Conjecture and Consequence

Exercises in Deduction

A few months ago, when a clip aired revealing that current Arab Spring president of Egypt Morsi had, before he was elected, maintained that the Jewish people are “apes and swine”, it became apparent to any rational observer of the mainstream media that the mainstream media’s knowledge of Islam is an inverse limit approaching zero. Like one of those horrendous calculus strings as things go from bad to worse, the media either didn’t report Morsi’s sentiments because it is salaciously inconvenient, or chose to obfuscate by appeals to western ignorance of the nuances of the region, alleged Israeli atrocities, and its flagship ideology, Islam.

Obfuscation is the latest and only tactic left for the media in all matters concerning Islam and Muslims, a tactic not afforded to any other group. It has hallmarks of an affirmative action mindset, where everything is reduced to grievance and historical justification, and causes are deduced from those grievances.  And in so being, it is highly incoherent. Tangentially, as an easily accessible example, the conclusion that is often nimbly deduced from this mindset is that nationalism is bad because nationalism is the cause of the abuse of which Muslims have been subjected; whether it be the French, the British, Israelis or the Russians, a nation and their xenophobic national pride or colonial avarice is to blame.  But without an idea of a collective nation or culture, what use is the argument of collective grievance? And if it is of no use in regards to the French, but in fact a source of great self-deprecation, why is it used in respect to the Chechens, the Palestinians, or, for that matter, the Tibetans?

Nobody bothers to answer these questions because nobody bothers to ask them. Rather, the western powers are subjected to the idiocy of a one David Sirota when its civilians are killed and maimed.

Even before the identity or ethnic origin of the Boston terrorists were obtained or known, David Sirota wrote a piece in Salon entitled “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon Bomber is a White American.” The reason for our triumphant urge to pray for a white American suspect is twofold.  1) Because it determines “which groups are — and are not — collectively denigrated or targeted for the unlawful actions of individuals;” and 2) because it determines “ how big and politically game-changing the overall reaction ends up being.”  In all of this, Sirota declares, “the dynamics of privilege will undoubtedly influence the nation’s collective reaction to the attacks.”

He continues, unabated:

“This (white male privilege) has been most obvious in the context of recent mass shootings. In those awful episodes, a religious or ethnic minority group lacking such privilege would likely be collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse) if some of its individuals comprised most of the mass shooters. However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those shootings — even though most come at the hands of white dudes.’

 Likewise, in the context of terrorist attacks, such privilege means white non-Islamic terrorists are typically portrayed not as representative of whole groups or ideologies, but as “lone wolf” threats to be dealt with as isolated law enforcement matters. Meanwhile, non-white or developing-world terrorism suspects are often reflexively portrayed as representative of larger conspiracies, ideologies and religions that must be dealt with as systemic threats — the kind potentially requiring everything from law enforcement action to military operations to civil liberties legislation to foreign policy shifts.”’

We expect as much from Mr. Sirota. He seems to have a fetish with white men. He writes about them constantly. And if it weren’t for the tragic circumstances under which the article was written it would be amusing. But it is not. It is a prime of example of deductive impotence and a fine example of the lengths to which the left will go to construct the political skirmish on a battlefield of its own choosing. Sun Tzu once warned that you should never fight an enemy on the field of its choosing, but choose your place and time and you will be victorious. Like a good liberal, Sirota has heeded the advice of sun Tzu and created a controversy and thus a battle on the grounds on which he chooses to fight. This piece was a strategic offensive written before the bombing suspects were identified in order to turn the conversation away from where it should empirically go. It was strategic brilliance, but tactical error. He cannot be victorious.

He cannot be victorious because the turf on which he chooses to wage rhetorical war is highly deductive and therefore highly vulnerable. A deductive argument is one in which axioms flow to conclusions without hesitation and hindrances. Socrates being a man, and men being mortal, leads to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal. The argument is entirely dependent on its premises, premises on inductive facts; Men are mortal is a conclusion only revealed by observation and induction. If one of these premises is suspect, the cards collapse and the conclusion becomes irrelevant.  Having fired off the first salvos, we must respond to Sirota forthwith.

Sirota betrays his argument before the first sentence is even penned with the title itself. Let’s hope… the Marathon Bomber is a white American. There is no plurality here. The bomber is assumed to be a single white American bomber by the singular use of the verb “to be” and “bomber”. This elementary stuff, elementary stuff of which Sirota is ignorant. If he had wanted to make the argument that he advances, entitling the screed “Let’s hope the Marathon bomberS ARE white American neo-Nazis with intricate connections with a network of terror cells operating in the south,” would have been more effective. But in as much as it is elementary, it is also minutia, and merely serves to capitalize the fact that Sirota is an idiot.

The raw meat of his argument, however, is in this group of sentences: “This has been most obvious in the context of recent mass shootings. In those awful episodes, a religious or ethnic minority group lacking such privilege would likely be collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse) if some of its individuals comprised most of the mass shooters. However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those shootings — even though most come at the hands of white dudes.”

Here Mr. Sirota conflates ethnicity with motive without as much as the bat of the eye in the case of “white dudes” while condemning the same mental movement in the case of minorities. Whiteness is implicitly the cause of the mass shootings and is also referenced as evidence of white male privilege in the collective response to those shootings, while the non-white ethnicities of “minorities,” a highly ambiguous term the definition of which shifts depending on which way the winds blow in the Arctic, are in his schema the reason for alleged profiling. Mr. Sirota just profiled the entire nation for profiling minorities, a circumstance that suggest that we are not dealing with an intellectual argument but an ideological smear. Considering the fact that, if we assume white male privilege, the motive of white males when shooting up a school or a movie theater is never entirely clear because if a white male is raging against a society intoxicated by white male privileged their violent outburst is something of a bizarre masochistic aberration, while minorities that do so are implicitly raging against a white male dominated society and are therefore absolved of serious criminality.  In this way, the argument works to refute its own claim and justify minority terrorism. Either there is white male privilege, these crimes being an aberration, or society needs to profile white males as well. His argument does nothing to mitigate his concern about ethnic profiling, but actually expands it.

Further, if the reaction of society to massacres committed by white male gunmen or terrorists is taken as evidence of white male privilege, then the conclusion is trivial. What needs to be accounted for is why white males find it necessary to kill masses of people when society is so richly organized for them. I can bet that it is not caused by white male privilege. And I can bet that if fielded such a question, Sirota would find a way to make it a nuance of white male privilege. In the end, nothing has been accounted for and nothing is seen.  This, I suppose, is exactly how Mr. Sirota desired it.

Exercises in Empiricism

While a deductive refutation of Sirota is not going to get us to the conclusion “there is no such ephemeral quality of society as white male privilege as it regards terrorism,” neither is the conclusion “white male privilege accounts for why white males are not collectively denigrated as it regards terrorism.” An empirical procedure, however, will take us exactly to the former and refute definitively the latter.

The first empirical assessment that we need to make is to test the idea that white male terrorism has never been considered an existential threat. In 1871, Republican President Ulysseses S. Grant signed into law the Klu Klux Klan act. Unfortunately for Sirota, this was not a situation in which the former Commanding General of the Union forces was institutionalizing the ideology of the Klu Klux Klan, but specifically targeting as enemy combatants a group of white extremists racist terrorist, who happened to be citizens, on behalf of a minority recently set free by the sacrifice of nearly 300,000 union soldiers.

