Ave, Abe

Shinzo Abe, a longstanding firebrand of a Prime Minister in Japan, was assassinated yesterday while giving a campaign speech for a party member. [Link is to the Wall Street Journal, but pick whatever paper you'd like: this story tops all the major ones today.]

Abe was one of those foreign leaders often described by our press as 'conservative' even though he doesn't fit an American mold very well at all. He was the reason that Japan is as well-positioned as it is now to resist a resurgent China, keeping its 'self-defense forces' as close to being capable of real military operations as he could without violating Japan's pacifist constitution. Under his watch, Japan began building what was obviously a power-projection capacity, including its first aircraft carrier since World War II.

He was also a nationalist and a patriot, the kind who is willing to forgive his country for its sometimes-intense sins in order to celebrate its genuine glories. As far as I know he was unapologetic about this habit of character unto his death. A 'habit of character' of such strength in moral matters is either a virtue or a vice in Aristotelian terms; Abe was loved or condemned depending on what judgment individual people had of which category his habit properly belonged.

Though he was thereby an American ally, he was always Japanese first, as he ought to have been. Loyal to his ancestors and his people, he passes now to face a better judgment and a final one. 

Confidence in Institutions

The new Gallup poll on Americans' confidence in our institutions is out. Longtime Hall readers know I've watched this poll for a very long time. For a long time my great concern was that confidence in our democratic and constitutional organs was falling, while only coercive institutions -- the police and the military -- managed to stay above water. That suggested dangerous consequences, should the organs of constitutional government collapse while people still believed in and trusted institutions whose purpose is to force people to obey.

This year confidence in the military is down somewhat, but still above water; somewhat surprising, I think, given the massive recruitment troubles they're having. Confidence in the police is now below water at 45%, with the left wanting to defund them and everyone else noticing that they stopped enforcing the law during the recent riot seasons. Forty-five percent is still too much, if you ask me; indeed neither of these institutions deserve to be considered widely credible. 

Congress has generally enjoyed the lowest level of confidence from everyone, and this year has single digits across the board except among Democrats -- and even there they only rise to ten percent. But look at these Presidential numbers:

Republicans: 2%

Independents: 18% down from 31% last year

Democrats: 51% down from 69% last year.

Two percent is even lower than Congress, and even Democrats could barely muster a majority with faith in the institution with it firmly in their control. 

Boom in Georgia

Somebody blew up the Georgia Guidestones last night -- well, one of them. The Georgia State Police apparently destroyed the rest of them 'for public safety.' 

There's apparently been some controversy over them lately, with some calling them 'satanic' for some reason that escapes me. I guess people didn't like that they were astrologically aligned, but that's if anything pre-satanic: Men of the West were aligning ancient stones with the sun and stars long before anyone knew the name, at least. They had some ancient languages inscribed on them, as well, but the 'guides' were more Star Trek than satanic; I'd guess it was a collection of new wave professors from the nearby University of Georgia who put the things up.

I rode out to them back in 2015 after I'd heard a rumor about their existence. Here's the panel talking about the astronomical alignment.

And here's one of the guideline panels, which includes at least one piece of very excellent advice we should be following even today:

The marble is from nearby Elberton, Georgia, where my son used to wrestle occasionally back in high school. It is the home of a notable quarry, which if were I Sherlock Holmes I is where I would begin my investigation into who blew the thing up. That explosion looks like dynamite to me: not big enough to be artillery but still sizable, and near a quarry where dynamite is available and where there are people who know how to use it. I am not Mr. Holmes, however, so I shall leave the matter in accord with the Two Rules of Business. 

Draining US Strategic Petroleum Reserve to Lower Gas Prices....

...in China.

More than 5 million barrels of oil that were part of a historic U.S. emergency reserves release to lower domestic fuel prices were exported to Europe and Asia last month, according to data and sources, even as U.S. gasoline and diesel prices hit record highs.... The flow is draining the SPR, which last month fell to the lowest since 1986....

Cargoes of SPR crude were also headed to the Netherlands and to a Reliance (RELI.NS) refinery in India, an industry source said. A third cargo headed to China, another source said.

Real Journalism

The Washington Post deserves praise for this story, adapted from a book by the authors, exploring how the opioid crisis was made possible by Big Pharma suborning DEA.

Corruption abounds, but it's rare to see a forthright examination of it in a major media outlet. Good for the Post.

