Isaac

Did some listening today.  And some thinking.  About old things, things that have driven our society forward for thousands of years, things that laid the foundation of this civilization.  

One of these old stories has to do with the father of Judaism, Abraham, and what happened between him and his son (by Sarah), Isaac. 

After a lengthy tale of hardship and toil, Abraham was told to sacrifice his son to God, and he willingly prepared to do so, to the point where God stepped in and told him "meh...nevermind".

Or so I've always perceived.  No explanation, no sermon has ever really satisfactorily satisfied me as to why this is crucial knowledge that would make sense within the canon of the Old Testament.  I've never liked that story, never could get my head around it.  For like 35 years.  It's bothered me.  

Well, I was "today years' old" when I finally figured out the lesson that I believe is behind the story.  It is indeed tied to the idea of "sacrifice" but I think "sacrifice", in this case, was meant in a much broader sense.  

Abraham was told to "sacrifice" his son to God, which seems a bit severe, seeing as how Abraham and Sarah were 100 years old when he was born and the mere existence of Isaac was a frickin' miracle to begin with.  

But in what sense was the concept of "sacrifice" used here?

I think the lesson here is to understand that "sacrificing" one's own progeny is to forthrightly send them out into the world, thus exposing them to the cruelties that are manifest there, after teaching them to act in a proper manner, to strive to become as righteous as one is capable of, and to expect them to live up to those lessons while the parents themselves live up to the example that is inherent in those lessons.  

If one does so forthrightly, then the lesson taught to Abraham, and to us by extension, is that God will care for our children in a manner that will be better than even we, the parents, are capable of and in ways that we haven't really considered.   

It is necessary for every parent to do as Abraham did, to instruct our children properly, to demonstrate that behavior set, and when it is time, expose our children to the cruelty and malevolence of mankind with serenity and calmness.  Because it is incumbent upon each of us to have faith as we do so; that God will care for them in ways that we haven't even thought about.

Thus is the lesson of Abraham and Isaac, as I've come to understand it.  Let me know what you think.

Coriolanus

There seems to be a war on, and I don't perceive that it's the same kind of war that most of us have trained for.  This isn't a war against an external threat that threatens the borders of this nation.  Nor am I referring to some shadow obviation of our fiat currency or technological security.

 

I am referring to the war that is currently being waged against the warriors who defend this nation. 

 

It is, without a doubt, the most subtle battle that I've ever experienced, but there is a battle there nonetheless.  I mean, I got the sense in February 1992, when the first edict out of the first Clinton administration was to "don't ask/don't tell" became a compromise to the wholesale legitimacy of homosexuality within the ranks of the military, that the actual ability of the military to suppress, close, and rip the throats out of our enemies was a secondary consideration in the upper-levels of the government. 

 

I thought, as a young Captain, that the Clintons wished to weaken the military culture that they had despised since the 1960s.

 

I was so wrong.  They didn't want to just "diversify" the military culture, they wanted to end it.  The military culture in the United States is perhaps the oldest.  It has hoary cultural traditions that are scary to this society, where any mode of behavior that is not closely supervised by some government bureaucrat is inherently dangerous and possibly suicidal.  The dichotomy is kinda big and deserves it's own section...

The Difference 

It's not dishonorable, just thoughtless.  All of us who have returned home face the inevitable... "Did you hafta kill anyone?" 

Unfortunately, the sheer numbers of those who choose to enlist/commission, against those who won't, will not sustain a sufficient number of people to allow us to maintain the culture that we've managed to sustain since the nation was born.   As a result, those who've had "skin in the game" become increasingly rare.  As with Rome, fewer and fewer understand what it means to bleed for one's oath, for one's nation.  As with Rome, once you've alienated those willing to bleed for you, you've lost the soul of the nation, since the willingness to do so is what binds us together as citizens.

Martius (AKA "Coriolanus") teaches us that we should fight for what we believe no matter what.   

 

 

 

[Brutus] There's no more to be said, but he is banish'd,
As enemy to the people and his country:
It shall be so.

 

[The people]  It shall be so, it shall be so.
 

[Coriolanus] You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!
Let every feeble rumor shake your hearts!
Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,
Fan you into despair! Have the power still
To banish your defenders; till at length
Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,
Making not reservation of yourselves,
Still your own foes, deliver you as most
Abated captives to some nation
That won you without blows! Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere.

-Coriolanus, Act III, Scene II

 

 

 



Though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness...

I remember feeling like I do right now back in 2012.  I was in my rig (a white gov't 4x4 pickup truck), listening to AM talk-radio following the presidential election.  

"Fuck 'em", I thought.  "If this is the will of the people, let 'em come on and do what they're going to do.  We'll see what happens after."

Trump happened after.

So now we have this here.  One of the most instructive utilities of the Trump administration is the true exposure of how deep the establishment "swamp" runs. 

Definitions are important, so let's get into the "Swamp" in this context.  "Swamp", can be defined as the established global corporations who funnel billions of dollars worth of lobby money into the legislature, and even more billions of dollars worth of graft into paying off bureaucrats in the executive branch to serve their interests at the detriment to the electorate.  While I have no readily available data indicating that such remarkable amounts of money are making it into the pockets of judges, to think that those worthies are immune to such graft is to deny a reasonable appreciation of human frailty in the face of overwhelming corruptive influences.  Suffice to say that I will conject that the judiciary is in on this too, if only because I'm not naïve, and I've observed judicial behavior.

The Swamp could not allow a second Trump administration.  They've pulled out all the stops since the day he was inaugurated.  On that day, numerous sages in the corporate media actually compared Trump to Hitler.  You can't do that again.  That's "11" on the volume knob, and they went there on DAY 1.  They created a Russia narrative.  They weaponized both the DoJ and the Intelligence Community to convince us that Trump was a Russian Asset, or to impeach him for doing something with the Ukraine which was actually true of his accusers.

They've emptied their vaults.  They got in bed with China, allowed China to cultivate a virus and destroy the working class, and covered for China at every turn.  This was the only course of action available to them in December of 2019.

In December of 2019, the GDP was somewhere around 3.9% (remember, we were told by the last President in 2011 that 1.8% growth in the GDP was "the new normal").  Working class wages, job availability, and minority unemployment were at the best that they ever had been.  We have not deployed in support of a new war since Trump took office.  The inner-cities were blooming unlike anything we'd seen since Eisenhower.

Then it all turned to shit.  Wuhan Flu, George Floyd, manufactured crisis, anarchy and war in the streets...

And yet the Dow/Jones still thrives.  Daily trading hit 30,000 in one day several weeks ago.