About a hundred years later, the FBI was tasked with finally crushing the Klan under Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. In pursuit of this task, the FBI considered the Klan to be the utmost threat to the integrity of the nation and all manner of profiling, infiltration, unconstitutional wiretapping, serial violations of due process, and other schemes were brought to bear on the inveterate racial ideology and its patrons. David Sirota’s notion that we generally conceive of white male terrorists as lone wolves is wrong in any objective historical examination.

When we do consider white male terrorist as lone wolves, it is generally because they are lone wolves. Timothy McVeigh had a specific grudge against the government for the Waco  and Ruby Ridge incidents; few collaborated with him; he found martial spirit in The Turner Diaries, but abhorred its racism; and was on some days a Catholic and on other days he proclaimed to be an atheist. He was not consistent. His ideology was more left than right. His first ruminations about the evil of the American government was what he saw as the injustice of the Gulf war, and he wrote a scathing justification for his terrorism by comparing his attack to that of the alleged attacks on Iraqi civilians. All in all, he was a hard one to peg.

I could give historical examples until the heat death of the universe, but the assassin of President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, is highly instructive and will serve as the quod erat demonstrandum of our refutation.

Lee Harvey Oswald was a verified communist who absconded to the Soviet Union and then killed President Kennedy. He claimed he was innocent. And then he was killed. His death served as a catalyst for conspiracy theories that sought to brand him a right wing extremist working for the Klan or other extremist groups, and this frenzied speculation is what so unnerved the nation that the Klan is what was targeted when it should have been the Communist Workers party, a hotbed of terrorist and fringe activity.  Even though  Oswald was ideologically opposed to any right wing movement, this metaphysical white male privilege descended down upon the consciousness of the nation and forced many people to blame it on the white males in the south. The fact that a man who defected to the soviet union and then returned to kill the president was then bizarrely accused of conspiring with right wing groups is the final blow to the notion that the society of the United States has given a pass to white males for terror activity. This ends the discussion of white male privilege.

Moving from the inane to the absurd, Sirota’s claim that minorities are targeted and collectively denigrated by society when they commit an atrocity is false. The Virginia Tech shooter was extremely Asian, yet there was not even a small scale negative reaction to Asian people living in this country as a result. In fact, Asians, though a numerical minority, are fast losing their political minority status. In a case of reverse affirmative action, the California University system has now put quotas on the number of Asians allowed into their schools because Asians have the nasty habit of being good at being smart and are causing a lack of diversity on California campuses. It is conclusive: David Sirota’s entire thesis is incandescent horseshit when viewed under the microscope of empirical and historical reality.

The reason Mr. Sirota penned his piece when he did was to mitigate the fallout if the Boston terrorist turned out to be Muslims. One of them was a Muslim, and one Muslim is in custody awaiting a long and irritating trial. One was a U.S. Citizen, and one was a legal resident. The Russians tipped off the FBI about the elder former Muslim’s, now a Muslim corpse, extremist activity, twice. And yet white male privilege caused him not to be watched thoroughly enough to be apprehended before he had the chance to kill an 8 year old boy. In a circumstance dripping with horrid irony, one was a white male American Muslim. He is, as a point in fact, from the Caucuses, from which we derive the ethnic profile Caucasian. We will very soon see that profile bubble removed from our driver’s license applications and voter registration forms, our selective service cards and our tax forms to be replaced with the white male privilege option.

When the images of these two suspects were released by the FBI, I confided in a friend, my boss, as it happens. I told him that these two cretins were of one of three nationalities in descending order of probability: Chechens, Kosovars, or Bosnians. When it was affirmed that they were in fact Chechens, my boss demanded that I quit and apply to the CIA, half joking. “How the hell did you know that?” he demanded. I told him that when the entire world saw white males they racially profiled and determined that Muslims were not to blame, but for me it merely reduced the possible national origins from about thirty to three.  I profiled as well, but not racially. I profiled an ideology.

And that is the difference between David Sirota and me. He profiles races and genders. I profile ideology. But the question remains: should we profile Islam in the same manner and afford it the same scrutiny as that of the KKK or neo-Nazi ideologies. There is not a doubt in my mind that we should.

At the beginning of this rather prolonged effort to show that Sirota is an ass, I mentioned President Morsi’s comments on the Jews. They are as apes and swine, he said. This is not a sentiment unknown to Muslims. He was, in fact, appealing to the mass Muslim sentiment. The Quran references Jews as apes and Swine in three different Suras and in three different contexts. The Quran has much to say about Jews. From the index of my translated Quran under Jews we will find that they (are) “became apes and swine, are cursed, enmity of (Muslims/Allah), greedy of life, slew prophets, took usury, unbelief and blasphemy, work iniquity, write the book with their own hands,” among other horrors. It does not require deep exegetical procedures to access this vile. It is printed in beautiful Arabic calligraphy, and boldly in English.

Muslim apologists will first claim that there are peaceful verses in their book of death that diminishes the importance of the violent ones. They will not tell you that the peaceful verses originate from the time when Mohammed was in Mecca and was virtually powerless and peace was the only way by which he could gain converts. But when he went to Medina, he became a tribal warlord, and according to the Hadith, and extra-Quranic text of Mohammed’s life, beheaded 700 hundred Jews, men, women, and children, with his own sword. According to the rule of abrogation in Islamic law, the later verses, the Medinic verses, the violent ones, abrogate the peaceful ones. This is information that is accessible to anyone who dares to look for it. It is by no means an inferential  stretch to proclaim that if we are to compare Mohammed to Jesus or the prophets of Israel, we are comparing Hitler to mother Teresa.

And that is the next argument. Muslim apologist will point out a glaring red herring and have us chase after it by stating that the Biblical text is full of violence. And so it is. But the biblical text is a historical narrative as much as it is a spiritual guide, and those instances of violence were temporal concerns apart of the thatching that is the history of Israel. There are no Jewish commandments to kill non-Jews. Rather an admonition from G-d, “do not abuse the stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt.” Judaism was birthed out of a slave revolt, while Islam seeks to subjugate and enslave, to make dhimmis out of the non-Muslims, and to institute sharia law everywhere. The term itself, Islam, means surrender. The whole religion drips with tyranny and terror. Every Muslim, no matter his chronological station, is required to fight jihad and wage war against the Infidels, subjugate Jews, and maintain a mental disposition that divides the world in to the “house of war” and”the house of Islam.”

A glaring example of  recently put into practice can be found in the Balkans. In the 90’s, we bombed the Serbs on behalf of the Bosnian and Kosovo Muslims. The reported genocide in Kosovo was found to be false. During the Serb’s battle with the KLA, 3000 people died, 1/3 of them ethnic Serbs, many beheaded by KLA Muslim terrorists.  The United States Air force bombed soft targets in Serbia for weeks and killed as many as 4,000 Serb civilians.  Yet two years ago, a Kosovar Muslim traveled to Germany and shot two American Servicemen at the Berlin airport while screaming Allah hu Akbar. By any conventional wisdom, we would expect Serb civilians to track down and murder American soldiers, but the Serbs aren’t Muslims, they are orthodox Christians. So amenable are the Serbs that the Serb gunner who shot down the F-117 stealth fighter over Kosovo contacted the American pilot after the war and apologized. There is soon to be a documentary released on their reunion. And so vicious are the Ethnic Albania Muslims that they will track us down to kill us even though we helped them commit genocide. There is rarely in human history such an illuminating empirical example of Islamic ethics than that of the Kosovar Muslims and their antithesis, the Serb Christians.

