Category Archives: History

Rule Five H.L. Mencken Friday

Last Sunday was the birthday of Henry Louis (H.L.) Mencken, a man whose written words I’ve read, pondered and quoted at length.  Here, from Issues & Insights, is a neat tribute to the man and his thoughts.  Excerpt:

Henry Louis (H.L.) Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, born Sept. 12, 1880, was a newspaperman, essayist, satirist, social critic and perhaps America’s most outspoken defender of liberty in the first half of the 20th century. Reflecting the difference between what was defensible as consistent with preserving our rights and what government did, a major theme of his writings was that “Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”

On his birthday, it is worth remembering some of the reasons Mencken offered to justify that shame, since, by his standards, our government is even more shameful today than when he wrote.

The basis justifying shame in our government lies in the appropriate role of government:

The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone – one which barely escapes being no government at all.

Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently – one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.

The problem is that our government has exploded in a torrent far beyond those proper bounds:

Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us.

All government … is against liberty.

Here’s my favorite bit from Mencken:

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself … Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.

All government … is against liberty.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

All government is against liberty.  Some governments, of course, are wont to move harder against liberty than others; as far as the United States have fallen on the freedom scale, we’re still a long ways from North Korea.  But the arc of government always bends in that direction.

In spite of my usual optimism, I’m not sanguine about the future of the American republic.  Why?  Because I’ve read a lot of history.  It is in the nature of government to grow always larger and more intrusive.  And, as Mencken points out, all government is against liberty.  It’s a ratchet, not a dial, and thus only moves the one way.  I’m not saying that a return to traditional American liberty-based government is impossible, but I wouldn’t bet a nickel on it happening.

What’s surprising these days is that it all seems to be happening so quickly.  Actions by government – mass lockdowns, imprisonment of political dissenters, corruption of the military, partisan prosecutions by Imperial law enforcement -just seem to be spinning out of control.

Maybe, given honest elections, we could hold the bad things at bay a little longer.  But we can’t rely on honest elections any more, either.  Meanwhile, we can look back on Mencken’s work, realize once again how prescient he was, and wait for the next shoe to drop.

Animal’s Daily Neolithic Partying News

Beer – is there anything it can’t do?

11,000 years ago, in what is now Turkey, a group of Neolithic folks gathered to hunt gazelles, feast, and get trashed on beer.  Excerpt:

Southern Anatolia is at the northern end of the Fertile Crescent, a region in the Middle East invigorated by the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, where hunter-gatherers first settled down to farm. Göbekli Tepe was constructed sometime during this lifestyle transition, perhaps by different groups lured together through innate social desires. Exquisite carvings, decorated pillars, and animal-like figurines first suggested to researchers that this was a temple of some sort, intended for worship. Then, in 2012, archaeologists uncovered six large limestone troughs that could have each held up to 42 gallons of liquid. At the bottom of these structures were faint traces of oxalate, a compound which develops during the mashing and fermentation of cereals. To the researchers, this new evidence suggested that site’s previously modest narrative needed a rewrite.

“At the dawn of the Neolithic, hunter-gatherers congregating at Göbekli Tepe created social and ideological cohesion through the carving of decorated pillars, dancing, feasting—and, almost certainly, the drinking of beer made from fermented wild crops,” they wrote.

Whatever “worship” was going on at Göbekli Tepe, it was lively, to say the least.

Indeed, one wonders if beer goggles were already a thing in those days.

Think on this for a moment.  Human behavior, for the most part, doesn’t seem to change much, even over the span of 11,000 years.  I can easily picture these folks – a gazelle on a spit over the fire, a fired-clay jug of some foamy, alcoholic brew in their hands.  Teach them to speak English and they’d fit right in at any pig roast/kegger held in the Allamakee County hills of my youth.

It’s neat to know that people then, just liked people today, liked to unwind after a hard day with a mug of suds – and occasionally to let loose and get hammered.

Now, when did they get around to whiskey?

