Most recent installments.

 
Stop and think — earlier installments.

Comment?

Reader responses

Where, oh, where may we expect party-political activism to lead us? If we labor under a mental fog on this subject, here we have a lesson for clearing it out that's as powerful as an unfiltered Camel. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2007) 

The Ministry of Corn. As Strakon noted in this space on March 7, the politically driven surge in ethanol production has had the "unforeseen" consequence of raising the price of corn. Well, that has now led to a shortage of corn tortillas in Mexico. Lower-middle-class and lower-class folks are finding it hard to afford tortillas.

As the consequences of Mexicans' poverty swell, so too will the pressure for them to come to the United State, where they stand to make more money — perhaps by working on farms growing corn for ethanol, further impoverishing their countrymen. Or by working in food factories, processing corn products instead of, say, Peter Pan peanut butter.

But this joint attack by the Dark Suits and Red Guards features more than one sharp talon. As previously reported, livestock farmers are being pressed hard by the inflation of corn prices. I caught NPR's take on that the other day, and the newsreader told us, joyfully, that everyone is going to have to learn how to eat like vegetarians.

Everyone except the Gores, of course. (That's my take.) [Modine Herbey] (March 2007) 

No comment. On March 14, I came across a story in the Huntington (Ind.) Herald-Press headlined, "Tarter to compete at state pageant" (p. 3A). It begins: "Jon Benet [sic] Ann Tarter, 4-year-old daughter of Tami Martin, has been chosen as a state finalist in the National American Miss Indiana Pageant to be held July 19- 21 in Indianapolis....

"The pageant will include girls ages 4-6. The winner will receive a $1,000 cash award and air transportation to compete in the national pageant at Disneyland in California."

Accompanying the story is a headshot of the little child, wearing a fashionable pair of sunglasses. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2007) 

Fulfilling his mission. According to the local ABC-TV affiliate, a teacher at a state high school in Fort Wayne has been showing the Al Gore vehicle "An Inconvenient Truth" to his students — and that's not all. For extra credit, the state-children may sign a petition that will be sent to Congress, urging members to heed Gore's beliefs and policy prescriptions concerning "global warming" — that is, urging members to further expand state power and further violate our liberty. As if the conspirators of Capitol Hill needed any encouragement.

In undertaking all of this, of course, the teacher is only fulfilling his mission as a perfect product of the Red Guard teacher factories: turning his young victims into good statists — and busy advocates of statism. Some in Fort Wayne consider the teacher's project to be controversial, which indicates that the chief purpose of state education has escaped them. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2007) 

Even more socialist medicine is on the way — specifically, war-socialist medicine. The Walter Reed revelations are already opening up a whole new vista of tax-and-spend opportunities across the country, not only for military hospitals but also for those white elephants of dumbhead socialism, the VA hospitals. (Technocratic socialists undominated by careerism would just have distributed health-care vouchers to veterans and let them spend the money wherever they chose.) I hope the boffins of public finance relentlessly track these medical expenditures, which are going to be a big, big share of the cost of Bush's War.

But costs in money aren't the half of it, of course. I've heard that 30 percent of legionaries returning from Mesopotamia are expected to be diagnosed with mental problems — disorders resulting from their activities over there, I mean, not just from growing up in Bizarro America. Well, that's great. As if the American genpop didn't display enough mental problems to start with! — including the rather serious mental problem that resulted in their surrendering to leviathan and leviathan's wars.

Naturally, it's in the material interest of state-doctors to overdiagnose health problems (ordinary doctors can't get away with that so easily); and, naturally, rent-seekers in the health-care industry will welcome those diagnoses. But whatever the real proportion of the disturbed is among Our Boys (and Wymyn), we've got crazy — and expensive — days ahead of us, for sure, and I'm afraid they'll continue long after that twisted little squirrel monkey in the presidential palace capers off to his gold-plated asylum in 2009. [Nicholas Strakon]

An afterword on smart fascism. I suspect the archipelago of VA hospitals resulted not from socialist idiocy or backwardness but instead from the determination of smart fascists to award juicy hospital-construction contracts to builders, who are always well-wired politically. Even if a voucher system prompted the construction of ordinary hospitals across the country, veteran-patients would have been distributed among them thinly and in an uncontrolled pattern, and the pay-off to developers and contractors would have been much less visible and much less calculable. No good, politically. No good, either, for bureaucratic empire-builders.

The same dynamic applies to building "public" housing developments rather than issuing housing vouchers. According to G. William Domhoff, developers are always the executive committee of the ruling class at the local, municipal level. They must be served, and they must see themselves as having been served. [NS] (March 2007) 

Our multicultural socialist utopia strikes again. According to a police brief in a local paper, a Somali gentleman in Fort Wayne, arrested in the rape of a 12-year-old girl, has now been permitted to plead guilty to a reduced charge of child-molesting. Unfortunately the newly minted Midwesterner speaks only some lingo called "Mai Mai," so taxpayers were forced to fly in two translators from out of state for the court proceedings. The paper doesn't mention whether some crazed Red Guard church group, also working with taxpayer funds, imported the chap into Fort Wayne in the first place — but we know which way to bet, don't we? [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2007) 

Brigandage in the cornfield. The government, in its superior and farseeing wisdom, subsidizes the production of ethanol to the tune of 51 cents a gallon. That's according to Stacey Stumpf, in a good analysis of the consequences of that intervention published in the Fort Wayne (Ind.) Journal Gazette on March 4, "Fuel versus food: The economic reality behind ethanol." The subsidy doesn't victimize just shoppers as they confront higher prices at the grocery for all corn products. The impact is wider than that, as Stumpf notes: "The imbalance that inflated corn prices creates could spell doom for livestock farmers" who depend on affordable corn to feed their animals.

The political, bureaucratic, and media classes seem to have greeted ethanol's inflation of the price of corn with the same purported surprise that they greeted the "astonishing" discovery, after the invasion, that there were no WMDs to be found in Iraq. Naturally, any economist able to multiply two by two and come up with four would have had no difficulty predicting the price rise. And anyone, economist or not, who could do a little arithmetic could figure out that you can't subsidize Peter without expropriating Paul. But it doesn't take much study of Our System of Government to suspect that, when the subsidy was first being considered, anyone who dared utter the obvious was brushed aside by political- entrepreneurs among the Dark Suits. (I've noted before that the grain industry appears to be better wired, politically, than the meat industry, milk subsidies notwithstanding.)

Eventually, of course, the production of corn will catch up to the politically enhanced demand, and, mutatis mutandis, prices will stabilize or even fall — which is to say that yet another political distortion of the economy will have been institutionalized.

Stumpf writes, "The best way to manage the competing interest of food and fuel needs is to consider all the costs." She's writing for a socialist newspaper, so I imagine this observation wouldn't be too popular there, but I have to point out that the free market performs all those calculations automatically. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2007) 

Wildly appropriate. I disagree with Field Marshal Wide Neck (R-Ariz.) on almost everything, but it's worth pointing out how far I disagree with his characterization — "wildly inappropriate" — of what Ann Coulter said the other day.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, she claimed she'd planned to comment on John Edwards but had been told she'd have to go into rehab if she used the word "faggot." The telescreen actually bleeped out the dread and vile obscenity — our new f-word — which provided me my first hoot. Further hoots followed soon, as all the masculine-manly-macho-man Republicans — including Wide Neck, Romney Moroni, and il Duce Giuliani — jumped right out of their stuffed shirts and bounced their furry little selves off into the tall grass like the pusillanimous P.C. bunnies they are.

I haven't found too much good to say about warchick Coulter over the past few years, but now I'm rediscovering something like a soft spot in my granite heart. I doubt she meant to single out Edwards as a faggot; I'm pretty sure she considers almost all Democrats to be hopeless fags. In any case her real achievement was to terrify, humiliate, and expose all those would-be bravos of the GOP, forcing them to cower publicly before the anticultural homosexualist Cheka. Old-style Republicans who dream of the Party's regrowing a spine in the face of the prevailing cultural Bolshevism may hope that Coulter has made it more pointless than ever for GOP pols to suck up to the homosexualists. (Of course that doesn't mean the suckers won't try.) On the other hand, maybe some Normals, seeing the spectacle, will have second thoughts about supporting any of the GOP's quivering little rabbits. As for Coulter herself, she says she's still laughing. Hear, hear. Nifty demolition job. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2007) 

I wish pirates still wore eyepatches and wooden legs. And I wish they still kept to the sea. Dressing in business suits and coming from all directions as they do these days, they can sneak up on us if we don't watch out. In my case I've been neglecting, over the past some years, the "historic-preservation" pirate who aims to undermine people's right to their own home. But Fort Wayne, Ind., is apparently suffering through an upsurge in that kind of pirate attack, according to this February 20 piece in the town's Republican paper, the News-Sentinel: "Historic district label a benefit to area / It brings restrictions, but enhances property value."

The article, represented as a column, is by Kevin Leininger, who in the past has given the impression of being a hemi-demi-semi-libertarian; and he starts out promisingly enough:

Imagine having to get some city bureaucrat's approval before painting your house, replacing a leaky roof, installing new windows, or even planting a tree.

But about 650 Fort Wayne homeowners don't have to imagine. In the name of historic preservation, they've been living that way for years — and could soon have lots of company.

Leininger cites homeowners who purport to be eager to give up their freedom in return for higher property values, and I'm sure such freedom- suicides exist in this arena. They exist everywhere, and their loudly advertised eagerness to be enslaved makes it especially difficult for partisans of freedom to be heard in a country and among a people who have become deaf to principle.

Any melodic ring of libertarian principle quickly fades in this writing by Leininger, who eventually starts talking about "trade-offs," in the context of freedom vs. regulation. Anytime you hear someone talking about "trade- offs" in that way you know he's actually broken through his wishy- washiness and has landed with a thud in the middle of amoral utilitarianism.

Let's glance, at least, at the real-world dynamics of power and the lust for power. Do you expect these bureaucratic buccaneers to stop finding districts that are "historic" any time soon? Or do you expect them to persevere in extending their power over other people's property, in the name of "history"? Leininger himself proposes that the current victims "could soon have lots of company."

The question, as posed here in The Ditch, is of course rhetorical, since we don't number too many state-dazzled Pollyannas among our readers. And, really, the "history" excuse is a bit rich, isn't it? Anyone who believes that our statist supervisors have any understanding and regard for history as freemen understand and regard it just hasn't read much history. The state, after all, is the great wrecker of history and the great suppressor of history's lessons.

Leininger quotes one of the "historic" bureaucrats as claiming, "We start with what the owners want." And that is a good place to start. But we need to teach these pirates that it's also a good place for them to stop. [Nicholas Strakon]

Comment. Higher property values are a dandy thing, assuming you're already grandfathered in as an owner, but whenever the state succeeds in raising the asking price for a piece of property, it works an injustice on those interested in buying it. I remind readers of the California Coastal Commission and the housing shortage it has caused for ordinary people, in the course of privileging established wealthy people. The state cannot privilege some people without injuring other people. And it has no more business distorting the real-estate market than it has distorting any other market. [Modine Herbey]

Comment. Has there ever been a "trade-off" that benefited liberty? Has anyone ever traded away something else and kept the liberty?

