The Professor Has Got It Wrong

The other day, PH posted a refutation of sorts about a review I performed on Ron Paul's book "End the Fed".  He objected to quite a few of points that Paul made in his book--erroneously attributing Paul's points to me, when I thought I made clear that I was showcasing Paul's argument, not my own*--his doing so suggests an acceptance of the Fed and its role in our economy, if not tacit support. I've locked horns with PH about banking and money and the charging of usury before, so it comes as no surprise to me that PH would throw the penalty flag on the concepts in Paul's book.

On the Fed's purported role in smoothing out the business cycle and eliminating inflation, PH wrote:

Obviously, the ability to control it implies the ability to raise it as well as lower it. Inflation is not a random or naturally occurring event in the business cycle. It is a choice by policy makers. The Fed is specifically empowered to control the rate of inflation through monetary control so as to support the goals of the government.

At first blush, there is nothing wrong with what PH says. In fact, what he writes actually supports Paul's contention that the Fed acts contrary to the purposes for which it was sold to the American people. Inflation does not occur randomly, it is a conscious choice by some actor in the financial system. But the part that I'd like to focus on is where PH says "policymakers". Usually in our government, this word is used in reference to elected officials or other agents of government. In other words, guys that work for We the People. In this case, however, the decision to inflate or not inflate is made by those appointed to a supposedly quasi-governmental body that oversees a banking cartel, whose end purpose is to enrich themselves at the public's expense. That their policies supports the goals of the government--i.e., easy money to support state-enlarging and empire-maintaining spending is secondary to assuring their own profits.

Referencing the Fed's leading role in the debauching of the currency:

This is stupid and misleading. You cannot buy a 1913 product with a 2010 dollar. Nor can you buy a 2010 loaf of bread with a 1913 dollar. Dollars, just like all other commodities have no fixed price or value. Ideally dollars are abstract and undergo changes in value over time.

Here PH has it wrong. If I were to transport myself back in time to buy a 1913 car, it would take a heckuva lot more 2010 dollars to do so than 1913 dollars. My preference for four-wheeled transport hasn't changed, but the value of the money in my pocket certainly has. Which is Paul's argument, and is where PH's red-herring focus on an "ideal" money whose value shifts over time serves only to excuse a skyrocketing increase in the quantity of money required to barter for a certain product. If my preferences haven't changed, but it takes so much more money for me to trade for the things I want, where did the value represented in the difference in quantity of money go?

On inflation and interest:

The big losers in inflation are in fact those people who lend money out and expect to be paid back. It is the banks themselves that lose the biggest value when they are repaid with inflated dollars. So long as the interest rate is above the inflation rate, savers and banks win. As long as they have a known inflation rate, they can make long term loans at a set interest and be assured to gaining value.

The trouble I have with this characterization is that the very agents of inflation...the banking cartel...appear to be sowing the seeds of their own destruction by debauching the currency. Why would they do this? Where is the profit, the incentive, if they are simply consigning themselves to failure? Thus I find difficult to accept the assertion that inflation, stoked each time a fractional reserve banker makes a loan, hurts bankers and savers alike. The interest rate would have to continually increase each time a loan was made in order for this concept to hold true. Yet we know this does not happen, otherwise they would not, and could not, remain in business.

Inflation is caused by government spending in excess of income. Either by borrowing or by printing.

Bzzzt! Inflation is the insertion of more money into the money supply, simply by decreeing it so. Each monetary unit introduced into circulation makes each existing one worth that much less. Of course, modern economists and their Keynesian/monetarist focus obscure this issue by pointing to the rise in prices and calling that inflation. But that is like pointing at a stuffy nose and fever and calling that the flu, when it is a virus that causes the symptoms. Inflation is the same way.

Either way, eliminating the FED does nothing to eliminate government excess.

Wrong again. While eliminating the Fed will not eliminate government excess, I'll admit as much, one cannot say that it will have no effect. Reckless spending by government is naturally limited when can only tax the people for it. Even if the government has to borrow for their spending, it is limited. Not so with a central bank, for such an animal gives a central government the ability to monetize its debt and stealth-tax its spending, which hides the cost of its growth.

...while the British government was heavily in debt during our revolution, the British nation was wealthy beyond belief.

As has been our country in the past two decades, but I suspect the piper will need to be paid soon. Paul contends, and I agree with him, that such wealth is an illusion, a consequence of a government spending bubble financed by easy money.  Our society is prosperous and shiny on the outside, but rotten to the core on the inside.

Also, if my understanding of history is correct, a portion of the wealth of the British empire came from its overseas possessions, the wealth of which flowed toward the center of the empire .

The degree of militarism that a nation can afford is a function of its wealth and national government fundraising ability. A country the size of the USA can easily afford to occupy 15-20 foreign countries with substantial military force and stay within the normal budget (as evidenced by the fact that we have for the past 50 years).

Perhaps PH misses the fact that we've run up monstrous budget deficits...i.e., not "within the normal budget"...and a $13T national debt, partially in an effort to maintain a huge blue-water navy and to keep our huge military busy meeting strange new people and killing them in far-flung places overseas. Our latest adventure--installing democracy at the point of a gun--is but one incarnation of such a policy. Paul's point is that the Fed enables this behavior far beyond what would normally be possible via taxation and simple borrowing.

PH appears to be missing Paul's main point that central banking encourages the growth and metastasization of aggressive government policies. Yes, PH is right in that aggression is the function of trigger-happy pols. But he neglects to account for the additive effect of central banking that permits governments to go far beyond what they would ordinarily be able to do.

Wrt the Constitution and paper money:

This is a limitation on the powers of the states, not on the federal government. Paper money had been widely used in all of the colonies and by the Continental Congress. In this article, the constitutional framers were giving exclusive power to create money to the national government. This says nothing to keep a national government from issuing paper or any other kind of currency.

PH is correct here insofar as I erred in my review by not citing both applicable Sections of the Constitution that apply to money. Here is the text of Article 1, Section 10:

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts...

And Article 1, Section 8:

...To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures...

PH is also correct in noting that paper money was used by all the states during the Revolutionary war. What he neglects to mention is how the phrase "not worth a Continental" came about, and the well-documented antipathy the Framers felt for paper money.

This debate about paper money and coin money has been raging for over 200 years, neither PH nor I will settle this debate today. Paul's assertion is that the Constitution forbids paper money given Article 1, Sec 8's instruction to "coin" money, not print it, and in Article 1, Sec's 10's prohibition on the states to make nothing but gold and silver legal tender. I agree with Paul, in that when one combines the written words of the Constitution, to include the Tenth Amendment's "reserved powers" clause, with the intent of the Framers for "no paper/fiat money", that the Constitution forbids paper money and certainly does not give Congress the authority to outsource management of the currency to a quasi governmental banking cartel.  But even if the Constitution said explicitly "no central bank", we'd still have one anyway. On this PH and I agree...IMHO, there is too much money to be made and too much power to be had to permit the people a sound, honest money.

Then PH engages in a bit of "American exceptionalism" hubris about the dollar as the world's reserve currency:

The US dollar, unbacked by anything, has been the world preferred reserve currency because everyone universally trusts it. Attempts by other nations to replace it have been self-serving attempts to put their own currency (and the wealth that would generate) in the place of primacy. Their attempts have failed because the world money market is already open and free and other nations are already free to hold reserve currencies of any other nation. The US dollar is still king because other nations make it so. As soon as a different currency proves itself to be stronger, it will be the king.

It is the preferred reserve currency not because it is so great intrinsically, but because of our size and dominance on the political landscape for the last 70 years. PH is correct in noting that the dollar will no longer be king when American hegemony ends. That day is rapidly approaching--both the end of American hegemony and the use of the dollar as the world's reserve currency--and the debauching of our currency and the money bubbles blown by the Fed and members of the Fed cartel will go a long way toward ensuring both events happen. For certain, it couldn't last forever, not when we tax via inflation everyone and every nation that has loaned the US government money.

In sum, I respect PH like a brother, but I think he's dead wrong about the impact of the Fed on our national economy and in his blithe acceptance of immoral, unconstitutional, and hazardous "free money" run by a cartel of banksters unaccountable to the people.