Animal’s Daily Historical News

If you’re interested in military history, like I am, you’d do well to check out the works of Dr. Mark Felton. He is a military historian who specializes in the Second World War, and has a knack for finding obscure bits of wartime lore that most folks have never heard of.  Here, for example, is a video (yes, I know, YouTube, but what can you do?) talking about the Dirlewanger Brigade, an SS unit formed of convicts, psychopaths and sociopaths that even most of the SS looked on with some horror:

Most of Dr. Felton’s videos take the same form; an in-depth, detailed presentation of some obscure happening that most people never heard of.  Ever wonder what became of the bodies of Nazi war criminals executed at Nuremberg?  Did you know about the first attempt by the Allies to invade Hitler’s Fortress Europe?  The Japanese copy of the infamous Tiger tank?  The last battle involving the WW2 German Panzer tank – in 1967?  You can find all that and a lot more.

I can’t recommend Dr. Felton’s work enough.  I have not yet started on his lengthy list of non-fiction books, but they’re on my list.  Speaking of which:  His written works include:

  • Yanagi: The Secret Underwater Trade between Germany and Japan 1942–1945 (Pen & Sword: 2005)
  • The Fujita Plan: Japanese Attacks on the United States and Australia during the Second World War (Pen & Sword: 2006)
  • The Coolie Generals: Britain’s Far Eastern Military Leaders in Japanese Captivity (Pen & Sword: 2008)
  • Japan’s Gestapo: Murder, Mayhem & Torture in Wartime Asia (Pen & Sword, 2009)
  • Today is a Good Day to Fight: The Indian Wars and the Conquest of the West (The History Press, 2009)
  • The Real Tenko: Extraordinary True Stories of Women Prisoners of the Japanese (Pen & Sword: 2009)
  • The Final Betrayal: Mountbatten, MacArthur and the Tragedy of Japanese POWs (Pen & Sword: 2010)
  • 21st Century Courage: Stirring Stories of Modern British Heroes (Pen & Sword, 2010)
  • Children of the Camps: Japan’s Last Forgotten Victims (Pen & Sword: 2011)
  • The Last Nazis: The Hunt for Hitler’s Henchmen (Pen & Sword: 2011)
  • The Devil’s Doctors: Japanese Human Experiments on Allied Prisoners-of-War (Pen & Sword: 2012)
  • Never Surrender: Dramatic Escapes from Japanese Prison Camps (Pen & Sword: 2013)
  • China Station: The British Military in the Middle Kingdom 1839–1997 (Pen & Sword: 2013)
  • Guarding Hitler: The Secret World of the Fuhrer (Pen & Sword: 2014)
  • Zero Night: The Untold Story of World War Two’s Most Daring Great Escape (Icon Books: 2014)
  • The Sea Devils: Operation Struggle and the Last Great Raid of World War Two (Icon Books: 2015)
  • Holocaust Heroes: Resistance to Hitler’s Final Solution (Pen & Sword: 2016)
  • Castle of the Eagles: Escape from Mussolini’s Colditz (Icon Books: 2017)
  • Ghost Riders: When US and German Soldiers Fought Together to Save the World’s Most Famous Horses in the Last Desperate Days of World War II, (Da Capo: 2018)
  • Operation Swallow: American Soldiers Remarkable Escape from Berga Concentration Camp (Center Street: 2019)
  • Chapter 8: The Perfect Storm: Japanese Military Brutality in World War II, Routledge History of Genocide, Ed. C. Carmichael & R. Maguire, (Routledge, 2015)

Check out books and videos both.  Dr. Felton has a real gift for uncovering these little bits of military history, and his work rewards the viewer.

Rule Five Failure Of The Law Friday

I found this an interesting read; from the Law & Liberty blog, here is Law On the RangeIt’s an interesting theme, and one that speaks to current events; what do we do when the law fails us?  Excerpts, with my comments, follow.

The western is a deeply American genre, full of themes intimately bound up with American history and Americans’ images of ourselves. It has fallen on hard times in recent years, partly because westerns often center around narratives that are now thought of as politically incorrect. This makes it all the more exciting that the Library of America has published a single-volume collection of four classic westerns: Walter Van Tillburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1940), Jack Schaefer’s Shane (1949), Alan Le May’s The Searchers (1954), and Oakley Hall’s Warlock (1958). All were made into films (also terrific), but the novels are more complex and nuanced. They are also a pleasure to read, although the historically accurate renderings of the language of the frontier may soon render them vulnerable to cancellation.