An Idea Whose Time has Come- Electoral College for States

 Honestly, I can't believe I've never heard anyone suggest this before.  Not only that we need the Electoral College federally, but that we should extend it to the state level to counteract the new 'big states', the megalopolis city-states that run our lives.

Razorfist's (aka Rageaholic's) shtick is to be crude and drop a lot of F-bombs- I even debated not posting the video- so be forewarned that there's more vulgarity here than you'd normally expect in the Hall- but it's too good an idea he's presenting to not post this- so I beg your indulgence this once-

I think this is an idea whose time has come, and even if we were unsuccessful in implementing it, a Democrat party/media complex would be too busy fighting this to go after the Federal Electoral College, which would itself be a win.

A Forgotten 4th of July Song

 At least, I forgot it was one ...

Sketchy Review of "Woke Racism"

This isn't a good review of John McWhorter's recent book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Nope. For that I'd have to do a lot more work and time is short.

In brief, McWhorter, a black professor of linguistics at Columbia U., argues in six quick chapters that CRT and all that racial wokeness is a new religion that is unintentionally racist and harmful to black Americans. He calls the members of this new religion the Elect. He offers a way to genuinely help black children instead of teaching them all that CRT nonsense and a way to deal with the Elect.

McWhorter is a leftist and starts by saying he's writing for fellow leftists. While he doesn't say what his own beliefs are, in arguing that wokeness is a new religion, he treats religious belief as essentially irrational, unprovable, and not amenable to rational argument. He reminds me of Steven Pinker, a Harvard linguist who is also on the left but who argues for Enlightenment rationalism as well as freedom of thought and speech.

As for helping black children, his answers are nothing new: "1. End the war on drugs." "2. Teach reading properly", i.e., via phonics. And "3. Get past the idea that everybody must go to college" and focus a lot more on vocational education.

His method for dealing with the Elect is remarkably similar to what I've heard from the right. In a section titled "Just say no", he writes, "What we must do about the Elect is stand up to them. They rule by inflicting terror ..." A key part of that, he claims, is that people need to get over their fear of being called racists in public (172-3). You can imagine what he says in the next section titled "Separation of church and state." Finally, he offers sample scripts for how these conversations with the Elect might go. Kinda interesting how he imagines them.

A significant part of the value of this book for me was how he gets to these conclusions. I won't even attempt a summary; the value is in his complete arguments, because he argues rationally from the left's viewpoint.

There are things I disagree with McWhorter about, but it's a good book, a quick read, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in this topic, especially if you live or work in a woke environment.

More Worries about "Christo-Fascism"

Vice has pulled a video from Tik Tok that it believes illustrates a serious threat. I appreciate that they defined their terms.

Christian nationalists believe that their country’s national policies and laws should reflect evangelical Christian values, and culture war issues like LGBTQ rights, “critical race theory,” or immigration, are regarded as signs of moral decay that imperil their nation’s future. 

Christo-fascists take that one step further, and believe that they’re fighting primordial battles between West and East, good and evil, right and left, Christians and infidels. These two labels, however, sometimes overlap. 

On TikTok, ideologues from both ends of the spectrum are weaving together a shared visual language using 4chan memes, scripture, Orthodox and Catholic iconography, imagery of holy wars, and clips from movies or TV...

It’s no accident that this community is burgeoning on TikTok of all places, according to Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University in Iowa who focuses on apocalyptic religion and political violence. “You build your audience with a young demographic, and then you spread your ideas that way. This is how you build the next generation of fascists,” he said. 

Christianity could be associated with a fascist movement because both the faith and the ideology are corporatist. That doesn't mean 'corporation,' but rather comes from the Latin corpus meaning 'body.' The idea is that the Church or the state is a kind of organism, and the different parts of the organism have different functions. This is by analogy to the way that the hand or the eye are different organs with different functions, but each of which is part of a greater whole that it serves according to its functions. The Pope or Leader is supposed to be the brain; the eyes are inquisitors or police; the hands are the people who do the work they are assigned and directed to do. 

Fascism gets its name from the Roman fasces, a device that was both a weapon and a symbol. The fasces was a bundle of sticks bound together, sometimes with an axe head bound up in one end. Roman magistrates carried one to administer corporal punishment, but more to symbolize the way the Roman order worked: the sticks were individually brittle and weak, but bound together they became strong. 