Liberty-lovers are willing to give up a lot for their liberty — lives come to mind — but I don't think they ever talk about it as a trade- off. [Ronn Neff] (March 2007) 

A neocon insight. Even pop-music fans will have to admit that there's one good thing about the implosion of Britney Spears.

It's sure to get al Qaeda off our back. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2007) 

Once again I've let White Rose Day sneak up on me and actually pass by without commemorating it on the site. But it's never too late to honor the brave young Christians in Munich who defied and sought to subvert the Nazi regime and its war machine. On February 22, 1943, their courage cost them their lives.

I wrote about the White Rose once before, shortly after Bush started his war on the Iraqis, in a column titled ' "Support Our Troops.' " Four bloody years have passed since then, and the criminals in Washington persist in their murderous, tyrannical adventure. So the time has come for me to repeat something.

Not long ago Fox's Bill O'Reilly was going around asking war-skeptics what he seemed to think was a trick question of unsurpassed cleverness: "Do you want the U.S. to win in Iraq or not?" While his interlocutors seemed to detect, and resent, the trickery, they tended to fumble and stumble in their replies, trapped as they all were in collectivism and national- statism.

I wish he'd asked me. I would have given him a straight answer, and that answer would have been No! In my 2003 column, endorsing the sentiments of the White Rose, I wrote: "If the troops of the United State will not leave Iraq voluntarily, we must — to Support Our Country — hope for their defeat."

Such a defeat, outright, would represent a splendidly humiliating defeat for the Empire at large. And that would be a very good thing, not just for the American people but for the rest of the world's peoples, too.

Let us do all we can, here on the home front, to dissuade youngsters from letting themselves be lured into the Legions, and let us do all we can to shun and shame the legionaries themselves — those who decline to repent — and expose them for the willing criminals they are.

Let us also ask this of any who will listen: When, in their foreign wars, have the armed forces of the United State ever succeeded in defending our freedom? When have they even tried? [Nicholas Strakon]

From the first leaflet of the White Rose: "Do not forget that every people deserves the regime it is willing to endure!"

White Rose Website
 
Andy Nowicki on The White
Rose and dissent in our time

(February 2007) 

How soon will we be told? The food recalls are coming thick and fast. I'm not actually much of a peanut-butter addict — it takes me six months to get through a jar — but I do depend pretty heavily on those 5 oz. packages of Oscar Mayer precooked chicken strips. At my little town's grocery, they're displayed almost directly across the aisle from the now-empty Peter Pan section. Rather, that's where they were displayed. Now they're gone, too, since Georgia health bureaucrats found Listeria bacteria in a package they inspected.

Here's an update on the entire food crisis by HealthDay News, reposted by LibertyPost.org: "Cooked Chicken Breasts Join Tainted-Food Recalls." And here's a brief AP dispatch on the chicken flap carried in a Macon, Ga., paper: "Possibly contaminated Oscar Mayer chicken strips recalled." The company under the gun this time is Carolina Culinary Foods, of West Columbia, S.C., which seems to be a Kraft Foods subsidiary or contractor.

The chicken hasn't made anybody sick yet, according to the media. For all I know, this ruckus may be the result of bureaucratic incompetence or an excess of bureaucratic zeal; here at TLD, we do try to remain alive to such possibilities, to put it mildly. Alternatively, it may have resulted from incompetence at the higher levels of the food company, and indirectly from the hobbling of competition in an economy stricken with fascism. Or resulted, perhaps, from insufficient hygienic and sanitary practices among the company's employees of Swiss and Icelandic descent.

However, primitive colored immigrants from the Third World are prominent in the workforce of many food factories across America. By the way, they're not all Hispanics. Some are from African "countries" that are barely out of the Stone Age, and others are from various diseased swamps in South Asia. If the latest flap did result from hygiene and sanitary problems, or endemic illness, among such people — whose continued mass influx our supervisors all expect us to celebrate — how soon do you think the mainstream media will let us know? [Nicholas Strakon]

Offer. Anyone who manages to winkle out credible information about the ethnic composition of the workforce at Carolina Culinary Foods — whether that information casts suspicion on Icelanders or Hmong Tribesmen — will receive permanent status as a Friend of TLD. Apart from putting you on my update- notice list forever, that and $3.79 will buy you a package of Oscar Mayer chicken strips, assuming they ever reappear. [NS]

(February 2007) 

Where's Captain Hook when you need him? Though my own working jar of Peter Pan peanut butter bears the dread "2111" prefix, I've already eaten half of it without getting sick. But a bunch of people across the country haven't been so lucky. And to discover that even peanut butter — the glorious stuff that lasts forever, unrefrigerated, on one's shelves — is now untrustworthy ... Well, it's just the final straw, isn't it?

According to the media, the source of the salmonella disaster is a ConAgra plant in Sylvester, Georgia. I must say, that provokes ungenerous suspicions. They are suspicions similar to ones I've entertained before, in other contexts. In the past I've wondered how many system breakdowns — power outages, lapses in telephone service, air crashes, fatal hospital errors, food adulterations, and so on — were attributable to the form of antiwhite discrimination known as "affirmative action." Now I'm starting to wonder how many sanitation disasters can be attributed to the deluge of low-down colored aliens and the determination on the part of transnational corporations to hire them en masse in their production facilities, whether or not such folk understand certain commendably hygienic practices that many white folk still grasp. The established media won't tell us, which limits us to speculation; but it's speculation of the informed sort.

ConAgra in particular does rely heavily on colored aliens, especially Spanish-speaking lumpen from south of the border. LibertyPost.org has produced a detail-heavy page on the peanut-butter crisis containing many quotes, or confessions, from that company. Here's one: "Of our approximately 36,000 employees, nearly 30 percent are Latinos, nearly 10 percent are African-Americans, five percent are Asians and one percent are Native Americans. [Sic: they mean Red Indians.] This is all the more impressive when considering that our headquarters and many of our operations are in mid-America where the U.S. population is much less diverse." Impressive indeed! Certainly one thing the American heartland needs now more than ever is diversity in personal hygiene.

Here's another corporate confession, not so directly related to the Peter Pan meltdown but revealing of the wider context: "In 2005 ConAgra Foods initiated a partnership with the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), joining their Corporate Leadership Program at the Leader's Level." One does not know what all that bizgabble means, of course, but one thing we do know is that the company, by its own admission, is supporting a tax- sucking cabal working relentlessly to undermine the white West.

As you know, as an anti-statist I don't hold with border-police statism as a solution for the alien deluge. I don't hold, either, with the totalitarian Establishment's predictable solution for all the recent food adulterations: more and better bureaucratic regulation! Digging ourselves deeper into the poisonous pit of statism is not a solution for anything except how better to rob, murder, enslave, ruin, and destroy. For decent people, freedom is the solution. That includes freedom of association, of course, which subsumes our individual freedom to exclude and shun; and it includes also — within any valid environment of law — the freedom to sue the serapes off companies that sell disease advertised as food. [Nicholas Strakon]

Update. The Federal Food Police, perhaps aiming to serve one of its client companies, is now saying there's only a "possibility" of a connection between the salmonella outbreak and ConAgra's peanut butter. Meanwhile, for its part, the company says it has inspected its plant and, Yes, We Have No Salmonella Today.

We'll stay tuned. [NS]

(February 2007) 

It's thought-experiment time. Recently it came out that John Edwards, a candidate for emperor, had hired a couple of anti-Catholic bigots as bloggers "to run outreach to the liberal blogosphere," as a posting at GetReligion puts it. ("Watch that potty mouth," February 7 [updated])

According to the AP story I saw in a local paper, the bloggers' activities "personally offended" Edwards — but not enough for him to fire them. (The GetReligion posting includes embedded links to the AP story and other accounts.)

The thought experiment I propose is actually quite a modest one. Imagine that a candidate of either ruling party had hired anti-Judaic bloggers who freely, and obscenely, vented their hatred and disgust with Judaism.

The question isn't whether the bloggers would still have their jobs. The question is whether the candidate would still be a candidate.

I'm pretty sure I know the answer. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2007) 

"The Ayrabs are coming! The Ayrabs are coming!" I got a good laugh out of the hysteria in Boston over those little electronic signs advertising something on the Cartoon Network. As Jimmy Kimmel (my favorite news source) reported, the signs had been up in several other cities for quite a while before the Great Boston Panic, yet no one in those towns had flown into a sissy tizzy. Bostonians must have bred a whole lot of pansies since they threw that little Tea Party some years ago. But I suppose the more Left-totalitarian a town is, the more pansies you'll find quivering there. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2007) 

Now that Michael Nifong, the persecutor in the Duke bogus-rape scandal, is being threatened with disbarment (in a spectacular departure from the Zeitgeist), I hope what I'm writing here may be my final comment on the affair. I'm going to go back to the very beginning and note for the record that the white sports-students involved, while victims, were never heroes.

As everyone in the case stipulates, they hired strippers. Now, we testosterone-troubled fellows may debate whether or not a self- respecting, culturally whole Western man can ever have dealings with ecdysiasts of any race — well, not we, actually; I'm not going to debate it; for present purposes I don't have to. What seems beyond question even for the high-testo crowd is that an uncorrupted Westerner cannot do business with strippers of the Negro variety. In fact, the idea of patronizing black strippers could never even occur to a Western man who had retained an ounce of white racial and cultural morale, aesthetic orientation, and self-respect.

In meditating upon the Duke case we discover more lessons about our civilizational collapse than those revealed by Nifong and his abettors. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2007) 

Who rules Indiana now? The Indiana General Assembly is in session at the moment, and I'll brush right past that old quote always misattributed to Mark Twain to get to the thing the lawfakers have already done that just makes me roll my eyes. The House, newly and narrowly controlled by Democrats, on January 26 overwhelmingly approved a bill to require all state-school systems "to teach students about the horrors of the Holocaust" (Associated Press). The Holocaust referred to is the Jewish suffering in the Europe of the 1940s (and maybe the 1930s, too, for all I know).

The vote was 91-0, but the Indiana House has 100 members. Assuming someone wasn't out sick, I take that to mean that the ultimate in political courage for skeptics in the House was — to abstain from attending or voting. No one dared to Just Say No. I expect the Senate, narrowly controlled by Republicans, to turn in an endorsement at least as overwhelming, with little or no career-deadly naysaying.

Originally I was going to ask whether some account of the Jewish Holocaust were not already being universally taught in the World War II segment of World History class. I feared the answer would be that there no longer is a World History class in most state schools, at least not one we'd recognize. But upon further reading I found that this matter is moot. According to the AP story I saw, "Holocaust lessons would be required by law as part of U.S. history courses starting in the 2007-2008 school year" (my emphasis). I thought that must be a misprint in my local paper, so I checked out the on-line version of the story carried by the Indianapolis Star. "U.S. history" is right.

Well, that's just incredible. Once again I have encountered a statist action so bizarre that it's not only beyond parody but actually beyond analysis. At least by me.

