Daily Aphorism 12 March, 20206

Liberty is not a gift of comfort or a license for unbridled appetite; it is a stern discipline that demands self-mastery first, then mutual vigilance, and finally the willingness to impose consequences when trustees of power betray their oaths.

All Must Govern

The entirety of a people must govern, not merely those entrusted with positions of official governance. This is non-negotiable if freedom is an actual and serious objective for a population.

First and foremost, the individual governs himself. 

Failing that, he is governed by his fellows, whether officially or otherwise. 

When the official fails to govern himself or others properly, the people must govern him. Upon his carcass must fall grave punishments for his crimes. Make no mistake: this is punishment pure and simple—revenge for the willful failure to do what is right and required under the mantle of the Public Trust we so graciously vested in him.  

It is nothing less. It is not justice. It is not rehabilitation. It is grim punishment—an expression of our refusal to tolerate even the slightest deviation from the straight and narrow path of proper governance.

It also serves as a message to all others who assume the mantle of the Public Trust as to what awaits them if they stray.

If one takes seriously the notion of freedom within civil society, these conditions must be satisfied by everyone at all times, lest freedom be lost.  

It is precisely because we have not taken them seriously that America—and much of the world besides—finds itself in its present state of political degeneracy.

We stand at the nexus and the window of opportunity is closing.  Make of that what you will.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Bruen Is Betrayal

The standard of "text and tradition", as established in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) is complete and utter betrayal by SCOTUS of every American. 

"Text and tradition" ignores a far deeper and immutable principle: that of an inherent right that normatively precludes violation for any reason whatsoever, whether a declared emergency, the absence of "text and tradition", or what have you. 

The perfect nonsense - the bald-faced LIE - of "text and tradition" unavoidably reduces the right to keep and bear arms to a privilege. With the Bruen ruling, SCOTUS has once again left the door to our liberties ajar for any tyrant with the temerity and inclination to barge in, uninvited and unwelcome.

"Text and tradition" declares through unavoidable implication that our 2A protected right is contingent upon what "government" has allowed in the past. In doing so, SCOTUS has blatantly and with thin and shabby art left the reality of the practice of our right to keep and bear arms up to what "government" says is allowed. In so ruling, SCOTUS has demoted in point of positive reality our inherent right to that of a synthetic one, which is naught more than a privilege gussied up in a false language of rights and liberty.

Bruen wasn't a win for freedom. It was a clear and unmistakable heavy loss.  

To those who may feel that I exaggerate the danger here: examine with even the most casual scrutiny the long and sordid history of "government's" odious, elastic, self-serving and often deadly habit of redefining terms as mood and expedience might dictate at a given moment.  Even the most meager but honest effort will reveal that the danger is not only real, it is common as dirt, almost always producing ill effects that persist over decades and generations to come.

And so while the Bruen ruling may appear as a win for the lovers of freedom, it has actually served only to yoke them ever more tightly to "government's" whim and caprice, and doing so in what I can only characterize as employing a most bluntly ham-fisted and artless, yet non-equivocating method.  Once again we have been swindled by those in whom we have placed our trust to see to our best interests.

Do not be fooled.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

The Four Horsemen Of Human Corruption Ride!

Corruption is a term thrown about, almost always by Johnny Average, in accusatory tones at political figures and the oft-hated "wealthy".  He is the shining example, the apex exemplar of the man pitching stones in the shabbily constructed glass house of his daily reality.  The one person at whom he will never direct his wilting gaze of open contempt is the one he sees when standing before the bathroom mirror.

And yet, it is to every class of rot and tragedy in the human world that he contributes his quantum crumbs of decay, the summing of which across every Johnny on the earth breaks the camel's back such that we end up with the world as we now see it.

Though I repeat myself, the substance of the following work bears repetition that the noses of all the Johnnies may enjoy the odors of that to which they have so fully contributed with their own forms and degrees of self-same corruptions which they so eagerly affix to others.

Corruption the First: fear.

Those who embrace pretty slavery do so largely out of the cowardice that arises from fear. They fear the unpredictability of non-coerced life, which is often heavy with risk. It terrifies them, and so they are willing to subject themselves to pretty slavery, waiving in principle all their rights, however tacitly, in exchange for the lie that is "security".

In all this, of course, play the elements of avarice, ignorance, and lassitude.

Wanting the proverbial "free lunch" is perhaps the most common of all human corruptions. "I want all the benefits of what I believe to be freedom without having to bear neither the costs nor other burdens of becoming free and remaining that way.

Pursuant to human avarice, which is Corruption the Second, and the fear it drives, and which complementarily drives it, we have willful ignorance, Corruption the Third. A man's drive to such ignorance allows him to rationalize his other failings and the rotten choices to which they lead him, and by virtue of its drag, pull innocent third-parties right along with him.

And of course, our dirt-common tendency to laziness, Corruption the Fourth, particularly in the face of that which is falsely promised as being free of cost, is just the cherry on top, further incentivizing the ignorance that churns pursuant to the satisfaction of the avarice, and the false assuaging of fear.

And so with the mutually reinforcing Four Corruptions of humanity, we humans have statistically sold our souls to the devil for the sake of outright lies and mountains of bullshit that tell us we can at no cost that which always commands a price. It is when rot settles into the human soul - the rot of fear, avarice, ignorance, and lassitude, that tyrants are set free to do nearly anything they please. The technology-enabled horrors of the twentieth century stand as witness to, and proof of just how depraved the human animal is willing to become for the sake of getting what he thinks he wants, no matter who gets hurt.

This is why actual, risk-laden, proper freedom - the kind that demands courage, generosity, intellect, and industriousness of a man - is almost universally unpopular in the human world. What the vast and overwhelming majority really want is pretty slavery, which is the illusion of freedom that veils the rotten heart of the tyrant's pleasure, no matter how appealing the positive conditions may appear at a given time. The fact is, you remain in a cage at someone else's whim and caprice, no matter how large, fancily appointed, or gilt.

Humankind chooses slavery over liberty, thereby leaving the tyrants free to shorten the leashes on which all men now live their miserable existences, at any time and in nearly any manner the Whipmasters see fit.

Bring a large predatory cat out of the wild, place it into a cage and see how happily it will live. They prefer risk-laden freedom to comfortable and easy captivity. And in the end, they pace their cages in miserable depression, what is perhaps the most painfully pitiful sight imaginable. And humans actually choose this condition!

Shame on us, every last one. So long as we persist in giving in to our most base impulses, freedom has no hope. Be well and until next time, please accept my best wishes.

To Be Free Is To Be Self-Governing

The notion of living in a free society raises the practical question of what, exactly, we must become and do in order to be such a people.

Autodiathism is the answer. "Anarchy" has become jargon, saddled with impossible baggage. I jettisoned that term long ago, even though I still use it on occasion. I coined "autodiathism" some years ago from the Greek for "self determination". The idea is to be self-governing. It is a simple concept the requirements and challenges of which are monumental in spite of their outward simplicity.

Civilization is a condition in fundamental conflict with human nature. Civilization cages what is essentially a wild and free animal in its nature, and so the animal rebels against the bondage, however light it may actually be. Our choices in this regard are few: live with the constraints of living among and amid one's fellows, or kill each other until we are left with the last two cavemen, Thak Eisenberg and Grog Blumenthal, nervously eyeballing each other from opposite sides of the nightly fire, hobnailed clubs in hand and ready to deal the final period at the end of humanity's last sentence.

Clearly, the human instinct to survive - to LIVE - biases us toward learning to live with each other. This is perhaps the right choice, everything considered. But the challenges there are stupendous because the civilized state rubs against and thwarts our hunter-gatherer nature. Having been suppressed, the inner animal of nature's origin rebels, and so we have robbery, assault, and battery - as well as all the other "wrongs" that men commit against each other.

The Framers of America were quick to point out that free people must perforce be moral. In the context of civilization, morality turns out to be a huge hill to surmount. But once there, it is relatively easy to remain there, all else equal.

To be free is in deep part to be self-governing in accord with one's proper moral constitution and his habits of comportment. But even in a society that is morally sound in the general, there will be those who either cannot or will not self-govern. We call them criminals, most often... or in some cases just "assholes". Because they fail to self-govern, they must be governed by others for at least a time.