Small businesses crushed.  Whole towns effectively destroyed.  Local governments allowed their citizens to fend for themselves while being attacked in their homes and businesses.  District Attorneys in every Democrat-majority city are allowing criminals to go free for almost anything short of class "A" felony. An electorate denied their relief through the social contract.

Yet Silicon Valley thrives.  Amazon crushes all-time shipments.  Netflix and streaming services flourish.  Wal-Mart and Home Depot are killing it.  Local stores are dying.  Local restaurants and bars, bakeries and gyms, all of them are being crushed by government fiat.  Think about that.  Not because the people don't have the money or the desire to go there, but because the government has not favored them.  How pissed would you be if that was your business?  Where is the social contract here?  Why did you pay taxes and pay for licenses for decades, if this was your end?  

While the rich and powerful dine in comfort in trendy restaurants, I can't go with my wife when admitting her to the hospital for an afibrulated heart condition. She and I have to wait while she sits in the ER with no food and no rest for more than twelve hours, until they take her to a room. So that I can then talk to her through a closed window as she cries and suffers.  

I walk through a small town that I've lived in for almost twenty years.  I know it well, and yet I can't recognize folks whom I've known for years because we're all in masks to protect us from a virus that is fatal in less than .05% of those effected under the age of 60.  (We joke at work that you're more likely to die from a shark attack in a port-a-shitter at Checkpoint 35 in the Prospect Training Area than from this.) Social distancing holds us aloof from one another.  Masks rob us of our individuality.  We default to suspicion of one another, resentment, mistrust.

Yet China had one of the best quarters in the past three years by exporting masks and medical equipment to the world that they infected.

There is one public figure who brought this about by pointing out that America was being cheated of her potential.  To bring him down, they have crushed the working class, again, the same as they've done since China was allowed into the World Trade Organization in the early 1990s.  

On my news feed, I see Bill Gates, Tony Fauci, and each talking head (employed by one of the multi-national corporations that own every news outlet) telling me that all of this is necessary.  Just like NAFTA was "necessary".  Just like JPCOA, the Paris Accords, and TPP were "necessary".  Just like everything the establishment has ever done to us to sustain the impression that they know better than us, while taking what we have and are capable of making and sending it overseas.  

That illusion was destroyed in 2017.

Say what you want about the man (but do it somewhere else, though.  I've heard it all, and your narrow-minded disapproval of his reported flaws will not move me.) Trump showed us just how corrupt this establishment is.  He demonstrated that we didn't need to make war in SW Asia for oil, because we have all we could ever need here, thank you very much, and all we really needed to do was to explain to the Middle Eastern potentates that we're done fighting their wars for them, and then come home and get rid of the internal regulation that was holding down petroleum extraction within the United States.  Guess what?  We became energy independent within two years of Trump's inauguration, and they've been fighting their own fights over there without us.  We'd been lied to for fifty years.  Now we know different.

What else have we been shown?  Well, here's something.  We don't need China, China needs us.  The President dealt with China exactly how a sane businessman would, offering deals that would give mutual advantage.  We were killing it.  In December 2019, China had the worst sustained GDP development, bereft of our purchases, since the 1950s.  The main reason for that downturn was because the President had created a normalized trade agreement, so of course their GDP would take a hit.  Since they couldn't reap the profits off the backs of the American working class, the Chinese Communist Party came to the solution that they preferred to turn this around through actual biological warfare against the rest of the world.  The Swamp signed on for that one, and it's still using it to attempt to convince us that China is blameless.  

In light of this information, and given the reasonable doubt as a result of recent investigations that there is much to be in doubt with regards to the legitimacy of this election in at least five states, I think the working class is being sold down the river yet again.  When Big Media, Big Pharm, Silicon Valley, the US Chamber of Commerce, the vast majority of Wall Street, and the Large Global Banking Interests all agree in their opposition to a single man, I start wondering: what is their unifying common interest?  Further, those who claim to be part of the traditional left, in opposition to the "Man", the "Establishment", the "Reactionaries", why are you siding with the common interests of these mega-billionaires?  

Jesus wept.  Rage Against the Machine actually advocated using their lyrics to the song "Killing in the Name Of" as a mnemonic to recite while washing one's hands during COVID restrictions.  (So you sing the chorus... "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me"... while you comply with the wishes of the WHO)

So that's the world right now, as it seems to be arrayed against us.  

What can we do in the face of this, you ask?

Get in the books.  There's a ton of things that I don't know that I should know.  I watched about a hundred MLB games per season since I stopped deploying.  I have had roughly 300 hours between March and October given back to me to get smart on things. Over the past five years, I've read the "Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitsyn, "A Brave New World" by Huxley, "Maps of Meaning" and "12 Rules for Life" by Peterson, "Camp of the Saints" by Raspail, and "Winter in Moscow" by Muggeridge.  I recommend all of them, though you'll need to hit me up if you want a copy of the last two.  Amazon has paperback copies of "Camp of the Saints" available for $148 and those of "Winter in Moscow" available for $758.  Good luck finding them in a library.  (I managed to find a copy of them both on an online abandoned book auction for less than $100 each.  Check those places out.  That's the only way this information will survive.  Silicon Valley is trying to kill it.)  Read the Constitution, and know it.  Read the Federalist Papers, where the founders explained their reasoning of arranging the government in the manner that they did.  Those things are your responsibility as a citizen, a steward of this Republic.  If you don't know these things and can't articulate a defense of them, then your children and grand-children don't have a chance in hell of living under such an arrangement.

Get local.  You've heard me say this before.  If Trump can't maintain office, and the incoming admin succeeds in packing courts and adding DC and Puerto Rico as States, this is not going to end well.  Get local.  If and/or when Federal and State governments start trying to flex their extra-constitutional muscle, the fella on the dime to enforce that bullshit will be your local leaders.  When that happens, you're going to have a bunch of nervous bureaucrats, who have access to statute law and armed men to enforce it, at odds with angry armed citizens who don't like it.  There needs to be a means of mediation that involves people talking to one another, and those people are us.  Go find a VFW, and American Legion, or a Marine Corps League.  If you're not former military, find a civilian group like the Elks.  

In 2004, when J. Paul Bremer [spits between fingers] fired the Iraqi government and every member of the Ba'athist party (i.e. "every Iraqi who had a job"), what resulted was something that I'd read about, but never, EVER, thought that I'd see in this world: A Hobbesian State of Nature.  Without a government to hold "All under awe. Where life will be nasty, brutish, and short."  Hobbes predicted that, in such a state, men would hole-up and defend their shit while slowly reaching out to their neighbors to effect "mutual protection associations".  This is a contract.  "If they come for your shit, I'm gonna roll in and help.  You'll do the same for me."