How many of my fellow Hoosiers will consider it bizarre? Darn few, I expect, given most Americans' profound mental collapse. In any case, as an analyst I'll have to limit myself to a couple of matters less formidable than the bizarreness itself. First, I wonder how soon we may see the law requiring schools to teach statekids about Stalin's Christian Holocaust and Mao's Chinese Holocaust. (Armenians may wish to horn in, here, too.) Or is all of that already being done sufficiently? In History of Antarctica courses, maybe? Or perhaps History of Latin America?

Algebra, even?

I wonder, too, which version of the Jewish Holocaust story the schools' U.S. historians will be ordered to impart (I expect a uniform statewide curriculum to be adopted). Will the statekids be taught howlers along the lines of the Dachau gas-chamber myth, the lampshade myth, and the myth that actual gas chambers survive at Auschwitz, not just artist's conceptions manufactured by the Polish Commies? Those are among the tales that one is still fed by the History Channel and other distributors of propaganda for non-readers. And there's no category of non-readers larger and more vulnerable than America's statekids.

If I ever find out, I'll let you know. One thing I am sure of is that the segments promoting Rosa Parks, Susan B. Anthony, His Holiness Michael King, and the inalienable wickedness of American whites will not be considered for removal in order to make room for the Holocaust stuff. Instead, maybe the statrons can finally drop all that trivial business about the Bill of Rights, Edison, the Wright Brothers, and so on. Assuming it's still in there.

I suppose all this is old-hat for readers in much of the rest of the country (especially the more, ah, cosmopolitan parts), but when it hits Indiana you know the game is pretty much over. My title for this piece is inspired by the series of Who Rules America? books by ruling-class analyst William Domhoff, in particular Who Rules America Now? For Indiana, in important respects, we may now take that question to have been — asked and answered. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2007) 

The diagnosis, comrades: anti-homosexualist delusions! As most readers, for their sins, must be aware by now, a celebrity named Isaiah Washington has gotten himself in a grim fix with the homosexualists and their enablers. I had thought Washington was a sports figure, but thanks to the current dust-up I find I've been conflating him with another famous Negro, Isaiah Thomas, who is, or was, a coach of some professional athletic team somewhere. It turns out that our Mr. Washington is in the cast of a successful TV show called "Grey's Anatomy," whose series premiere several years ago I actually tried to watch. After 15 minutes I decided that the show was not manufactured for the diversion or edification of such as I, and I haven't been back. But enough about me.

According to "'Grey's' doctor is in treatment," by the AP's Lynn Elber, Washington was quarreling on the set with Mr. Patrick Dempsey, who plays a character on the show named "Dr. McDreamy" (in jest, I assume, for Mr. Dempsey has to be the ugliest Irishman since the original Mayor Daley); and during the adversarial encounter between the two thespians, Washington for some reason was moved to call a third actor, who was not present, a "faggot." After the story broke, that fellow's public confession demonstrated that Mr. Washington's characterization of him was accurate, if impolite.

One lesson of this for us Majority bystanders is that Mr. Washington's negritude afforded him no verbal privileges vis-à-vis the homosexualists. It is useful from time to time to see which privileged groups can trump other privileged groups.

Far from allowing him to skate, the Compassion and Diversity Police (heavily staffed, always, with homosexualists) fell upon Mr. Washington with nightsticks and brass knucks. And of course Mr. Washington, desperately trying to fend off the compassionate and diverse blows directed at his head and shoulders (and also to save his career), fled into "therapy," which, I must explain for any Normal Worldians sojourning among us, is Modern Americanese for "re-education camp."

In this country, Respectables cannot receive an expression of revulsion for certain privileged "lifestyles" or "sexual orientations" as an honest opinion or moral judgment or conclusion based, as may be, on long meditation upon evidence, history, and logic. No, even when expressed civilly rather than uncivilly, Respectables must interpret it as the unmasking of illness calling for treatment. Not too long ago, in the course of conversation with a friend, my own reward for questioning the value of homosexualism for our continued civilization was to be slapped with the bogus-medical label "homophobe." The metaphor of mental illness has certainly come a long way: one might even say that it has come, flapping and squawking, to its inevitable roost.

Elber quotes Mr. Washington as proclaiming, "With the support of my family and friends, I have begun counseling. I regard this as a necessary step toward understanding why I did what I did and making sure it never happens again."

It makes me think of that sad sack, Parsons. He was similarly grateful for the "support" he was receiving and was about to receive. Sitting in a holding cell with Winston Smith, his neighbor at Victory Mansions, Parsons said, "Between you and me, old man, I'm glad they got me before it went any further. Do you know what I'm going to say to them when I go up before the tribunal? 'Thank you,' I'm going to say, 'thank you for saving me before it was too late.'"

Confrontationally enough, I propose the following as a litmus test: If one finds this whole thing to be deeply spooky, he may well be a normal person. And if he does not, he most certainly is not. [Nicholas Strakon] (January 2007) 

This is what happens when you impose a one-child policy and girl babies are the ones aborted:

"Chinese facing shortage of wives / China will have 30 million more men of marriageable age than women by 2020, making it difficult for them to find wives, according to a national report." (BBC, January 12, 2007)

Well, the feminist champions of women's rights in this country didn't seem to mind that it was little wimmin who were being aborted. I'm sure they won't be upset that there are fewer wimmin getting married. I mean, "like a fish needs a bicycle," right?

Better dead than in bed? [Ronn Neff] (January 2007) 

"Bush's dream of a peaceful, democratic Middle East now seems as insane a misreading of history as the old Marxist dream of a Workers' Paradise. He sounds like an arsonist trying to convince us that the blazing city can still be saved. Has he forgotten who lit the match?" — Joe Sobran, "End of a Dream," January 11, 2007. (January 2007) 

Defying everyone but the neocon zookeepers, the Chimp-in-Chief has announced his revised war plan — Operation Fresh Disaster, I believe it's called, or Another Fine Mess, maybe. (If I may mangle a bit of Yeats, how about Surging toward Jerusalem?) A bunch of functionaries have already been fired or shuffled around, Vietnam War-style, and under the rest of the plan Bush would send 21,500 more legionaries to Iraq along with another several billion dollars robbed from taxpayers, including $1 billion for some socialist "jobs" plan. With respect to the last item, anti-Bush socialists are aghast that the loot would be spent on foreigners instead of on Americans, and the rest of us, I trust, are simply aghast.

Can anyone still believe — really believe — that the government gangsters enjoy special wisdom unavailable to ordinary people? That they virtuously make use of whatever arcane knowledge they may have? That they act for our benefit? Those ideas underlay the civic culture back when I was growing up, along with a certain slogan that you don't hear much anymore: "Taxes are the price we pay for civilization."

If no one outside the State Developmental Center can believe any of it these days, why do so many people act as if they do? And not just on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, either. [Nicholas Strakon] (January 2007) 

Joe Sobran on Bush and the war: "It's one thing for the captain to go down with his ship; but another for him to refuse to recognize that it is sinking, even when the rats have deserted it and the water has reached his earlobes." ("After Rumsfeld," Washington Watch, The Wanderer, December 14, 2006) (January 2007) 

The butter psych-out. Ronn Neff recently made a thought-provoking observation to me — he has a habit of doing that — and I'm hereby purloining it for purposes of publication. He and I were dining out, and we were having the usual trouble obtaining real butter from our waitron. Neff commented on how odd it was — this thing that modern Americans have about butter. If you ask a waitron to bring butter, you'll almost certainly get some variety of dyed spreadable vegetable oil. Sometimes even if you specify real butter you'll still only get dyed spreadable vegetable oil. One is driven to wonder whether today's waitrons even know what butter is.

The oddness, Neff pointed out, resides in this: Almost all modern Americans live in fear of this natural food, but at the same time for commendatory purposes they have made the word butter migrate in its meaning to denote dyed spreadable vegetable oil. And the real stuff languishes in near obscurity. (If you doubt that, hie yourself to the supermarket and check out the relative proportions of butter and its artificial imitations.) People claim to prefer the inferior substitute, but at some level — if I may paraphrase a certain brand name — they don't want to believe it's not butter.

They believe butter is icky and evil, but they are eager to think of the ersatz stuff as butter, and they actually call it butter.

I suppose this butter business parallels the tendency of most people to fear and loathe freedom while at the same time praising the System we labor under as a regime of — freedom. I'm not sure that explains a whole lot, though, and I merely toss this dollop of butter analysis into the pot for the benefit of anyone who may be able to pick apart better than I the mysterious casserole of current American culture. [Nicholas Strakon] (January 2007) 

Finger-wagging for funds. Honestly, I'm too old and tired to fight the butter battle unrelentingly, and oftimes in restaurants I simply sigh and resort to the modern mantra: "Whateverrrr." But some things still always get my Irish up, which is by way of reporting that yesterday morning I got a call from the cops. (For purposes of verisimilitude a police radio was squawking away in the background.) I paraphrase, naturally: "Hello, this is Trooper So-and-So from the Indiana State Troopers Association, calling to remind you not to drive drunk, and to buckle up in every imaginable way, and ..."

I cut him off, more politely than I should have: "OK, thanks. Bye, now." And hung up.

I knew what was coming. I've gotten such calls before. The last time I had more of my wits about me and said, "OK, thanks for the sermon," and hung up.

The first time I didn't know what was coming, so I listened to the whole thing. Believe it or not, it's a solicitation for money!

Now, speaking of American culture, whazzup wif dat? I cannot imagine calling a self-respecting American, giving him an unsolicited, paternalistic sermon — reducing him to the status of a wayward child under the stern gaze of the Authorities — and then asking him to donate to the sermonizers. What dazzling arrogance. (I hope my own fund-raising appeals come across a little more gracefully.)

The scary thing is that it apparently works, or the troopers wouldn't do it. Man, alive. And we wonder how anyone can fall for the Nigerian Scam. [Nicholas Strakon] (January 2007) 

St. Gerald and Satan Hussein. Two prominent public men expired recently, but for some reason most folks don't seem to be interested in discussing what the two had in common. In fact, they seem so uninterested in that subject that they don't even think it's necessary to sermonize about how different Gerald Ford and Saddam Hussein were from each other.

Certainly they were different, in some respects, but just how different could two men be, as public figures, if they shared a certain job description: leader of a nation-state?

Now, I always have my eye on the ruling class, and in the shadow of the American ruling class Ford was surely more of a puppet than Saddam was. Saddam cooperated with the American ruling class for a number of years, and benefited from the cooperation; nevertheless, he seems to have been the builder and actual chief of the Iraqi ruling class, as it existed from 1979 until 2003. But let's take mainstream analysts at their word and assume that Ford was as personally responsible for what took place during his regime as Saddam was for what took place during his.

One definitive similarity it's important to keep in mind between the two men — the one being revered now as a modest saint, and the other long damned as a spectacular devil — is that each had his own murder toll. People would have a better chance of grasping this if they were able to see through all the fancy costumes, bright flags, marble palaces, and election rituals, and recognize governments for what they are: a special kind of organized crime. The biggest and most powerful kind, in fact. By far.