So a basic requirement for flourishing and ubiquitous autodiathism is that people BECOME "government" - but not in the usual sense of the lie with which we all grew up. Rather than governMENT, there must be governANCE; firstly of the self by the self, but secondarily and only where and when needed, of those who fail at it, by those around them. This is primary, but there should also be secondary roles of near-equal importance and of great utility, where we hire trusted guardians of the peace who discharge their sworn oaths as matters of primary obligation, paid of course. Because their lives are pledged to such service functions as investigations and trial of accused criminals, they become well adept at those functions that include law, forensics, and so forth. But they are not absolute authorities whose every fiat must be blindly obeyed. They are, indeed, servants who operate at our sufferance. They operate within an envelope of granted authority under agreed conditions making clear to them that any excursion beyond the metes and bounds of that generously granted authority will carry harrowing consequences, anywhere from losing one's position or life, to losing life itself, depending on the severity of the violation in question.

This all requires vast public participation, high moral standards, and an attitude of eternal vigilance, narrowly PROVISIONAL trust, and a grim intolerance of any breach of that trust, including the ready will to remove life from those who break faith with whom they swore to serve, i.e., the general public.

This is a task that, were we to begin today with full cooperation and material means for implementation, would take at least a full generation go get off the ground in a way we might even vaguely deem "comfortable". It would take probably at least three or more full generations to get most of the mental, cultural, and the various external poisons out of the population. And it would likely take a healthy number of public executions as stark illustrations and reminders of just what it means to betray the trust in which all such guardians of the peace have been vested.

Draconian response to tyranny is essential as the deterrent, no matter how seemingly trivial the violation may seem, It is the only way to best ensure that all comers to the altar of the public trust do so with shivers for fear of betraying it, whether through corruption or accident.

The price of tyranny must be set to such impossible height that all scoundrels are immediately dissuaded by their own choice to demur from public service. Let them endeavor to defraud grandma of her savings, rather than assume the mantle of trust, for tolerance of such people with the latter leads to what we now have: borderline chaos and endless grift with life rendered a misery for countless legions of otherwise good people. The time is now finally upon us to decide, and decide we shall, one way or another; whether through positive action of the default of evasion what sort of a world it is in which we wish to live. There is no escaping this, so my advice is to think on it carefully, realizing what you relinquish if you choose continuing tyranny, which will one day not too far off, advance beyond our reach to throw it from our necks. I continue to believe in the goodness of people, in spite of the evil that besets us on all fronts. And so once again I bid you adieux, and as always, please accept my best wished. May the Divine guide us all toward the light of goodness.

Somewhat Daily Diatribe, 5 February, 2026

The "left" whines and shrieks "racist!" endlessly.

Newsflash: we are all "racist" because we are wired to be.

Forgetting that the notion of "racism" was concocted by CPUSA in the late 1920s/early 1930s in response to America's "no thanks" response to the pitch for "communism", and granting for conversation's sake some marginal validity to the idea, the truth of it would be that our mid-brains are wired to the tribe: "us v. them" is in our DNA, which is a major reason why civilized humanity engages in so much warfare. We are a fundamentally predatory species oriented toward our most immediate filial and social relations. Couple that with our possession of a complex cerebral cortex that can a little too easily wander into strange territories if we fail to control how those cortices evolve from childhood, and the formula for some grand challenges becomes our reality. Add to that the fact that territorialism is yet another fundamental aspect of our midbrain selves, and we then find ourselves with the conditions for some rather serious trouble, as is borne out by our checkered history of ever advancing wavefronts of violence.

Civil life runs at deep odds with our basic midbrain programming. Therefore, remaining behaviorally sane in a civil world becomes a study at internalized warfare within individual in one manner and degree or another. Sedentary living even at the small village scale lies at some odds with the hunter-gatherer architecture of the human mind. The midbrain impulses suited to living on the constant move and taking what you need to survive from the unclaimed resources of the planet are engineered for basic survival under such conditions, and not a whole lot which is fancier. Those reflexes, however, have been perverted by the unnatural circumstance - the "cage" if you will - of civilization, and have run right up against the formalized, abstract ideals for life among and amid one's fellows under those conditions - products of the higher cortex. Therefore, crime, tyranny, war, poverty, disease, misery, and possibly eventual extinction as a species have arisen with the great advances to which sedentary civil life has lead the human species. Hunter-gatherer tribes were never going to send people to the moon. They also were probably not getting mugged on a lonely lower Manhattan street at 2AM on a Saturday in frosen January by one of their own.

We were engineered for the savage life, i.e. mobile tribal living, and not for sedentary civilization. Small bands of maybe 50 individuals can move quickly. No houses or huts to pack up and move. No pack animals to keep/maintain, and far fewer and simpler stresses. If a threat looms, you get out of dodge in minutes, or even seconds if conditions demand, with relatively small material losses, typically. Life is free, but in many ways very tough; but that toughness fosters unity and strength in both the individual and the group. Things are difficult enough when people work together as small but smart and well-practiced superorganisms. Therefore, the immediacy of overbearing reality renders gratuitous in-fighting as a very dangerous development to be avoided at almost any cost.

This is very different from sedentary, civil life where the populations are much larger, people who are strangers to one another live in unnaturally close proximity to one another, and the biggest superorganism in town is always the "government", stranger to all men, and which issues directives to which disobedience is often met with grim violence. Further complicating matters, "territory" is become static, much larger, and far more abstract in many cases, rather than small, fluid, and readily portable by a single individual human being. Property has become much larger, most often quite cumbersome, and relatively very difficult to manage, as opposed to that which one can carry on his back.

There are many advantages to civil life, but the price we have paid has been stupefying. And in more recent times, it has been shown to foster rank, raw stupidity, whereas much simpler savage life where one is on the constant move demands quiet, well-centered minds, patience, maximally engaged intellect and smarts at all times, wisdom from direct experience, and an attitude of understanding and respecting the consequences of one's choices in an indifferent and often very dangerous environment.

In those times, ages ago before the rise of sedentary living - and even well into that era - people moved physically with far greater mindfulness and deliberation. They did so because a broken leg would likely mean death. Today we have people doing the most insanely idiotic things, like jumping off 80-foot ice cornices into bowls of 8-foot deep powder snow so they can thrill-ride down to the lodge for a hot-toddy and some wild memories... assuming they don't end up buried in an avalanche. And if someone busts a leg, the ski patrol will take then to the ER where the booboos will be made all better.
Until comparatively recent times, people spoke with far greater elucidation, deliberation, clarity, and completeness of thought because no sensible man wanted to risk misunderstandings, especially with strangers, when the consequences could result in death or maiming injury.  When reading texts from times not even so long past, we see longer and seemingly flowery, almost redundant sentences uttered between people.  This expressive style was not used because people liked to hear themselves talk and show off to others how poetically they could ask directions to the nearest corner bodega.  It was to make as certain as possible that they were not taken as a threat to the other, nor were they offering any form of verbal disparagement.  As to that latter, it must be understood that in such times people even of comparatively meek social status were raised to understand and deeply respect the nature and power of words, whether spoken or written.  They understood that nothing in their lives were as immediately important than words.  Even a single poorly chosen word could mean severe consequences for an individual because neither were threats, nor disparaging remarks, nor defamation easily tolerated, especially by the upper classes, even among each other, much less from those of the lesser ranks.  Let a poorly considered sentence fly from your lips and you could find yourself on the field of honor the following morning, or just killed on the spot, a sword or dirk buried in your chest.

Today, due to the often will-contrived synthetic protections of "government", people have degenerated in their understanding of words such that people now as matters of constant habit allow all manner of wildly ill-considered statements to escape.

Your thoughts form your reality, and your words form your thoughts.

Let that sink in just a bit as you consider the things you hear people routinely say these days. You may wish even to consider some of what issues from your own pie hole. We all do it, and we do it because we can almost always get away with it. None of that bodes well for our future as a species. Such behavior as we routinely see today would have been seen as bordering on demonic possession even a mere couple of centuries ago precisely because it lacks any hint of basic sanity. But that is where mismanaged superorganizing on the modern civil scale has taken us. While many of civilization's byproducts border on the miraculous, the price exacted has been terrible on many fronts, and I often question whether it has been worth it, given the evils that it has all dragged along with it. By a similar token, one has to question how many of those evils arose a matters of nature, versus intentional introduction by men of lesser integrity, capacity, and perhaps even of malevolent intention.