The novels are at least loosely based on real events, although all portray the West as far more violent and less ‘lawful’ than it was. An invaluable source on the history of the West is Terry L. Anderson and P.J. Hill’s The Not So, Wild, Wild West (Stanford 2004). The novels’ focus on atypical events helps provoke us to think about the role of law in a free society. Their settings share the absence of the formal rule of law, and the struggle of communities’ and individuals’ to establish law to protect their lives, families, and property.

It’s important to note that these novels are set in a time when civilization was expanding into a wilderness, and the rule of law had not yet been fully established, requiring the people to take matters into their own hands.  How is this relevant today?  Because arguably, in several of our major cities in particular, the rule of law is collapsing and eventually, if there is to be any order, the citizens may again have to take matters into their own hands.

The law fails in Warlock, Shane, and The Searchers; only in Ox-Bow can we see alternative paths by which the law could have been successfully invoked and only in that book are the representatives of the law portrayed as anything less than failures. In Warlock, the chief authority is the literally insane General Peach, who lives in his own reality obsessed the perhaps mythical Mexican bandit. The country sheriff is a day’s ride away but refuses to do more than appoint a helpless deputy for Warlock, explicitly telling the citizens that the town is too far away for him to concern himself with. The voice of the law is a disreputable “judge,” who has no official status, who is never depicted without his whiskey bottle, and who is sleeping off a bender when the fateful decision to send for Blaisedell is taken and therefore unable to even attempt to stop the Citizens Committee (of which he is a member). In Shane, the homesteaders at first want to wait out the attacks on them by the cattlemen, in hopes that their growing numbers will lead to the establishment of a local sheriff, who will be responsive to the more numerous homesteader-voters rather than to the cattlemen. In The Searchers, the Rangers show no interest in Debbie’s fate or the men Amos and Mart kill when the two are ambushed. They only become involved once the searchers’ activities threaten to stir up trouble with the Comanches.

So, a common theme is that the official representatives of the law are either absent or disinterested.  Sound familiar?  In many of our cities (I’m looking at you, Portland) while the street-level law enforcement is present, they have been hobbled by their political leadership to the point of helplessness.  So, what will happen?

The failure of the rule of law is most dramatic in Warlock. When the army finally comes to Warlock, albeit for the illegitimate purpose of chasing the striking miners out of town to help  the mine owner crush the strike, Blaisedell takes a stand in front of the boarding house (ironically named for the General), protecting some sick miners within. At first, he appears successful in persuading the soldiers surrounding the building to go away. Then the General suddenly assaults Blaisedell, beating him furiously with a stick, marking his face with welts and knocking him to the ground, roaring “I am! I am!” The troops enter the hotel and seize the wanted men. Just as the mine owner’s victory appears complete, the General suddenly receives word that the quasi-mythical Mexican bandit has been sighted. The army charges off, allowing the miners to be escape. The General dies while leading the pursuit, in ambiguous circumstances. The rule of law collapses as a result of his unhinged and unfinished quest.

One could argue that the rule of law is collapsing now, not in small towns still in the process of being carved out of the wilderness, but in American cities, some of which were formerly some of the greatest cities in the world but are now quagmires of crime and corruption.  But it’s not just the collapse of the rule of law; it is also the corruption of the rule of law by those ostensibly charged with maintaining it.

The article concludes:

These four novels serve that purpose well by enabling us to think through how we would act when the formal legal system is absent or fails, as it does in each of these stories. There are dangers in acting too hastily (Ox-Bow) or for the wrong motive (Searchers). Using force to solve a problem risks both the enforcer we turn to (Shane) and the soul of the community (Warlock). None of these books offer easy answers, which is why they are still worth reading more than half a century after they were written. All of them will provoke the reader to think, which is why we should be glad the Library of America has combined them into this excellent edition.

But here’s the bit that’s missing from the analysis:  The cultural values of the people themselves.  A large portion of the trouble in our inner cities have derived from a combination of things:  The failure of the education system to teach people how (not what) to think, a toxic, malignant ‘thug’ culture that has captured too many young people, and an increasing tendency to disregard the established political process in favor of riots and looting.

So what do the regular folks do?

It’s important to note that an organized police force is not necessary to maintain public order.  Here, in the locale of our rural Alaska home, there is no local police force, no sheriff’s office; the nearest badged law enforcement establishment is the Alaska State Police barracks in Wasilla, some thirty-odd miles away.  But robberies and home invasions are unknown here, because of an aspect of the frontier culture that is still Alaska:  One of the best ways I can think of to get shot, probably by an accomplished marksman, is to kick in someone’s door in the middle of the night.  Alaskans are accustomed to looking after themselves, and in general do a pretty fair job of it.

