Some Things You Can't Even Give Away

The Lady Marjorie and I have been cleaning out her mother's condo in Philadelphia. And we have learned a few things.

When you are clearing out grandma's house there are three categories of Stuff.

1. Stuff that people will pay for.
2. Stuff that you can give away.
3. Stuff that you cannot give away.

You can get auction houses to come and get stuff that can fetch them a half decent price.  There are all kinds of ways you can do this, depending on who is going to pick up the risk on what it is all going to sell for.

You can take all kinds of stuff to Goodwill and the other charities that accept donations.

But it is the final category that interesting: the stuff you cannot give away, the stuff that you have to pay someone to take off your hands, the stuff that the auction houses don't want and Goodwill won't accept.

In other words, this stuff is worth less than nothing.

Here is what I am talking about. World Book Encyclopedia. Goodwill won't take it, because nobody wants an encyclopedia these days. Golly, I wonder why. Here is something else: electric typewriters. Nobody wants these miracles of mechanical technology any more, not unless it is an antique manual model. What a shame!

OK. So you that throw these things in the dumpster. But there is something more.

Nobody wants wall units, those majestic pieces of floor-to-ceiling furniture that once supported your stereo, your TV and VCR, and displayed your china collection.

You can see why. Encyclopedias? You can get it for free on the Internet. Typewriters? Hey, it's not just that you can type up anything you want on your laptop; you can dictate into your smartphone. You can even dictate into your smartphone and have it translate into another language.

But the sacred shrines of the household, the wall units, what about them?

It is obvious. Today, people hang giant-screen TVs up on the wall, and they stream everything with Apple TV, or Roku, or Amazon Fire. But what about those china collections? I suppose the answer is that china is not an expensive luxury any more. Good china, cups, mugs, glassware are no longer prized possessions. You can get 'em good and cheap anywhere. Who needs to announce their wealth and taste with stuff anymore?

There is more: mattresses, box springs, upholstered furniture. Forget it. You have to pay to get people to take 'em away. And the guy that took ours away says that stuff is worth less than ever before. He used to get $300 for a trucklead; now he is looking at clearing $100. It's hardly worth bothering. So you have to pay him to take it away.

Well, I don't know the moral and epistemological meaning of all this, whether it speaks of our obscene wealth or our obscene decadence.

I only close with this. When the World Bank did a study on wealth (pdf) back in 2000 they found that physical capital from resources, land, and plants and equipment added up  to a minor part of our capital and wealth. In the advanced countries "intangible capital," the stuff between peoples' ears, amounted to about 80 percent of all wealth.

So it really is true what they say. "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal..."

But I say: What about grandchildren? Is it OK to lay up a batch of grandchildren? I hope so.

Muslim Problem Solved. Except...

My grandfather, who ran a small export business in Japan until WWII intervened, used to declare that "it's all over bar shouting."

So I am here to announce that the Muslim problem has been solved: it's all over, bar shouting.

It's all in a piece by David P. Goldman.

The Muslim problem is quite simple. Ordinary Muslims in the West are more afraid of the terrorists than they are of the police.

Right now, according to Goldman, the intelligence services attempt to penetrate the Muslim terror gangs by seeding them with Muslim criminals that get out of jail free by agreeing to inform on their terror pals. But the terrorists are on to the bureaucrats' game and so make the informers prove their loyalty to the Muslim cause by performing terror acts.

That is why almost all the terror attacks are committed by "known wolves."

No kidding. This makes a whole lot of stuff make sense.

The problem is not that different from the black gang problem, as told by Jill Leovy in Ghettoside. Everyone knows who done it, after some drive-by killing, but nobody will inform against a gangbanger, because they are afraid. On the other hand, black inner-city residents rail against the police that arrest gangbangers for minor offenses.

It was Civil War generals Sherman and Sheridan that taught us how to deal with terrorists and their sympathizers. Writes Goldman:

We don't have to be particularly smart; we merely have to do some disgusting things. Sherman and Sheridan suppressed sniping at Union soldiers by Confederate civilians by burning the towns (just the towns, not the townsfolk) that sheltered them. In other words, they forced collective responsibility upon a hostile population, a doctrine that in peacetime is entirely repugnant, but that in wartime becomes unavoidable.

By the way, did you know that Gen. Sheridan was an adviser to the Prussians in 1870 and taught them how to deal with French snipers and hostile populations?

