Archive for November, 2012

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Too Wealthy for the Public Weal

Posted November 30, 2012 By John C Wright

A reader with (considering the question) the very appropriate name of Moore writes in to ask:

Economically and socially speaking, is there any amount of wealth that is ‘too much’?

Here’s the analogy: we have a right to bear arms. Nonetheless, I can’t own a fully-functioning tank, or an MX missile, or a nuclear bomb. And most of us (I presume – please correct me if I’m wrong) are OK with that. There’s a limit – someplace – to what it means to ‘bear arms’, and hunting rifles are within it and F-16s are beyond it.

Similarly, we have a right to property. Now we don’t often see someone who controls $10B as being as dangerous as someone with a squad of M-1 tanks, but my question is: why not? As someone who has spent years in the finance industry, that rich man, and what he is capable of, is every bit as scary and dangerous as somebody with a hundred fully automatic assault rifles, probably more. For if the guy with the assault rifles decides to, he (and 99 of his buddies) could take over a city kill some people, until the police, the national guard and the other armed citizens take them out. The guy with a few billion dollars, with a few of his buddies, can, say, bring down the economy in order to profit by having bought ‘insurance’ that only pays off if the economy collapses – and then get his people in the government to fund the payoff of his insurance. Millions of innocent people lose jobs, pensions and billions of dollars in the value of their holdings and we all inherit trillions in debt as a result of these moves. More or less – this is the ‘atomic bomb’ level. Something like this did just happen.

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Spies and Superspies and SKYFALL

Posted November 29, 2012 By John C Wright

The latest entry into the longest running film series is history was superb.  I strongly recommend SKYFALL to anyone who shares my tastes in Bond films.

Being a penurious writer, and having four kids and zero babysitters, and being able to entertain myself much more cheaply with books, role-playing games, or any number of public domain books or films on the Internet, or stream content on Netflicks, it takes an extraordinary film to crowbar me out of my house and into the local gigamegahyperplex for the big screen experience, and to call the experience worth it.

SKYFALL was worth it.

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The Knife and the Pony

Posted November 29, 2012 By John C Wright

I was puzzling and pondering about the alliance between the Left  and the Jihad. Having exhausting any historical cause or psychological cause, I conclude the cause is spiritual.

The inspiration of the imps in Hell, consumed with their wretched hatred of mankind, are the only thing sufficient to explain how Leftists can (for example) at once claim to support the rights of women, and bring the terror and majesty o the law to bear against writers (including, namely, Mark Steyn) for talking about honor-killings and female genital mutilation.

Tom Simon, one of the most intelligent writers it has ever been by pleasure to read, recently wrote in the comments here on the topic of this alliance:

I’m sure the match was made in Hell, but there is, unfortunately, a pseudo-rational basis for the unholy alliance. It is an outgrowth of Marxist thinking, though most of the people who subscribe to it don’t know that and have no idea they are practising Marxists, because of the stupid modern habit of jumping into an argument in the middle without any attempt to find out what axioms it is based upon.

Put as shortly as possible: All property is theft; therefore those who have no property are the victims of theft. Muslim countries are poor, therefore they are victims of those who are rich.

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The Darkening of the Intellect, Deadening of the Moral Sense

Posted November 26, 2012 By John C Wright

I found this today:

http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/022015.html

Anthony De Rosa is a reporter for Reuters. He asks:

If Iron Dome is so successful, what is the purpose of killing so many in retaliation, especially human shield causalities?

If this were a serious question, asked in earnest by a creature with a human soul, the sober answer would be that Israeli air strikes are meant to destroy enemy launch sites.

But it is not a serious question. The best answer is this, tweeted by one Robbie Guy:

If you had an AMAZING jock strap, reducing pain by 90%, can I still keep kicking you in the balls without you retaliating?

Yet even this contemplated castration via blunt boot damage is too kind a reaction to this comment by a Rueters writer. Jew-hatred should not be tolerated in any civilized nation in the West. It is beyond the pale.

