Among the cardinal virtues, courage is the odd man out. It is almost always prudent to be prudent, temperate, and just, but not often prudent to be courageous.
Month: October 2022
The Albatross and the Donkey
Joe Biden is and will remain an albatross around the neck of the Democrat jackass.
Forgiveness and Self-Justification
One feels justified in not forgiving. "Why should I forgive the bastard? He wronged me, and not just once!"
"Don't you need forgiveness? You must forgive because you yourself need to be forgiven for what you have done to others!"
"There is a part of me that can appreciate your fine Sunday School sentiment. But to survive in this ugly and brutal world I had to become tough and unfeeling; I had to learn how to be unjust and how to wrong people. And of course I had to practice on the weak and vulnerable if I was to make any progress and not be killed right away."
PayPal, Social Media, and the Control of Information
The PayPal Fiasco was no Accident
PayPal on Oct. 8 sent out an update to its terms of use, or acceptable use policy (AUP), that included a shocking addition. It reserved the right to confiscate $2,500 from people’s accounts if they spread “misinformation.” It was a clear announcement of what many already suspected: PayPal has enlisted in the information war.
This comes weeks after PayPal blocked several important accounts in the UK, including Toby Young’s personal account, the Free Speech Union, and the DailySceptic. These are hugely important venues for the English-speaking world in countering the COVID propaganda narrative. It was no accident that they were targeted.
[. . .]
By the following day, PayPal reversed itself, claiming that the banning of “misinformation” was just a mistake.
My take is that the PayPal bums don't have the courage of their convictions. The 'woke' warriors believe in their cause only as long as commitment to it does not affect their bottom line. But when protests cause revenues to drop, they reverse their course, and then lie about their reversal! A trifecta of outrages: the destructive anti-free speech agenda; the cowardly and crass reversal of course; and then the lies about the reversal.
The Tentacles of the Social Media Octopus
In America we once believed our First Amendment prevented a government monopoly on information. But in the age of globalization, the Internet, and social media, the state has become the enemy—not the protector—of free speech.
One obvious sign is that the Biden Administration keeps trying to create new sorts of ministries of truth or “Disinformation Governance Boards.” It alleges such Orwellian censors must combat “disinformation” and “misinformation.” In fact, these bureaucracies are designed to criminalize unwanted free expression while also advancing state propaganda.
Among our Washington officials, the following myths were once declared the official version of the “truth”:
- Mounted border patrol agents “whipped” innocent illegal aliens.
- Officer Brian Sicknick was violently “killed” by Trump protestors.
- An “armed” insurrection sought to stage a pre-planned coup on January 6 designed to overthrow the government by violent means.
- Christopher Steele’s dossier was a factual, well-researched compilation.
- Justice Brett Kavanaugh was a serial sexual assaulter.
- Jussie Smollett in Chicago’s wee hours valiantly fought off white, racist MAGA-hatted thugs.
- Hunter Biden’s laptop was abject Russian disinformation.
- And Joe Biden does not suffer from serious cognitive issues.
What is unique about these lies is not that the government and its media partners advanced them, but that to this day, some continue to disseminate such untruths in spite of widespread and publicly available information discrediting them.
California Governor Gavin Newsom just signed into law a bill criminalizing the work of doctors who express public doubts about medical orthodoxy. Specifically, the law warns that so-called dissident opinion is synonymous with “misinformation.” It is now a crime for doctors to spread “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care.”
If we were to criminalize all of history’s doctors who “contradicted scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care” then Hippocrates, Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur, and Marie Curie would have been felons in their day.
Berdyaev on the Moral Source of Atheism
Substack latest.
It is 410 A. D.
Alaric is sacking Rome. An obscure Roman philosopher is penning an agenda for the salvation of the republic. His writings are lost to history. In any case, too little, too late. Will we share his fate?
Three years after the Visigoth invasion, a Christian Platonist and mystic in North Africa puts pen to paper. As Rome goes under, and night falls, the Owl of Minerva rises in the pages of The City of God.
If St. Augustine could see us now he might remark that while the pagan gods failed Rome, we failed the true God when we began worshipping idols.
Joseph-Nöel Sylvestre’s 1890 Painting Depicting the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in AD 410.
Hot LInks
Facebook blocked my page because of my refusal to sign up for Facebook Protect. They wanted me to set up two-factor authentication 'for my protection.' I decided not to go along on their phishing expedition. Not that I have any objection to 2FA as such. You ought to use it for all your sensitive sites financial and otherwise.
Blocked from FB, I opened an account at Twitter. I'll use it mainly to advertise my Substack articles.
I was using FB mainly for linkage, so some of that will be brought back here.
Reasons to be vaccine-hesitant.
Something to consider: Do you think that a government that lies repeatedly and brazenly about things that can be easily checked, such as the security of the border, will hesitate to lie about things not so easily checked such as the efficacy of vaccines?
Murray Rothbard on How We Can Win
If I started quoting it, I'd quote the whole thing. Please read it for your own good.
Citizenry, Government, and Firearms
You say you don't trust the citizenry with firearms, but you do trust the government with them? If "the government is us" as Barack Obama and Joe Biden have said, what you say makes no sense. For if that were so, there would no difference in point of trustworthiness between the governors and the governed. But of course, Barry and Joey were bullshitting in Harry Frankfurt's sense, that is, shooting their mouths off with no concern for the truth, not even the concern the liar must have for the truth given his intention to hide it from us.
The government is most assuredly not us, but it is composed of people like us. And what are we like?