We probably don't have to do anything that disgusting. The lesson comes from the solution to the "anarchist" problem in the US before and after World War I. I wrote about it here (H/T Steve Sailer).

The solution was to deport the anarchists, who were usually European immigrants, like Sacco and Vanzetti and the sainted Emma Goldman. After about 556 anarchists were deported the whole thing died down.

Except of course that our lefty friends have canonized the martyrs to the faith, as well they might.

Now, I must say that I am very encouraged by all this, because I see the solution to the Muslim problem also solving the world's lefty problem. Yay!

See, the only reason we have not gone Full Sherman is because of lefties, because they have selected Muslims as the next group "outside the system" for whom they are going to advocate for their "rights." I have written about this here and here. This advocacy for people outside the system made a lot of sense in 1850 when the workers were outside the system, and again, sorta, when women got the vote, and again when the Civil Rights Acts ended the Jim Crow era in the US South.

By the way, the KKK was the South's way to go Full Sherman and terrorize the people in the South so that they would fear the KKK more than the federal Reconstruction troops and officials.

My biggest fear right now is the escalating Partisan Stress Index of Peter Turchin and his Ages of Discord. Left and right in America are raising the stakes on each other, to levels last reached in the 1850s. Eventually it could lead to civil war again.

I don't know about you, but I really do not want civil war in the good old USA.

But not if the Big Problem is Muslim terrorism. That's because the only real job that justifies the obscene cost of government is to Keep Us Safe.

Sooner or later the people will demand that the government Keeps Us Safe from Muslim terror. They will blow right by the left's vile lies about "hate" and "xenophobia" and "Islamophobia." They will ask the President "Is it Safe," and the President will respond by applying Shermanesque tactics to frighten the moderate Muslims into abandoning the extremists in their midst.

Obviously, we are not at the point where the President sends troops into Muslim neighborhoods to burn all their houses down. But I reckon that the first politician that figures out how to square the circle, by deporting Muslims back to their hellholes if they have information about terrorists in their midst and did not report it, is going to have a very big career.

And the point about President Trump is that he is starting to set out markers on the Muslim question, such as with his Muslim Ban from selected terror-supporting countries. Lefties are setting out markers about "hate" and "Islamophobia." Eventually, the American people will have to choose.

The Fundamental Fantasy of the Left

Radical leftie Freddie de Boer has a piece out warning the left that the Iron Law of Institutions, the notion that people work to maximize their power within an institution rather than work for the institution, also includes a statement of lefty principle, which is worth quoting.

[S]ocialism is desirable in part because it’s only socialism that guarantees true freedom, the freedom to live and behave free of want. We’re the movement that can make people really free because once in power we can let them pursue their own interests free of hunger, homelessness, and so on.

Very nice. But who is going to provide "the freedom to live and behave free of want"? Oh, I see, it is "us," because "once in power we can let them pursue their own interests "free of hunger, homelessness, and so on."

This is reminiscent of Nancy Pelosi telling us how Obamacare would let artists and writers stop worrying about paying for health care, so they could get on with writing and painting.

But socialism doesn't remove the who-whom question that Lenin raised. It just concentrates it in the "once in power people," the "We." Someone has to produce the goods and services so that people can "live and behave free of want," and someone has to tell them what to do.

Actually, there is no world "free of want." We all want, and that is why we work in the world. The question is who-whom. Who works, who consumes, who gives the orders, who takes the orders.

The bigger question is whether there is a social system that minimizes the giving of orders, and limits the power that is brought to bear on individual humans to get with the program and produce so that others may consume.

It is the faith of the socialists or the "Democrats and liberals from the radical left, the political tendency [de Boer] belong[s] to" that peace and justice and freedom from want are enhanced by a socialist politics. I would say that their faith is a delusion, proved by the history of the last 100 years.

The only alternatives that we know of are a system whereby a market with prices for everything from labor to cough drops signals to each and every one of us what we should do (or more important, not do) to get what we want. The other system is one in which powerful people, either feudal lords or politicians and their socialist managers, tell people what to do.

We have some history on this. Starting in about 1800 a market-based system started up in some lands of northwest Europe. The result over 200 years was an increase in per-capita income of about 3,000 percent, something that had never happened before in human history, ever.

