Sunday morning music

This morning's article is an unusual combination.  I'm going to introduce you to a song, then talk at some length about its very profound meaning for me.  Call it an extended meditation on God, life, the universe and everything, if you will.

A couple of weeks ago I happened upon an album released in 1999 by country and bluegrass musician Ricky Skaggs, titled "Soldier of the Cross".

I'm not a big fan of either music genre, and I don't normally bother with "commercial" Christian music, but somehow I felt led to click through to a couple of the tracks and listen for a few moments.

One of them was titled "Seven Hillsides", composed by Texas native Walt Wilkins.  It describes the dilemma of a preacher who's to deliver memorial services at the graves of seven soldiers, killed in action overseas.  How is he to comfort their families, particularly their mothers?  How is he to make sense of their deaths in the context of the Christian message?  Since that's something I've had to do for myself, first from the perspective of my own faith, and then for others as a pastor and chaplain, you'll understand that this song struck me very powerfully indeed.

Walt Wilkins has recorded this song himself, on his 2001 album "Rivertown".

However, Mr. Wilkins has said he loves Ricky Skaggs' version of the song, and who am I to argue with the songwriter?  Before I go on, let's listen to it.

As a pastor, I can assure you that's a very good description of the moral and spiritual dilemma we face every time we have to do something like this.  How can we make sense of tragedy and loss in the context of our faith?  To me, it's blasphemous to suggest that everything that happens is God's will.  I refuse to believe that God points at someone and says, "I'm going to kill you now, to see how your family copes with your death, and test their faith!"  That's not the God I've come to know over the years.  Rather, I recall that God never once promised us a life of wine and roses, or milk and honey, or whatever.  Instead, he promised us grace to cope with life, whatever it throws at us.  In my experience, he keeps that promise - if we're prepared to accept his grace on his terms.

Regular readers will know the background to my faith, and how it's been formed and tested over the years.  I make no claim to be some sort of Christian hero - I'm anything but.  I've made more than my fair share of mistakes, and committed far more than my fair share of sins.  I fear God's justice when I face his judgment for my life - almost as much as I hope in his mercy, which is the only thing that will save any of us.  Nevertheless, as best I can, I try to live what I've come to believe through my experiences.

For those of you who aren't familiar with my background, here are a few blog articles I've written over the years, in chronological order.

Remembering Mike

The night Christmas became real

My heroes

For context on South Africa and events there during those years, see my articles "Remembering Inyati" and "Was apartheid South Africa really that bad?"

My faith grew out of those experiences, and remains formed by them to this day.  I try to express it in the pages of this blog, particularly when writing about modern tragedies such as terrorism and war.  However, a lot of people who haven't seen such destruction at first hand seem to approach such issues with a much simpler, black-and-white perspective that doesn't allow much in the way of "gray areas", where ethics, morality, attitudes and actions are less clear-cut and more complicated.  Far too many people seem to see the world - they prefer to see the world - in terms of "us" and "them":  and we're all right, and they're all wrong, because that's the way it is.

That attitude is the cause of so much death and destruction that it's almost impossible to tabulate.  I've seen it in more than one war zone in sub-Saharan Africa, and I'm seeing it now in these dis-United States.  I wrote about it at some length after the Paris terror attacks of 2015, in an article titled "Paris and the pain of being human".  I meant every word I wrote there;  but my words clearly didn't satisfy many readers, as the more than 60 comments the article attracted will make clear if you read them (I hope you do).

Here are the salient paragraphs from that article.

Those aren't the worst aspects of violent conflict. To me, the worst is what it does to the human psyche. You become dehumanized. Your enemies are no longer people - they're objects, things, targets. You aren't shooting at John, whose mother is ill, and who's missing his girlfriend terribly, and who wants to marry her as soon as he can get home to do so. You're shooting at that enemy over there, the one who'll surely 'do unto you' unless you 'do unto him' first. He's not a human being. He's a 'gook'. He's 'the enemy'. He's a thing rather than a person. It's easier to shoot a thing than it is a person.

. . .

And in the end, the bodies lying in the ruins, and the blood dripping onto our streets, and the weeping of those who've lost loved ones . . . they'll all be the same.  History is full of them.  When it comes to the crunch, there are no labels that can disguise human anguish.  People will suffer in every land, in every community, in every faith . . . and they'll turn to what they believe in to make sense of their suffering . . . and most of them will raise up the next generation to hate those whom they identify as the cause of their suffering . . . and the cycle will go on, for ever and ever, until the world ends.

We cannot 'kill them all and let God sort them out' (and let it never be forgotten that those obscene, inhuman instructions were reportedly issued, not by a Muslim fundamentalist, but by an Abbot and Papal Legate of the Catholic Church).  There are too many of 'them' to kill them all, just as 'they' can never kill all of 'us'.  We cannot kill our way out of terrorism.  We cannot kill our way out of the dilemma of being human, with all the tragedy that entails.

May God have mercy on us all.

That article, looking at the pain of loss suffered by so many in those terror attacks, strikes very close to the heart of what I felt when I listened to "Seven Hillsides".  Right now, I'm seeing the same hardness of heart felt by Americans towards each other.  Those on the left demand their version of utopia, and regard all who stand in their way as "reactionaries" or "conservatives" or "rednecks" or "deplorables" or whatever the "label du jour" might be.  Those on the right regard their opponents as "progressives" or "socialists" or "terrorists" or "thugs" and the like.  However, neither side refers to their opponents as "human beings".  They objectify them as something to be rejected, perhaps feared, certainly destroyed in respect of their positions, if not their actual lives.  They won't accept them as fellow Americans who happen to hold different opinions.

The Christian faith that's supposed to animate this country, according to so many of the Founding Fathers, is conspicuous by its absence on both sides.  The right may complain about openly anti-Christian sentiments on the left, but their own attitudes display as much disregard of the Golden Rule as do their opponents'.  Pot, meet kettle.  Kettle, pot.

And so, pastors such as myself are again dumped straight into the old dilemma.  How can we make sense of suffering, pain and loss in the context of our faith, when both sides fail to recognize their opponents - political, electoral or otherwise - as fellow human beings for whom Christ died?  In war, it's common for allegedly "holy leaders" to claim that "God is on our side" or "God is with us".  It's always struck me as incongruous that both sides make that same claim.  It must be awfully schizophrenic for God to find himself divided like that, two halves of himself working against the middle!  Clearly, that sort of religious propaganda won't fly.  Mothers on either side mourn the loss of their loved ones . . . so how can we put that loss in the context of what it means to be Christian, and human, and real?  How can we preach God's truth, rather than our partisan, one-sided, limited perspectives?

I have no answers that will satisfy everybody.  All I can do is point out that we are called to judge ourselves by God's standards, not to judge him by our standards.  Sadly, most of us fall into the latter error;  and if pastors try to point that out, we're derided and rejected for not taking sides.  We can't win.

And that's the pain of being human.  We are called to be more than human;  not just natural, but supernatural - yet we insist on remaining in the mud and the mire, and refusing to "lift up [our] eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh [our] help".  We won't find God's answers by looking down at the human condition, but by looking up, to see what he intends human beings to become.

How should we behave towards each other?

The prophet Micah put it in a nutshell.