The four novels described all, to some extent or another, describe the failure of the rule of law and the necessity of the citizenry handling injustice, unrest and disorder themselves.

Now, think on that for a moment.  Why does the rule of law exist?  To protect the liberty and property of the citizens.

Is it doing so now?

Animal’s Hump Day News

Happy Hump Day!

I swear, you can’t make this shit up.  Take a look:

I distinctly remember Ronald Reagan meeting Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland.  Reagan landed first, and was waiting when Gorbachev’s Aeroflot airliner landed – in the Icelandic wind.  Gorbachev deplaned in a typically Russian heavy overcoat and fur hat (say what you will about the Russians, they know how to dress for cold weather) and Reagan was outside waiting for him in a regular business suit.

As Gorbachev approached, he slipped on a patch of ice.  He did not fall, but before his aides could react, the older Reagan ran to his side and steadied him, as though he was the younger, stronger man, representing his younger, stronger country.

It was a great visual.  Now we have doddering, senile old Joe Biden, sending the world just the opposite message.

Great.  Just great.

With that…

On To the Links!

Yeah, that’s not going to work out the way you think.

And that’s not likely to work out at all the way you think.

The epidemic that wasn’t.

Well, this is embarrassing.  If you’re not feeling like this, you should be.

No shit, Sherlock.

No shit, Sherlock II.

From the time of dinosaurs, and before.  Cool.

Holy shit!  Watch the embedded video – there was sure as hell automatic weapons fire on the Mexico side of the river.  Believe me, I’ve heard it before – and not an automatic rifle.  That was an M-60 or something of that sort, a crew-served machine gun.  (But they have such strict gun control in Mexico!)

Neandertals took good care of their teeth.

Well, you bought a house in loony California, so…

Fuck you, China.  Right in the neck.

This is actually racist.

1.  Read riot act.  2.  Order rioters to disperse.  3. Open fire.

Another one bites the dust.

Baghdad Bob at the southern border.

Meanwhile, immigrant facilities are apparently full of giant baked potatoes.

Joe Biden(‘s handlers) can’t keep covering this shit up.

The Navy is still looking into fusion.  Not surprising, the Navy operates a lot of reactors and has plenty of nuke experts.

This Week’s Idiots:

CNN’s Stephen Collinson is an idiot.

Newsweek‘s Michael Dyson is an idiot.

The Guardian‘s David Smith is an idiot.

USA Today‘s Nicole Carroll is an idiot.

Notorious blowpig Michael Moore is still an idiot.

Colorado farmers and ranchers respond to Gov. Polis’s idiocy.

Slate‘s Pedro Gerson is an idiot.

Slate’s Jane Hu is an idiot.  I’m sensing a pattern here.

Everyone involved with this bill is an idiot.

The Week‘s Ryan Cooper is an idiot.

The Nation‘s Elie Mystal is an idiot.

And So:

Boy, this one brings back some memories.  I remember going to the Ben Franklin’s Five and Dime when I was a little kid.  They had bins of little plastic toys, dinosaurs, birds and the like.  My Mom would give me a nickel each trip, if I had behaved myself, so I could buy one.

Later, as a teenager, I worked at the Woolco in Cedar Falls, selling guns and fishing gear.  Woolco was, of course, a branch of the famous Woolworth chain of five and dime stores.  I never fell in love with a co-worker there, although I did date one of the girls from the Garden Center for a while.  Nanci Griffith did a wonderful song about that happening, however; this is Love at the Five and Dime.  And (let’s say this softly) compare this marvelous display of talent, class and skill with what passes for music today, say, for example, at the recent Emmy Awards.  Anyway.  Enjoy.

Rule Five Stumbling Into War Friday

National treasure Dr. Victor Davis Hanson wonders if President Biden(‘s handlers) might be about to blunder into another war due to incompetence.  Excerpt:

If, even unwittingly, President Biden projects the image that the Pentagon is more concerned about ferreting out wayward internal enemies than in seeking unity by deterring aggressors, then belligerents such as China, North Korea, and Iran and others will likely—even if falsely and unwisely—wager that the United States will not or cannot react to provocations, as it has done in the past. And accordingly, they will be emboldened to provoke their neighbors with less worry about consequences. 

Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 on the false assumption that Stalin had been too busy purging his military elite, starving his own people, or executing both rivals and friends. He certainly did all that and more. 

Yet despite Soviet cannibalism, nonetheless, Hitler was apparently unaware that the chaotic Russians could still field an army twice the size of his own. Stalin’s tanks and artillery were just as or more deadly than Hitler’s—and soon far more numerous than the assets of Blitzkrieg. A spirited, defiant and, yes, united populace was determined to protect Mother Russia from the invader. The British Empire and America were far more potent allies than Hitler’s Mussolini and Tojo. 

So wars are deterred when all the potential players know the relative strengths of each and the relative willingness to use such power in defense of a nation’s interests. Lack of such knowledge leads to dangerous misjudgments. And war then becomes a grotesque foreordained laboratory experiment to confirm what should have been known in advance.

Wars begin when aggressive powers believe that their targets are weaker, or give the false impression that they are weaker, or at least stay inert in the face of provocation. What were Argentina’s generals or Saddam Hussein thinking when they provoked the United Kingdom or the United States during the Falkland War and First Gulf War? No doubt, they assumed that their more powerful targets were too busy elsewhere, played out, or insufficiently concerned to react. In aggregate, a lot of damage and death followed in those two respective brief wars of 1982 and 1991—and all to prove what should have been obvious.

Read the whole thing, of course.  Dr. Hanson’s insights in this arena, as with so many others, are invaluable.

But as an old soldier myself, I have some insights as well.  The hard truth is that the United States is weaker than it was in 1991, when we fielded the largest expeditionary force the U.S. military had produced since World War II.  A generation of “peace dividends” followed up with even reservists dealing exhaustively with deployment after deployment after deployment in some of the worst shit-holes in the world have brought us to this pass.  Now the Biden(‘s handlers) Administration’s Top Men seem more concerned to wring their hands about “white supremacists” in the military than they are with making sure that the armed forces are able to carry out their primary purpose – to kill people and break things – or that they are only sent out to do so when there is a vital, compelling national interest in doing so.

We now have soldiers, Marines and airmen in some of the worst places in the world with no clear mission, no exit strategy, and serving no defined national interest.  It’s no wonder the armed forces are having retention problems.  But that’s OK – we can just keep lowering standards for new recruits, right?

Dr. Hanson concludes:

Biden would do better to apprise quietly his friends and enemies of America’s force and determination. He should resist comprehensive deals with China and Iran that have unrealistic chances of success given their agendas. And he could claim Trump’s successes as his own and continue their current trajectories, rather than court favor abroad by distancing himself from a largely successful foreign policy guided by Secretary of State Pompeo. 

Otherwise, the alternatives will become increasingly dangerous.

President Biden(‘s handlers) will, of course, do none of those things.  And yes, they are very likely to blunder into some kind of conflict.  And, yes, young soldiers will pay the price for this administration’s incompetence.

Animal’s Daily Truthiness News

National treasure Dr. Thomas Sowell, one of my personal heroes, weighs in on the current state of affairs.  Excerpt:

It is amazing how many people seem to have discovered last Wednesday that riots are wrong — when many of those same people apparently had not noticed that when riots went on, for weeks or even months, in various cities across the country last year.

For too many people, especially in the media, what is right and wrong, true or false, depends on who it helps or hurts politically. Too many media people who are supposed to be reporters act as if they are combatants in political wars.

Someone once said that, in a war, truth is the first casualty. That has certainly been so in the media — and in much of academia as well.

One of the most grotesque distortions growing out of this carelessness with the facts has been a removal of Abraham Lincoln’s name and statues from various places, on grounds that he saw black people only as property.

Such criticisms betray an incredible ignorance of history — or else a complete disregard of truth.

I suspect it’s some of both, but there is plenty of complete disregard for the truth going around.  Take, for example, last week’s events at the Capitol.

The legacy media would have you believe this event, which was for the most part better defined as hooliganism than terrorism, was some kind of historic first; when in fact the Hart Senate Office Building was invaded only in 2018 by anti-Kavanaugh protestors, Senators were confronted in elevators and all this was accepted as “free speech.”  Not to mention that only earlier this year D.C. was literally on fire, and this was described as a “mostly peaceful protest,” in one case by a reporter who literally had a burning car in frame behind him.