Starting about a century ago, a socialist-based system started up in the lands of Russia and China. The result was famine and horror, and the leaders of both countries have stopped trying to implement socialism, mainly, I suspect, because a poor country can't throw much weight around in international power politics.

Now Freddie de Boer allows as how in any week he probably attends an "organizing meeting, union meeting, or protest" and very likely more. In other words, he believes in the power of politics, of the power of a union to extract more for wage-earners from the bosses, and the power of a government to extract more for voters from the rich.

I have a fundamental problem with this, apart from the history, which is pretty clear. The whole point of social animals is to declare a zone of peace in which the use of force is avoided as much as possible. Usually this is achieved by hierarchy, where the bottom dogs cringe before the power of the top dogs; but at least there is no actual force, not usually.

In the market system of price signalling the top dog is the price, and everyone cringes before the price. That is how the use of force is diminished.

The problem with socialism and all politics-centric ideas is that they reintroduce force into the place of social peace. They say that the peaceful process of working and consuming according to the dictates of prices just doesn't work. The only way is by force, by replacing the work boss -- with the power of hiring and firing -- with the political boss -- with the power of the state, or men with guns.

It is the easiest thing in the world to pretend that what I do with power is just sweetness and light, whereas what other people do is the work of Satan.

But I believe that the way to understand politics and government is that there is no such thing as justice. Only injustice meted out by the chaps in power.

And that is why it is best that the people in power should always be thinking about what the people on the receiving end of their power think about it.

For some reason, people in power don't tend to think about this, not until it is too late.

Trump's Paris Climate: Sound and Fury

Yesterday, June 1, 2017, President Trump announced that he would be withdrawing the US from the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

In response coal-plant investor and environmental enthusiast Tom Steyer talked about Trump's action committing "assault and battery on the future of the American people." And the AP released a "scientists say" article brimming with ruling-class conventional wisdom.

What on earth is going on here?

First of all, there is the complaint of my old boss, Stuart Alexander. He once complained about how the people working under him, especially the software people, were always going off on tangents.

Exactly. Life is hard, and people are always eager to take a break from the job in hand and worry about someone else's job.

Politicians are in charge of protecting their people from enemies foreign and domestic. But they spend most of their time doing other stuff, like regulating the fuel economy of cars and pretending that health care can be reduced to an administrative system.

Climate-change politics is an almost irresistible temptation for politicians because it is a war that isn't a war. As I say, the whole point of government is to protect us from existential perils, from the Soviet Union to global Islamic terrorism. What about catastrophic climate change? It is, you may say, Minecraft for the grown-up ruling class.

But it is all make-believe. Here's why.

In the first place, scientists have developed climate models that do not model the future. In yet another proof of God's existence, the climate has "paused" in the years since the climate models were developed. The world just is not heating up as much as the models predicted and continue to predict.

As Richard Feynman, a scientist, once said. If you gin up a theory and it doesn't predict then your theory is wrong. You better start over.

Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and more CO2 will tend to warm the earth but we don't know how much.

Yes, the Earth is warming, but we don't really know why.

Yes, there is a "pause" in warming right now, but we don't know why.

Yes, the Earth has been warming since the Little Ice Age, but we don't know why.

Yes, the Earth is in an interglacial period in an Ice Age, but we don't know why.

Oh yeah. We have theories about all this stuff, but nothing dispositive.

Let's think about this in a completely different way, using the Antifragile notion of Black Swan inventor, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

His point is that the problem for anyone is not the routine stuff; it is the unexpected catastrophic event. In finance, it is the financial crash. In politics it is invasion.

But what about climate? I'd say that the catastrophic event is not runaway climate due to increased CO2. We've seen the Earth with more CO2 in the past and with less CO2.

(Actually less CO2 is not good, because at about half the current CO2 concentration plants start to give up and stop photosynthesis.)

Let us start from the top.

What about an asteroid impact? What would we do to make sure that human life continues? That the US continues? That my grandchildren continue? In that order.

What about a Carrington event, a pulse of electromagnetic radiation (EMP) that takes out all electronics? What do we do to mitigate that? First, we would want to be sure that we can restart electronics. Then we would want to reduce the loss of life due to the pause until normal service is resumed.

What about nuclear war, such as an attack by the Norks? Star Wars? Aid to the devastated city?

What about Venezuela, where political stupidity wrecks a nation's economy? What about that?

What about the End of Entitlements, our own rendez-vous with Venezuela?

And finally, what about the Earth's temperature rising faster than it is right now?

