My Christmas is Complete

Thanks, Garry

Natural Highs

Was a big day for the Reb.  Our readers really dug Virgil's maiden voyage here, which makes me very happy.  I like good writing, sure, but mostly I like folks with spirit.  The boys at the Resistance are why I like being American.  It warms my "old" heart!

Thanks to loyal friend Liberalguy for featuring us today.  You know I'm grateful.  Folks don't necesssarily know how hard you work, LG.  I do.

Also, Fuchs.  I grew up around loggers.   Fuchs is made of gold.  You can take it to the bank.

Expect more fun, and the best writing we can deliver, under the circumstances.  We all support not just ourselves, but Obama's National Bank, as well, and that greedy ghoul, Soros.  We're too busy bailing out unions and hacks to feel sorry for ourselves.

But, damn, we're hot!

This is how we treat our friends:

Washington Rebel: Where Genius and Sexuality Meet

Darkness has descended upon our land. It has enveloped the heart, soul and minds of those who recognize and acknowledge purposeful, willful evil has been set upon us.

What are you doing America? How long will you continue to suffer this long train of abuses? What are you doing about it?

The time to act is now. Liberty and the exercise thereof is a daily event. If you fail to exercise your liberty, if you fail to be free, then ultimately you have no one to blame but yourself as your liberties diminish and eventually disappear. No one is taking them from you. You are giving them away.

Accordingly there has been some activism; rallies, meetings, protests, and other meaningless activity that has done little if anything to stem the statist juggernaut steadily grinding your liberty to death under its boot. You are and have been of little consequence to them. Like masturbation it feels good and accomplishes little. You can continue to protest, continue to vent your spleen. In the end it will amount to nothing.

As we move into a new year you had better contemplate what it is that YOU are going to do to stem the totalitarian tide that seeks your very destruction and that of your family, your society, and anything else that you hold dear. We are here to assist you though we will not be holding your hand. It’s your liberty. You need to earn it to keep it.

Gentle reader you must become active. You, the individual, are one of the most powerful forces on the planet if you simply chose to exert yourself. There are any number of activities that you can launch and participate in that will assist in defeating your would be masters. As all actions have consequences many of these activities don’t come without a price. However freedom and responsibility are inseparable thus translating your will to action should be of little concern to you.

In this New Year we fully expect you to take action. Deprive the machine of the tax revenue required to fuel the engine of your destruction. Buy from the grey market, sell in the grey market, and participate in cash only transactions. Don’t buy from government motors. Don’t conduct business with banks or other institutions that participated in the TARP or other government programs. Become active in your local community. Become active in local politics. Hold your local leaders accountable for their actions and/or inactions in regards to their defense of liberty. We will assist you in identifying meaningful ways in which you can assist yourself in resisting the leviathan that has become a threat to all though it is going to require that you get up off YOUR ASS and participate.

With or without you we will move forward. We will eventually be victorious. What say you? What are you going to tell your children and grandchildren? Are you going to tell them that you were a man and did the right thing regardless of the cost or are you going to tell them that you sat out and shucked your responsibility?

We’re men ‘round here. We do what needs doing. If you can hang with us then you are welcome. If you are part of the pragmatic mob that is too afraid to do anything meaningful to secure liberty for its progeny then you need to move on. You and your soft hands need to go find more comfortable surroundings. We’re not here to be nice. We are, after all, Washington Rebel with an emphasis on REBEL.

We’ll see you in 2010. You best be ready to get to work. If not we’ll be eating you in the future. You probably won’t taste too good but we’re sure you’ll be fattened for the slaughter.

Virgil sends….

"We no longer have time for the good,
the beautiful,
or whether or not something is true. We have only time for conversation." -- John Cage

Thanks, Vanderleun.

At Washington Rebel, we're loyal to Venus.

And Not Ashamed to Admit it.

Pessimistic, or Just Plain Tantalizing?

One of the tricks of being a Big Time Writer is that anxiety and depression and sexual arousal are masks for having something to say.  Old rounders like me hide behind cat shadows, when there are no Librarians around to irritate.  These considerations have led to a continuing debate: are we pessimistic, or optimistic?

I think I'm pessimistic because, in the words of a logger friend of mine, "our roots run deep."  That is to say, I was raised in the country.  My Old Dad had me digging when I was eight and wasn't afraid to snap my head with a whistlin' fist when I wasn't diggin' fast enough, see?  I was lucky enough to see animals in the wild, and had animals and birds whose welfare I was responsible for.  To this day I still dream about our two old pack horses.  They were as much friends to me as any human friend I've ever had. 

