Category: Pat’s Opinions

Once again, shots ring out, people fall, bleeding, injured, dying. Once again a lone gunman, or a group of persons acting in concert, rain destruction and death on innocents who have neither the passion or the interest to be involved in the war brought to them by the evil-doer. Once again, in the aftermath we hear the same questions; “Why would he/she do such a thing?” or; “We had no idea, we never saw this coming.” or; “He was just a regular guy that snapped.”

Once again we will see a human tragedy exploited by opposing political talking heads; “It’s those right-wing Nazi gun nuts.”; “It’s those commie-pinkos trying to destroy our way of life”; “It’s the radical Islamo-Facists who hate our democracy.” ad infinitum.

Once again we will see postings on Facebook and the ever present memes; “Pray for Las Vegas”; “Pray for the families and the victims”; …and all the rest, for about two or three days and then it will be back to normal arguing over the political opinions of grown men making millions of dollars playing a child’s game or the societal philosophies of play actor or singers who, for some strange reason, invests these modern day court jesters with what the peasants see as gravitas to where their utterances on subjects of which they have no knowledge take on the weight of pronouncements from the Delphian Oracle. And, once again the questions are asked; “Why does this keep happening and what can be done to stop it?”

Scholars look to the ancient Greeks as a model for a righteous and orderly society, (I have lost count of the times I have heard political pundits decry the loss of “regular order” in the way our Federal legislators do business today). Yet, as with many things, some Greeks got it right and some didn’t.

The Greeks invented rational analysis of modes of government that we now call political science. Herodotus travelled the ancient world to learn what he could about local life and to gain personal testimonies from eyewitnesses of the Persian War. He is called the father of history but could also rightfully be called the father of geography and the father of what we now call ethnic studies.

The Greeks began man’s quest to discover the unseen unity and order underlying the seeming chaos presented by physical nature. When they turned their attention to man and the “good” man longs to possess, they invented philosophy and all it’s branches; linguistic; moral; political. They asked, (and attempted to answer), the questions; “How can passions be governed by reason?” “Should they always be?”; “What is the relationship between authority and goodness?”; “Can the old traditions be violated at will?”; “Is there a law to which even the gods must submit?”; “Is there such a thing as progress or moral evolution, and, if so, where is it going?”; “What, if anything remains changeless?”

Aristotle said; “Man is a political animal.” He didn’t mean; “Man loves to meddle in the affairs of others,” but “Man, by his nature best thrives in a “polis”, (a small, self-governing city-state, whose citizens would know one another by sight or by family reputation and would take an active and regular part in the city’s direction. Anything else, posits Aristotle, is barbarian and to be pitied. It could mean suffering rule by imperial bureaucrats sent from a capital far away, or immersion is a state so large that almost no one is intimately involved in governing.

It means a life like those of the Cyclops described in Homer’s Odyssey:
“Nor do they meet in council, those Cyclops,
Nor hand down laws; they live on mountaintops, in deep caves; each one rules his wife and children, And every family ignores it’s neighbors.”

Life in this mode cramps both intellectual and practical virtue. For all practical purposes this characterizes our current life in the technocratic welfare states of contemporary America and most of western Europe.

Why did Athens fall? “Man is the measure of all things,” said the sophist Protagoras, preaching a moral relativism that even today many find hard to ignore. It is easy to see why; it flatters people and gives them leave to choose to obey what laws they please, support what wars they please, pay homage to what idols they please. Tradition helps to bind us to our duty but relativism brushes tradition and duty aside. If I am the one who chooses what is “good” or “bad”, then I call the things I like or afford me pleasure “good”, (like voting myself money from the public till or “hooking up” with as many partners as I possibly can) – and call things “bad” that which is approved by people who disagree with my opinions.

The result is not tolerance but alienation. Somebody has to prevail and in our day it is the policymaking elites. They will tell us that an unmarried woman with a child is equivalently moral as a family or a man attracted sexually to other men is qualified to be and should be a leader of young male youth. If we try to tell them that they are “wrong” they will scoff and hurl their relativism back into our face with; “Wrong? There is no such thing as wrong,” they smirk, “and if there is we will be the first to let you know.”

What happened to Athens has, in great measure, happened to the west and particularly to the United States. Pride and stupidity explain much but rapacity and moral relativism explains much more. We have been indoctrinated through our institutes of learning that there is no such thing as objectively “good” or “bad”. We are taught that the “wisdom” of the past is mere social convention which grows obsolete with each setting sun. We are told in movies, on TV and, in some instances from the pulpit that it is no hard-won victory for a people and deserves no reverence. “Right”, “morals”, religion”, traditions are all, old-fashioned, obsolete, passé’ and should be consigned to the garbage dump of history.

