Of course, the only good news for people who believe in individual rights is that the Left can see this through only one lens: gun control. It’s already a cause célèbre and justification for gun grabbing, according to this bit of rabid stupidity by the NY Times. Of course, the guns were bought legally in California. All of the laws that the political left/progressives told us would prevent mass shootings were in place. Anyone who has actually, legally purchased a gun in California knows what a colossal pain in the ass it is (myself included). At some point in the process, you realize it has absolutely nothing to do with safety of anyone. It’s just meant to make the process as miserable as possible to discourage you from buying a gun. That’s it. I know because I’ve now purchased guns from the two most gun-restrictive states in the country – Massachusetts and California. (If by coincidence I move to Chicago and try there, I’ll have won the trifecta of crappy gun law jurisdictions.)
What will be largely ignored is the fact that (A) the wife was a Pakistani woman (our ally), who came with her husband to the US from Saudi Arabia (our ally), and that (B) those two countries rank consistently near the top of countries with the highest anti-American sentiment in the world. The RAND corporation or some other such organization does a report on countries and ranks them by their anti-American sentiment. e.g. When you see people in that country cheering in the streets when someone gets killed in our country, that might be a clue. As an aside, despite Trump’s bullshit claims (and inability to distinguish New Jersey from Iran), I certainly recall seeing images of people in Muslim countries celebrating when the Twin Towers came down… But they weren’t Muslims in the United States, Trump, you moron. That never happened.
Now, I could take the anti-terrorism angle, but I won’t say anything more than “get back to work” to the FBI and everyone else involved. I don’t want press conferences. Have someone issue a press release with what you know and want to say. Now get back to work. I don’t want to listen to a bunch of self-important people cater to the press in these set-piece TV appearances. In truth, I don’t even understand in this day and age why we have these things. You all have computers, right? I mean, you could way more easily control what gets out, ask for any information or assistance you want from the public, ensure people get the message that you’re all “working together” blah blah blah, and then get back to work! I mean, isn’t there a terrorism investigation to conduct? Yes? Then why aren’t more people in their offices tracking down leads and putting their nose to the grindstone, rather than putting on these dog and pony shows?
This sound overwrought? Well, I used to make a living hunting terrorists, so I happen to have some experience from which to speak. It’s ball-breaking, painstaking work. It requires metric-boatloads of hours, poring over information, trying to find connections in all of the various reporting sources that even a field guy like me could access, looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack, trying alternate spelling variations of muslim names, etc. (Seriously, you have no idea what havoc that used to play in databases in the early days. Was it spelled “Kadr,” “Khadr,” or “Qadr?” And that’s a very simple, easy example. Multiply it by a few hundred or thousand names and variations and aliases). Then there are the human sources to be worked, the actual intelligence to be gathered, then it has to be written up – hopefully well: that is, clearly, concisely, and and such that it can be searched through and followed up on, acted upon if necessary, if someone else needs the information for a piece of their puzzle, and on and on.
That’s how you find terrorists. I don’t recall holding many – er, any – press conferences in pursuit of my goal to help stop, capture, and kill terrorists.
Notwithstanding that, I’m not going to write about the gun control angle. I’ve had my say on that. And I’m not going to go the stupidity of the DHS, even though even the government has now (finally) acknowledged what we already knew: it’s an unmitigated disaster. Seriously – I love that there are 72 people on the FBI’s terrorism watchlist working for the Department of Homeland Security. That couldn’t better prove my point about both gun control and government stupidity simultaneously: the NY Times is arguing that we need to disarm the citizenry (by government) so we can all be safe and sound, while there are 72 people on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist who work for DHS, and presumably some of whom are allowed all of the special privileges and clearances that come with that, including (I surmise) the right to keep and bear arms – but not for me and the other “little people” – for our own good. Right. Makes perfect sense, NY Times, you flipping morons. And I’ll let skate that DHS has a 95% failure rate for people just walking on with guns and other weapons, according to their own IG report.