If it turns out that the Chechen butchers were lone Muslim wolves it will be just as damning, if not more so, than if they were a part of a grander Islamic terror organization. A neo Nazi in Oregon may not know a neo-Nazi in Arkansas, but if they both commit an atrocity, it will be the ideology that is the common denominator, and we will have very little issue saying so.

 And so it is with Islam. A single Muslim who takes his book seriously is just as much a threat as a vast terror network. The verses of the Quran are what animated Morsi to spill his bile, and they are what animated the Chechens to kill in Boston. They animated the Chechen terrorists at Belsan, who killed 300 hundred children, and they are what animated the 9/11 hijackers. All roads lead to Mecca.

A Final Note

The final empirical assessment we must make is that people who kill are not necessarily mentally ill or insane. The Nazis were not.  Unless someone is willing to argue that if the third Reich had had better access to Zoloft, the holocaust would not have happened, we must reconcile ourselves to the ancient but applicable and everywhere historically immanent notion that human beings are not inherently good and that ideology has the potential to influence everything from compassion to rage, to genocide, to rape, to blowing up the Boston marathon.

Without doing so we run the risk of a becoming functionally therapeutic whilst being murdered instead of identifying the ideologies most likely to persuade sane people to kill and destroying them either via argument, shame or defensive war, and uplifting and honoring those ideologies which create kindness and compassion and abhor violence.

In the immediate aftermath of the Boston atrocity, a general sentiment circulated that there are a great many number of good people and that this is evidenced by the fact that many people rushed to the scene to render aid to the victims without concern for themselves. This is surely a testament to the virtue of the individuals involved and their altruism. But what of the people who fled? Are they not good? I don’t know, and neither does the progenitor of this idea, Patton Oswalt.

Undoubtedly, sometime in 1944 an SS officer, tired from a day’s work killing Jews, still managed to rush to the aid of a fellow Aryan during the bombing of Dresden. He was likely celebrated in Der Sturmer, while a militant anti-Nazi German citizen ran from the bombardment. There is of course no comparison between a Nazi ss officer and a first responder on the Boston streets, but the action of rushing to save lives does not necessarily add evidence to the notion that humanity is good. This sentiment is entirely therapeutic and a reflexive response from an individual who cannot absorb the fact that humanity is a neutral moral object and the only way to defeat evil is not to appeal to the great ephemeral mass of “the good” but to have the courage to properly identify good and evil and destroy it, however unpleasant that may be. Oswalt was on the right track, he understood that killing civilians watching a marathon is bad, but failed to follow through with the moral urgency that the situation demanded.

Today in Denmark, Jewish envoys  implored Jews living in that country not to wear Kippot or any other Jewish symbols around the city of Copenhagen or any of the other areas  now completely overrun by peace loving left wing students and placid Muslim immigrants. Things are well in Holland too. In Amsterdam, as long as pot can be smoked, prostitutes can be used, and Jews remain under the radar, peace can flourish. Moving south and across the channel, there are now parts of France and England where Jews cannot go, or any other infidel, including dogs that are routinely butchered and poisoned. But peace and diversity are surely intact because those countries are tolerant of Muslims who happen to live, coincidentally, in those same areas. Just because Europe hasn’t seen this level of overt anti-Semitism since Nazi Germany doesn’t mean that the waves of Muslim immigrants have anything to do with its ascendancy. And as long as Europe has peace and diversity, who cares if Jews can’t live there safely anyway?

Poll after poll has shown that more than 50% of Europeans believe the State of Israel is the greatest threat to peace on the planet because an age of peace and prosperity and free hybrid cars can only be ushered in once Jews are again stateless and powerless. Europeans recently showed their new found love of negotiations and tolerance when they elected to carve an independent entity out of the very heart of the Jewish State and then condemn the fact there are Jews still living there. Over a million Muslim citizens living in Israel are never subject to such criticism because Muslims are allowed everywhere, but Jews are not. To have one Jew living across the green line is a serious impediment to peace that needs to be rectified by burning Israeli flags on European campuses and in front of Israeli embassies. Occasionally, some people in these crowds will call for the death of Jews, and in many cases, as in Toulouse and Hungary, some people will kill Jews, but this is not antisemitism. No,  it’s the peace process.

Just in time for the Christmas holiday, mainline Christian denominations such as the Presbyterians, the Anglicans, Episcopalians and other horrendous spiritual oddities, which Jesus himself would not only eschew but not be allowed entrance to because he is Israeli, ramped up their Jew demonization campaigns. One denomination leader complained that if the Magi were to visit Bethlehem today, they would first have to queue up at the checkpoint. And so they would, and this is an egregious crime, we all know, because the checkpoint is there to keep Jews alive, but Christian theology since the days of Augustine, Luther, and liberalism has demanded that Jews perpetually die for Christian sin. It’s all good theology, you see.

Sixty years ago Jews were so loved that they were told to wear yellow stars of David on their jackets and sleeves. Today, they are so loved they are told not to. You see, Jews are allowed to be Jewish only when it is convenient for the rest of the world. When they are assimilated they are made to identify as Jews so they can be killed, and when they self identify of their own volition they are told their identity is dangerous for the peace of Copenhagen because the last thing that Danish police want to do is offend the SS in the minarets, for they may find themselves in the same position as the SA did sixty years ago.

And so the Jew of Copenhagen and the Jew of Hevron are the same, hated for being proud Jews who happen to live not just past the green line but on planet earth. In both instances the world leaders, the Christians, who still believe that their church is so liberal and tolerant that not only have they superseded the Jews but the supersessionalists of old, and the Muslims, who hate Jews as their Koran has demanded them to, have decided that the Jews living in any environ are a threat to peace. The evil Kippot disrupts the solemn atmosphere of Copenhagen just as the Jew lighting Shabbos candles tonight in Samaria or Judea threatens to plunge the entire world into nuclear war. In both instances it is by shear weight of number that justice is impugned. The secular/Christian west does not want a fight with the Muslims, so they will capitulate to demands that there be places on the planet where to say the Shema is not only prohibited but brings the death penalty instead of standing with the Jews against the approaching hordes. The Jews can be pushed around and made to feel guilty for being Jews because the west has not only purchased, tag, tax and title, the Muslim proclivity to blame Israel for everything but continues the sporting Christian practice of hating the Jews for nothing and killing them for peace and security of western babies. In a reemergence of the old blood libel, the Jews and the Jewish state are considered the greatest threat to the security of the west.

The west has made a calculated decision that the Jews aren’t worth defending and thus they have decided to again make up myths that justify their sacrifice of them to the Nazi and now the Muslim hordes. Neither the Jew of Copenhagen nor the Jew of Hevron is safe unless the Jew in Copenhagen leaves and joins the Jew in Hevron. Then G-d will protect His people in their land and will vanquish both the east and the west in their dialectical attempt to kill his people for the sake of peace. That’s my theology, you see.

When I first learned of the brutal massacre of 26 people including 20 children under the age of 8, my first feeling was not of sadness, anguish, or dismay, but anger. My sister informed me of the tragedy. I had just woken up from a long night of study. Mouth agape, I stared her straight in the eyes and responded, “There go our guns. And here comes the charge of the psychological community.”