We are a mixed bag of a few saints, many scamps, and a broad mass of moral and intellectual mediocrities. And the same holds for those in government except that in government, scamps, fools, clowns, know-nothings, liars, bullshitters, quislings and the incompetent rise to high posts in a way that is impossible in the private sector.
The current (mal)administration is one of the worst if not the worst in the nation's history. The names say it all: Biden, Harris, Garland, Mayorkas, Granholm, Yellen, Buttigieg, Jean-Pierre, Pelosi, Schumer, and I'm just warming up.
And you are still a Democrat?
Saturday Night at the Oldies: October Jazz
The 15th already! October's a bird that flies too fast. Time herself's such a bird. I would freeze her flight, but not that of
Charley 'Bird' Parker, Ornithology
Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen, Charlie Parker
Kerouac and Allen, October in the Railroad Earth
Jack Kerouac, San Francisco
Mose Allison, Parchman Farm.
This one goes out to Tom Gastineau, keyboard man in our band Dudley Nightshade, who introduced me to Mose Allison in the late '60s. Tom went on to make it, more or less, in the music business. I caught Allison at The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, California, a couple or three times before I headed East in August of '73. Heard him on the East Coast as well at a joint in Marblehead, Mass. with a girlfriend I dubbed 'Springtime Mary' which was Kerouac's name for his girlfriend Mary Carney.
Mose Allison, Young Man's Blues
Mose Allison, I Ain't Got Nothing but the Blues
Dave Brubeck, Blue Rondo al a Turk
Herbie Hancock, Watermelon Man
Beyond Philosophy
Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality, trs. Richard and Clara Winston, Herder and Herder, 1969, pp. 129-130. Originally in German under the title Tod und Unsterblichkeit in 1968:
Thus we have now at last touched, and perhaps overstepped, the boundary which is set for the philosophical enquirer. Really to reach this boundary — therein lies, I think, the true meaning and distinctive opportunity of philosophy. The great philosophers have always seen in philosophy a challenge to penetrate beyond philosophizing.
I divide the paths beyond into two main groups, call them 'mundane' and 'transcensive' or perhaps 'descensive' and 'ascensive' for want of better terms. Two examples of the former are Pyrrhonism as represented by the skeptic way of Sextus Empiricus and political activism as represented by Karl Marx and his followers. I have had plenty to say about both in these pages.
Examples of the higher and nobler paths include religion and mysticism. Here I write about their relation to each other and to philosophy.
The main thing, as it seems to me, is to forge onward and not fall back.
Populism Reload: An Interview with Steven K. Bannon
Steve Bannon talks sense. See if you don't agree:
Mark Granza: Let’s talk about the “Deep State“. The term is widely used by people on the Right to describe the network of bureaucrats and organizations secretly running the country behind the scenes. Is this in your experience an accurate description of what’s going on in Washington?
Steve Bannon: I think the nomenclature is important to get right. I would rather call it the “administrative state”, which is really a fourth branch of government never intended by the founders and, quite frankly, the American people. The Administrative State’s purpose, and really the Progressive Left, is to take over all functions of government through these agencies. Up until now they could issue their own regulations and laws, and now they control even their own law enforcement, whether it’s 87,000 IRS agents or these jackbooted FBI or the EPA, with armed security and guards. So our big focus should be its deconstruction. It needs to be taken apart brick by brick. You saw how out of control this was with the CDC and FDA when the pandemic hit, with Tony Fauci as the face of the administrative state that ruled without permission to be questioned. And it’s not that we don’t need an FDA or CDC, but they definitely have to be heavily repurposed. I would say the national security and the intelligence apparatus and part of the legal one are what we would more traditionally think of as a “deep state”, probably best personified in the first Trump impeachment. If you remember all that kind of fetish about the interagency process and the sacramental nature of the way those things should work when Trump was President, that was really the Deep State saying that Trump was unacceptable because deeply he did not believe in those processes. He did not believe in their function, nor their policies.
You can tell this now with Ukraine, these groups have their own goals. It has captured the American national security and foreign policy apparatus, and it needs to be defeated. They don’t believe in the Constitution, they don’t believe that a commander in chief should be able to make his own decisions. You know, I’ve advocated from day one that we need another Church Committee. In the 1970s, after Watergate, after Vietnam, after the assassinations and all the turmoil in the streets, it was determined that the FBI and the CIA had crossed the boundaries of what their mandates were on both surveillance of Americans, infiltration of groups, and all of their tasks really. And so you had the Church Committee set the modern structure for the FBI and CIA as a consequence. But I think that’s been blurred over time. You clearly still have a lot of nefarious activity going on and a lot of stuff that needs to be reviewed. I think we need to get back to that; a total revamping, rethinking and rejuvenation of these apparatuses, whether it’s the NSA, CIA, FBI, DOJ, the military or the armed forces. I’ve spent eight years as a naval officer. My daughter went to West Point. She was with the 101st Airborne Division and deployed to Iraq. So we are all big patriots and huge believers in serving in the military. But things have gone way off track and we definitely need to, not just take a hard look, but have massive reform at those levels.
Slavery, Abortion, and ‘Skin in the Game’
Substack latest.
The ‘Equity’ President
'Equity' is wokespeak for equality of outcome without regard for merit or qualifications. In Joe Biden, the demented have finally a representative at the highest level of government in the greatest nation the world has ever seen. Who can deny that this is progress? To question it would be discriminatory and ableist.
A Reason for Reserve
The less I know of you, the more highly I can think of you.
The Melting Pot
A melting pot can't do its job if unmeltable ingredients are thrown into it.