* an easy mistake to make, given how I largely agree with what Paul has to say

Friday Roundup

It would be scandalous if it weren't so stinkin' predictable...DHS secretary Napolitano is reportedly considering exempting Moslem women from pat down searches at airports.  Reason? A concern for their privacy vis-a-vis their faith. Which I have no issue with, as long as the dearly held beliefs that other faith traditions hold for their wives and husbands' sexuality is also held in as high esteem. Of course, it is not, so here we are. This example but adds to the mountain of evidence against the prevailing culture of secular humanism--a theology that treats all cultures as alike, except for Christian culture--that cancer must be extirpated for the good of the rest of mankind--and the absolute inability of a liberalism-addled culture to defend itself from any threat whatsoever. 

Here's another example of how some groups are clearly more equal than others...Wichita Kansas pastor arrested for handing out Gospel tracts and DVDs to Moslems. In the public space.

Katy, Texas, woman sexted her son's friends with nekkid photos of herself.  Apparently she fancied her son's teenage friends.Anyone wanna take bets on how scot-free she'll get off?

The biggest take-away lesson from the experience of the Pilgrims and their first Thanksgiving? Property rights are the key to a free, self-sustaining civilization.

Flighty woman wonders: should she get divorced? Click, read, observe the rationalization hamsters trotting away, and judge for yourself.  Personally, I think she should get divorced and never re-inflict herself on another man.

Can't wait for Mr. Right? No problem! Just marry yourself!  Tho looking at pix of the bride, perhaps she wasn't that good of a catch, anyways.

Every once in a while, a woman regrets inviting the State into her marriage.  Like this one, who rose to fame recently for her foul behavior vis-a-vis a neighbor's dying daughter, who had her children taken from her and given to their father to raise.  And here I thought you had to basically be Britney Spears to have your kids stripped from you.

From the religion of peace...a Christian woman is sentenced to death for blasphemy in Pakistan.

Each day that goes by, I wonder if the public would be safer enforcing their own laws, just like in the old days. At least they'll be more accountable for their actions.  In today's example, I give you KC cops shooting at a backfiring van.

Makes me glad I'm homeschooling...all the better to insulate my children from the lib fever swamp that has enveloped the public schools.  Today's example: PS goons tell Anglo boy to take the American flag off his bike because of, get this, racial/ethnic tensions caused  by children of Mexican heritage. If a culture can't even get up enough spine to defend itself in the face of encroachment by other cultures, it deserves to die.


Mark Richardson over at Oz Conservative has a great post about the unequal distribution of risk of divorce.  Some highlights:

So what are the factors affecting the risk of divorce?

a) The risk is much higher if the wife marries at a very young age. For instance, 8 years after marriage 42% of women who married under the age of 18 are divorced; 35% of women who married at ages 18 and 19; but only 25% of those aged 20 to 24.  The protective effect of waiting doesn't continue after age 25, at least not when longer term trends are considered.

b)  Parental marital stability. If your parents divorced you're 40% more likely to divorce yourself. If your parents married others after divorce the figure rises to 90% [emphasis mine, EW].

c) Education and income. Any university level education reduces the risk of divorce by 13%. Having an income over US$50,000 reduces the risk by 30%.

d) Ethnicity. Divorce risk varies by ethnicity, with Asian couples being least likely to divorce, then whites, then blacks (the white rate of divorce in the US is 32%). Interracial marriages are less stable on average, with black male/white female marriages having double the risk of divorce compared to the white average.

e) It seems too that the more sexual partners a woman has before marriage, and the younger she becomes sexually active, the higher the risk of divorce.

From TakiMag, an illustration of the absolute moral bankruptcy of the metric of consent as the critical factor when judging the  rectitude of sexual behaviors. For instance, the feminists who protested the comic strip in question assumed that the woman depicted didn't consent to such switcheroo "Prestige" behavior...but what if she had? Did that make the behavior, or any of the other lewd depictions of sexual athleticism featured in Purdue U's Sex Position of the Week series somehow more wholesome?  Does the presence of consent make such a series promote unhealthy behaviors and habits any less?

Have a Blessed Thanksgiving

A couple of random tidbits of trivia about Thanksgiving for you all, then some links to those in my blog circle who have written about Thanksgiving as well. I pray that each of you that read this have a safe and blessed Thanksgiving day!





Additional reading:

Thanksgiving and Its Origins, by Welmer, at The Spearhead.

A Thanksgiving Lesson, by Mark Hendrickson, at MND.

In Which We Give Thanks, by VD.

Tuesday Tomfoolery

 

Stolen from Rob Fedder's place.

Book Review: End the Fed

Author's note: this post first appeared over at The Spearhead on November 11th, 2010.

The Book: End the Fed, by Ron Paul. 210 pages.

The Gist: In this book, Representative Ron Paul details his case that the Federal Reserve Bank cartel causes more misery, suffering, and problems than it causes, and should thus be disbanded.  He claims that ending the Fed "would address the most vexing problems of politics of our time", ending dollar depreciation, stripping the government of an easy ability to finance endless wars, curb attacks on civil liberties, halt debt accumulation, and arrest the expansion of the welfare state.  Moreover, Paul the Elder claims that doing away with the Fed would ends the government's ability to use financial sleight of hand to underwrite its ability to expand without limit, would be a first step toward restoring constitutional government, would halt the business cycle, end inflation, would stymie the corrupt symbiotic relationship between government and "too big to fail" banks, and would end the abuse of monetary policy during political election cycles.

Key Quote: Paul cites Scripture: "You shall have just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin" (Lev 19:35-36).

On dollar depreciation, halting the business cycle, and ending inflation: Rather than be a mechanism for controlling and eliminating inflation, Paul asserts that the Fed is instead an agent of it.  Take history, for instance: Paul points out that $1 in 1913 is worth five cents today; such that what once cost $1 in 1913 costs $21 in 2010, with the result that the government and the banking cartel have sapped--Paul uses the word "stolen"--$.95 of every dollar over the span of the last century.  Paul also demonstrates that, when confronted with economic crisis, the very tool that administrators of the Fed use to keep the markets liquid and to keep prices up is to inflate the currency; thus, far from ending inflation, the Fed is the primary means by which inflation is injected into our economy.  In addition, rather than smoothing out the business cycle, Paul claims that the Fed ensures they continue to recur. For example, the assertion that the Fed makes smoother the boom-bust pattern of the business cycle requires one to focus solely on the bust phase, where the Fed does indeed provide liquidity to keep the banks lending and the credit markets functioning.  However,if one views the business cycle as one that begins during the boom phase--where easy money begats malinvestment and excess capacity--it becomes clear that the Fed creates the very problem that it later "solves".

Paul's book cites an interesting quote which I think illustrates this point quite well:

...[the banks] actually expanded the currency by extraordinary issues, whilst there was no existing check upon them, until its depreciation was so great that speculation and overtrading in all their disastrous forms involved the country in a scene of wretchedness, from which it did not recover in ten years

Source: Raguet, Condy, A Treatise on Currency and Banking, New York, Kelly Reprints, 1967, 1840, p 156.

On central banking as a catalyst for war: With an endless money machine that provides nearly limitless funding to finance expensive military adventurism, governments are free to build up forces and wage as much expensive military aggression as they can convince the polity is reasonable. On the other hand, those governments without this easy-money option to make their money for them are forced to economize and make guns-and-butter choices.  Mises in 1919:

...one can say without exaggeration that inflation is an indispensable means of militarism. Without it, the repercussions of war on welfare become obvious much more quickly and penetratingly; war weariness would set in much earlier 

As further evidence of this central banking-warfare connection, Paul cites the case of WWI, where only 21% of WWI was financed through taxation, 56% was from Fed-backed borrowing, and 23% was outright money printing. And this is on the US side; one shudders to consider the impact of central bank lending on the ability or willingness of Germany or Britain or France to wage the War to End All Wars. Furthermore, WWI, while wiping out all the old monarchies, created the Imperial America and a globalized foreign policy mission. For Russia, it meant Communism, as the war machine spurred by easy money created shortages, price controls, devastation, and social unrest that resulted in the Bolshevik revolt of 1917. None of these calamities could have been possible had the USA or other countries not had the easy money of a central bank to underwrite their military campaigns, for opposition to direct taxation on wealth naturally limits governmental adventurism.