He has showed you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

That, right there, is a pastor's calling;  to remind and help people to lift up their eyes, and their lives, and "walk humbly with our God".  That's not an optional instruction, to be observed only if others do the same to us.  The Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you") and the eleventh commandment ("Love one another as I have loved you") are spiritually synonymous.  However, as pastors, we need not be surprised if reminding people of that reality leads to rejection by some.  After all . . . look at what they did to Christ, who embodied that teaching.

And, thus, today . . . we face our own "Seven Hillsides".


* Sigh *


Peter
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Primitive superstition wins again as a good man is murdered

Tragic news out of Guatemala.

A RESEARCHER for a London University has been burnt alive by violent mob after being accused of practising witchcraft in his homeland.

Domingo Choc Che, 55, an expert on traditional herbal medicine, had been working with a team from University College London (UCL), before being set upon by a group of men in his native Guatemala. The violent group accused Mr Choc Che of causing the death of a member of the community after he had given medicine and for carrying out a ceremony on the grave.

Disturbing pictures shows huge plumes of smoke bellowing from the victim who desperately tried to save his life by running through the field.

Moments later Mr Choc Che collapsed and died at the scene before emergency services were able to attend.

. . .

The Mayan medicine specialist had been working as a collaborator on a UCL pharmaceutical project ... The scientific project involved researching biodiversity use of Mayan medicine in Guatemala.

There's more at the link.

I was very sad to read that news, but not surprised.  In any primitive culture, anything that doesn't fit the traditional narrative is regarded with suspicion and distrust.  From attacks on medical teams trying to use modern medicine to treat Ebola in Africa, to the burning alive of suspected "witches", to the murder of albinos in Tanzania to obtain their body parts for shamanistic rituals and "medicine", to the "cargo cults" of the Pacific, the problem of primitive, uneducated, non-scientific (or rather pre-scientific) culture is rampant in much of the Third World.

The biggest problem is not that such lack of understanding exists:  it's that those from a modern scientific background can't understand or appreciate the depths of superstition confronting them in such places.  They don't take enough time or trouble to understand local beliefs and attitudes, or to explain what they're doing and why.  They simply press on with their studies and research, because they don't want to "waste time" explaining what they know locals are unlikely to understand.

That's what leads to tragedies like this.  Because the locals feel ignored and "left out", they naturally put the worst possible interpretation on what they see the outsiders doing.  If that threatens the foundations of their belief system or culture, they're going to do something about it.  In this case, Mr. Choc Che was the victim of that response, with locals assuming his medicines had caused the death of the sick person he tried to help.

I experienced similar reactions in primitive African society.  I learned early on that one couldn't just hand out medicines.  It wasn't safe if improvement didn't result.  Rather, it was best to take the sick person to another location, where they could be treated by doctors and nurses without having suspicious family members hovering over them, ready to lash out at any sign that things weren't going well.

For those of my readers who may venture "off the beaten track" for any reason, tourism, research or whatever, please bear that in mind.  You're on someone else's turf.  You're the intruder, the outsider.  You can't assume that you're welcome, or that you're understood, or that you're free to do whatever you please.  Conformity to local customs and expectations is at least polite.  It may, at times, help to save your life.

Peter

Seattle: what did I tell you?

Yesterday I wrote that Seattle has abandoned the rule of law.  It's allowed protesters to set up an "autonomous zone" in a six-block area of the city, and pulled police out of it.  I warned of what was likely to occur - and guess what?  It's already happening.

Headlines that tell the story:

Police: Seattle demonstrators

running checkpoints at CHAZ

Lawless In Seattle:

All That CHAZ

Seattle’s Autonomous Zone

Has Its First Warlord;

Local Rapper Raz Simone Takes Over

There are already reports of violence being used to "enforce order" by local vigilantes, and that "some demonstrators on Capitol Hill are armed and trying to extort protection money from area businesses and residents".  The protesters who've "taken over" (only to have their "control" hijacked by thugs with guns) are learning that "an armed and organized element with leadership that isn’t afraid to use violence pretty much trumps all the slogans and antifa bullsh** you can spout."  Say it ain't so!

That's what happens when you negate the rule of law.  Inevitably, the law of the jungle takes over.  It's survival of the fittest and strongest.  Bring them food, or be food for them.  Chairman Mao said it well:  "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun".  The halfwits who proclaimed the "Autonomous Zone" are re-learning that lesson - and not just about power, either.  They're also learning that if you try to help them, the grasshoppers will rob the ants blind.

They want food, do they? I have a suggestion. Let's each of us buy a packet of frozen peas, and transfer the contents to freezer containers so we can use them at our leisure.  Then, let's mail the empty frozen-pea packets to the organizers of the Autonomous Zone (or perhaps to our local Antifa branches or Democratic Party offices), with a note reading "No Justice, NO PEAS!"  I think we should make that go viral, so they're inundated with empty pea packets.  It's no better than they deserve.

What about Seattle's police force?  Their city leaders won't allow them to do their job.  Therefore, those individual cops who still have a spine, and at least some professional pride, should resign from Seattle PD and take their services to places where it'll be appreciated and properly used.  The others should follow the well-known precept of "Lead, follow, or get out of the way".  They're not allowed to lead, and they have no effective leader to follow, so they should get out of the way and let citizens defend themselves - because it looks like nobody else is going to do it.

I said yesterday that "I'm a pastor and chaplain, and have my own perspective on what's happening - which does not involve violence unless in defense of my life, family and property."  Getting rid of thugs with guns who are threatening me, and refusing to be intimidated into contributing to their support, most certainly falls under that defense, IMHO.  I think it's time the good citizens of the "Autonomous Zone", and of Seattle as a whole (at least, those who haven't been brainwashed into abandoning their rights and responsibilities as citizens), banded together to reassert their own authority, and show these idiots where to go.  If necessary, assist them to get there.

After that, elect or appoint city and state authorities who'll preserve the rule of law in future.  I don't care what you do with the old ones.  They're utter failures, and deserve no consideration at all.

Peter

Seattle has abandoned the rule of law. Is this a foretaste of what's to come?

Protesters and demonstrators in Seattle have set up what they're calling the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone around the 11th Precinct police building in Seattle.  They've even produced this map of the "liberated" area (clickit to biggit).

As the labels on the map make clear, this is nothing more or less than a far-left-wing, progressive, communist-inspired project.  The labels are typical of communist propaganda throughout the world over the past century or more.  They leave little doubt as to the ideology behind this farce.  It's Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" writ large, on the streets of one of America's largest cities.

Of course, that city - Seattle - is so far left of center in its politics that it's arguably no longer American in its governance and outlook.  The occupiers of the "Autonomous Zone" appear to agree.  This notice appears on one of the barriers blockading entrance to the zone:

Please imagine, for a moment, that you're a business owner or resident inside the boundaries of that zone.  Suddenly your customers and suppliers no longer have free access to your business;  suddenly your right to the peaceful enjoyment of your residence is interrupted by radical activists who are controlling entrance to and exit from the zone.  You may face demands for access to your facilities at any time, and any refusal may draw accusations that you're "racist" or "reactionary" or (perish the thought!) "conservative".  You may be expected to "support the people" by donating supplies to the "masses", whether you like it or not.  Refusal is unlikely to be well received.