Here's my judgement. I'd say that on nukes, Venezuela, entitlements, climate, we can just muddle through, as usual. And it wouldn't hurt for each of us to Go Mormon, and have a stash of emergency supplies handy.

It is on EMP and asteroids that government can help, for a start by moving electronics and the electricity system towards some kind of antifragility. There is no doubt that the bigger the event, the more people will die. But each of us had better understand that the ultimate goal is to make sure that some of us survive.

How much would it cost to make all of us survive? Most of us? Some of us?

That is assuming that we humans survive the advent of AI, of artificial intelligence.

To Teach Liberals a Lesson, Re-elect Trump

There have been a lot of conservatives this week saying, OK, that's it. we can't be good guys any more. We have to hit back at the left: their violent protesters, as at Berkeley and Middlebury, and now Washington State's Evergreen State College, their suppression of everything conservative; their open vileness towards President Trump in the Kathy Griffin severed head episode.

Chaps like Ace of Spades are saying, OK, that's it; I'm done being nice; I'm going to return blow for blow.

Look, I get it. That's why I now say that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice, because whatever the ruling class does when it is in power always amounts to injustice.

As in Barack Obama weaponizing the intelligence community against Republicans and non-liberal Americans in general.

The thing is that we don't have enough media to go blow for blow in the You Did It First department.

But the way to sort the left, as the Brits would say, is to keep the House and Senate in 2018 and re-elect Donald Trump in 2020.

And to do that we need the support of decent middle-aged Good Little Girls that right now are repelled by Trump's bar-room persona. They need to decide that the vile lefty Social Justice Warriors are much worse, and they need to be telling all their friends about the husband of a friend that lost his job because he wasn't "woke" enough at work. "I can't believe they did that."

The point is that this happened before. That was what The Sixties was all about. The left at the time thought it was carrying all before it, that fundamental transformation was right around the corner. Only it wasn't.

First, Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968. Believe me, that was a shock to our lefty friends, but never mind: the anti-war protests swelled, and National Guard troops fired on peaceful protesters at Ohio's Kent State University.

But then Richard Nixon won reelection in a 60-40 vote over uber-liberal George McGovern, the dream liberal candidate. Liberals were so angry that they ginned up an impeachment against Nixon for doing what every Democrat does before breakfast. You know, like weaponize the IRS against the Tea Party.

But the defenestration of Richard Nixon didn't stop the anti-liberal wave, because Ronald Reagan got elected in 1980, despite being an amiable dunce and a B-movie actor that just could not master the details of "governance."

Sound familiar?

Let the record show that it took from 1968 to the aftermath of 1988 for liberals to realize that their fundamental transformation had locked them out of the White House.

And then, don't forget, the Clintons and the rest of the liberal machine thought that their election in 1992 was Katy bar the door. Only it wasn't. The 1994 midterm was a shocker -- and I was there, volunteering for a GOP House candidate in Washington State -- as Republicans won control of Congress for the first time since 1952.

Maybe Marx is wrong, and history won't repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

But I'd say there's a darn good chance that we are going to see a repeat of the Sixties. And the reason is that the cultural enthusiasm for revolution and "resistance" just does not resonate with ordinary middle-class people.

The reason is not hard to find. Revolution and resistance are conceits of rich kids, Marxes and Ayers (son of a Commonwealth Edison exec) and people that have been converted to liberalism by their college experience. But most people just want kids and a job and a nice home; they do not have a clue what LGBT and intersectionality and critique are all about, and they do not understand the enthusiasms of the social-justice left.

Just remember, it took 20 years, from Nixon to Bush I, for liberals to realize that they had a problem. They had to be beaten by the evil Nixon, by the B-movie actor Reagan twice, by the colorless Bush before they would be ready to think that they had a problem.

How long to you think it would take this time?

Government Can't Solve The Problems We Got

Never mind about the white working class and the collapse of good jobs at good wages in the manufacturing sector.

We know that President Trump's promises to the white working class on that score are empty. There is just not going to be a world in which kids can sorta graduate from high school and go down the street and sign on at the local steel plant for a lifetime job.

But it is worse than that. It's not just manufacturing jobs. Now it is retail jobs. My Man Kevin Williamson tells the grim tale, in a piece built around the jolly old days of  Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the not-so-jolly days of a boarded-up retail mall in Oklahoma.