The bright spot in all this is that it is by all means possible to live freely, healthily, profitably, happily, and properly among and amid out fellows. All hope is by no means lost... yet.

The dark spot is that far too often we choose not to. Our individual corruptions of fear, avarive, ignorance, and lassitude lead us to make poor choices in such matters. For all the miracles to which civilization has given rise, it has also corrupted the human animal deep in his marrow, and as of this writing things appear to be getting worse by the day. I question whether our pending plans for sending people to Mars will have proven worth the losses of freedom, not to mention the oceans of blood spilled on the path to getting us there. Only time will tell, but in closing I say this: we are not helpless. What we have broken, we can repair. Human relations are deeply ruptured these days, and I see no possible brightness in humanity's future unless and until we make proper amends in our habits and our attitudes toward each other. I have no idea how to do that on a global scale, but I can stake stabs at how to do it in America, which while a simpler proposition, nonetheless remains a monumental and at times seemingly insurmountable task. One thing I can say for certain, however, is that the fundamental divisions between "tribes" that include vaporous notions such as "right" and "left", or "progressive" and "conservative" have to be settled and mended as the level of the Principles of Proper Human Relations. Anything less dooms us to a bleak non-future where we retreat into a New Dark Age, full of hatred, anxieties, tyrannies perhaps yet unimagined, poverty, misery, and death for those who fail to toe the tyrant's line. There will be no more protesting the the quiesced rights that so many of us have taken for granted for so long. There is hope, but YOU have to become its vehicle, it's realization. The notion of such hope carries validity only when one acts, and does so properly in accord with the Principles of Proper Human Relations. We do not speak here of burning cities in the strident effort to dominate the other; to force him into the good mold, because human nature being what it is, he will fight you tooth and nail out of the resentment he feels at being given no choice. We must, rather and through example, convince the deceived and ill-trained of the virtues and pleasures of living properly among and amid each other; of the joy of it; the profitability. The only alternative is grim, leaden existence where vibrant, healthy, and free life ought rather to be found. And in order to become such an exemplar, one must master himself: the most nearly impossible task in all of human reality. Note "nearly". Barring some sort of Reset Event, the road ahead for us appears long and very arduous, and that is assuming we even bother giving our remaining hopes a halfway serious effort. The alternate path is nothing less than doom - and that does not have to mean the physical extinction of human animals from the earth. It can even more easily mean the extinction of freedom's last remnants and any prospect for their return. As the levers of human technology grow in power, coupled with the ever degenerating, tightening standards of individual comportment that reduce us to Merecog status, the window of opportunity to turn things back toward liberty closes ever more narrowly until the day comes it shuts completely. On that day, and in concert with what will almost certainly prove the ever growing and viciously enforced avarice of the Global Hegemon, all hope for humanity will have been extinguished.

All people will then have been reduced to the lowest, most demeaned, degraded, and disparaged status of rank and abject slavery possible. The juicy irony, for whatever cold comfort it may provide, will be that that the agents of "state" who have deceived themselves into believing they stand outside of the constraints of control they foisted upon the rest, shall themselves be equally imprisoned by their schemes. The technologies so many view today as miraculous will have been forged into the shackles of their perpetual misery.

So my suggestion is to get right with yourself by whatever means you need. If it means getting your lazy bones up and going to church, then do it. But whatever it is, I suggest you not wait even one more day because that window is closing on us all. Be good. Be loving. For Pete's sake be smart. And until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Being Free Is No Picnic

I used to be a consulting engineer. I ran my own small firm and made fair piles of money. Then one day my phone stopped ringing because apparently I was too old. I now work a second career making about 7.5 percent of my former earnings, and I don't complain about it. I could cry and wail and shriek "age discrimination", but I don't because were I to do so, I would be a dishonest scoundrel attempting to secure something to which I am not entitled: a job guaranteeing me my former going rate. I would rather starve than stoop to such depravity.

So I work on a construction crew. It keeps me from getting fat at 68, keeps my other skills alive, and to be honest, it is more interesting and satisfying than dealing with whiny clients who make all manner of wildly stupid decisions despite your strong analysis, the upshots of which tell them in clean and concise language that those decisions are big time risk-laden losers.

I am owed NOTHING by this world, and neither are you, save that we respect one another's equal rights. I make my way and if one day I cannot, then I will leave this world for want of whatever it was I could not secure for myself. I can accept that precisely because I understand I am owed nothing, save respect for my natural rights, just as I owe the same to all others. Make your bones using your best honest effort. Some will win and some will lose. This is the nature of things.

If you want to learn and become reasonably wise, then learn this. I promise that it will serve you well.

Freedom, for which actual "anarchy" is nothing fancier than a somewhat arcane euphemism, demands seven things of a man:

1 Intellect
2 Smarts
3 Integrity
4 Respect
5 Generosity
6 Responsibility
7 Courage

Choose these and you will be a free man. But none of it is easy; much of it being terrifying at times, and aggravating much of the rest of the day. Then there is that slice of your soul that is going to rebel against each of these virtues precisely because they are all difficult, and therefore chafe against the part of you that is just a little bit rotten, wanting free stuff and cheap ease, not to mention having the world precisely to your liking.

That's your inner two-year old, and make no mistake, we all of us have one.

Being an adult means putting the brat in a box, burying him, and never again letting him darken your door - an effort that must continue unabated for a lifetime because that spoilt toddler is eternal, and he never ever gives up trying to strong arm you into caving to his insistence and, at times, tantrums. Why do you think people rob banks, end up in prison, dead, or destroy their lives with drugs and violence? It is because the leave their inner runt in charge, rather than keeping the little beggar on a choker with a very short leash.

Choosing to be an intact, free and sovereign adult can at times be a miserably difficult task. But when you choose correctly, you enjoy a brand of liberty that no amount of self-indulgence can ever come close to matching. Letting your base self run amok is the guaranteed path to disaster and death. Keeping him in his box is really the only reasonable path to a life worth living. The dividend of self-respect - knowing that you are the captain of your fate - is priceless, and nothing in this world can beat it. I know because I've been on both sides of that line.

The good news here is that the more diligently you practice the habit of holding your inner destroyer at bay, the easier it becomes; the more familiar, and therefore the more comfortable. Bear also in mind that maintenance is a whole lot easier than getting up the slope in the first place. And at some point, much as with the practice of good mannerliness, it becomes pleasurable habit from which one gains endless satisfaction because you have become your own master. Few things are as satisfying as knowing that you are beyond some specific corruption not because you are inherently immune, but because you have chosen to be. That is the truest and greatest power a man can cultivate. You are in control of who you are and what you do, come what may. And what comes is not always the thing that you think you want, so be prepared for disappointments. Those are the times when it pays to be stubborn because giving in to the screaming brat may make you feel better in the moment, but down the road you are guaranteed to regret the decision.

The quality of your life is 90% dictated by your attitude. Choose to be a whiny cur and your life will be riddled with miseries at every turn. Choose to be an adult in control of your emotions, impulses and desires, and you will benefit from it in ways you cannot now imagine. Learning to eat bitter and yet remain intact and in control of yourself is high attainment. Comparatively few are able to do it; far fewer are willing to even try. But the failure is almost never one of capacity, but of will. People just decide that there's no point in being that good. And so they settle for being lesser men for the sake of getting what they think they want. This is the very definition of the Weakman.
Johnny gives in to the appeal of Eileen's legs because he just cannot (WILL not) stop thinking about what it must be like having them wrapped around his head.  And so he dwells and dwells until his sense of what is right (like not cheating on his loving wife) shrinks in comparison to his sense of what he wants, resulting in all manner of rationalizing as to why it's OK, even if only for one time, to hit on Eileen.  And that is just one of the manifold ways in which people run their lives off the rails with all the best of intentions.

You will never lose by choosing to be a free man, which is a man of knowledge; a man who runs himself, which is to say a man of self-control. Of that you have my sincere promise, but the path is difficult with most giving up, which is a terrible shame, for were they to stick with it, I confidently estimate that 90% or better of all the problems of which so many complain, would vanish as if by magic.

Ron Paul used to quip that "freedom is popular". He was wrong. Freedom is decidedly unpopular and it is so because of those seven requirements for being a free man.

Ball's in your court.

It always was. God bless you all, and until next time please accept my best wishes.