Worst of all, to my mind, is that local police deliberately and openly abandoned their own precinct building, opening the way for the radicals to take over.  I doubt very much whether police took this decision on their own initiative.  I'm pretty sure it was imposed on them by city administrators.  Despite claims that the precinct will remain staffed, it's now clear that those staff are not using their own headquarters building, which has been taken over by the mob.  Police are patrolling from mobile staging areas instead, and appear to be voluntarily remaining outside the self-declared "Autonomous Zone".  What this means for you, if you live and/or work inside that zone, is that you can no longer rely on police protection or assistance.  You're on your own.

This means that Seattle has effectively abandoned the rule of law within city limits.

Let's examine what "the rule of law" is.  Encyclopedia Britannica defines it as:

... the mechanism, process, institution, practice, or norm that supports the equality of all citizens before the law, secures a nonarbitrary form of government, and more generally prevents the arbitrary use of power. Arbitrariness is typical of various forms of despotism, absolutism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism.

. . .

In general, the rule of law implies that the creation of laws, their enforcement, and the relationships among legal rules are themselves legally regulated, so that no one—including the most highly placed official—is above the law. The legal constraint on rulers means that the government is subject to existing laws as much as its citizens are. Thus, a closely related notion is the idea of equality before the law, which holds that no “legal” person shall enjoy privileges that are not extended to all and that no person shall be immune from legal sanctions. In addition, the application and adjudication of legal rules by various governing officials are to be impartial and consistent across equivalent cases, made blindly without taking into consideration the class, status, or relative power among disputants.

There's more at the link.

Those conditions no longer apply in Seattle.  There, it's now patently obvious that:

• Not all citizens are equal under the law.  Left-wing protesters and agitators are being handled with kid gloves.  Try mounting a right-wing protest, for any cause from free speech, to pro-Second-Amendment, to outright racism like the Ku Klux Klan, and you'll doubtless get handled rather differently.  Don't believe me?  Why don't you try it, while the rest of us watch?  Pass the popcorn, please . . .
• Power is used arbitrarily, particularly as regards policing.  The police are no longer "protecting and serving" everybody.  They're doing so selectively.  If you're in a zone controlled by the politically correct, you can expect little, if any, help from law enforcement authorities and officers.  Seattle PD's motto is officially "Service, Pride, Dedication".  As far as the "Autonomous Zone" is concerned, I see from them little service, nothing to be proud of, and dedication only to surrendering to the mob.  It's hard to see how any self-respecting officer can remain in the employ of so pusillanimous an agency.
• The Mayor and city administration are abandoning their duty of care towards the city under their control, and pandering instead to pressure groups and extremist ideologies.  Those who don't fall into "politically correct" categories are no longer welcome in Seattle.  They're on their own.

In a properly administered state, the Governor and/or state authorities would have intervened long since to protect and uphold the rule of law, and ensure equality before the law for all citizens of the city.  That's unlikely to happen in Washington, where left-wing progressive politics dominate the state government.  The powers that be will adopt a snooty, high-toned, morally bankrupt perspective on the whole thing, and abdicate their responsibilities.

I'm fairly sure this won't be the only such "Autonomous Zone" set up in US cities.  Anywhere the radicals can expect compliance from city authorities, they'll try to do likewise.  Those opposed to them, or those who object to their businesses and property being turned into political pawns, are going to find themselves S.O.L. as far as the authorities are concerned.  It goes along with the "Defund the Police" and "Abolish the Police" narratives currently being spouted by the radicals.  By excluding police from "Autonomous Zones", they hope to demonstrate that they're not needed.  They may not be needed by the radicals, but they'll sure be missed by those the radicals intimidate, oppress and rob!

Of course, this will only accelerate the inevitable backlash.  Don't believe me?  Aesop spelled it out yesterday evening in relation to the "Abolish the Police" movement, but what he said applies just as well to radical "Autonomous Zones" (run, as they are and will be, by the same people that want to get rid of law enforcement).

Since ever, the whole thing is a Left-wing con job, exactly like advertising.

Create the need for the otherwise needless; then meet the new "need".

They've just taken ads for dishsoap and popcorn makers to their logical political extreme.

It's a riff on the Mafia's "protection" racket:  "That's a nice society you have there; be a real shame if it suddenly burned down."

The only answer to that is to shoot the "salesmen"; and then hunt down and exterminate the guy who sent the salesmen, and all their minions, to the last man, and last child.

Nothing less will suffice.

The Left, whether they realize it or not, is setting the table for an existential war of survival, down to the last side standing.

It's a recipe for civil war on a biblical Armageddon scale.  Everyone's families and entire lifestyle are the chips in that game.

Kill all they send.
Then find and destroy the nest.
First one to go ugliest the fastest wins.

Any half measures are a recipe for self-destruction.
Dresden and Hiroshima were a template.
Second place prize is a body bag.

What we're all witnessing daily right now is the Left's Useful Idiots trying to completely upend civilization, to suit their own ends.

Half of them think they can win. The other half would rather burn everything down to try, knowing they cannot win, and not caring anyways.

This is logic via Lucifer:  "If I cannot rule everything, I'll burn it all down."

The answer to that, as ever, comes out of the barrel of a gun, and at the point of sword and spear.

Again, more at the link.

This is my greatest fear right now.  The more radicals on one side push the limits, the closer they get to the brink, the more the other side will become radicalized and push right back, raising the stakes, "upping the ante" until there's no alternative but to go all in - or lose.  That's what's behind terrorism, the ultimate expression of radicalism.  It's what we saw on 9/11, but written (so far) in political slogans and biased, one-sided actions rather than in the large-scale shedding of blood.  Can it stay that way?

Historically, it hasn't.  Historically, extremism has always led to counter-extremism.  I think that's what we're seeing right now in the USA.  I'm reliably informed that many local movements are forming and organizing right now.  They're taking extreme pains to remain "under the radar", not using traceable or interceptable communications, being very careful and selective about whom they trust, and making plans that are not discussed publicly.  Some have progressed to the point of coordinating their plans with other groups, through very carefully vetted channels.  I won't be surprised to see regional and national networks forming, in due course.

I'm not part of any of those groups.  I'm a pastor and chaplain, and have my own perspective on what's happening - which does not involve violence unless in defense of my life, family and property.  However, some of those involved are former (and still trusted) colleagues, so I hear a few things from time to time.  I'm very worried by what I'm hearing.

After the Paris terrorist attacks in November 2015, I wrote:

I've seen war from the inside.  I've been under fire, and I've fired on others.  I've been wounded ... and I've inflicted my share of wounds.  I've picked up the dead, and the pieces of the dead.

Those aren't the worst aspects of violent conflict.  To me, the worst is what it does to the human psyche.  You become dehumanized.  Your enemies are no longer people - they're objects, things, targets.  You aren't shooting at John, whose mother is ill, and who's missing his girlfriend terribly, and who wants to marry her as soon as he can get home to do so.  You're shooting at that enemy over there, the one who'll surely 'do unto you' unless you 'do unto him' first.  He's not a human being.  He's a 'gook'.  He's 'the enemy'.  He's a thing rather than a person.  It's easier to shoot a thing than it is a person.

. . .

You no longer think of civilians as such.  They're in enemy territory, or known to be sympathetic to the enemy:  therefore, they're 'things', suspects, never to be trusted, never to be treated objectively or with anything other than the forced, mandatory legal definition of 'decency' imposed by your superiors . . . and even that becomes flexible when those superiors aren't around to monitor what you're doing.

. . .