I feel horrible that this mental movement was my initial response, and that my first thoughts weren’t with those of the families of the killed. But I knew that the screeching that would accompany this tragedy and horrific murder of innocents would be unpleasantly shrill. And after a week of listening to the screeching lunacy of the left wing about guns, I am no longer disposed to beat myself up too badly about it; their sin is far more egregious than mine. This post is a response to everyone.

To the Media

I would like to congratulate you, dear media, on doing everything you could to make this massacre as horrible for the families as possible. Daniel Greenfield reported on FrontPage that CBS news correspondents were beating on the doors of Newtown demanding that someone answer some questions for them. “This is our story” they wearily entreated.

I apologize if the thought of your “courageous” reporting being unappreciated is not going to cause me lost sleep. You have packaged half witted, selective, and biased reporting as truth so regularly that many people have decided that you, dear media, are part of the problem. You are quick to post a picture of the assailant for the masses to scream at. But then you parade a series of doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists in front of millions of people who tell us that these kinds of events are either biologically based or are the product of some ethereal gun culture, or a new term introduced as “white masculinity.” And then you wonder why we find these things all too natural to be mad about. You demand ratings with fuzzy, eerily edited photos of the perpetrator and then tell us we are not  sophisticated enough to be disgusted  because the lab coats said that it is all natural or all nurture, and then they collectively mollify our disgust by heralding the arrival of some new pill or treatment that is supposed to bring peace to earth, pharmaceutical companies eagerly waiting in the wings.  You were quick to report that Adam Lanza may have had Aspergers, without informing anyone as to what Asperger’s is, or whether it may or may not have had anything to do with his decision to murder 26 people, and were even quicker to report on what type of guns he used.

To the Mental Health Medical Establishment

Aside from the killer himself, you people are probably the most despicable group that has yet to waltz from the mental institution to the pundit box. On Foxnews, a psychologist was asked if there exist signs which may indicate to anyone that an individual is capable of murdering 26 people. His response was telling if only because it meant nothing. “Well of course,” he replied, ” you will see these people withdraw, lack empathy, and, in some instances, exhibit cruel behavior to animals.” No shit. This answer lead me to conclude that psychology is no more of a descriptive science than astrology. One does not require a degree or even literacy to conclude that one who “may display a cruelty to animals and further lack empathy,” is capable of killing 26 people.

Psychiatrists are no better. You can hear them pontificating about various brain chemicals and their imbalances, a tumor here, a seizure there, and bam, we have a mass murderer. Both of these disciplines are not worth the millions of dollars in pell grants that we dish out so they can make us all feel as if we have settled the case. The psychologist mentioned above was at least honest enough to admit that his babble wasn’t worth listening to, after, of course, he demanded that we all listen, “these people are really hard to peg, ” he shrugged.

I suggest that the entire mental health community just shut the hell up because if you were worth a shit, then perhaps Adam, who you claim was “deeply troubled” only after he did something deeply troubling, would have been better cared for if you hadn’t been so busy dreaming up horribly unscientific experiments about belief in G-d being correlated with a lack of reasoning abilities.

To the Atheist/Secular Community

How does it feel to know that we can scratch  both the old and new testaments from the catalog of ideologies that may have contributed to this massacre? You people have been bantering about for decades now the idea that religion is the root of all evil, even while ignoring that evil is a religious idea. You are quick to find solace in the religious explanation for the inquisition but then when faced with such modern horror, you are quick to cite the psychiatrists mentioned above. Forgive the rest of us if we continue to find you dumber and less consistent than than even the Muslim fanatic. I, frankly, have no idea how any of you can be upset about this tragedy, for you have exerted a great deal of energy telling us that this whole existence is objectively visible and testable but have refrained from giving us any reason to feel as if it has any meaning outside of of the subjective, which, as it happens, means, according to your ideology, it has no meaning at all. And if it has no meaning, then what tragedy occurred in Newtown? For if we are to speculate that this was a “bad” occurrence then we are suggesting that there are some things that are true but aren’t scientifically verifiable, that is, irrational. While the religious community has to struggle with G-d, you have nothing to struggle with because this is just a dog eat dog, psycho kill psycho, Darwinian world ain’t it? But you will be quick to riposte that this Adam didn’t act “rationally”, and this irrationality will explain the evil. But you must remember, unless there are metaphysical qualities to rationality that make it subject to the law of the excluded middle, not acting rationally doesn’t mean that it was irrational behavior. Further, if we can recall, the columbine shooters were iconoclastically rational, they worshiped Darwin, and thought they were aiding natural selection by killing people who believed in G-d. You may counter again that an is does not create an ought. This is so, but it also means you have no ethical footing on which to ground your outrage about religion or the massacre of 26 people, for all you have is the is. Times like these reveal that you are just as religious as the rest of us.

To the Left

When I address the left, I mean the libertine left whose devotion to lifestyle rights is a stringent as the puritans were to fidelity. Many of you overlap into the atheist category as well, being in possession of two absurd habits at once. For about fifty years now you have eschewed and criticized any and all traditional values and have ushered in the age of the serial killer Charles Manson as well as hallucinogens. Your contributions to society have all been negative and in no way have advanced us towards any better understanding of human nature, except that human nature is not to be trusted when it comes to correct courses of action. You have allowed pornography to destroy fidelity, excessive materialism to destroy families, created an entire generation of listless necromancers who are more concerned with pot legalization than the serial pedophilia that the ACLU legally protects, and then wonder in awe that your utopia is shot up by the likes of Adam Lanza. This isn’t new, your libertinism always injects itself onto the stage in the waning days of great civilization. Your ways paved the path for the holocaust in the 18th century, when it was decided that the Jews were an impediment to libertinism at the national level, and ushered the destruction of classical societies as pederasts ran Rome into the ground and edicts had to be established to keep the population stable, demanding that men have children instead of sexually abusing the ones that already existed. Yet, now you think that the problem with the world is the existence of guns, and you will henceforth do everything in your vicious, cynical, power to finally emasculate the society to such an extent that men can’t protect their children and women have free rein to kill them before they are even born. Congratulations.

You will screech until guns are gone, then  knives, then shards of glass, then arrows, axes, hammers, nails, sticks until finally all that is left is rocks and then you will demand of G-d that he curse the rock instead of Cain.

To Everyone Else

If you have escaped the grips of the categories above then you know I have nothing to say to you; you know that I have no account for the necessary nor the sufficient causes of the massacre in Newtown. But we must remember that besides all those fancy forces that physicists constantly go on about, there is a great force of evil which  hides amongst the shadows of human experience. As it happens, evil achieves its greatest victory when a large portion of humanity ignores its existence and attempts to explain it by reference to something natural. This is the greatest tragedy of them all. We now look to lab coats because we are too lazy to wrestle with G-d.

Recently— an  hour before posting this — I indulged that habit of conveying my dismay at the current state of culture over a facebook post. Most of my facebook post barely receive a response, mostly because many of my friends are more concerned with the release of the Hobbit than anything else, no offense to Tolkien.

I posted the following:

Am I the only person under 30 who still realizes that there is not a single individual, group, country, government, social club, industry, or bank that owes me anything? Am I also the only person under the age of 30 who realizes that nobody owes me a job, or security, or healthcare or a drivers license for that matter, and to think they do is not only idiotic but immoral?