By the time I started getting exposed to city specimens of mankind on a regular basis, I was repulsed.  For the most part, I still am.  There's something missing from them.  Their souls are absorbed in manic narcissism.  What else can I say?  They talk more than they listen; their "sexuality" is mercenary and exhibitionistic; they put great stock in their own vanity, which to me is empty, nihilistic.  I think that's why corporate folks seem girly to me.  The men, I mean.  They were never really boys, so they can't really be men.  Likely their mothers were more receptacles of consumer vitality than actual mothers.  They produced children as one would exhibit jams and pies.

Dark?

Oh yeah.

I summarize my pessimism this way: All systems, of whatever kind and origin, evolve to a level of complexity wherein they are doomed to die.  An old Goodyear training manual put it this way:

To evolve you must eliminate; to develop you must discard.  This is unfailing law.  Nature is constantly eradicating remnants in order that she may weave new fabrics unhindered.  She purges to progress.  And man is ever abandoning the useless old and adopting the useful new.  He rejects in order to revise and reform.

In my world, Barack Obama is not a bright, articulate leader.  He is a boy, as in, not yet a man.  He is symptomatic of a society that no longer knows the difference between the two, a society that seeks security from a lonely little boy who needs attention.

For our folly, we must and will pay.  Him I do not resent.  In fact, I don't resent any of it (though I am grateful to be old enough to know my eyes won't have to watch the complete cycle!).  I see what has to happen, that's all.  I feel sorry for Barack and people like him.  There's a big chunk of them missing.  He's acting out his absence on the absence of those who need to believe.  You see that?

Our thanks this morning to The Barrister for these links:

The Frightening 'New' Side of Barack Obama.   No offense to Charles Hurt and you other fools for failing to recognize adolescent resentment and self-righteous narcissism in a man barely qualified to run for city ward.

When Clinton won in1992 with a Democratic House and Senate there was no partisanship. There was a mandate. An agenda. Progress. When America reacted to the big government Democrats tried to enact in 1993 and 1994 by electing a Republican House and Senate the dreaded "partisanship" arose.  Grover Norquist

Yes, Gazans Suffer.  But Israel is not the Reason.

Little Feat.  Willin'.

The Classical Liberal and I read the same tea leaves on the effort to push the U.S. toward an international directorate.  Who is Maurice Strong?  Not a patriot's friend, that's who.

Monckton Incident at the Daily Bayonet: Welcome to the Brave New Green World, where your presence is unapproved and you will be beaten for your beliefs.

The Alliance for Workers' Liberty, at Poumista.

Some damn fine bloggin' from some damn fine folks: bloggers, like yours truly.

Oh, and About that Sick Passenger . . . . .

 
The System Worked

What with the holidays, and so forth, yours truly overlooked a nice post over at That's Right, called Rule 5 Sunday Random Hot Tea Party Girl Hunt, which includes a real picture of a real person (continuing the Washington Reb tradition of posting ordinary girls engaged in ordinary tasks).  What?  I had my head in the punch?  I don't know, but we're making up for it. 

If anyone's feeling slighted out there, please let me know because . . . .

This is How We Treat Our Friends

Irish Cicero Flexing in the Mirror.

 
A Gentle Caress.

Both photos courtesy of . . . . .

Stimulus Program

Because of the ideological grindbox Democratic monkeys have been cranking for three generations, we are told to believe that "the Republicans did nothing during the Depression.  Roosevelt rescued the economy."

Thank God for people like Henry Hazlitt and Thomas Sowell, who know better.  And thank God for Murray Rothbard (America's Great Depression), who has a piece out called Reliving the Crash of '29.  Check out these paragraphs with the propaganda you've heard over the years:

[T[he Republicans had never been the laissez-faire party. On the contrary, it was the Democrats who had always championed free markets and minimal government, while the Republicans had crusaded for a protective tariff that would shield domestic industry from efficient competition, for huge land grants and other subsidies to railroads, and for inflation and cheap credit to stimulate purchasing power and apparent prosperity.

It was the Republicans who championed paternalistic big government and the partnership of business and government while the Democrats sought free trade and free competition, denounced the tariff as the "mother of trusts," and argued for the gold standard and the separation of government and banking as the only way to guard against inflation and the destruction of people's savings. At least that was the policy of the Democrats before Bryan and Wilson at the start of the 20th century, when the party shifted to a position not very far from its ancient Republican rivals.

The Republicans never shifted, and their reign in the 1920s brought the federal government to its greatest intensity of peacetime spending and hiked the tariff to new, stratospheric levels. A minority of old-fashioned "Cleveland" Democrats continued to hammer away at Republican extravagance and big government during the Coolidge and Hoover eras. Those included Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland, Senator James Reed of Missouri, and former Solicitor General James M. Beck, who wrote two characteristic books in this era: The Vanishing Rights of the States and Our Wonderland of Bureaucracy.

Check out Classical Liberal's Lindsay's No Mystery.  And Either is Inflation.  Damn Fine Bloggin'.