The trick is that some version of that idea is necessary for any successful politics: if you can't come together in common purpose, you aren't going to build any sort of state. It is thus not merely fascists who have reason to talk this way; any political philosophy at all is going to have to do it. Anarchists may wish to do without leaders, but they can't do without common purpose and people pulling together to get things done. Together we are stronger, and it is only by pulling together that we get the garden dug and weeded and harvested. 

So you do get communities of a corporatist mindset in Christianity -- abbeys and monasteries and religious orders and the like -- but of course you do, because you couldn't build a society that didn't have some version of that idea. The presence of a necessary condition is not surprising just because it was necessary. 

There's something similar at work here, I think. Christianity is under attack -- I see memes designed to mock and belittle it every day -- and not only nor even especially from 'the East' but from those within our culture. Pulling together in defense of it is the only way in which it might survive.

Also, I notice the two images that they pulled as exemplary are not unhealthy messages by themselves. "Revolt against the modern world not because it is modern but because it is evil" says one; perhaps you might substitute "insofar as it is evil," but otherwise this is a traditional message for every age. The second one features a knight wearing Crusader livery, and says "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." That's a healthy message. 

Delta

"Ladies Love Outlaws" is a classic Waylon album from 1972, and he is now classic Americana. Waylon thus provides a good ending piece for Independence Day. 

That album also featured this piece, which I think he got from Elvis. The 1972 version was not especially great, as he was still sounding a lot like Nashville (and notice the clean shaven face in the album cover). By 1974, he really had his sound worked out with his band.

Very productive years for him, seventy-two to seventy-four. By seventy-four he was at the top of his game.

Bluegrass, Red Rock

 The music is fine, but the rocks are the real attraction here. My goodness, what beautiful stone.

Epictetus on Freedom

We spent part of the winter with Epictetus, so you might be interested in hearing his thoughts on freedom. 

Via the Daily Stoic, which adds that changing our nation's history is beyond us, but striving to perfect adherence to our principles of liberty is within our power. That is a worthy goal for free human beings.

 Via Tim Kennedy, former Green Beret. He advises: "Don't lose."

Independence Day

This year I have had women write to tell me that they don't feel like they can celebrate Independence Day. This strikes me as a strange sentiment; 'I feel our government is so oppressive that I can't celebrate the idea of overthrowing an oppressive government.' This should be the ideal holiday. Go practice handling explosives.

Democrats in general seem to be having trouble this year. Same answer. 

Read again The Spirit of Rebellion. If you're against the government, do something about it. Be free for an hour of your life at least. If you're not, have a barbecue to remember those who once were. Authority turns septic sometimes. Human dignity entails and requires occasional rebellion. 

Perhaps -- so the Church teaches -- it also requires occasional (or even regular) submission to legitimate authority. We can worry about that on another day. Today is the Fourth of July.

Happy Independence Day.

Hony Tonk

 

Freedom means decision, choice and difference.

Off the Request Line

 I don't know who that guy is, but the meme is by request in the comments below.

Rolllin'

Get to the road, boys. Only got a few days until the freedom festival.

Spirit of Rebellion 2022

If you click on the black flag on the sidebar, you'll be taken to one of my favorite things I've ever written, an Independence Day post called The Spirit of Rebellion. It is originally from 2015, and ties together a  number of historical trends -- including the recently-mentioned Robert the Bruce and the War of Scottish Independence -- that brought us to our American nation. The Declaration of Independence is the root of our tradition, its principles having survived the Articles of Confederation and the establishment of the Constitution, and those eternal principles shall survive the Constitution when it finally falls. Yet these even older things are the seed from which the root sprang, and we are wise to remember the deep history.

This year the spirit of rebellion is being seen mostly on the left, surprisingly since the Democratic Party controls all the Federal levers of electoral government. The loss of the Supreme Court, which was for so long their method of amending the Constitution without the bother of obtaining a three-quarters majority of states' consent, has been hugely upsetting. Yet according to this poll, up to a quarter of Americans are nearly ready to take up arms against the government, and spread across the political spectrum (one in three each of Republicans and Independents, one in five Democrats). 

Ironically, only about a third of those declaring for war are currently gun owners. The long feared militia movement is not going to be the source of revolution; if it occurs, it is likely to be a combination of abortion supporters on the left and those among the general citizenry horrified by the corruption they can witness in the government and its allied elites: a majority of all voters say the system is corrupt and rigged against ordinary people, and 49% say they have come to feel like strangers in their own country. 