That gets bigger and bigger.  In Iraq, we saw the resurgence of the tribes in this manner.  For us, the tribes will be communities, and the leaders will be those who can mediate between the bureaucracy and the citizens.

Get in there.  Get ahead of this.  Hope for the best and assume the worst.  Noah didn't start building when it started to rain.

Folks, the Supreme Court just turned down an opportunity to resolve a case between states for the election of the Chief Executive.  It's getting cloudy, and a flood is increasingly likely.  By virtue of your experience and your training, you are the instrument in this situation.  Get busy and start building those arks.  

Unclean  

The Alternative Preamble --OR-- The Inherent Right to Your Pain.

The Alternative Preamble

--OR--

The Inherent Right to Your Pain.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

Life, liberty, and the mitigation of individual suffering?

Life, liberty, and the inherent responsibility of the individual to accurately identify and deal with our own pain?

Three manners of saying the same thing. Folks, 99% of life isn't dedicated to "pursuing happiness". It's dedicated to threat mitigation, so that each of us can identify those things that will most likely kill us.

I think Jefferson/the Framers came up with a nice bumper-sticker, but I think they elided over the true function of the utility of freedom. Sure, we'd all like to be unrestricted in our mobility up the hierarchy, but each of us is much more interested in accurately being able to identify the things that will result in our demise, and be free to overcome those threats, (specifically those who were on the American Frontier in 1776). Whether those threats are British occupying forces, hostile Natives, feral predators, criminals, robber-baron creditors, monopolistic oil or railroad interests, invading carpet-baggers, Jim Crow Democrat political machines, or Silicon Valley Utopians, our response to these potential threats should be as unrestricted as possible. Because, once those threats are mitigated, the "pursuit of happiness" is much easier, by several orders of magnitude.

As we are frequently reminded by Karen shaking her finger at you: "you can't know his pain." This is true, and it's actually the basis for why the government, and you (yes you) should leave me the fuck alone so that I can deal with it in an integrated manner. Go back and reread the Declaration of Independence with this mindset, rather than the shiny "pursuit of Happiness" prelude, and tell me I'm wrong. I'll wait.

Here's the deal. Whether you read Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Victor Frankl, or Martin Luther King, the commonality that runs through the narrative of all three is that tyranny began at precisely the point where individuals were lumped into groups. Cordoned off into sub-categories of humans. Each one of those sub-categories had something terrible done to them. Yes, their "pursuit of happiness" was limited, but what does that even mean?

No, something more onerous was done to them: Their suffering, their pain, was taken from them, combined, and then dictated to them by someone who didn't even know them, whom they had never met, who cared nothing for them, and to whom their individual identity was nothing more than an entry on a demographic spreadsheet. Groups don't suffer. Groups can't feel pain. Individuals suffer, and the pain of the individual is his responsibility to mitigate. It is only possible for that individual to do so. Nobody can take your pain and fix it. You do that.

That is the danger of a tyranny, and the very manner of its consolidation around the necks of a given nation. Tyranny attributes the degree and effect of those grievances to groups of people, and refers to them as "the downtrodden". Those people, grateful that they seem to have gained a sympathetic ear, buy into a narrative that tells how their group has uniquely suffered along this mortal coil, this panapoly of suffering. Blame is assigned. Pejoratives are assigned ("Kulaks", "Juden") Those groups are persecuted.

Ask any lower class Ukrainian in 1927 to identify who was persecuting him, and he'll respond "The Kulaks!"

Ask any lower class Chinaman in 1958 to identify who was persecuting him, and he'll respond "The Intellectuals!"

You see my point. Each of these examples demonstrate how the pain of the individual was subsumed into the resentment that was convenient to people who could give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut whether these poor, benighted individuals lived or died. The pain of these individuals was their own, it was taken from them, mandated that they be outraged by it, and then was subsequently forged into a weapon to enslave all of them.

Many of you don't share my race, creed, religion, national origin, or age, but each of you has value because you're an American citizen. That was the deal. I don't want anyone to come around and assume your pain and take responsibility for it from you. It is yours, and your individual agency is tied specifically to how well you choose to deal with that pain, that suffering, and grow past it, through it, and to ultimately transcend it. It is the immutable responsibility before every human to do that, to teach our children how we managed to do it, and to derive satisfaction from having beaten it. Tyranny wishes to take that process from you.

What is at stake here is our very soul. Each of us is indelibly marked by the pain that we've overcome. Each scar marks something that we've learned. These scars are precisely what identify us as individuals. Different from every other person. Worthy of being considered as an effective contributor to this society. Not your race. Not your religion. Not your national origin. Not your age.

Don't let them assume your pain. It is not theirs, it is uniquely yours. Overcome it. Learn from it. Allow that process to specifically identify you, not some arbitrary trait that someone else wants to rope you into. It's who you are. Don't let them take it from you.

The Flood, Part Three

Completed Unclean Thawts (At least for now)

So, I outlined the universal apriori basis of "The Flood" in part one, here:
https://fearfiles.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-flood-part-one.html

Then, last night, I explained it's implications within society and politics here:
https://fearfiles.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-flood-part-2.html

So there's your context, which is important in predicating what I think is the most important aspect of this archetype.  Tonight, I'd like to try and articulate the implications of preparing for "The Flood" in the life of the individual.

I think the Bible does an effective job of describing a proper way to perceive the relationship between the individual and reality.  It does this through a narrative that tells the story of how man evolved the instinct to sacrifice.  As I mentioned last night, these points are echoed in fables and parables that have been handed down from the recesses of time.  They are ancient in origin.  Mankind became aware of the difference between him and God: limitation.  The implication of this difference is suffering.  To be mortal is to suffer.  There are two natural reactions to this: 1) Become bitter at the nature of reality, believe in nothing, and slowly detract from the fund of potential energy around you by maintaining a severe affect; 2) Deal with reality on its own terms.  Enjoy what you can, while you can.  Find a purpose that is rewarding and believe that the purpose that you serve in enduring the pain justifies the struggle.  Understand that this sacrifice, this denial of gratification in the short term, will serve that purpose in the long term.  This idea of "sacrifice" is what is portrayed by Abel, and Abraham, and Noah.  It's reflected in the ant, the tortoise, and the frog.  We see the story everywhere we look.  In "Neo" from the Matrix, in "Cool Hand Luke, in "Obi Wan".  It is a recognition that the unfairness of the reality that we experience can only be mitigated by our effort in accepting the burden of responsibility for our fellow man, for the people that we love.