So to answer Dr. Sowell’s question:  No, the truth does not matter any more.  To pols in both parties, honestly, The Narrative is what matters.  But the actions of the Democrats and their supporters in the legacy media have been, for some time now, particularly egregious.

Rule Five Options Friday

It’s increasingly looking like President Trump’s legal challenges are sputtering out, and that next month we’ll have an arguably senile old C-lister inaugurated as the (figurehead) President.  But that’s not what’s really significant about all this – the number one takeaway from this 2020 event is that we no longer have an honest and effective election system in this country.  The Presidential election process has descended into banana-republic territory, and at this point it’s hard to see what we can do to fix it – given that it would take action by the very people who allowed it to be broken and, indeed, who benefit from it being broken.

So what options remain for our tottering Republic?  As I see them, there are three:  Submission, secession or civil war.  Let’s look at them one by one.

Submission.

This is, sadly, the most likely option.  I’m not saying it’s the best option, mind you; just the most likely one.  A great deal of the electorate is not engaged much in the process, while a strong plurality was in favor of the “whatever it takes” approach to removing President Trump and doesn’t give much of a damn that it took electoral fraud to do it.

The implications of that are serious.  No matter the outcome of any election, anywhere in the country, both sides will presume that any outcome they don’t like was due to fraud, and in many cases they’ll be correct.  The Left in particular has now taken the mask off.  They have shown that they will do whatever it takes to gain power and retain power.  That’s not a recipe for maintaining the liberty of the people. 

But if the ordinary people of the nation accept this, then the United States as we know it will gradually devolve into an authoritarian state.  End result:  The U.S. ends not with a bang but a whimper.

Secession.

Let’s assume for a moment that we’re not talking about an 1861, South Carolina-style secession, but rather the “peaceful divorce” option already being floated in Texas and other places.  Take a look at the map of states that supported the Texas-initiated lawsuit that was just struck down a week ago today; most of the states are contiguous, excepting our own soon-to-be home state of Alaska.  A peaceful divorce of some sort would leave a nation on the northeast coast, one around the upper Midwest (call it Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan) and the West Coast. 

The free states would have good ports at Galveston, Corpus Christi, Mobile and Savannah on the golf and east coasts, and Anchorage on the Pacific.  (I may have missed a few, or maybe a few dozen ports there, but you get the point.)  The free states would also have most of the continent’s agricultural land, energy production and a lot of the manufacturing capacity.  The not-so-free states in the East would have… well… the legacy media, a fair amount of the old academia institutions, and the peripatetic victim classes.  The West Coast states would be set up a little better with some agricultural lands – assuming the new national governments allowed farming – and some industry, along with several good Pacific ports.

But how would the military be divided up?  Would there be any mutual defense pacts?  The new Blue nations would almost certainly devote little or nothing to defense; how long before China looks with envy at the undefended West Coast?  There are a million things that would have to be worked out.  Even so, I see this as probably the best way out of the current predicament, even as it is not a very likely one.  The down side is a global power vacuum, as the superpower that once stood astride North America like a Colossus would be gone for good.  End result:  Two, three or more nations where one once stood, the sum of those parts being rather less than the whole had once been.

Civil War.

This is by far the worst, and fortunately least likely, option.

Any such conflict would be, unlike the 1861-1865 war, a true civil war.  It would not be uniformed armies maneuvering in open country and fighting conventional battles; it would be much more like the various third world conflicts of the last century.  It would be a conflict involving atrocity piled upon atrocity; it would be fought on the streets of the cities, and spilled out into the countryside and the small towns.

This event would see the rise of local warlords; a partial or complete collapse of conventional authority would likely result.  Some percentage of the military would go to each side, likely – depending on actions of commanders – taking some military equipment and vehicles along with them.  The cities would be cut off, and as starvation set in, the urban cohorts would head into the country, assuming there was food there, but having no idea how to obtain or produce that food for themselves, and running into armed landowners when they try to appropriate that food.

And no matter which faction managed to wrest out some local victories, the United States, in this option, ends with a bang, not a whimper.

The Odds?