So, that’s all I have on those, largely because I don’t think those are fights that need to be won, culturally. I read somewhere recently that every time the President comes on TV to talk about more “commonsense gun control” that shortly thereafter there are record numbers of purchases and background checks to be performed. In other words, I don’t need to scream at the top of my lungs about gun control. The fact is that the country won’t go there culturally. The gun-grabbers are a shrill minority and I suspect that’s why they’re so shrill. They’re losing. And they know it. Americans can be fooled, but only for so long. Americans know that there were mass shootings long before the current string. For those not old enough to remember, there used to be an expression called “going postal” and it referred to a string of shootings by postal workers. I like the St. Petersburg Times’ reference in 1993:
The symposium was sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service, which has seen so many outbursts that in some circles excessive stress is known as ‘going postal.’ Thirty-five people have been killed in 11 post office shootings since 1983. The USPS does not approve of the term “going postal” and has made attempts to stop people from using the saying. Some postal workers, however, feel it has earned its place appropriately.
Vick, Karl, “Violence at work tied to loss of esteem”, St. Petersburg Times, Dec 17, 1993. Depending upon one’s time frame, you can construct a dataset that looks like 2 mass postal shootings (all by themselves) each year for 20 years. Maybe we should ban post offices?
No, instead, I thought I’d use this as a launching point for why I don’t need to discuss the above and what I’m trying to do in the first place: change culture. Now that seems a weird (and perhaps overly ambitious) thing to say. Let me offer up one of the best essays that I believe has ever been written. It might not seem to be directly on point, but I think it’s an important jumping off point.
It took me a long time to finally commit to writing a thousand or so words every week. Like, a horribly, interminably long time. It wasn’t writer’s block. I had a lot on my mind that I wanted to say. And I’ve had to read enough of other’s people’s writing in the course of forty-five years of both reading and writing, which has included a not-insignificant amount of professional writing as an attorney, to think, “I could do that.”
I wasn’t afraid of constructing an argument, even an extended one, and following it through, even in defiance of court ordered page limits.
My crisis was one of faith.
When you reach a point where you think your country, the one for which you’ve offered to sacrifice your life repeatedly, is going to shit, it’s really hard not to feel a bit despondent about the whole affair. I mean, after all, what does it really matter? Or, as the preacher of Ecclesiastes would remind us:
…vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?”
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
I kinda started to get the “fukkits.”
This may be a product of middle age. It may be an occupational hazard of being old enough to have seen cultural shifts in the fabric of the country that have had real, lasting, negative impacts. And I’m not one of those “pining for my youth” kind of old guys, either. My childhood was in no way idyllic. I can remember Ford and Carter. I remember the Iranian hostage crisis very well. I remember the oil crisis, lines for gas, rampant inflation, and a general sense that America wasn’t all that great a place. Reagan was, for whatever else can be said about him either good or bad, whether he spent too much on the military, or gets too much credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union, etc. – an unabashed cheerleader for the United States, the American Dream, and our Way of Life. That might be the single most important thing I remember about him. He was an unabashed defender of America, American values, and American culture. By 1984, after the Olympics in Los Angeles that made Peter Ueberroth a household name – as well as Carl Lewis, FloJo, Edwin Moses, the Dream Team and many others – there was a great deal of pride in being an American.
Yet, in my lifetime, that sense of cultural pride has gone the way of the dodo, Betamax, and Intellivision.
I ran across this piece by Albert Jay Nock, called “Isaiah’s Job.” It first appeared in 1936 in the Atlantic Monthly. It is, in my opinion, some of the best essay writing ever. I don’t feel overly dramatic saying that, as there are several luminaries in economics, writing, and other public walks of life who have said that Nock’s essay was an inspiration to them, as well. I’d read the piece before on someone’s recommendation – I think it was my boss, actually – but had forgotten about it (somehow) and in my feelings of malaise, my path was somehow directed back to it while searching for something else. Boom. There it was.