Hierarchy Isn't A Problem

For the past several years I've noticed a disturbing simplism with people who claim to be "anarchists", most of them on the younger side of things, with respect to the notion of hierarchies. Many such people rail on endlessly about the evils of all hierarchies, pledging to see them eliminated in toto, no matter the cost. This tendency to simplistic views is now extremely common, it having grown steadily in America since at least the mid- to late-1960s. We could see it with the hippies as they spewed their half-baked notions of freedom, war, culture, and politics in general as they served well enough in their roles as useful idiots to the progressives. But at least many of those young adults recovered, at least in some part, once they stopped the LSD, dropped dope smoking, and of necessity had to go get jobs so they could eat and have a place to sleep that wasn't some stranger's couch or the back of a van. Sadly, the trend of simplistic world views has grown not only to ubiquity in certain populations, not all of them of a "progressive" or "left" bent, but it has done so in a manner such that it seems civil discourse with such people has become just this side of impossible with large legions of them. In that vein I would like to zoom in on those who self-ID as "anarchist": this Bud's for you. I would begin by noting that here my use of "anarchy" is not as jargon, a snippet of heavy baggage that the term has carried for well over 100 years now, and which is why I prefer "autodiathism", from the Greek for "self-determination". Men such as Gavrilo Princip are prime historical examples of minds run amok to the extent that world-altering changes ensue in the wake of the material choices of action they make pursuant to the chaotically errant beliefs they embrace. One such current fad beliefs among so-called "anarchists" is that all hierarchies are inherently evil and that they must be eliminated... probably by any means necessary, and regardless of who gets hurt. And so I feel obliged to correct this false belief for the sake of humanity's future, not that anyone's listening. There are a great many different types of hierarchy, the salient idea being the plain and simple fact that hierarchy in sé is neutral. Claiming the idea of hierarchy as some sort of inherent evil as so many go on about until the eyeballs of reasonable men roll from their sockets, is plainly non-credible. It is like blaming the gun for the murder of the poor fellow working the graveyard shift at a corner bodega. It is so obviously wrong, it astonishes those same reasonable men as to how it is possible that anyone with an IQ is able to accept it as even worthy of considerations, much less as valid and true.

The bottom-line value of any hierarchy lies in whether it brings the employers of such structures to the satisfaction of their objectives, all else equal. A hierarchy is just another tool. It can be used for good, or otherwise.

Communist and other authoritarian political hierarchies, particularly when applied to populations larger than the typical Irish Catholic family of three generations past, have proven as universal failures because they chafe against everything that is human in people, most particularly those who have to work to support those who loaf; it pisses people off and leaves them with attitudes which are understandably antithetical to that which is generally considered constructive and desirable. Reasonable people do not like being robbed, defrauded, or played for fools.

As for hierarchies in businesses, an area of consideration that gets all sorts of truly foolish lip service in so-called "social media" discussions, those are mostly private matters. Little Johnny Dough and his brother Dill, may have jobs at Glominoid Corporation, but they are by no means entitled to those jobs in any absolute sense, contrary to what some people might believe. Therefore, if they don't like their circumstance as applies to their employment, they are free to seek other arrangements. If they cannot secure other employment, then they are out of luck in that regard, and are then faced with the choice to cowboy up and get with their employer's program, quit, or risk being given the heave-ho when their less-than-satisfactory attitude comes to the boss's notice.

It's a tough world out there, but not nearly as tough as it might be. People would do themselves a big favor in remembering that. Not only are hierarchies not inherently evil, in many situations they are absolutely necessary. The lowest hanging fruit there, of course, would be the case of warfare. Imagine Galithia has just marched its army over your northern border. They are well-trained and disciplined. They operate on a hierarchical basis and function like a well-oiled machine. This is what I call "superorganization": when a group of people come together pursuant to a common purpose in order to accomplish things that a solitary individual could not achieve on his own. Could a single man have built the Great Pyramid at Gizeh in Egypt? Not likely, especially with the technological capacities we currently assume were available in those days. But gather twenty thousand men of manifold skills and sprinkle twenty or so years of time liberally about, and before you know it, VOILA! Superorganizations must perforce be managed. Your body is a superorganism in cellular terms, and it is a hierarchical system that manages the various functions. You don't have cells in the tendon of your left big toe managing heart rhythms or the lining of your colon doing your thinking for you... well, at least most of us don't. The organs such as brain, kidneys, heart, liver, etc. are arranged in a form of hierarchy insofar as the regulation of their respective functions are concerned, as well as their inter-relations. Someone one needs to tell the gall bladder when to dispense its contents to the stomach, how much, and when to stop. That represents a functional hierarchy with which you would not be able to properly digest your food intake, which would eventually lead to the arrival of your expiration date. Consider the erection of a 150-story office tower. Without a properly designed, constructed, and functioning hierarchy, the task becomes utterly impossible to so much as get off to a reasonable start, much less complete. Yet I hear "anarchists" railing one endlessly about the universal evil of hierarchies as a class of arrangements. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Now we look at the other side of the coin, where hierarchies bring some form of evil to the world. A prime example is always found in political schemes. Communism/socialism is perhaps the premier example of hierarchies that produce nothing better than unvarnished evil in the forms of poverty, degradation, servitude, disease, misery, and death. In such cases, the anarchist's complaint stands valid, almost to a fault. Consider the political corruption that now rampages through the halls of America's Congressional offices. What was once at least marginally better in such terms, is now utterly absent any pretext of respect for either the Constitution, or the rights of Free Men its putative purpose is to protect from harm. The well designed hierarchy of American governance has been turned against the people it is supposed to serve, this example underscoring the way in which the tool has been turned from proper application that produced net good results, to something which foists net evil upon the people. Just as a hammer is a tool, or capitalism, hierarchies can produce fine results, disaster, or just about anything in between. It is neither good nor evil. The good and the evil that results rests wholly at the feet of those who design, administer, and operate a given hierarchy. This isn't rocket surgery. And to rather than going all crazy, losing one's mind over <GASP> hierarchies, it pays good dividends to dig just a little more deeply where it will be revealed to anyone with an open mind that the value of such structures predicate almost completely on the results they produce, all else equal.

So do yourselves a big favor and lock away your emotions run amok, calming yourself, and adopt demeanor of reason backed by solid logic. I promise that you will thank yourself in the end. There are endless dragons in the human world against which to do battle. Hierarchy, as such, is not one of them. Be well, and until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Today's Diatribe, 22 January, 2026

The grand testament to the unforgivable stupidity of spoiled and overyly-pampered Americans lies in the fact that we now have a significant minority who actually believe that socialism/communism is the answer to the world's problems.

The danger here is almost incalculable, and the enemy is us.

The history of authoritarian collectivism is now plenty long enough - and the absolute bloodiest in all of humanity's blood-marinated history - to be validly assessed as first-order evil and the greatest possible danger to all that is good between men.

Genghis Khan was a low-rent amateur in comparison with the Marxists, Leninists, Maoists, and all the other viciously murderous simulacra who butchered and starved their ways through the decades of plunder, death, disease, poverty, slavery, and abject misery.

Those wicked, murdering fiends contrived the kind of personal hell that strips away any abstract debate about numbers or "direct vs. indirect" causes. Those soulless simulacra didn't just murder — they engineered suffering on a scale that mocks the humanity it claimed to want to save, while brazenly posturing as "liberators". What greater irony in bald-faced lying could possibly devolve? The Soviet hypocrisy - the unmitigated brass they manifested - of daring to vilify Hitler while outdoing him in body count and systemic sadism by an order of magnitude... The NAZIs were choir boys in comparison with communist/socialists. There is simply no comparison. Such notions constitute a bottomless depravity that exposes the subhuman nature of their false convictions, and the endless corruption that lies at the very heart of forced collectivism.

No words are sufficient, no form of condemnation equal to the debt of rightful justice owed to the memory of those who perished at the hands of communist/socialist demons, not to even mention the unmitigated tragedy of the viciously abused people who miraculously survived the physical meat grinder, only to have had their lives consumed and reduced to ruin by the most toxic and deeply, dangerously idiotic contrivance of all human history.

What do we say to the dead, and to those whose lives were wasted in brutish cruelty and abject servitude to the most evil criminals ever to walk the earth? "OOPS"?!

