Twenty Five Years Ago

From Billy Beck

On this day, twenty-five years ago, Ronald Reagan signed the Income Tax Reform Act of 1986. Three months later and for the first time ever, my social security number was demanded by a prospective employer.

Do you understand?

For the first time in American history, it was illegal to work for a dollar without accounting for it to the United States Government.

I will never forgive Reagan for this atrocity, and it is why I do not tolerate anyone in my presence lauding his stand for "freedom".

To hell with him.

He also supported and signed the Mulford Act which was the beginning of the assault on the Second Amendment in California. Even if you can forgive his support for that POS (Oh no! Black peeples haz guns!) he supported the Brady Bill and even had the chutzpah to write an editorial for it in The New York Times.

Billy Beck on Tuscon

When I make my rounds of the blogs, Billy Beck is almost always my first stop. It should be yours, too.

His post on the recent shooting in Tuscon is quoted in its entirety for truth.

---

So, Sue had written...

"This has always been a violent culture from day one, a little common sense (short supply) and pause a beat before saying something isn't asking too much is it?"

And I told her:

@ Sue: Throughout their history, Americans were the most commonly sensible people in the world. A central problem now is that great and important swathes of the language no longer refer to reality. (This is what language is supposed to do: to raise the cognitive output of the human mind to a perceptual level -- writing or speaking -- for transmission of concepts.)

How and why this has happened is a long story, but it's important to understand two crucial aspects of it:

1. Although it's been going on for at least a century, this decay was drastically accelerated in the irrationality of the 1960's and its wake. (I am personally convinced that this condition is actually symptomatic of a deeper epistemic problem: the ability to think; to integrate concepts from the sensory material of reality, is disappearing, and the language reflects that. There are also, I think, elements of feedback in this dynamic, in which a decadent language must have certain implications for cognitive proficiency, especially among the young.) 
2. A general long-run result of all this must be that more and more people just don't know what to say anymore, and don't mean anything when they say anything at all. (Interesting question: how much of a margin is there between those today with that condition of confusion and flat-out psycho-loonsters of the sorts that have existed forever?) When the language is corrupt, then the transmissive and receptive elements of reason itself are destroyed: there is no way to talk to anyone about anything, including matters with direct bearing on life and death.

Violence sublimated in political metaphors has always run through the public conversation in various rivers, nevermind the fact that the nation was born in violent revolution. What you called "common sense" was once, in part, a clear-eyed ability to perceive reality and act up to it. Now, I wasn't the first to mention the Tucson murders in a political context: just exactly that is what's been on nearly everyone's mind when the subject comes up. I will point out, however, that attempting to attribute this monster's behavior to ideology at all is only barely worse than observing the rush to do it. More important: if we're going to talk about the dreadful effects of every sort of hate speech in the political sphere, then I -- for one -- don't mind starting with every sort of metaphorical "war" that some commissariat announces with bloody sickening regularity since (in my lifetime) Johnson's "War on Poverty" and Nixon's "War on Drugs".

Wanna know why?

It's because words mean things, and crazy people think they're taking reality seriously when words don't mean things anymore.

I contend: the most dominant and rising element of irrational force in American culture is government, and more and more people are starting to live down to it.

---

The spoken language, the written word and mathematics are the most powerful tools mankind has yet invented for understanding the reality around us. Equally important is that the above tools allow mortal humans to transmit that knowledge to others even after death. The discoveries of Isaac Newton in Physics and Mathematics may have been made before but because he wrote them down in the Principia, they became part of a common pool of knowledge future humans could draw on.

They are not, however, magical tools.

I think that, of the three, it is pretty obvious that mathematics best embodies clear and logical thinking. Because of that it can also provides good examples of how a lack of a shared context leads to misunderstanding.

For example if I ask you what is the sum of 360 + 1 you will probably say "361". That is good answer but in a polar coordinate system the answer "1" may be equally correct. If I ask you what is the results of adding 3 to 11 I expect you will say "14". However looking at a clock face, you will (hopefully) see that, in that particular counting system, the answer "2" is also correct.

