, Dr. Alexander, our world is not getting better and better in any way that I can discern.  It may be getting worse and worse… but I’m willing to attribute such pessimism to the filter of my own rather depressive predisposition.  It’s certainly not sprouting wings as more enlightened individuals return in new bodies—and, by the way, utterly purged of their former individuality.  You say, Dr. Alexander, that many very curious cases of ESP involve children who recollect images or events from previous times and far-flung places.  Yes, those interest me, as well.  But wherein do you find evidence that these children a) preserve the character of Captain MacKay who died on the field of Culloden or, more importantly, b) display any moral awareness beyond their years?  What are you thinking, man?  What world are you living in right now, as you bow to your applause and shake Oprah’s hand?

Do you consider that you yourself have become a better man than before, though you have failed to learn—Other World Journey notwithstanding—the moral necessity of individual coherence?  Say you’re indeed better; but you are still Eben Alexander, are you not? So may we expect the better Eben within minutes of your eventual death, as your soul flutters into a newborn? Right now, then—message and all—you’re just the old, inferior Eben… have I got that correct? Or have you been permitted to transport certain revelations despite your lack of corporeal upgrade? I like much of what you propose.  I, too, love the idea of using sound to access a clearer, cleaner state of consciousness; I’ve long suspected in my own life that our urban environment damages our minds with its sheer cacophony.  But… but Doctor, why must you insist that Beatrice bestowed upon you the secrets of this healing power so that we might go forth and Conquer the World for Goodness?

Oh, how I dread that formula, in all of its versions!  World conquest—and always, always for “goodness”!  Millions of hearts have coddled it, if their tongues have not exactly expressed it… and not all of those hearts, by any means, were bad ones from the outset.  Yet none was ever made better after nursing such a spiritual virus.  This world is imperfectable: at best, we hold our own against sin.  True hope lies elsewhere.

Perhaps I’m especially distressed by Dr. Alexander’s video because I have just published The Eternal Moment: Seeking Divine Presence in the Present on Amazon.  You can read there at much greater length of my concern over “future-worship”, our time’s dominant form of idolatry, if you’re interested.  I urgently suggest that you get interested.  Beware of “ascending” staircases whose bottom step rests upon today’s earth and whose top step merely reaches tomorrow’s earth, or the next day’s.  Such climbs tend to go steeply downward, from heaven’s perspective.

Pessimist’s Progress: Congressional Incompetence Lets a Ray of Hope Slip Through

On the one hand, a pessimist is constantly beset by the feeling that apologies are in order, as if he had pulled everyone into the ditch during a serene walk in the countryside.  On the other hand, I can’t pretend that a train hasn’t jumped the track and that I don’t see it barreling straight toward our scenic lane.  A couple of weeks ago, an Iowa judge sentenced a Hispanic youth to 16 years of jail for burning an LGBTQ flag… and this atrocity from the bench was reported almost nowhere.  I heard of it through Michael Savage: the one print source I’ve tracked down suppresses the offender’s age and ethnicity.  I’m not entirely sure which is worse, according my pessimist’s handbook: the insane verdict and penalty (for even the verdict was insane) or our news media’s conspiratorial silence on all such stories, and especially on “perpetrator details” that conflict with other narratives.  If a gun-loving white male Southerner had drawn the sentence….

And, yes, the outrageous serial-suffocation of the truth practiced by our mainstream news media is a conspiracy—and, yes, that word still has both a meaning distinct from “lunatic fantasy” and a presence in everyday events.  Yet the operatives of George Soros can dictate vocabulary to the Fourth Estate with such effect that, in the EU, the non-compliant are deprived of their livelihood (cf. Michelle Malkin’s comments about the Rome Charter Association and Hope Not Hate, both Soros-hatchlings, in Open Borders Inc).   Over here, merely dropping the name “Soros” draws charges of “anti-Semitism” after a psychedelic demolition-derby of unconnected dots.

Meanwhile, one-time conservative superstar Mike Lee is joining the congressional chorus of baboons who smell leopard because the president used his powers as commander-in-chief after a fashion just approved by both houses; and the real danger faced by us all—attack from terrorists or cartel-hirelings that nestle abundantly in all our major cities, is ignored by virtually every member of Congress while we debate whether Iranian rockets might start a war if they actually hit a target.  As if we didn’t have a war on low-but-rising simmer right here on our front door….

Ironically, I registered my first burst of optimism since well before Christmas when I heard Dr. Peter Pry reveal (on Frank Gaffney’s Secure Freedom Radio broadcast of 1/8) that our congressmen had accidentally done something useful while rubber-stamping the 3000+ page National Defense Authorization Act read by none of them (and authorizing, by the way, the President’s power to wage war).  Secreted in the NDAA were three provisions that greatly advance the hardening of our frightfully vulnerable power grid.  Indeed, if there’s one reason to dread the aftermath of Qassem Soleimani’s elimination that has more nightmare-potential than a Hezbollah/MS-13 alliance, it’s our susceptibility to blackouts lasting for months.  Of course, said alliance could exploit our insecure grid rather easily… but it’s already a ticking time-bomb without the ingredient of human evil.  Just add a major solar flare pointed in Earth’s direction.  A potentially catastrophic flood of ionized particles narrowly missed us in March of 2014.