Retail jobs are collapsing, and that is dead serious because there are millions of people (especially, I suspect, white working class women) who have learned the life of work from an entry-level job in retail. Here is a middle-aged woman looking back on her first retail job.

Now that she is an adult with children of her own, she understands that what she was actually investing in was learning how to have a job. “I had to be accountable,” she says. “I had hours, had to be there on time, had to be clean and dressed appropriately. And I had to interact with people in a way I hadn’t before: In a job like that, you have to answer questions, and if someone is kind of mean to you or critical, you can’t stomp off and cry. I wasn’t a kid at work — I was an employee.”

I think that this is the single most underappreciated contribution of capitalism. Even if the customer is mean to you, you still suck it up. Your job, whatever it is from CEO to retail clerk, is to become a servant of the exchange economy, which is all about serving other people.

But those jobs are going away, say Kevin:

At the highwater mark, there were about 5,000 malls in the United States, and there are now 1,100, at least 400 of which are expected to close in the next few years. 

Ouch. And what about the people getting their first entry-level job at the mall?

What shall we do? Where shall we go?

What we must not do is act like Hillary Clinton.

The funniest episode in the protective yet revealing new Hillary Clinton profile arrives when we learn that this sad, unemployed, 69-year-old lady is so desperate to keep her self-image alive that she still employs flunkies and retainers to treat her as though she actually were the president, or the secretary of state, or a president in waiting, or at very least the leader of the opposition.

Sorry, Hillary, it's over. And the worst thing in the world when you are over is to have people telling you that everything is copacetic, and nothing needs to change.

Now back to the economy.

The fact is that we don't have a clue what is coming in the next few years: culture, politics, economy-wise.

And yet our political institutions are all set up to service the current economy. Let us start with the education system, a dreadful, slow, mindless government monopoly.

OK, kids, quick! What should we do with the education system to prepare the next generation of kids for the jobs of tomorrow?

Exactly. Nobody has a clue, least of all in politics and government.

Now, my view is that the point of government is that it is designed to prevent change, most obviously the age-old change of pirates and predators appearing one morning and raping and pillaging the place until the men are dead and the women carted off into slavery.

That sorta worked in the agricultural age when nothing changed on the growing-of-food front. Not any more. Today the market and its prices decide everything, whether people like it or not. The reason the market must decide, whether you like it or not, is the Great Enrichment, which has increased per-capita income by 3000% in the last 200 years.

Imagine saying that the one most amazing thing is all history that has really made a difference, is just a trick, a mirage, as the left has been doing for 150 years.

Imagine a government, any government, planning and executing the Great Enrichment. Exactly. It is impossible. Let us just ask what government would have done about the losers in the successive economic revolutions, the machine textile revolution that put the hand spinners and then the hand weavers and I know not what out of work. And then the railroad revolution that must have put Charles Dickens carter, Mr. Barkis, out of work. And the oil revolution that put the sperm-whale hunters like Capt. Ahab out of work.

The point is that, whatever the particulars of each  economic revolution, life went on, and the losers kinda faded away like the handloom-weaver father of Andrew Carnegie.

We are seeing the fading away right now of the white working class, whose men operated the manufacturies and whose women worked in retail.

So where shall we go, what shall we do?

To me, Fact One is that the current ruling class, the educated liberal elite, doesn't have a clue. All it knows is what it wants for itself, creative jobs and the delicious conceit of leading the People of the Subordinate Self towards Peace and Justice.

But suppose the ruling class is wrong? Suppose its approach to education only works for the children of the educated class? Supposing its single-payer health care notion crashes the health system? Suppose that its one-size-fits-all pension system runs out of money?

If we had market-driven education, health care, and pensions, then all these "systems" would self-correct as the world turned. It wouldn't be easy, and people would suffer. But under the current system plenty of people are suffering, plenty of people are going to suffer in the near future, and yet nothing is changing.  The poor have been utterly betrayed by the current system for the last 50 years, and nothing is changing. Scratch a liberal and they have no ideas, except the move the deckchairs on the Titanic and ask for more money.

But now we are on the brink of really big-time change, that no government program or ruling-class conceit has any clue about what to do.

But we do have a "system" that will deal with it. Markets and prices will adapt every day to the changes that are coming. And people that want to do something more than just die of despair will adapt to the changes, and they will wive and thrive.