The adherents to the most unforgivable evils ever vomited forth from hell's gizzard into the lap of abused and slaughtered humanity must never be forgotten for what they made of themselves by conscious choice. Let them serve as eternal reminders of the worst that humanity has had to offer unto itself, that we may never again fall into such felonious error.

And let the Free Men of the world come finally and perpetually to grim intolerance of those who advocate for yet another round of such stench-generating depravity, regardless of intentions fair or foul. Let Free Men give fair augury to the carpet bagging peddlers of such decay and tyrannical danger, that their machinations will not be far tolerated; that they will be reduced to ash if they persist in their attempts to pollute the minds of sovereign people with the lies that corrupt through enticement, and which are the black heart of what is among the greatest of all evils, second only to that of human corruptibility itself, upon which it relies for its ingress.

And if perchance it proves that there can be no peaceable avenue to the just, and proper resolution of such dolorous threats of ragingly deadly ignorance and malevolence, then may Free Men find the wisdom, resolve, and the much needed courage to take what measures desperation may require of them in order to preserve all from the ravaging falsehoods that threaten to shackle our wrists, ankles, necks, and our minds.

The era of tolerating of the intolerable must now come to an ignominious end at any cost because it is destroying us.

God bless America, human freedom, and may destruction and castration find all tyrants, petty and grand. May all Weakmen be reduced to irrelevancy, forever quiesced by their own blatant corruptions of ignorance and avarice in the faces of their betters, that they may pose no material threat to the best interests of free and sovereign humanity. Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Government Of The People

 Notice how the president is not calling up a militia in the face of the grave troubles now coming to boil in Minnesota; nor is anyone else in "government".

I make no judgment on this fact as to cause or intention, yet I cannot help but wonder why it is so, for the possible reasons are several fold.

Because of the way utter failure has increasingly progressed by "government" in America over the past umpteen decades, one can only wonder whether this is yet more scheming intended to leave "government" as the tacitly assumed sole authorized wielder of such powers and roles, the rest relegated to dependence upon "government" to handle all problems no matter how great or petty, through prohibition. This is a valid concern, and IMO time is here for Americans to stand and take matters into their rightful hands through assertion of their sovereign rights and authority to put crimes against liberty to proper ends, most especially when those crimes are committed in large scale such as we now see in places as rioters burn cities and bring innocent people to unjust physical harm.

The "state" is not the only entity qualified to correct such excursions from peaceable daily life. "Government" is in fact the least qualified to correct such problems even in the best of times, much less so after 150 years of ever growing corruption and failure.

Arm yourselves in body and mind in preparation not just of the current and escalating troubles, but to become the proper and perpetual instruments of just and rightful governance, first and foremost of yourselves, but also of those of your fellows who fail to do so in criminal fashion.

Remember and never forget: "government" OF the people, first and foremost. YOU are "government". You must be, because if you will not govern, you WILL BE governed by others in whose intentions, integrity, and capacities you can never be quite certain. Giving yourself over to police, mayors, governors, legislators, and village dog catchers is to put your very life in the hands of people whose trustworthiness is PERFORCE never sufficient to the day.

The choice is ours.

It always has been. Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Tragic Disappointment At Nürnberg

I just watched the Soviet version of the Nürnberg trials documentary. While the horrors of the NAZI crimes cannot be validly disputed, and they were absolutely ghastly, the spin put on it all by the soviet producers cannot be taken seriously as anything other than disingenuous political posturing.

The hypocrisy of the Soviets, especially in the face of Stalin's murder of tens of millions of what were putatively his own people, was and remains rank and utterly repugnant, not to mention blatantly obvious. The Soviets were and remain as matters of historical fact, among the most hideous and pathetically transparent political actors ever to befoul God’s half-acre. To hear the words of derisive condemnation issuing from the soviet interests was a joke whose irony proved absurdly impossible, not to mention risibly puerile.

The NAZIs were rotten bastards, but the Soviets also butchered in numbers that rivaled — and by some credible reckonings exceeded — those of the Nazis.

What astonishes me in terms of the seemingly infinite human capacity to meekly tolerate every manner of rank evil that rampages across the face of the earth, is that in the wake of these indescribable horrors, all of which have been documented courtesy of the blessings of modern event recording technologies, the people of the world remain as degraded degenerates whose evil fault lies precisely in their indolent and cowardly tolerance. They make of themselves little creatures of the most despicable cowardliness imaginable, instead of standing tall and courageous in the face of ever more direct tyranny.

The average man at his rare best is found willing to speak as the weak-wrist milquetoast against such horrific tyranny, yet will do nothing of substance to counter it. Nay, he in fact remains meek and cowardly, accepting and obeying every rotten fiat shoved under his nose by men unfit to clean their toilets; and for what? For the sake of not rocking the boat; of his fear of losing what little the tyrant has for the nonce allowed him to retain.

Taken uncritically, the Nürnberg trials seemed as a bright spot of hope for humanity at that time where the rot and filth of the NAZI butchers was laid bare, the perpetrators held to account. It seemed a new standard had been laid down for holding tyrants accountable for their acts of violation against the God-given rights of all men.

But alas, the hindsight of the last eighty years has shown in no uncertain terms that in spite of the initial appearances, the trials at Nürnberg were nothing better than yet another example of obvious revanchism dressed in the false garb of proper justice and a new direction for humanity in the common man's relationship to his so-called "government". The interceding eighty years have witnessed monotonically increasing levels of "government" overreach and monotonically decreasing accountability, all the while the people remaining timid servants to those who were ironically set in place under the putative assumption of serving those over whom they now presume to lord.

What a tragic disappointment it has all been. Be well, and until next time, please accept my best wishes.

When, Where, and How Ideals Apply

The ideals of freedom are well and good under peaceful conditions. Under the current conditions in which we find ourselves in America, and indeed globally, certain elements must be set aside. So setting them entails grave risk in the same ways we all say with the so-called "war tax" which was supposed to be repealed after hostilities ceased. We all know what happened with that vaporous promise. But to play by the rules while your enemies make every circumvention thereof, is to be a fool.

If a people be virtuous in their morals and intellects, the aforesaid risks become greatly attenuated, and those ideals are then appropriately restored to their full and proper station in the land, most likely safe from elision over time. Otherwise, it matters no whit what the status of one's ideals may enjoy; the rot of corrupted culture, of decayed minds devoid of the necessities basic to liberty, essentially guarantee the degraded outcome of poverty, disease, misery, and death.

The world is not in a state of rational, peaceable coexistence. Anyone thinking China is not a grave enemy is a dope. Anything thinking the so-called "cartels" pose no real threat to the peace, stability, prosperity, and safety of the western hemisphere, is a dope. America is in a state of near chaos. Playing by the rules while rioters burn cities and those in whom the public trust has been vested refuse to pursue criminals is the choice of fools, idiots, and traitors to liberty.

I fully understand wariness of the things Trump is doing, and I share in it because we all know just how quickly they run amok. But to continue as we have, tolerating the intolerable; failing to correct the deep evils plaguing the land, courtesy of the political class; failing to embrace the intelligence, moral basis, and self-control required of the Free Man, is to declare cultural suicide as inevitable.

The extreme measures the current president is taking are absolutely necessary. Why? Glad you asked: because WE THE PEOPLE have failed in every conceivable way to honor our freedoms by BEING Free Men, rather than meek and obedient consumers of pretty-slavery, not to mention those who have failed to act upon their noble words in favor of liberty. We as a nation of individual Americans have, by and large shamed ourselves so deeply, words fail.  And we continue to do so as either we idolize Trump, or curse him, all the while our fat and overly well fed asses remaining planted in our living rooms. As a people, we are a political/philosophical disgrace. We talk, but fail to do, all the while wanting what cannot be and expecting someone else to provide at no real cost.

The one and only thing about the "left" that I respect is the fact that they get out and pursue their interests, rotten as those may be. But credit must be given where due, even to one's enemies. We Americans, on the other hand, still sit idly in the expectation that someone else, anyone other than ourselves, is going to make all things right. And the booger on top of that turd-sundae is this: some show the unmitigated gall to clutch at their pearls and wail when the men they called upon to save them step up to correct the evils that beset us all.  Meanwhile, from the other sides of their mouths they clutch their pearls and wail about the evils they want vanquished. I don't much care on which side of the question one chooses, but really, make up your damned mind.