Even if we don't load all the deaths from the Iran-Iraq War onto Saddam Hussein, his murder toll no doubt surpassed that of Gerald Ford. Well, it's my understanding that Albert Anastasia's murder toll surpassed that of Lucky Luciano. But Ford, like Luciano, had his murders. Or did the United State revert to a strict noninterventionist foreign policy the moment Ford took over from Nixon? On Ford's watch did the Central Government finance no murderous thugs competing for power in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East? Did the DEA and IRS and other political-police gangs murder no peaceful dissidents during Ford's tenure? Did none die early deaths as political prisoners in federal penitentiaries?

Men more radical on this question than I may wish to remind us of wrongful deaths even more indirect — resulting from the Central Government's incessant robberies, frauds, regulations, denials of the freedom of association, and on and on. With respect to free association, some may even go so far as to point out that Ford was a defender of official antiwhite discrimination ("affirmative action"). We know that that policy resulted in the loss of billions of dollars of wealth for Americans; are we really to believe that it resulted in no unjust and untimely deaths?

Saddam murdered more people than Ford did, but to make a man a murderer one homicide works as well as a hundred thousand. Saddam's murders were overt and outrageous in their spectacle, while Ford's were covert and deceptive in their gray routine. In that respect Ford was a more dangerous murderer than Saddam; one may recall that Ford got away with his murders, and Saddam didn't.

To be sure most civilized people would rather see Gerald Ford in the presidency right now than George W. Bush, who resembles Saddam as a spectacular murderer more closely than Ford ever did. But that doesn't make it right to have any such thing as a president. Or a gigantic, murderous criminal gang calling itself government. [Nicholas Strakon] (December 2006) 

The worst presidents, redux. In his column for December 14, "The Magician," Joe Sobran wrote, "Bush has been a worse calamity for the country than 9/11 itself." And I knock over furniture in my rush to associate myself with that view. But is the Chimp-in-Chief the worst U.S. president? That, I still doubt.

Leftist historian Eric Foner thinks he is. Earlier this month the mainstream press gave a little play to a Washington Post opinion piece by Foner arguing that "He's The Worst Ever." Now, though I don't buy the main conclusion, I do find two good things about this essay. First, anyone willing to describe Bush as the worst president is probably not a captive and pawn of the Israel lobby. [*] It's comforting to see a piece by a non-captive and non-pawn occasionally picked up by the wire services and published in one's local paper. Second, Foner departs from the Establishment liturgy in denying James Knox Polk a place on the list of near-greats, which is where he usually ranks. In fact, Foner says that Polk "bears comparison to Bush" because the former launched an unprovoked attack on Mexico. OK.

In early 2001, I wrote a four-part series on the presidents I considered "The twelve worst." No one more recent than Lyndon B. Satan made my list, and I explained that in this way:

It may seem odd that no president of the past quarter of a century makes the list.... [H]onestly, at the risk of disappointing haters of Bush of Arabia [Bush I], I don't think they qualify. They're up against some mighty stiff competition, for one thing. And however wicked and dastardly they were per se, they came along too late to wreck the Republic.

I'm a little more interested, though, in the rest of Foner's rankings. I'm not surprised to see a proponent of leviathan put Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt in the "great" category (alongside Washington). Courtier historians and left-wing "dissenters" all tend to agree about Lincoln. And I suppose that if you praise Lincoln you've got to beat up on his predecessor, James Buchanan. Sure enough, Foner puts Buchanan on the "bottom rung," with Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Richard Nixon.

I'd never seen Coolidge placed that far down on the list, but Foner claims his regime was as corrupt as Harding's, in its favoritism to "business." One may wish that liberal and leftist historians interested in corruption and cronyism would peer as closely at the Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt regimes as they do at Grant's, Harding's, Nixon's, Wee Bush's, and now Coolidge's. (Foner doesn't mention U.S. Grant — or Herbert Hoover, either.) With Woodrow Wilson (who completes my own unholy trinity of presidents), Lincoln and Roosevelt founded what is now recognizable as the American style of fascism, a central attribute of which is institutionalized corruption that systematically awards privilege to big, established business.

But let's get back to Harding and Buchanan. Whatever Harding's faults and crimes, during his brief tenure he did repeal most of the police statism imposed during Wilson's War. Unfortunately he didn't burn out the poisonous little weed of the FBI, and of course the Prohibition Bureau thrived during his two years; but those two outfits started up under Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson, respectively. And though Harding was a high-tariff man (like most Republicans in those days and like many these days), and free trade is a sine qua non of a noninterventionist foreign policy, when you compare him with the great warmonger who came along ten years later the "knightly Harding" stands a lot closer to George Washington than he does to F.D. Roosevelt.

Buchanan did little to stave off the "impending conflict," as the courtier historians tell us, but he certainly seems to have done more than his successor. In fact Lincoln went out of his way to ignite it. Buchanan was a "normal" chief executive of a polity ruling over what was still in many ways a "normal" country, at least in its own traditional terms. He did not manage to get 630,000 Americans killed in a war that was both completely unnecessary and criminal. Lincoln did. By the end of Lincoln's term, unlike the end of Buchanan's term, the country was much more distant from normality than it had been four years before. It was well on its way to being ruled by a consolidated leviathan, and also on the downward-sloping road toward empire. Compared with Lincoln, it's hard to see Buchanan as having been all that bad.

Here's something you may want to try out on your mainstream friends, to make it easier for them to understand how alienated you are. Next time they mutter something about Bush's being a bad president, agree with them and add, "Yeah! Almost as bad as Lincoln!"

In any case, what a relief it would be to see a man like Buchanan or Harding elected ruler. But for people shuddering in the shadow of a thundering, blundering, full-blown empire, it's probably much too late to pray for the modest grace of benign neglect. [Nicholas Strakon] (December 2006) 

Peter Boyle died on December 12. I never watched "Everybody Loves Raymond" much, but I fondly remember Mr. Boyle as a comic or serious actor in such films as "Joe," "The Candidate," "Slither," "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," "Young Frankenstein," and "Hardcore." The three performances that stuck with me most vividly were the eponymous "Joe," a volatile and ultimately homicidal working-class despiser of hippies; the genial Mob-connected bartender (and hit man) in "Eddie Coyle"; and, naturally, the Monster in "Young Frankenstein." Most of the films Mr. Boyle appeared in fell far short of greatness, of course, but I believed every word he said in them.

I'm startled to realize that the roles of his I remember best are all from the 1970s. That makes me feel old — as does Mr. Boyle's passing, at age 71. RIP. [Nicholas Strakon] (December 2006) 

A plague on all their castles. In a local paper I see that a high school senior in Providence, R.I., is fighting with School Authorities over how he's going to be dressed for his yearbook photo. The kid, who is a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, had his picture taken wearing chain mail and holding a mediaeval sword. The Authorities objected, but not for the reason you'd expect, namely, that the idea is idiotic. No, no, they objected because the boy's get-up, especially the sword, violates the school's "policy against weapons and violence in the schools." It's one of those ingenious "zero tolerance" deals the school bureaucrats have come up with.

A knight-errant has now entered the lists — the ACLU, which is suing the school on behalf of the kid. The ACLU has never cared much about defending the right of non-governmental people to possess weapons, but apparently that indifference does not extend to photos of antique weapons and armor. Anyway, the ACLU is asking the court to block publication of the yearbook if the book doesn't contain the kid's demented photo. Maybe one can't actually expect freedom of the press in a state-school environment, but I'm going to go ahead and wish a plague on the ACLU's castle, too.

Meanwhile, after struggling to make sense of all this, I've decided to join the Society of Walking Anachronisms. [Nicholas Strakon]

Doubly meanwhile, an elementary school in my own little Huntington County, Indiana, has sponsored a canned-food drive among its fourth-graders, promising that if they garnered enough cans, they could spray their principal with whipped cream. They garnered, and they sprayed, and the Huntington paper ran a photo of the man, face covered with the stuff. Schools hold such farces fairly often nowadays, always in a "good cause," of course. What I wonder is how the schools, after kicking the props out from under their principals in that way, can hope to effectively enforce their plethora of "zero tolerance" policies. Or even keep the chaos down to a dull roar. I suppose metal detectors help, but overall I reckon it's just another of those zany contradictions of modern American institutional culture. [NS] (December 2006) 

This civilization is dead, dead, dead. The other day I saw survey results indicating that 38 percent of all births in Indiana last year were illegitimate. (The word or concept of illegitimacy did not actually feature in the newspaper story, of course.) I already knew that the rate for the whole country had hit 40 percent, but this latest report literally brought it home. And I'm still trying to figure out a way of believing it. Thirty-eight percent! Even discounting the 70 percent Negro rate, it's still incredible, especially in view of the fact that during most of American history the white rate rested in the low single digits, so far as is known. Let's not forget that the current incidence of bastardy accompanies a declining rate of overall procreation among whites.

Meanwhile, scores of thousands of young Americans voluntarily go out into the world, promoting the holy and progressive American Way to foreigners, with the assistance of M-16s, tanks, and helicopter gunships.

Speaking of that, I wonder how many of the miseducated saps lured into joining the imperial military know who their father is. [Nicholas Strakon] (December 2006) 

Joe Sobran on utopianism: "Those who are eager for a war always tend to forget that it's likely to be executed by someone like Bush, after which they will complain that though it was fully justified and could easily have been won, it was needlessly botched. They are caught by surprise when the tragedy ends unhappily. Then comes the old refrain, 'Don't blame us!'" — "In Praise of Bush," December 4, 2006. (I'll post a link when the column appears on the Sobran's site.)

Sure enough, Fort Wayne's Republican congressman, the plump and greasy chickenhawk Mark Souder, recently blamed the Empire's failure in Iraq on Democrat war critics and their insufficient "bipartisanship." (December 2006) 

The scalawag imperialist. On December 5, the night before the Baker-Hamilton report was released, ABC's "Nightline" interviewed three U.S. senators on what to do about Iraq. None proposed the correct move, Get out NOW, tail between legs, which would inflict the heaviest and most salutary blow to the Empire's standing in the world. Of the three, two were off base but at least not crazed. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) proposed a phased withdrawal, and Joe Biden (D-Del.) wanted the imperial forces to impose a weak federation (on Iraq, not the United State). But the third statesgod, Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, suggested that the Empire send in even more troops.

And he added: "I know what that entails — that means more Americans are gonna get killed and injured."

That foray into honesty was startling, but it wasn't the most interesting part of what Graham said. Instead, it was this statement, in which he strove to establish a reassuring historical context for the grand mission in Mesopotamia: "What people are saying about Iraq could have been said about America. In my state, South Carolina, we started a civil war. Our constitution, when first drafted, [provided that] no woman could vote. African-Americans were non-citizens. It has taken a long time, my friend, to go from the ideals of the Declaration of Independence to where we are today."

By "constitution," I assume Graham was referring to the pre-Lincolnite constitution of South Carolina, not the U.S. Constitution, for the latter contains nothing about the citizenship status of blacks as blacks and nothing about women's suffrage. The settlement of those questions was reserved to the states; at least that was the case before the Lincoln Counterrevolution got rolling.