I call the Congress’s final green-lighting of energy protection—after about two decades of criminal negligence—ironic (in addition to moronic) because it’s probably a result of… well, of nobody’s having bothered to read the damn bill.  Any damn bill.  Are you getting that?  The single greatest cause for rejoicing we’ve had so far this year has been Congress’s runaway incompetence.  Sometimes you can get to the watering hole unmolested while the baboons are slinging excrement at a rug with spots that fell out of a garbage truck.

Now, exactly why Congress has shown such contempt for, if not hostility to, the concern over EMP raised by figures like Dr. Pry is a mystery that must draw more speculation than clear fact.  Republicans, at least, seem to have been sufficiently bribed by power companies to keep the shadow of a virtual extinction-event stubbornly to their blind-eye side.  (Every Republican has at least one blind eye: Dan Crenshaw just happens to wear a patch.)  But Democrats?  Can you imagine an issue better tailored to their conventional narrative?  “Evil private-sector monopolies bet the deaths of nine in ten Americans against the opportunity to make a marginal profit in a game of existential blackjack!”  What’s up with Democrats?  They’re alarmed that plants enjoy carbon dioxide, apparently—which composes less than a half of a hundredth of one percent of the atmosphere (and of that, less than two percent is manmade).  Their hair is on fire because California and Australia are burning… but the cause is always too much CO2, never idiotic environmental regulations prohibiting the culling of deadwood, never careless human populations wandering hither and yon nomadically.

Well, what about a genuine threat to human survival supported by hard science (as opposed to Michael Mann’s hockey-stick graph compiled from medieval measurements that he retrieved via Ouija board)?  If our civilization is to be hanged for a lamb, how about hanging it for a sheep?  You can hang us for both, you know, guys—the mother of all necktie parties.

But no: Democrats and their shills in propaganda-outposts like The Weather Channel are as insistent that the EMP threat is pure hoax (that’s right: conspiracy theory) as they are dead-red certain that fish will swim down the streets of Nashville and Kansas City by 2030.  Why is the former anathema while the latter is rigid orthodoxy?  Why?

I would observe that both positions have a critical element in common: the promotion of a Soros-like one-world government (euphemistically called “the open society” in a phrase hijacked from libertarian Karl Popper).  What’s the solution to climate change/global warming/global climate irregularity?  Massive doses of atmospheric Ex-Lax?  How about we just drive less by disposing of over-aggressive zoning laws and combining residential and commercial functions within neighborhoods, as was done for 99.9% of human history (or so say 99.9% of “scientists”)?  No, no—none of that.  The only possible answer is to create massive national-tending-toward-global bureaucracies that minutely decree what you eat, where you vacation, how you travel, how many cows you can raise, where your thermostat must sit… and this while banishing your source of employment from the face of the earth and confiscating any loot you may have saved to bequeath to your children.  Period.

And how does hostility to securing the power grid dovetail into this maniacally statist program?  President Obama told Dr. Pry explicitly upon shelving the report of the latter’s EMP Commission—well, almost explicitly.  Read between the lines.  The explanation offered for inaction was that, in paying attention to our exposed grid, we would make the Russians and the Chinese suppose that we considered them enemies.  This would turn down the thermostat of international diplomacy and send a chill through the room.  Ergo… no defenses.

Now, such numbskull sensitivity makes sense if your ultimate objective is, in fact, to fuse the United States government with those of other nations that might wish to destroy us.  As Diana West has lately chronicled (with painfully irrefutable accuracy), our elite has been kissing up to communist totalitarians since FDR used Lend-Lease to shuffle Stalin the tools needed to murder about forty million Russians and East Europeans (oh, yeah… and defeat Hitler).  The difference then was that we actually had the nuclear materials that we were passing under the table to Uncle Joe.  Now we do not have a secure grid, unlike Russia and the PRC.  We’re not sharing our trump cards with them, because we have none; we’re discarding everything in our hand higher than a five.

That, at least, is the game we were playing until Congress—Democrats and Republicans—entertained visions of dancing sugar plums in their heads as the NDAA was ramrodded through.  Now we’re in the survival game again… just barely.  Securing the grid may take years, even without the Soros/utopian Deep State seeking to ambush the initiative at every turn.  Our government, let us never forget, continues to be composed approximately half of ideological traitors: fools, that is, who aren’t necessarily on the take, but who really believe that the world will be a much better place when just a chosen few such as they are allowed to micro-manage everyone else’s life.  And of the remaining half, at least half are on the take.

Our judiciary is utterly out of control; our cities and towns are deeply infused with terrorist cells allowed through our porous border that merely await a signal; our news media tell lies with pride and conviction in the virtue of their project; our “science” establishment is largely and increasingly funded by advocates of the socialist agenda; our universities promote handling opposition to “science” with prison time; our “representatives” hawk their race and sexual preference when they should be explaining how they plan to protect us; our young children are taught that all was sweet on earth until white Europeans appeared… the little Dutch boy hasn’t enough fingers on his two hands to stanch the leaks in this dike.  When something good happens, the happy event is owed to the rampant incompetence, laziness, and cocksure stupidity of those who wield power.  Mr. Hannity has rapid-fire exchanges with Mr. Jarrett and Mr. Gowdy about what the Constitution permits and what “history” will say; but, alas, we have no Constitution.  The Constitution is dead, murdered by five hundred knives in the back and several hundred feet trampling from comfy benches.  History?  There is no history!  History is the product of thoughtful, informed, fair-minded people casting a careful eye back over the past.  We have no such people in a position to have their labors published.