Cover Me

A persistent irritant of mine are my so called "liberal" friends who can't handle alternative thought.  If I send them one of my posts I can feel the alarm bells ring back over the ethers.  They jutht don't know what to thay!  As das and I have frequently remarked, "liberal" ideas have to be digested by us.  It's impossible to attend school in the United States, listen to the news in the United States, read book reviews in the United States, without getting the prissy little school girl version -- that is to say, the "liberal" view -- of life.  Once, when meeting for lunch with several influential bloggers, the question was posed: what turned you conservative?  With the exception of das, who was shocked into reality by 9/11, the rest of us had been challenged by books we read when we were younger.  For example, two books that challenged my Seventies worldview were

The Incredible Bread Machine

and

The Mainspring of Human Progress

Both of these books are zippy, tremendously interesting, and very, very mind-bending.  Here is a pertinent review of The Mainspring of Human Progress:

This book, first published in 1947, is both a condensation and an amplification of Rose Wilder Lane's classic The Discovery Of Freedom. With Lane's consent, Weaver retold her story in his own way, making use of her ideas but adding material from his personal experience and from various other sources.

Part One: Comparisons and Contrasts, explores various puzzling questions of history and the concept of human energy. Part Two: The Old World Views, contrasts the fatalistic pagan outlook on life with the Judeo-Christian view of individual freedom and personal responsibility.

Part Three: The Revolution, looks at mankind's three attempts to attain individual freedom: the ancient Israelites, the golden age of Islamic civilization, and the American Revolution. Part Four: The Fruits Of Freedom, investigates the results of freedom, including the flowering of inventive genius that followed. It also explores the concepts of hope versus fear, freedom of choice, the dynamic versus the static, the moral versus the material, voluntary co-operation and the lessons of history.

The writing style is accessible and engaging and there are interesting quotes by people like Thomas Paine, Fredric Bastiat and Isabel Paterson. In an interesting way, the book illuminates many problems still plaguing the world today and traces them back to the ancient conflict between pagan fatalism and the principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Of course there are non-religious philosophies of freedom that are based on reason alone, and the aforementioned Paine was a theist who was opposed to dogmatic religion. But whether one agrees with all of Weaver's points or not, The Mainspring Of Human Progress is a classic that remains an eloquent defence of the principle of individual freedom. The book concludes with a list of references, a bibliography and an index.

On the subject of individual freedom, I also recommend the work of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Karl Popper, Alfred North Whitehead, Ayn Rand, Stefan Hoeller, Robert Nozick, Milton Friedman and Johan Norberg.

This is the stuff they simply don't teach in school.  If, for example, you and I were in school today, we'd hear a tremendous amount of drivel about American racism, slavery, et cetera.  As if these were news flashes.  "Human Beings Do Bad Things!"  The points would be made ideologically, of course, as if only white people could be racist; as if being white was an ideology!  No one would volunteer what a wonderful departure from the bulk of history America is, and how it interrupted the normal flow of historical cruelty.  Find me a working teacher who has read and thought about The Mainspring of Human Progress.  I'll bet there are fewer than a thousand of them in the Land of the Free.  That should tell you something about your children's future.

You get the drift.  There are other things about America that our "liberal" friends have expunged from the record.  I have written two posts wherein I tried to reveal the process we've all been subjected to in the name of being "progressive": Liberalism: Cowardice Embossed as Narcissistic Pomposity and When Adoration Replaces Manhood.  It's a wonder whether anyone but a committed conservative could understand what I'm saying.  Every "liberal" I know turns into a yapping Pomeranian when new information presents itself.  We conservatives are hateful, after all.  It is only right to hate us back!

Another distinction -- made by George Will someplace, I think -- is that conservatism is not actually an ideology, contrary to how our "liberal" friends portray it.  "Progressivism" is an ideology.  "Progressivism" is committed to changing whatever -- 'cause it needs to be changed.

I don't know if George Will said this or not, but our formulation at Washington Rebel is always the same: A Conservative Understands His Character Must Change.  He does not impose himself upon the rest of the world.  He seeks excellence in character.  That is the thumbnail difference between "liberals" and conservatives.  "Liberals" know how you should change.

And why.

In other words, they're cowards.

Temple at Elephanta

An international team of physicists working in the bottom of an old iron mine in Minnesota said Thursday that they might have registered the first faint hints of a ghostly sea of subatomic particles known as dark matter long thought to permeate the cosmos.  Dark as a Dungeon

Archeological Digs at the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov site in What is Now Northern Israel Shows Social Organization and Planning 750,000 Years Ago.  Community organizers in loin cloths.  (Big leap for anthropologists; big yawn for ACORN activists in search of meaning)

How far has man come?  Top 10 Google Earth Finds, including, but not limited to:

Fuckin' Atlantis!