I won’t do it the disservice of trying to retell it or recapture it here. It deserves its own reading. There’s a youtube version of it being read that is pretty good for listening to in a car if one is of a mind and into audio books or whatever new technology has books being read to us. I should note I’m kind of a word nerd and I love reading the written word far more than I like hearing it read, for what I think are good reasons that are more than mere matters of personal taste. Regardless, what Nock captures in that piece is not merely inspirations for the teller, but a long-term reason: you never know when the Remnant might be listening. In fact, according to Mr. Nock, it’s likely you won’t know:
The fascination and the despair of the historian, as he looks back upon Isaiah’s Jewry, upon Plato’s Athens, or upon Rome of the Antonines, is the hope of discovering and laying bare the “substratum of right thinking and well doing” which he knows must have existed somewhere in those societies because no kind of collective life can possibly go on without it. He finds tantalizing intimations of it here and there in many places, as in the Greek Anthology, in the scrapbook of Aulus Gellius, in the poems of Ausonius, and in the brief and touching tribute, Bene merenti, bestowed upon the unknown occupants of Roman tombs. But these are vague and fragmentary; they lead him nowhere in his search for some kind of measure on this substratum, but merely testify to what he already knew a priori — that the substratum did somewhere exist. Where it was, how substantial it was, what its power of self-assertion and resistance was — of all this they tell him nothing.
I must confess to being overwhelmed at times by the news of the day: Hilary Clinton commits multiple felons in front of everyone without consequence and is likely to become the Democratic party nominee, as her only opposition is an avowed Socialist. That neither of them are simply laughed off of the public stage is an embarrassment for the country. And the Right isn’t much better. Donald Trump’s candidacy has now progressed well–beyond the “publicity stunt” phase into a full-blown candidacy. He’s leading by 20 points in the Republican primary in some polls. That, also, is a nartional embarrassment. Or there is the complete idiocy of Univeristy of Missouri students – and the abject cowardice of their administrators. Or the utter complacency of my fellow citizens about the unwarranted (and I mean that literally, as in “without a warrant”) scouring of their emails or cell phones, in service of both the dubious Wars on Drugs and Terror. It is in those moments that I despair that there is anything left of American culture to save, yet both Nock’s essay and the supporting historical record make it clear that if we’ve finally pissed away the legacy of Freedom – which has not, by even the kindest look at history, been the norm for most of mankind’s existence on the planet – then we have to hope that in some distant future, if another Dark Ages is to come upon Man, that perhaps there will be a rediscovery by our distant progenitors of “the Good,” much as we rediscovered the Greeks. Of course, it wasn’t simply the Greeks, but they certainly left a significant mark, along with many other ancient societies, and began a revitalization in thought, in philosophy, in economics, in mathematics, in science, etc., that has led – in a scant 500 years – from bloodlettings and sawing off limbs during combat to extracorporeal membrane oxygenation during open heart surgery or working prosthetic fingers – as just two small examples of the wonders of the technological progress we’ve made.
I could go on forever about how far we’ve come. Yet we’ve only really just finished abolishing slavery. That is, there are still countries that have de facto slavery, having only lately abolished it by law.
I would submit that change will not happen through elections. Team Blue and Team Red can no longer even tolerate dissent. Find me a well-known Democrat who is Pro-Life, for example. Or a high-ranking Republican who is loudly Pro-Choice. It’s no longer acceptable to have even the slightest difference from the party line and hope to have a chance to dip into the seemingly bottomless well of campaign dollars. And it’s not on one side, so please don’t go ranting about all of the EVUHL K-K-KORPORAYSHUNZ until you’ve done some homework. The Dems collect just as much as the Repubs do. Sometimes a few billion more, sometimes a few billion less; it varies with either Team’s then-public fortunes, typically. The Clinton Foundation alone, and its fundraising practices, should be enough to silence any discussion about the “Evil Kochtopus”. The Koch brothers are libertarians, for cripes sake.