After about two months of traveling a dark tunnel during the so-called holidays, I begin to see a small prick of light… or else the neurons are firing randomly as carbon dioxide suffocates them!  But, since ‘tis the season to wax prophetic, I will dare to share a few “grimly optimistic” thoughts next time.  Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Crosscurrents: God’s “Presence in the Present”

I’m not feeling terribly optimistic about current events–yet I don’t wish to pollute my or anyone else’s celebration of the birth of Hope with excessive brooding over our ephemeral world.  Allow me, then, to share with you one chapter from the rough draft of a book that I plan to see finished in 2020.

I intend for this final chapter of the book’s first part to summarize by compacting several assertions made about the “numinous moment” or “event outside of time”.  Yet before I attempt that act of stitching together, an analogy may be helpful.  I’ve been racking my brain for an adequate one—for a parable, almost, that could convey to our linear-thinking minds how real time might match up to time as we know it.  I at last came up with something akin to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

Imagine that you are walking across fog-strewn terrain toward a vague but steady light source.  You really have nowhere else to go that offers any apparent sense of destination; for the mist curls so thickly about your feet that you can’t even see your shoes, and that shimmering beacon on your horizon is your single reference in the soupy haze.

Unrevealed to you, then, in any very clear manner is the enormous but very gradual staircase across which you walk.  Its steps are suited to a giant’s feet, each being perhaps three yards wide; yet despite their great breadth, they rise by only an inch at a time.  You’re actually cutting across these stairs at a broad angle.  The result is that you can advance for fifty or sixty yards along one step before you stumble into the next one’s rise.  Naturally, since you can’t see your feet, you conclude at every mild stumble that the ground beneath you is a bit uneven.  You have no notion of slowly ascending a great staircase rather than moving ever forward toward the light which—you hope—will be the refuge liberating you from the milling gloom.

Those stairs that come at your progress laterally and throw it off balance once in a while are, of course, meant to represent the “outside of time” moments that subtly take us by surprise once in a while… and then, usually, are forgotten at once, since we assume that our attention should be fixed on forward motion.  The biblical phrase “stumbling block” had a part in helping me weave this strange analogy, for we indeed tend to treat such moments as interruptions or distractions.  We dismiss them with whatever explanation is ready at hand and get back to the serious business of “progress”.  Yet what could be more serious, in a spiritual sense, than climbing the giant’s staircase and seeing where it takes us?  If only we knew that it was there beneath the haze—that the little trips that sometimes throw us off stride all have an order!  But our senses aren’t equipped to provide such information directly.  Any knowledge of the stairs would have to be pieced together with extreme patience, most of it requiring a certain amount of inattention to that forward motion we think so full of promise.

For what kinds of experience, exactly, should we keep an eye peeled?  In the course of Part One’s ramble, I believe I have volunteered three at various points.  The first would be personal experiences that have stubbornly stayed with us for years, many (perhaps most) of them deeply rooted in childhood.  In discussing the sort of encounter that I myself recall as having knocked me off my stride and stood me upright, I did not mention anything as numinous as an angelic visitation, a message delivered in God’s voice, or a Near-Death Experience.  That’s because I have never lived through any event of the kind.  I suppose that those of us to whom God does not speak plain English in a deep, unmistakable voice have a little trouble fully believing those who claim to have been so contacted.  We don’t necessarily disbelieve them… but we wonder if their personality may be of a naive and very excitable type.  Everybody has dreams, and some of us have vivid dreams.  (Here I may include myself: my dreams are always in color and sometimes more “high-def” than any waking experience.)  A stable person understands, though, that you take a dream with a grain of salt.

Near-Death Experiences I find to be far more intriguing.  No doubt, some people massage a rough stay in the hospital until it looks like a trip to the Beyond, just as some people innocently mistake an escaped balloon that catches the sun’s last light for a UFO.  When so many witnesses of sound mind and solid character, however, testify so resonantly to the presence of something that greeted them as their vital signs flat-lined, I can’t wave their words aside.  (For that matter, a seasoned pilot makes a very good UFO witness—and there are several such reporters of strange aircraft.)  In attempting to retrieve a particular title for citation here, I found that the medical doctor/author whose name eludes me is veritably buried on the Internet under a mass of similar professionals who have documented the NDE over the past forty years.  Take your pick of them all.  It’s a pretty impressive witness list, however you arrange it.

But, no, I have presented in my discussion no such mind-boggling evidence.  The encounters I tried to describe do not grab you by the lapels, shake you, and announce sonorously, “I come from the other world!”  They simply don’t fit into the routine… and they fail to fit in after a fashion that you can’t forget, because it so insistently seems to mean something.  Just what it may mean, you never manage to decide satisfactorily.  It’s there, sticking out… and you can’t smooth it away as the reasonable effect of some handy nearby cause.