That's the bitter fruit that extremism always produces.  It's done so throughout history.  There are innumerable examples of how enemies have become 'things'.  It's Crusaders versus Saracens, Cavaliers versus Roundheads, Yankees versus Rebels, doughboys versus Krauts . . . us versus them, for varying values of 'us' and 'them'.

. . .

And in the end, the bodies lying in the ruins, and the blood dripping onto our streets, and the weeping of those who've lost loved ones . . . they'll all be the same.  History is full of them.  When it comes to the crunch, there are no labels that can disguise human anguish.  People will suffer in every land, in every community, in every faith . . . and they'll turn to what they believe in to make sense of their suffering . . . and most of them will raise up the next generation to hate those whom they identify as the cause of their suffering . . . and the cycle will go on, for ever and ever, until the world ends.

We cannot 'kill them all and let God sort them out' ... There are too many of 'them' to kill them all, just as 'they' can never kill all of 'us' ... We cannot kill our way out of the dilemma of being human, with all the tragedy that entails.

May God have mercy on us all.

I fear greatly that unless the extremists on both sides come to their senses, those words may yet prove prophetic in these tragically dis-United States in which we live.

Peter

EDITED TO ADD:  It seems that yesterday evening, Tucker Carlson basically agreed with what I've said here about the threat from extremists.  See for yourself.

Quite so.

What will life be like without police? Ask Mexico. Ask Africa.

The Federalist points out that all those demanding the "defunding" or abolition of police forces might do well to consider the consequences, which are clearly visible in Mexico.

But let’s say these ultra-progressive municipal governments could get their wish and abolish the police in their cities entirely. What would happen? Inevitably, an armed group would emerge and impose a monopoly on the use of force.

If you want an idea of how that works, look to our southern neighbor, Mexico, where over the past decade endemically corrupt police departments in some areas have been supplanted by autodefensas, or local self-defense militias. But before you get too excited about the prospect of paramilitary autodefensas policing American cities, understand that in Mexico these groups are a mixed bag at best—and at worst they’re not much better than the corrupt local police and cartel gunmen they replaced. More importantly, their mere presence in Mexico was and is a disturbing sign of societal decay.

To understand why, a bit of background is needed. The modern autodefensas movement in Mexico arose during some of the most violent years of Mexico’s ongoing drug war. In 2013, a doctor from the cartel-ravaged state of Michoacán, José Manuel Mireles Valverde, organized one of the first self-defense militias to fight against the Knights Templar Cartel. He initially recruited ordinary men, shop keepers and farmers, to hunt down cartel henchmen and drive them out of their towns.

Initially, these ad-hoc militias met with some success, capturing or killing members of the Knights Templar, setting up roadblocks and ambushes, and expanding the number of militias operating throughout Michoacán. But as the violence in the region increased, the militias eventually caught the attention of the Mexican government, which deployed the military against both cartels and autodefensas ... By then, the line between autodefensas and cartels had begun to blur. The militias had been infiltrated by cartel members, including former members of the Knights Templar who knew the cartel was losing power.

. . .

... the autodefensas movement quickly went from being an organic uprising against a vicious cartel to a vigilante free-for-all ... As the government stepped in to control the autodefensas movement, it became increasingly clear that cartel members were joining self-defense militias, especially in Michoacán and neighboring Guerrero state. Sometimes it worked in the opposite direction. Lacking resources and weapons, self-defense militias would turn to drug cartels for financing, and would later be used by drug lords as proxy forces against their rivals.

Today, autodefensas remain active in parts of Mexico but they have largely melded into the ever-shifting patchwork of gangs, cartel off-shoots, and corrupt local police forces vying for power and territory. The fragmenting of Mexico’s criminal gangs and armed groups has helped fuel rising violence in recent years, with this year on track to break last year’s record for homicides. As far as violence and corruption go, things are worse in Mexico now than they were when Mireles formed the first autodefensa group.

That is to say, the rise of self-defense militias in Mexico, no less than the rise of cartels, is a direct result of the collapse of civil authority. Absent a functioning state, militias are no more accountable to the general public than a drug cartel—and no more capable of resisting corruption than the local or federal police.

There's more at the link.

That was pretty much my experience in large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, too.  As the authority of the state and/or local government waned during periods of anarchy and civil unrest, local gangs, tribes or other groups would take advantage of the "power vacuum" to seize control of their own areas.  They would levy "taxes" against the people to fund their operations (in reality, organized looting on an ongoing basis), and terrorize anyone who refused to pay, up to and including rape, torture and killing.  If the "ordinary people" organized to oppose them, the opposing force would rapidly become corrupted by precisely the same temptations that had attracted their oppressors.  Once entrenched, such local power players could only be dislodged by superior force - never by reasoning with them.  They were making too much money (by local standards) to be willing to give it up, and nobody else in that impoverished continent had enough money to offer them a bribe big enough to stop.

Another part of that problem was that many merchants and other vendors simply refused to deliver supplies to the region(s) concerned.  They became food deserts, with the only exception being foreign aid (mostly stolen by the groups in control, and sold in local markets) or subsistence agriculture.  I can tell you right now, if BLM or other groups take over local city suburbs, the big stores in and near them will simply close their doors, rather than be robbed on a daily basis.  That will lead to the activists (a.k.a. thugs and looters) trying to extend their activities into areas still well supplied, which will in turn provoke a violent reaction from those in the latter areas, trying to protect what they've got.  Since "the best form of defense is attack", to quote a well-known saying, they'll probably take the fight to the activists in their own areas, too.  In the absence of effective policing, who's going to stop either side?

That's your recipe for at least a localized civil war, right there.  Don't tell me it won't happen.  It will.  I've seen it before, far too many times for comfort.  It'll happen here, too, if we create conditions favorable for it.

Peter

What's next? Rainbow-farting unicorns to replace police?

I have no problem accepting that this country's law enforcement functions have overstepped the mark on many occasions.  I've written about some of them in these pages, as regular readers will know, and I support holding officers and agencies accountable when they cross the line.  It's also undeniable that American policing has often been about a one-sided enforcement of laws that were designed to benefit some parts of society, but not others.  As Matt Taibbi points out:

Basically we have two systems of enforcement in America, a minimalist one for people with political clout, and an intrusive one for everyone else. In the same way our army in Vietnam got in trouble when it started searching for ways to quantify the success of its occupation, choosing sociopathic metrics like “body counts” and “truck kills,” modern big-city policing has been corrupted by its lust for summonses, stops, and arrests. It’s made monsters where none needed to exist.

Because they’re constantly throwing those people against walls, writing them nuisance tickets, and violating their space with humiliating searches (New York in 2010 paid $33 million to a staggering 100,000 people strip-searched after misdemeanor charges), modern cops correctly perceive that they’re hated. As a result, many embrace a “warrior” ethos that teaches them to view themselves as under constant threat.

This is why you see so many knees on heads and necks, guns drawn on unarmed motorists, chokeholds by the thousand, and patterns of massive overkill everywhere ... Police are trained to behave like occupiers, which is why they increasingly dress like they’ve been sent to clear houses in Mosul and treat random motorists like potential car-bombers ... senior officers value police who make numbers more than they fear outrage from residents in their districts. The incentives in this system are wrong in every direction.

The current protests are likely to inspire politicians to think the other way, but it’s probably time to reconsider what we’re trying to accomplish with this kind of policing. In upscale white America drug use is effectively decriminalized, and Terry stops, strip searches, and “quality of life” arrests are unknowns. The country isn’t going to heal as long as everyone else gets a knee in the neck.