Circular number systems are very useful in the real world (ask any programmer about the modulo operator) but that fact stresses the importance that each side in a conversation be aware of the underlying assumptions. Obviously it would be a disaster if the architect designing a building used 11 + 3 = 2. It would also not be very pretty if a navigation program returned your longitude as 361° 92' 75".

Clarity is good; vagueness is bad. That is, I think, the thrust of Billy's argument above. When a word is used without a shared meaning in context, the results are unpredictable.

In the case of those who seek power over others, there is a benefit to promoting vagueness. Words are the tools we humans use to communicate ideas to each other. Corrupt the language and you corrupt that process. It would be as if the words and symbols in the Principia were replaced with gibberish before anyone had a chance to read and understand it.

Goddamn You Billy!

Historically, Billy Beck's guesses have been more accurate that most other peoples' "facts". Now, as if I didn't have enough to worry about, Billy Beck speculates:

Among other bits & pieces of Western civ falling-ass down, I notes the fascinating story of Rham Emanuel blowing out of the White House.

What's happening, you see, is that he knows the commie fat is in the fire behind this Obama gag, and this is his first move to get behind Field Marshal Rodham.

You heard it here first.

Seriously, my own observations seem to indicate an imminent Clinton Coup. The only good thing I see about the possibility of Rahm Emanuel deserting to the Clinton camp is both Hillary and he are politically savvy power whores. Putting the two together could be like locking two scorpions in a bottle. If Americans are lucky, they will be too busy trying to sting each other to bother us much.

Beck: The Hinge Generations

Billy Beck thinks there is no America left. He may be right. If he is I hope that somewhere enough of what he has written over the years survives so that whichever future historian gets to write the definitive story of The Decline and Fall of America, will have a chronicle from someone who understands what happened, why it happened and can write about in clear, unambiguous prose.

The America that almost was deserves much better but may have to have to settle for nothing more than an honest assessment of why we Americans failed it.

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The Hinge Generations

McPhillips:

The Left worked through academentia, through its media salons, through its sniffs and conceits, through its exhausted disdain for Americans themselves, through deep liars like Chomsky and cracker-barrel Marxists like Zinn."

It's pretty simple for a whole paragraph: just one sentence and not especially complex, although one must know the players, an awareness present in far, far too few Americans now. Not much to it, really, except for fact and truth, which is all one ever really needs.

No; what I find compelling in it is the past tense. Last night, I was driving up the road and thinking about some fairly large-scale writing. I conceived a section-lead that went like this:

The long train of human history had been filled with endless revolutions, evolutions and chance transmissions of arbitrary power. People had grown habitual to the ridiculous and endlessly horrible idea that some could presume the power -- not the right -- of life and death over countless others, and this idea had rolled across centuries without principled question, gathering priceless and unique individuals as the grease under its wheels. In all the annals, however, an America had never fallen."

This is my working concept, now: that it's over, and that all that's left are the particular details of collapse. That will be a rich story in itself, for sure, but we are living a truly unparalleled tragedy. It is unparalleled in that this was the first country in history founded on rational ideals of individualism (even accounting for the original sin of black slavery), and it is a tragedy in that it has been destroyed from within.

It is interesting to note that there are those alive today who are living a uniquely notable experience because they are now still alive to see the end of America, but old enough to have lived its peak. The past century or so has seen the seeding and cultivation of ideas only now coming to terrible yield. However, the enormous impetus of America's original conception, coming together as it did with the Industrial Age, managed to carry various aspects of this country's culture (material, intellectual, aesthetic, etc.) to heights which were the apple of the world's eye through most of the twentieth century, and for good reasons. Even to this day, one can easily find anywhere in the world some benighted peasant who still longs for The Great Feast of Ostentatious Consumption that America represents to most people who haven't been studied by critical sociology. Of course, that poor bastard never got to blast gas through a Chevy 454 SS at three gallons (or more) for a dollar, never had the quality of information delivered to his door that we once had, and his country never celebrated life on the scale that ours did before everybody really started hating themselves and then -- of course -- everything else, and their arts showed it.

