Come, Let Us now praise Ineffective Men

The funeral would not be complete without the flawless O'Bambi lending his aspirational tones to the affair.

"The march is not yet over... the race is not yet won."  We persist onward ever beating paths of righteousness through the wilderness toward that hope that springs eternal, and that day when we can truly say that all men and women, (regardless of where they came from or who they love or the color of their skin), are free at last, free at last, and, thank God Almighty, endowed with equal access to the pursuit of their happiness....

Doesn't this treacle nauseate anyone?  It's not even good rhetoric

Now...just the other month, the Flawless One, said that change is not possible without making people "uncomfortable".   Well... I suppose riding along in a rickety cart as it bumps and wobbles toward the Place de la Revolution would make one "uncomfortable"...  but I shan't quibble.  I agree; the threat of change makes people in power 'uncomfortable." 

Okee dokee....  Do people who are "uncomfortable" turn out in mawkish mass to do honours to their inconveniencer?  I don't think so.  The fact that the entire establishment has turned out to sing praises to John Lewis tells me that he didn't threaten them with change.  And not threatening them with change did not do much to lead "his people" out of the wilderness in which they continue to find themselves after all these years of beating paths of righteousness....

Now to be fair.  Lewis did significantly participate in the Civil Rights Movement.  As a founding member of SNCC (pronounced "snick") he made J. Edgar Hoover and Strom Thurmond at least distinctly uncomfortable.   In fact he made Saint Jack uncomfortable too.  In fact, in fact, Lewis made the Holy Martin Luther King a tad uncomfortable as well.  All fine and well.  It was a great step forward on the path of righteousness that this country at last allowed Negroes to sit in the front of a bus and to sit at all at a counter. 

But then Lewis got rewarded with a seat in Congrease.  This is exactly what gets done in Mexico.  Take someone who is making you uncomfortable and coopt him into government, where he will become instantly emasculated and compliant all the while giving lip service to... well, to hope and change ...

What did Lewis accomplish in his 30 years in Congress?  I can't find a thing in Wiki.  Roll Call magazine saith, "He has been called "the conscience of the U.S. Congress,”  I suppose the way Bernie will be eulogized as the conscience of the Senate....  Yeah, but what did he DO?  What, in the all important scale of Incrementalism did he get accomplished? 

He (like Bernie) voted against Cumstain Clinton's "saving" welfare from destruction at the hands of lazy Black Baby Punchers.... He (like Bernie) voted against Banker Biden's Tough on Ni***rs Criminal Justice Deform. He (like Bernie) voted against Shocking and Awing Iraq.  All well and good. But I can perhaps be forgiven for observing that Lewis' protests outside of Congrease were far more effective than his consciencing from within. 

The point is not to dump on Lewis, although I do think that allowing one's self to be used as a feel good sop to the oppressed electorate he was elected to represent falls short of qualifying as "heroic".  The point really is that it is IMPOSSIBLE TO WORK CHANGE WITHIN GOVERNMENT. The system was too diabolically crafted by Madison to prevent precisely that.   As radical AOC now compliantly bleats her support of Biden, we might do well to consider whether electing progressives "to congress" is not the one sure fire way to defeat the progressive struggle for change. 

Consider the past 200 years a defective first draft.


©2020

The Antiquated Second Amendment

A few days ago, in Goon Staat, we wrote

"The Kevlar-encased thugs on the streets of Portland feel no social kinship with the people they are "containing."  They wouldn't think twice about breaking your wrist or shooting your grandma"

No more than a day later, a video showing a goon smashing a man's hand was all over the media.

Your read it here first.  You might also have foreseen it in  2002 when I wrote,

The images we see in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq today are a foretaste of the Homeland tomorrow. It will be so.

But it is now time to look back 

In 1775, General Gage took control of Boston and bade the inhabitants of that good town to turn in their arms.  A response published in the Evening Post on 23 June, read

"What terms do you hold out in this gracious proclamation?  ... Are you not ashamed to throw out such an insult upon human understanding, as to bid people disarm themselves till you and your butchers murder and plunder at pleasure?