There's more at the link.

Despite Taibbi's undeniable points, anyone with even the most basic understanding of human nature and human interaction will realize that police are necessary.  There's a not insignificant proportion of humanity that prefers a criminal lifestyle, and lives it out of choice, not out of necessity.  No amount of wishful thinking will change that.  Therefore, current calls to abolish or de-fund police are beyond stupid.  They ignore reality.

If you're not convinced of that, try working for a few days inside one of America's prisons.  Deprived of their opportunity to prey on other citizens, what do the incarcerated criminals do?  They prey on each other, and on the officers tasked with keeping them behind bars.  There's a lot more crime inside prison walls than outside them, because when criminals are brought together in a small, concentrated space like that, they influence and exacerbate each others' worst tendencies.  You could call it a "pressure-cooker" environment.  I should know.  I spent years as a chaplain, both part-time and full-time, trying to help prison inmates.  I've written about it at some length.

In the process, I learned the hard way what works, and what doesn't.  I'm here to tell you that appeasement, kind words and wishful thinking don't help as long as those incarcerated aren't willing to change.

There's a group in Minneapolis calling themselves MPD 150.  They advocate for the replacement of that city's police force with what one could describe as "community self-policing".  See for yourself.  (Click the image for a larger view.)

Their agenda, their manifesto, is utterly ridiculous to anyone who has any real-world understanding and experience of criminals.  I quote:

The transition to a police-free Minneapolis will require immediate measures to limit the harm routinely inflicted by the police in their normal functioning and steps to address the underlying causes of distress. First responder responsibility and on-site authority in crisis situations, public spaces and schools will be transferred to parties prepared to interact sympathetically and respectfully with the people. Social service functions will be relocated in community-based settings. Military equipment will be sequestered. The police are tasked with enforcing austerity – the extraction of resources and resilience from communities for the benefit of the rich – and controlling people’s attempts to survive, resist or self-medicate under its impact. Dismantling the police will require reallocating their budget and assets to support real solutions to community desperation: good, well-paying jobs, affordable housing, healthy food, empowering education, accessible health care, removal of toxins, etc. Ending the brutal police system is, by necessity, a program for a more just and resilient city.

That's so daft as to be laughable, if it weren't so serious.

• "First responder responsibility and on-site authority in crisis situations, public spaces and schools will be transferred to parties prepared to interact sympathetically and respectfully with the people."  Oh, yeah?  You're a first responder, confronted with a couple of muggers armed with knives.  They want to get away with their loot.  Kindly explain how you're going to "interact sympathetically and respectfully" with them.  While you're telling us, I'll be selling tickets to watch your "interaction".  I reckon it'll be a smash hit (literally) on pay-per-view TV.
• "The police are tasked with enforcing austerity – the extraction of resources and resilience from communities for the benefit of the rich – and controlling people’s attempts to survive, resist or self-medicate under its impact."  Tell that to the average police officer and watch them fall over laughing.  "Extract resources and resilience"?  "Benefit the rich"?  No, not in the least.  They're there to stop criminals making themselves rich at your expense!  As for "self-medication" . . . great excuse for being a drug addict, isn't it?  And when you drive under the influence of those drugs, and kill someone in your zonked-out state, you should be treated with sympathy, instead of as the criminal you are . . . right?
• "real solutions to community desperation: good, well-paying jobs, affordable housing, healthy food, empowering education, accessible health care, removal of toxins, etc."  I seem to recall that Minneapolis, like most cities of its ilk, had a lot more of those when the city was governed by people who understood the reality of where money comes from.  It comes from businesses and individuals offering something to sell that people want to buy.  From those sales comes salaries and wages for employees, taxes for the city, state and country, and all the other means needed for a community to sustain and develop itself.  Take away those sales and all the economic activity that flows from them, and all you have left is wishful thinking.  That's not economically sustainable, no matter how much you might prefer otherwise.

I won't bother going into more examples.  These people have no idea about reality - or, rather, they've painted a mental picture of their own rainbows-and-unicorn-farts mental reality, and they're trying to superimpose it upon a physical reality that doesn't in any way match their delusions.  I'll leave you to read MPD 150's "10 Action Ideas for Building a Police-Free Future" for yourself - if you can stomach it.  It's not worth your time.

Yes, American law enforcement agencies are all too often flawed, with policies and procedures that frequently ignore Sir Robert Peel's fundamental principles for policing.  They were the foundation for British law enforcement in the 19th century, and I think offer a perspective that would deal with most of the problems we encounter today.  Sadly, even in Britain, their birthplace, they are today honored far more in the breach than in the observance.

The nine principles were as follows:

1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
2. To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
3. To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
4. To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
5. To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
6. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
7. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
8. To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary, of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
9. To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

I think we'd be far better advised to reintroduce and inculcate the Peelian Principles into American policing, rather than seek to abolish it.  Yes, that includes "demilitarizing" our police.  That should never have happened, and it remains a very serious problem.  Take away the weapons of war from law enforcement.  That's not their job.  If things are bad enough, criminally speaking, that they have to have them, then we don't need police to deal with them - we need the military.  The two functions are distinct from each other, with completely different mindsets and approaches, and should not overlap.  If they do, we end up with police who behave like armed occupiers rather than peace officers - and that will put us straight back into the mess we're in right now.

Peter

The demon of inflation has lost more of the chains holding it back

Demonocracy is known for its graphic illustrations of financial facts and figures that can be so large we simply can't grasp them.  It puts them into visual terms to which we can relate.  For example, here's $1 trillion in $100 bills, stacked up and arranged neatly together alongside objects with which we're familiar (a Boeing 747, an eighteen-wheeler, the White House, etc.) for scale.  Click the image for a larger view.

Demonocracy has used the same technique to visualize the current US stimulus package in response to the coronavirus pandemic.  It's frightening when you realize just how big it is - and understand that the whole thing is based on borrowings and "printed money", generated out of nowhere, with no economic reality to back it up.  Here it is in video form.  I recommend watching it in full-screen mode to get the full impact.

You can see the whole thing as a Web page at this link.  It's even more frightening like that than in a small video window.

Finally, remember that you and I - every single US taxpayer - is on the hook to repay that money, sooner or later.  I don't think that's economically or mathematically feasible, which leaves only two options.  Both may happen, separately or together.

1. The rate of inflation will be deliberately allowed to grow, rendering "current" dollars almost worthless in relation to "historical" dollars.  Old debts can then be repaid with new dollars, a much less painful process.  Unfortunately, that leads to hyperinflation.  Just look what happened to Weimar Germany when it tried to do exactly that to repay war reparations.
   
   
   
   
2. The US government will simply ignore fiscal reality and continue to borrow money to fund its expenditure.  This will see the deficit climb, and climb, and climb, until eventually no-one will buy US bonds or securities any more, because the "debt overhang" has become so great as to threaten the stability of the world's economic system.  At that point, the US government's ability to pay for all its programs will collapse - as will the US dollar as a world reserve currency, and the US economy as a whole.

