Magnificent satire.

Okay, so it seems clear enough that there is a concerted effort to make our world so absurd that satire would logically just wither away from total irrelevance.  I find myself commenting about this all the time.

And yet, some pesky humans--bless their seditious, contrarian hearts--manage to adapt nonetheless.  The following solid gold nugget from Patrick at Popehat, guesting over at The Agitator: Screwtape Wept.  It begins:

My Dear Wormwood,

As discussed in my last letter, your patient’s decision to join the police department seemed a mixed development at best. It is true that Hell follows no law save the most ancient, “Eat or be eaten.” But as a general rule we want to discourage the creatures from obeying any laws, even of their own devising. Despite the best efforts of our most fiendish disputants, we in the Lowerarchy are unable, as yet, to remove from their laws all that reeks of the Enemy, such as justice, temperance, chastity, and respect for their fellow vermin. Still, we have made great strides in this age toward bending those who enforce the laws, such as your patient, to the commendable vices of cruelty, corruption, graft, influence-peddling, and the forsaking of oaths. So I did not discourage your patient’s occupation, as long as he could be steered onto a path which would eventually bring him to Our Father’s House.

Let's just say it does not end there.

Now I haven't actually read The Screwtape Letters, myself;  it is only through this homage that I even found out about CS Lewis' original.  (It's now on the list.)  But, like all good satire, this one is self-encapsulated on its own, and it's funny.

The artistic level of ridiculing humor targeting the state is observably on the rise, as is the general volume.  It's still well underground, but it's alive and growing.  Hell, maybe some day, when more people have had enough and are ready to hear it, it'll actually "go mainstream" or something crazy like that.

"Sleeping giant", or something.

Glenn Greenwald on the surveillance society. Please share everywhere.

Long live Glenn Greenwald.  His perspective, his background, is such a long way away from my own, but holy smokes, the man says important things well. 

Please, read this entire article (yes, it is long, and worth it), and share it as far and wide as humanly possible.  Lots of people need to see and confront what it contains, and for many of them, Greenwald will be a much better messenger than you or I--while delivering substantially the same message.

I'll indulge documenting two examples here.  Here's the first:

But I think that the more difficult value of privacy, the one that’s harder to think about, the one that’s more important than the one I just described. And that is that, it is in the private realm exclusively, where things like dissent and creativity, and challenges to orthodoxy, reside.

It’s only when you know that you can explore without external judgment, or when you can experiment without eyes being cast upon you, that the opportunity for creating new paths comes and there are all kinds of fascinating studies that  prove this to be the case. There are psychological studies where people have sat down at their dinner tables with their family members and friends talking for a long time in a very informal way. Then suddenly one of them pulls out a tape recorder and puts it on the table and says, “I’m going to tape-record this conversation just for my own interest. I promise I’m not going to tell anybody, I’m not going to show it to anybody, no one’s going to hear it, I’m just going to tape-record it because I like to go over all of the wisdom that you give me.”

And it’s an experiment to psychologically assess what the impact of that is. And invariably, what happens is, people who are now being recorded radically change their behavior. They speak in much more stilted sentences, they try and talk about much more high-minded topics, they are much stiffer in their expression of things because they now feel that they are being monitored. There was a pilot program in Los Angeles six or seven years ago that was in response to a couple of exaggerated news stories about rambunctious school children, elementary school children, on buses that were apparently being bullying and abusing other students.

The solution that they came up with was, they were going to install surveillance cameras in every single public school bus in Los Angeles county, which is the second or third largest county in the United States. The response, when it was ultimately disclosed, was well, this is going to be extraordinarily expensive! How can you have tens of thousands of working surveillance cameras with people monitoring them, recording them, every single day for every school bus in LA county? The answer that they gave was, Oh no, we’re not going to have working cameras in these buses, there may be a few buses that have working cameras, just so nobody knows which buses have those. We’re going to have faux cameras, because we know that if we put cameras up, even though they're not working, that will radically change the behavior of students.

In other words, we are training our young citizens to live in a culture where the expect they are always being watched. And we want them to be chilled, we want them to be deterred, we want them not to ever challenge orthodoxy or to explore limits where engaging creativity in any kind. This type of surveillance, by design, breeds conformism.  That’s its purpose. that’s what makes surveillance so pernicious.

How many people do you know who really need to confront that?  I know a boatload, myself, and I seriously doubt that I live among an exceptional population in that regard.