It would be wise to remember the closing point of the Independence Day essay.

Maybe we can pick a nice day in mid-October, when the weather will be excellent for the celebratory cookouts that mark it. I understand the former Columbus Day has opened up as a holiday, but any of the days nearby it are usually excellent.

And for anyone reading this who might occupy a position of power: beware. You tread on thin ice with very many political factions among the citizenry, and you will be judged by those eternal principles in the Declaration. If you fail that test, you will not be missed: rather, your fall will be toasted for centuries to come.

Happy Independence Day.

The Oaken Heart of Robert the Bruce

One of the great stories about the heroic King of Scots, Robert the Bruce, is the story of his heart. On his deathbed he asked his old companion, Sir James Douglas -- known as Good Sir James in Scotland, and Black Douglas to those Englishmen who encountered him on the field of battle -- to take his heart on crusade. 

According to Jean le Bel, when Bruce was dying he asked that Sir James, as his friend and lieutenant, should carry his heart to the Holy Land and present it at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem as a mark of penance. John Barbour, alternatively, has Bruce ask that his heart should simply be carried in battle against "God's foes" as a token of his unfulfilled ambition to go on crusade. Given that Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands since 1187, this second is perhaps more likely. 

Douglas faithfully fulfilled one of these two proposed vows, which suggests it was probably the one actually asked of him. When Bruce was dead, Douglas had his heart placed in a silver and enamelled casket and wore it around his neck, sailing to Spain to join King Alfonso XI's crusade. Douglas was killed at some point in the great battle that brought victory to the Spanish king.

Recently a way to fulfill the second proposed vow has been found. An oak tree the Bruce himself planted 700 years ago died, and its heart-of-oak was removed. This was carved into the shape of a man’s heart, and taken on pilgrimage to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. There it was lain in the place where Jesus was thought to lay, and prayers offered for the Bruce. 

This act is in the spirit of wild romance that was the very soul of the Age of Chivalry. 

The Weirdness of 'White Fascism'

I don't mean the obviously fake kind, where everybody pretends that the National Right to Life Coalition represents some kind of 'Christo-Fascist white patriarchy.' I mean the only-maybe-fake kind, these guys who went to Ukraine to join the Misanthropic Division, Europeans mostly.

THE DEATH OF a French volunteer in Ukraine is the first clear evidence that there are at least some far-right extremists among the foreign fighters who have flocked there to fight Russian forces.... The Misanthropic Division’s violent, hate-filled Telegram channel was the first to announce Bleriot’s death, one day earlier, on June 3. The post said that he died on June 1 in Kharkiv and included a photo in which the thin and bearded Bleriot wears a T-shirt that says “Misanthropic Division” across the front....

Bleriot was a “man who fought bolshevism and antifascism all his life,” according to the Telegram post, a “brother-in-arms,” who died defending Europe and Ukraine from “Asiatic hordes.” ... Bleriot was from Bayeux, a town in the north of France. In an interview with an Argentinian reporter, uploaded to Reddit on March 3, he identifies himself as a Norman, says that he is “ready to kill Russians,” and “ready to die.” He adds that he left behind two children at home, and starts to cry. 

For the years since 2016, I've been reading journalists who inform me that Vladimir Putin was symbolic of right-wing white nationalism broadly, and that the Russian Orthodox church was aligned with Putin in trying to create a Christian nationalism also broadly aligned with this sort of white nationalism. But here are people who feel like it is their moral duty to "kill Russians" in order to make Europe safe from "Asiatic hordes." (Are there Asiatic hordes? China's population is headed off a demographic cliff.) 

Several pages down into the report, we get a clue.

As for the Misanthropic Division, it’s hard to tell how real it is, and how sizable. The extent of its actual association with the Azov Battalion is also unclear. Take Bleriot, for example. There’s no indication that he was with any Azov unit when he died in Kharkiv, in the northeast of Ukraine, far from Azov’s main areas of operation in the south. It may be that the Misanthropic Division is not a real-world unit with a leader and a chain of command so much as a twisted military clique that anyone online can claim. 

Now they've got photographs of a guy with a tattoo on his head, which indicates some level of commitment (assuming it's not photoshopped). It's hard to tell, though, how much of any of this is more than the fevered imaginations of people who spend a lot of time online -- even the ones who actually went to Ukraine.