I’m engaging in pure guesswork here, but my estimate of the odds of each of the above scenarios, right now, are as follows:

  • Submission – 75%
  • Secession – 20%
  • Civil War – 5%

I’m probably pegging the odds of civil war a little too high.  My first gut reaction is to place that probability at 1% or less, but I’ve spent the last week watching reactions, and I have to say in my almost-sixty years I’ve never seen such a reaction to an election.  The primary reason I place the odds this high is that it’s arguably already started, with the Profa thugs of the Democratic Party’s brown-shirt enforcement wing already rioting in the streets. 

The main reason I don’t put the odds higher is that Profa has shown themselves to be rather egg-like; externally they have a hard shell, but when confronted and the shell cracked, they are pretty squishy and runny inside.  Things could well spiral out of control even so, and while I still think it’s unlikely to devolve to that point, I wouldn’t rule out some kind of preference cascade leading to the unthinkable becoming thinkable, and one thing that could lead to that is the ordinary citizenry realizing that their municipal governments aren’t going to do anything about the brown-shirts, and taking matters into their own hands.

So.  Thoughts?

Rule Five Old Rules/New Rules Friday

This came out over on Freethepeople.org a little over a week ago, but I took a little time to absorb it:  The Rules of Politics Don’t Matter Anymore.  Timely, indeed.  Excerpts, with my comments, follow.

When Virginia decided to secede from the Union, 50 counties in the western part of the state were generally in disagreement with that decision. They formed their own government and held votes to create their own state. They were admitted into the Union in June of 1863 by the vote of Congress. The challenging part of this is that the Constitution in Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1 states the following:

“New states may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new state shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other state; nor any state be formed by the junction of two or more states, or parts of states, without the consent of the legislatures of the states concerned as well as of the Congress.”

Legally, if Virginia had seceded and was not a part of the Union, then the congressional vote to admit it was void because the government established in West Virginia was make-believe. Virginia was part of a different country and therefore the West Virginian contingent was as phony as wax fruit. The Confederacy hadn’t given West Virginia permission to secede from the Confederacy. If, as Lincoln claimed, the state of Virginia was in rebellion, then the state still bound by the Union had not given its permission as required by the Constitution. Either way, the state was formed illegally and should not have been admitted into the Union.

Now this is an interesting bit.  Author Aaron Everitt points out that, while the separation of West Virginia may well have been prohibited by the Constitution, it’s certainly not going backwards now.  But the larger point is the precedent that was set:

Here is the basic problem with those of us who still want to play by the rules of the Constitution… We still want to play by the rules. When courts say we can’t secede any longer, we accept our medicine and say it isn’t a workable idea because it would break the rules. Last I checked, the advancement of most social changes in the United States were not because we changed the Constitution (like the rules say we should). Instead, they have come by executive order, Congressional law, or judicial fiat. As rule followers, we scream and holler that the other ideologues are “not playing by the rules.” Still, the advancements keep coming and the government gets larger and more out of control. We get on our blogs and talk radio and yell about how the progressives are destroying our country! We insist they play by the rules of the Constitution, and we watch the world shift underneath our feet. We keep hoping they will play the game we want to play, by the rules we think we all should play by—instead they show up ready to do whatever it takes to win; the rules be damned.

So why haven’t the political right learned to do the same thing?  And if we do, how then are we any better than the left, who set this standard?  What price political victory?

If that is the game we are playing, why not take a page from West Virginia? What if, in this era of larger and more overwhelmingly authoritarian government, we decided to do what West Virginia did and just break apart regardless of the rules? What would stop Morgan county in Colorado from just becoming its own country or state? They can’t do it because the Constitution says so? Since when has that mattered to those on the other side of the ideological spectrum? Wouldn’t these places be wise to become defiant and say “We are leaving”? A better question still is, who will stop them? Will the federal government really send the troops in to preserve the Union? I have a hard time imagining tanks rolling through the middle of Eureka, California to make sure they stay beholden to Sacramento let alone Washington D.C. Most of the people in San Francisco would be glad to see those people leave. They generally frustrate their utopian ideals and stop them from creating their socialist paradise. I struggle to see the cafe and croissant crowd demanding that Morgan County in Colorado remain a part of the state. I see no moral imperative to holding this massive country together any longer. There isn’t a crusade that anyone can rally behind with enough energy to stop the departure of places that are insignificant to the elites.