There was a time, within the lives of people alive today, when American life was a celebration. God's curse of rot upon all those who took it in heart and mind to cast some as outlaws by way of race, but we were producing our way out of that. By the time rock & roll came along, all that rot was on its way to the grave, even if the best days of Dr. King's life had to be burned down in that cause. Naturally, the blight of racism will never be completely gone because you can't do a damned thing about stoopidness. However, there were also generations in this country seeing each other across racial lines and the laws were being beaten into shape. No more Bull Connors cracking attack dogs on black people in the street in broad photographic daylight: now, everybody can get their door kicked-in in the middle of the night when the SWAT-Fifes don't have their poop in a group.

There are many alive today who satisfy themselves as "Americans" even as they remain ignorant of things that were being lost before they were born -- "free spirits" who were tattooed with federal numbers on traditional paperwork and who have never worked a day in their lives without accounting their very existence in dollars to the law. Their grandfathers could build houses if and where they wanted to once they had accrued the moral authority (that's "money", kids) to do it: these people can barely un-flatpack a bookshelf, but at least they wouldn't have to beg zoning permits for that.

Even as it slides, though...

("Won't be nothin'
Nothin' you can measure anymore"

-- Leonard Cohen, "The Future")

...they will notice the cold bite of the state. These are special generations -- the earliest of them just passing now and the last of them alive in albums with long hair and bell-bottoms -- who can see it all freezing right in front of their eyes. Their children are groomed to the cold from birth now. All the time, they know less and less about the sheer gaiety of life that once was this country, and what it took to produce that. They take for metaphysically-granted political (and their consequent cultural) structures emergent right in front of them that were once the stuff of "fevered McCarthyism". The worst part of that is the complicity of their parents, who should know better because they actually lived a great deal of what's been lost, now.

This is my working concept: there is no America anymore.

This is because it's not really about geography, although there just can't be an America anywhere else; not after all the history-blazing mind, body, heart and soul that countless heroes have stamped upon this land. It's not about some stumbling homunculus of a land, however, propped upright on stilts of pious nonsense. There is an idea to it -- a mind to drive the machine, which is what it takes to keep the whole species in out of the cold and happy and thriving. It is one of the great, great things monumental to history that nobody grasped technology the ways that Americans did, and for all the whining and crying from brainless snots through much of the last half of the twentieth century, it must be said that they lived beyond the reach of kings only few generations before them because of the ways that tools multiply the power of the human mind and body.

And only free people do this. That's why we were what we were, and why we won't be soon enough for these people to live that, too

---

On The Recent Glance Directly At Me, From The Death-Star

Latest from Billy Beck

Yes: of course I am aware that I was paraphrased in a speech given last week by an ex-United States president. The e-mail notes have been furious, and still trail in almost a week later. You can read the speech here. That's a .PDF, and the passage at hand is in the first paragraph of page eleven. Everyone who has paid attention to me knows that he mangled my line, but that it is without question my line.

Here are some facts: the speech refers to "...these 'hatriot' groups, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the others..." (Bottom of page ten.)

Mike Vanderboegh has run the line that I wrote on his weblog almost since the day that I wrote it.

Here is my conjecture: the ex-president either briefly eyeballed that blog himself, or accepted a memo from one of his flunkies which included the line that I wrote.

I have made up my mind that I would be no more interested in hearing his apology than I am offended by his presumption. It is simply a matter of note that The Lying Bastard of The Ozark Long March knows nothing of which he speaks, amid his insinuations that I advocate violence in this poor country's current straits.

Here is a word for that despicable person: I am "a Southerner", too, you strutting ignoramus. I was born in Little Rock, and my mother graduated Central High School six years before Eisenhower finally saw fit to roll out the National Guard. Don't even try to hand me your threadbare sanctimony about "paying" for the Civil War. For many reasons which I will not attempt to relate to you, I am quite beyond your ex cathedra pose in the matter. You have nothing to say to me. Sit down and shut your insipid mouth.