Which brings me to a second kind of experience, and a clearly related kind: art.  If I had to define an art object (or if I were given the chance to do so—for this is my wheelhouse), I should start by saying succinctly that it “expresses the inexpressible”.  Then I should probably try to express myself better and end up making a mess of my definition… because the paradox here is ineradicable.  A work of art assembles material impressions in such a way as to leave you convinced that their collaboration encodes a vital message, a whole greater than the sum of its parts.  You proceed to write an article or a book about the work, if you’re a scholar—and the more words you weave together in trying to nab the message, the more fish slip through your net.  What we academic types always seem to miss about art is its most fundamental characteristic: that it forever points to something not quite there.

Art, I’m convinced, is an angel that God sends to all of us.  The winged visitor might be a painting, a temple, or a mere tune—or the simple-seeming lyrics of the tune; but whatever his specific shape, the cherub manages to whack us lovingly upside the head and make us stumble a little on the invisible step of the giant’s staircase.  All true art calls us to faith.  It does so just by nudging us out of our determined forward stride for an instant.  Its subject by no means has to be the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, or anything related to any item of orthodox belief.  When I was an officer in a regional division of the Conference on Christianity and Literature, a lot of paper- and article-submissions passed under my eye—and the vast majority addressed some issue in the work of John Milton, C.S. Lewis, Flannery O’Connor, or some other overtly Christian writer.  I always regretted such narrowness of focus in our undertaking.  I wish we could have faced the academy head-on with the confident assertion that all true art comes from God.

For the academy needed a good stiff slap in the face—or punch in the nose—from those of us whom the angel had smacked… but we instead huddled around “our” authors who, for the most part, had been banished from contemporary college classes, anyway.  As I described in an earlier chapter (and will not reiterate now), our ailing culture’s intelligentsia have exploited the free pass we gave them to dismantle art entirely, presenting its essential mystery as no more than a cheap kind of hypnotism practiced by the powerful upon the oppressed.  That thick-headed, empty-souled program of demoralization should never have been allowed to pass unchallenged.

But it was… and so, as a culture, I think our sense of the mystical lurking in material things all around us took refuge in nature.  Again, the overlap with other kinds of numinous experience is obvious.  Many of my personal “outside of time” moments involved a particular natural setting, and many of the arts draw heavily upon nature, as well.  In their quasi-scientific zeal to explain everything away in some “sensible” deterministic fashion, our intellectuals like to attribute our visceral bond with nature to a genetically hardwired response to life on the savanna.  Of course we like trees!  They represented safety from lions when we were naked apes.  Of course we like purling streams!  Every living creature needs water, and water that runs swiftly is least apt to cause illness.

You can hardly win at this game if you protest, “No, it’s not the tree’s height and the stoutness of its limbs for climbing that I like.  It’s the intricate play of shadows in the pine needles—it’s the soughing of the branches in a breeze.”  What do you know?  You don’t have a Ph.D.!

One of the responses that most fascinates me is the one we register to distant sounds.  A far-off train whistle or dog’s bark… such “racket” can induce a deep sense of peace when, a mile or two away, it is scarcely heard.  Isn’t that because of its delightful (yet painful—delightfully painful) hint that even the most energetic spurts of life are but bursting bubbles on a vast ocean’s surface?  The abyss of meaning here is grandly unfathomable.  And how on earth would the evolutionary biologist disarm such a spiritual phenomenon?  Would he say that our apelike ancestors of course perked up when they heard distant sounds, because those were warnings of approaching predators?  But the approach of a predator would ignite an impulsive fear, not stir up a leisurely meditation—and to argue that the reaction has evolved as we have become less susceptible to predators might explain a diminution of fear, but couldn’t conceivably explain the emergence of pleasure.  Why can our “best and brightest” not accept that their explanations won’t reach every nook of the forest?

I will wander off target again if I don’t take care… but I might point out, in passing, that even we non-scientists are now sabotaging our relationships with nature through intrusions of progressive thinking—through cultic outbursts of “future-worship”.  We can’t simply let the indefinite play of light and shadow in a forest or down a mountain glen speak to us of the unspeakable: we have to bend that moment into “activism”.  We must “save nature” by outlawing the removal of underbrush and deadwood, by replacing mines with the “renewable energy” of wind turbines.  In the process, we create tinderboxes that will incinerate millions of acres in the next wildfire, and we erect killing machines that slaughter hawks and other high-flying species by the tens of millions annually… but we sleep better at night, because we have come home from our nature hike with a “mission”.

I’m no fan of the internal combustion engine.  I recall dropping a word or two about my long walking tours in Ireland and Scotland, and I routinely walked to and from work before my retirement.  I’m not out of sympathy with the general distaste for our high-tech pace of living—not at all.  But, please… let nature live!  Don’t be the doctor who starts cutting out organs when a little bedrest would cure the patient.  After putting up bluebird houses around our property, my wife and I have seen families of bluebirds a dozen strong congregate around the watering dish almost daily.  That’s a good feeling.  We don’t really have to go beyond that and agitate to increase the percentage of ethanol in gasoline—which will cause yet more meadowland to be put under the plow, which will destroy yet more wildlife habitat.  Every experience of nature doesn’t have to feed into a political agenda… does it?