On thing is for certain. If you are sitting around waiting for the politicians and the wise men to "do something," then you have a real problem.

Ben Sasse Hunting Unicorns

Republican Ben Sasse, US Senator from Nebraska, has written a book, and The Atlantic has reviewed it. The moderate Republican wants to rehabilitate "a shared moral language" for America.

Frankly, it's a little surprising that an elected official could be so obtuse about the political and cultural situation, and start talking about virtue and a shared moral language, in 2017 in the middle of the elite's war against President Trump.

I say that because it ought to be pretty obvious to anyone in the public square that the whole point of the leftist project, from 1848 to today's "woke" progressives, is to slaughter the west's common moral language and its notion of virtue, particularly the seven virtues celebrated by Deirdre McCloskey in her Bourgeois Virtues. After the massacre of the western canon the progressives will examine each and every one of us for our faithfulness to the left's vision of "justice" and administer the intersectionality loyalty oath to those that pass the test.

Sorry, Ben. We are way past the possibility of a shared moral vision, at least for now. That is why Dennis Prager today writes regretfully today about the Never Trumpers. Don't these guys understand that we are in a cultural civil war?

Put it this way. I wrote in my American Thinker piece this week that

In my view, the measure of a man is not what he believes at the end of the rainbow of justice, but what he is willing to concede to the other side in the spirit of good will, right now.

Good for Ben Sasse. If he wants to find a common moral ground then he is a good guy that is willing to concede something.

I tell you what I am willing to concede. I am willing to concede that a lot of people want nice safe government-guaranteed entitlements, even though they cost a bloody fortune in payroll and hidden taxes. If I had my druthers I would like to pay my share to look after people who are unable to look after themselves. But I would really like to take care of my own education, my own pension, and my own end-of-life healthcare.

So tell me, what are liberals prepared to concede to conservatives, right now? Would I be that far wrong if I said: Nothing?

The fact is that in war it is the losing side that makes concessions, and only when defeat is staring it in the face. The fact is that we are in a cultural civil war, which has spilled over into a political civil war, and is like to end up in a real shooting civil war.

The reason for this civil war is that the left believes, in the words of Barack Obama, in "fundamental transformation." You will notice that there is nothing in fundamental transformation that admits of a shared moral language. Indeed the whole point is to change the world, not to understand it.

So that means we have to fight.

But fight for what? That is what I am working on, because I start from the idea that we need something beyond the four virtues of the ancients, and the three additional virtues of the Christians. Let us put it in the language of a book I am reading that is trying to mix up Hegel and Heidegger. In this book, The Critique of Pure Modernity, David Kolb is investigating, shall we say, the use of negation in Hegel, that we proceed dialectically through negation and reflection, while acknowledging that the negative is very often almost the same as the original, and the notion of "unconcealing" in Heidegger.

Let us say that the meaning of all this is that the world is always already right in front of us and around us and within us, but yet it is concealed from us. The way to unconcealing is not just from a mechanical investigation,  the method of science, but more tricky and twisty. It involves appreciating that the world is not just mechanical and action and reaction, but that the whole is not just as the sum of its parts and has a uniqueness in which the parts are fully involved in the whole.

Another way to look at it is in the left-brain/right-brain analysis of Iain MacGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary. In his narrative myth (in its best sense) the left brain is always trying to reduce the world to a model and a plan of domination. The right brain just takes in the world as it is, without prejudgment.

Now the critique of MacGilchrist is that in the Enlightenment, in Modernity, in Newtonian mechanics, in technology, we have overbalanced in the direction of left-brain reductionism, what Kolb calls, from Heidegger, "universal imposition."

I would say that the whole lefty project is one long universal imposition of the left's model of the world, and you better submit.

On the argument of Kolb and MacGilchrist that lefty vision is only half of the truth, and it will lead to disaster at worst, and a very diminished human experience at best.

That is why I say that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice, the universal imposition of ruling class power upon a subordinate population.

The road to wholeness starts with my notion up above. The measure of a human is what he is willing to concede to his opponent, right now.

Or, to soften this up a bit, what is a man willing to concede, down the road at the end of the civil war, in the peace treaty between the good guys and the bad guys?

Ben Sasse is willing to make concessions right now, but I fear that the time for concession is way off in the future. The last time that the left was willing to make concessions was in 1992 after three straight Republican administrations. I dare say that the same sort of persuasion would be needed this time.