Lost city of Atlantis discovered? Grainy images show city-like formations at the Bottom of a Shot Glass in Mexico.  Actually, in the Caribbean.

Archaeologists Claim They've Found Lost City Of Atlantis (VIDEO FUBAR)

 
Is the Human Brain Portrayed on the Sistine Chapel?  Surely Joe Biden knows.  I mean, he can at least point toward the thing.

Life Quest: Could Parallel Universes Be Congenial to Life?  We'll know if I get another swat from the principal!

Don't like that tumor sprouting from your forehead?

Researchers Link Calorie Intake to Cell Lifespan, Cancer Development.  Dr. Mouse said as much.  Before he died.

Dr. Evil's Possessed Chair

What Religion Are you?  The flow chart knows all.  I be a Buddhist!

Another crackpot lawyer:

 
Did this man and his wife confect a Philosopher's Stone and disappear into the waves?

Read on!

Thanks to Daily Grail, plus my index finger, which has a mind of its own, eh?

Real Women

Back in the Nineties I was fortunate enough to have spied on the library shelf (you know, one of those ancient buildings filled with books) a collection of Robert Graves' essays called Mammon and the Black Goddess, which contains a piece called Real Women.  The essay highlights a number of points that are too often neglected in this era of sexual exploitation -- the era of the "hookup" and "friends with benefits."  Spiteful sounding words if there were any!

Before I get to Graves, let me provide two quotes that set the stage.  The first is from Dick Meyer's Why We Hate Us:

We hapless moderns have discovered that the much-hyped self can't just create itself and get happy.  Human beings are not amoebas.  It is not at all clear to us anymore what an invented or discovered self is to be forged from.  Our communities have been neutered, and our traditional, inherited, moral, religious and aesthetic sensibilities have been discredited.  The philosopher Charles Taylor talks about the "sources of the self."  Well, what "sources of the self" have authority and credibility anymore?  We're good at organizing self-centered lives, with faux chateaus, wealth, nostalgic kitchens, and sensitive therapy talk.  We create what  have come to be called "lifestyles."  A lifestyle is thinner than a life.  We hate not having something more (67).

Character and manners do, substantially, maketh man -- and woman.  This is exactly why we used to spend so much time and love instilling character and good manners into our children and why some people still do.  After loving them, this is the primary challenge of parenting.

But parenting isn't enough.  Character and manners make up what Alexis de Tocqueville called "habits of the heart . . . . Cultivated habits of the heart, [Robert Bellah] argued, were a lubricant for politics and for happiness (203).

The second quote comes from Founding a Republic of Virtue, by Daniel N. Robinson:

At the time of the founding, Colonists were not rugged individualists but communitarians. They understood their obligations to be chiefly to each other, putting self-interest aside; they believed themselves to be members of a commonwealth, premised on Christian (puritan) principles.

It seems to me the root of all our troubles is traceable to the rejection of the Golden Rule (and the Ten Commandments, while we're at it) -- the rejection of living for others -- for the community.  This is not a religious blog.  We don't make religious pitches.  We allow that 'objectivism' -- not to mention common sense -- can support an ethic of making one's character more serviceable to the community.  I always cite Emmet Fox's books because they can be enjoyed by persons who have an allergy to church, such as myself, and because they have something of value for resolute believers in specific creeds of salvation -- all mutually exclusive, of course!

What I'm talking about is the reduction of love and sex and family to a system of glorified slavery, a kind of anarchy of the soul in which individuals evade kindness and courtesy and committment as if they were scourges to be avoided.  People who "hook up" and are "friends with benefits" are not people at all.  By my reckoning, they're ghouls.  As my friend John Jay once put it, "Every father knows the difference between a smile, and a leer."

Yep.

Who is the biggest victim?  Men?  Women?  Society?  Love? After the horrors of World War I and an ill-fated attempt to fit within British society, poet Robert Graves turned his back on polite society and reverted to the ultimate conservatism: an agrarian life on Majorca, armed with an Oxford English Dictionary and a burning love for The Theme -- the draw of the Poet to the Ninefold Muse.  Like any Poet, or Irishman or Dreamer, Graves understood that women possessed a terrible power -- the power of creation and death and so on.  I'm not saying these things are theologically correct; nor do I agree with feminist formulations, which are mannish political creeds.  I'm saying that, when a Poetic character swoons with love, his entire being is transported to a higher calling.  He can no longer stack shelves at the Home Depot.  Madness and death stalk him.  He has to serve the White Goddess, the Moon, whose powers are portrayed as follows:

I have selected several paragraphs from the essay, Real Women.  Commentary to follow.

