Paradocracy

This weekend, please pause to reflect on the reason we as Americans celebrate Memorial Day each final week of May.  In paying tribute to the costly War Between the States , this day serves to honor the men and women who, just a century and a half ago, made the dearest of sacrifices in defense of liberty, sovereignty and states’ rights.  Nearly 3 percent (800,000) of the US population perished in that bloody and treacherous war; to put that figure into perspective today, a 3-percent death rate in 2020 would leave 10 million Americans dead.  Even before the end of this devastating war, in the aftermath of losing so many of their beloved sons, husbands and fathers in the defense of their home states, mothers, wives and daughters, mourning their losses, decorated the graves of their loved ones  to honor their memory and their sacrifice to the Southern, and truly American, cause. The War Between the States claimed so many American lives, more than in any other con...

I recently experienced another moment reminiscent of  The Big Short , which I thought I might document for purposes of comic relief and added insight into the psychology domestically governing the world’s reserve currency, one still — after nearly half a century —  “temporarily” irredeemable in that precious commodity which originally rendered it worth holding in the first place. Living in a world of articulate illiterates, we often find ourselves conned into false senses of security or even those of conventional wisdom.  Whether it's a seemingly-successful salesman in a shiny new Mercedes-Benz, an impassioned activist with a megaphone and a boatload of buzzwords, or an intergenerational tradition that's escaped scrutiny, the narratives around us form quite a compelling tale; but if we bother to endeavor just beneath the surface, between the lines and into the details, we just might find what they've all been avoiding: the truth.  In the case of the salesman, his...

Worse than any virus is the contagion that controls what the people think and say. Feverishly searching for answers, they latch on to those ideas which appear sensible to them yet go unexamined by those lacking the tools and acumen to conduct such a test.  The spread of mistruths, then, much like an uncontrollable pandemic, infects each person ill-equipped to defend himself against it. With the incessant flow of mistruths, the immunodeficient public unfailingly succumbs to them without any knowledge of what or how it happened.   This is the contagion of Leftism, which feeds off of desperation, ignorance and, above all, hysteria. Social hysteria is merely the preferred tool of the day for prying into the homes and lives of the average voter.  In reflecting upon the list of household names from just a year ago, one can gain a meaningful insight into the political interests at work over the past few months. An election year, the many household names of today hav...

Over the course of time, man began to believe the messages coming across the screen; incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction, he found himself believing the most despicable of lies and the most incredible of claims.   Failing to notice his weakened condition, he trained himself to believe the screen over his own eyes, even his own experiences.  Even in the face of the starkest of contradictions, his self-doubt kept him from believing what he had seen with his own eyes; he thus relied on the screen to vindicate, to instruct, and to affirm.  In his estimation, nothing could yet be true unless it had first appeared on the screen.  Worshipping it, he failed to realize the differences around him and that life had passed him by.  For him, the screen was life and everything else was noise.  The screen told him what to think, what clothes to wear, which car to drive; he gradually left every important decision to the wisdom of the screen, ...

People seldom win wars; that is the privilege of government. For if the the people are victorious, they've had a revolution , and where they suffer defeat, they've had a rebellion ; in most cases, the people relent, and thus they have an enduring  despotism .  Where any rebellion by the people is defeated, the chance at a people's revolution becomes a brutal and costly civil war . Ironically, no such conflict has ever truly existed; where any war is classified as civil , you can rest assured that it was  civil only insofar as the despots prevailed and they were desperate to convince their future subjects that the annihilation of their ancestors was more civilized than brutal, that their lives were sacrificed for the betterment of civilization, and that they had rebelled against a most righteous and benevolent authority, which conveniently happens to be the one still in charge today. Where some people celebrate the success of some war, they are but the pawns of an adm...

Far from a philosophical treasure, democracy , which enjoys celebrity in theory and popularity by design, serves in practice merely to unite the dregs of urban society against the independents unconvinced by their social conventions.  As a form of mob rule, democracy, advantaged inherently by the scale and sophistication of the economies and populations it exploits, lulls its unsuspecting constituents into supporting the kinds of transgressions they would never independently dream of committing themselves.  Ultimately, tyranny of any kind, regardless of the source from which that power is ostensibly derived, is still tyranny; and wherever democracy is said to have prevailed, it has succeeded merely in subjecting the public to the enterprising ambitions of dishonest despots.  Always cunning in their craft, politicians stand everywhere at the ready to charge public opinion with their fine-tuned rhetoric and silver-tongued stanzas, compensating with enthusiasm wherev...

I suppose we all have to ask ourselves, when are we going to finally call this what it is?  Tyranny is subtle, even excusable if we’re trying hard enough to sympathize with it. The American Revolution was a rebellion waged against tyrants in red coats; the Crown, lacking in the kind of sophistication of the modern despotism, didn’t have local police departments as we do now.  Indeed, if they were more intelligent in their designs in the eighteenth century, they would have outfitted their soldiers with Boston Police Department uniforms after first inventing the institution. Had they fooled the colonists into believing that the troops actually represent them, they may well have averted the rebellion.  Today’s war for independence is, and will be, waged against a well-armed soldiery at the local level, adorned in uniforms bearing the state’s, county’s or city’s name. This veritable war for liberty won’t quite resemble America’s previous bouts for independence, because ...

The US economy has officially entered recession, and the record lows among interest rates are not merely symptomatic of the Federal Reserve’s response to recession, but they have all the while presaged recession in their very inception of their zero interest-rate policy.  Those record-low mortgage rates will be available to only a select segment of prospective home buyers, who suddenly face tightening lending standards as banks acknowledge the inherent downside risk of collateral, and the elevated risk of default, in shaky job and housing markets.  While tightening lending standards may lead the eligible few to feel special in qualifying, that feeling, if unaccompanied by a strict financial plan, will predictably fade as soon as they realize what they've become. The record-low interest rates permeating the market represent the efforts of the Federal Reserve to induce spending to buoy asset prices in order to sustain the illusion of a viable debt-financed econ...