Paul also ties the lender of last resort to a more aggressive national foreign and domestic policy, creating what he calls the "welfare-warfare state". With a central bank, countries can dream ad infinitum of ever more power, programs and ambitions.  America could and did become involved in countless full-scale wars, police actions, small invasions; after each political crisis, the answer is the same as after each economic crisis: more monetary expansion, the better to "prime" the economic pump. Thus guns or butter turned into both guns and butter...with a central bank, there is no longer a need to choose between the two, and the ability of the Fed to make money is what makes this crisis-response model possible. Conversely, as long as the funding stream remained limited to what could be extracted by force from the wallets of the population, there was a natural upper limit to the power and size and scope and ambitions of the State.

I pause to offer a personal observation that the easy monetary spigot supplied by the Fed may actually result in less American military effectiveness on the battlefield and therefore more protracted wars (and needless suffering).  This is because an un-mobilized society, where only the soldiers feel the pain of warfare, not the whole of the civilian population through privation and war rationing, is not as personally invested in the nation's wars, and is therefore more prone to approve the committing of forces abroad.  Furthermore, such a population, thus disconnected from the ravages of warfare, is more susceptible to manipulation of public opinion by the media, a fact that Ho Chi Minh exploited during the Vietnam conflict.  I suspect the advent of the all-volunteer military in the 1970s aggravates this condition.

On civil liberties and the growth of the state: It is a sort of truism in libertarian circles that when government grows, liberty necessarily suffers in a zero-sum equation. Paul subscribes to this maxim in noting that central banking tends to aggregate power toward the central government and away from the people and the States. Citing the fifth plank of the Communist Manifesto,

centralization of credit in the banks of the State, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly,  

Paul contends that central banks serve as a type of "backdoor economic planning", the sort of economic model which the world had the opportunity to fail spectacularly in the 1980s with the fall of the former Soviet Union.  We know from the warnings of von Mises and others that centrally planned economies fail primarily because they lack a  mechanism to make accurate supply and demand decisions across all points in the economy. Lacking this information, they die by suffocation, overcome by the weight of their own inefficiencies. In a similar manner, by setting interest rates low nationwide--so as to better fund the welfare-warfare state and monetize the national debt--rather than letting independent local banks set rates for local conditions, the Fed discourages savings while encouraging borrowing and consumption.  This serves to create both the boom-bust business cycle and its attendant inevitable banking panics and the pretext for government to swoop in and "fix" the problem with more centralization, either with (a) more regulation (read: more power to government and more corruption), or with (b) more governmental guarantees that the public won't be harmed by institutional failures (read: more moral hazard, which leads to more crises).

In a further example of the socialist nature of central banking, Paul offers the following: with the Federal Reserve Act (FRA), Congress formed a cartel of the 12 largest banks and permitted them "to inflate the currency at will, providing for themselves and the financial system liquidity in times of need, while insulating themselves against the consequences of bad loans and overextension of credit...it was a form of financial socialism that benefitted the rich and the powerful".  When things go badly, as they always will under a fractional reserve system, "they claim they provide an invaluable public service and deserve support from the public treasury", not unlike the events here in the United States over the last two years with hyperventilating demands that the public bail out the banking institutions. Or else.

The stealthy and insidious effect of central banking makes locating and fixing a culprit for mysterious yet persistent economic fragility and boom-bust cycles difficult.  However, after each unnecessary yet inevitable crisis, "rogue capitalism" or the "wild west free market" is blamed for the failure.  This creates the window for opportunist politicians, either benevolent or malevolent, to grow government and curb civil liberties. "Just this once," we're told; however, history tells us the "just this once" excuse is repeated over and over again, as politicians trade liberties for security in a futile effort to prevent crises from recurring.  Paul notes that "pragmatism, urgency, benevolence, fairness, compromise, fear of the future, and the need for safety and security provide the moral cover for an authoritarian approach to rescuing and protecting the people" from the crises their very own government precipitated.  This crisis atmosphere feeds the natural urge to merge government and business interests through which, naturally, the merchant enriches himself with public money while "serving the public good".  In addition, because there is such a large (and growing) pot of money at stake, businessmen lobby legislators and regulators intensely, in order to shape legislation or rules in their favor.  Quite often this hybrid public-private economy and the regulations and rules that accompany it fail to achieve their desired results; once again the "free market" is blamed (when this economy is anything but free), and the problems again become an excuse to further enlarge the government and enrich special interests. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

On restoring constitutional government:  Paul claims the Founders were clear on their intent for a central bank and paper money, having thoroughly debated and defeated both in the framing of the Constitution. Paul is equally frank in his view that the Fed is unconstitutional.  In his view, the Constitution could not be more clear--no paper money, period, only gold and silver (Article 1, Section 10), and the Constitution furthermore did not and does not grant to the Federal government the power to create a central bank (those powers not specifically delegated to the Federal government are reserved for the people or the States by the Tenth Amendment).  Yet how does Paul account for this seemingly blatant infraction of law? He cites the Federal government's (mis)use of the "necessary and proper" clause of the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8) and a ruling by the Marshall court--yes, that Marshall court--in McCullough v Maryland (1819), which basically means that the Fed Gov can pass and enforce any law it wants as long as it can justify it as necessary and proper in the performance of its duties.  According to Paul, this SCOTUS decision set the stage for the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

On halting the abuse of monetary policy during election cycles: It is an open secret that the Fed, despite its supposedly apolitical nature, is often quite politically activist, and its decisions to increase or shrink the money supply can make or sink presidential candidates or political parties.  Furthermore, the presence of a central bank with unlimited ability to inflate becomes the central vehicle through which politicians buy votes, both of the people themselves (inflation yields the temporary illusion of prosperity...which translates into votes for the controlling faction) and for big business. "Big government breeds big corruption", as Paul notes the records set in the 2008 presidential election because the size of government was so large and, because of the depression, was only forecasted to expand quickly.  There was money to be made and influence to be purchased. The central bank and its inflationary policies are also used to buy votes in another manner...from "zero liability voters" who are grateful for the bread a welfare-warfare state gives them, and from the rich, who benefit from government largesse and reap the income from usurious interest.  Thus, under a central bank, both of these populations act in their own best interests, and vote for policies that serve to eat the substance out of the middle class, which finds its wealth robbed by inflation and transferred to wealthy and the poor. Paul notes that a central bank is, well, central to this wealth transference, as "transferring wealth is limited when taxes and borrowing are the only tools" available to politicians to use in their fleecing of the middle class.

I enjoyed this book thoroughly, which should come as a surprise to anyone who has previously read Rothbard and Keynes. I long ago had convinced myself that Rothbard's Austrian conception of economics is the more correct one, even before I read his and Keynes' works. I also concur on the moral case against the Fed, considering inflation to be no different from legalized theft.  The weakest part of Paul's argument was, in my opinion, the Constitutional one, for he is clearly swimming upstream against the tide of Madison's SCOTUS-approved Federalists and the very human tendency to pull power in toward the central government.

In the end, Paul sums up well the fecklessness of the Constitution in preventing the establishment and legalized larceny of the Fed, noting:

...the Constitution itself is incapable of achieving what we would like in limiting government power, no matter how well written. The morality of the people and wisdom of our elected officials are the only things that count

In other words, when the morality of the people shifts such that they view the taking of other people's property as right and proper, no amount of legal chains will stop them.  Thus the argument for ending the Fed will win the day not when the Constitutional legal case is made, but when the people decide once again that sound money is the route to prosperity, to a limited government, and that robbing their neighbors to line their own wallets is immoral.

Friday Roundup

"Career spoiler" (NSFW...link depicts adult female full frontal nudity. Be forewarned, it's not a pretty sight).  That is what one Danish choice mommy, in a fit of pique about the family choices she had made, painted on her daughter's body after she scrawled "ordinary hooker" on her own. Classy.

While not such a great public speaker and given to cringe-worthy hyperbole, Marc Rudov does an excellent job exposing the asymmetry in the modern dating scene while exhorting his fellow men to stop underwriting their own exploitation. Video is 14 min 31s. (HT Christian J).

Remember the "sunscreen song"?  Perhaps that song and XBox 360 is behind the spike in rickets cases in the UK.