A real woman, by my definition, neither despises nor worships men, but is proud to not have been born a man, does everything she can to avoid thinking or acting like a man, knows the full extent of her powers, and feels free to reject all arbitrary man-made obligations.  She is her own oracle of right and wrong, firmly believing in her five sound senses and intuitive sixth.  Once a real woman has been warned by her nose that those apples are tasteless, or assured by her fingertips that this material is shoddy, no salesman in the world can persuade her to the contrary.  Nor, once she has met some personage in private, and summed him up with a single keen glance as weak, vain or crooked, will his mounting public reputation convince her otherwise.  She takes pleasure in the company of simple, happy, undemanding women; but seldom or never finds a friend worthy of her full confidence.  Since she never settles for the second best in love, what most troubles her is the rareness of real men.  Wherever she goes, her singularity will arouse strong feelings: adulation, jealousy, resentment, but never pity for her loneliness.  Real wome are royal women; the words once had the same meaning.  Democracy has no welcome for queens.

It would be wrong to identify the real woman with the typical wild one who, after a difficult childhood, has left home early to live by her wits at the expense of men.  The wild woman is incapable either of friendship for other women, whom she cannot fail to regard as rivals, or of love for a man, her declared enemy.  But at least she keeps her eyes open and ridicules the view that women must enthusiastically accept this glorious modern world of plenty bestowed on them by the hard-working menfolk, and that they enjoy being passionately swept off their feet and afterwards treated with amused indulgence.  There was never, of course, anyy truth in the comic strip legend of a primitive he-man who would grab his woman by the hair, threaten her with a knobbed club if she refused his advances, and haul her off panting ecstatically to his cave.  In ancient Majorca, the island which I have made my home for more than thirty years, the woman, not the man, owned their cave; and, according to Roman historian Strabo, if he took things too much for granted, she would merely say, 'Begone, and take your possessions with you', and out he had to go -- the children were hers in any case.

To reach some understanding of real women, one must think back to a primitive age, when man invariably had treated women as the holier sex, since they alone perpetuated the race.  Women were the sole agriculturists, guardians of springs, fruit trees, and the sacred hearth fire, and lived unaffected by any notions of progress.  Tribal queens never thought in terms of historical time, but only of seasons; judged each case on its own merits, not by a legal code, as real women still do; and showed little regard for trade or mechanical invention.  Chance discoveries or new techniques in arts and crafts were welcome, so long as neither upset tribal economy nor enhanced the importance of individuals.  It was the queen's task to restrain men from letting their ambition or intellectual curiosity override practical common sense, as it is still the woman's task to ask her husband, "Must you kill yourself making money?  Haven't we enough for the next five years at least, even if you stopped working working altogether?"  Even if he cares to listen, social pressures compel him to provide for his family until he drops dead.

History begins with the emergence of men from female rule . . . . After long whispered conferences it was agreed that men ought to claim their freedom . . . . Thus the male habit of reasoning from irrelevant facts, rather than relying on woman's practical wisdom, began the war between the sexes that has been raging ever since.

Men gradually usurped women's prerogatives in farming, magic, handicrafts, war -- the Amazons were no mere figment -- and government.  The story is epitomized in a classical Greek myth: how the goddess Hera pitied a poor, bedraggled cuckoo and warmed him at her breast.  This cuckoo was her brother Zeus in disguise, who ravished and humiliated her by seizing throne and sceptre.  Later, when Hera and her kinfolk rebelled against Zeus, he hung her from the vault of heaven, with an anvil tied to each foot . . . .

What precise lessons can be drawn from Graves' comparisons, I'm not prepared to say.  For example, there may have been women in his time who wanted their husbands to slow down making money.  Are there any now?

I have taken the position for years that what has been described as patriarchy was the natural development of the human ego, or left brain, which is detailed in two books: Erich Neumann's Origins and History of Consciousness, and Julian Jaynes' the Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.  In other words, I think there's more evolution than politics in the processes described.  I think feminists -- and I believe Graves -- were too harsh in their judgments, and insufficiently curious to consider other possibilities.  Neumann thought that the appearance of phallic images in Egyptian art heralded a different notion about how the universe worked, one in which there was a male component to God, or creation, a possibility not really considered prior to that.  Was this malice on the part of a priesthood, or an historic eventuality that was inevitable?  I say it was the latter.  Eventually humanity had to deal with the issue of polarity.  Why and how it all developed, I don't know enough to say.

However this debate gets argued -- let alone resolved -- the fact is, men today are more like women, and children, than they were in my childhood; and women are far more mannish.  Whatever the cause, we live in particularly unloving times in which the "old morals" have been thrown out in favor of mercenary thefts.  It is no wonder we have no way to ballast ourselves.  In searching for "sexual identity", modern man has abandoned sanity. At Washington Reb, we take the position that "the facts of life are conservative."  Sooner or later, people must "find themselves" -- reconnect to their sources -- in traditional settings.