"Opposing an arbitary measures or resisting an illegal force is no more rebellion that to refuse obedience to a highway-man ... or to fight a wild beast...  It is morally lawful, in all limited governments to resist that force that wants political power, from the petty constable to the king. .. THEY are rebels who arm against the constitution, not they who defend it by arms."

Fast forward to 1787 when the newly independent insurrectionists were now seeking to frame their Constitution. They were no less suspicious of their newly formed central government than they were of General Gage.  Strong opposition coalesced against a strong central government. The fear was that it would tyrannize the sovereignty of the States and the freedoms of the people.  The answer of the Federalists was simple: there was nothing to fear because the people would always retain their arms.

“My friends and countrymen,  THE POWERS OF THE SWORD ARE IN THE HANDS OF THE YEOMANRY OF AMERICA FROM SIXTEEN TO SIXTY  The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves?  Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an Americam  [T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the foederal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands ofthe people.3   (“A Pennsylvanian" (Tench Coxe), To The People of the United States, Pa. Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.)

Madison also rejected fears of a federal standing army, because, he said, to a regular army "would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands." Madison lauded "the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.

 So too Noah Webster, who wrote, that "[b]efore a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States."  (An Examination Into The Leading Principles Of The Federal Constitution (Oct. 16, 1787). The Philadelphia Federal Gazette, summed it up.

"As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people, duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which shall be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow-citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article in their right to keep and bear their private arms."   (Fed. Gazette (Phila.), June 16, 1789,

Liberals adverse to guns, which they believe to be the cause of violence, have long sought to massage the Second Amendment out of existence.  “Militia,” they say, meant today's National Guard.  The very phrasing of the argument reveals its anachronism.  In 18th century America, the militia was much more akin to yahoos running around in the forest shooting weapons in camies than it was to a National Guard.  Both raising a militia and raising the hue and cry were fairly informal and spontaneous popular actions.  What assembled on the greens at Lexington and Concord was not a government organized body of troops but a self-forming group of armed men resolved on a common purpose...which in that case could be labeled “obstruction of government.”

Liberals have also spared no effort declaiming against the necessity for bearing arms.  The “omnipresent teacher of us all” (Brandeis, J. in Olmstead v. United States), will provide for our safety without the need for us to be armed.  Government good. Anarchy bad.  It is absolutely the case that government can be the beneficent teacher and provider of us all, when it reflects the popular will and strives for the common good.   But to say that government can be a force for good is not to say that it will be so. 

This argument has played out in other contexts as well.  The liberal Justice Breyer is all in favour of allowing fair, impartial and wise judges to craft the “appropriate” sentence in any case as they, in their wisdom, best see fit. Justice Scalia saw otherwise,

"I feel the need to say a few words in response to JUSTICE BREYER's dissent.

"In JUSTICE BREYER's bureaucratic realm of perfect equity ...  the facts that determine the length of sentence to which the defendant is exposed will be determined to exist (on a "more likely than not" basis) by a single employee of the State. It is certainly arguable (JUSTICE BREYER argues it) that this sacrifice of prior protections is worth it. But it is not arguable that, just because one thinks it is a better system, it must be, or is even more likely to  be, the system envisioned by a Constitution that guarantees trial by jury.

"Justice Breyer sketches an admirably fair and efficient scheme of criminal justice designed for a society that is prepared to leave criminal justice to the State. (Judges, it is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves, are part of the State -- and an increasingly bureaucratic part of it, at that.) The founders of the American Republic were not prepared to leave it to the State, which is why the jury trial guarantee was one of the least controversial provisions of the Bill of Rights. It never been efficient, but it has always been free."

Needless to say, Justice Breyer is also in favour of gun control; the more drastic the better.  “Just leave law and order to us!  We will do it better.  We will do it fairer. We will do it cheaper! cough. 