Yet “wisdom”, “right”, “morals”, “religion” and “tradition” are the distilled experience of our ancestors. They are a result of generations of men and women coming to terms with the universal laws that govern our existence. The deep order of things give us useful boundaries and protect us from the nonsense that “right” is whatever a majority of people may wish it to be.

We have been given free will and choice, and we have the ability to ignore and degrade the natural law. But just as gravity is there and operates in spite of whether or not you believe in it, natural law still operates. We can choose to obey the natural law or face destruction. We have turned away from the old ways and the old truths and have become worldly. We are worldly because we scorn the truth in favor of what will win political contests or popularity contests. But, in our worldliness we are impractical because the truth is the truth, whether we like it, or honor it, or obey it or not.

Rife throughout forum posts, twitter blather and Facebook entries are several expressions that have become used so much they’ve lost their meaning to the bedraggled masses – if the mob understood these meaning in the first place – and have become what is known as logic-terminating clichés/tropes.

Some examples are:

“this is so Orwellian”, or “history is repeating itself”, and “it’s all bread and circuses”.

There are many more, but for this thread we’re going to look at the last one, its historical and cultural significance, and how it applies to civilization and history. To extract most benefit from the thread, it’s recommended to keep aloof from personal biases and look at our own nations as if from the point of a future historian, studying the past.

For the purposes of this post, general entertainment will be included with bread nd circuses

“Bread and Circuses”, Latin, Panem et Circenses, has been misquoted and misunderstood in the modern era, thanks in large part to the corrosive influence of Hollywood, and earlier due to spread of Jacobean, predominantly Revolutionary French, writers and painters, who frequently cherry picked Roman culture and history to suit their ends of portraying Western Civilization as in a constant state of rot. Some ahistorical cinema examples being to the effect of; “He’ll give the people bread and circuses, and he’ll love them for it.”

More recently, the teen girl’s author Suzan Collins, in a frenzy of unoriginality, has vivisected whole swaths of Roman history for her Hunger Games series, even being so droll as to label that world’s evil capitol as ‘Panem’.

So, the implication is that of a ruler, normally depicted as a tyrant, placating the unruly, dissatisfied citizenry with free food and sports events to distract them from their daily woes.

There’s a pressing irony here, because this is exactly what Hollywood does.

But let’s take a closer look at bread, sports, entertainment and how these things can be used to chart with fair accuracy where a civilization is, and where it’s headed.

“Panem et circenses” is first attributed to the Roman poet and satirist, Decimus Junius Juvenalis (Juvenal), who lived during the 1st century AD, though the exact dates are disputed.

It’s important to understand that by this time the Roman Republic was long gone, however its legacy and the benefits of its achievement still remained. We’ll need to revisit pre-imperial Rome to understand bread and circuses more clearly, but for now, here is Juvenal’s direct quote, taken from his Tenth Satire:

iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses

Those who read Latin can fully appreciate Juvenal’s genius at placement and turn of phrase. The English:

“Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”

For once Wikipedia is very accurate in describing Juvenal’s intent, and how it fits within the context of his civilization at the time, and here we see some of the term’s deeper meaning:

” identifies the only remaining cares of a Roman populace which no longer cares for its historical birthright of political involvement. Here Juvenal displays his contempt for the declining heroism of contemporary Romans, using a range of different themes including lust for power and desire for old age to illustrate his argument”

In other words, the issue was not merely a matter of ‘football and EBT cards’ for the mob, but that ethnic Romans themselves had become so dissolute, so nihilistic and so removed from legitimate political interest concurrent and part in parcel with political power using food and entertainment to control them.

Commendably, Wikipedia references the origin of the ‘Panem’ part, ie, free food, known the modern colloquial as ‘the grain dole’ and in Rome as the Annonia.

Now, here’s the important part for our purposes of examining this from a civilizational perspective: The Annonia was passed several hundred years before, by one of Rome’s earliest and most famous ‘social justice warriors’, Gaius Gracchus in 123 BC.

So, it’s to early Republican Rome that we must journey in the thread’s next post, to examine what both the Romans -and the modern West- were, are and will be.

When Yugoslavia began separating into ethnic republics it started out peacefully, (Slovenia) and then degenerated into violence, (Croatia, Bosnia and Herzogoveina). There were atrocities based on traditional animosities on all sides: Serb; Croat and Muslim.