*  *  * *

You can listen to Dick Meyer and Dr. Sanity discuss Dick's book here:

Dick Meyer, Why We Hate Us

Practices Zealously Pursued Become Habits

Permit me, Sir, to add another circumstance in our Colonies which contributes no mean part towards the growth and effect of this untractable spirit. I mean their education. In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the lead. The greater number of the deputies sent to the Congress were lawyers. But all who read, and most do read, endeavor to obtain some smattering in that science. I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations. The Colonists have now fallen into the way of printing them for their own use. I hear that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone's Commentaries in America as in England. General Gage marks out this disposition very particularly in a letter on your table. He states that all the people in his government are lawyers, or smatterers in law; and that in Boston they have been enabled, by successful chicane, wholly to evade many parts of one of your capital penal constitution . . . . . If the spirit be not tamed and broken by these happy methods, it is stubborn and litigious. Abeunt studia in mores. This study readers men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources . . . . .They augur misgovernment at a distance, and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.  Edmund Burke's Speech of Reconciliation.

Among the numerous problems our country faces, the primary spiritual or moral conundrums might be summarized as follows:

1) The growth of the Leviathan national state, commandeered by ideologues.  In other words, the debate between Republican and Democrat isn't really a debate.  The debate is whether our citizens choose slavery over self-rule.  That is the debate.

The Discovery of Freedom

The Incredible Bread Machine

2) Our Leviathan is a fascist state.  (See Michael Ledeen's review of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.)  We haven't transitioned to socialism yet, nor do I think we ever will -- in part because no one has.  It can't be done because it contradicts human nature.  The great communist states are criminal enterprises, not Giant Daycares.  What's pawned off as socialism is analagous to the what Rome did: the upper classes held all the land and hired out its legions.  It kept Rome free from riots by bribery, "bread and circuses."  Everyone else was a slave, or so close to slavery you couldn't tell the difference.  Once the system broke down -- and Rome had several close calls, the big ones being in Cicero's time -- Rome was lost.  It had no middle classes, no religious structure, no cultural commonalities to fall back on.

Even the idealized "communism" of Native Americans is an illusion fostered by the Warm Fuzzy Liberal.  First, the Indians' technology didn't go very far.  You can't survive winters very well when you're living in a Neanderthal economy.  Second, Indian societies had their wealthy, their privileged.  It's built into human DNA.  Trying to legislate it away does just the opposite: you create a de jure ruling class that can't be removed.

Except by fire and blood.

Look at the folks from Goldman-Sachs who have taken over our government.

Probably the best solution to our problems would be 1) a consensus to restore the vitality of the Tenth Amendment (and also repeal the Seventeenth Amendment).  This would limit the corruption ideology of by restoring authority to states, where politial extremes are easier to contain; and 2) our politicians instituting the same sorts of financial reforms we have been imposing on debtor nations for decades, to wit . . . .

We'd have to dismantle the entitlement structures!

You couldn't do it all at once, of course.  It would have to be done strategically.

Our entitlement state is our slavery of Lincoln's time.  Those of us with guts know it can't be sustained.  The poofters among us can't think past the next bumper sticker.  And they vote Democrat.

Of course, we aren't going to institute those reforms, which means a social and legal breakdown is on the way.

Right?

Meanwhile, our Warm Fuzzies believe that man can have NO FUTURE!! unless people like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi regulate the markets.

If you believe that sort of drivel, you are truly pathetic, weak, and dangerous.

Leading the Way

Washington Reb has found its purpose, thanks to the serendipitous citation of the that Nat Hentoff quote about Committees of Correspondence, and Garry's reference to what we've been thinking about.  That would be to offer ourselves as Washington State's "Committee of Correspondence."

Well, one of them anyway!  The first to say it, I suspect!

Groups appointed by the legislatures of all 13 American colonies to provide a means of intercolonial communication. The first standing group was formed by Samuel Adams in Boston (1772), and within three months 80 others were formed in Massachusetts. In 1773 Virginia organized a committee with 11 members, including Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry. The committees were instrumental in promoting colonial unity and in summoning the First Continental Congress in 1774.  Answers.com

A modest resources list, for those of you who care to join in the fun -- and, if you're a blogger, let's start linking!  No one expects you to quit your job to master these materials.  I know I can't.  You take it in chunks.

Suggestion: if you take a hot topic, like, 'Who are these folks wrecking the American banks to make money and turn us into slaves?", well . . . . there's a research project for you.  You're not going to master it in a week.