The next example I picked because a well-intentioned neophyte recently tried, amid a larger conversation about where the faith for Obamacare comes from, to hold up the 1960s civil rights laws as an example of how "working within the system" can get results.  I responded that "I would not want to try and defend the idea that we're any better off now, than then," and what I was thinking at the time was that it might be a pretty non-trivial challenge to try and convince American Muslims that ethnic or religious bigotry has been in any meaningful way "fixed" by any number of "Civil Rights Act"s.  Let's just say that Greenwald veritably nails it here:

I spend a lot of time with American Muslims and American Muslim communities doing the work that I do and where I go and speak, and one of the things that emboldens me and keeps me very energized and engaged about these issues is if you go and speak to communities of American Muslims is you find an incredibly pervasive climate of fear.

And the reason is that they know that they are always being watched. They know that they have FBI informants who are attempting to infiltrate their communities, they know that there are people next to them, their neighbors, fellow mosque-goers, who have been manipulated by the FBI to be informants. They know that they are being eavesdropped on when they speak on the telephone, they know that they are having their e-mails read when they speak or communicate to anybody. What they will say all the time is that it’s created this extreme suspicion within their own communities, within their own mosques to a point where they’re even afraid to talk to any new people about anything significant because they fear, quite rightly, that this is all being done as part of  a government effort to watch them.

It doesn’t really matter whether it’s true in a particular case or it isn’t true. This climate of fear creates limits around the behavior in which they’re willing to engage in very damaging ways.

But I think what this Surveillance State really does more than making people consciously aware of the limits in those two examples I just described: people not wanting to go to Occupy movements and people in Muslim communities being very guarded is, it makes people believe that they’re free even though they’ve been subtly convinced that there are things that they shouldn’t do that they might want to do.

Buh-zing.  He just said it better than I ever could.

And those really are just two small highlights.  The whole "article" is essentially gold, and worth the read.  (Extra points if you get as big an eyebrow raise at the context of its delivery as I did.  Now that is interesting.)

Need more humor like this.

Had to document this one.  Don't even recall exactly how I got the link for it, but that hardly matters.  To whoever "Stephen Smith" of A Beginner's Guide to Freedom is:  thank you;  I needed this today.

This isn't just one joke.  It's several multi-entendre zingers in one funny story.  And unless and until someone asks me to take it down to just a link, I'll post it in its entirety here, along with Smith's attributory note:

(This post is by no means my original material. This joke was forwarded to me by some friends in Alabama).

Whoever it was, it's right on.  While you're here giggling, give Beginner's Guide some click-love.

Here you go!

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in Montana when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?”

Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure, Why not?”

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the Internet where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an e-mail on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC-connected Excel spreadsheet with e-mail on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”

“That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says Bud. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then the Bud says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?”

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”

“You're a U.S. Congressman,” says Bud.

“Wow! That's correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required,” answered the cowboy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don't know a thing about cows...this is a herd of sheep. Now give me back my dog.”

Independence Day

Otra otra vez.  Wrote this* in 2009--could have written the same thing years before that--and oddly enough, not a thing has changed.

More constructive, this year, are Claire's thoughts.

People tell us that declaring (or going off and living) individual freedom in an unfree time is nihilistic. They call it giving up. They say we haven’t tried everything. They say it’s no solution to tyranny, but a surrender. They cry that we must join some Effort, get behind some Cause. And sometimes we do.

But these days, the number one job for We the Free is to create while the empire crumbles. Our job is to live in a way that builds a new reality in the ruins of the old.

As is so typical for Claire, this is just exactly what a weary mind sometimes needs reminding about.  (And bonus points for linking back to Nock, at just the time when I need it.)

Duly noted, and carrying on.

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* As of this writing, the original Examiner article is still valid;  they keep telling me it's going to get pulled, and maybe someday it will be.  After which, it is still reproduced at the above Rifleman Savant link.

Where does the faith come from?

Saw on Facebook a link wherein (hold onto your hats, now, for this surprise) Krugman shills for Obamacare and sings the praises of The Roberts Decision*. 

I gritted my teeth and responded, and it seemed appropriate to document it here.  Note that names have been scrubbed out of respect for a very bright and otherwise intelligent person.

[W]ith apologies (this is your crib here): 

Here I go being a heretic again, but this is the question that most vexes me:  where does the faith come from?  Why, exactly, do people believe that this bill will actually help the little guy, instead of doing what every other bill in every other aspect of regulatory life has done since long before any of us were born:  empower the politically connected at the expense of the not-politically-connected rest of us?  Surely it's not simply because of the marketing and propaganda:  does the assurance of a transparent Establishment shill like Krugman (and the NYT itself) simply make it so?  None of this squares with history, which after all is nothing but an endless sequence of "reforms" that always, always, always seem to wind up worse than what inspired them in the first place.  (We've been "throwing the bums out" since 1796.)  Why do people keep lining up to do the same thing, and expecting different results?  It's really hard to avoid the battered-spouse analogy here.