No, It’s been my experience, and good fortune sitting where I sit as CrossFit’s General Counsel, to have watched what it’s like to help, in some small way, to mold a culture from the beginning. It’s my purpose to continue to beat the drum for the kind of culture that I know is necessary for a flourishing of “the good.” It is not, despite what so many well-wishers claim, to be found in more and more byzantine constraints by our allegedly benevolent government functionaries. The DHS, as I noted above, did not – and does not – make us more secure, notwithstanding all of the best intentions. Increased taxation on businesses, particularly for start-ups and new ventures, and a labyrinth of regulations do NOT help grow the economy and they sure as hell don’t protect consumers. Government control of the currency, by the likes of unelected “governors” in the Federal Reserve, do nothing but sow confusion and devalue our currency. Our elected leaders can not even balance a frigging budget, something we expect high school seniors to be able to do to live on their own, yet we continue to allow people to overspend trillions in tax revenue. Trillions. You need to really understand that number to appreciate how much money the US government collects and then says, “Nope. Not enough!” every year, year after year.
So I rant and rave here, to argue and leave for any who care, a record of what I’ve learned and support for those positions. Always, as Newton noted, “… if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” If I’ve gotten it wrong, it means I’ve missed a clue that was there to be seen. On the whole, however, having now been a part of a company that started out with one single gym, became a few-hundred when I joined (I was one of the first three- to four-hundred Affiliates in 2008) and later to be a part of its organic growth in a down economy, not just in the United States, but worldwide, has provided a host of lessons for a man who was steeped in government service, and came from a family of (still)-proud Democrats.
Of the folly of increased government, of the loss of Liberty, of the importance of certain cultural touchstones, I’ll keep making the case where I think I see a chance to fill in a cultural gap, to perhaps provide a different look at something old or share an insight from someone else. I think that is part of the obligation that every human being has. Leave it better than you found it. Of course, I’ll support even government where it’s trying to keep an honest record, but there was no government that compelled Thucydides, nor who wrote the Aeneid. And since I’m disinclined to take just about anyone’s word at face value, the more prophets keeping score, the better. Speak the truth, always humbly, where you see it, and be willing to reconcile or explain other data as it comes in, and either update the hypothesis or discard it and admit error and start anew. That’s the obligation We, the Living, have to those distant ancestors who survived millennia of starvation, hardship, privation, disease, war, natural disasters, infestations, plagues, poverty, and ignorance. It is, as Thomas Sowell so wisely notes, that “[a]ny serious look at the history of human beings over the millennia shows that the species began in poverty. It is not poverty, but prosperity, that needs explaining. Poverty is automatic, but prosperity requires many things – none of which is equally distributed around the world or even within a given society.”
He goes on to point out what seem to be rather obvious facts, but they are obvious in the same way that our need for oxygen is obvious. You’re perfectly well-aware of your need for oxygen- as soon as you don’t have it freely or its constricted enough. Sowell points out:
Geographic settings are radically different, both among nations and within nations. So are demographic differences, with some nations and groups having a median age over 40 and others having a median age under 20. This means that some groups have several times as much adult work experience as others. Cultures are also radically different in many ways.
As distinguished economic historian David S. Landes put it, “The world has never been a level playing field.” But which has a better track record of helping the less fortunate – fighting for a bigger slice of the economic pie, or producing a bigger pie?
In 1900, only 3 percent of American homes had electric lights but more than 99 percent had them before the end of the century. Infant mortality rates were 165 per thousand in 1900 and 7 per thousand by 1997. By 2001, most Americans living below the official poverty line had central air conditioning, a motor vehicle, cable television with multiple TV sets and other amenities.
A scholar specializing in the study of Latin America said that the official poverty level in the United States is the upper middle class in Mexico. The much criticized market economy of the United States has done far more for the poor than the ideology of the left.
http://www.wnd.com/2015/09/the-left-has-its-pope/#OMJIEjiluZR2D3H7.99
That’s probably enough for now.