Primary Materials:

David McCullough 1776, John Adams

Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws

John Locke's Two Treatises on Government

American Revolution

Founding a Republic of Virtue

History of the United States

Great Debate: Advocates and Opponents of the American Constitution

Modern Library's Federalist Papers

The Debate on the Constitution : Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification : Part One, September 1787-February 1788 (Library of America) (Hardcover)

The Debate on the Constitution : Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification, Part Two: January to August 1788 (Library of America) (Hardcover)

Thomas Paine : Collected Writings : Common Sense / The Crisis / Rights of Man / The Age of Reason / Pamphlets, Articles, and Letters (Library of America) (Hardcover)

The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence (Library of America) (Hardcover)

Thomas Jefferson : Writings : Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia / Public and Private Papers / Addresses / Letters (Library of America) (Hardcover)

Secondary Materials:

Cato's Essays on Liberty

The American Republic, by Orestes Brownson

The Frontier in American History, by Frederick Jackson Turner

America, by Walt Whitman

Democracy, by Henry Adams

Emerson

Frederic Bastiat

Library of Liberty Reading Lists

Medved's First Person American History Series

The Left pissed Alinsky all over your country.  If you want your country back, you have to start with spreading the word.  That means you have to formulate, sharpen, and apply, argument.

What are you waiting for?  Your Gramma to make you cookies?

Dudes Who Dug "Tully"

Christmas at Theo's

Merry Christmas From the Reb

 
Sing Liberty Home

Our Masters at Work

Two strange bedfellows have asked Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate President Obama's right-hand man, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, for his potential role in the near collapse of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, just as Treasury lifts the cap on their bailout money.

The real story of our time is how the United States government is being manipulated to trash our dollar at our expense.  In the name of "compassion" and "hope and change", you and I are slaves.

The Thirteenth Amendment has been de facto repealed.  This is a president who lectures us, not shares with us as an equal.

And you voted for it.

Merry Christmas.

I spent a lot of time studying our Founders and people like Samuel Adams and the original Tea Party. What Adams and the Sons of Liberty did in Boston was spread the word about the abuses of the British. They had Committees of Correspondence that got the word out to the colonies. We need Committees of Correspondence now, and we are getting them. That is what is happening with the Tea Parties. I wrote a column called "The Second American Revolution" about the fact that people are acting for themselves as it happened with the Sons of Liberty which spread throughout the colonies. That was a very important awakening in this country. A lot of people in the adult population have a very limited idea as to why they are Americans, why we have a First Amendment or a Bill of Rights.  Nat Hentoff, America Under Obama

These elites are not simply milling about waiting for “the next chapter of trouble.” I think in too many cases they -like troubled eldest siblings, the “first children” who have never quite gotten over the subsequent additions to the family- have been actively fomenting chapter after chapter of trouble, for some 40 years. They are complacently building little fortresses, but they are doing so for a reason. Having written all of these chapters of trouble, they are feeling quite confident that their story is solidly structured, and they are ready for the dénouement they have planned. The anticipation of their surprise ending is making them almost giddy.

The ending, of course, is the coup d’état. Believing that the rest of us, now disillusioned, are no longer clinging to romantic ideals of honor, or truth or nobility, these always-restless First Children, devoted to deconstruction, believe they are about to take down the presidency, the churches, the “old” government and even the “old” media. They expect to put into place something “brand new.” But believe me when I tell you what they are building is older than dirt. And up from it. Which is why they will need their fortresses. Castro lives in one, too.

They’ve been practicing all of this, by the way, perfecting the Art of the Painless Coup so thoroughly that most ordinary folks do not even realize what has occured. Anchoress, Art of the Painless Coup

 
2009: A Year of Spectacularly Squandered Opportunity.

 
Everyone, right, left, take a breather.

Americans, no matter how vehement our disagreements--we are not going to start shooting at each other. Remember: we’re just a bunch of guys (and gals) sitting at plastic keyboards writing down our thoughts.  If our American reality is going to disintegrate there are many, many intermediate stages we will go through. We will become Latin American for starters. But it is hard for me to see that happening. Americans do not smash glass bottles and glue the flame-jagged ends atop thick walls surrounding our property. We do not despise the poor. We are a compassionate and generous people and we do care about each other.

For you conservatives (or ex-leftys!) who would get inflamed by every leftist gesture from the White House or the media, take a breather. The left would have us live a totally politicized life. That’s the left’s game. Conservatives are clumsy when it comes to formulating rigid sets of ideals; we involved in life and life activities beyond mere politics. And worse, the left doesn’t know how to critique the right. They always get it wrong by the limits of their curiosity and the grandeur of their vanity. For the left we are all the religious right. The left never stops to reflect that their most solid political bloc--black Americans--pretty much affirm the same religious beliefs as the evil religious right.