Whiskey on the epidemic of feminine resentment that middling women (4 to 7 on the attractiveness scale) harbor toward non Alpha men.  Yes, guys, they resent you for their inability to accurately assess their own DMV. I suppose this is the natural outcome of the twin sins of (a) telling every little girl from the get-go that they are princesses coupled with (b) the unshackling of their sexuality.

Pitchfork Pat quotes FDR, of all people, on the subject of welfare: "The lessons of history ... show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit."

Sexual harassment for me, not for thee: Gloria Allred (who else?) is representing a woman who was told, among other things, to cover her breasts because the other employees found them distracting.  In other words, women can make men take down pinup calendars at work all day long, but the minute men object to women dressing unprofessionally, spamming the workplace with exposed cleavage and short hemlines, it's "sexist and derogatory". 

FB underlines what we all know intuitively to be true: virgins make better wives.  Or at least ones that take "'till death do us part' a tad more seriously.

Now, this is red-state behavior, my friend: buy a truck, get an AK on the side.  Word.  BTW this happened in the same town as the first airport in the USA to tell TSA to take a hike.

Apparently 4 in 10 Americans say that marriage is becoming obsolete.  I tend to agree...not that I think it is obsolete, or should be obsolete, but that it is becoming so. And why shouldn't it be? After all, the law has been written in such a way as to make marriage an unecessary step for a woman to lay claim to a man's resources, while long ago society stopped caring whether or not men were married to the woman he is having sex with.  On thing the Pew survey linked above does make clear, though, is that marriage is fast becoming the marker of the upper class, and will serve to reinforce societal stratification.

WapitiMail: Gusto Queries

Author's note: this post first appeared at The Spearhead a little over one year ago, today. 

A reader named Gusto emailed me the following query:

If I'm unfortunate enough to father a girl, what should I do to make sure she grows up with the right attitude?

A great question, and thanks for asking it. There are quite a few embedded issues lurking below the surface, so I will ask your indulgence in unpacking them.

The first embedded question in your interrogatory is this: "should we men have children in the first place?" My answer to that is the lawyer-like "it depends". Broadly speaking, there are three camps in the dude-iverse when it comes to men and marriage and family. The first camp is made up of men who take seriously the warnings, sounded eloquently and effectively by elder brothers such as Baskerville, that counsel against men marrying and and having children. These men comprise the bulk of the marriage strike crowd.

The second camp is comprised of men either (a) aware of the warnings and took the risk anyway, or (b) was unaware of the warnings and assumed the risk by default. The end outcome of the behaviors of men in Camps 2a and 2b is the same, regardless of intent: get married, have kids, roll the dice. Maybe those fellows will get lucky, maybe not. I myself am a member of Camp 2a, although I was squarely in Camp 2b territory in my first marriage.

The third camp, much much smaller than either of the two previous, is comprised of those fellows that have the resources to pursue woman-not-included reproduction and raise these children outside of a pair-bond construct. These men do not maintain a romantic/sexual relationship with a woman but pursue a family anyway, either by adoption or by surrogacy, the latter of which is becoming more and more cost-effective in these days of globalization. The critical step to consider when implementing the surrogacy option is that a man should never allow a woman to act as the primary caregiver for his children unless she is paid for the effort or is a female relative. If he does, he risks placing himself on the same footing as those fellows who married to have children. Just as men who act the father figure to unrelated children run the substantial risk of becoming the target of a chilimony suit, I wouldn't put it past a family court judge to reward a former girlfriend's squatter's rights with a two-decade long entitlement to my income stream. In short, a man who mixes the business of looking after his children with pleasure may find himself hit up for chilimony on her way out the door--with his children in tow. When "primary caregiver" is the standard, blood relationship matters little, and the State (post Welfare Reform) is merely looking for the closest, deepest pockets to pick, appropriate precautions must be taken, and this caregiver relationship, if used, must be kept strictly economic.

At any rate, however one accomplishes it, having a child is, in its essence, a vote of hope for the future, a public statement that one thinks that there is at least a future worth bringing the next generation into. One may also view child-bearing and -rearing as a form of demographic warfare, in that we know that the political inclinations of a child is best predicted by the political slant of his parents. Moreover, added to this are the facts that the fembots and their ilk fail to achieve replacement fertility, and that they must import acolytes from abroad and convert them in the education camps they run with taxpayer dollars. This low birthrate presents a critical vulnerability that we MRAs/FRAs/MGTOWers can exploit as part of a multi-pronged strategy to replace the present hegemony. We should aim to out-breed our adversaries, from the bottom up, over decades, in hundreds of thousands, even millions of small battles known as male-headed families. In such a way we may reclaim territory lost when the battle of the sexes brought "personal is political" divorces to our marriages and our families. To hazard a Rumsfeldian expression, this is the "long war" that won't be over in a mater of days or months but in decades and/or generations.

The second embedded question, hinted at by the suggestion that having a girl-child would be a disappointment, is really two: should we men select the sex of our children, and should we men become like the women who express "gender disappointment" (GD) in conceiving boys? (Click here for a transcript of a stunning--in the sense that rarely is such feminine obtuseness so conspicuously on display--Elle article on the subject.) These are questions that a man can only answer for himself, given the thorny ethical and moral issues involved, although I do hold up the latent anti-male genocidal tendencies of these GD women for a bit of point-and-laugh scorn and ridicule and disgust. Thus, I suggest that, as critical as it is to raise good strong young men who are fully aware of the Femmatrix that surrounds them, if the twin misandrist threats of Femmarxism and Victorian traditionalism are to be defeated, it will require not only properly trained young men but properly trained young women to partner with them. Which leads me to the third question, the one you originally intended.

So what should we emphasize when raising those young girls, who are literally half of the future of the revolution that we men look to foment, and are essential to keeping the wheels of revolution turning? For starters, we should be raising girls the same way that we raise boys--to have integrity, to build up treasures in Heaven and not in this world, to be industrious and not lazy, to exercise self-control, to be responsible for their own actions, to prize the monogamous commitment of marriage, to hate divorce and, above all, to believe in a higher power that will hold them accountable for what they do in this life. From there, the instructions for daughters diverge slightly, tailored to the differential nature of the feminine. They are, in no particular order: to be modest in their dress, to be a help-meet worthy of the sacrifice and leadership of the man she'll meet and marry, to be chaste, to keep her own significant sexual appetites in check, and to not be a stumbling block for the men around her.

As an aside, while we are talking about the raising of good, quality boys and girls, it should go without saying--but it doesn't, so I will say it--that a man, if he wants the best for his children, should resist mightily the temptation to offer his children as a sacrifice to the modern-day Molech, the public school system. These government-run camps have been completely overrun by the feminists, and are where boys learn to despise the masculine...and where girls learn that feminine self-indulgence and responsibility-shifting are the ultimate values. If the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, and if the fembots and their acolytes are the hands that rock that cradle, then men who wish to spare their children from this fate would do well to refuse to voluntarily submit their children to such brainwashing.

But it isn't quite sufficient to train up your children in the way they should go and to avoid making your children victims of weapons of mass instruction. Just as, if not more, important are the characteristics you model for them as a husband, a father, and a citizen of the broader society. Are you the kind of father and role model that you want your son(s) to aspire to be? Do you model the sorts of masculine behaviors that you want your daughter(s) to seek out and to marry? For we are all tested each and every day; how we act, the choices that we make as men and as fathers, propagate themselves into our offspring.

As men, I think it important to not only effect first-order change, that is, a shift in attitudes of the men and women in our immediate vicinity, but we should also foment second- and third-order change as well. We can do this primarily through the institution that the present hegemony has fought so hard to destroy: the family. Through the family we provide moral and religious instruction as well as material provision, and it is through the family that we men give the gift that continues to propagate well after we've departed the scene. By our actions, by living lives morally and uprightly, we model behavior that will make the lives of our children happier and healthier and wealthier. Our children will absorb this instruction, and as the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, will transmit it to their children, thus initiating the second-, third-, and subsequent-order chains. Through such a focus, multiplied by millions of men in across the country, we men can found the natural aristocracy of virtue and talent, dreamt of by Jefferson so long ago, and through this aristocracy we can re-install the family as the cornerstone of society, thereby prospering our societies, making them stronger, and--by virtue of displacing government--more free.