I'm putting aside, entirely, my principal objection to this racket, in order to point out that even for those persuaded by pragmatism, this thing has "lose-lose" written all over it.  After more than a decade of the PATRIOT Act and what it has wrought (just for a recent and well-known example), I confess I just want to understand where the faith continues to come from.

Probably the best voice on this topic is the redoubtable Arthur Silber.  He's about as far away from my own background as one could get, shamelessly self-referential, and unabashedly impolite in his directness, but what he is not is ill-informed or wrong.  His work on this subject goes back well before the bill's passage, but his latest piece sums it all up quite nicely:

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2012/06/choosing-blindness-and-stupidity-and.html

Seriously, for anyone who has the faith:  why?  What is it about this one that is going to be different than all that came before it?

UPDATE:  In response:

Kevin - Where does the faith come from? I think it comes from that what we currently have is not working very well. Healthcare costs are astronomical, insurance is complicated, people who need insurance (e.g. preexisting conditions) find it hard or impossible to get. We are not SURE that this is going to work, but giving it a try could possibly improve things. The only thing that stays the same in life is change - yes, some reforms have failed, others have improved things (civil rights reform in the 1960s). We don't know until we try. For some reason the analogy of me in my first year of teaching keeps coming back to me: for example, in a certain situation what I'm doing is not working. So I try something new. It could turn out to be a disaster, it could be brilliant, or it could be somewhere in between. But at least I'm adapting to and thinking critically about my situation. In my opinion, the same thing applies here.

And to document my response:

To truly "do something different" you have to look at this with a bigger lens.  There is nothing--nothing--about the system that we have now, the one that we all seem to agree is so unsustainably unworkable, that has not already been "fixed" many times over by legislation that was sold to us the same way, for the same reasons, and with the same result.  The system which so badly needs repair now, is the very one that the Beltway Establishment has already given us.  And so, as another product of the Beltway Establishment, ACA will perform just like all its smaller predecessors;  we'll "discover", breathlessly, in time, that its construction is (surprise!) riddled with perfectly legal ways for connected cronies to make out like bandits at the expense of the politically unconnected--and it will do so in such a way as to provide the fuel for the *next* moral outrage that we "allow" some people to take advantage of others like that.  Ten years down the road--or however long the cycle will take this time--the same gang will get everyone whipped up into another frenzy to "do something" because of how bad the system has by then become...and without a doubt they'll make sure that we are all well-informed as to what we can do to "reform" it:  appeal to the same people, using the same political processes, affected by the same pressures...to achieve the same result.  All the while, the little guy (that is, you and I) continues to get screwed.

Rinse, repeat.  (Look into it seriously, and you'll discover that all politics works this way, from imperial warmongering to traffic tickets.  Even sacred cows like "civil rights reform";  I would not want to try and defend the idea that we're any better off now, than then.)

If this way of thinking is rather contrary to everything you have been taught, you're hardly alone. I'm ashamed to admit how long it took me to recognize reality, but ultimately I just completely ran out of excuses and had to admit that in order to do something different, we'd actually have to do something different.  This revelation requires that you be willing to let go of what you "know", for long enough to actually view it with a critical eye--and this is what most people are unwilling to do.  The dual ironies in this are that 1) if what you "know" is truly better than an alternative, it would easily withstand the critical comparison, and 2) the only reason that political systems so vigorously persecute their heretics is that their moral imperative is easily destroyed by independent critical thought.  (Like any protection racket, it's a survival strategy.)  Consider the further irony that a common dismissal of political heretics is that they are somehow "paranoid"--for seriously considering an alternative.

It's not that we're not sure that this (ACA) is going to work.  History suggests that we are sure that this is not going to work--unless by "work" we mean "further aggrandize the power of the state at the expense of the individual", in which case it will work beautifully, because that is what political systems do. 

Most won't agree with me.  Many have sortied forth with playbook ad hominem or smug dismissal.  But nobody has shown me where this perspective has been proven wrong.

In the end, and despite the frustration, it's not my place or intention to "convince" anyone. I didn't respond to that either, when others were throwing arrows at what I "knew", and at any rate the reliability of an opinion achieved by browbeating is inherently suspect, isn't it?

