Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
History moves on. Socialists are reactionaries.
Cortez, Obama, Harris, et al are not keeping up with history. Like Buckley before them, and his heirs Kristol, Goldberg, Podhoretz, Mirengoff, so-called Libertarians, and the mountebanks at Brookings, CSIS, Cato, Manhattan Institute, etc., now, Cortez, Michelle, Antifa, Jihadis, etc. are standing athwart history trying to stop it. They are reactionaries.
Creation did not stop upteen-millions of years ago. It is always ongoing. It’s arc, as Socialists are pleased to call it — but meaning themselves — is freedom, independence, and sovereignty of individuals, groups, and states.
Lefties/Jihadis are reactionaries, standing athwart history — the drive for freedom — screaming, “STOP!”
A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling “Stop!”
William F. Buckley, Jr.
Only, history doesn’t stop, never stops.
The arc of history is the impulse for freedom, not Socialism, much less Sharia. Who would thwart, nanny, condemn, obstruct, commandeer, co-opt, or nudge that impulse away from its natural trajectory is a reactionary . . . and a loser . . . who will get schlonged, to use the obscene Yiddish for overpowered and subdued.
John Howard commenting at Power Line:
They always bestride the necks of the people, not because they want to, but because we are better off for being ridden.
Such a great sentence, I am driven to poetry:
We call ourselves the government
You may think we’re absurd
But remember we’re the cowboys
And you are just the herd
Our guns and clubs and prisons
Are proof our thoughts are deep
So think of us as shepherds
We think of you as sheep
China is west of USA, not east. Asia is the American West. Austin Bay is thinking like a Europe-Firster, across the Atlantic, calling China East-Asia. But China is across the Pacific. West. As Bay sees Trump policy/outlook becoming Asia-First, he will join the #NeverTrumpers officially.
USA moves westward, not eastward. Columbus was looking for passage to China and India because Europeans did not rouse themselves to overwhelm Moslems blocking passage via the Mediterranean Sea or Asia Minor and Arctic passage was known to be impossible. So movement was westward. And that is how USA continued to move once stood up.
This is going to hurt Europe-Firsters even more than it already has. But they cannot budge or fudge the facts. USA looks west, not east. East is Old World, who sneers at USA freedom. West is New World, who yearns for USA freedom, and Asian Old World whose populace wants it also.
Christianity itself moves west, from India/Tibet to Judea, to Rome, Alexandria, Moscow, Lisbon, Paris, Madrid, London, across the Atlantic, and then across the Pacific.
History moves with the light of the sun, east to west.
OIF and OEF were justified as punitive expeditions, but as major land wars they are directionless retrograde movements, as events have shown: weak, debilitating, and unsavory . . . killing only, sans grand national strategic objective, a terrible, demoralizing prospect for Soldiers and Civilians alike. OIF and OEF were Europe-Firsters’ errors, fighting Europe’s wars for them, again. Not possible to succeed, cannot win others’ wars. They must do that themselves.
NEW SOCIALIST IT GIRL CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells Anderson Cooper that even when she’s factually wrong, she’s still ‘morally right.’
derf commented:
I remember hearing Obama say that even if an increase in the capital gains tax resulted in lower revenue he’d support it because it was the right or moral thing.
Peas in a pod.
David R. Graham replied:
That was his public extortion/humiliation of big everyone. He got super rich doing that. AOC the functioning psychotic is doing the same. Maduro does it. Lenin did it. Harry Reid did it. Idi Amin did it. Every mullah does it. Politician/lawyer extorting businessman and industrialist . . . and labor most of all.
Big business hates these guys but they pay the tribute extorted so as to be able to continue in business rather than face a Robert Mueller. The money they throw around lobbying rather than refusing and fighting the extortion is the measure of their fear and weakness.
DJT knew this game when he announced for POTUS. He had played it, successfully, for decades. He decided not to, for the sake of his country and family. A very brave man, DJT. Very brave. We saw how quickly his predecessors of both parties moved to make him regret and reverse course. So far unsuccessfully.
Plouffe put it plainly: the point is not just to take DJT out. The point is to make such an example of him that no one will have the temerity ever again to stop paying tribute/extortion and expose/reform the deliciously dirty business our politics really is.
China plans to take over the world. So do the EU, Moslem Jihad, and Democrats. Crowded field.