But the founders of the American Republic were not prepared to leave it to the State...at least not without hedging their bets.  They were not fools.  They recognized that government was needed to raise and provide armies for the national defence.  They realized that government was needed to do many things necessary for the regulation and improvement of society.  But they also recognized that abuse is implicit in all power; and that most oppressive is the abuse resorted to by General Gage when he demanded that the citizens of Boston disarm themselves and trust his troops to do the right thing.  

   

What we see in Portland today is exactly what the people of the country feared back in 1788.  A madman on the loose tyrannizing citizens with thuggish armed force.  What one wonders would the response have been from the citizens of Lexington and Concord?  Liberals will decry resort to force.  But who is resorting?

Liberals will cavil that guns and rifles are no match for military hardware.  But in so saying they fail to view the Second Amendment through the lens of the time in which it was written.  As recognized by Justice McReynolds in  United States v. Miller (1939), the Amendment guarantees the right to possess arms “suitable for military use.”  Whatever the military possessed, the citizens had the right to keep and bear as well. 

Of course, the Drafters could not envision armoured tanks, jet fighters and missiles and it is in fact impossible for an individual to “keep” any of these things because their maintenance and operation requires more than a single person.  But the fact that an imbalance exists does not mean one should make the imbalance even greater by totally disarming the citizenry.  The plain fact is that if the citizens of Portland shot back at Trump's Thugs they would think twice about breaking people's wrists. 

The wail will be raised that I am envisioning “chaos” and  a “breakdown” of society.  To which I answer that society has already broken down.  It is cowardly to ignore the obvious.  It broke down a long time ago when the government back in 1981 decided to militarize the police.  Why was that decision made?  Because the government (although it of course disavowed it) regarded the people as a “potential enemy.”  Once that regard is adopted liberté, égalité and fraternité cease to exist.

 ©wcg 2020

T'is Truly a Gift to be Simple

An article in Avenue Magazine titled, "Homesteading in the Hamptons" reported on how young professionals were trading stressful sophistication for the simple life.  The picture of an attractive 30-something woman with perfect skin, dressed in Schlep Chic and leaning against a brick wall with a rough hewn door, said it all.

 

 "We just got tired of all the eating out and social obligations in Manhattan. So... we came out here for the simple life. We traded our Mercedes for a Land Rover. We got a  Bosch 800 convection oven ($2,299.00) and a Miele refrigerator ($7,299) so Marissa can hone her skills at -- ha ha ha -- being the master chef. We grow some of our own artichokes and pomegranates, but get most of our produce from iGourmet on line. We love their grass fed organic Piedmontese filet mignons... they're only $36.80 a pound, including shipping from France! It's such a gift to be simple, such a gift to be free and to come down where you ought to be."

Golden Brioche Award for this.... the MEDIAN home price in the Hamptons is $1 million.

 

©

American Goon Staat

Thugs from the Department of Homeland Goons debarked in Portland to quell the protests, disturbances and riots that have taken place over the last month.  Shocked and awed, complacent liberals have woken up to the reality of Goon Staat Murka.

This was nothing not foreseeable.  Back in 2008, Chipster discussed (and decried) the militarization of the police forces.  [The New Constables]

But this militarization of the police forces was the inevitable concomitant of a national foreign policy based on  full spectrum "power projection" around the globe.

In 2002 and 2003, Chipster wrote a series of articles parsing Neocon-speak and analyzing the elements of their brutal foreign policy. Chipster observed that "power projection as policy is fundamentally antithetical to the cellular structure of civilization."   Part III of "Thug Politik" concluded as follows:

"It also follows fom the entire “security-based” mentality. “Security” begins at home and since the Homeland is the preeminent zone of democratic peace, it requires its security environment to be shaped as much as any other

"If the neocons are willing to turn U.S. soldiers into drugged up killers, they will see no objection to pharmaceutically enhancing domestic security forces. The images we see in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq today are a foretaste of the Homeland tomorrow. It will be so."

It was obvious.  What one does abroad one ends up doing at home.  Not because "what goes around comes around" but because what one does one becomes.  The images of goon staat in Portland is what we, as a country, have become and we did so of our own conscious or indifferent choice.