It is the recognition that The Flood is imminent, and that each of us has a duty to build a vessel within us that is capable of withstanding the worst abuse that can be dispensed by nature and by the malevolence of mankind.  None of us have a "right" to that vessel, precisely because nobody on Earth has the duty to build it for you.  It takes work.  It requires that we deny ourselves gratification so that fewer will suffer in the end.  It's an ominous responsibility that lies before every human being.

So, how do we get there?

If we accept what I just described with regards to the nature of the reality that we find ourselves in, I believe that we have a duty to tell the truth to ourselves, and to be aware of how malevolent each of us is capable of being.  When mankind first came to understand his own pain, it was a small intuitive leap to understand how to inflict pain on others.  This is another unfortunate implication of mortality, and that understanding is critical for each individual to gain an intimate familiarity with.  The alternative is a lie: "I could never do THAT."  "People are genuinely pure, it's the world that corrupts them."

In the biblical narrative, a good example of this is outlined when Christ was tempted by Satan in the desert.  He was shown, it is described, the successful ends of his efforts.  It was all within his grasp.  All he needed to do was to bow and accept the pure malevolence of reality.  He turned his back on that, understanding it at its core, and chose to go forward as he had: suffer betrayal by his friends, banishment by his church, and be tortured to death by his government so that it would be possible for God to look upon mankind favorably so long as they acted in a similar fashion.

Go back and read that again.  This is what preparation of the individual for the imminent Flood entails.

"But it's just a story, right?  That shadow, that temptation to submit to the cruelty of the world, it's just a parable.  Those implications don't apply to me.  I'm just a fat old white dude in the Mojave Desert." 

Such are the lies that we tell ourselves, seeking a justification for not taking up the burden that is rightly ours.  The denial of that burden leaves us vulnerable to the inevitable Flood.  Lies are just our futile attempts to bend reality to our advantage.  It doesn't work that way.  The Flood is coming.  It will expose your lies and leave you without shelter, emotionally unfit to continue.

I was talking to a dude the other day, a good man who is under criticism from his professional community because they refuse to accept his explanations for why they can't do something that they want to do.  I told him, "Tell them the truth unapologetically. The truth doesn't warp your reality, it warps the reality of those who are full of shit because they lie to themselves."  I had inadvertently walked into something that applies across the human experience and is one of the reasons why I've taken up the pen this weekend.

Accept as much responsibility as you can manage with dignity.  Challenge yourself at every opportunity.  Become familiar with your malevolent nature and hold that nature at bay, while also recognizing that malevolent potential in others.  Tell the truth to yourself and those with whom you interact. Do this every day.  Remain cognizant of this as you do all the little things.

The Flood is on the way.  People will be counting on you.  Be worthy of their faith in you, and be worthy of your faith in yourself.

Shalom, my friends.
Unclean

The Flood (Part 2)

So, expanding upon last night's argument (which can be found here, for those who need context: The Flood, Pt. 1

It is established that the threat of "The Flood" applies to societies worldwide, and this threat is viewed as having two causes: 1) sin, (defined as sustained apathy, incompetence, or corruption); and 2) entropy, (defined as the inevitable deterioration of everything). At first blush, it would almost seem as if the sustainment of a working system of culture, society, or government is impossible, given what we know in our apriori structures about the futility of these things.

Well, it's a good thing that we have memory, which allows us the opportunity to not make the same mistakes over and over again and thereby suffer stupidly. We've spent hundreds of thousands of years watching one another, noting what works and what doesn't, and then passing these observations genetically and verbally to our progeny. This has resulted in a number of utter fucking miracles, when you consider the odds, that I will deal with directly.

When contemplating the threat, "the Flood", that is represented in our collective memory, one might ask how we can mitigate it. Well, to use this metaphor to it's most effective ends, it would seem to be a moral imperative for us to prepare adequately for its inevitable arrival.

Holland, a country that has much of its arable territory located inconveniently beneath sea-level, has built a system of levees to protect against the eventual flood. Their engineers did so in a serious manner, planning their construction while accounting for the effects of the worst possible storm that could come about once in 10,000 years.

We can readily contrast this wise planning against the experience of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans. The Army Corps of Engineers, when planning the levees to protect that city, calculated the effects of the worst possible storm that could come about once in 100 years. Meanwhile, corruption within the administration of that city took advantage of a system ripe for the taking, thereby corrupting the initial construction and subsequent maintenance of those levees. They were shown to be every bit as effective as the effort and thought that were evident in their creation and maintenance, and a whole city drowned as a result.

We should not be surprised. The fables that have been handed down to each generation for thousands of years give truth to this story. The "Ant and the Grasshopper", the "Tortoise and the Hare", and most depressingly, the "Scorpion and the Frog" all deal with treating reality seriously, not taking anything for granted, and preparing for the worst.

So, what should we do? Well, as nearly as I can tell, the solution for a sustainable society runs in exactly these areas. One must prepare a vessel capable of withstanding the worst abuse that the world and mankind can manifest upon it. Once that is done, it is imperative that the vessel be maintained appropriately, to be able to continually withstand this abuse.

Among the miracles that I referred to above, we can count the modern manifestation of a Lockean Republic as perhaps the best example. Locke put into words something that is truly fantastic: The idea that a government doesn't exist to enrich the throne, but rather a government exists to defend the liberty of its people, who will then prosper as they are allowed to exercise their own free-will in the furtherance of their own self-interests within the confines of the rights of their fellow men. Consider how unlikely it is that Locke should derive these specific ideas, that he could be able to articulate them effectively, that those articulations should prove to become popular, and that English exiles would then use those ideas and build a nation on another continent based upon them.

The founders of this nation are to political philosophy what Dutch engineers are to disaster mitigation.

In the way that the Constitution is laid out, and its rationale explained in detail by two guys who didn't even like each other in the Federalist Papers, they weren't planning out a Utopian society like post-modern flapnoodles such as Ocasio-Cortez, Warren, or Sanders. No, the founders were planning for the worst of times, the 10,000 year flood.

I think they succeeded fantastically.

With the vessel (The Constitution) having been effectively constructed by serious people to stave off corruption and apathy, while also mitigating the effects of incompetence, what is left to us is to maintain that vessel. How does one do that, exactly?