To those who say this is not Jew-Hatred, I ask only that you provide me with three examples of a nation condemned for defending herself from unprovoked attacks without declaration of war by enemies not in uniform upon her innocent civilians, aside from a Jewish nation being attacked by Jew-haters?  Well? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

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Giving Thanks for Cats, and other small guardians of civilization

Posted November 23, 2012 By John C Wright

A reader with the eldritch and unspeakable name of Nostreculsus writes:

Although cats are disgusting vermin that must be put down, I must warn against any plan to consume their meat in a stew. It is just too dangerous. Science tells us that cats are infested with symbiotic parasites that lodge in the brains of those unfortunates exposed to cats. These parasites then control the minds of the human victim, convincing him to shelter cats, to feed cats and to serve all cat purposes. There are even sad cases where the infested human’s perceptions are so disordered, so that he finds the cats “cute”, and “fluffy”, rather than as the diseased and repulsive beasts they truly are. Any such infested humans should be reported for medical decontamination at once.

At least, that is what the parasites from my faithful golden retriever, Scout, are telling my brain. He is truly man’s best friend.

This is almost as amusing as the scene in Tanith Lee where the great demon prince Azhrarn, upon discovering the mankind does not like snakes because of the slitted eyes and sinister pride and sleek cruelty of snakes, takes a snake and pets it, giving it fur and feet, and releases upon man the race of cats, who men love, because of the slitted eyes and sinister pride and sleek cruelty of cats.

I am totally kidding about the cat cooking. Without cats, out first ancestors who settled down from a nomadic life and grew grain and raised city walls would have been eaten out of their grain supplies by rats, and civilization would have never begun. All writers owe our livelihood to cats, since the first writing systems were apparently to tally grain or write down the names of the kings of walled towns. So, a few thousand years of catlike lazying around and doing no work is small price to pay for all the efforts of all farm cats for countless years keeping the rat population down.

Now, of course, after the last election, we realize that the rat population has returned, and the voters voted themselves all the seedcorn in the grainhouse, and all the rats feasted and feasted again with so called stimulus packages that magically reversed cause and effect (as if consuming goods could somehow produce goods) and various inflationary quantitative easing schemes. Oh, where is some Egyptian devil-goddess with the head of a cat to call down vengeance upon this nation with a swarm of slitted eyes cats, sleek and cruel, to eat all the hordes and hordes of rats rising like an endless tide to consume our civilization? Where, O God, is the archangel in charge of cats? Send us, Lord, St. Gertrude of Nivelles!

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Quote of the Day

Posted November 21, 2012 By John C Wright

“Poetic license” is the freedom allowed to writers for achieving literary effects by deviating from facts, conventional logic, or standard grammar and spelling.

“Political license” is the freedom allowed to politicians to make statements deviating from facts, logic, principle, or consistency to achieve electoral effects. Although sanctioned for politicians by long practice, this freedom is denied to ordinary mortals. When they say something silly, they expose themselves to immediate contradiction, derision or rude guffaws.

This gem comes not from Mark Twain nor H.L. Mencken, albeit worthy of their pen. It from a man named John Frary in the comment box here: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/11/20/the-surrealistic-states-of-america/

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Harriet Klausner Review!

Posted November 20, 2012 By John C Wright

I assume this seems funny only to me, since, at this date, I am the only one who has read my book so far. Some of the sentences have that odd, mechanical sound of a sentence translated by Google translate from a foreign language.

So that those who have not read the book will see the humor, I will add corrections and comments in parenthesis.

The Hermetic Millennia
John C. Wright
Tor, Dec 24 2012, $25.99
ISBN: 9780765329288

Crew members of the starship Hermetic discover the alien warehouse [sic: a Monument the size of a small moon], which contained [contains-agreement of tense] advanced knowledge and an energy source [the Monument does not contain an energy source, but circles a star made of antimatter, which is an energy source] way beyond what humanity knew [knows]. Menelaus Montrose and Zimen [Ximen] “Blackie” Del Azarchel had two diverse [divergent] visions of a future earth. Whereas Montrose wants his home planet to thrive with the shared discovery and prepares to challenge the alien menace, Blackie feels the need to reengineer the species to make them worthy of the warehouse [Monument] owners [,] the Domination of Hyades when they return [invade] in eight millennia to determine whether enslaving mankind is worthy of them [Other way around: whether mankind is worth enslaving][and a run on sentence]. Blackie wins the first round as he persuades other crew members this is the only way their species survives the return [invasion] [which happened in the first volume, in the opening chapters].