To expect men to act by rules that do not accord in propriety with the prevailing conditions of a political environment is not reasonable. Expecting accord between mutually and violently exclusive conditions is rank, inane stupidity, meriting no consideration whatsoever. To expect men to correct the raging evils, the threats that beset us by drinking tea with crumpets, pinkies sticking out prominently whilst discussing the finer points of croquet on the manicured lawns of the estate, is raving evil in itself.

So make up your minds: slavery, however prettily set, or a stab at freedom, which is likely to cost blood, given the prevailing circumstances. But don't ask for ideal liberty at no cost to your delicate sensibilities.

Not only will you not get it, you will only succeed in irritating the rest of us.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Do Not Utter "Transgender"

Your thoughts form your reality.

Your words form your thoughts.

There is NO SUCH THING as "transgender". There are only transvestism and the psychoses where people clain to be of a sex other than as they were born, genetic male or female. This is deep mental disorder, whether organically sourced, which does exist in vanishingly rare instances, or that which arises due to cultural psychosis. 

Kids' minds are VERY plastic. They see, hear, and absorb EVERYTHING. That is why we must be so careful of the things we do, say, and the examples which we pose before them. What we have done here in America is unspeakably obscene and criminal. What worse defilement can any adult commit than allowing beautiful children to permanently disfigure themselves surgically for the sake of a social fad?

We have allowed this both legislatively and culturally and we damn ourselves because of our manifold corruptions that have lead us to such degraded states.  I cannot imagine the depths of the psychosis that must be required in order for a nominally decent adult human being to so much as acknowledge such horror valid, much less that they board that bandwagon.

The fact that even those of us who retain their basic sanity use "transgender" in their discussions of that foul lie represents a victory for the destroyers because in so using it, we lend the term, and thereby the notion validity that it does not possess in and of itself. In so doing, we shoot ourselves in our own feet.

We should use "transvestite" and "transvestism" instead, denying the enemies of good health and social cohesion even that much credibility. These are people who range from mentally deranged to outright evil such that Stalin and Mao appear the choir boys next to them. They are malefactors who must be denied any acknowledgment whatsoever, regardless of how trivial it may seem.  Once an idea concretizes in the minds of a critical mass, that notion then becomes a part of the culture in question.  The potential for damage then rises precipitously and eradicating the idea becomes nearly impossible.  The idea of transgenderism could be removed, but only if we stop acknowledging its validity.  Using the word keeps the lie alive.

Your words form your thoughts. You get into the habit of using "transgender" and out of thin air, quite literally, the notion forms in your mind as if it were real, when all it really is, is the bullshit of the ironically monikered "progressives" that has wormed its way into your soul. It matters no whit that you rail against it. By using the term, you have acknowledged it, and in so doing have helped make falsehood into truth.

DON'T DO IT.

This is difficult, but necessary.  Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Why Most People Actually Hate Freedom

I have in my experience found that most people who claim to love freedom actually hate it.  To begin with, they do not know what defines actual, proper freedom.  Therefore, when they are presented with descriptions of the circumstances and conditions that are typically part and parcel with such freedom, they recoil in anger-laced disgust and horror, ready to eviscerate anyone who dares suggest what is for them obscenity itself.

The question then naturally arises: "why?"  Why, when presented with the realities of being properly free in the civilized world, does the vast majority of people react with such unconsidered rejection?

The trivial answer, of course is that we as a species are mostly corrupt.  But that doesn't really address the question with any specificity regardless of how true it may otherwise be.  Sufficient to the day is the following.

Freedom is counter-entropic, which means it requires lots of often very difficult and tedious work in many forms to overcome the natural entropy of the universe as we currently understand it, and which dominates the human condition as a never sleeping ruiner of all that is good between men.

Freedom requires the following of a man, and in no particular order:

1. General intellect
2. Essential smarts
3. Integrity
4. Honor
5. Courage
6. Objectively correct morals
7. Generosity
8. Self-control/mastery
9. Attitude
10. Self-mastery

1. Intellect

It should be clear that intelligence is perhaps the paramount fundamental requirement for freedom because it is foundational to all the rest.  Without proper intelligence the would-be free man is incapable of grasping the conceptual basis of liberty, especially in the context of a civil society.  Groups of hunter/gathers might get away well enough with banging one another over their heads when emotional impulse demanded such satisfaction.  They might copulate like dogs in the street in front of their fellows, uncaring as to whether anyone sees them.  But in a civil society it appears that people have generally shied away from such base behaviors because life is no longer quite so simple and unstructured, as is the case then with simpler societies living in the wild.  Being so, more highly structured elements of interpersonal relations arise, probably very naturally because the nature of practical human relations has changed as the result of civilized coexistence in villages and later, larger towns and cities.

The dullard is incapable of wrapping his head properly around such ideas, however tacitly they may be held by his fellows, and therefore remains more a creature of reflex than a thinking, rational being in possession of the requisite faculties for being a self-governing member of a civil society.  Today, such people often end up in prisons, mental hospitals, or on the slab.

2. Smarts

While a necessary element, intellect is not sufficient to the cause of self-governance, which is the very basis of properly civilized human freedom.  Nominally normal people possess the raw intellect to be free men.  However, left inarticulate, that intellect will serve them not to such ends.  Basic intelligence must be molded by training and experience, forming and constituting what we call "smarts".  Free men must perforce be smart men, and their smarts must include the types of learning that provide them with the capacity to make proper decisions with respect to how they govern themselves, lest they be governed by others.

It is all well and good to have the smarts of a carpenter or an engineer, but without a correct knowledge of self-governance the same man becomes useless in his potential as a civilly free being.

3. Integrity

The integrity of a man speaks to a certain sort and level of predictability, which translates directly into his trustworthiness.  Without trust between them, two people can have no sort of a relationship beyond one of wonder, doubt, and suspicion.  Trust is the single most essential element in any relationship between men.  If I cannot trust you, I do not want you near me.

4. Honor

A sense of honor more finely tunes the quality of individual integrity.  A man may have high integrity, yet no honor, depending on that to which his integrity cleaves.  One could have great integrity, which is to say devotion and predictability, for betraying those who have chosen to trust him.  That would be a man with integrity, yet no honor.  Honor speaks to the brand of a man's integrity.  It signals to others that his trustworthiness does not extend to acts which others would regard as foul or otherwise unpalatable.  Quite the contrary, it very much indicates that one can be trusted to consistently do the "right" things by others.  This is the correct brand of trustworthiness, as opposed to the incorrect that would include the predictability that one would betray others in some consistently stable pattern.  This may seem a silly distinction, but I assure you that it is essential to be aware of it and to understand it, no matter how tacitly obvious and/or irrelevant it may seem.

5.  Courage

What is courage?  It is the quality in a man that leads him to do what he knows is right even when to do so leaves him quaking with fear, dread, and trepidation.  Without courage, men would shrink away from what is right for the sake of what feels safe, momentarily expedient, or easy.

6. Correct Morals

An objectively correct moral foundation is an absolute requirement for being properly free.  Those of a certain philosophical bent will rail and rage against so much as the suggestion that such an objective standard exists because in their limited minds all things are "relative".  In a very pedantic sense, one that is detached from practical reality, they are correct.  However, their views on such matters are invalid precisely because they have no relevance to real living on planet earth.  What they fail to understand is that once a frame of reference is chosen, which is to say a standard of assessment, objective truth with respect to that standard arises and solidifies instantly, thereby establishing the selfsame objective basis for making all manner of judgments within that frame.

On the earth and in the human world, the one in which we must daily navigate as we move through time and space, life itself becomes the standard by which objective decisions are made.  It is important to note that the application of that standard must perforce be consistent and devoid of any hypocrisy, which speaks to one's integrity, honor, smarts, and basic intellect.

So for example, as a living breathing human being there are things toward which I move, and those away from which I flee.  I wish good health for myself; food and drink; freedom to pursue my interests.  I wish not to be dismembered; to lose what is mine; to be burned with fire or beaten or raped or murdered.  In my perhaps longish litany of desires do I find my standard of comportment, my aversion to hypocrisy being critical to my ability to render assessments and judgments of myself, as well as others.

If I do not with to be dismembered, then I must refrain from dismembering.  If I wish good health for myself, I should also wish the same for others, or at the very least refrain from wishing ill upon them.

If I wish to have my rightful prerogatives respected by others, then I must perforce show them the same courtesy.