The Chinese character for crisis (危机) is formed from the stems of two others: "danger" (危险) and "opportunity" (机会). We know the dangers inherent in marrying, we know the dangers in begetting children in the current legal climate. I would not blame a single one of my brothers for deciding that the risk is unwarranted. But in the dangerous act of marrying and having children,of training them, and leading them as we are charged to do--not just boys but girls too--we posture our families to take advantage of the opportunity presented to us to restructure society in such a way as to prosper us all.

Tuesday Tomfoolery

Today's tomfoolery features a somewhat dated cartoon that is still as applicable today as ever:

A PBS Frontline article sums up the curious stance of the PS system wrt drugs in schools this way:

The United Nations released a report in February of 1996 expressing concern over the discovery that 10 percent to 12 percent of all male school children in the United States currently take the drug, a rate far surpassing that in any other country in the world. Indeed, citizens of the United States, most of them well below the legal drinking or smoking age, now consume over 90 percent of the 8.5 tons of methylphenidate produced worldwide each year.

There is something odd, if not downright ironic, about the picture of millions of American school children filing out of "drug-awareness" classes to line up in the school nurse's office for their midday dose of amphetamine. It is this sort of image that fires the imaginations of Ritalin's critics--critics like child psychiatrist Carl L. Kline of the University of British Columbia who was reported in the August 4, 1991, New York Times Education Supplement as saying that Ritalin is nothing more than a street drug being administered to cover the fact that we don't know what's going on with these children.

Given how it is that most often boys who are drugged with such mood-altering poisons such as Ritalin (methylphenidate hydrochloride) at the rate of 8:1 to 9:1 compared to girls, according to this First Things article, this issue is as much a men's rights issue as it is a pharmacological one. Moreover, given that, according to the same FT article, up to 20% of the students in some school districts are on Ritalin, it makes me once again assert that sending one's male children to a public school is tantamount to child abuse. For the sake of the cognitive development and mental health of your sons, parents please homeschool your boys. Not only will you save them from being eaten alive in the maw of Molech, but you will help ensure the bright ones achieve their full potential. Same with the slower boys, who would be left behind in a PS classroom and consigned to special ed. Neither group of male students are well served in a PS classroom setting, where the female teacher instructs to the center of mass of student, and in doing so, captures most if not all the female students (whose IQs are more tightly grouped around the mean) while managing to lose both the exceptionally bright boys--who act out their boredom--and rather dim boys--who act out because they can't keep up.  Naturally, she blames both on either the boys' hyperactivity or lack of discipline, and reaches for the little yellow pill, when the real issue is a school setting of, by, and for girls and women, and a home setting that permits boys to slip into Acquired Discipline Disorder.

Just say no to drugs. And to the public school meat grinder.

Movie Review: The Karate Kid

Movie: The Karate Kid (2010), starring Jackie Chan (Mr. Han) and Jaden Smith (Dre).  Three and a half bugles out of five. I down-grade the movie for pervasive martial arts violence outside of the dojo, occasional rough language, and a few instances of peril. Otherwise, a fairly family-safe movie.

Basic Plot:  In a  fairly faithful re-hash of the 1984 version of the Karate Kid, the latest incarnation of the Karate Kid features a single-child boy from the wrong side of the tracks, raised by a single mother, in a fish out of water scenario (this time, it is Beijing China versus Reseda, California).  The boy, after being bullied by a gang of skilled martial artists, is taken under the wing of a reclusive martial arts master, and through this time-compressed mentoring (as in last movie, the climax centers around a full-contact martial arts tournament), the gains the respect of the bullies, gets the girl, and begins the transition to adulthood.

Analysis.  First up is how the boy's mother came to be single parent.  While I do not recall from the first Karate Kid how Daniel's mother came to be single, this movie makes it clear that Dre's mother is no baby-mama. Swimming against the tide of most Hollywood fare, Dre's father, rather than having "left" or having been evicted by Mom, was instead deceased, dying three years before the movie is set.  This lack of a resident father causes some mild discipline issues in Dre, who chafes at his mother's chiding for not picking up his clothes and other attempts to get him to act the right way.

Compared to the first Karate Kid, I found the class differences depicted in the movie to be much more muted, despite the larger racial / ethnic differences between Dre (black) and Mei Ying (Wen Wen Han...a very light-skinned northeast Asian) than between Daniel (a Mediterranean white) and Ali (Elizabeth Shue...a Nordic white).  The first Karate Kid made an explicit point about the mis-match between "that boy from Reseda" and Ali's country-club character who lives in Beverly Hills, while the difference in lifestyle and wealth between Dre and Mei Ying is less obvious. There is also a subtle difference in the behavioral differences between the Daniel / Dre character in the two movies: Dre has some mildly 'urban' rough-and-tumble mannerisms and harbors an annoying 'too-cool-for-school' attitude, while Daniel was simply endearing.  His love interest, though, remained roughly the same...the Ali / Mei Ying character is clearly much more affluent and culturally and behaviorally refined than is the Daniel / Dre character.  Consistent too between the 1984 and 2010 versions is the difference in skin color between the lead characters.  Once again we see a darker-skinned lower-class male paired with a very, even uncommonly, fair-skinned upper-class female.  This conforms to a persistent narrative in American-made media, a narrative that almost never fails to pair black males with lighter skinned females, and a narrative that is explicitly, even moralizingly, class-busting in its encouragement to higher-class women to date down.  Of course, we know in practice that such hypogamous pairings seldom succeed, but that doesn't stop Hollywood from promoting it or hinder flesh-and-blood women from attempting it.

Consistent too from the 1984 version to the 2010 version is how the Daniel / Dre character gets in the bullies' crosshairs in the first place--by intervening where he doesn't belong. In yet another instantiation of "let's you and him fight", an unobservant and undisciplined Dre presumes to insert himself  between Cheng (a reprise of Johnny Lawrence, the lead bully character) and Mei Ying, as the ex-boyfriend / girlfriend have a verbal altercation. As a result of his interference in domestic relations in which Dre has no equity, a fight ensues, and while Mei Ying verbally exhorts Dre for rising to her defense, Cheng roundly beats Dre down.  Later, we discover that the bullies go to the same school as Dre, and proceed to torment him daily.  Dre comes to hate Beijing and wants to return home to Detroit, and resents his mother for liking the change and new opportunity, thus providing the catalyst for his seeking the tutelage of Mr. Han.  The hidden lesson here, of course, is buried behind the surface action of the movie; don't go poking your nose in someone else's business, unless one is prepared for the consequences.  A closely related corollary is that one had better be prepared to cowboy up if you attempt to act the role of white knight for a female that is not your relation.  Thus while this plot device is necessary to get Dre and Mr.Han to meet up, after Han comes to Dre's defense after witnessing a 6 v 1 attack, it does well to show boys and men that there are consequences to indiscriminate applications of romanticism.

One thing that should endear the Karate Kid series to MRAs everywhere is its implicit support for a portion of the MRA business case: that it takes men to make a man.  In both the 1984 and 2010 versions, a single boy, socially isolated, weak, and underdeveloped from years of a fathering deficit, is taken under the wing of a humble yet skilled older male and guided through the transition from boyhood--with all its posturing, ego, and boasting (all of which the Dre character exhibits pre-transformation)--to manhood, with a focus on right conduct, honor, respect, and excellence. This is not to take away from the contribution of the mother in each case; however, it does serve to underline that the feminine by itself can only take a male so far before a hand-off must be made. The Karate Kid is another example of how Hollywood doesn't always get it wrong, in showing that it takes the company of a man for a boy to complete the transition to the masculine.

Speaking of mothers, I noted the contrast between the portrayals of the Karate Kid's mother figure in the two Karate Kid movies.  In the first movie, Daniel's mother is classic prole white: full of unlikely dreams, eking out a subsistence, while her son founders, aimless, fatherless.  She seems a passenger on the airplane of life.  This contrasts significantly with how Dre's mother is portrayed in the re-imagining of this movie: grittier, more controlling, less tolerant of Dre's misbehavior, less accommodating, all up in his biz, yet still loving.  In other words, a tougher customer, and a more respectable woman.  And she is also black.  As a white fellow with little perspective into how the black family operates, I wonder if there is a lesson or two to be construed here as well.