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Revenge of the Mediterranean Man

Posted November 20, 2012 By John C Wright

The most insightful essay on North and South — I mean Northern and Southern Europe — I have to date read. The Platonic idea mentioned here, of music being more central to the nation than her laws, is one I touched on glancingly in my latest book THE HERMETIC MILLENNIA.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/333637/revenge-mediterranean-man-michael-knox-beran

An excerpt:

It is not my intention to write a brief for the superiority of the northern system. Were it up to me, I would preserve the economic liberties that have made the northern nations more prosperous than any others that history records. But man does not live by bread alone, and it seems to me that the northern peoples made a mistake when, on the threshold of modernity, they allowed a number of the Mediterranean qualities their culture had adopted to decay.

During the thousand years that elapsed between the deposition of Romulus Augustus, the last emperor of the West, and the posting of Luther’s 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg, many of the cities and towns of northern Europe emulated non-compulsory, local forms of civic order originally developed by the Mediterranean peoples. Under this town-square arrangement, individuals were free to develop their own talents yet were always in touch with the common life of those around them. (The basic argument is set forth in Thucydides’s version of Pericles’s funeral oration.) The result was the market-square (or agora) culture that the achievements of Athens, Florence, and Venice, of Salamanca and Kraków, of Bruges, Dijon, Prague, and a thousand lesser centers have made familiar to the whole world. Both the material prosperity and the artistic splendors that these cities attained or inspired are still evident to those who visit their historic centers. It is more difficult for visitors to grasp the pastoral and charitable care that once flourished in these cities, a solicitude that led Dante to liken Florence to a “fair sheepfold.”

The great expansion of the modern age overwhelmed these older forms of order: Men came to live, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “irregularly massed.” New kinds of suffering arose amid a general plenty, the misery Dickens and Hugo and Ruskin wrote about in their books. But instead of drawing on the West’s older philosophy of mercy and adapting it to an altered climate, the sages of the north devised a wholly new remedial system.

Unlike the pastoral culture it was intended to replace, the new therapeutic machinery was to be compulsory rather than voluntary, national rather than local, secular rather than spiritual, rigidly bureaucratic rather than idiosyncratically flexible. The old pastoral culture was a product not merely of the religious sensibility of the old Europeans but of their aesthetic finesse: They used art and especially music to create desirable patterns of order in everyday life. (Art and music, the Greeks believed, are more effective than laws in the building of cities — an insight that we in our rage for rule-making have forgotten.) The old pastoral culture of the West appealed to the imagination, for it was saturated with myth and deeply indebted to the poets. The new redemptive machinery, by contrast, was sterile and unimaginative: It said nothing to the soul. Such was the viper the northern sages nourished in their bosoms. They called it socialism.

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The Other Side of the Picture

Posted November 19, 2012 By John C Wright

This was written by Flannery O’Conner (who, along with Dean Koontz and Walker Percy, ranks as the most widely famed of Catholic and Southern authors) to a student who had, or thought he had, lost his faith in College.

30 May 1962

To Alfred Corn,

I think that this experience you are having of losing your faith, or as you think, of having lost it, is an experience that in the long run belongs to faith; or at least it can belong to faith if faith is still valuable to you, and it must be or you would not have written me about this.

I don’t know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the 20th century can be at all if it is not grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief. This may be the case always and not just in the 20th century. Peter [sic] said, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” It is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.

As a freshman in college you are bombarded with new ideas, or rather pieces of ideas, new frames or reference, an activation of the intellectual life which is only beginning, but which is already running ahead of your lived experience. After a year of this, you think you cannot believe. You are just beginning to realize how difficult it is to have faith and the measure of a commitment to it, but you are too young to decide you don’t have faith just because you feel you can’t believe. About the only way we know whether we believe or not is by what we do, and I think from your letter that you will not take the path of least resistance in this matter and simply decide that you have lost your faith and that there is nothing you can do about it.