And do on and so forth down the list of common human desires, which serve as the very basis of our objectively correct morality.  Hypocrisy is the most insidious of all human evils, for it hides in places many cannot find it, cloaking itself in manifold justifications for why Johnny is free, but Jimmy is not.  Were there only one evil I would be permitted to eradicate from the world, it would be hypocrisy.  Such eradication would in my rough estimation instantly eliminate 99% of all readily avoidable human troubles.

7. Generosity

In the relevant sense, generosity does not mean the opening of one's wallet to shower silver upon the less-fortunate, but rather the generosity of spirit that, in consonance with one's honorable nature, knowledge of what is right between men, proper morals, courage and integrity, leaves others to live their lives as they wish, just as you wish your rightful prerogatives to be respected by others.   You may not like their choices in all instances, but you are large enough, generous enough to allow them to make them in any event, so long as those choices do not trespass against the equal rights of others.

8. Self-control

The free man is mastered by no man other than himself.  He owns himself and is therefore responsible and fully accountable for his actions.  Therefore, self-control becomes yet another central characteristic of the man. He uses the faculties he has developed in such ways as to best satisfy his goals without resorting to the violation of the equal rights of his fellow human beings.  If for example he has entered into an agreement with another, sees an opportunity to get away with an act that would profit him at the expense of the other without his knowing, yet knowing that it constitutes a breach of trust between them, he employs his self control to squelch his impulse to act in that way such that he preserves his honor, integrity, faith to his morals, and his agreed-upon obligation to the man with whom he has his agreement.

Self-control sees him remaining a gentleman when he encounters the most beautiful woman he has ever beheld; one upon whom his impulse is to fall upon and drag away to his cave to satisfy his base desires.  He is no rapist and no woman, regardless of her raw, sultry allure will lead him to turn his back on everything he holds dear as a human being in himself.  It means he remains sober when the desire to join in the libations is strong, but he must for whatever reason desist.  It means knowing when to walk away from a gambling table even when he's certain that the next hand, toss of the dice, or fall of the little ball is sure to be the one that will yield the big payoff.

9. Attitude

Self-control is driven by one's attitude.  The right attitude is foundational to right decision making.  Without it, correct decisions come only by dumb luck and almost never through deliberate intention.  Charles Swindol said, "life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it."  In other words, more than anything else, your attitude determines at the deepest levels the quality of your life.  The right attitude produces right results, the wrong attitude, disaster petty or grand.

If you don't care, which is to say that you carry an attitude of not caring or not caring properly or enough, you will most likely not exercise the self-control required to regulate your behavior in a properly self-governing manner.  You will not care about your honor, integrity, or morals, and as such you will be incapable of being a free man, but rather only an ill-disciplined brute, plodding his way through the minutes and moments of his days, caring no whit for how his choices affect others.  And for him the day may come when the consequences come, whether they be finding oneself with no friends or family, or perhaps in a prison cell, or even no longer among the living.

And perhaps equally importantly, all this counts most when nobody is watching, running contrary to what so many believe. "Meh... nobody will know."  YOU will know, and you will never be able to escape the knowledge of what you did, or failed to do, as well as the fact that once committed, the bell can never be unrung.

Self-mastery

This, the tenth quality of the list, is the result of the other list elements taken together.  Self-mastery is the overarching requisite for self-governance.  Without it, self-governance becomes a hit-or-miss affair, rather than something upon which others may depend upon in you.  The qualities of one's intellect knitted together with the smarts needed for proper self-governance, as well as the honor, integrity, courage, moral foundation, generosity, self-control, and attitude culminate in self-mastery.  Self-mastery is the ultimate achievement any many can attain in a lifetime.  Self-mastery tells the world that you are the sole proprietor of your life; that you are free of masters other than yourself.  It does not mean that you make no errors or mistakes.  It does, however, tell the world that you own those errors, stand accountable for them, and do what you are able for the sake of amends, the avoidance of encores, and your self-respect.

Taken as a gestalt...

In other words, proper freedom and attendant self-governance requires everything of a man, whereas authoritarianism requires nothing other than mere obedience. Do as you're told, the tacit assumption there being that the "authority" knows what they are doing and has your best interests in mind, rather than someone else's.

This is what I call "pretty slavery". It is the free lunch that can never exist, but for which people lie to themselves contrariwise for the sake of not having to do the heavy lifting required of the free man on a daily, moment-by-moment basis. Such people want all the benefits of freedom without having to bear any of the costs of obtaining it and, more significantly, the burdens of keeping it. Such people are what I call "Weakmen". They are weak almost never due to an absence of capacity, though there are by all means such cases. Their corruption of strength roots directly in their attitudes of refusal to do what must be done in any given moment in order to fulfill the requirements of being a self-governing free man. It's just not sufficiently appealing to them, and because they are free to reject those requirements, they choose to in the overwhelming majority of cases. The Weakmen think they have gotten over with attaining something for nothing. Au contraire. Such corruption comes with the precipitously steep price of one's autonomy of self-ownership and their self-respect. Self-ownership is supplanted by that if a third party authorized to steer one's choices willy-nilly as it's designs and possible (likely) caprice may dictate. Such men think that they remain the sole proprietors of their own lives, but they are either blind to the presence of the tyrant's hand, or they simply do not care that it is there to interfere with them, so long as the cage they occupy is large enough and sufficiently provisioned with the accoutrements desired. Bread and circuses. And of course, the self-respect of the Weakman such as it may ever have been, flushes right down the toilet, further degrading the image he holds of himself.

For the Weakman, the responsibilities of being free are simply too much work, most especially the self-mastery part, all feigned protests to the contrary by Johnny Average notwithstanding, for he lies. So much so is it the case that Johnny holds naught but dread for the requirements of the Freeman, he will come to the defense of his evil masters up to and including the point of murdering his betters for the sake of protecting the tyrannies to which he has been so deftly trained by those who have not his better interests in mind. I will add that his hatred of freedom is bolstered by an even greater hatred of those who embrace it, for not only do they stand as threats to Johnny's status quo - that which is familiar and therefore comfortable to him - but they shame him for his inferiority, of which they remind him by their very existence. Though Johnny may appear something of the dullard, he is not so much so, save for functionally as the result of his willful choice, rather than any organic incapacity. He was given a perfectly serviceable intellect, and because of this he is able to dope out for himself, however tacitly and devoid of sufficient self awareness, that he is in fact inferior to those whom he hates with venomous, bitter rage; those who embrace liberty.

Underneath all the noises of his wrenching and wracking consciousness there lies the dim awareness that he could choose differently. But Johnny is a coward, and a bitter one at that. He has not the drive and courage to walk away from the squalor of his dominant thoughts, yet he sees it in those who do. He possesses the sense, however deeply buried, to be shamed by this, and typically is. But being so corrupt, it is beyond his desire to improve himself; to choose the better path, for not only does he lack the courage to do so, the deeper truth is that he has not the confidence in himself to believe he can do it. Therefore, he retreats into the darkness of his shuttered soul and, incapable of escaping the shame his higher self knows he should be feeling, rages against those who in his twisted mind make so public a mockery of him as they reveal to the world just how diminished and degraded a wretch he is. This is seen every day as those on the so-called "left" defend decay and criminality of all sorts. They do it because it is all they have; it is all they know. They refuse to see the errors of their way because to do so would demand change in themselves, and that would demand work. Actual, blood, sweat, and likely tears work. Oh, the horror! Being ultimate narcissists, they simply refuse to admit any fault of their own; everything wrong with the world is borne by the Other. They cannot bear their shame, so they bury it under mountains of self-hatred that they redirect outward toward those whom they know in the seat of their souls to have made the better choice. They seem to prefer squalor and decay over what for them seems a self-shattering admission of error.