This is a sentiment that you see kicked around a lot right now.  I think it’s largely an expression of frustration, especially after the shenanigans surrounding the recent elections, but there’s always the possibility it could become more than that; there’s a trip wire that could be crossed.  The article here concludes:

We used to have an “invisible fence” for our dog. For years the dog was trained through its own trial and error that it could go no farther than a certain point in our yard or it would get shocked. A few years into having the system, the wire was severed and the line stopped working. However our dog had become so accustom to being shocked in the past that it never crossed the line—even though the system was useless. I wonder if we, as Constitutionally-minded people, aren’t in the same predicament as my dog? So afraid to change because we want to obey. But if we take these thoughts from Jefferson to heart, perhaps it is our right, if not our duty to start the breakup.

Ay, there’s the rub.

Even now, after this sullied election, with the growing urban/rural divide, the United States is one nation.  But the bounds of this nation are like the invisible fence that Mr. Everitt used as  a metaphor, and there’s another phenomenon that may lead to us ignoring that fence, that being a preference cascade, one that leads us to break the bonds.

And once that’s done, there’s no going back.  The only question will be whether America remains, afterwards, in any recognizable form.

 

Rule Five The More Things Change Friday

In accordance with my odd habit of reading classical and sometimes rather arcane stuff, I’ve recently been reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.  It’s a fascinating read, and for having written this around 1800 years ago, this Roman Emperor had some insights that still apply today – some almost uncannily.  A few of these are here, followed with my thoughts.

Moreover I learned of him to write letters without any affectation, or curiosity; such as that was, which by him was written to my mother from Sinuessa: and to be easy and ready to be reconciled, and well pleased again with them that had offended me, as soon as any of them would be content to seek unto me again. To read with diligence; not to rest satisfied with a light and superficial knowledge, nor quickly to assent to things commonly spoken of…

“To read with diligence.”  How many people do that any more?  It took me years to learn to seek out differing viewpoints; the Old Man used to exhort me to vigorously challenge my own opinions, but I was probably in my forties before I really took that advice to heart, and it did result in my changing my mind on a few issues.  My current worldview, that of a somewhat prickly minarchist libertarian, arose from my following of that advice.  And “…nor quickly to assent to things commonly spoken of” applies as well.  In simple, modern English:  The “common wisdom” usually isn’t.

And these your professed politicians, the only true practical philosophers of the world, (as they think of themselves) so full of affected gravity, or such professed lovers of virtue and honesty, what wretches be they in very deed; how vile and contemptible in themselves?

Boy howdy!  Does this ever apply to most modern pols.  “…what wretches they be in very deed,” as in profiting hugely from their service, even if it’s indirectly; say, by laundering bribe money from a Ukrainian oil company by placing your useless, coke-head, prostitute-impregnating son in a plush “position” on their Board of Directors.

What is that that is slow, and yet quick? merry, and yet grave? He that in all things doth follow reason for his guide.

This kind of fits in with the first item, doesn’t it?  When used as a verb, ‘reason’ may be defined as to “think, understand, and form judgments by a process of logic.”  Now read Twitter, or FaceDerpbook, or any of the other various and sundry social media outlets, and see how many people you think are thinking, understanding and forming opinions by a process of logic.  I can answer that in advance:  Almost none.

He that runs away from his master is a fugitive. But the law is every man’s master. He therefore that forsakes the law, is a fugitive. So is he, whosoever he be, that is either sorry, angry, or afraid, or for anything that either hath been, is, or shall be by his appointment, who is the Lord and Governor of the universe.

The key takeaway from this?  “…the law is every man’s master.”  But today, the law is not every man’s master; too many people (like, say, Bill Clinton) get away with too much, with too many things, that common people never would.  “…the law is every man’s master” is another way of saying “equal treatment under the law,” which is, as we have documented many times in these virtual pages, effectively dead in this country today.

Marcus Aurelius was in many ways no prize by today’s standards.  He was an Emperor, by definition an autocrat.  But he was the last of what Machiavelli more-or-less accurately described as the “Five Good Emperors,” and the Roman historian wrote of him “…alone of the emperors, he gave proof of his learning not by mere words or knowledge of philosophical doctrines but by his blameless character and temperate way of life.”  His Meditations, these eighteen centuries later, are still worth reading – and reflecting upon.  Some of our political employees would do well to mark his words.