As I said, the really scary prospect is that we may see both of those things happening simultaneously.  During the previous recession, the Federal Reserve ended up as the largest "buyer" of securities issued by the US Treasury, effectively printing money to pay for printed securities that weren't worth the paper they were printed on.  It's doing the same thing now, as international demand for US securities can't absorb the trillions of dollars required for the current pandemic stimulus package.  The Federal Reserve's balance sheet has grown astronomically over the past couple of months, and the growth shows no signs of slowing down.

There are those who argue that the current situation may lead to deflation, rather than inflation, due to asset prices taking a major hit.  In the short term, they may well be correct.  However, in the long term, the lesson of history is clear.  Dilute the currency in any way (adulterating precious metals with base, or printing money without any economic foundation to support it) and sooner or later, the chickens come home to roost.  Inflation is the inevitable result.

I think we're already seeing some of that affecting the consumer.  Have you noticed food prices lately?  I know they're attributed to market conditions, but I think they also reflect the underlying reality of inflationary pressure on the consumer.  I've demonstrated several times in the past that real consumer inflation, as measured by objective sources such as Shadowstats or the Chapwood Index, has been far higher than official figures.  As Miss D. and I do our shopping every week, we're seeing inflation even higher than that.  Some items' prices have increased by more than 25% since March!

What will dumping an extra few trillion dollars into the economy, money created out of nothing from nowhere, do to the rate of inflation over time?  I think we all know.

Peter

Strip away the civilized veneer, and human beings are still capable of anything

I'm obliged to American Partisan for posting a video of the rebellion and civil war in the Congo in 1964, when white mercenaries and Belgian paratroopers had to restore order across thousands of square miles of equatorial forest and bush.  The video is explicit:  you'll see bodies and parts of bodies, all of them real, and most of them casually discarded or even used as decorations by the fighting men.  That's what such absolute disregard for human life does to those who encounter it.  Eventually, it grinds you down.  You become numb, inured to it, no matter how deep your faith or developed your conscience.

I'm not going to embed the video here, because it's very graphic in its depiction of brutality and horror.  Nevertheless, if you want to see what Africa can be like at its worst, I recommend you watch it.  You'll find it at this link.  When you've done so (or if you'd rather not watch it, for which I don't blame you), read on below.

The thing is, nothing's changed in Africa.  Precisely that same brutality is going on right now in the east of the Congo.  The terrorist groups who oppose (and sometimes attack and kill) the medical teams trying to deal with Ebola?  They're the descendants of the same people who slaughtered so many thousands in the sixties.  It's not just the Congo, either.  The Rwanda genocide, the Burundi civil war, the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, the South Sudan civil war, the Sierra Leone conflict, the First and Second Liberian civil wars, the Rhodesian conflict, South Africa under apartheid . . . the list goes on and on.  Nor is it just Africa.  The Killing Fields of Cambodia, the East Timor genocide, the Nicaraguan Revolution, the Salvadoran Civil War . . . need I name more?  For another example of this sort of casual brutality in action, see the documentary "Cry Freetown" about the civil war in Sierra Leone.  You'll find it at this link.  The same warning applies to that video as to the earlier one - it's brutal.

This is the reality of more primitive societies when the thin veneer of civilization is removed from them.  Decades of colonial rule, followed by independence and decades of alleged "education" and "development", have not changed that basic reality.  I know.  I've been in many of those countries, and seen that at first hand for myself.  Nor is it only allegedly "primitive" societies.  Our First World nations are just as vulnerable to such savagery.  Consider the Holocaust, or the lynching of black people during the civil rights struggle in the American South.  It's just that we (usually, but not always) take longer to strip away our slightly thicker veneer of civilization.

Many people in the First World today have become so insulated from this sort of reality that they literally can't conceive of it.  Yet . . . it's not very far from us.  Consider cartel violence in Mexico, or the worst of the crime-ridden inner-city ghettoes in the United States.  Precisely the same savagery is evident there.  It's almost indescribable to a Western audience, because their educated, civilized minds just can't wrap themselves around such things.  Yet . . . it's true.

We may degenerate more slowly than others, revert to savagery more gradually than others:  but in all of us, civilization is only so deep.  Pushed far enough, some - too many - of us really are capable of reverting to the most primitive savagery.  I hate to acknowledge that, and I don't want to believe it, but I've seen too much to doubt it.

Peter

"A Band-Aid on a chest wound"

That's how the Guardian describes the rush by illegal immigrants to get in line for California's handout of taxpayer dollars to them.

Last month, California made headlines when it announced a first-in-the-nation plan to create a $125m coronavirus relief fund for undocumented workers. But its rollout got off to a chaotic start this week, with thousands of calls flooding phone lines, creating huge delays, and so many visitors to the official website that it crashed for hours.

Adding to already overwhelmed telephone systems, the state issued last-minute directives that said callers needed to reach a live person in order to apply for aid.

Nonprofits across the state selected to distribute the money reported huge demand as people rushed to secure a spot for the first-come, first-served program.

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, or Chirla, one of 12 nonprofits tapped by the state to distribute the funds, received more than 1.1m phone calls on day one of the program – 630,000 calls just within the first 90 minutes of opening the hotline.

“We knew the number of applicants would be high, but we were just overwhelmed,” Chirla’s executive director told the New York Times.

Lucas Zucker, the policy and communications director for a nonprofit north-west of Los Angeles that advocates for social and environmental justice, wrote on Twitter that the program’s rocky rollout was predictable.

“Websites and phone lines across the state crashed. Our team saw so much frustration, anger and sadness from folks just trying to feed their kids. The need here is way too large to be met with a one-time disaster relief fund. We’re putting a Band-Aid on an open chest wound,” wrote Zucker.

. . .

Undocumented immigrants make up an estimated 10% of the state’s workforce ... [there are an] estimated 2 million undocumented immigrants living in California.

There's more at the link.

Note the last paragraph cited above.  I daresay the sheer volume of calls demanding a share of that money gives the lie to the 2 million estimate.  (My law enforcement contacts in California privately estimate the number of illegal aliens there to be at least 5 million, possibly more.  They base that on their experience of traffic stops, criminal investigations, and so on.  I believe them.)

Of course, the state of California should not be rewarding illegal aliens for their presence with taxpayer dollars.  That's flatly insane, and can do nothing except encourage further illegal entry (which is probably the point, given the nature and policies of that state's government).  However, this stampede for assistance highlights the economic plight of the marginally employed.  We've already seen that many are apparently returning to Mexico under the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.  They have no jobs there, and Mexico has few (if any) social assistance or entitlement programs to help them.  Those who remain in this country aren't eligible for the federal government's assistance or stimulus package, yet are also at risk of losing their jobs not just temporarily, but in the long term, as the economy contracts.  To say that they're becoming desperate is to put it mildly.

What does this forbode for social stability?  I don't think it's anything good.  I expect demonstrations, even riots, in California as the illegals demand more sustenance to which they're not legally entitled (at least, not under federal law).  I expect California's government to cave in to their demands, and expend more taxpayer funds on them.  That, in turn, will arouse resentment and anger among taxpayers, who see their money being wasted on those who have no right to it.  I don't think that's going to end well.

Will this have an impact on the November 2020 elections in that state?  Is the special election there earlier this month an early "canary in a coal mine" for a sea change in California politics?  Who knows?  We can but hope . . .