When the mayor of Portland takes to the airwaves to decry Trump's using DHS goons as his "personal army" for "political purposes" he misses the point and is simply using the outrage to score partisan political points.

The phenomenon -- the image of the state as a boot in the face -- well antecedes Trump.  It was a national culture nurtured by the Flawless O'Bambi as well as by Chimp, Clinton, "GHW," and Reagan.  The first SWAT teams were put together by L.A. police chief Gates in 1967.  In 1981 U.S. Congress passed the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, giving police access to military intelligence, infrastructure, and weaponry in the fight against drugs. Reagan subsequently declared drugs to be a threat to U.S. national security.  Federal assistance, training and cooperation followed. 

Even before Chipster started the Gazette, he decried slogans like "war on crime" and "war on drugs."  The reason ought to have been obvious: a state of war is not compatible with civil society which is premised on trust, friendship and cooperation.

People said Chipster was quibbling and being pedantic. "It's just a slogan."  Plus ça change.  Americans are as indifferent to "how you say it" as they are towards everything else except the number of axe cuts to fell a tree. But how you say it determines how you think it and how you think it determines how you behave.  Le voilá.

The Kevlar-encased thugs on the streets of Portland feel no social kinship with the people they are "containing."  They wouldn't think twice about breaking your wrist or shooting your grandma.   They have been likened to "invaders."   Indeed, in Thug Politik, Chipster labeled the neocon movement as an "invasive disease."  He was wrong.  There was nothing invasive about it.  In the 18 intervening years Chipster has come to realize that the end-stage of the neocon national security thug staat is implicit in what this country always was.  The truth is we only become what we are.

In 1788 the Count of Aranda wrote a memorandum to King Charles III, decrying the American "pygmy" which he said would soon turn into a devouring colossus.  He understood that in 1776 the English Colonies in the Americas had embarked on empire, notwithstanding the pretty and magical words they used to cover their shame.  Words which the Flawless O'Bambi never tired of intoning...

The predictable Amurkan response will be: well what's wrong with that?  Rome was an Emipre and Rome was cool! Well... listen to what Saint Augustine had to say about that:

In the first place, man is separated from man by the difference of languages.... Their common nature is no help to friendliness when they are prevented by diversity of language from conveying their sentiments to one another; ...  The imperial city has endeavored to impose on subject nations not only her yoke, but her language, as a bond of peace.   This is true; but how many great wars, how much slaughter and bloodshed, have provided this unity! And though these are past, the end of these miseries has not yet come.  The very extent of the empire itself has produced wars of a more obnoxious description-social and civil wars-and with these the whole race has been agitated, either by the actual conflict or the fear of a renewed outbreak. If I attempted to give an adequate description of these manifold disasters, these stern and lasting necessities, though I am quite unequal to the task, what limit could I set?

Less charitable was the German leader, Arminius: "Rome creates a desert and calls it peace."

Yes, by their nature, empires impose "bonds" of custom, law, language, commerce and this, in itself, is a good thing of sorts.  But it is a deceptive good because it is founded on violence and the holder of the Faustian Bargain will always demand to be paid in the end.

The vainglory of those who puff up with pride at the analogy of a Pax Americana  (as neocons certainly do), might have second thoughts if they actually thought about the analogy being made.

In short, the images of the Goon Staat in Portland were first depicted in the Colonial raids on French and Indian villages in the Ohio Valley.  The forbidden end always begins with a first step. 

What is needed is not simply "reform" of the police, not simply voting Trump out of office,  but national reckoning and repudiation.

©WCG 2020

  

Mask-exploitation

California's governor Newsome gave a press conference the other day about how the state was meeting the Covid Challenge.  His report was full of statements about how the state was "meeting needs on a matching criteria protocol that began to take shape..."

It appears that among those matching criteria protocols was coordinating with private enterprise to increase the production of masks. According to the WOKE Guardian, in late March Los Angeles mayor, Eric Garcetti, the city "partnered with numerous local companies to produce protective gear from frontline workers."

Yay!