First, it depends on a competent citizenry. It is necessary for us to understand and articulate the machinations of the protective scheme that was handed down to us. This also requires us to understand the composition and strength of the "flood" that is inevitable. Only through reading and comprehending these things will we be able to maintain the worthy structures that were gifted to us to maintain. Since part of this protection involves freedom of expression, we must take each opportunity to remind one another of the coming storm, whether it be just off the coast or imminent sometime in the next 10,000 years.

Therefore, maintenance of this vessel looks something like this:
Learn about our government. Learn about the alternatives that we've chosen not to exercise and why we've made those choices. Talk to one another about the utility of what has been prepared for us and the threat posed by these alternatives. Teach our children about these things. Pray the entropy doesn't undermine our efforts. Everything else is in God's hands. As He described to Abel, your sacrifice must be genuine and sincere.

And that gets into tomorrow's bit...

The Flood, Pt. 3

The Flood (Part One)

Most societies have a "flood" mythos that fits into our story. It is a cross-cultural phenomenon that is there for a reason. It is a warning.

Mircea Eliade, in his book "History of Religious Ideas" says that the commonality between most "flood stories" across the narratives of many societies is a manifestation of a combination of "sin and entropy". Each of us can learn a lot from this, both individually and as a perspective on our culture.

First, I think it's necessary to delve into a few definitions.

The etymology of the word "sin" comes from the Hebrew word "chatta’ah", which translates "to miss the way". Whether you admit God or not, each of us knows what it is to do wrong, and that description of "sin" is instructive, I think. To "miss the way" implies that the "way" was there, but you missed it, through apathy, incompetence, or malevolence.

Entropy is the inevitable deterioration of everything. It's a fundamental law of the physical world around us. It implies that everything, an atom, a molecule, a structure, or an ideal is running to ruin constantly, right before our eyes, and we are helpless to stop it.

So it would be logical to say that the destruction of reality, i.e. the world around us (the flood) is brought about by the apathy, incompetence, and malevolence of people (sin), accelerated by the natural tendency of reality to dissolve over time (entropy). This would seem to be the lesson of this story that is common among cultures, warning us against a "flood" in our society and a caution to each of us in our personal lives.

Viewed thusly, it would seem to be an important lesson, given to us from time older than time. What is implied in this lesson, then? What are the moral implications that have been handed down to us, individually and as a culture, to avoid this disaster?

I've got a few ideas about these remedies, temporary as they might be, to stave off this inevitable flood. I'll get into my ideas about the societal implications tomorrow night, and the individual implications on Sunday.

Unclean

Part 2 can be found here.

The Context of a Free Culture

Last night we talked about the "Great American Stew Pot" and why that's awesome.

Tonight, we need to break down reality a bit. Because, let's face it, despite the shiny happy story we all want to believe, every religion agrees on one central point: we are mortal, which means we have limits. The cost of limitation is suffering. Therefore, to be mortal is to suffer.

I leave whatever coping mechanisms you've developed over the years to deal with that realization, but what has specific implications for us as a nation is this: if everybody suffers, then no suffering by any group can be said to be more important than that of any individual. In this manner, the law that protects us all under this social contract recognizes the rights of the individual as the accepted unit of measure. Thus, we've arrived at an agreement with each other that "I will live my life and defend my liberty and property in such a manner that it will not interfere with you doing the same thing."

It really is that easy.

What complicates it ties in a little bit with what I was saying last night. We're not a "melting pot", we're a "stew pot". You bring into the equation your identity, with all of the oppression and suffering from your line, and I bring all of mine, and we stand and bitch at each other about whose ancestors got the shittier end of the stick. The basis of suffering as the primary condition of mortality would seem to negate the basis for that conflict. Let me explain.

My family is Scots-Irish. A quick summation of my tribe: Two thousand years ago, the Romans slaughtered 1/3 of the Celts, enslaved another 1/3, and taxed the shit out of those remaining who were lucky enough to survive, farm, and reproduce. After the Saxons conquered Britain and intermarried with the Angles enough, many Scots moved to Ireland. The Anglo-Saxons then bought up a lot of the land and eventually started forcing Scots-Irish into debtors' colonies in the New World, which was great until Sherman burned it down. So a bunch moved to Texas and lived up on the plains, fighting with Comanche with no expectation that the government could protect them. It was rough, but enough of my ancestors reproduced and here I am.

None of that matters now. Every single race or creed can trace a similar path of woe and oppression. The woe and the oppression is the default position of the human race. It's not the "Man" or the "System" that's kicking my ass, it's the limitations of mortality. As near as I can tell, there are two possible reactions to this realization: 1) Become bitter and cynical of the reality in which I find myself, and accept a nihilistic representation of the world around me and just make it worse; 2) Accept reality on its own terms and seek to conduct myself in a manner where the suffering is justified by challenging myself to become better. Voluntarily accept responsibility for as much as I can and try to follow Christ's example to make the world around me a better place.

By a miracle, I've been blessed to live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. One where my natural rights are protected by law and I have the latitude to make these choices. The fact that this latitude exists for every single individual citizen should overshadow all of the ancestral baggage that we're dragging around. The potential that lies within the individual, when added to the chaotic potential that exists within a free society is enough of a challenge for each of us to master without kicking each other in the shins about the fact that you are of Italian or Belgian or English or Yankee or Comanche descent and our grandfathers fought once upon a time. -Unclean

Nation of Exiles (AKA "People Stew)

Okay everybody, let's talk this out. Let's admit some hard truths that might be hard to admit. Let's look at all of this realistically. Any who disagree are always more than welcome to challenge this, and I encourage you to do so in the spaces below this.

I'd like to carve this up into two or three pieces, but I'll try to keep each one relatively short.

Tonight: WHAT IS AMERICA?
First, America is not a "melting pot". It's a stew. In a melting pot, everything combines. That doesn't happen when you throw together the descendants of almost every global society into one single system. A "stew", on the other hand, has a completely different connotation. It indicates that, even though your family has been here for hundreds of years, the big chunks of identity that they've passed down to you still haven't combined into some sort of...sauce. However, contrary to what the media is desperate for you to believe, this is NOT a nation of immigrants.

We are, my friends, a nation of EXILES.

It's an important distinction. "Immigrants" are like cattle, who wander for better pasture and cleaner water. No, our ancestors left their homes and came here. Generally, because they were malcontents who didn't like the conditions in the motherland that had nurtured their ancestors SO MUCH that they told everyone they knew to get bent, picked up all they could carry and came to this country. Or the government took notice of them and sent them here to shut 'em up. Or, in my case, they had enough debt on the books to be sent to the debtors' colony in Georgia. Or they were impressed into slavery and sent here. Why is this important? Because, this created an environment where they were protected from all of the shitty propensities that governments have, by virtue of them being citizens of this nation.