Peter

The coronavirus may damage nature for years to come

Having worked in the Third World (specifically sub-Saharan Africa) for many years, I've been expecting an uptick in human predation on the environment, due to many people being thrown out of work by the coronavirus pandemic and becoming desperate to survive.  It looks like that's already happening worldwide.  The BBC reports:

You might be forgiven for thinking that the global lockdown measures keeping us all at home can only have been good for the environment ... But in the world’s tropical forest regions, it’s another story. Environmental agencies have reported an uptick in deforestation during lockdowns, as well as increases in poaching, animal trafficking and illegal mining worldwide. The trends are alarming, environmental experts say, and could be hard to reverse.

“This narrative of nature having been given a break during Covid, it’s not entirely accurate. It’s accurate in cities and peri-urban areas,” says Sebastian Troeng, executive vice-president of Conservation International. “But unfortunately in the rural areas, the situation is almost the inverse.”

. . .

Brazil and Colombia have seen an uptick in illegal logging and mining; the Philippines has also reported illegal logging and wildlife trafficking; Kenya has reported increased bushmeat and ivory poaching, as well as increases in charcoal production, which has been illegal since 2018; Cambodia has seen an increase in poaching, illegal logging and mining; and similar reports have come from Venezuela and Madagascar.
Concerns have also been raised in Malaysia and Indonesia, which have the highest deforestation rates in South-east Asia, while in Ecuador, indigenous and afro-descendent communities have reported increased illegal mining in the Choco and Amazon rainforests.

There are two main factors that could be driving these trends, says Troeng. The first is criminal groups and opportunists expanding their activities, taking advantage of lockdown and diminished forest monitoring and government presence. The second is that people living in these rural areas are facing increased economic pressures and are forced to rely more heavily on nature for food and income. In some cases, such as Madagascar and Cambodia, there has been a large urban-rural migration as people lose their jobs in the cities or return home to be with their families during quarantine, which has put extra pressure on local environments.

“What worries me is that we’re seeing these emerging trends, and they’re not going to be reversed when Covid measures are lifted because they’re related to economic factors. So my anticipation is that we’re going to have to deal with this for potentially months and years,” says Troeng.

There's more at the link.

In my old African stamping-grounds, this is particularly evident.  When so many people are surviving on the ragged edge of starvation, any added burden like the coronavirus pandemic will drive those barely "making it", now deprived of what little opportunity they had, to turn to anything available - even if that means destroying nature around them.  It's that, or die, as far as they're concerned.  The BBC again:

It isn't just for food or money, either.  Animals that compete with humans for scarce resources will be regarded as a threat, and eliminated on the simple basis of economic competition.  Headlines from Botswana this week bear that out.

Wildlife authorities in Botswana, the country with the world’s biggest elephant population, are seeking an explanation for the death of 56 of the animals in the north west of the country.

Over the past week 12 carcasses were found, adding to the 44 found in a week in March, the environment ministry said in a statement on Tuesday. Tusks hadn’t been removed from the elephants, indicating that they were not the victims of poachers, the department said.

. . .

Elephants have become a political issue in the southern African nation with President Mokgweetsi Masisi last year lifting a hunting ban and saying more needed to be done to stop the 135,000 elephants in the country from damaging crops and occasionally trampling villagers.

Again, more at the link.  Bold, underlined text is my emphasis.

I know that part of the world.  The only income - I repeat, the only income - in the area comes from tourism to the Okavango Delta, one of the greatest game reserves in the world.  It's an almost unbelievably beautiful place, one that I hope to visit again before I die . . . but the people living there must compete with wildlife to survive.  As long as they derive income from tourists, that's not a problem.  Take away the tourists (as has happened over the past couple of months), and it's a different story.  I'm willing to bet that those 56 elephants were probably poisoned, just as poachers in Zimbabwe have used cyanide to poison elephants in nature reserves and steal their tusks.  If it's a question of "we eat our crops, or the elephants eat our crops", the elephants will go to the wall.

Ecological and environmental sensitivity is basically a rich person's prerogative.  Those living on the margins are just trying to stay alive, and they'll do whatever it takes - even if that means destroying the world they live in.  As far as they're concerned, they're living for today.  Tomorrow?  If they live long enough to see tomorrow, they'll worry about it then.

That's already been a death sentence for ecologically sensitive areas and endangered animal (and human) populations all over the world.  It's likely to get worse, more's the pity, because the richer First World is preoccupied right now with economic survival and regrowth.  It doesn't have money to spare to help with Third World problems.

Peter

Asking the unthinkable question

The wholesale erosion - or even flat-out denial - of our civil liberties and constitutional rights during the coronavirus lockdown has (not for the first time) raised vitally important questions.

• To what extent should we allow our government to do this?
• To what extent should we be prepared to acquiesce, to knuckle under, before we take a stand and say, "This far and no further!"?
• How should we resist when the intrusion into our rights becomes too great to bear?  Must we restrict ourselves to fights in the courts, which may well result in a verdict proving us right, but in the meantime - until that verdict is issued - will result in our having to endure those intrusions?  Or are we entitled to take physical, dynamic measures to resist oppression?

Let's set the scene first.  Carol Brown lays it out.

We have become part of a mass scale human experiment in government control and it turned out that stripping away our freedom wasn’t all that difficult. Under the guise of concern for our health and well-being, tyrants came out of the woodwork.  Our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, and our lives are being destroyed as the left solidifies and expands their oppressive powers. We’ve been herded around like cattle, threatened, isolated, confined, silenced, and arrested. You name it, it’s happening.

. . .

We’ve been told who can work and who can’t ... We’ve been physically and verbally harassed, threatened, fined, detained, arrested, jailed, and/or placed in forced quarantine ... Stay home. Do not go out. Do not earn money. Do not pay your bills, feed your family, maintain your credit rating, live your life. Do not make a single move without permission from the State or you will be punished.

Do not dare go to church. They have been shut down, some threatened with permanent closure. Even services that maintained social distancing were not tolerated ... Religion cannot thrive in a totalitarian state, as the state must reign supreme.

. . .

In several places, our right to protest has been stripped away as has our right to promote protests ... The Bill of Rights has been set on fire and tossed off the top of a skyscraper as a police state rushes in ... The government will hunt you down, find you, and force you and other members of your household to stay in your home, even if there’s no food in the house. The quarantine cycle could leave an entire household locked up for weeks and weeks on end, with no end in sight as we are essentially placed under house arrest. Strategies for how to identify people who’ve met certain criteria have been discussed, including government issued armbands.

. . .

And while the lust for power underpins this shocking spectacle, it’s wrapped up in the guise of “safety.” Who could possibly question a doctor in a white coat touting such an idea? No good totalitarian regime would be without its idealized worldview to sell fools down the river.

And so we’ve sailed, as our economy has collapsed, Americans have been controlled, law enforcement has complied, and people are bombarded with fearful messages every hour of every day – messages riddled with distorted information and lies, from bogus models to inflated mortality rates and everything in between ... When nations go to war, they do so to defend their culture and way of life. Instead, we are destroying ours.

. . .

So far, the police state has been a wild success.

There's more at the link.

If you want a classic example of the above, just look at Illinois Governor Pritzker's latest insanity.  He's going to make criminals out of anyone and everyone who dares disobey his dictatorial edicts.  Will the people of Illinois stand for it?  If they do, they've strayed far from the path our Founding Fathers laid out for us . . .