To the extent that it does, or that we let it do so, we seal off what may be perhaps our decaying culture’s final portal upon the numinous.  I have come to adopt a single word in my thoughts for the ungainly phrase, “numinous experiences”, which I shall begin using from here on out.  I call these “outside of time” encounters, or smacks in the side of the head, or glimpses out the train’s window, or nudges off the tunnel’s track… I call them crosscurrents.  We need to yield to these rare transverse currents whenever they briefly stroke us: we need not to attempt to wrestle them onto a vector that parallels our forward motion.  They won’t go there.  They are all telling us the same thing, and it is this.  “The purpose of what you do is not the purpose you offer when explaining what you do.”  Our actions are indeed purposive, if we are good people—but not purposive in any sense that we can define, since their ultimate objective is not of this world.  When we nevertheless succeed in reducing our explanations and definitions to terms that make complete sense in this world—and when we thereafter adjust our actions to suit the verbal formulas we have produced in mutilating efficiency—we become less good.  We lose touch with the spirit.  We skew our forward motion so that we no longer trip over the occasional, invisible step of the giant’s staircase.  We proceed, instead, along a perfectly flat surface, paying attention only to its “corrected” smoothness that permits a speedier advance… and we climb the staircase no farther, nor do we even notice that we’re straying from the beacon at our lower level.

“Most Scientists” Are “Laughing” at Our Unsecured Power Grid—But Our Climate Panics Them

The photo above represents your alternative source of light at night after an Electro-Magnetic Pulse takes down the power grid.  The same source will also provide all of your evening’s externally generated heat, unless you have a fireplace and a cord of wood.  And if you need to contact someone long-distance… well, why not try shouting at the Moon?  The chances of getting an answer back from her are about equal to those of reaching your loved ones across the continent.

But wait, I forgot: we don’t need to worry!  The mainstream media, having heard from someone or other (I can’t imagine whom: their sources are usually named “Anonymous”) that President Trump issued an executive order to secure the power grid in March of this year, have devoted themselves to deriding the threat’s reality.  If Trump wants it… he ain’t gonna get it; if he says it’s deadly… let’s invite it to a party!

Hence the article, “Is It Lights Out for Trump’s EMP Push?” in Politico by one Sarah Cammarata.   Tommy Waller urged the audience of Frank Gaffney’s Secure Freedom Radio podcast (Nov. 22) to track down this piece and read it.  We should alert ourselves, he advised, to the degree of arrogance and contempt with which a genuinely terrifying and imminent threat to our survival—as opposed, say, to rising sea levels—is greeted by Democrat representatives and their media lackeys (what one might call the Traitor/Useful Idiot Complex).

To arrogance and contempt, Mr. Waller might have added “early adolescent command of the language and pre-adolescent analytical abilities”.  Those are further qualities, at any rate, which Ms. Cammarata brings to the discussion.  The notion of an “EMP push” in the title is already a head-scratcher.  Donald Trump hasn’t been “pushing” for an EMP: he has been trying to secure our national grid against a major EMP’s apocalyptic effects.  Cammarata, however, appears to have her attention focused on something more like high-fiving: and hence she communicates in a kind of kid’s shorthand (as when a child says “beeper” for “smoke-detector”).  One of her opening sentences reads, “On Sept. 13, controversial physicist, self-declared climate skeptic and backer of the fight against EMPs William Happer left the White House.”  I suspect that neither Happer nor anyone else with a degree in the sciences would describe himself as a “climate skeptic”… or are we to suppose that he doubts the existence of climate?  Controversial physicist?  Is that a new variety of physics—or does Ms. Cammarata’s set simply disagree (having mustered the entirety of their gray matter to produce a thumbs-down) with his belief that plants actually like carbon dioxide?  The fight against EMP’s?  Again, one doesn’t fight an EMP: that’s rather the whole point, Ms. Cammarata.  You can’t fight them.  They occur naturally, and a major solar-pulse event appears to be overdue by about half a century.  You and your chattering legions may conclude over cocktails that you can fight “climate”—but a massive ion storm, at least, is irresistible.  What you do, or what one does (or what a functional adult would do), is protect the electric grid from utter incineration.

But, no, let’s denominate all the significant factors with the same precision as is used in labeling Bill Nye “the science guy”… and then let’s whoop and holler because “we won” and “they lost”.

I know that Thursday is Thanksgiving.  I know that I, for one, will find great joy and gratitude in my heart late Wednesday night if my son’s plane lands safely, despite the machinations of certain unscreened intruders for whose ease Ms. Cammarata’s clique has already dissolved our border security.  The truth is that featherbrains and subversives have transformed our national celebrations of solidarity, thanksgiving, and respite from routine anxiety into the most fearful times on our calendar; for it is precisely at these times, when parents, siblings, and children are en route to annual reunions, that diabolical minds would most like to spring a calamitous trap upon us…..