One can but feel pity for such collapsed souls so lost, so hopeless that likely nothing beyond a reset event holds any chance for their recovery. And even in the case of such an event, it seems likely that a vast plurality of those people would prefer to meet their doom than ever admit that maybe they had taken a wrong turn somewhere in their lives. So say the outward indicators. As for solutions, I have few offerings. The so-called "reset event" - an occurrence so disruptive of daily life that it becomes immediately clear that carrying on as one has is now come to an immediate end. Such an event is, I suspect, most likely physical such as a meteor strike upon the earth, aliens landing on the South Lawn, or Jesus popping out from behind a cloud, and in what might be described as a less than jovial mood. I can see little or no chance for lost people as they currently seem to exist. Their psychoses are so deeply seated as to leave normal means of aid and salvation beyond the reach of their fellows. They are not even in the same world as self-governance and likely never shall be, all else equal. It is terribly sad because we are talking about several billions of souls, worldwide; a definite and likely overwhelming plurality of extant humanity. I wish I had the answers. Some say it is Jesus, and I may not disagree - but how do you bring people to the Sacred when they outright refuse it no matter how it is presented to them; when they are so habituated to the profane; when the manifold evils of the world are the things they have intransigently chosen for their devotion and worship? I wish I were smarter. Please forgive the seemingly sour note on which I now conclude this work, but as usual and until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Why Taxation Cannot Be Avoided

Those who claim to be of a liberty-oriented bent tend to go on at some length, at times rather drearily so, about the evils of taxation.  Normatively they are correct, but their views on the matter tend to be errant in that they fail to see all sides of the positive reality in which we all exist.

For one thing, unless enough people were to refuse to pay, all the talk is pointless. But there's more; a whole lot more.

It behooves us to acknowledge that there are matters of positive reality that cannot be wished away with normative fantasies. The main reality relevant to all this is that of superorganization. When a group of people come together to act as a single body, they become very powerful when compared with the individual. The larger and better integrated the group, the more powerful it is. When properly managed and applied, and perhaps with a smidge of luck, the superorganism becomes a formidable entity against all people, including its own. Pay close attention to that point because it is very important.

Being human constructs, superorganisms become complexes of not just individual bodies, but of human motivations and incentives. Let us call this the "m-complex". It is basically the sumtotal of the motivations of those who make up the superorganism, usually massaged by those at the top. It is very powerful, and it is very human. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but perhaps the idea is made clear. We have on our hands something we could call "ultrahuman". It effectively acts as a single entity and it is by no means of necessity benevolent. Furthermore, it suffers from many, if not all of the failings of human individuals. They are feudalistic, clannish in nature, and THAT is where the trouble roots in terms of much hated taxation.

I once forwarded the notion of "lowest denominator" as one of the most significant dictating factors in human political affairs. He who will be the least constrained in his actions will be the most powerful, all else equal. Oftentimes, all else is not equal, so we cannot rely utterly on what I am about to describe, but it is a very good guideline in statistical terms regarding how things are likely to go between groups.

If, for example, group A is constrained not to involve civilians in warfare, but group B is not, in a war between the two group B holds a material advantage over A. A will not bomb B's cities, whereas B will unhesitatingly bomb those of A. We could go on with examples of how one group becomes more powerful than another, but perhaps the point is made clear.

So now to the point about taxation. Superorganizing costs. It costs lots. That is the cold, ugly truth of the matter. And if your clan does not keep up with the Joneses with respect to some set of basic capabilities, philosophical, political, economic, and military, you will be consumed by your unavoidably predatory neighbors.

This is an all-or-nothing deal. If so much as a single group retains a materially superior level of superorganizational capability, all other players must also retain theirs. Otherwise, the one who has retained their capacities, including and perhaps especially the m-complex, then rises above the rest in terms of its raw ability to dominate, and it WILL. This is human nature. We are predatory apes.

Why do you think the Soviets had to get the bomb? They were lowering themselves to the same denominator as America, Britain, and France for the sake of their survival. Israel stole the bomb for what is safe to assume are similar reasons.

We, the humans of planet earth in the time we call the "twenty first century" are of so wretched a condition in spite of our Teslas and iPhones and other fancy trappings, we are reduced to having to make the choice of acceding to taxation so that rival clans don't eat us, or risk being so eaten, either by the Other or even our own; those who run our side of the three-ring Cirque du Bullshit.

And of course the real kicker is that we cannot be certain of how real are those external threats. Are they? Or are they just more smoke being blown up our backsides? But if we decide to stand tall and refuse on mass scale the demands made by our own, the tax vampires, I suspect that the maybe phony baloney threats would suddenly become very real. Why? Because Theye are One. The rulers probably don't care whether they live in America, or London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing, Bumfuck... so long as they retain their exalted positions and enjoy all the highest advantages of material life as they hover, high above the rabble over whom they lord, mostly unbeknownst to the wad of the unwashed vulgar.

So you see, we are in a catch-22 of the grandest scale. If we stop paying taxes in numbers sufficient to alter the status quo nontrivially, something Theye would certainly be unwilling to tolerate, either we would fall prey to the external threats as our military and other presumably defensive institutions went dark for a lack of funding, or some other reaction would be concocted as a sap against the rebellion.

Theye are very powerful and they are endlessly covetous of their power. Theye are devious, very clever, very smart, very disciplined, endlessly treacherous, and are therefore very hard to overcome. Given our current state of technological capacity on the one hand, and our state of moral decay and rank ignorance, it may prove the case that Theye are now undefeatable. I don't know one way or the other, but I do know that we are in feces so deep, were the vulgar to awaken fully to their tenuous positions, I'd wager the suicide rate would go through the roof. That the common man doesn't pass his days in paralytic terror is testament to his capacity to turn his eyes away from reality, mostly on the softly spoken lies of his keepers.
There you have it.  Mr. Rock, meet Mr. Hardplace.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.

Trump May Have Overlooked An Option Regarding Fentanyl

During the cold war, the American "government" put the economic gronk on the Soviet Union in many ways in order to hamstring Russia's capacity to make practical advances in technology, including the ability to augment the quality and reliability of their "products", such as they may have been.

Among the strategies was the restriction on exporting certain material capabilities to the Soviets, constituting a technology embargo.  Silicon chips, for example, could not be sent into the Soviet Union, nor could any sort of computer or computer controlled machinery. Even manual machinery such as lathes made my Hardinge were part of the embargo.  

The manner and mechanism used to make such restrictions legally binding was to declare them as "munitions".  Just as rifles, artillery, explosives, tanks, aircraft, and ammo were restricted based on the fact that they were munitions, the selling of which would constitute aid and comfort to an enemy†, so it was declared for other technologies, the provision of which would expand an enemy's capacity to bring harm to American interests.

That ability remains intact, and my idea is to apply it to fentanyl.  Consider the devastating potential of the illicit forms of a drug with approximately 300 times the potency of morphine in the hands of an enemy who might balk at the idea of engaging America in direct military conflict, knowing that they would be crushed.  Fentanyl is an obvious candidate forf bringing America to a state of sufficient decay and chaos to allow its enemies to then control it from within with no immediately obvious ties to the enemy forces responsible.

This may be the reality we now face.  China is not an American ally.  The Meso-American and South American drug cartels are not American allies.  These are all enemies and they are all shipping large quantities of fentanyl into the United States.  The Drug Enforcement Agency estimates about 7 metric tons of fentanyl enter the United States every year.  At an assumed LD50 of .667 mg/kg, 7 metric tons of pure fentanyl would be enough to kill about 115 million people.  This, of course is idealized, the practical reality being likely very different due to factors such as losses in administration of the drug to vast populations in places such as cities.  The more practical likelihood is about 10% of that 6.8 tons is actual fentanyl, which is still 680 kg and enough to kill about ten million people, were it to be distributed in lethal dosages.  While this modified scenario greatly decreases concern for a chemical warfare strike on America, the possibility should not be dismissed quite completely because technologies advance daily and human conniving for the sake of political gain never ceases.  The combination of those two factors with the raw potency of pure fentanyl, not to mention its far more potent derivatives is the stuff of nightmares and must at least be held in mental reserve.

But all paranoid speculations aside, fentanyl is by all means proving a threat to American lives and to America's security.  The estimates of overdose deaths at this time is about 74,000 per year in America.  This figure appears to be on a plateau for now, but it is anyone's guess where it may go, though my hope is for a downward slope.  In any event, given the potential for use by an enemy as a weapon of mass destruction or as one of slow and steady decay, fentanyl could and perhaps ought to be classified as munitions.  This would open the door to a broader menu of possible responses to nations known to be supporting the manufacture, smuggling, and distribution of this chemical agent.  

Nations like China have been skating in terms of any consequences for their clear complicity in the illicit and illegal fentanyl trade.  Perhaps it is time to alter the cost-benefit dynamics for these enemies of the American people.  If we can classify a lathe as munitions, I hold little doubt we could do the same for a potent and readily lethal drug such as fentanyl.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.


† In other words, an act of treason.