What struck me first was Graham's claim that South Carolinians started the American Civil War. (I am choosing the plainest understanding of his use of we.) South Carolinians were the first to secede from the U.S. federation as it still existed under President Buchanan, but they started no war. President Lincoln started the war by refusing to recognize the continuance of the garrison at Fort Sumter as an invasion of a foreign country and by manipulating Confederate forces, in the finest Woodrow Wilson – Franklin Roosevelt style, into firing the first shot. (Lincoln's example, of course, inspired the later statesgods.) The siege and eventual surrender of Fort Sumter enabled the Great Satan to call for 75,000 troops to drag the people of the former U.S. states of the South back into his newly defined Union, killing hundreds of thousands of them along the way.

I'm pretty sure that even as recently as 25 years ago, no successful white politician from South Carolina would have dared suggest that the people of his state started the war. I wondered whether Graham, despite his accent, might be a carpetbagger from Massachusetts, but it turns out he was born in Pickens County, South Carolina, which makes him a scalawag. And the grim fact is that scalawags are thick as kudzu in the South nowadays.

Graham underlined his scalawagism in his reference to the Declaration, which was both bizarre and clumsy: "It has taken a long time, my friend, to go from the ideals of the Declaration of Independence to where we are today." Actually it took four score and seven years, my friend, for at Gettysburg, Lincoln succeeding in ripping the central principle of the Declaration right out of the American political mind. I'm thinking of the rule under which "whenever any form of government becomes destructive to [the natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."

Thanks to Lincoln and his comrades, the rights of revolution and secession have been explicitly excluded from "respectable" American political thinking. The only part of the Declaration still retained in the American mind is its passing reference to equality, on which the totalitarians masquerading as egalitarians have ridden to power.

The most telling aspect of Graham's understanding of American history and polity, which is shared all too widely, is the destination to which it has at last delivered us: the criminal imperialism and homicidal humanitarianism of the Iraq War. But I'm sure even more transcendent glories await. [Nicholas Strakon] (December 2006) 

Universal lying program. It is doubtful whether, in the entire history of the world, any political body has ever over-estimated the real cost of any program that it created. There is a very simple reason for that: politicians lie about costs — consciously, wantonly, with complete abandon and with malice aforethought. If they were marginally honest, or even merely incompetent, then actual costs would be lower than the projections at least once in a thousand times — but they are always, always, always much higher than the promises.

The latest example is the "universal health care" imposed by the Massachusetts legislature in the spring. Supposedly it was the bright idea of Governor Mitt Romney (R), who wants to be president, so the media used the momentous occasion to hail him as a bold innovator and cite his plan as a model for other nanny states. Everyone in the People's Republic of Massachusetts, we were told then, would be covered for only a "slight increase" in expenditures.

Now that the scheme is law, we are being told a different story. Instead of the promised "slight" $125 million boost in state spending for health care in 2007, Massachusetts is facing new costs of at least $300 million for the first year of its endless new boondoggle. That was admitted only when it came time to file documents for a bond offering to fund the program. As HealthyBlog commented, "They can say whatever they want to the public, but they can go to jail for fibbing to Wall Street." [Douglas Olson]

Comment by Strakon.That quote from HealthyBlog suggests a tool for finding out some of what the pols are up to: discover, if we can, what they're telling Wall Street.

Comment by Ronn Neff. Notice that it also identifies the ruling class: the political class can lie to the public, but it can't lie to Wall Street. [In chess notation this observation would earn a !!! — NS] (December 2006) 

The unintentional anarchist. Mirabile dictu, this beautifully anarchistic analysis appeared in a column carried by a Republican newspaper in my area:

We love government because it enables us to accomplish things that if done privately would lead to arrest and imprisonment. For example, if I saw a person in need, and I took your money to help him, I'd be arrested and convicted of theft. If I get Congress to do the same thing, I am seen as compassionate.

This vision ought to bother the Christians among us, for when God gave Moses the commandment "Thou shalt not steal," I'm sure He didn't mean thou shalt not steal unless you got a majority vote in Congress.

— "Why we love government," by Walter E. Williams, November 29, 2006

"Good" anti-Semitism. One of the slickest tricks of the 2006 political season was the blatant use of anti-Semitism by the Left — Democrats and the media — in a concerted effort to unseat Senator George Allen (R-Va.). It's quite obvious the only reason Allen was "outed" as a Jew — forcing his octogenarian mother to confess she had hidden that aspect of his "heritage" — was to cost him votes among right-wingers and rednecks. His un-kosher, ham-fisted handling of the whole affair made him look like the telegenic moron he is, but that was only serendipity for the "good" anti-Semites, whose brilliant ploy has apparently escaped comment everywhere until now. A few thousand more redneck votes would have kept Allen in the Senate and prevented a Democrat majority in that body — for what that might have been worth. [Douglas Olson] (November 2006) 

Watch for the little tentacles. Marxists sneer that "war is good for business," and state-capitalists clearly agree with them, though they're much more likely to be smug about it than sneerish. We free-market anti-statists like to point out that war is good for only some businesses, and we insist that it is a bad, unjust, distortive, and unprofitable state of affairs for the economy as a whole. (I hate to repeat myself, so for more on this point I'll just refer you to the somewhat sarcastic second, third, and fourth paragraphs of a column I wrote in July 2000.) We usually concentrate on indicting the giant war contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and General Dynamics — to name just a few of the privileged titans that make up "Pentagon capitalism," in the classic phrase of the late Seymour Melman.

But in narrowing our focus to the fascist heights, we can miss quite a lot of the landscape. My own unblinkering came in the form of a story by Jenni Glenn in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, "Not just bullets and beans / Civilian firms go after defense contracts" (September 17, p. 1H).

Glenn reports that, according to the head of some outfit called the Northeast Indiana Regional Marketing Partnership, "about 165 northeast Indiana companies, including food companies and sound system manufacturers, sold supplies to the Department of Defense last year." And, naturally, the "partnership," or conspiracy to seek fascist privilege and feast on tax money, if you prefer, "would like to see that number grow." So, I'm sure, would Indiana politicians such as Mark Souder, Fort Wayne's chickenhawk Republican congressman, and Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh, War Liberal for Goldman Sachs. The more dependent area companies become on military contracts, the more rewards the pols are likely to earn. When Bayh ran for re-election in 2004, he tromboned proudly hither and yon about all the war jobs he'd brought home to Indiana. And although Souder didn't make too much of it as his re-election campaign got rolling this year, in February he proclaimed, with perfect political amorality, that Bush's War had been a good deal for Fort Wayne because of all the war jobs in the city and its hinterland. I suspect Souder thought it had been a good deal for him, too.

In the story at hand, Glenn quotes Bruce Stach, "founder of Whitley County management consulting firm Sigma Strategic Solutions LLC" and a veteran of both the Air Force and "defense supplier" ITT Corp.: "The defense business is growing faster than the economy in Indiana as a whole. So how do we do more of it? That's the question." You bet it is.

The war profiteers in the area that aren't, as Glenn puts it, "stereotypical defense contractor[s]" include:

• Aunt Millie's Bakeries Inc. — Fort Wayne — bread and other baked goods

• Briljent LLC — Fort Wayne — technical writing and documentation services

• Da-lite Screen Co. — Warsaw — manufacturer of projection screens

• Lincoln Foodservice Products — location unspecified — ovens, pots and pans, and toasters and warmers for commercial use

• Maple Leaf Farms — Milford — supplier of duck and chicken meat (yes, duck meat!)

• Petroleum Traders Corp. — Fort Wayne — fuel wholesaler

• Polar King International — Fort Wayne — manufacturer of walk-in coolers and freezers

• Sweetwater Sound Inc. — Fort Wayne — supplier of high-tech music and recording equipment

• Biomet Inc. — Warsaw — orthopedics company
   DePuy Orthopaedics Inc. — Warsaw — orthopedics company
   Zimmer Inc. — Warsaw — orthopedics company

... which makes it unanimous for the big players in what has become the Center of the Universe for orthopedics devices, Warsaw, Ind.

It's easy to spot the big tentacles of the state, but we need to be on the lookout for its little tentacles, too. They're much more numerous, and if you don't watch out, they'll be wrapping themselves around your ankles before you know it. [Nicholas Strakon] (November 2006) 

Tag and empire. Cultural conservatives have had some fun recently with state schools that have banned the playing of tag during recess. The schools, no doubt staffed by Bolsheviks in the first place, seem to be responding specifically to the complaints of milquetoast or commie parents. One of the schools, in Massachusetts, some years ago banned dodgeball as "exclusionary," which of course is a shrieking no-no among the Glorious Representatives of the Heroic Workers and Peasants Who Are Subject to Fainting Spells.

As for me, though, I continue to struggle with the apparent contradictions of American "culture" as it enters the late stages of monstrosity. On the one hand, America — or the United State, at least — is trying not just to retain but even expand its foreign empire. On the other hand, and a limp-wristed hand it is, many of the white Americans who are still willing or able to have kids seem determined to twist them into the most ruined kind of pantywaists. (Make that tattooed and nose-ringed pantywaists.) Can a nation of pansies really man an empire? Rome, in its ultimate degeneracy, had to rely on barbarians to do it, with consequences that are famous.

Perhaps I need to seek a new synthesis. Here's a possibility. A nation of men who were truly manly and women who were truly womanly might be less likely to support, and serve, an empire transparently dependent on deceit, scare-mongering, and (not to put too fine a point on it) sheer wickedness. At the minimum, true men and true women surely would not abandon their spouse and children to volunteer for an evil, criminal enterprise at the behest of the pissant Bush and the big spiders behind him. [Nicholas Strakon] (November 2006) 

Real public education. In Alameda, Calif., it transpires that seventh-graders at one school receive lessons in cursing — and now, finally, at least one parent has complained. Her lad's "teacher put up a big piece of paper and had the kids call out every cuss word and racial epithet they could dream up," according to Noel Cisneros of KGO-TV, the ABC affiliate in the Bay Area. ("School's 'Swearing' Class Angers Some Parents," October 16, 2006) The social engineers' purported aim is to demystify swear words and racial epithets, and teach "tolerance." Cisneros describes the words involved as "racially and sexually explicit."

The principal reports that the school has been giving the lessons for ten years, and no one's complained before this. According to the story, First Complainer Caren Vance "says maybe parents didn't complain because they didn't know. The children were told not to discuss the lesson outside the classroom, which some interpreted as — 'don't tell your parents we're swearing in class.'"

Now that the story has broken, of course, remedial action is being taken and assurances are being given: in the future parents will be notified so that they can give or withhold permission for their children to take part in these classes.

And that should take care of it, right?

Every parent — not only in that school, but in all other schools (public and private) — should be asking himself, "What other secret classes are being held at this school? What are the teachers in non-secret classes telling my kid not to tell me?"

It has long been known that teachers instruct students not to tell their parents some of the things they learn in sex-ed classes. At some point, parents with IQs above 63 should ask themselves (aloud), "What else are they not telling me?"

Come to think of it, that's a good thing for anyone interested in government affairs to be asking himself on a daily basis.