Oh, and they could buy all the guns that they could afford.

So, instead of a "melting pot" of people sauce, you've got a people stew of wildly different flavors of backgrounds and histories, bound together under a social contract roux that is based in the Constitution, and everything tastes EXACTLY like mistrust and suspicion of authority. With guns.

Meanwhile, ALL of those countries that expelled our ancestors kept all of the folks who would just accept their lot, sit down with the other kids, and color inside the lines.

But without any guns.

These two sets of people have been breeding and teaching their young what society means for hundreds of years. Whatever it is that makes us suspicious of authority has been concentrated. Whatever it is that made them docile and accepting of control has also been suffused.

This is what makes us different.

Okay, so there’s this thing that very few have been able to nail down.  Some call it “Marxism”, some call it “Neo-Marxism”, most call it “Social Justice” and just leave it at that.  Without definition or any consequence that would follow from defining such an ideal.  Well, I’ve found someone who has defined this, free of charge, on YouTube (for fuck’s sake, I mean, who knew such a thing was possible?!) 

The name of this philosopher is Jordan B. Peterson.  I’ve taken to watch him on an almost nightly basis, and for good reason.  He offers the most effective counter arguments to what I’ve been crying out against for the past twenty-five-or-so years.  Giving credit where it is due, and to point all of you in the direction where I’m headed, this guy is seriously legit, on several different levels, and has managed to actually get me to question many of my own paradigms (and we’ll get into that below).

Dr. Peterson is a clinical psychologist who is a professor at the University of Toronto.  His screed was weaponized when the Canadian Parliament chose to pass a law that mandated that he use gender pronouns other than “he” and “she”, thus crossing, in his mind, over into tyranny.  He reckoned that his government had passed over telling him what he could not say, into a territory of what he MUST say.  So, the guy went feral, became famous for it, and it brought to light the most sane intellect that I have read/seen/listened to since I sat down with Locke’s Treatise on Government, lo these twenty-five years ago.

Those who know me well will note that this is perhaps the highest praise, indeed hyperbole, that I can heap upon anyone.  As one might expect in this day and age, Dr. Peterson has a YouTube channel, where he has cached his college lectures and some other material.  It can be found here:

Jordan B. Peterson

Because of the length of many of his discussions, he set up another website that is intended to make his arguments a bit smaller and thus easier to digest and share.  Those arguments can be found on this channel:

Bite Sized Philosophy

So, now you know of Dr. Peterson, I have done my duty to give this man credit for his ideas, and it is time, gentlemen, for me to get to the fucking point.

Sweetheart, this ain’t no party, it ain’t no disco, it ain’t no fooling around.

It’s…

BILE

Post-Modernism and Why We Will Win

Okay, so maybe you’ve clicked through the links offered above, and maybe you didn’t.  While you should do so, at some point, it is why the hell I offered them up in the first damn place and if you don’t, the terrorists win. 

So, there’s that.

What Doc Peterson is after is actually very simple: in the late 1960’s, those who were enamored of Karl Marx were running into a difficult moral conundrum:

They were shown to be full of shit by a man named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  Alex wrote several tomes that showed the Marxist experiment to be a complete moral, economical, and political failure.  I’ve recently read the third volume of his Gulag Archipelago, and I highly recommend it because in that volume, Solzhenitsyn demonstrates exactly how Marxism convinced an entire country to turn on itself, for the greater good.  He explains in fantastic detail how blaming Lenin and Stalin (et al) is a convenient argument, but that, when it came down to it, the Soviet people came to a calm and reasoned conclusion that the imprisonment, torture, and slaughter of their fellow citizens was the proper decision, in the name of “the people”.

One can see why the Marxists of the late 1960s came to understand that the downfall of their ideology was at hand.  Many of them had unwittingly entered some sort of logical guillotine not of their making.  They seemed to wish that the good will of humanity was in reverse correlation to the sheer tonnage of human suffering in the name of utilitarian good.  That the good of the many might outweigh the misery of the few or the one, and that the misery of those poor bastards wouldn’t end up as the realization of tyranny so profound and so disgusting so as to make Kafka’s worst nightmares as common as the fucking TV Guide. 

So, they met, the fiends, in Paris.  Of course it was Paris.  The City of Lights, for the love of God, would inexorably be the birthplace of the “repository of the most repulsive coterie of intellectuals ever seen”.  People such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty.  Along with those inane and self-deluded dwarfs, individuals such as Stanley Fish and Frank Lentricchia, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin in feminist legal criticism, Jacques Lacan in psychology, Robert Venturi and Andreas Huyssen in architectural criticism, and Luce Irigaray in the criticism of science also surfaced in that slowly roiling oast of offal.  This wasn’t just Mos Eisley on Tatooine, this was Paris, France on low grade weed and sautéed Psilocybin mushrooms and shitty foie-gras.

In short, it was a terrible idea for all involved.  We’ve been suffering from its result ever since.

Because, what these vipers decided upon, as the moral high-ground of a united workers’ paradise crumbled beneath their $200 Italian loafers, was to deny the “old” ideal of a class struggle.  Yes, sports fans, those cocksuckers decided, in those heady days of the late 1960s, that the elite and the bourgeoisie were no longer at war against the proletariat.  They had a better idea. 

Modernist thinking hearkens back to the renaissance.  A golden age when men were fierce (those who had managed to survive the plague), women were fancy, and “reason” was the order of the day.  Michelangelo was painting ceilings, while Gutenberg invented the printing press, Luther explained why man needed no intercession of holy men to be heard by God, Adam Smith explained why things and labor had value, and Locke described in detail why Hillary Clinton was a fascist.  Good times.

Fast forward to the late 1960s, when LBJ, methaqualone, Bell-bottomed pants, and the New York Mets gained their prominence.  This later set of theories, ushered in by the above mentally retarded coterie of french intellectuals, has been called “Post Modernism”. 

(Source: READ THIS IF YOU DON’T READ ANY OTHER LINK)

What they decided was that the righteous path of civilization was to group people in to ever smaller identities, each race, creed, color, gender, and sexual orientation, each at war with every other.  Ignoring the common tragedy of human existence, but noting only the harm that has been done to each of us in turn.  This is Post Modernism. 