One result of the stimulation of your intellectual life that takes place in college is usually a shrinking of the imaginative life.

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Bad Catholic on Nothing

Posted November 16, 2012 By John C Wright

Without doubt the clearest meditation on this theme I have ever read.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/badcatholic/2012/11/better-than-nothing.html

… the modern world sees destruction as something bold, brave and ballsy. We see sin — always destructive — as a solid in an otherwise watery universe.  The vandals, arsonists, gangsters, home wreckers, and serial killers; the self-destructive, self-righteous, and self-serving; the womanizers, tyrants, and abusers – we are most of these things, and we think at least one or two of them badass.

But if we come from Nothing and are going to Nothing, what boldness can there be in destruction? The law of entropy will kill our families, reduce our houses to dust, and slowly, steadily, bring about all the super-hardcore-ness we can imagine. There is no rebellion in hastening the inevitable. A killing spree may shock society, but it is a boredom to the universe, who ultimately kills everyone. To objectify a woman into a sex object might give men a thrill, but it is a pathetic to the universe, who is busy rendering her into a corpse.

Sin is weak. Sin is a white flag of surrender waved to the oncoming Nothingness.

[…]

Sin is always the easiest action to perform in any given situation. All it requires is Nothing.

To commit the sin of wrath or anger, a man doesn’t have to do anything, he merely has to lose something — his temper. He breaks, he snaps, he “gives in”, all of which merely points out the obvious, that he stops doing something. There is no boldness in wrath, any more than there is in rot, though they amount to the same thing, an acquiescence into Nothingness.

To commit the sin of pride, a man need not do anything. He does not know — nor can he — if his family and friends are having the same experience of life, or the same depth of thought and feeling that he is. He does not know them as selves — that is, as he knows himself — but as others. …  All Pride requires is not doing anything.

Lust is merely the absence of love in the erotic. Sloth is the simply the absence of diligence and love for life. (It requires nothing, as a man standing straight requires nothing to slouch. He only needs to stop doing something, to stop standing straight. Sloth is a spiritual slouch.) Envy is the absence of kindness. Greed is the absence of charity. Gluttony is the absence of temperance.

So to summarize: Man comes from Nothing and goes to Nothing. In the brief interval of time in which he exists, he has the free choice to give in to the Nothingness that surrounds his existence — to sin — or to fight it with joy — to practice virtue. Sin is surrender and virtue is resistance.

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I cannot believe we are still having this discussion

Posted November 16, 2012 By John C Wright

Note: I had thought this topic long dead, as the title indicates. Since someone brought it up again, I reprint my previous thought on the subject, editing only the opening remark.

A reader who, on other topics, I deem worthy of respect, has ventured the following comment in regards the Iraqi war:

“Pre-invasion, Iraq was a deplorable place run by an unrepentant dictator that is better off dead. However, at the time, it was a secular and not a Jihadist hell-hole. (to the point that Al-Qaeda disliked Saddam nearly as much as us). Of course, Saddam kept it secular by terror and repression.

By toppling Saddam, and having an incompetent in charge of the war not understand how to conduct the aftermath (see the work of Tom Ricks for details) , we MADE it a hell-hole of religious conflict that we subsequently poured trillions of dollars into trying to fix.

I can’t grok why President Bush attacked Iraq.”

The original rationale for the war is the same now as it has always been.

Since someone else has done the work for me, I will simply post his line of argument in full, saving my comment for the end.

http://qando.net/archives/002062.htm

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Message from Morlockland

Posted November 16, 2012 By John C Wright

Gentle readers, I got this message in my spam filter, and I could not tell if it had been written by a robot or a man, if it were directed at me, or was part of an anonymous mass-mailing. I wrote a note to the address, to find out if it were robotic or human, and as of this writing received no reply, so I yet wonder.