Is human life really that worthless in your eyes? If someone becomes sick through no fault of there own but can’t afford to treat it deserve to die. Because that is exactly what you are saying. And I find it disgusting!

I thought that my response to this person was adequate for a post, so here it is. Enjoy:

Name Withheld, that I don’t think that anyone owes me anything does not suggest that I think human life is not valuable. Nor can we arrive at the conclusion that I believe that someone who is sick but can’t afford care deserves to die. This is an egregious non-sequitor, just shameless. Your pronouncement reminds me of an introductory philosophy course where everyone believes, the professor included, that uncharted territory has been traversed upon the observation that things don’t always arrive at our aesthetic ideal. The professor himself, stolid, perhaps stout, adjusting his wide brimmed glasses, clears his throat and announces to the class that there are situations which are naturally unjust, a hypothesis, as it happens, which is emphatically reinforced by current thinking in biology. The pre-pubescent intellects of youth are ready to imbibe this toxin with great alacrity and, after having had a look around, see injustice in every place that it is not. Committees and clubs are formed around the latest natural injustice that needs to be rectified; rage is generally considerable, and anyone who decides their banter odious is found to be “disgusting.”

I could just let you dwell on the implications of your illogical inferences about my opinions regarding human life, but I am feeling rather generous at the moment and will instead guide you step by step through the process. Owing to your incredible reading comprehension skills, and your diminutive interpretive ones, you seem to believe that if one does not feel as if they are owed something, that same person does not feel responsible for something. I do believe that some people deserve to die, mostly dwelling under the categorical heading “serial killers.” But if one cannot afford the medical care requisite for a complete recovery, that they may perish, without the accompanying intercessory compassion, does not imply that they deserve to perish. You injected the term “deserve,” you own it. Congratulations. But this is where the notions of responsibility and obligation comes into the discussion, a topic that gets very little air time in our culture now so emphatically intoxicated on the concept of “rights.”

That sucking sound we all now hear is the sound of a society whose compassion has been drained increasingly by the parasitic and now meaningless term rights. I remember when the healthcare law was being overtly protested and counter-protested on the steps of the United States capital and young women in the camp of the dreamy eyed Obama was interviewed saying the following: “I believe that healthcare is a fundamental human right.” That the right of a Doctor not to practice medicine and instead write books would be circumscribed by such a metaphysics didn’t need to enter her ruminations because she can count on the state deity to enforce it. And as I wrote on this very same subject months ago: “The Gulags of the Soviet Union did not exist because of some mere malevolence of its leaders, but precisely as a deterrent to those who desired to write books over practicing medicine, or make steel in lieu of mining coal. By appealing to rights outside of its negative implication in the individuals relation to the state, in a secular society, is to invite gulags, a materialist secular hell in replace of a transcendent spiritual one. They popped up all over Europe this last century like flowers blooming in the fauna of secular spring.”

I am my brothers keeper, but that does not mean that my brother should believe that I owe him something, for his psychology would always be in a subtle state of war with me, looking for instance and chance to pounce and derive benefit by appeals to guilt. I term this the ethics of guilt; it is an ethics we have enthusiastically embraced. This is not synonymous with conscience. Conscience is the awareness of ones duty and the standing orders of moral axioms. As such, my devotion to my brothers well being does not derive from a belief that recompense is owed me, but because it is my duty, religious to be exact; but as we have chipped away more and more at our spiritual foundations as an entire society, guilt is the means and measure of ethics. And so we are a society gone slowly mad. Billions of dollars are spent annually on therapy and psychology, the science of the derelict of duty, to sooth the guilt inflicted on us by both our absence of collective meaning and the duties we have so thrown away in its absence.

There was once a time when the thinkers of Europe believed that reason would light our ethical path, that religious duty and positive obligations were impediments to progress, but our current circumstances suggest otherwise. We now inhabit a culture of getting and not giving, of being owed something instead of the honor of being obligated something. Benjamin Franklin suggested, nay empirically observed, that a society not girded with the strength of morality and conviction, of positive and religious moral duty, would not last for long. But those on the left that so gush and bleed their hearts out, exuding and radiating a psychological guilt, are the first to mock the traditions of past of spiritual and ethical fulfillment that are designed to rectify many of the problems that we now face. That sucking sound you hear is the sound of a sewer gutter gargling the last few ounces of compassion and duty we still have, that which has been consumed now manifests itself as the screeching whine heard when some new natural injustice is discovered. Somebody else is always guilty, and we are consumed further by a political discourse that demands that we toss to the dustbin ancient metaphysics but keep ancient ethics, albeit the ones, and only ones that don’t violate a women’s right to kill fetuses on demand.. This too does not go.

I appreciate your comments if only because it gave me an opportunity to release some polemic angst.

Cheers.

Rededicating Chanukah
The amount of oil was only suitable for one day, but it burnt, miraculously, for eight. Outside of the rabbinical world, this is the deepest understanding of the Chanukah celebration, the festival of lights, which most people possess.

The true story of Chanukah is not so innocuous, or magical, nor is it all good news. More so than the Exodus story, the telling of which was banned in some former European colonies, it is a very dangerous idea. Chanukah is, in its most easily accessible formulation, a divinely sanctioned rebellion, an uprising, anti-imperial and anti-relativistic. Those stubborn Jews told the imperial masters of the Ancient Mediterranean that they will not abide with Hellenic culture, their intellectual and material empire. G-d, said the Jews, is the arbiter of Justice, not reason or aesthetics or beauty or Aristotle’s ridiculous notions of happiness, the effects of which the entire world from Macedonia to Indian felt in its truculent, imperious, advance at the tip of Alexander’s sword. Happiness was once a gruesome business. It still is.

The Greeks and the Jews Then

Those centuries were as promising for the advance of culture as were the decades leading to the rise of the Nazi party in Europe. Things were swell, material accessible, plenty of food, high culture on display, mathematics studied in the Lyceum while servants and eunuchs played for the men of “great soul,” Aristotle’s kalokagathia. There was a flourishing debasement of human beings but a sturdy advancement of aesthetic pleasure.

While the Greeks happily indulged the orgiastic and Pagan nonsense of their subjects —the Persians, Indians, Carthaginians, the neo-pharaoh Ptolemy, and, as it happens, those horrid epicycles — the Jews and their notion of objective Truth, emes, a purpose and a beginning, a linear history, Tzedekah and clarity of both intellectual and sensual urges were radically departed from the Greco Eros and Will as power. There was something about those ancient Jews that was a bit off. One G-d, not to be worshiped by reason but by mitzvah and charity and justice, is an idea as abhorrent to the Imperialist as it is to the relativist.

The Imperialist sees nothing about the world which may suggest something exists which is greater than his own power. The relativist can find nothing about the world that suggests that there should be empires or anything true. The Greeks were the empire of relativity. Worship your gods, we will worship ours, and, for that matter, yours as well, and we can trade deities like a set of baseball cards while the mathematicians and sophist train up generations of the ruling class to keep the wine flowing and the music playing.

In ancient Greece, specifically Athens, the way a man achieved wealth was via lawsuits, suing people, and via the state seizing property and redistributing it in cyclical fits of democracy. The law of the polis was never a law of Justice, the rule of law, but of persuasion and reason, in a couple words, soulless and dubious. The Sophists, peripatetic teachers, taught those willing to pay how to make a living off the state. Rhetoric was taught in order that a man may obfuscate the insanity of it all. Work was never rewarded but regarded as a form of enslavement to the rudiments of animal necessity.