To the rest of you reading this, let me try to explain something to you. Pay close attention:

"If we discard morality and substitute for it the Collectivist doctrine of unlimited majority rule, if we accept the idea that a majority may do anything it pleases, and that anything done by the majority is right because it is done by the majority (this being the only standard of right and wrong) -- how are men to apply this in practice to their actual lives? In relation to each particular man, all other men are potential members of that majority which may destroy him at its pleasure at any moment. Then each man and all men become enemies: each has to fear and suspect all; each must try to rob and murder first, before he is robbed and murdered."

Now, I am not going to attribute that quote for you. I have good reasons for that. I will point out to you that the basic principles on display in that passage are now a matter of the public consciousness: it is an accepted maxim now that, in politics, "either you are at the table or you are on the menu". I will point out to you that America has never before sounded more like a bar-fight than it does now. All of this is because of what Frederick Bastiat put his finger on, one hundred sixty-two years ago, when he wrote: "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

We now live under The Sucker State. There will be no voting our way out of this, and that is as it should be, in at least one aspect: free people do not supplicate to government. They become manifest in their actions. In any case, however, whole generations have gone down under the rampant delusion that the sources of life spring from everything but individual human productivity: they believe that government can steal for them forever.

The hideous noise that you hear all around you in this culture, now, is only the beginning intimation of how wrong they are. It is the sound of savages scrambling around the lip of the government cannibal-pot, into which all values must eventually be collected by force and from which they will be dispensed under heavy guard. If you are capable of one moment's sense and are not a goddamned deliberate liar -- like an ex-president -- then you can see where this is all going.

There is only one more thing to say, here: every sane person had better hope and pray against violence. This goes for you, Mike, and everyone like you. I understand your efforts and I know why you prepare. This thing could blow-out at any seam, at any moment, and it is only prudent to be ready if that happens.

I, for one, would have far, far greater esteem for anyone ready -- like me -- to present themselves for imprisonment in order to demonstrate to the whole world just what this regime appears to be ready to destroy. No honest person could ever mistake the moral probity of a move like that, and even if it failed, the issue would be unmistakably clear to all -- this battle with a force dedicated to destroying freedom (the word that fell from The Lying Bastard's lips, last Friday) -- and the final and terrible resort to violence would yet be available.

I beg you all to keep cool in this matter.

Just in case you don't already know, the quote is from Ayn Rand. Textbook of Americanism (PDF)

The Puritans Are at it Again

In the middle of the worst depression since the 1930's, the California Legislature has decided that cuss words are an vitally important issue.

The state Assembly passed a resolution Thursday that would establish the first week of March as "Cuss Free Week" throughout the state. If approved by the Senate next week, the measure would take effect immediately.

The resolution includes no enforcement mechanism and is simply meant to promote greater harmony and connectedness, said Assemblyman Anthony Portantino, a Democrat from La Canada Flintridge and co-author of the measure.

Read the rest at Fox News

After witnessing years of deficits and the massive debt load created, I concluded there is very little intelligence life in the California Legislature. None if which seems to leak into whatever the majority happens to be at any given time.

F**king Puritans.

Billy Beck, of course, has an appropiate response

That'll be the day: when I respect any resolution of civility from a goddamned felon-in-waiting.

So does Rick O'Connell (From "The Mummy"):

Evelyn: You were actually at Hamunaptra?
Rick: Yeah, I was there.
Evelyn: You swear?
Rick: Every damn day.

Permafrost

Billy Beck nails the real cause of the malaise that is destroying America in "Permafrost"

It mystifies a thinking man: how does anyone believe that it can be resurrected through what the chattering Right has in mind? To hear these simple people swoon over electoral prospects regularly into the future as far as the eye can see is to know truly pathetic and tragic times. They think that freedom consists in choosing their own masters.

and

This will never be voted away, and the idea that there is something valuable afoot in this threadbare charade in Massachusetts is as appalling a thing as anyone ever knew.

...to understand that the snow will never melt in your remaining lifetime.

Read the whole thing. It's short.

Few commentators in the Blogosphere -- or anywhere else for that matter -- have the depth of knowledge and understanding of the ultimate importance of principles as Billy Beck. Even fewer are as unabashed about saying so. It may embarrass him for me to say this but the man is a treasure.