As I sat pecking those last words on my iPad, a “news flash”—courtesy of our Big Brotherly link to reality, Twitter (that is, our link to Big Brotherly reality)—informed me that two people had been shot in an incident at a North Carolina medical center.  Stop the presses!  The propaganda machine never misses a chance to inform us of more gun violence, as if this were almost as great a menace to our safety as… climate change!

Yet in the matter of a legitimate threat whose eventual realization is as sure as sunrise, we are to smirk and cherry-pick stray facts as springboards for jokes.  “Warnings about electromagnetic pulse attacks have long inspired eye-rolls or outright guffaws among national security experts, but advocates of the issue briefly found a home on Trump’s National Security Council….”  The joke’s the news, you see, in the Cammarata school of journalism.  No names, just “eye-rolls” and “experts”.  And yes, on any given Thanksgiving or Christmas, your son or daughter’s plane is more likely to plunge to earth because of a terrorist bomb than because of an epochal solar flare… so let’s all have a good holiday laugh as we roll the dice along with our eyes.  If we lose, just about everybody dies… but the odds of winning seem really good.  Today.

Just about everybody, yes.  Peter Pry’s commission (described by Cammarata as “now-disbanded”, as if its members had been sent packing in disgrace) reproduced a projection of federal agencies that ninety percent of the continental US’s population would die within a year if the national grid went down.  About all we ever needed to do (and this has been known for years) in order to insulate ourselves from major consequences is enclose our generators in Faraday cages, an incredibly cheap and quick fix to neutralize such a devastating blow.  (“Some experts predict [the hardening measures] could cost billions of dollars,” notes Cammarata, eyes rolling, with her typical accuracy and precision—and displaying the concern for frugality that she brings, I’m sure, to her assessment of the Green New Deal).  Instead, we shall stay just as we are until a major storm of solar flares produces something like the 1859 Carrington Event (a recurrence of which, as I’ve indicated, is overdue).  Then our lights will go out, our heating and cooling systems will be kaput, aircraft will fall from the sky, cars with computerized systems will refuse to run, gas will not pump, refrigerated food will thaw, credit cards won’t work, any water not cranked up from a well (i.e., all water that once flowed from urban and suburban faucets) will dry up, hospitals will offer no assistance, emergency responders will be stalled and overwhelmed, rioting and panic will erupt… but no, it hasn’t happened yet, so why should it happen tomorrow?

Pardon me if I now reproduce a full paragraph from Politico which captures like no other the utter frivolity of the discussion:

A consensus among most in the scientific community is that EMP attacks are nothing to worry about and even a laughable subject. But a smaller group of scientists has argued that the federal budget should make a priority of spending for preparing for EMPs — as do some political figures, such as Cruz, who reject the much greater scientific consensus about the perils of human-driven climate change.

Sigh.  For once and for all, scientific truth is not determined by majority vote—not even a majority formed of scientists.  On issues as complex as the behavior of Earth’s magnetosphere—or of its climate, by the way—an endocrinologist’s or entomologist’s verdict carries no more weight than a trucker’s or shoemaker’s.  Indeed, even within relevant fields, experts in one area must cross-reference their understanding with that of experts in other areas.  “Science” does not qualify as a specialization of any sort.  “Most scientists” laughed at Watson and Crick when they first presented research that would lead them to discover the double helix of DNA.  In general, laughing is not a scientific response.  Yet here we find the jolly “most scientists” trope so favored by exponents of manmade climate change trotted out to dispose of EMP concerns; and, indeed, Cammarata explicitly nudges in the idiotic “climate-change denier” slur (nobody denies that climates change, by the way) to tar the Cassandras of the insecure grid.  She well knows, too, that names like “Cruz” (“Carson” and “Gingrich” were introduced earlier into the rogues’ gallery) will further prejudice Politico’s readership against viewing the crisis as serious.  So the argument amounts to this: “We know that the Trump phalanx is always wrong about everything; we see them here clamoring for billions of our money; most scientists disagree with them, and they fail to show similar anxiety over Global Warming, regarding which most scientists are again on the other side; ergo, laugh away at them—and let’s have some contempt in that laughter!”

The single advocate of the “most scientists” position named by Cammarata is “Arthur House, the former chairman of Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority”—and House, indeed, doesn’t criticize the science behind EMP anxiety; he only emphasizes that utility companies are unlikely to foot the bill for securing the grid if left to make their own decision.  This is precisely the self-interested motive for reprehensible inaction which Peter Pry repeatedly underscores, and which is documented exhaustively at SecureTheGrid.com.  Need I add that many of our “most scientists” have been employed at one time or another by these highly compromised private-sector quasi-monopolies?  In other words, in the process of ridiculing the threat, Ms. Cammarata has exposed to us the primary reason for why we should mistrust the scoffers.