Those Hebrews, however, had a book that spoke differently. Avodah, work, was mans way of life. He can sanctify its banality by charity and sacrifice; bringing earth up to heaven and a bit of heaven down to earth. The Hebrew state functioned only to make the work of man the sanctification of G-d. Non-Jews, the Ger, were never considered barbarians as a matter of metaphysical fact to be conquered enslaved and indentured, but equally divine. In those instances where non Jews were regarded as inferior, it was not due to the circumstances of birth but of behavior and culture. The ancient Hebrews, forsaking immediate pleasure for spiritual fulfillment and cultural cohesiveness, found many examples of man gone mad by the images, imaginations, that he had sold himself as truth. The Greeks were just another processional float of the cultural parade.

Greece was a monument to reason, a culture that justified itself by the intellect and the intellect alone. We can bicker about Greek mythology and its inherent fabulous character, but the explanatory motifs served the same purpose as science does today. Myths were accounts of the natural, summer, winter, fall and spring subdued by the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Creation Ex nihilo was so unfathomable that the Greeks refused to fathom it. Instead suggesting that the Universe has existed from eternity to eternity and therefore no explanation of contingency is necessary if only because contingency wasn’t an issue. “The universe is all there is,” as Carl Sagan once languidly put it; believing that he had hit upon a new idea, Sagan at once wrote many books extolling the virtue of the meaninglessness of it all.

Fractures began to appear in Greek thought as myth gave way to philosophy and Aristotle penned some words on Ethics. Happiness, Aristotle declared, is the good end to which all men should strive. Just so. But what made happiness the Good? What made anything the Good? Aristotle could offer no other explanation than that it is in accordance with reason and that reason is a natural faculty exclusive to man. This circular account does nothing to inspire allegiance. And I suspect that Aristotle did not think it Good himself, but from where else could his ethics be derived?

Nowhere. In the Beginning G-d created the Heavens and the Earth, explained the Hebrews. The Greeks had created and sold themselves a philosophy that could not achieve the heavy lifting they required. The subconscious doubt circulating around the assumptions of Greek philosophy became visceral sores upon interaction with the Jews and their declaration of transcendental purpose and linear time. Anti-Semitism is a function of a society’s inability to cope with its own failings, either intellectually or morally. This is not an opinion, but a fact. That the target is always the Jews is because they are the whistle blowers of history, either morally or intellectually. When humans fail morally, the Jews stand as representative of a moral order and, as we all know, the messenger is always the first to be killed. Furthermore, when mankind starts tinkering with odious and detrimental philosophies, cynicism, asceticism, relativism and nihilism, the Jews stand representative of order, purpose and humility. In the ancient world, the rejection of terms was often signaled by the messengers being killed and the corpses being sent back to the soliciting party. In the case of the Jews, they are the messengers of G-d and their slaughter was the Greek rejection of His terms.

It is the confluence of both the particularism of the Jewish people and the universalism of the Jewish message which many find detestable, not the least of whom being the Greeks. The Jews can’t justify themselves rationally, and their message is not rational either. It is a message of life, the respect of it, and, as Aristotle showed, there is no rational argument to be made in its defense. It’s either a faithful belief or an aesthetic sense.

The Greeks were universalists too. Functioning pragmatically, the Greek universe, as it happened, revolved around the Greeks. The individual was either a Greek or a barbarian. As the cosmologies of the pre-Socratics proved infertile, Greek thought began to focus more sharply on the Greek himself. Socrates bothered not with cosmology but with men and behavior, the state, and the question of who should rule. Less than a century later, the Greek decided that he should rule.

As the incoherence of Greek philosophy began to become apparent, a dripping angst of concern with inferiority became a deluge of violence and self aggrandizement. The Greeks had dispensed functionally with their myths, the Homeric gods. In their stead, rationalism pervaded. Rationalism prevailing does not mean that reason was the conduit by which it was achieved. It was more of a system of belief in reason itself. However, a crisis occurred. Much in the same manner that a crises cast positivism to the dustbin in the middle of the twentieth century, it became apparent that statements about reason weren’t rationally grounded themselves, but merely axiomatic. They were again back to the Homeric gods.

The modern study of history, when not enmeshed in the functional illiteracy of materialism, sometimes revisits the old theories of the surge and retreat of societies, the idea that ideology creates historical events. But what rarely gets explained is what generally occurs when a society fails in a particular ideology. It is not always the case that society just descends and begins a downward spiral. Often, a society begins to expand like a dying star before implosion, inflating its collective ego in reaction to the failure of its cultural program. In the case of the Greeks, the ego inflated rapidly. A culture that worshiped reason failed to justify any of its precepts rationally and thus set about a program of pragmatic empiricism. If reason was not to cast its countenance upon the Greeks, the Greeks would themselves create an empire in which empirical facts about Greek greatness could hardly be denied. By the end of his conquests, Alexander thought himself a god. Greek rationality gave way to Greek relativism and pragmatism. These two aspects of Greek life had been in conflict for some time, but with Alexander, the latter prevailed decidedly. Reacting in the same manner that any civilization does to a crises, the Greeks started killing Jews.

The Revolt

Antiochus set to killing Jews that practiced their Judaism, desecrating holy sites and erecting idols in Jerusalem. These were the first salvos of the war between meaning and materialism. As stated above, the main aggravation for the Greeks was the concept of the Supra-rational, the unseen, and the illogical, or, not-logical, dictates of Jewish worship. While the Greeks understood exactly why they put pennies in the eyes of the dead, the Jews could not explain why they tied phylacteries –-   and thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes –- other than that the book says so and that they are suppose to be a sign of something. Nor could be explained the prohibition against eating pork, mixing milk and meat or linens and wool.
The killing of Jews was a direct result of the Jewish inability to explain their existence in either mythological or rational terms. The Greeks could easily abide a culture that has one god, but they couldn’t abide a culture that says that the one god is the G-d, for the idea of a G-d of everything, a Ruler of a contingent Universe, left the Greeks mere transient shadows upon the wall of the caves. For a people that liked to think of themselves as gods, this was unacceptable.

To be terse, a great revolt occurred. There was bloodshed. Close quarters combat made it a gruesome affair. People were disemboweled by sword and left bleeding amongst fields and the cobblestone streets of Jerusalem. There was screaming and great lamentations over the dead. Representatives of every segment of society were subject to the horror.

And then the temple was rededicated and a great miracle occurred, a godly sanctification of the violence that had ensued. This event does not comport with modern sensibilities. G-d had intervened and shown his blessing for a violent conflagration, showing that our modern conceptions of peace for the sake of peace and peace alone is as suicidal and as empty as the rule of the Greeks over Jerusalem. G-d does not sanctify pacifism in the face of tyranny.  .

The Greeks Now

Hitler once wrote:

“Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity.  I am freeing man from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge, from the dirty and degrading self-mortification of a false vision called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and independence which only a very few can bear.”

The Jew, Hitler declared, was the progenitor and disseminator of this particular disease. The Greeks of antiquity felt the same. They didn’t want any limitations on their power, either physical or metaphysical. So Greek metaphysics embolden Greek tyranny, and, as it happens, Nazi metaphysics, in a moment of recursion, looked back to the Greeks and Romans for martial inspiration. This is not a coincidence.