Savor the voice of those who sit in the seats of the scornful:

Oh wait… I thought “the issue” was abortion for you… The issue that defined all others. Guess that was yesterday.

So if you hate debt so much how about the next time a republican manufactures a war you bring up that wars cost money, and recommend that this president pay for his multi trillion dollar hissy fit in Iraq? The way wars are paid for (besides blood, and I would go into that waste of life but this is on the debt… So allow me to stay on track) with “taxes and bonds, and bonds and taxes” not by “tax cuts for the rich and hey why don’t y’all go shopping”?

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Tea with the Mrs!

Posted November 14, 2012 By John C Wright

Tea with Jagi Lamplighter and
John C. Wright

December 8th, 2012, from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm

Virginia fantasy and science fiction authors Lamplighter and Wright will drop by December 8th at Constellation Bookstore to chat about their work.

Coffee,  Tea, Cocoa and treats will be available.

Constellation Books! Where every book is a star!

303 Main St
Reisterstown, Maryland
21136-1903

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Ellis Wyatt, Phone your Office

Posted November 14, 2012 By John C Wright

In news naturally ignored by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and virtually everyone else in the establishment media, The Hill reported late last week that the Interior Department “issued a final plan to close 1.6 million acres of federal land in the West (i.e., 2,500 square miles) originally slated for oil shale development.”

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and the Environmental Protection Agency plan to spend the next four years using largely phony environmental concerns to prevent the country from seeing affordable energy costs and from achieving long-term net energy independence. The U.S. could accomplish the latter within a decade if the government would, with appropriate oversight, let the oil and gas industry do in the West what it has successfully been doing in North Dakota and Pennsylvania.

from http://pjmedia.com/blog/3-windows-into-obamas-dangerous-second-term/

My comment: We had a chance to have an energy Renaissance in this country. It would have ended the Depression and undermined the petrodollar-funded Terror Masters in the Middle East.

But no.  America voted her future away.

In related news, Israel is under missile attack, foodstamp enrollment has reached an all-time record breaking high, layoff and reductions in workforce from permanent to temporary jobs is underway (anyone under 30 hours a week is not covered by his employer according to Obamacare), the Stock Market is declining.

And the man whom the Administration decided to scapegoat as the cause of the Benghazi attacks — by now, by all admitted to have been planned terrorist attacks, not a spontaneous mob enraged by some unwatched YouTube video — is still in jail.

Oh, and the Nation is entirely broke. See the Debt Clock to the right.

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On Ecumenical Partisanship

Posted November 14, 2012 By John C Wright

A reader with the magical name of Robertjwizard asks:

“So I ask – what, outside of banning abortion (which many Catholics practice) does a Catholic stand for politically?”

Not to be impudent, but our kingdom is not of this world.

Politically, we want to save man from death and damnation.

The Church has existed under the Imperial government of Byzantium, under warlords in the Dark Ages and kings in the Middle Age, monarchies both constitutional and absolute, under more than one Holy Roman Emperor, under republics, democracies, sultanates, and under modern dictatorships.

We believe the free market can be corrupted and used for evil, and so to the capitalist we sound socialist. We believe the state can be corrupted and used for evil, and so to the socialist we sound capitalist.

We believe in the ‘just war’ theory. To the doves, we seem like warhawks, because we are not pacifists. We do not believe in pre-emptive surrender. To the warhawks, we seem like doves, because we do not believe in pre-emptive attacks, nor war as anything but a last resort.

We are reactionary in that we hold that the laws of morality do not change or vary any more than the laws of nature. We are radical revolutionaries in that we hold that the world is broken and corrupt to its roots and needs Herculean and immediate effort to lift mankind out of the mire.

Politically, Catholics stand for sanity, for balance, and for every man under every form of government. We are catholic, that is to say, universal.

We are the only party that stands for the truth rather than for an ideology. We are not a party at all, but a family, or, to be precise, the body of Christ incarnate on Earth, whose every member is of Him and in Him.

Let me put impudence aside and give a clearer and longer answer, quoting a man both wiser and better spoken than myself.

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