When one extrapolates “Post Modernism” (or “unpacks it”, as our stunted media has coined), one sees that each individual has some motive against some group, and all claims are legitimate as if the gavel of God himself has struck the sound block of everlasting doom.  Of course, according to Post Modernistic dross, there is no God, no judgement, nor any logic.  These gifts of reason and republican government that have come to us through millions of years of discovery learning, hardship, and dying at the hands of tyrants has been claimed to have been “tools of oppression” (no, I’m fuckin’ serious.  “Reason” has been recently shoved in my own face as a “tool of white, cisgender privilege”.)  Further, as we extend the list of types of people who have been “oppressed”, we effectively keep any mandate from assembling on any issue.  Look around.  You can’t swing a cat on a street in any urban area without hitting several “people of color” who identify as one of fifty some-odd “gender groups” (or who can’t even make a decision in that realm and refer to themselves as “gender-fluid”) and who are suffering from some sort of “post-traumatic stress” brought on by channeling oppression from another group that took place several hundred years ago, of people they don’t know, by people of their own race.  According to the Post Modernists, this is optimal.  They’ve been doing this for almost fifty years.  Urging us to divide ourselves in these ever-multiplying identities, precisely to provoke a violent and visceral response between each and every one of those hostile identities.

The problem with this argument has become manifest now, just as simply as it was forty years ago, when Solzhenitsyn exposed the soul-crushing cruelty of the original Marxist farce in Soviet Russia.  We see the ramifications of this Post Modernism almost daily in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, the Netherlands, every conceivable Western European country where this moral/political philosophy has been put into practice.  We’re near the end of its sad example.  As with every philosophy that is not grounded in the rights of individuals to life, liberty, and property, this new brand of tyranny is smoking and limping into the pits.  It cannot sustain itself nor the people that it claims to protect.  The reason why is almost mathematical.   

The solution here is to casually as possible, disregard the stoned, french, post-modernist fellows in the corner.  To survive as a people, none of us has a “duty” to defend the state.  Rather the state has a duty to defend our rights against tyranny.  Those rights, and none others, are outlined specifically in the Amendments to the US Constitution.  We don’t exist to provide the government with a purpose, rather the government exists to provide each of us with the freedoms endowed upon us by the Creator.  For, in the eyes of the Creator, we are all human.  We have a duty to defend a way of life. 

“So,” you ask, “what in the hell can I do to stop this insanity?”

Well, think about it this way.  With modern technology and social media, each of us will end up talking to or interacting in some way with about 1000 people.  Do the math.  1000 x 1000 = A million goddamn people.  That’s only two orders.  This is why we’ll win.  These ideas can’t be unfounded.  They can’t be unlearned.  In a manner similar to what Gutenberg did with regards to communication that set the conditions for the enlightenment, the internet is in perfect position for each of us to let loose our barbaric yawp and claim our rights.  Think, write, read, and don’t keep that shit a secret.  Inform those around you.  Teach the young, for Chrissake.  Grab them by their pointed little heads and explain our story.  Get the word out. 

Consider that the practice of Marxism lasted less than a hundred years in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.  What China is doing isn’t Marxist, despite Mao’s murderous attempts at the contrary.  Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea are abject failures after less than fifty years of Marxist practices.

The concept of Republican Democracy and Capitalism has not just endured, but EXCELLED for more than 240 years, and finds itself only recently in danger from external forces. 

I have faith that we will win this.  Keep talking, people.

Immundus, In saecula saeculorum

Unclean

   

Dr. Thomas Sowell: "Is Personal Responsibility Obsolete?"

Is Personal Responsibility Obsolete?  Part I

By Dr. Thomas Sowell

Among the many disturbing signs of our times are conservatives and libertarians of high intelligence and high principles who are advocating government programs that relieve people of the necessity of working to provide their own livelihoods.

Generations ago, both religious people and socialists were agreed on the proposition that "he who does not work, neither shall he eat." Both would come to the aid of those unable to work. But the idea that people who simply choose not to work should be supported by money taken from those who are working was rejected across the ideological spectrum.

How we got to the present situation is a long story, but the painful fact is that we are here now. Among the leading minds of our times, including Charles Murray today and the late and great Milton Friedman earlier, there have been proposals for ways of subsidizing the poor without the suffocating distortions of the government's welfare state bureaucracy.

Professor Friedman's plan for a negative income tax to help the poor has already been put into practice. But, contrary to his intention to have this replace the welfare state bureaucracy, it has been simply tacked on to all the many other government programs, instead of replacing them.
It is not inevitable that the same thing will happen to Charles Murray's plan, but I would bet the rent money that there would be the same end result.

Just what specific problem is so dire as to cause some conservatives and libertarians to propose that the government come to the rescue by giving every adult money to live on without working?

 

Poverty? "Poverty" today means whatever government statisticians in Washington say it means — no more and no less. Most Americans living below the official poverty line today have central air-conditioning, cable television for multiple TV sets, own at least one motor vehicle, and have many other amenities that most of the human race never had for most of its existence.
Most Americans did not have central air-conditioning or cable television as recently as the 1980s. A scholar who spent years studying Latin America has called the poverty line in America the upper middle class in Mexico.

Low-income neighborhoods suffer far more from social degeneration, including high rates of crime and violence, than from material deprivation.

Welfare state guarantees of not having to work, however the particular policies are applied, are not a solution. Relieving people of personal responsibility for their own lives, however it is done, is a major part of the problem.

Before there can be a welfare state in a democratic country, there must first be a welfare state vision that becomes sufficiently pervasive to allow a welfare state to be created. That vision, in which people are "entitled" to what others have produced, is at the heart of the social degeneration that can be traced back to the 1960s.

 

Teenage pregnancies, venereal diseases, dependency on government and murder rates were all going down during the much disdained 1950s. All reversed and shot up as the welfare state, and the social vision behind the welfare state, took over in the 1960s.

That vision featured non-judgmental rewards and non-judgmental leniency toward counterproductive behavior, whether crime or irresponsible sex and its consequences. But relieving people from the responsibilities and challenges of life is doing them no favor. Nor is it a favor to society at large.

American society has become more polarized under the welfare state vision. Nor is it hard to see why. If we are all "entitled" to benefits, just by being present, why are some entitled to so little while others have so much?

In an entitlement context, all sorts of "gaps" and "disparities" automatically become "inequities," and a reason for lashing out at others, instead of improving yourself. Only in a society in which rewards are based on contributions is there any reasonable reply to the question as to why Bill Gates has so much and others so little.

The track record of divorcing personal rewards from personal contributions hardly justifies more of the same, even when it is in a more sophisticated form. Sophisticated social disaster is still disaster — and we already have too much of that.