As President, Bill Clinton orchestrated the ill-advised and unenforceable Dayton accords which has resulted in;

1)an apparent permanent American Military presence,

2)a war cost that amounted to over $15 billion before Clinton left office,

3) By siding with the Muslims against the Serbs, the United States fanned the fires of Islamist extremists, something even Clinton’s chief peace negotiator Richard Holbrook characterized as “a pact with the devil”.

Clinton orchestrated a bombing campaign against the Serbs from March through June 1999 without the consent of Congress. The House of Representatives voted against authorizing Clinton’s bombing of the Serbs, a direct violation of the Constitution.

To support this unconstitutional action, the Clinton administration suggested that as many as 225,000 Albanian Muslims went missing or were murdered. A later study by a Spanish investigator sent to uncover evidence of Serbian atrocities reported that we found not one mass grave.” He added; ” The final figure of dead in Kosovo will be 2,500 at most which will include many deaths that cannot be attributed to anyone in particular.” All this in an area that held no vital interests of the United States in jeopardy.

The war against the Serbs was not the first time that Clinton used US air power. On August 20, 1998 he personally ordered the bombing of the El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries Company  in Sudan, claiming that the factory produced nerve gas and was funded by Osama Bin Ladin. Clinton claimed that the bombing was in retaliation for the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. All claims of illicit manufacture were subsequently found to be false and the factory actually was used to produce veterinary products and OTC medicines, mostly aspirin. There also was no evidence of a connection to Bin Laden.

This bombing makes no sense until you realize that August 20, 1998 was the date that White House intern Monica Lewinsky was to testify before a Grand Jury and that Clinton made his non-apology apology speech to the American people later that week, (when we found out how to parse what the meaning of the word “is” is.)

Obviously, this was back at a time when the resident of the White House was little concerned when someone “took a knee”.

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
— Henry Ford
“Give me control of a Nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes its laws.”
— M. A. Rothschild
The first MAJOR MYTH, accepted by most people in and outside of the United States, is that the Fed is owned by the Federal government, as implied by its name: the Federal Reserve Bank. In reality, however, it is a private institution whose shareholders are commercial banks; it is the “bankers’ bank.” Like other corporations, it is guided by and committed to the interests of its shareholders
In October of 1907 several banking firms, starting with the Knickerbocker Trust Company of New York, collapsed as depositors withdrew funds for fear of unwise investments and misuse of money. Lines of people waited in front of the Knickerbocker to close their accounts. Days later, the Trust Company of America had droves of depositors removing their money. Then, shortly thereafter, a run took place at the Lincoln Trust Company. Across the country apprehension that the panic would continue to spread occurred. In the fall of 1907 the United States was in a recession, it’s banking system lacked a lender of last resort mechanism, and an intricate network of directorships, loans, and collateral bonded the fate of many financial institutions together.
Several banking leaders including Jekyll Island Club members George F. Baker, president of the First National Bank, and James Stillman, president of National City Bank, met with financier J. Pierpont Morgan and began examining the assets of the troubled institutions. A decision was made to offer loans to any of the banks that were solvent. The secretary of the treasury George B. Cortelyou was eager to divert the situation and offered the New York bankers use of government funds to help prevent an economic disaster. President Theodore Roosevelt, while the panic of 1907 transpired, was on a hunting trip in Louisiana.
In the following days, acting like a one-man Federal Reserve system, J. Pierpont Morgan decided which firms would fail and which survive. Through a non stop flurry of meetings, he organized rescues of banks and trust companies, averted a shutdown of the New York Stock Exchange, and engineered a financial bailout of New York City.” In the end, the panic was blocked and several young bankers including Henry P. Davison and Benjamin Strong Jr. were recognized for their work organizing personnel and determining the liquidity of the banks involved in the crises. In 1908 J. Pierpont Morgan asked Henry P. Davison to become a partner in his firm J. P. Morgan & Co. and in 1914 Benjamin Strong Jr. was selected to be the first president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Soon after the 1907 panic, Congress formed the National Monetary Commission to review banking policies in the United States. The committee, chaired by Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island, toured Europe and collected data on the various banking methods being incorporated. Using this information as a base, in November of 1910 Senator Aldrich invited several bankers and economic scholars to attend a conference on Jekyll Island. While meeting under the ruse of a duck-shooting excursion, the financial experts were in reality hunting for a way to restructure America’s banking system and eliminate the possibility of future economic panics.
The 1910 “duck hunt” on Jekyll Island included Senator Nelson Aldrich, his personal secretary Arthur Shelton, former Harvard University professor of economics Dr. A. Piatt Andrew, J.P. Morgan & Co. partner Henry P. Davison, National City Bank president Frank A. Vanderlip and Kuhn, Loeb, and Co. partner Paul M. Warburg. From the start the group proceeded covertly.
The choice of the word “Federal” in the name of the bank thus seems to be a deliberate misnomer—designed to create the impression that it is a public entity. Indeed, misrepresentation of its ownership is not merely by implication or impression created by its name. More importantly, it is also officially and explicitly stated on its Website: “The Federal Reserve System fulfills its public mission as an independent entity within government.
Not long before the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913, President William Taft (1909-1913) pledged to veto any legislation that included the formation of a private central bank.
Soon after Woodrow Wilson replaced William Taft as president, however, the Federal Reserve Bank was founded (December 23, 1913), thereby centralizing the power of U.S. banks into a privately owned entity that controlled interest rate, money supply, credit creation, inflation, and (in roundabout ways) employment. It could also lend money to the government and earn interest, or a fee—money that the government could create free of charge. This ushered in the beginning of the gradual rise of national debt, as the government relied more on borrowing from banks than self-financing, as it had done prior to granting the power of money-creation to the private banking system.
The late Congressman Louis McFadden, Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee in the 1930s, described the Fed in the following words:
“Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lenders.”
The fact that the Fed is committed, first and foremost, to the interests of its shareholders, the commercial banks, explains why its monetary policies are increasingly catered to the benefits of the banking industry and, more generally, the financial oligarchy. Extensive deregulations that led to the 2008 financial crisis, the bank bailouts in response to the crisis, the continued showering of the “too-big-to-fail” financial institutions with interest-free money, the failure to impose effective restraints on these institutions after the crisis, the cuts in social safety net programs in order to pay for the gambling losses of high finance, and other similarly austerity policies—can all be traced to the political and economic power of the financial oligarchy, exerted largely through monetary policies of the Fed.
So, in the final analysis, the money supply, government debt, credit creation, inflation and to a large degree employment is controlled by the member banks of the privately held Federal Reserve Bank. But the question remains, “Who controls the member banks?”
Interesting question, is it not?