Nietzsche had said a few decades earlier that “God is dead, and we killed him.” He was referring to the resurgence of reason and its ultimate failure, culminating in a relativism of  “beyond good and evil” and Nietzschean Superman. God having been murdered by 19^th century philosophy, it is also not a coincidence that the 20^th brought with it an attempt to remove all the evidence of his former life. The Jews were the fingerprints at the crime scene that had to be removed in order that progress away from conscience and morality could continue.

Thankfully, this program failed, and, by a miracle of history with few antecedents and yet to be repeated, 3 years after the murder of 6,000,000 Jews, Israel declared its independence, returning and rededicating the land of Israel to a time and circumstance that had not existed for 2000 years.

But the story has not ended and the Greeks still wish to erect idols in Jerusalem. The Greeks have escaped the entropy of history and have been preserved in the amber of the world community, a neo-pagan organization which cherishes attrition over peace and dedicates a great deal of its time to chastising a country of 6,000,000 Jews. Israel, as the only surviving nation state, is a thorn in the side of an internationalizing program that has decided, much like the idealized state of the Greeks, that it is the arbiter of truth and justice and that there is no power or belief greater than its own.  The liberal ideologues, like the Greeks, think themselves gods. Moral and cultural relativism is the means by which power is centralized. The calculus is brutal, if there are no moral truths then there are no moral restrictions, and this allows unprecedented power to those who make a decent living off the erected idols of a peace process. Tributes, benedictions and libations are energetically offered up every time a Jew defends himself.

Supporters of the Jewish state continuously and energetically point out that the people with whom the international community has decided that the Jews must negotiate with are the most evil and tyrannous group of individuals on the planet. The Muslim world rightfully deserves to be exposed for all its depravity and hate, but the likelihood of this tactic working is small, for this presupposes that the international community is ignorant of the depths of evil which grips the Muslim world. Nobody could be so ignorant.

Instead, the new Greeks acknowledge Muslim insanity and explain it by reference to colonialism or other things equally idiotic. The western Greeks worship reason and believe that man is inherently good and that he only lashes out in anger when accosted – they fail, however, to ever account for the accoster. Thus, Muslims hate Israel because Israel did something to them. The Muslim Greek, inversely, believes in power and nothing but power and will continue Jew killing until the Jews are gone. The western world is the rational Greek, and the Muslim world is the Greek of Antiochus, acting as the henchmen and executioner for the rational Greek.

Alan Dershowitz has argued that hatred of the Jews and their state is irrational, that it is just “classic antisemitism” as he terms it. I contend that Dershowitz is wrong. The “classic antisemitism” was a faithfully rational enterprise. It worked by a series of subconscious movements which Hitler, as shown above, finally penned: morality is the enemy of humanity or power, the Jews are the disseminators of morality, and therefore the Jews are the enemies of humanity and international peace. Peace, the rational Greeks say, would be achievable if only we could eliminate such concepts as justice which limit its implementation and such strictures as clear moral dictates of right and wrong. It doesn’t matter, they say to themselves, that the Muslim world kills people en mass daily because this can be contained and we can still benefit from the cheap oil that exudes and drips off Islamic rapiers.

The recent vote by the U.N to recognize Palestine as a state is confirmation of this situation. For years the Palestinians have been attacking Israel, brutally killing civilians, abducting soldiers, disemboweling them, and teaching in their U.N. funded schools that the Jews are evil and deserving of such a fate. Everyone knows this is happening. No one is denying the facts, but they are rationalizing them. And as the western Greek continues to rationalize, the Muslim Greek continues to spread its empire of hate.

Rededicating the Temple

This situation is untenable. Peace will not come in our time and we should end our addiction to the notion that peace is an ideal. A world in which truth and justice is sacrificed for the sake of peace is, ironically, always to be in a state of war, and we should never fall prey to false promise of peace.

Chanukah is holiday which commemorates G-d’s commemoration of a military victory over the tyranny of relativism and nihilism. The message of the Jews is what contains society, keeping it from over inflating itself such as it did with the Greeks of antiquity. A cursory glance of the moral landscape and modern culture reveals to those who can see that the western Greek is again over inflated, soon to implode. Into that vacuum may come the Muslim Greek, if we allow him entrance. But the western Greek is spending a great deal of time convincing us that we don’t need to look around. “Keep your head down,” he demands, “the shadows on the cave wall are real.”

A shiny idol has been erected in Jerusalem, a city soon to be divided and taken from the Jews again. Where are our modern Maccabees?

From Daniel Greenfield at Sultanknish.blogspot.com

Come right in and step right up. See the bright lights and the oddities of nature. Inside folks, for the low price of twenty-two trillion dollars, you can see Binders of Women, Team Big Bird and entire reams of green windmills and fields full of bayonets and horses. Here lies become the truth and everything is full of sugar. And the highlight of the show with be Barack, the Exotic Prince from the Wilds of Indonesia and Kenya, with a special appearance by Oprah and a hologram of JFK. Here in the Carnival of Fools, the party never stops and no one ever has to pay the bill.

“There’s a sucker born every minute,” a famous connoisseur of them once said. And suckers are big business. Very big business indeed. But don’t feel too sorry for the sucker. The sucker is a creature composed of ignorance and greed. He believes in his own specialness. He believes that he can fool other people into giving him their money, when actually he is the one being fleeced. The mark is an aspiring scammer who is too dumb to realize that nothing in life is free and the scam is on him.

If you browse through your email’s spam folder, the chances are good that you will come upon a missive from a Nigerian prince offering you the opportunity to help him cart away his fortune in exchange for a sharp cut of the profits. These scams date back to the dinosaur years of the internet, and though there are occasional elaborations on the theme, the African scammers stick to the tried and true, even though the tried and true has become a cliche that anyone should be able to see through.

Why?

Because the Nigerian Prince scam is a self-selecting group. Anyone who still falls for it after all these years is dumber than your average sucker. The scammers know this and they don’t want to waste their valuable time hooking a difficult fish with a plausible scam. They go for easy marks for the same reason that some men fish with dynamite. Because it’s easier.

America has its own Nigerian Prince. I think you know his name by now. His campaign sent out nearly as many emails as his Nigerian colleagues do, promising fame and fortune to those suckers who would help him transfer some wealth from the 1 percent to the 99 percent. And now that his second term is here, the check is in the mail. And if the government check doesn’t clear, well that’s what happens when you put your faith in Nigerian Princes.

A scam like the Democratic Party needs suckers. It needs millions and millions of the dumbest people that can be found outside of specially supervised group homes. And then it needs to appoint people to watch over them, give them the occasional food and minor check, and drive them in vans to the polls after two or four years so that the con artists can keep their manicured paws on the local treasury.

These people have to be stupid, yes, but like all marks, they have to be greedy. They have to be the kind of people who relish taking someone else’s money without working for it. The kind who grin at the idea of putting something over someone else. The kind who think that they are smart because they decided that the world owes them a living. They think that they’re smart, but they’re only the marks in a con. And when the con is done, like the guy depositing a check from Nigeria’s Prince Uscamo, they are going to be the ones left holding the bag.

A con plays on the greed of the mark. And on his stupidity. And in a democracy, you can take over a country if you organize enough motivated suckers to vote for trillions in government money that they will never see, but that they are on the hook for. And if you don’t have enough native suckers, then you import more, taking care that your immigration policies favor the greedy sucker demographic. But unfortunately in a democracy where half the population doesn’t bother to vote and a quarter votes for the scammers, we are all on the hook for the scam.