Lastly, the movie does an excellent job showcasing the beauty of China, and presents Sinic culture in a positive light.  However, I could not help but notice the persistence of the Chinese Red Star in many scenes.  Is it a sign of the lengths a totalitarian government must go to inculcate patriotism, loyalty, and a civic religion into its citizens? By hanging the national symbol in as many public venues as possible, a sort of spam propaganda? Perhaps. But this Red Star also found itself on Dre's shirt in a couple of scenes, leading me to wonder if such a display is merely an exhibit of Hollywood's continuing infatuation with murderous Communist revolutionaries, what a Reason Magazine writer dubbed "killer chic".   Signs say yes.

In all, this was an enjoyable movie, one that I am not afraid to have my children view. Recommended.

Friday Roundup

Remember "to professionalize, you must Federalize"?  Yes? No? Either way, try this one on for size: TSA officer repeatedly punk'd passengers going through screening at Philly airport.

German minister for women(!) criticizes feminism. A little. You know this won't go down well with the sisterhood, and it didn't.

Yeah, I said it. She's just a bra-burner, only better looking and with better hygiene, in reference to Palin. I make no bones about my dislike for her oddly socon-approved fembot tendencies, and she did herself no favors by appearing abreast Geraldine Ferraro (remember her?) on election night (HT: MarkyMark):


Is the demand to get a vasectomy the sh!t test to end all sh!t tests? VD thinks so; look what this Brit doctor had to say:

‘The number of vasectomy reversals is increasing and that’s a sign of how relationships are breaking down in this country,’ says Duncan Harriss. He sees five to ten men a week who regret their vasectomy — or, to be more precise, whose wives regret it. ‘The most common situation is that a man has had children, had a vasectomy in his 40s and then the relationship has broken down.

‘There are bitter cases where a man has a vasectomy to please his wife and then she leaves him a month later. It’s deliberate — she’s done it to spite him,’ he says. ‘Just yesterday, I got a call from reception to say one of my patients was having an altercation with his partner. She wanted him to have a reversal and he wasn’t so keen. An hour and a half later, they went their separate ways, him with a red slap mark on his face, having refused to have the procedure.’

I'm sure some in the conservative commentariat will get on 44’s case for saying this publicly...but the truth is obvious as the nose on my face...we are a great former empire in decline.

Licensing needs to be viewed for what it is...a vehicle for taxation and control. And in this case, a backdoor into harassment of citizens just because they can.

Carrie Lukas got it wrong with her "stiletto nation" article...I don't believe for a minute that the great body of female voters, who broke more toward the GOP in this election than they had in any others in recent memory, have suddenly given up on their relentless pursuit of security and instead starting plugging for a much more risky freedom. Nope, I think that they voted for a status quo that is a little less quo, but not a lot less. Mark my words, the warm comfy blanket of entitlement to other people's money will have to be pried from their grasping fingers...if not by politicians, than by the cold equations of economic inevitability.

Will it sell? I shudder to think about the demographics of the buyers of this product, and what they would do with it when they have it...Obama sex doll for sale in China.

Pitchfork Pat warns that the once-great American republic is headed toward irrelevancy, via totalitarianism:

The United States is starting to look like the French Fourth Republic. After France lost Indochina, began losing Algeria and was flipping from one premier and one party to another, the call went forth from an exasperated nation to Gen. DeGaulle to come and take charge of affairs. Consider the critical issue facing America today – the budget and trade deficits, the soaring national debt, an unemployment near 10 percent for 14 straight months – and how neither party seems to have the cure. Both parties have lost the mandate of heaven, and neither knows if its economic philosophy even works anymore. We are in uncharted waters. The country is up for grabs.

Demography is destiny; I wonder if white Angles can turn the corner? Mohammed becomes the most popular boys name in the UK.

Given how liberalism gave us eugenics, among other horrors, not less than a century ago, they should be afraid, very afraid, about this discovery: scientists claim to have found the liberal gene.

If we aren't there to stay, to make it an American colony peopled by Americans and scatter the indigenous to the four winds of the empire, then what the blazes are we doing there? Until then, I don't blame our puppet for doing this. It's smart politics after all.

I've heard the Big Apple described as rotten to the core before, but I have to admit, this one took me by surprise: 10% of sexually active NYC teens have had at least one same-sex partner, and that 1/3 of these teens self-identify as "straight". Other noteworthy stats from the survey:
- 3.2% of teen boys were homosexual,
- 3.7% of teen boys were bisexual
- 3.2% of teen girls were homosexual,
- 8.9% of teen girls were bisexual,
- Teen boys and girls report IPV in roughly equal amounts (34.8 v 35.8%, respectively)

Happy Veterans Day--A Discussion About Nations

To all those vets, out there, I give you thanks and respect.  Go out and hoist a symbolic brew into the air, on me.

To everyone else, vets and civilians alike, I would like to take a few moments to discuss something that my good friend Professor Hale wrote at his blog yesterday, for it bears further examination.  He wrote a pair of posts about what it means to be a nation, that institutions matter, and what "swearing to uphold and defend the Constitution" means when applied to real life.  To his posts I'd like to offer my own perspective.

First, my man PH is right: words do matter.  He asks "what is a nation?", and proceeds to define it as "the people, all citizens, our institutions, our geographical boundaries and our culture". And while this is an agreeable definition of a nation, it is neither complete nor 100 pc correct in my opinion.  Below is a definition of the term Nation that captures both common uses of the word that I find much more suitable:

nation [ˈneɪʃən] n

1. (Government, Politics, and Diplomacy) an aggregation of people or peoples of one or more cultures, races, etc., organized into a single state; the Australian nation

2. (Sociology) a community of persons not constituting a state but bound by common descent, language, history, etc.; the French-Canadian nation

Unfortunately, muddling up this entire mess is the conflation of "nation" with "state". To me, the two are different, and in the case of today's "salad bowl" conceptualization of American culture, there is no such animal as an "American nation". There was one, briefly, back in the early 17th century, but after the English colonists that initially settled this land began to accept large numbers of non-Angles into their midst, what was a fledgling American nation disappeared.  There is, most definitely, an American state, one that swelled and grew steadily after the War of Southern Independence and continues to expand today.

To me, the operative definition of Nation, and the one I use in this post and denote by capital-N "Nation", is the second one, a community of persons sharing a common racial and/or ethnic identity, language, and history. States as political entities come and go, but national identity persists as long as distinguishing characteristics remain.  History shows time and again that the bonds of blood tend to outrank all other ties that purport to bind.

PH folds civic institutions* into his definition of "nation". I disagree with this...while it is true that institutions join with values and natural, racial/ethnic inclinations to make a culture, these features are distinct from the characteristics that make a nation. Which is why political scientists hyphenate "Nation" and "State" together--to denote the Nation that has also established a state around itself.  But the original meaning of each term is preserved..."Nation" and state".



I note that the "nation-state" construct doesn't wholly apply to the United States anyways, for the USA is a country that, while a state, is not a single Nation but is instead a hodgepodge quilt knitted out of many Nations. Into this chaotic Balkanized cultural fabric enters the Constitution, a document that attempts to supplant various and varied racial/ethnic loyalties with a fealty to a concept, to the ideas of freedom and the precepts of law and procedure outlined in a piece of paper. In this, the United States is fairly unique, for in every other country (as far as I know), the soldiers pledge allegiance to the government, to the rule of men.

Because soldiers declare their allegiance to a document that the ruling class views as "living" and flexible, I find myself largely agreeing with PH on what he writes about the Constitution. Which is a shame, because it is quite a powerful indictment of just how far our people have sunk. Our troops and public servants no longer serve the cause of freedom, as symbolized by the document; no, they serve power and power alone, and moreover, are ruled by power as well. PH writes:

The Constitution is a document. A piece of paper. A piece of paper that changes from time to time. Which version of the Constitution are soldiers sworn to uphold? Most of them don’t care. They just support the magical idea of a constitution. In fact, the greater majority of all men enlisted and commissioned into active service cannot tell you what is in the Constitution that they are sworn to defend. Nor do they have political discussions about the various parts of the Constitution and whether they are worth supporting. But the one thing that soldiers can be counted on with near-unanimous consent is that they will do what they are told. The "Chain of Command" in the minds of the greater majority of soldiers takes a place superior to the Constitution in practice.