Is Personal Responsibility Obsolete?: Part II

By Dr. Thomas Sowell

Too many social problems are conceived of in terms of what "we" can do for "them." After decades of massive expansions of the welfare state, the answer seems to range from "not very much" to "making matters worse."

Undaunted, people in a number of countries are coming up with new proposals that are variations on the theme of government-provided income — which amounts to relieving people from personal responsibility.

Yet even some conservatives and libertarians are coming up with proposals for more "efficient" versions of the welfare state — namely direct cash grants for life to virtually all adults, instead of the current hodgepodge of overlapping bureaucratic programs.

Charles Murray recognizes that "some people will idle away their lives" under his proposal. "But that is already a problem," he says, and therefore is no valid objection to replacing the current welfare state with a less costly alternative.

Everyone recognizes that there are some people unable to provide for their own survival — infants and the severely disabled, among others. But providing for such people is wholly different from a blanket guarantee for everybody that they need not lift a finger to feed, clothe or shelter themselves.

The financial cost of providing such a guarantee, though huge, is not the worst of the problems. The history of what has actually happened in times and places where people were relieved from the challenge of survival by windfall gains is not encouraging.
 
In both England and the United States, the massive expansion of the welfare state since the 1960s has been accompanied by a vast expansion in the amount of crime, violence, drug addiction, fatherless children and other signs of social degeneration.

Maybe that was just coincidence. But there have been too many coincidences in too many very different times and places where people were relieved from the challenge of survival by windfall gains of one sort or another.

In 16th and 17th century Spain — its "golden age" — the windfall gain was gold and silver looted by the ton from Spanish colonies in the Western Hemisphere. This enabled Spain to survive without having to develop the skills, the sciences or the work ethic of other countries in Western Europe.

Spain could buy what it wanted from other nations with all the gold and silver taken from its colonies. As a Spaniard of that era proudly put it, "Everyone serves Spain and Spain serves no one."

What this meant in practical terms was that other countries developed the skills, the knowledge, the self-discipline and other forms of human capital that Spain did not have to develop, since it could receive the tangible products of this human capital from other countries 
But once the windfall gains from its colonies were gone, Spain became, and remained, one of the poorest countries in Western Europe. Worse, the disdainful attitudes toward productive work that developed during the centuries of Spain's "golden age" became a negative legacy to future generations, in both Spain itself and in its overseas offshoot societies in Latin America.

In Saudi Arabia today, the great windfall gain is its vast petroleum reserve. This has spawned both a fabulously wealthy ruling elite and a heavily subsidized general population in which many have become disdainful of work. The net result has been a work force in which foreigners literally outnumber Saudis.

Some welfare states' windfall gains have enabled a large segment of their own citizens to live in subsidized idleness while many jobs stigmatized as "menial" are taken over by foreigners. Often these initially poor foreigners rise up the economic scale, while the subsidized domestic poor fail to rise.

Do we really want more of that?

British historian Arnold Toynbee proposed the "challenge and response" thesis that human beings advance when there are challenges they must meet. The welfare state removes challenges — and has produced many social retrogressions.

 

Those with the welfare state vision often want to remove challenges even from games by getting rid of winning and losing. That is consistent with their overall assumptions about life. But it seems very inconsistent for conservatives and libertarians to support plans whose net effect would be to reduce the inherent challenges of life for still more people.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Out Here, My Friend, We Deal in Lead...

Got a load on and got a little retrospective about just how long and how hard we all have fought these past twenty-five years.  Went on Facebook and vented my spleen.  Went a little like this:

I'm a Marine. I've been one since 1994. I have retired from being responsible for deploying to fight, but I am still responsible for training Marines in the art and science of combined arms in my civilian job. "Retiring" from the obligated service entails an age, and a level of experience (I think) that provides me with a perspective that is (I flatter myself) worth at least heeding.
It occurred to me today, about two hours ago, that I am happier at this point of my life than any other. I have become accustomed to being the "loyal opposition", for the past 28 years. As a young man, growing up in my formative years under the Reagan Presidency, my assumption was that the guy in that office, doing that job, wanted the best for Americans and wished for the country to be awesome. Slowly, Reagan's successors have eroded that assumption. I've slowly come to understand, in the fullness of time, that Smedley Butler was right, that War IS a racket, and that Reagan was the exception, not the rule. Reagan was an outsider, he had a cup of coffee as the governor of California before becoming the President, but he had not spent a lifetime of becoming the heir-apparent to the throne of the Chief Executive of the US as his successors did. Those individuals compromised the legacy that was genuinely aimed at making America stronger and more successful.
The current President seems to have the same motivation that Reagan once did, and the freedom of interaction to do so. He doesn't have a list of contributors to mollify as he goes about his business. He doesn't seem to be as likely to get us into a war to benefit the business interests of those who have contributed to him sitting in that office. This leads me to list the things that I realized, just now, that I do not miss:

*I do not miss being told by the President that I should feel bad about myself because I'm white.

*I do not miss being told by the President that I should be ashamed of my country, the oath I took to defend it, or the actions that I took in doing so.

*I do not miss worrying about the fact that my CinC wants to destroy the culture and tradition that I've adopted as a Marine Officer.

*I do not miss the daily press conference where the designated member of the White House staff decries almost everything I hold dear as vicious, while maintaining every vice that I've ever known is a virtue.

These are a few things that give me genuine happiness. I know that many of you find the President offensive, without any precise reason why, except for what the mainstream press is publishing out of a fit of puerile rage because they didn't get their way. The process of electing a new President was carried out, and we've got a new guy doing exactly what he said he would do. You might not agree with him or his decisions. God knows that I can sympathize, since the vast majority of what has come out of that office since 1992 has resulted in my own disagreement and outrage. Throughout that period, twenty-five years in duration, I have ever urged whomever would read my tripe to understand the constitution and the intent behind its adoption. I did not call for the head of any of the usurpers that had been elected. I did not urge violent demonstration against them. I only urged folks to be aware of what was guaranteed in the founding documents and to demand that they were either returned or maintained.

Now we finally come to it. Those that simply cannot accept what I have accepted for many years are calling for open rebellion. That is their right, and they are free to seek such redress for whatever slight of their rights that they perceive. But to those individuals I say this: I've gotten pretty good with my long gun out to 1000 yards, and I can knock the ass out of a barn cat with my lever gun anywhere inside 300 yards. If your sense of outrage makes it within a mile of my place, you're not going to be able to cash that check from MoveOn or whatever Soros exchange you work for. Out here, my friend, we deal in lead.

Unclean