I get irritated with the National Review crowd when they sit around compiling lists of The Top 20 Great Conservative Novels or The Top 20 Conservative Movies. This is nonsense. Conservatives can lay claim to the great works of art of the ages because they are about and for man (i.e., humankind). The left will always and forever diminish its own productions with politics. In what way is Tolstoy not conservative? He refuses to hate any of his characters--more actively, Tolstoy loves his characters enough to invest them with life beyond mere political stances. William F. Buckley started the National Review because he knew that conservatives needed a vehicle to work out the ideals of conservatism. But Buckley had vast interests beyond politics: reading, writing, sailing, conversation, ideas, music, religion; he was an immensely alive man who, while conservative, political, never made a religion out of politics.

Finally remember: there is no American Dream. To be an American is to dream and to live a life filled with dreams.

Whenever anyone asked my Dad, "Why do you hate the snow?" he might mutter, through a clenched pipe, "I fought a battle in the snow."

Our friend Stormbringer is doing a series on the Battle of the Ardennes -- the Bulge.

Stormbringer brings a perspective someone like me could never have.

It's depressing but . . . .

To honor the United States and all the brave persons who suffered during those years, you owe it to yourself to read Stormbringer's series:

Christmas Season 1944

Christmas in Europe 1944

White Christmas 1944

That's some damn fine bloggin'.

Logger Babes for Peace

Via the Barrister:

The 10th Amendment Foundation.  What is the Federal Government's genuine strategic role?  A strong dollar, strong defense, and firm foreign policy in a wicked, deceitful world.  In America, it's at the state and local level where society is built.   The "progressive" mania to build the ideological state at the expense of community is partly a hangover from Mother Jones' 19th Century, and mostly a masturbatory refusal to take one's own inventory.  Show me a "liberal", and I'll show you a meddling school girl.  I have yet to meet a bumper sticker liberal with a fully formed character.

Believe me, when I do there'll be an entire post dedicated to that discovery.

David Freddoso: Rude Awakening for a Naive Left

Good Morning, Obamacare

Scientists on Mirror Lake: Trying to document actual climate change, without the hysteria.  They say.

Merry Christmas!  A radical Muslim preacher linked by U.S. intelligence to a gunman who killed 13 people at a U.S. Army base is believed to have died in a Yemen airstrike on al Qaeda militants, a security official said on Thursday.

We'll be praying for a bountiful harvest at the Reb.  We entertain no illusions about Islam.

Peter Wehner: "When it comes to the public outrage that will emerge based on the deals that took place to secure passage of the Senate health-care bill, the degree of tone-deafness among Democrats is nothing short of startling."

Via our good friend, the News Junkie:

The Socialist Revolution Has Come to America  It's not Obama.  It's three generations of simpletons who prefer watching football to having a brain.

Jonah Goldberg: From Poverty to Prosperity

Robert Samuelson: A Parody of Leadership

Via Liberalguy: Ask a liberal what he most dislikes about the "right"? "I resent the attempt to tell me how to live my life," he'll say.

Merry Christmas to our Loyal Readers.  You're Appreciated.

We cut trees in the Pacific Northwest.  We don't try to hump them.

'Round these parts, we don't bow to politically correct conformity, either.

If you don't like being an American, get out of the way.  No one will miss you.

God is Light

Blair wrote: "Today we know that galaxies are as common as blades of grass in a meadow. The Hubble Space Telescope recently completed a particularly deep (faint) census of a tiny 'pencil beam' extending far out into the Universe. This survey, called the 'Hubble Deep Field,' was targeted on a region of the sky that was nearly devoid of known objects, so as to be (hopefully) representative of conditions in the distant Universe. The resulting images are truly amazing. Strewn across this tiny piece of the sky are perhaps 1500 or more galaxies of all shapes, sizes, and colors! Because this survey pertains to such a small piece of the sky, the implications are staggering: if the region of sky demarked by the bowl of the Big Dipper were surveyed to the same depth, it would contain about 32 million galaxies! And the estimate for the entire visible Universe is that there are upwards of 40 BILLION galaxies, each containing tens to hundreds of billions of stars!"

To put the vastness of creation into perspective, Blair uses a sheet of paper: "Imagine that the distance from the earth to the sun (93 million miles, or about 8 light minutes) is compressed to the thickness of a typical sheet of paper. On this scale, the nearest star (4.3 light years) is at a distance of 71 feet. The diameter of the Milky Way (100,000 light years) would require a 310 mile high stack of paper, while the distance to the Andromeda galaxy (at 2 million light years one of the most distant objects visible to the naked eye) would require a stack of paper more than 6000 miles high! On this scale, the 'edge' of the Universe, defined as the most distant known quasars some 10 billion light years hence, is not reached until the stack of paper is 31 million miles high -- a third of the way to the sun on the real scale of things!"

Pondering this vastness is a humbling experience indeed.

Mark Alexander, Light of the Universe