Rich lawyers write laws to advantage themselves and clients, pay tribute to politicians to pass those laws, then proclaim that rigged system a free market and those hurt by it ducking individual responsibility.
Short version: But if the peasants don’t pay their rents, how shall I buy my perfume?
Longer version: Dr. Fosdick interrupting seminarian giving sermon in homiletics class: Mr. X, you don’t give a damn about my soul!
And Carlson neither looks nor sounds like Portnoy. I think he is talking about fairness and families, structures rare and precious now.
Conservative Inc. Conserves Only Itself
By Helen Lamm
I believe Mr. Pieresen has eisegeted Machiavelli. He appears to equate moral purity with good character. Machiavelli, good theologian that he was, made no such assumption much less assertion. No one has moral purity. So morality and good character are incomparable.
Good character is thinking, speaking, and doing the same thing. Machiavelli is adamant that a leader/prince/ruler have good character in that sense for otherwise, no one will respect him and many will be inspired to rebel against him. Bad character is thinking, speaking, and saying different things. Bad character in that sense is the death knell of a leader because no one will trust him and many will move to overthrow him.
The morally impure — which is everyone — are successful in this world and the next if they have good character. DJT has exceptionally good character, as we observe every day. And he has significantly less moral impurity than do the herds of Socialist, Conservative, and Libertarian dogs barking and nipping at his ankles.
From this brief exposure to his thought, I would resolve to not consult Mr. Pieresen for wisdom regarding governance or theology.
MrLynn replied to my foregoing:
“Good character is thinking, speaking, and doing the same thing.”
But if that thing is engaging in criminal or immoral behavior?
Interesting points, though I had to look up eisegete. /LEJ
I replied to MrLynn:
Answer: it is good character because it is honest.
Evil which announces itself as such is a kind of good. It is honest. Give it that. Actual good never announces itself as such in words (the no-no of self-promotion), though one can see it when it is present. The really hated creature, the real teeth-grinder, is the person who announces themself as good or maybe just slightly bad but is actually harming others either unintentionally or maliciously.
But honestly, have you ever heard of a criminal thinking, saying, and doing the same thing? The devil lives in silk suits and ermine coats and dines with toffs at posh watering holes.
Conservative Inc. Conserves Only Itself
By Helen Lamm
The competing values and considerations mentioned do not exhaust the competing values and considerations in play.
One example: in principle, leaving Syria is leaving NATO because it exposes — it already has — Turkey as not NATO’s friend. (French are protecting Kurds also. As are English.) Unlike Europeans, Americans are disinclined to dink around with despots because they utter piercing eloquence or have wives fawned over by Vogue magazine. And, leaving NATO effectively is leaving the UN, now a background chant moving front-ward.
Who isn’t nauseated by the autoeroticism of what Foreign Policy, CSIS, Brookings, Manhattan, Hudson and the rest of the foreign policy establishment are pleased to toast as the international liberal order — aka vaporware?
Another example: Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Famiglia Saud.
And this: the course clear to all but reactionaries — e.g., John Bolton — is US and Russia team in Syria to check Turkey, afford Kurds breathing room, sever Tehran’s reach for the Med, and tell Assad he has a new master: US-Rus. Then US departs Syria but remains vigilant from close quarters.
Lefties/Jihadis are reactionaries, standing athwart history — the drive for freedom — screaming, “STOP!”
Yet, the fruit of civilization is Freedom.
William Wallace’s battle cry is Political Freedom, the bitter but necessary rind of the fruit of civilization.
St. Benedict’s key establishment is Moral Freedom, the nourishing pulp and juice of the fruit of civilization.
Jesus the Christ’s central offer is Spiritual Freedom, the sweetness of the juice of the fruit of civilization.
And finally: Instead, he tolerated two years of fecklessness and poor judgment from Rosenstein.
Most complimentary reason I can imagine for POTUS Trump’s doing this: defense in depth, draw the rascals forward towards oneself so they self-expose and get beyond their communications. Painful, but with a puissant enemy and a forming rather than a formed force with which to oppose it, rational. This has in fact happened, whether by design or not.
That may not be the reason for POTUS’ handing of this matter. Whatever the reason, however, I am certain it has not comprised cowardice by POTUS Trump.
Free Markets is the battle cry of brigands.
Fair Markets is the battle cry of liberators.
Adam Smith was a Professor of Moral Philosophy.
Conservatives and Libertarians treasure principles over people, economy over country, money over happiness, and power over strength.