 

In his State of the Union address on Wednesday, January 8, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “War on Poverty” as a part of his “Great Society”.

Johnson believed in expanding the federal government’s roles in education and health care as poverty reduction strategies. Johnson stated “Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it”. He believed that all it would take was the right government programs, and, (of course), a massive amount of Federal dollars).

The speech led the United States Congress to pass the Economic Opportunity Act, which established the Office of Economic Opportunity, (OEO) to administer the local application of federal funds targeted against poverty. It remains in the continued existence of such federal programs as Head Start, Volunteers in Service to America, (VISTA), TRiO (education programs) , and Job Corps.

These programs were a staggering and enormously overwhelming failure. From 1950 through 1968 the poverty rate had steadily fallen by around 1 percentage point per year. In the years following the Federal “War on Poverty” the rate has stagnated. After the expenditure of over seven trillion dollars there is little, if any progress to be realized other than a removal of vast sums of tax dollars from the American economy.

One of Johnson’s programs established the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 which provided millions of Federal dollars for the education of poor children. Those large expenditures yielded no results. By 1977, a study by the National Institute of Education found that any positive effects achieved during the school year had dissipated as the students entered a new grade. They ended up just as far behind as students who had not had the benefit of the programs. This also held true for the highly touted “Head Start” early childhood learning program.

Medicare and Medicaid did little to increase the availability of medical services to the poor. What it did do was create a third-party payment system, (usually the government), that paid for services that medical professionals were previously providing “pro bono”, (voluntarily), to the poor. Medicare and Medicaid was basically a wealth distribution scheme run by the Federal government that transferred income from middle class taxpayers to middle class health-care professionals. It also had the unintended consequence of raising health-care costs across the board.

The Job Corps was conceived as a vocational training program for the unskilled. From the beginning it attempted to train a workforce that was uncooperative and unwilling to be trained. Studies showed that those who completed the programs had no better success in the job market than those who were untrained. Two thirds of those who signed up for the free vocational training did not bother to finish the program, all for a cost that about equivalent to a Harvard education.
Combined with the welfare programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, (later changed to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families – TANF, by President Clinton), these Federal benefits were, in fact, counterproductive.