I simply offer an alternative perspective.  Keep it in mind as you watch how this plays out.

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* Thanks, Claire, for stating that one like it is.

This woman has a following?

Look, I admit, I'm pretty cynical about some things, but I have to admit that I am actually amazed at what I just saw.

I hadn't ever actually seen Rachel Maddow--ah--perform before;  hell, we don't even get television at home (I'm away on business as I write this).  Surfing for a bit after watching the swimming events at the Olympic trials, I stumbled on Maddow's show, saw a Fast and Furious image in the background, and figured I'd take a look.  You know, put the real deal up against what others have said and how I've seen her quoted.

Hotel Foxtrot Sierra.  This woman has a following?

It was breathtaking in multiple dimensions.  She appeared to be hyperventilating the entire time, for starters, and rushing both to fit everything in, and then repeating it all as frequently as possible.  The transparency of her content, as parroted eleventh-hour talking points from the "don't be nosy" phone tree, was jaw-droppingly laughable, even by modern urinealism* standards.  It was clear that the expectation was that if she said it enough, it would simply become true from sheer force of will and repetition.

It was embarrassing to watch.  I felt like I should look away--not so much out of disgust (which would be perfectly understandable on its own merits) but out of simple, sheer pity for the complete, on-camera abdication of her own dignity.  I'd use the "oh, bless 'er hawrt" locution, but this is way beyond just being full of shit.  What she was doing here wasn't personal bluster, it was a sortie.  (It's perfectly clear that when Master talks, she musters.)

Someone must be landing blows that hurt, or at least scare.  (Thank you again Mike and David.)

Well, I guess now I have first-hand experience to go on.  I'd figured I'd be disgusted, I admit, but this was just in a completely different category than I was prepared for.  In the end, I can't decide whether to kick myself for not being cynical enough, or to be happy that my continuing disbelief at what impersonators of human beings are capable of, might be prima facie evidence that I've still got some humanity left intact in there.

Well, let's just hope that she represents "the best and brightest" of tyranny's footsoldiers.  (Ha.  I wish.  Still.)

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* Damn, I do miss straightarrow.

A shout out...

Posting has been light of late--part of an attempt to recover a little sanity--but a few things bear mention.

First:  sincere condolences and best wishes to David Codrea, who just lost his father.  It is difficult to overstate how important David is in the resistance to the War on Guns, and when he took a personal hiatus to attend to his family, it was impossible not to notice his absence.

I try to mention David's importance frequently when I post about Gunwalker or the War on Guns in general, but you know, it's worth mentioning here.  (Not that readership here even registers as "meager", but rather that it's just worth documenting "at home".)  The man has been a pillar of principle for a stack of years now, and I have been personally following his work for nearly a decade of that.  I make no secret of a few differences of opinion, but in the scheme of things those are trivial:  on matters of import regarding guns and gunnies, there is no one more authoritative than David.

David:  you do further credit to yourself by the way you took and handled your hiatus.  It reminds us that you are human, and with the work you do, that is an observation easy to overlook.

Thank you, again, for all you do.  It freakin' matters.

---

Next:  it's also good to have Mike Vanderboegh back, still recovering from a medical adventure rather more substantial than it first appeared.  Mike has been as tireless as David in the Gunwalker case, and it is likewise very difficult to overstate the value and importance of his work in keeping the life in something that powerful people very much want to go away.  These two complement each other quite effectively;  where David is the rock, the steady, Mike is the firebrand.  (And if you're familiar with David's work, you'll recognize what it says about Mike that he makes David look like "the steady".   :-)

Mike, it's good to have you back.  Please do take care of yourself;  there is still much agitating to do, and nobody does it better than you do.

---

And that brings us back around to Gunwalker, which as Joel notes, may be "go[ing] into extra innings".  Via Mike, check this out:

Now I'll admit I don't know anything about this Bill Whittle guy, but damn, that was good.  Good enough to overlook those few places where the pointless partisan labels get trotted out;  even those seemed to be in service of the point, which he flogs admirably in plain sight.

More of that, please.  Maybe something from Glenn Greenwald, or Scott Horton, or someone else that everyone identifies with "the left", just so we can dispense with the ridiculous notion* that this is a partisan issue.  (Hell, I still wish Balko would pick it up, with his audience at The Huffington Post.)


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* Don't get me wrong.  I understand perfectly that to those inside the Beltway it may well be a partisan issue.  But anyone deluded with the notion that those trying to keep this case alive are simple Republican stoolies is invited to explain Vanderboegh's use of the terms "dead elephants" and "Old Yellowstain".