I am a traditionalist, not a reactionary, much less a Conservative or Libertarian. I do not deny one vector of the human geo-genetic sheaf in favor of another. All the sheaf’s vectors, the entire bundle of them, have purpose. History is teleological. Hegel: The truth is the whole.
My first impulse upon encounter with the unexpected is to inquire of myself internally and of external resources: How did the great personalities of foregoing ages treat with such a matter?
The unplanned is always arriving. Details are unique but the topology of anything arriving has been seen before. It is that topology of events that attracts the attention of observers. For, truth be told, the attention of observers causes the unplanned’s arrival.
Thus, vast treasure exists in the recorded and ruminated experience of the race. Records exist, in their own and others’ hands, of our forebears’ living and operating OODA Loops as ever-recurring topologies. Knowledge of these topologies is the real treasure of the family, the nation, and the planet.
Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God
Update 1: GEN (RET) B. B. Bell: Military Generals And Globalism – And Response
Update 2: Egyptian Islamists Fight Back on Screen
Update 3: Angelo Codevilla: European Defense
Update 4: You know, after all these months watching Trump-Russia ebb and flow, I read this and think to myself, You know what? All this fuss, because the CIA and FBI got mousetrapped by a simple, standard Russian disinformation campaign. That’s what Mueller et al is covering up: their own unintelligence and incompetence. And who has benefited? Donald Trump.
Update 5: The longer this goes, the more solid becomes my assessment that top IC professionals are intellectual nincompoops as well as moral dissolutes. Now it no longer surprises me that 9/11 got through to happen, that IC justified Iraq invasion by Saddam’s WMD rather than by the more pungent fact that he, although not the only one, was behind 90’s and 01’s attack on WTC and also 01’s Anthrax distro, which was the 2 of the WTC/Anthrax textbook mil operation 1-2 punch.
Since POTUS Reagan, and even during POTUS Reagan, USG has attracted a huge and increasing number of credentialed low life, in character and impulses effectively trailer trash.
Time to pull way back in both domestic and overseas involvements and regroup on lines of defense and commo we can actually maintain rather than extruding lines of defense and commo which get whacked because there are not enough normal — intelligent, moral — countrymen available to operate them.
With an indescribably stupid yet bumptious — say rather, dis-eased — credentialed cadre impatiently waiting to sweep away remnants of sanity from the ranks of the national stewardship, shortening front — as mil doctrine would put it — is not only desirable but mandatory.
Update 6: Roger L. Simon: Trump Was Not Just Spied Upon But Entrapped
Update 7: She marks civilization’s fundament: agriculture. We live from six inches of top soil. Period.
She does not know how to proceed from that fact, at least not yet, and she approaches the subject from the ideology of identity politics, but she sees the fundament and deserves credit for that, even if she wills to misuse it.
She is, after all, up from the plantain Puerto Rican. Hitler saw the need for German military restoration as fundament of antidote to Allied rapacity at Versailles. AOC sees local agricultural puissance as fundament of antidote to crony capitalist cash crop farming. Give the monsters credit for what they got/get right.
Give her time, she will only become more formidable in this and other regards.
As to what she and her cohort want really to institute, ponder the career of Ks. Jerzy Popiełuszko.
Update 8: Good point, good article. Emphasizing: vector of USA development is westward, not eastward, away from Old World snits (to include MENA), not towards them.
Geo-strategically, water is wet land. The same strategic rules that apply to land warfare apply to sea warfare. The sea is wet land. The air is thin land.
One implication of that reality is that INDOPACOM is an Army show primarily, not a Navy one. Current deployments of thought and dispositions of assets do not reflect that fact.
Navy is a transport and fires support asset. Marines are an assault asset. Air and Cyber — and Space — are forward fires support assets. Army is the asset tasked and equipped (when well) for land-control primarily and assault when needed.
The US foreign policy establishment anchors in the premise that USA strategic interests lie to the east, across the Atlantic. They do not. They lie to the west, across the Pacific. That abyssal error is the source of confusion and mayhem in the assembly and execution of statecraft by the USA’s bi-partisan leadership kakistocracy, essentially mutineers against USA identity and strategic interests. Until now. Now, someone is shaking their foundations, thankfully.
Update 9: Roger Kimball: Don’t Celebrate Bastille Day
Update 10: When Turkey Destroyed Its Christians
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