The article’s most appalling moment comes about halfway through.  Having been assured for several hundred words that “most scientists” consider the probable effect of an EMP on our grid no worse than the aftermath of a hurricane (I actually added that tidbit to Cammarata’s detail-starved ramble from other sources), we’re now in for a final, clinching argument.  Our friend Mr. House, who appears to wear a second hat as a security expert, delivers the following insight: “The problem is it’s such a blunt instrument.  An EMP just wreaks havoc without much precision.  In that way, it’s like an unsmart bomb.”  Umm… did you get that?  We have nothing to fear because… because an EMP attack would kill virtually all of us.   It thus “invites massive retaliation” on the part of the Dr. Strangelove crew surviving in bunkers, concludes our “expert”… as if any of our land-based nukes would remain capable of launch, or as if Kim Jong Un or his handler, Xi Jinping, would give a damn if a few millions of rabble were smoked.  Sleep tight!

If House’s confidence that an adversary would decline to murder three hundred million of us is the article’s most appalling moment, its most puzzling feature to me is the final several paragraphs that seem to ramrod in the names and protests of numerous EMP-worriers.  I confess that on my first perusal of the piece, my iPhone buried its concluding words under such a mountain of advertisements that I failed to notice them.  The discussion appeared to have ended.  Later I found that, incoherently, the advocates for the contrary position came trickling in, their voices already drowned under a steady din of laughter from the scientific (but unnamed) multitude.  Puzzling, yes: what does Sarah Cammarata make of the overwhelming authority (if underwhelming numbers) behind her opposition?  Why smuggle this section in almost as a postscript?  Is she in fact somewhat persuaded of the risible view, but anxious about becoming a laughing-stock herself?  Is it so very painful to admit that perhaps Donald Trump did one thing right?

I wish I were making up all the incoherence and puerility that besets the Cammarata piece at every turn.  Alternatively, I most sincerely wish that I took more comfort in the assurances of unnamed “experts”.  I wish I could understand why the high-balled estimate of cost for neutralizing this low-balled menace to humanity is just too much, yet the sacrifice of our First World economy to ensure that time-shares in Florida don’t go under the waves is a good swap.  I wish I hadn’t just finished reading Diana West’s American Betrayal—that I wasn’t so convinced, both through reading and through personal experience, that our government, our education system, our news media, and even our clergy were riddled with people devoted to our nation’s collapse, if not actively in the pay of its mortal enemies.  I almost wish that I could coast insouciantly through my evenings awash in Daiquiris and through my days surrounded by other texting-and-chirping idiots like me. As Sophocles’ Teiresias laments, “What a fearful thing is thought when thinking brings no advantage!”

On my own (that is, without the aid of giggly “informants” like Cammarata), I’ve tried to understand the other side of the issue. I keep dredging up versions of House’s insane cocksureness just above: assessments that an atmospheric detonation adequate to take down the national power grid would imply the ongoing presence of full-blown thermonuclear warfare, and would further imply… what? That “their” destruction would be mutually assured in ours? That the consequences of “their” aggression would almost certainly carry over into “their” terrain? Again, if “they” are Xi Jinping and his genocidal Caligulas—or, for that matter, if “they” are merely the Iranian mullahs eager to be transported to the Gardens of Paradise—how is such chessboard strategizing a comfort? And how do we actually know who “they” are before the lights go out… and why does all such reassurance, without any exception that I have so far found, ignore the eventual certainly of a purely natural EMP of major proportions?

Because it’s well worth adding that at no point does Cammarata register the possibility of a catastrophic EMP’s occurring quite naturally: she wears the tribal feathers quite prominently in that regard.  Yet such stupefying negligence should make our lack of preparation exponentially more alarming (assuming that our “beloved enemies” would commit only tactical slaughter, not genocide).  We have no viable plan on the drawing board, either, for averting a large asteroid on a collision course with Earth… and I don’t think I’m far wrong in supposing that a meteoric event could produce an EMP event—that a Tunguska-level vaporization of a massive rock in the upper atmosphere could black out an entire continent today.

But “most scientists” are unconcerned, because no catastrophe happened yesterday and, probably, none will happen tomorrow.  Now, death by… whatever… from “climate change” in a dozen years (by drowning? by overheating? by rioting? I never understood exactly what—and it changes) … yeah, we hear that “most scientists” are down for the Race to Save the Climate.  Of course, “most scientists” need grant money from our highly politicized federal agencies.

Meanwhile, the Russians and the Chinese have long since secured their grids, though money is much tighter in both economies than in ours—and they don’t seem to be spending a penny on keeping sea water off the beaches. Why is that, do you suppose? Guess they just don’t have any “scientists”.

“Radicalized” Teenage Girl With Kitchen Knife Shows Us the REAL Threat to Our Nation… Uh, No

“White teen girl detailed plan for racist attack on black churchgoers in notebook, police say”: that’s literally the title (with only first word capitalized) of the Washington Post article trumpeting a non-event.  Ponder those words.  A white girl scribbled some troubled thoughts about murdering congregants at a black church.  Essentially, this is the content of a “story” that made headlines throughout the Southeast, and upon which WSB-TV Atlanta lavished at least three minutes on the evening of November 19.

Once you know more details, the episode becomes even more… non-eventful.