It is sad to read this, not because PH is wrong, but because I think he is correct. Long ago, our soldiers by and large stopped caring about what was really in the Constitution, because they were following the example of our leaders, who themselves stopped caring what was in the Constitution even longer ago. When we have a central bank that prints fiat FRNs, when we have a Federal government that presumed to set a national speed limit, that presumed to outlaw liquor, then hard drugs; when we have a central government that arrogated to itself the power to set educational policy country-wide; when we have a central government that infringes upon the right keep and bear arms, well, little wonder then that the people themselves and the troops are easily confused as to what being loyal to the Constitution means.

As an example, in the 1990s, I recall reports of a strong movement within the Clinton-era military to publicly declare that they would not go house-to-house and disarm the public in the event of a riot or public insurrection. This was on the heels of the Rodney King riots and the Ruby Ridge and Waco (remember those?) fiascos, where in the latter two, scores of civilians died at the hands Janet Reno's US-military supported goon squads. Most of the objections centered around using the Federal military for law-enforcement purposes. Problem is, that prohibition is found nowhere in the Constitution, but in a post-bellum law called the Posse Comitatus Act.

But PH's larger point is right, I think. "Support and defend" these days boils down to pretty much what those in charge tell you to do, not to uphold an oath that instructs soldiers to fix their decisions on laws and not on men. For how does one discern on his own between a lawful order and an unlawful one--particularly those orders that don't obviously run afoul of moral or ethical codes--when the law itself is shot through with exceptions, interpretations, penumbras, and emanations? For example, the few officers or staff NCOs who would refuse an order to, say, disarm American citizens during a natural disaster because it violates the Second Amendment would be promptly relieved with those who will happily do so. Who is correct? I doubt that question will be debated much, because the refuseniks would likely be court-martialed to the fullest extent possible for their refusal to obey. And how can it be any different, as the society from which officers and soldiers are drawn accepts, because they know nothing different, the precedents set by nearly a century of unconstitutional laws and SCOTUS decisions that whatever is shown to them as the law must be the law?

Having declared, more or less accurately so, that the Oath means to do as you're told by the State or else, I wonder, as PH does, where lays the boundary of loyalty to the State when such State no longer bears resemblance to the soldier's Nation and in some cases is actively hostile to it?

Once you have obligated yourself to defend the Nation and you have defined the Nation as the People, Institutions, culture and geography, what are you going to do now, Sunshine?

1. 10-20% of the people are not Your people, they are immigrants from third world countries, legal and otherwise. Some were even born here but have absolutely nothing in common with you.

2. The great American Institutions I have defined are a shadow of their former selves having been intentionally corrupted and undermined in exchange for political power.

3. The "borders" have become an arbitrary net with no fixed locations to denote the difference between "us" and "them".

4. Even the culture has morphed into something you do not recognize from your own childhood. Rampant divorce, out of control entitlement, free money living, and no inclination by a majority of people to reign in what they want the government to steal from their neighbors.

Can a patriot, claiming he loves his [State], conclude that this is no longer "his [state]" but a foreign one that has taken its place and as such not worth defending and yet maintain his that honor is satisfied and his oath upheld?

I don't claim to know where this will lead. But I do wonder what will happen with an armed force, quartered among us, loyal not to laws and liberty--as embodied by the Constitution, unabridged, for each soldier and officer to judge on his own--but to the power-hungry appetites of men making and interpreting the law to their fancy, is arrayed against the people. I also cringe at the decisions some soldiers will have to make in the future, as they realize the nation they thought they were serving is actually agitating against their own self-interest and the interests of the Nation from which they matriculated.

* I found PH's list of institutions incomplete--he omitted the institution of marriage entirely, a curious oversight given how crucial this atomic institution is to the whole fabric of society and the necessary para-governmental civic institutions that make a society tick.

A Totalitarian Streak A Mile Wide

Ed note: this column first appeared at The Spearhead on October 31st, 2010.

While Vox Day already beat me to this punch, I thought it useful to join him in piling on this august example of the toxic combination of feminine solipsism and tendency toward totalitarianism:

Whistles, catcalls and lewd come-ons from strangers are all too familiar to New York City women, who say they are harassed multiple times a day as they walk down the street. Now lawmakers are examining whether to do something to discourage it.

A City Council committee heard testimony Thursday from women who said men regularly follow them, yell at them and make them feel unsafe and uncomfortable. Advocates told stories of preteens and teenagers being hounded by adult men outside city schools and pleaded for government to address the problem.

The "problem" here of course, is not the behavior itself, it is that this troublesome conduct is committed by non-alpha men, and the women admit as such:

Soon, the group Hollaback, an organization formed five years ago to stand up to street harassment, will release a smart phone app allowing women everywhere to do the same. Hollaback told councilmembers that women have left jobs, broken leases and skipped school all just to avoid incessant unwelcome advances from strange men they pass on their commutes. Holly Kearl, author of "Stop Street Harassment: Making Public Places Safe and Welcoming for Women," said she informally surveyed more than 800 women from 23 countries and 43 states, and 99 percent of them had been harassed by strangers (Ed: emphasis mine).

Sexual harassment is commonly defined as "Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature that tends to create a hostile or offensive work environment". Note the operative word here, 'unwelcome', which moves this behavior from the objective to the subjective, from merely obnoxious into the domain of a crime punishable by the state. A crime defined not by objective criteria, but by the feelings of an individual woman, feelings that vary from time and place and from woman to woman...and man to man.

In other words, should the very same behavior be committed by men these women find attractive, not only would it be not a problem, it would be welcomed.  Which brings us to the crux of this matter: I can come to one and only one inescapable conclusion: the liberated woman hates hates hates non-alpha men with a passion, a zeal, a chip that, as a non-alpha male, I admit I cannot fully fathom. Moreover, such a liberated woman will use every tool at her disposal to restrain the behavior of undesirable (read: non-alpha) men so as to ensure she receives only "welcome" attention from men she finds desirable. Usually the default tool sought by these women is the law enforcement power of the State. Which is what we see here on the NYC council, a move to take these noxious behaviors, turn them into subjective "crimes" a la workplace sexual harassment laws, and hang that albatross around the necks of all non-alpha men who live in the city.

Picture from MSNBC's article. Click to enlarge

Missing from all of this discussion, of course, is any mention of the behavior or mode of dress of the women involved. Thus I found the photo placed atop MSNBC's treatment of this event to be more than a bit ironic, for it would seem to me that if one dresses in such a manner as to spam the whole social environment with your sexual signals, one then has little right to object when a fellow who is not within one's erotic field of regard happens to respond. That is not to say that the women who attended the council meeting, who in this NY Post article look rather average, dress in such an obviously sexual manner as depicted by the come-hither-shoes depicted here when out on the town. Rather, it is to note that the customary female role in human behavior, consistent over millennia, remains unchanged in these libertine times...the hard-wired pattern of feminine sexual display and male response to such displays. Of course, the women in this story wish to restrict and punish the male response to their displays, conveniently forgetting that it is they who initiate the process in the first place.  Instead, we (read: society) are supposed to focus on their feelings of insecurity, and are supposed to rush to provide it for them.

Thus, having wildly succeeding in controlling the behavior of undesirable men in the workplace, these women are moving to restrain the behavior, to attack the freedom of speech and of movement of undesirable men in the public space. Of course, this attack isn't couched in those terms; instead, the stalking horse used here to execute a sneak-attack the liberties of non-dominant men is--you guessed it--women's safety, a concern that is sure to garner support from white knights and the sisterhood all over town:

"Because of street harassment, from a young age women learn that public spaces are male territory," Kearl said. "They learn to limit the places they go, they try not to be in public alone — especially at night — and when they are alone, they stay on guard." Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras, chair of the women's issues committee that held the hearing Thursday, recalled learning as a young teen how to "speedwalk" to dodge certain men, and which corner stores she should always avoid.