And at this time of year, it is particularly a good thing to be asking about any candidate one is contemplating voting for. [Ronn Neff and Nicholas Strakon]

What do you think the chances are that the children are being taught to curse grammatically and spell their epithets correctly? [Modine Herbey] (October 2006) 

Liberty and just us. "Hypocrisy" is just too damn mild a word for the endless cr*p fed to the public by the maggots who infest today's political, cultural, and media swamps.

Every time an even vaguely conservative judge comes up for confirmation for the federal bench, the Left demands repeated public assurances that he will slavishly obey precedent and "apply established law" instead of thinking for himself. This is, of course, a blatant attempt to bind one judge to the outrageous precedents established by other judges who deliberately and maliciously refused to abide by that same criterion.

But what happens to those who actually do "apply established law"?

Earlier this month, homosexual "activists" — the biggest bigots and whiners on the planet except, perhaps, for the "disability community" — demonstrated on the street to protest the Atlanta Bar Association's honoring of former Georgia Attorney General Michael Bowers with a Leadership Award.

Why? Because he prosecuted — and won — Bowers v. Hardwick, the famous 1986 Supreme Court case that upheld a state's power to outlaw sodomy. That precedent was not struck down until 2003 by the No-Good Nine (as Wilmot Robertson used to call them), in a particularly puerile and sociologically reasoned decision that had nothing to do with law.

So, because Bowers did enforce "established law," as these people claim they want, they will hound him to his grave as a "hater." [Douglas Olson] (October 2006) 

The 12-month terror. The warnings and scurryings and squawkings about the confounded bird flu have started up again ... not that they ever really ceased. I keep wondering whether our rulers actually know something that they're not talking about — something, that is, other than the value of keeping their subjects perpetually terrified by one hobgoblin or another. I wouldn't expect them to talk about that, not publicly at least.

By the way, did you notice that last time around the Ministry of Truth, in its various forms, extended the traditional flu season all the way into April? I think the Ministry is agitating for a 12-month flu season, just as the state-educationists are agitating for a 12-month school year. And I think they're doing it for just the same reason. [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2006) 

Special Note. I'll soon be adding this recently established market-anarchist site to our main links page: Center for a Stateless Society, at www.c4ss.org/. It's a project of the Molinari Institute.

In my opinion this outfit is off to a good start. And I envy the ease with which, from the beginning, they have sidestepped the mire of confusion between "libertarian" and "anarchist." From their FAQ page: "If libertarianism is understood as the embrace of the Jeffersonian maxim that 'the best government is that which governs least,' anarchism is the extension of that principle to its logical conclusion — that the government which governs least is no government at all." Of course I started out back in those golden days when "libertarian" meant "anarchist." [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2006) 

Kim's bomb. North Korea's joining the "nuclear club" is not good news, and it may even be something to fear, in light of Kim Jong Il's reputation as an unusually goofy ruler in a world offering stiff competition in ruler goofiness. What I don't understand is the indignation. Though I flinch from using the concept of "right" in any statist context, it is plainly true that the North Korean state has as much right to nuclear weapons as the American state has.

If we look at the statist world from the standpoint of an individual state, we can see that possession of nuclear weapons is the nearest thing to a guarantee of true state sovereignty available within the current geopolitical structure.

For some states — Andorra, Burkino Faso, Nauru — the question of sovereignty hardly arises; they are dependent on the toleration of the real states surrounding them. Some others, such as the dirt-poor outfits of sub-Saharan Africa, lay claim to much more territory, but their sovereignty is fatally undermined by the fact that they will always be beggars in relation to the world System. And some states lacking nuclear weapons hope to retain some semblance of sovereignty by placing themselves under the umbrella of a superpower or by making themselves golden geese whose killing, they pray, cannot be contemplated casually.

But for states such as North Korea and Iran that seek to retain true sovereignty against the System, nuclear weapons are the sine qua non. Americans tend to dismiss Kim's expressed fear of a U.S. attack, but that fear may be genuine even if the threat is not. The United State did not hesitate to wade into the Korean civil war of the 1950s — and some anti-imperialist writers insist that Washington did its best to provoke that war, just as it had done its best to provoke the great Asia-Pacific war of the 1940s that condemned half of Korea to communism. Whatever the odd little Stalinist's failings may be, Kim knows much more about the history of the Korean peninsula than most Americans do.

Another bit of history Kim knows, which many Americans may not like to focus on even if they know it, is that the United State is the only nation ever to detonate nuclear weapons in war. And it detonated them in Kim's part of the world.

Ah, history — history, power, and the predictable behavior of competing states. I was going to write that Americans would have a better chance of learning and comprehending such things if they'd just ease off on the indignation. But there is a place for indignation. If Kim winds up selling nukes to Muslims who refuse to admit a distinction between America the Beautiful and the hateful United State — and the worst happens — some indignation will be highly appropriate, and it will be best aimed at the Washington imperial cabal that has been stomping and storming around the globe for more than a hundred years. [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2006) 

Totalitarianism makes us stupid. The actress Patricia Heaton became famous playing a role on the TV sitcom "Everybody Loves Raymond," and her celebrity now seems to have transformed her, in the traditional American way, into an expert on public policy, not to mention a moral teacher. Appearing on George Stephanopoulos's ABC-TV talk show for Sunday, October 8, she campaigned for a bill pending in the House that would devote almost $1 billion in taxpayer money to combating autism, and she blasted Texas Rep. Joe Barton for blocking it. Heaton said that "we need to get politics out of the way" and pass the funding bill.

Yep, having government finance an activity certainly gets politics right out of the way, doesn't it?

Can this woman actually hear what she is saying?

It's always worse than you think, of course. Barton was given an opportunity for a rejoinder, and he protested that he's not against government funding at all. He's just in favor of a different funding bill.

TLD remains at the forefront in the fight against totalitarian stupidity, which, to borrow Heaton's description of autism, "is affecting children across every socioeconomic level." Stupidity is affecting adults, too, as you see. Of course we depend only on voluntary funding. Hint, hint. [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2006) 

Down with cognitive vanity. It may be true that only a handful of people, at most, in the House Republican leadership knew that Mark Foley was a pedophile. However, according to a CBS News story carried by my local affiliate, "everyone" on Capitol Hill knew he was a homosexual.

Oh, really? How many, I wonder, of his constituents back home in Florida knew he was a homosexual?

With the election less than a month away, it's time to remind anyone who still has that voting monkey on his back that he does not and cannot know just whom and what he's voting for. Ever. [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2006) 

The generic murderer. As we all know, the singular third-person pronoun has slipped from its proper use in many contexts, owing to the campaign mounted against it by "gender" feminists and their dupes. And the campaign derives much unwitting reinforcement from the ingrained carelessness of hoi polloi in speaking English (and in thinking, for that matter). Thus we're always encountering crimes and puzzlers along the lines of, "When your child comes inside from a hard day's play, they may like to fix a snack," where the speaker or writer mysteriously converts child, singular, into they, plural. As torture and vandalism of the language go, it's right up there with the misuse of "like" for "as." (One hears both felonies all the time on the telescreen, and that certainly includes newscasts.)

According to the feministic language wreckers, it's an insult to women when a speaker or writer refuses to err in such contexts, or adopt the stumbler "he or she" (or its possessive variant), or (perhaps most dementedly of all) alternate between the masculine and feminine pronoun. (It is often possible, of course, to steer discreetly around the storm: "When your children come inside ...")

This isn't going to impress the lady fanatics, but I'm still going to point out that men don't have it all their way with this pronoun business. After all, an extremely wide range of proper but problematic expressions exists. It's not all, "If a poet writes brilliant verses he may win a prize as his reward" or "A good scientist must be careful with his data." We can also get insults to manhood such as, "After the unidentified killer murdered the family, he stole everything of value in the house" and "With a politician, it's always a question whether he's just corrupt or is also an idiot clown."

Speaking for myself, I'll swallow all such insults that come my way if I may be allowed to keep at least the skeleton of my language. [Nicholas Strakon]

Comment: Like if this aren't, like, obvious, I'll venture to point out that deafness to the music of our language arises from the same poisoned font as deafness to real music.

Or as your local newscaster might put it, both types of deafness "center around" the same problem. [Modine Herbey] (September 2006) 

A campaign for men of honor. Just a thought: must not a real War on Terror include a War on Torture? [Nicholas Strakon] (September 2006) 

Headlines, part one. I think that all the discussion of liberal bias in the media must now cease; it is clear that it simply does not exist.

As evidence I cite the recent death of Ann Richards. Was it not clear that it received no more attention than the death of any other one-term governor?

I'm pretty sure I can remember that every time a former governor has died — including non-liberal governors — the media have made a big deal of it, splashed photos on the front page, lauded the so-called public service of said governor, and dispassionately detailed his causes and accomplishments. Why, just in the last two years there was ... uh ... umm ... let's see, there was ... uh ...

Well, let's not get bogged down in ancient history. Everyone can draw on his own experience to verify my observation. [Ronn Neff] 

Headlines, part two. When I worked in daily journalism, my fellow newsdesk denizens and I sometimes joked that we ought to set up macros on our computers to save time writing headlines for certain boringly recurring stories. One recent headline we might have programmed to type with a single keystroke is, "Shuttle launch delayed again." But there's another recurring story that calls for a macro, and it concerns not the deficiencies of obsolete government technology that was ill-conceived in the first place, such as the space shuttle, but other kinds of government badness. Namely, hubris, manipulation, and deceit. I wonder whether anyone, over the past three years, has kept count of how many times it's appeared: "Planned troop reduction in Iraq put on hold for now."

I've lost count myself, but I'm pretty sure I would have worn out a function key activating that macro! [Nicholas Strakon] (September 2006) 

Tyranny and the theory of relativity. "A nation of slaves is always prepared to applaud the clemency of their master who, in the abuse of absolute power, does not proceed to the last extremes of injustice and oppression." — Edward Gibbon, writing of Theodosius I. (September 2006) 

Will liberals survive "Survivor"? Even those readers who righteously abjure the use of the telescreen may have heard of the racial flap involving one of the oldest of the "reality" shows, CBS's "Survivor." For the first of the season's two contests, the show's producer, Mark Burnett, has divided the "tribes" along racial lines — white, Oriental, Hispanic, and Negro. This has provoked fiery protest from many Negro "spokesmen" and, from soppy white liberals, the damp "expressions of concern" you'd expect.

In the opening episode (September 14), the first "challenge," for both reward and immunity, was set up to produce three winning tribes and one losing tribe. ("Survivor" non-fans may not get some of these jots and tittles, but they're not too important.) Like most challenges, this one was a test of physical and mental ability, and of teamwork; and, well, the Negro tribe came in last. That set up the first expulsion of a player — a Negro male. The results were not perfectly Rushtonian, in terms of the probable distribution of IQ and temperament: true, the Oriental tribe came in first among the winners, but they were followed by the Hispanics and only then the whites. In any case, if the Negro tribe continues to lose and continues to dwindle, things will get downright embarrassing.

However, the antiwhite forces may want to look at the bigger picture. Burnett has long regretted the fact that there are too many white people on his show — he calls it a lack of "diversity" — and for the current game he has corrected that with a vengeance, so that whites represented only a quarter of the contestants, at least at the beginning.