The “white teen girl” was sixteen years old.  Not eighteen or nineteen: sixteen.  She had apparently amassed a collection of… no, not handguns, not bombs or grenades, not clips for assault rifles: knives.  She collected knives.  So now we have a sixteen-year-old white girl with “knives”, in the plural.  There was no indication that she had trained with the Mossad, or that she possessed a black belt in some ancient Japanese art of firing out blades at a rate of five per second.  As far as we know, she has only two hands.  As far as we know, members of the Bethel AME Church in Gainesville, Georgia, are not exclusively octogenarians or manually challenged female invalids.  And of course, as anyone can be pretty sure of knowing, the Church was a “gun-free” zone, making it a target even for someone with no more than a kitchen knife (the species of blade involved in this case).  Our Gal Gadot wannabe was too respectful of the law, it seems, to equip herself with deadly weapons illegally.  Sometimes the “gun-free” idiocy works.

The WaPo article bestows much quote-space upon one Sergeant Kevin Holbrook, who was most likely the blond, baby-faced young man I saw interviewed on WSB news.  That lad is going far.  He pressed all the right keys to sound just the right notes.  The girl’s notebook contained “manifesto-type” ravings, observed the officer with wisdom beyond his years (and training).  He continued, as WaPo reports faithfully: “There were many writings and drawings, different depictions, and a lot of hateful messages in it….  As far as the details go, they were down to very specific information.”  Turns out that Holbrook is also something of a theologian.  Carnage of innocents was averted, he concludes, “by pure grace”: had the normal Wednesday night Bible study not been canceled, the teen fiend would not have found the compound’s buildings empty when she visited them, a dagger clutched Bluebeard-like in her teeth.

The church’s pastor, interviewed by WSB, confirmed God’s intercession in the canceled Bible study—and confirmed, further, my own inference that no men attend this church and that no women there are capable, say, of lifting a chair or coming at an assailant from behind.  But… might God be whispering to these good people that Bethel AME should host a self-defense class in the near future, if not actually persuade a retired soldier to slip a Glock inside his coat during services?

Now, the pastor and the sergeant weren’t quite on the same page as to motivation.  The former, while admitting that the sixteen-year-old had to be very troubled, wanted her tried as an adult (tried for snooping around the sanctuary with a knife in her belt); the latter was convinced, as he revealed in his WSB interview, that she was “radicalized” by “white supremacist” websites.  Now, if our would-be mass murderess were hypnotized by Internet conditioning, then she can scarcely be held fully responsible for her acts; but if she is actually to be prosecuted as a full adult, then the assumption must be that she had complete possession of herself—more so than one would expect of an ordinary sixteen-year-old.  And in that case, the “radicalizing white-supremacist websites” are utterly irrelevant.

An aside: I wonder how long Sergeant Holbrook has dreamed of using the word “radicalize”?  Doesn’t it sound cool?  But you can’t use it to describe, say… I don’t know: say a jihadist website.  I’m afraid you can’t even use the word “jihadist” any more.  I didn’t write that.

But “white supremacist”, now—you can and should drop that phrase early and often, at least if you hope for a long and ascending career path in law enforcement.  White-supremacist songs… white-supremacist holidays… white-supremacist weather and condiments and ways of pronouncing the word “tergiversation”: it’s everywhere!  The white-supremacist menace is everywhere!

Just be grateful that white supremacists honor gun-free zones.  Can you imagine if….

Meanwhile, the city of Atlanta continues to have daily drive-by shootings, daily convenience-store robberies at gunpoint, daily brawls that go ballistic when someone pulls out a handgun—and the crimes are almost always black on black.  But the city’s African American community shouldn’t allow its collective eye to be diverted from the real problem, which is…

The KKK is back!  White people are coming for you—and with knives this time!

WaPo wraps up powerfully, “The girl’s arrest comes as black churches and other houses of worship around the country have faced a wave of violence and intimidation.”  See, you hadn’t even heard about that!  I’m afraid it’s not quite clear to me whether the adjective “black” is intended to stretch to “other houses of worship”, or if the latter is clever MSM code for “mosque”.  (Of course, to WaPo, all Muslims are dark-skinned, so my interpretive confusion is a non-issue.)  And you certainly shouldn’t be misled into thinking that Christian churches everywhere are under escalating attack from outfits like WaPo to surrender their orthodox views on marriage, on gender, on the value of hard work… that’s not intimidation, it’s the inevitable friction of Neanderthal-meets-Homo Sapiens.  The real story here, once again, is that whites are out to murder blacks.  If you didn’t know that… well, what are news outlets for?

Sergeant Holbrook and his crack team apparently lost no time analyzing the girl’s Internet activity and ferreting out the insidious influence of WS propaganda; but they haven’t yet had the leisure to visit her high school and find out if,  just maybe, she had been routinely beaten up by black girls and decided upon the church attack as her revenge.  Wouldn’t it have been wonderfully Christian if she had stormed through an open church door, knife drawn, and then been talked to tears and surrender by the suffering Christ’s words of peace delivered by a true believer?  Maybe an invitation to sit with the group and pray instead of a call to 911?  We’ll never know if that might have happened—if someone other than Pastor Try-Her-As-An-Adult might have stood up and borne God’s message.

And we’ll never know about that high school situation, either.  Something tells me that the girl would have confessed that part of her motivation right out of the gate—and that our ambitious young investigators would instantly have buried it deep in the “unusable” file.