Kat Pope, 28, of Manhattan, said she quit going to her gym in the mornings because she was harassed so badly on her way there and back. Men at a construction site would whistle, stare and yell at her as she passed, every single day. She still gets harassed in other locations, but it happens maybe once a week instead of daily.

"It feels disgusting," she said. "In the moment, I feel helpless and I never know what to do to make it stop."

Carrie Goodman, 27, a student who lives in Manhattan, said she hears a whistle or comment "once or twice a day."

Hollaback is pushing the city to commission a study, a public awareness campaign and perhaps even legislation, including "no-harassment zones" around schools to protect young women. "Too commonly, street harassment is believed to be the price women pay for living in New York City," said its executive director, Emily May. "But we're not buying it."

"This is not our way of not being able to take a compliment," said Nefertiti Martin, who testified at the hearing. "This is an issue of safety."

Street harassment of women is as old as cities themselves and is common around the world, but the pushback against it is a more recent movement. Volunteer activists in Cairo are planning to launch a website, Harrasmap, where women can instantly report cases of leering, groping and other sexual threats.

Going beyond the sexism implicit in a set-aside committee for 'women's issues'--as if women's issues are any different from men's--and going beyond the blatant emotional manipulation inherent in lumping some behavior some women find obnoxious when committed by some men in some settings with the crime of sexual battery, it is obvious to me the toxic effect the female need for security, when empowered, has on the freedoms of society as a whole. For it is a short distance between the sort of power the State would require to provide women their desired safety, and the sort of power the state would then possess to control the lives of all its subjects.  The freedom of others--or the property rights, right to self defense, right to free association, etc, etc. of others, especially when the holder of those rights are men--does not appear to matter much to women concerned with making their lives more comfy at the expense of others.  This incident is merely consistent with that well-established pattern, a pattern that demonstrates that women as a sex are particularly prone to the temptation of trading the liberty of themselves and others for a little more personal security.  Of course we know that they (and we) will receive neither over the long run, but that requires a twin concern for (a) the abstract concept of freedom and liberty and (b) a focus that considers the past and the future--in addition to the here and now--that seems to be missing in the average female. Or at least the ones that inhabit NYC, that populate NOW, and who vote in elections. "The personal is political" is a very apt mantra for these gals, who take their feelings and solipsism right into the voting booth.  And liberty suffers for it.

WapitiMail: Born On A Different Planet

That's the conclusion I've resignedly come to when re-reading several comments from a reader named Dan on this post.  How can someone possibly reach someone else whose political advocacy is either (a) flame-bait, or (b) genuinely held opinions are so foreign as to seemingly originate from off-world?

Take these two statements from Dan in one of the last comments on this thread. First, regarding the purpose of juries and jury nullification, Dan had this to say:

Jury is where you decide whether someone broke the law. You don't get to make up laws yourself while on the jury.

This one is easy. Dan is flat wrong, at least where the Founders were concerned. A cursory reading of their writings is all that is necessary to divine this. They considered the trial by jury, a group made up of one's peers from the same community as the alleged crime was committed, to be a cornerstone of a free society. Why? Because they viewed the jury as the penultimate backstop against a tyrannical government, where the jurors have "a right to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy". Now I didn't say that last sentence, marked off in quotes.  As DMM had pointed out on that thread, someone much greater than I, Chief Justice John Jay, did it.  In 1794, in the SCOTUS case Georgia v. Brailsford.  DMM's comments also list a whole buncha other dead white guys and their express support for jury nullification.

Further, contra Dan, jury nullification is not making law, for it legislates nothing new. Rather, it negates laws already made, applied in a certain way, on a case-by-case basis. It merely says that the common man is the ultimate judge on the laws passed by his representatives by upholding or declining to uphold the law, depending on the situation. Here is more reading on the Founders' attitudes toward jury nullification for those so inclined.

A common argument that I have heard posed by those who think jury nullification is scary and terrible and dangerous is that widespread jury nullification would result in anarchy. Although Dan didn't ask this, I'll defuse that question pre-emptively with a two-part answer. The first part of my answer is, "so what"? Let's accept the supposition for a moment that widespread jury nullification results in disorder. It isn't the tonied government servants rulers who will pay the tab for said anarchy if it develops...for such fellows live well, behind the walls of gated communities, often with State-provided security or protect themselves with firearms that they themselves prohibit the common man to possess. Instead, it is the commoner who must live with the consequences of his decision to let a putative criminal go free.

Furthermore, the jury, in their role as the trier of law and of fact, is the one body in the entire law enforcement system where mercy and justice are injected into the system. The law, and law enforcement, are permitted neither to exercise mercy nor seek justice. The State and its agents enforce the laws they wish to enforce. Period. (I'll concede that some mercy is inserted into the system by the State and LEOs, but it is irregular and whimsical and I personally would rather not rely on someone who's scorecard is numbers arrested or convicted for mercy.  So I discount their minor contribution).  For those caught in the State's net, it is the jury that decides whether or not they would act similarly given similar circumstances, and it is they who decide to convict or acquit on that basis. It is they who ensure that mercy has the opportunity to be heard, or that justice is done. To do so, sometimes they must not act as the rubber-stamp for an out-of-control prosecutor or a rogue tyrant in a black robe.

Next, regarding the morality of the welfare state and redistribution of wealth, Dan spake:

In a modern society we agree to cede part of our earnings to the communal pool to be used for the general good. That's not [evil]...it's called "society".

Once again Dan and I part ways. Only one who considers all others' property theirs, or more appropriately, held by-the-leave of the state, can hold a view such as this. Dan's inaccurate application of social contract language notwithstanding, and putting aside the "common good" clothing, the simple fact remains that one's wealth is taken by force by a protection racket. Even--or especially--in a modern society, you will be persecuted if you refuse. And then the gang that took such property takes their cut first...and then decides which favored constituency gets what fraction of the remainder of the confiscated booty in exchange for their votes. That is the "common good" of which Dan so loftily speaks. Sure, roads get built and the mail gets delivered. I get that and support that. But far more often money is spent on pet projects that are more about greasing the cogs of a patronage system that has grown far outside its Constitutional bounds. Frankly, it amazes me that Dan cannot see that such state-sponsored redistribution scheme rankles those with moral compasses, or how such a scheme is (a) terribly vulnerable to corruption, and (b) doomed to fail as the zero liability voters decide how much of the wealth creators get to keep of their productivity. It's like the old adage: democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.

Going back to the social-contract part of Dan's argument, his assertion may hold more water if the government in question was responsive to the individual wealth-creator, or if one could realistically withdraw his consent to have his wealth taken. Neither condition exists in our "modern" society--our Beltway government is up to 3,000 miles away, all but inaccessible to the average citizen and insulated from their desires, just as it was back in King George's day. Moreover, the government continues to take one's property even after successful emigration. These two factors undermine any use of social contract theory to support his argument for taxation for wealth redistribution.

Like I said, a brief perusal of recent Earth history is more than sufficient to refute Dan's articulated argument. If one knows his history and does not selectively ignore it, I fail to see how jury nullification can be held in such low repute, the last refuge of those Dan slurs by calling "rednecks".

His and Hers Diary Entries

Her diary entry:

Tonight, I thought my husband was acting weird. We had made plans to meet at a bar to have a drink. I was shopping with my friends all day long, so I thought he was upset at the fact that I was a bit late, but he made no comment on it. Conversation wasn't flowing, so I suggested that we go somewhere quiet so we could talk. He agreed, but he didn't say much. I asked him what was wrong. He said, 'Nothing.' I asked him if it was my fault that he was upset. He said he wasn't upset, that it had nothing to do with me, and not to worry about it. On the way home, I told him that I loved him. He smiled slightly, and kept driving. I can't explain his behavior. I don't know why he didn't say, 'I love you, too.' When we got home, I felt as if I had lost him completely, as if he wanted nothing to do with me anymore. He just sat there quietly, and watched TV. He continued to seem distant and absent. Finally, with silence all around us, I decided to go to bed. About 15 minutes later, he came to bed. To my surprise, he responded to my caress, and we made love. But I still felt that he was distracted, and his thoughts were somewhere else. He fell asleep -I cried. I don't know what to do. I'm almost sure that his thoughts are with someone else. My life is a disaster.

His diary entry:

My motorcycle wouldn't start today, can't figure out why, but at least I got laid.