With the government removing the social stigma of being on welfare and providing a modest, at least, economic security there was little or no incentive to find employment or to strive for family stability, (since there was negative incentive for fathers to stay with and be responsible for their children).

The dramatic expansion of Federal welfare spending combined with aggressive propagation of “Welfare Rights” takes away the pride and dignity of the working poor in knowing that they were supporting themselves and not being a burden. Now, with the guarantee of a government handout, trying to take personal responsibility seems foolish.

We have gone from a society that prided itself on a work ethic and standing on it’s own two feet to a culture of “Gimmie-Dat”. Instead of feeling pride in making their own way, we have at least three generations who are conditioned to expect that the world, (or at least Uncle Sam), owes them a living.

Oh, and what about the “War on Poverty”? It’s over… poverty won!

“Promises , like pie crusts, are made to be broken.
–Vladimir Lenin

Every politician knows that the key to winning elections is to make great promises. Campaigners promise to cure the ills of society including taxes, war, government corruption, and pollution. Instead, if elected, they will bring about vast improvements in education, employment, infrastructure, and the economy.

In many ways, voters are the eternal optimists who can’t learn from experience. We want to believe that our politicians will improve our lives. But when post-election reality hits, we forget how unrealistic we were in believing that somehow “this time,” the outcome would be different.

Einstein is attributed with saying; “To do the same thing over and over and to expect different results is the definition of insanity.”

This tendency toward prevarication is not the exclusive territory of one particular political party or one “wing” of believers. “Progressive”; “Conservative”; “Republican”; “Democrat”; “Socialist”; “Libertarian”, no matter what the label or the point of view you can rest assured, if their talkin’, they’re lyin’.

A few historical examples:
1.Woodrow Wilson won re-election in 1916 with the slogan “He kept us out of war,” only to enter World War I a year later.
2. Franklin Roosevelt’s adamant guarantee in 1940: “Your boys are not going to be sent to any foreign wars.”
3. With a nation weary of war, Harry S. Truman unconstitutionally sent US troops to fight in Korea without asking Congress for a declaration of war, based upon the UN declaration of a “police action” against North Korea.
4. Lyndon B. Johnson promised in 1964, “We are not about to send American boys 9- or 10-thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” During his presidency, the U.S. entered the Vietnam War and Johnson did not seek reelection.
5. Richard Nixon in 1968 claimed to “have a secret plan to end the war” and promised to find a way to “peace with honor” in Vietnam, but American troops were not withdrawn until 1973 — a little more than a year before Nixon resigned.
6. Jimmy Carter campaigned on solving the energy crisis, but the energy problem only worsened during his presidency.
7. George H. W. Bush famously promised in 1988: “Read my lips: No new taxes,” only to sign a bill raising taxes during his first and only term.
8. Bill Clinton campaigned on a renovation of the health care system before he took office in 1993. His attempted health care reform — “Hillarycare” — ended in failure.
9. George W. Bush ran for office on a platform of not “using our troops as nation builders,” a commitment he completely abandoned after 9/11, with profound and unintended consequences. He promised to “change the tone” in D.C., privatize social security and reduce government spending — none of which he accomplished.
10. Barack Obama: I promise to deliver “an unprecedented level of openness in government.”
– have drawn a zero-tolerance “red line” vow about chemical warfare in Syria.
-If you like your doctor you can keep you doctor.
-If you like your health plan you can keep your health plan.
Barack Obama campaigned famously and successfully on bringing “hope and change” to politics. Obama jokingly said, “Well, that didn’t work out did it.”
The jury is still out on Donald J. Trump but after 8 months the scorecard doesn’t look promising.
The reasons politicians lie is because the public doesn’t want to hear the truth. People want to hear what they want to hear and they don’t want to hear the truth.
“You can’t handle the truth”.
– Jack Nicholson -A Few Good Men-

Much to our detriment, with the complexity of society we have come to believe that we no longer have the ability to solve our own problems, that we lack the talent, the education or the understanding to face and solve the issues confronting us. So we look for a “champion”, a “leader”, a “white knight” who has the answers and will ease our pain.

Because we lack the confidence in ourselves to take personal responsibility for our lives and the lives of our families, we turn to politicians to do the “heavy lifting” for us. We fail to realize that if these politicians had the answers, the problems we face would have been solved long ago.

Unfortunately, we as a body politic have come to look upon the following as useful political discourse…

THE DEEP STATE: Where other men blindly follow the truth, remember, that nothing is true. Where other men are limited by morality or law, remember, everything is permitted.
WITHDRAW CONSENT