We have just gone through two lovely elections that were won on the carnival principle. Put up a lot of bright lights, some unusual things for the crowds to gawp at, a few scantily clad ladies of the evening, and a lot of smooth patter, and forget taking any of the issues seriously. Tell jokes, juggle balls and deliver applause lines. And most of all promise the sky while taking the suckers for all they have and will ever have.

It nearly didn’t work, but the extra effort was put in and the vans delivered their cargo loads of moral depravity to the polls, where the poll workers showed them how to vote, and then the vans took them to do some food stamp shopping to remind them of how good life is under the scam. And many other people, the ones who don’t return emails from Nigerian princes, didn’t bother to vote, because they don’t believe in any element of the scam. And that just means the chief scammers have an open field.

And so the reign of the scam continues for another four years. The world will burn and the country will slide closer to the economic abyss. But in their dorm rooms, the Julias will pine knowing that their Nigerian prince loves them (doesn’t he sent them daily emails personally addressed to them?) and the vans will go back and forth, and cashiers will run food stamp cards through the machines in neighborhoods which subsist entirely on the scam, and in the hospitals elderly patients will due because health care is free, but treatments are more expensive than ever. And the devil will laugh.

Carnivals have to end sooner or later. And the scam doesn’t look nearly as good in the light of day as it does at night, when everyone has had a few drinks and life seems good and magic can happen. A few of us hopefully thought that daybreak had come, but no it was only the light of the carnival and the drunken laughter of fools spending their last dime to hear their Nigerian prince crack a joke, hum a tune and pledge his undying love to them.

“The fool walks in darkness,” said the Chief Executive of a nation called Israel some 3,000 years ago. And for the fools of Carny Nation, who, as he observed, fold their hands and eat their own flesh, rather than work for a living, it is always the midnight hour, always time for another drink, another laugh, another novelty and another spin of the wheel that goes round and round and never stops until sunlight touches it and it turns to dust.

The fools of Carny Nation fancy themselves wise men. After all they eat without paying for it. They get money without working for it. Every baby they pop out buys them another pair of shoes. When they vote Democrat, the President of Carny Nation sends them a check. And so they put another vote in the machine, get back a few quarters, put another one in the mission, and wait for the day that the redistribution jackpot will give them everything.

Last year in Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, the price of three eggs ran to 100 billion dollars. A beer cost 150 billion dollars and a roll of toilet paper, well it was just cheaper to use million dollar bills. We are talking about Zimbabwean dollars here, not American dollars, but eventually there will be no difference. Zimbabwe yesterday. America tomorrow. Money isn’t magic and there comes a point when no amount of words can increase its value. Eventually it becomes cheaper to print out presidential speeches on the bright economic future and use them as toilet paper.

When food stamps start coming in billion dollar quantities, then the sucker bet on Obama, Prince of Kenya, Indonesia and Chicago, may start looking bad. But suckers never realize when a bet is going bad. They double down and begin yammering some more about raising taxes. And why not. We’re sixteen trillion in debt. Why not raise taxes by a few trillion? You have to break a few billion dollar eggs to make a thirty-trillion dollar omelet. And that beer summit, it will cover the entire defense budget.

The grandchildren of Carny Nation will die in the streets, just as they do in their own home countries, but for now their future grandparents know that a baby buys a pair of shoes, 350 dollar Nike LeBron X’s, and that a vote for the Democrats will keep them from having to work or route them into nice government jobs with big benefits and easy hours. And when it all comes crashing down and their children are crying for food, because 100 billion dollar eggs are hard to come by; they will never blame themselves, instead they will blame the people they were scamming all these years, rather than the scammers who scammed them.

But of course Carny Nation is more than just food stamps and welfare checks. It’s green windmills turning slowly in deserts with no wind. It’s banks licking their lips at carbon taxes and consultants lining up to consult on everything from diversity to sustainability to intangibility. They are higher up on the scam pole, but like their van brethren, they’re still scammers who don’t realize that in the end they are the ones being scammed. Their children won’t die in the streets, but their bank accounts will.

Fools come in all shapes and sizes, in all races, religions and bank account sizes. Dumb isn’t measured by degrees or IQ points. Dumb people can absorb a lot of knowledge and spit it back. They can even discuss it incessantly in their best Word-a-Day language skills. The difference between dumb and smart does not come down to literacy or being able to juggle isosceles triangles/ Memory is a skill and most people can learn something if they really want to and have the proper background for it. The difference between smart and dumb is the difference between knowing what’s real and what isn’t.

Intelligence is a bunch of brain cells packed by a few lines of DNA into a cranium. Those are mental skills and they come in handy when tackling Algebra or studying the history of the Mayans. King Solomon, that ancient chief executive of a kingdom despised by Carny Nation, wasn’t talking about learning as intelligence, but as wisdom. Wisdom isn’t just knowledge, it’s understanding that knowledge by drawing the right conclusions. The search for wisdom is the search for those right conclusions.

Fools are often very clever. Some have enormously high IQs and office walls packed with so many degrees that there is no room for a window. And they are still fools because they have no ability to draw the right conclusions. Knowledge is cheap. Your computer has access to more of it than all the wise men of history put together could ever dream of. Intelligence is a genetic gift. Wisdom is what you acquire with both or without either. It is the right conclusions that we draw about life from living it.

Intelligent fools are a Zimbabwean dollar a dozen and the Zimbabwean dollar doesn’t buy a whole lot. Carny Nation 2012 Forward to the America of the Super Future on horses and bayonets of irony and binders full of memes was powered by clever, intelligent, technocratic and even cunning fools. And above them all was our own King Fool, our Scammer-in-Chief, our Nigerian Prince, who like all scammers is passing the time scamming us while unable to realize that he is the one being scammed and the time will come, when he will fall beneath the bus under whose wheels he has hurled so many.

“There is no future for those who slander the Prophet of Islam,” our Nigerian Prince proclaimed, as part of his coverup of the murder of four Americans, left to die by his government. A coverup that has resulted in the first political prisoner in generations sitting in a cell. But there is a future for those who disdain Mohammed, that primal scammer who told his followers that they would have an endless supply of virgin girls to rape in paradise if they killed enough of his enemies and stole their stuff in the here-and-now. There is however no future for fools. There is no future for Carny Nation.

The Democrats have built themselves a pyramid scheme of Babel and it’s fools, suckers and marks all the way down. This is their Carny Nation and it only sustains itself by demanding greater levels of stupidity from its followers. The worse the storm grows, the dumber and trashier the base of its pyramid grows as vaccination against sudden conclusions from outside.

Popular culture, the media and politics becomes one. A great white noise machine of light and sound, carnival lights, smells and sounds, men throwing flaming torches in the air, shouts and cries, rap stars, memes, ladies of the evening, stars, banners, slogans, cheers and anything else that will keep the fools from realizing that the time is five minutes after five and the time is coming for the scammers to slink away into the night with their ill gotten loot and for the suckers who thought they were scammers and the marks who thought they were cons to clutch their carbon offsets and food stamps and raise their eyes dazedly as the sunrise exposes the tawdriness of the carnival, the false front stalls, the empty baskets and the last drabs of greasepaint on their hands.

And then Carny Nation will end.

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