That little exercise in social engineering is surely a good start for antiwhites. For us it is a good lesson in the lengths to which liberals will go, in pursuit of what they say is egalitarianism. (The initial segregation will end in a future episode when the tribes are merged.)

As I say, embarrassment may yet loom, as it does for so many liberal projects; the worst embarrassment would occur if yet another white person won the million dollars at the end of the game. But I'm also keeping my eye on something else. In the discussions among the Oriental tribe, some lack of fellow feeling was evident between two Americanized Koreans, on the one hand, and a Vietnamese refugee, on the other. (One can only speculate on how much unpleasantness might have resulted with the Vietnamese fellow if a Chinese contestant had been included!) Liberals may finally learn, assuming they can learn anything, that there are tribes within tribes, and they have a way of surviving in the world at large even if they're voted off the island. [Nicholas Strakon] (September 2006) 

Discussing the progress of the so-called war against terror on Fox News's Chris Wallace program for September 10, neocon grandee William Kristol opined, "The question is, 'Are we winning?', not 'Are we safer?'"

My own question is, Are the "we" in his first clause the same people as the "we" in his second clause? [Nicholas Strakon] (September 2006) 

Yeah, we got it, we got it already. Last week saw the release of what must be the nineteenth sober, detailed report that no link can be found between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. (This one was from the U.S. Senate.) And at least some newspapers found it headline-worthy. The first story in this genre of which I've kept a record is a New York Times report published May 2, 2002, headlined "U.S. Drops Last Link of Iraq to 9/11." That's right — 2002!

Coming up next, one must suppose, is a sober, detailed report by some department of the Authorities that — contrary to popular belief — there actually are no gilded faerie-cities on the Moon. Let's hope, at least, that there don't turn out to be nineteen such reports, each lavishly funded by taxpayer money. [Nicholas Strakon]

Got to differ with you there, Strakon. We may get it, and we may have gotten it a long time ago, but most Americans still haven't. And won't — whether it's nineteen reports or a hundred and nineteen. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (September 2006) 

ABC aired its two-part docudrama "The Path to 9/11" on September 10 and 11 amid howls of outrage from the Clintonistas, who objected (before the broadcast) to the show's portrayal of their Satanic Master and, well, of them. According to media reports, under Clintonista pressure producers of the show have revised their introduction to de-emphasize their reliance on the 9/11 Commission's report. But that didn't begin to satisfy the Billary stinkbugs. The media say that the show's creators performed some other last-minute tinkering in an effort to shake the wretched insects off their back.

Now, I haven't read the commission's report — in fact, I don't think I've ever even seen a copy — so I won't be pronouncing upon how fair and accurate ABC's interpretation is; but I feel safe in making the following observations.

First: if the show's writers and producers, and the network, really had the courage of their convictions, they wouldn't have released a raw version of "Path" for Clintonista previewing. Even if I thought he'd read it, it would never occur to me to send an early version of my column to Alan Dershowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, or Al Sharpton.

Second: several of those who protested were U.S. senators, including Democrat leader Harry Reid. Senators have a right to protest whatever they want, I suppose, but these guys actually pressed ABC to cancel the broadcast! Remember that they're members of a body charged (unfortunately, unjustly) with designing the legal and regulatory environment of TV broadcasting. Does anyone feel a "chilling effect" in the wind? If, mutatis mutandis, Republican officials tried something like that, we'd hear shattering bleats of "Censorship! Censorship!" from now 'til the cows came home.

Third: when 9/11 occurred, the George W. Bush regime had been in office less than eight months. Certainly Bush's madcap neocons had already gotten up to some deviltry, even some deadly deviltry, but it's still worth keeping in mind that the Billary regime had been in the Palace for eight years before Bush was installed. As everyone nowadays is always sayin', I'm just sayin'.

Fourth: The show was aired on a network that most people would say usually favors Democrats and their doings over Republicans and their doings. So let's examine the possibility that the writers and producers created a 4 1/2-hour show that really did unfairly and inaccurately criticize the Billary, so that Bush and his regime came off looking comparatively better than otherwise would be the case. If that were so, then I'd feel a whole other kind of chill: the chill emitted by the "commander in chief" of leviathan during wartime. [NS] (September 2006) 

Please smoke responsibly. Allen County, next door to TLD Land, is apparently about to imitate its county seat, Fort Wayne, and enact a smoking ban in what are tendentiously called "public accommodations." In fact, the county aims to go the city one better: the county's proposed ordinance is even more restrictive, allowing smoking only in private homes, private clubs, and hotel rooms that the hotelier sets aside for smokers. An ordinary restaurant or bar would no longer be able to satisfy the law by establishing a hermetically sealed smoking section — even though many such establishments within the city limits have already spent tens of thousands of dollars building reservations for tobacco dissidents. (The county ordinance will cover the city unless it ops out, which it won't.)

WANE-TV, the local CBS affiliate, claimed that all the people it interviewed, "smokers and non-smokers alike," favored the county ban. Smokers favored it! How could that be?

One may be inclined to take that puzzling result with a grain of snuff, because WANE favors big, interventionist government, and often twists its "news" coverage accordingly. Time and time again, for example, in the course of reporting what it represented as straight news stories, WANE's reporters and anchors have praised "our boys" (and wymyn) for "defending our freedom" over there in Mesopotamia.

The station's survey a few years ago of smokers' reactions to the city ban reported essentially the same result as the latest survey, though I can't recall whether the endorsements were actually said to be unanimous. This time WANE aired only one smoker interview, with a young woman sitting at a bar. But I'm prepared to sweep all suspicion aside and believe WANE on this one, even though its reporters cannot have interviewed a representative sample of Allen County smokers.

The reason is this. When they delivered themselves into the hands of their false parent, the state, Americans began subsiding into childishness. Unfortunately the childish part is genuine enough, in terms of mentation and emotion. As you survey the American scene, how many adults do you find? Behold the infantile exhibitionism, the strutting boastfulness, the fantastic credulity, the renunciation of self-responsibility, the playground crudity and cruelty, the proud ignorance. How could it be otherwise? — in a country where the culture is immature, history is thin on the ground (or just unknown), and Democracy has long been a civic religion, leading people to imagine they have some sort of familial and familiar relationship with the state, which will "take care" of them despite their heedlessness.

Government authorities at all levels, but directed in large part by the Central Government, have certainly rendered us less capable of taking care of ourselves, less capable even of knowing how to take care of ourselves. In her great book Dependent on D.C., which I unapologetically cite again, Charlotte Twight points out that "dependence on government systematically built up over the last seventy years has eroded American belief in and commitment to self-responsibility." (p. 310) She cites Albert J. Nock to the effect that "we develop and refine our moral sense, our ability to 'do the right thing,' from freedom to exercise choice," and she observes that "the declining morality so widely observed in America as the twenty-first century begins may in part be seen as an additional consequence of growing federal control." (p. 316)

That said, let us explore the thinking displayed by the woman whom WANE interviewed at the bar. There she was, smoking. One assumes she was doing it voluntarily, doing it because she wanted to do it. But in the presence of official adults (the authorities and their servants, the established media) she declared that if the government should forbid her to do what she wanted, that would be fine with her. She didn't "need" to smoke at a bar; she could do it at home only. But if that was her true preference, she would have been doing it already; and since it was not her preference, it would have been a mercy if she had found enough mature strength to stand up and say so: "I want to smoke at this bar, and I've chosen to do so, and the property owner has chosen to let me. He and I are both adults, and this is the private business of adults. The politicians should butt out!" Taking responsibility for one's own actions — seizing it! — is the sine qua non of morality.

In many ways Americans are bad children; but what a shame it is that, in the face of Mother State, they cannot be defiant ones. [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2006) 

A seminar in Democracy. The officials who have taken our fate in their hands have so much to teach us! Recently I was reading Charlotte Twight's account, in her 2002 book Dependent on D.C., of how America's rulers went about imposing income-tax withholding during World War II, and I came across a delightfully informative exchange between a congressman slow to get with the modern program — Donald H. McLean (R-N.J.) — and an ex-official from Treasury, Elisha Friedman, who was testifying in favor of the new, more sophisticated, more efficient scheme of mass robbery:

MR. MCLEAN: Do you think there is anything inherently wrong in going too far in compulsory deductions from wages?

MR. FRIEDMAN: I can only come back to this, we have got to do it gradually. [In order not to scare the sheeple. — NS]

MR. MCLEAN: Whether you do it gradually or rapidly, I am asking you whether there is anything inherently wrong in taking money out of a fellow's pay envelope without giving him the right to say you are privileged to do it.

***

MR. FRIEDMAN: Is it wrong for a democratic form of government to do anything? You are the people's elected Representatives. When you decide to do something, it means the people have decided it. What do you mean, wrong? [pp. 119-20]

I'm writing for readers who definitively prefer Liberty to Democracy, so I needn't append much comment about the natural tendency of the latter to overthrow the former. I will, however, add a little historical context. By 1943, as we are reminded by historians such as Thomas J. Fleming, Franklin Roosevelt had "lost control" of Congress because of Republican gains in 1942 and an effective alliance between the G.O.P. and obstructionist Southern Bourbons. But the withholding bill passed anyway. One reason was that "there was a war on" and, even for those who hated him, Roosevelt was "commander in chief," which meant that he was holding millions of conscripted Americans hostage, many of them in distant lands. In any case, if Democracy can do no wrong in peacetime, why, the same must be true in spades during wartime. Moreover, a sufficient number of Republicans and Bourbons agreed with Northern Democrats that withholding was a nifty idea, not just for wartime but for all time. I hope I will not dissipate the sulfurous miasma of Roosevelt's deviltry by observing that the body politic of his day was possessed by a whole multitude of state-building demons, less eminent than he but equally busy.

This is just something to think about the next time you hear the pols and bureaucrats of our own day shriek with delight at a similar state-building miracle of "bipartisanship." A better description is monopartisanship, honestly unmasked. And it is never more dangerous than in wartime. [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2006) 

Beyond transparodistic. Some months ago the Chicago City Council decided it would be a good idea to force Wal-Mart and all other "big box" stores in its bailiwick to pay a minimum hourly wage of $10 plus the equivalent of $3 in benefits. Everyone with at least half a brain recoiled in horror. Mayor Daley begged the aldermen not to do it, and every economist who takes a less-than-black-magical approach to his discipline pointed out that the ordinance would be a sure job-killer. Didn't make any difference; they did it anyway. Until then I hadn't been following current events in Chicagoland, so this story was my first clue that the hard Left had secured a majority on the council. I was a little surprised, too, that city councils nowadays had or thought they had some sort of authority over the wages paid by private businesses. (Sometimes I'm slow.)

Even so, the ordinance was just an example of old-style socialism. Repulsively tyrannical and foot-shootingly wealth-destroying, to be sure, but not peculiar.

However, according to an AP story I spotted recently, peculiar was just waiting in the wings. Chicago's aldermen aren't merely Soviet-style commissars; they're goofball commissars. They've gone and outlawed foie gras — because the ducks and geese whose organs are harvested to make the delicacy are force-fed. According to the goofball mentality, it seems, force-feeding the birds is worse than killing them. The AP's Don Babwin tells the tale in "Chicago says farewell to foie gras."