But one wonders just how the city and local companies "team up."  Does it mean that city workers will join with other workers on the frontline of sewing machines?  You know an admin clerk or an emergency medical technician taking turn at sewing masks? 

Nah. 

Whenever government and private companies "team up" what is meant is that government provides some form of capital incentive to private enterprise on a "matching criteria protocol" of some sort.  In other words, taxpayer money is shoveled toward capitalists making them even more capital-enriched than before.

Well that's the way capitalism works.  Yep.  And the great thing about this is that as well as providing masks, this "protocol" provides jobs.

Yay again!

Jobs like those at F&G Sewing where one worker said "she makes five cents per mask and eight cents per robe – if she works hard enough during her 12-hour shift, she can make about $5 an hour. She describes workers toiling in a basement with small windows, no ventilation, no soap in the bathroom, and only one or two feet between workers;"

Not surprisingly, Outbreaks at factories now making masks speak to the scale of the problem. LA Apparel has been forced to close its three factories, where county health officials report at least 300 confirmed cases and four deaths.    At F&G  more than a dozen people have sickened. And that number is probably low because F&G has trouble finding out where its subcontracted basement sweatshops are, exactly.

Labor activists say the coronavirus pandemic is "exacerbating longstanding industry issues such as low pay, poor working conditions and the lack of a safety net."   You know, as when one worker lost her mask sewing job when she got sick and then got kicked out of her three-to-a-room shared apartment because her roomies considered her a health risk.

This is what Treasury Secretary Mnuchin meant, also back in March, when he said that Covid-19 presented "great investment opportunities."

Can Murka do ANYTHING without exploiting people and treating them like trash?

No. The country is rotten to the core. 

©wcg

Fact-washing

The Woke World News reported that a French bus driver in the city of Bayonne was viciously attacked and beaten to a pulp by five men when he asked them to wear a mask, as required by law. The driver was unrecognizable to his wife and was taken off the ventilator.

Who were these "men"? Why did the MSM mudia refuse to disclose their race? Why was it my 95% hunch that they were migrants?

The MSM doesn't want to report on the assailant's race because it is determined that nothing interfere with its social agenda. Anything which calls into question its agenda is labeled "irrelevant." But of course the passengers knew, the wife knew, the neighbours knew. Six months from now the factually sanitized pundits in the press will be genuinely shocked at anti-migrant protests which they will then piously label as "racism."

They started this back in the late sixties when they substituted "inner city youth" for "young black man in his early 20's." To tell the truth, they argued, would "perpetuate a stereotype."

Bullshit. No it doesn't. What perpetuates a stereotype is how you react to the facts, not the facts themselves. If you say to yourself. "Typical! That's what Muslims (or Blacks) do" then you have resorted to a stereotype. But the facts didn't cause that. You caused it by your thinking.

If on the other hand, you say to yourself: "Hmmm, I keep on reading about Blacks (or Muslims) attacking people, I wonder why that is" then you have confronted a social reality and have tried to understand its social causes. Without the fact being published you would not do that because you wouldn't see a pattern and a problem in the first place. Race, religion, gender, is never "irrelevant" any more than the valence of atoms is "irrelevant"

This is why I began to despise the liberal press in the late 60's. They resorted to massaging realities to conform to their expectations. The result was a world in which nothing was connected to anything else. "People" just attacked people on buses or in the street for who know what reason. Oh Gee. Life is full of such "random violence." That's awful... but at least I don't have to think about whether my political vote or my economic cluelessness has created that "random" violence.

And it doesn't even have to as broad and general as that. Knowing that the men in this incident were Muslims, is it possible, just possible, that the driver made a derisive remark when he "requested" them to wear masks? That would not excuse the assault, but it would be part of the explanation for it.

By the way... I think it's Lincolnshire in the UK that has a "random violence" problem. Every week there were stories about "youths" attacking people in public places. Damn Jamaicans, right? No.... they were all ruddy faced Brit Boys. So like maybe Conservative Party policies are creating Clockwork Orange?

Sanitizing facts is no better than abusing them.  We need more factual reporting.

©wcg