There have been some - pitifully few - law enforcement officers and agencies who have taken a stand, and refused to participate in this mandated assault on our constitutional rights and civil liberties.  However, the statists simply don't care about this.  They go right on riding roughshod over the "little people" they despise, even as they rule them.  Witness how the Virginia governor and legislature have ignored (and openly expressed contempt for) the more than 90% of Virginia counties who have opposed their drive to restrict gun rights.  Despite many counties declaring themselves "Second Amendment sanctuaries", despite thousands of gun owners demonstrating at the Virginia capitol, the powers that be went ahead and passed most of their anti-gun agenda into law.  The balance is likely to follow before long.  They were completely unfazed by the opposition;  in fact, their determination was probably strengthened by it.  "We'll show these deplorables who's boss!" appears to sum up their attitude.

What's more, our acquiescence in such administrative, executive and legislative overreach appears to be evidence that they can get away with it.  Apart from a few demonstrations, where has been the public outrage?  Where has been the mass civil disobedience that such overreach should call forth?  Where has been our signers of a modern Declaration of Independence who will pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honors to stopping such overreach, no matter what the cost?  All those things have been conspicuous by their absence.  No wonder the statists are emboldened!

The news media and social media are, of course, solidly behind the statists.  Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are actively censoring any views that oppose the mainstream, no matter how expert or authoritative the person espousing those views may be.  Dissenters are de-platformed, de-monetized, denigrated and denied the ability to propagate their views.  If those views are too well grounded in fact to be contradicted, they're simply ignored, as if not talking about them will somehow magically make them go away.

It's no coincidence that most of these offenses against our rights and liberties have occurred in left-leaning states and cities.  Matt Taibbi, no conservative, explains why.

Democrats have lately positioned themselves as more aggressive promoters of strong-arm policies, from control of Internet speech to the embrace of domestic spying ... Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for abandoning constitutional principles ... In the process, they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent. Blue-staters have gone from dismissing constitutional concerns as Trumpian ruse to sneering at them, in the manner of French aristocrats, as evidence of proletarian mental defect.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest of lockdown measures is troglodyte death wish. The aftereffects of years of Russiagate/Trump coverage are seen everywhere: press outlets reflexively associate complaints of government overreach with Trump, treason, and racism, and conversely radiate a creepily gleeful tone when describing aggressive emergency measures and the problems some “dumb” Americans have had accepting them.

Again, more at the link.

Sadly, many applications to the courts to overturn executive overreach have been delayed, tied up in legal red tape, or even denied by activist judges who are entirely in sympathy with statism versus constitutionalism.  A shining exception is Texas Supreme Court associate Justice Jimmy Blacklock.  In a recent decision, he stated flatly and emphatically for the majority:

“The Constitution is not suspended when the government declares a state of disaster.” In re Abbott, No. 20-0291, 2020 WL 1943226, at *1 (Tex. Apr. 23, 2020). All government power in this country, no matter how well-intentioned, derives only from the state and federal constitutions. Government power cannot be exercised in conflict with these constitutions, even in a pandemic.

In the weeks since American governments began taking emergency measures in response to the coronavirus, the sovereign people of this country have graciously and peacefully endured a suspension of their civil liberties without precedent in our nation’s history. In some parts of the country, churches have been closed by government decree, although Texas is a welcome exception. Nearly everywhere, the First Amendment “right of the people to peaceably assemble” has been suspended altogether. U.S. Const. amend. I. In many places, people are forbidden to leave their homes without a government-approved reason. Tens of millions can no longer earn a living because the government has declared their employers or their businesses “ ‘non-essential.’ ”

Those who object to these restrictions should remember they were imposed by duly elected officials, vested by statute with broad emergency powers, who must make difficult decisions under difficult circumstances. At the same time, all of us—the judiciary, the other branches of government, and our fellow citizens—must insist that every action our governments take complies with the Constitution, especially now. If we tolerate unconstitutional government orders during an emergency, whether out of expediency or fear, we abandon the Constitution at the moment we need it most.

Any government that has made the grave decision to suspend the liberties of a free people during a health emergency should welcome the opportunity to demonstrate—both to its citizens and to the courts—that its chosen measures are absolutely necessary to combat a threat of overwhelming severity. The government should also be expected to demonstrate that less restrictive measures cannot adequately address the threat. Whether it is strict scrutiny or some other rigorous form of review, courts must identify and apply a legal standard by which to judge the constitutional validity of the government’s anti-virus actions. When the present crisis began, perhaps not enough was known about the virus to second-guess the worst-case projections motivating the lockdowns. As more becomes known about the threat and about the less restrictive, more targeted ways to respond to it, continued burdens on constitutional liberties may not survive judicial scrutiny.

Ideally, these debates would play out in the public square, not in courtrooms. No court should relish being asked to question the judgment of government officials who were elected to make difficult decisions in times such as these. However, when constitutional rights are at stake, courts cannot automatically defer to the judgments of other branches of government. When properly called upon, the judicial branch must not shrink from its duty to require the government’s antivirus orders to comply with the Constitution and the law, no matter the circumstances.

More at the link.

I, for one, am not prepared to see the Constitution ignored or abandoned.  I swore an oath to support and defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and that oath had (and still has) no expiration date.  By that logic (and it is logical), those who ignore or trash the Constitution in their statist decrees and dictates are its enemies.  That means it's incumbent on me not to merely tolerate, temporarily, their excesses and overreach until courts can rule on the subject - particularly when we can't be sure the courts will rule as the Constitution requires.  Instead of tolerating, I need to take action.  The question is . . . what action?  To take up arms against, and violently resist, the duly and Constitutionally elected government and its officials - whether local, state or national - is by definition a criminal act.  However, it's well in line with the Declaration of Independence, which preceded the Constitution and precipitated the American Revolution.  That's a dynamic tension which may have to be resolved before too long.

I blame a great deal of the inaction of the American people on the abolition of civics education in American schools and colleges.  Even the Atlantic, a very left-wing, progressive source indeed, observed in 2016:

While there surely are many varied causes for the current American political situation, one among those is the relative ignorance of basic American history, scientific, technological knowledge, and what some refer to as “civics” among a large sector of our population. It is testimony to the failure of the country’s education system that a high percentage of the voting-age population is simply ignorant of basic facts—knowledge that is necessary to act reasonably and rationally in the political process.

. . .

James Madison put the current dilemma clearly in focus almost 200 years ago, when he wrote in an 1822 letter to W. T. Barry: “A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” The American people are not doing this today, and the results are evident in the cracks appearing in the country’s democracy.

More at the link. Bold, underlined text is my emphasis.

The problem, of course, is that statist administrations don't want people educated in civics.  Their poisonous intrusion into and effective trashing of Constitutional rights couldn't be done if the electorate were more aware of the limitations on their power.  Remove that awareness, and overreach becomes much easier.

So . . . what do we do?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

God forbid that a new civil war should be brewing . . . but I have a feeling in my water that one may be on the horizon.  I will not be ruled as a slave, licking the feet of dictatorial statist masters.  I will not allow my Constitutional rights and liberties to be ignored, trampled or taken away.  That's my bottom line;  and I'm old enough, and have little enough to lose, that I'm willing to insist on it, no matter what the cost.

What's your bottom line?  And how far are you prepared to go to insist on it?

This would be a good start . . . but I don't think it goes far enough.

The 2020 elections in November aren't far away.  Will the American electorate vote for statism, or freedom?  Subjection, or liberty?  We're about to find out.

Peter