Usually when I label something "transparodistic" I can actually find something to parody. Not this time. This, dear reader, is where the satire screeches to a stop. I can offer no clever gibes, no expeditions into irony, and of course no reductio ad absurdum because, after all, we're already there.

I can think of only one point to make. Babwin's first couple of paragraphs were astonishing enough, but then I got to the part where he reveals that the ordinance was adopted in April and was only now — in late August — going into effect. The ban was breaking news to me, but that's not all. Babwin himself wrote his account as if it were breaking news. Maybe both he and I were napping behind the door when the ordinance was first approved. If so, we've both got to start paying more attention. It's another good illustration — this time on the municipal level — of how hard it can be to keep up on all the noxious flotsam and jetsam rushing our way, as rulers persist, tirelessly and relentlessly, with their Katrina flood of lawfaking. [Nicholas Strakon]

Bring back the cemetery vote! I never thought I'd say this, but the foie gras story makes me long for the days of the original Mayor Daley. On his watch these moonbats couldn't have landed jobs collecting bribes from the neighborhood bookie, let alone gotten onto the City Council. Yep, Daley the Elder would have known how to handle such wackjobs.

For that matter, so would Al Capone. [Modine Herbey]

I don't find the fowl ordinance to be as peculiar as Strakon does. At least, it's no puzzler where the aldermen get their "authority." City rulers all across the country have the "authority" to ban smoking on commercial property. Why not foie gras?

They used to call this sort of thing an exercise of the "police power," and local governments in this country have always had a frightening plenitude of it. But only now are we seeing how far it can be taken, in our era of outright totalitarianism at all levels. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (August 2006) 

A crumb of truth for Winston. I've felt a bit like Winston Smith lately — more so than usual, I mean. Within a couple of weeks after the start of the latest Levantine war, I had heard it said on the telescreen that Israel attacked Lebanon and the Lebanese not only because Hezbollah had captured two Israeli soldiers but also because Hezbollah had attacked Israel with rockets. Condoleezza Rice said it; Nicholas Burns, the foreign ministry's undersecretary in charge of propaganda or something, said it; the Wee Decider said it, two times that I knew of; and Dan Gillerman, Israel's ambassador to the UN, said it. But I thought I remembered that Oceania had at one time been at war with Eurasia ... oh, sorry: that Hezbollah hadn't started firing rockets until after Israel started its air war. I was pretty sure that an early rocket offensive hadn't been reported at the time — that at least it hadn't gotten any headlines, unlike the taking of the POWs — but of course I don't see everything that's published, and I was sort of afraid to leaf through back issues of The Times just in case they had been, you know, rectified doubleplusthoro postfiling. It's tough enough for a loyal comrade to keep his mental bearings these days.

Well, it turns out that Hezbollah did launch one of its long-range rockets against Haifa before Israel attacked. That's according to Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker article I linked to on August 14. One rocket — out of 500 mid-rangers and long-rangers that the Israelis estimated Hezbollah had in its arsenal. Hersh doesn't say whether it hurt anyone or did any damage.

Spontaneous demonstrations have broken out among the workers and peasants throughout TLD Headquarters at the glorious news that on occasion our rulers do mix at least one tiny little crumb of truth into their slumgullion of lies. [Nicholas Strakon]

But how sure are we that it was Hezbollah that launched that first rocket? [Julia] (August 2006) 

Diversity juxtapositions. On August 4, I noticed a couple of stories in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette that I thought should have been packaged together. Instead, one was on page 1C, and the other was on page 2C. Hmm. I wonder why.

The first story was "Hispanic populace up 30% in area / And some think census figures low," by Ron Shawgo. That's 30 percent just in the period from 2000 through 2005, mind you. The area covered by the story seems to be restricted to Allen, Noble, and Steuben counties in northeast Indiana. Here's an excerpt:

Allen County [including Fort Wayne], with the largest Hispanic population in the region, had an estimated 18,262 Hispanics in 2005, up 30 percent since 2000.

Herb Hernandez, founder and past president of the Fort Wayne Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said the rate of increase is about right but he believes the numbers are low.

"I believe the [Hispanic] population of Allen County is closer to 20,000," Hernandez said. "The percent increase is very close. The trend you're looking for is there. To me that's a very good sign — 30 percent over five years. That's 6 percent a year."

Trigger-happy Hispanic drug-gang members in little Warsaw, Indiana, population 13,000! Not many years ago such a thing would have been inconceivable. Perhaps this is not such a good sign, Señor Hernandez.

Now, the number of Hispanics in the three-county area covered by the first story is not large in absolute terms — 33,000. If the Hispanic population of Allen County is 20,000, that's still only 5.8 percent of the total. And the most recent estimates for Warsaw place the Hispanic population at "only" about 1,200, or 9.2 percent. Readers in California and Texas — and a lot of other places, for that matter — may even be sniggering by now.

The thing is, though, you'd never guess the numbers were so small if you'd been following the crime news for northeast Indiana over the past few years. A remarkable number of Hispanic names — and many more than, say, 10 years ago — are cropping up in stories about crimes against persons and property. (One especially spectacular atrocity occurred this past December, when a Hispanic gent wiped out his entire family and, for good measure, a 10-year-old neighbor girl on her way to school. ¡Feliz Navidad!) Judging solely on the basis of the televised "perp walks," I'd have to say that blacks, in Fort Wayne, at least, still comprise a large majority of violent-crime defendants, but as for Hispanics — well, Hernandez said it best: "The trend you're looking for is there." [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2006) 

Powerful pork. It's not exactly surprising when our rulers extend their harassment of free expression to cover journalists and commentators on the Net, as we see them doing in this account by Laura Locke at Time.com: "Blogging All the Way to Jail." Locke's subtitle is "Josh Wolf is the first blogger to be targeted by federal authorities for not cooperating with a grand jury. Are the courts trying to send a message to new media?"

I did find one aspect of the Wolf case surprising, though. And I shouldn't have. Locke reports:

On Tuesday [August 1], Wolf was thrown into federal prison for refusing to testify before a U.S. grand jury and for failing to hand over unpublished video footage he shot during a raucous clash on the streets between San Francisco police officers and anti-G8 protesters last year. Wolf posted some of the video on his blog, and some clips were aired on TV newscasts that later paid Wolf for the footage. But the feds are demanding to see everything that wasn't made public.

They allege that the unused portion of Wolf's video may show the patrol car being set afire — part of a federal crime, the government asserts. Wolf denies there is an attempted arson on his videotape. The feds say they have jurisdiction over the case because the police car is partly U.S. government property since the S.F.P.D. receives federal anti-terrorism money.

But no — it's more!

As I say, I shouldn't have been surprised. Federalism in the United State has long been a rusted, bird-spattered, weed-infested wreck, but to expand their tremendous power even further our Central Governors seem determined to knock it apart down to the last corroded nut and bolt. Accordingly, they're now claiming some sort of ownership or authority over items that local governments buy with "anti-terror" money.

Once again I have to recall how my little Goldwaterite chums and I used to chirp, circa 1964, that "with federal money comes federal control," evoking almost universal laughter from the mainstreamers around us. Mainstreamers today still like to laugh in the face of some very serious matters, but I've got to say, that laughter is starting to sound a tad maniacal. [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2006) 

Utopians in Action. I've decided to adopt the foregoing as a standing head for occasionally reporting government failures, mostly on the smaller scale, though I won't necessarily bar comment on disasters of FEMA and Army Corps of Engineers proportions.

First up is the latest flooding in Fort Wayne, Ind., the nearest city of any size to TLD Galactic Headquarters. During the night of July 26–27, a thunderstorm of moderate severity watered the Fort Wayne area for a couple of hours. The government weather service had not bothered to issue any watches or warnings. More tellingly, the storm failed to knock out power here in nearby Roanoke; and since the reliability of our electrical service when there's any weather is little better than Third World levels, you can be sure that this storm wasn't much of an event.

Nevertheless, in Fort Wayne it resulted in widespread flooding of underpasses, neighborhood streets, arteries, and important intersections. And that flooding is absolutely routine. But would it be routine in an environment of "private" (i.e., justly owned) property? One that included no state "property"? Would developers and operators of neighborhood streets, arteries, and drainage and sewage systems really invest in the settlement of neighborhoods subject to frequent flooding or isolation caused by flooding? Is that how they would make their profits? Or would they be driven out of business by market forces? Local governments can be driven into bankruptcy, of a sort, but unlike market entities they cannot be driven out of business.

As it stands, ministates — that is, municipalities — rarely if ever "demunicipalize" sections of their territory, withdrawing government services from areas that would be economically untenable in a market society. (Imagine the lawsuits and federal investigations that would result if pols, going against their every instinct, did try to surrender some of their territory!) Instead, municipalities subsidize their continued control of otherwise untenable areas, and the continuing population of those areas, by extracting money from taxpayers who have chosen to live outside the affected areas (even including taxpayers in other states).

"Private" (i.e., non-state) reclamation and flood-prevention projects in difficult areas are certainly conceivable, but when it comes to state projects we'll never be able to tell what projects are economically feasible, because state projects necessarily rely on the political means instead of the economic means.

As the political means continue to swamp the economic means, it looks as though lots of populated land over which various levels of government claim sovereignty will continue to flood. And pols and bureaucrats will continue to scramble to find sufficient "tax revenues" (i.e., swag) to preserve the settlement of those areas. They'll also continue to lie to residents of flood-prone areas about the likely efficacy of their projects. At the same time, of course, the pols and bureaucrats will persist in ridiculing free-marketeers and libertarians as "utopians." [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2006) 

The making of an anti-Semite. If Mel Gibson simply has to be a drunk, he and we would have been much better off if he'd stayed home and been a quiet drunk. But we're past that now, and after Gibson's dreadful encounter with the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, the ADL's Abe Foxman was quick to crow that everything Foxman and his fellow anti-Christians said about Gibson during the passion over "The Passion" has now been proved to be true.

But there's a possibility that Foxman and his fellow crowers are neglecting. Granted, according to their ideology all Catholics are anti-Semites — probably all Christians are, except the outright Judeo-Christian panderers. Still, if Gibson is an unusually vicious Jew-hater now, maybe he wasn't until a couple of years ago when he was mercilessly and unjustifiably assaulted by whole battalions of Jews. Collectivistic, hateful bigotry, whether anti-Christian or anti-Semitic, is a bad, irrational thing, but some of us who fall short of sainthood or sagacity may weaken and let our general sentiments be affected when numerous and prominent members of an identifiable group decide to gang up on us.

The consensus world will assume that Gibson chose his enemies, without pausing to consider whether they might have chosen him. In any case, while we must be surprised to see Gibson drunkenly lash out, we cannot be surprised to learn that he knows he has enemies.

The incident reminds me of something the historian David Irving once said. This was long before he was jailed as a thought-criminal but long after he'd been demonized as one. He was answering questions after a lecture when an audience member asked him whether he considered himself an anti-Semite. Irving replied, with both care and keen wit, "Not yet." [Nicholas Strakon]

P.S. My original title for this installment was "Gibson and his enemies," but something