Israel has been invaded from Gaza by Hamas, the terrorist organization that governs the strip.

The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has announced: “We are at war.”

Up-to-date news can be found here:

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/2023-10-07/live-updates-762053

Is the money for the invasion coming from the Iranian regime? “President” Biden recently made billions available to the mullahs who are notoriously funders of terrorism.   

Is it possible that the planning and preparation for this massive attack was not known to Israel’s legendary intelligence service, the “best in the world” Mossad? Seems so!

Israel strikes back. Gaza City in flames.

No one says it better than Pat Condell:

“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” – Adam Smith

Portrait of urban America 2023: 

They wander among the stinking ruins of a once great civilization, along the cracked streets, over the perilous bridges, past looted abandoned  stores, hundreds of thousands of filthy sick drugged demented criminal vagabonds, naked or clothed in excrement- and vomit-stained rags, young and old, masculine feminine or neutered, pausing in the midst of the crowd to copulate sodomize fellate urinate defecate and inject their bleeding bodies with heroin cocaine fentanyl, finally slumping down on the foul bed of their own detritus to die.

City councils supply the syringes needles and drugs. And collect the corpses.

Since the election of the black vengeful far-left president, Barack Obama, and – after a four year interval of good government under President Donald Trump – increasingly under the nominal leadership  of Joe Biden, the population has been subjected to incremental impoverishment, shortages of food and fuel and other essentials, migrant invasion, encouragement of violent crime by black and anarchic gangs, the sexual mutilation of children, the persecution of dissidents, the imprisonment of political opponents and protestors, discrimination against Whites, the abandonment of impartial justice and the rule of law, the forced closure of small businesses by government on the the pretext of protecting people from infection during a flu epidemic, the falsifying of election results, the substitution of indoctrination for education, the punishing of dissent despite the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, the national humiliation of military capitulation to Islamic extremists in Afghanistan and the courting of them in Iran …

And  the decay of our cities into zombie-haunted ruins.

Victor Davis Hanson lists and gives examples of disasters that have befallen us. He writes at American Greatness, asking and suggesting an answer to the question we most want answered:

This litany of disasters could be vastly expanded, but more interesting is the why of it all?

What we are witnessing seems to be utter nihilism. The border is not porous but nonexistent. Mass looting and carjackings are not poorly punished, but simply exempt from all and any consequences. Our downtowns are reduced to a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” where the strong dictate to the weak and the latter adjust as they must. The streets of our major cities in just a few years have become precivilizational—there are more human feces on the sidewalks of San Francisco than were in the gutters of Medieval London.

The FBI and DOJ are not simply wayward and weaponized, but corrupt and renegade. Apparently the perquisite now for an FBI director is the ability either to lie while under oath or better to mask such lying by claiming amnesia or ignorance.

Immigration is akin to the vast unchecked influxes of the late Roman Empire across the Danube and Rhine that helped to finish off a millennium-old civilization that had lost all confidence in its culture and thus had no need for borders.

In other words, the revolution is not so much political as anarchist. Nothing escapes it—not ceiling fans, not natural gas cooktops, not parents at school board meetings, not Christian bakeries, not champion female swimmers, not dutiful policemen, not hard-working oil drillers, not privates and corporals in the armed forces, not teens applying on their merits to college, not anyone, anywhere, anytime.

The operating principle is either to allow or to engineer things to become so atrocious in everyday American life—the inability to afford food and fuel, the inability to walk safely in daylight in our major cities, the inability to afford to drive as one pleases, the inability to obtain or pay back a high interest loan—that the government can absorb the private sector and begin regimenting the masses along elite dictates. The more the people tire of the leftist agenda, the more its architects furiously seek to implement it, hoping that their institutional and cultural control can do what  ballots cannot.

We could variously characterize their efforts as destroying the nation to save it, or burning it down to start over, or fundamentally transforming America into something never envisioned by the Founders.

Will their upheaval  succeed? All the levers of the power and money are on the side of the revolutionaries. The people are not. And they are starting to wake to the notion if they do not stop the madness in their midst they very soon won’t have a country.

The fools, freaks, crooks and traitors who tyrannically rule over us are destroying the nation to save it? They envision something new and better than the constitutional republic established by the Founders?

Are the derelict cities and their sick inhabitants a necessary phase in a process the tyrants are pursuing towards a great end?

If so, what is that great end? 

Victor Davis Hanson indicates that he does not believe they have any vision of anything. Nihilism and anarchism are what he sees.

What if they are ruining the nation for no reason but their delight in ruining it? 

Racial “color-blindness” was tried for decades in America between the end of the Jim Crow laws and the election of Barack Obama. He ended it. The idea of the ethnic “melting-pot” – persons of any national origin becoming American nationals so citizens of the United States would be bound together by law (ius) not territorial nativity (rus) – which did work quite well for about two hundred years, was repudiated along with “color-blindness”.

Bruce Thornton wrote in the Hoover Digest in 2012:

The melting pot metaphor arose in the eighteenth century …  and it described the fusion of various religious sects, nationalities, and ethnic groups into one distinct people: E pluribus unum. …

The image of the melting pot drew its strength from the idea of unity fostered by beliefs and ideals—not race, blood, or sect. …

This image, then, communicated the historically exceptional notion of American identity as one formed not by the accidents of blood, sect, or race, but by the unifying beliefs and political ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: the notion of individual, inalienable human rights that transcend group identity. …

If some custom, value, or belief from the old country conflicted with those core American values, then the old way had to be modified or discarded if the immigrant wanted to participate fully in American social, economic, and political life. The immigrant had to adjust. No one expected the majority culture to modify its values to accommodate the immigrant …

Logically, the change has meant a person’s race matters; it is to be taken into account when his/her candidacy for everything from school to job to advancement is considered by authorities. Rus matters more than ius after all. And some races are more worthy than others.

So is separation of races and ethnicities the best way to prevent inter-race conflict? If so, are the races to be treated as “separate but equal”, or are some races and ethnicities really more worthy than others?

Yes, goes the argument, some races and ethnicities need to be recompensed for past injury inflicted by other races and ethnicities, so those who have been oppressed must be favored over those who oppressed them. That is “social justice”.

Some argue that racism is natural. Races, nations, tribes, as such, are antipathetic to each other and presumably always will be.

A counter-argument to that is: so is nakedness natural. People will always be born naked, but that’s no reason not to cover ourselves. The nakedness cannot be changed, it can only be remedied. And is, easily enough.

Ah, but racism is much more difficult, in fact impossible, to remedy.

This question arises: Is it possible that even if racism is natural and common in individuals, it is not standard? As a sense of humor is natural and common, but not standard like a heart and a head. It is not essential to life.

Even if it is not standard, comes the reply, it is far more common than a sense of humor. Too common to be eliminated.

And regrettably that may be true.

If racial/national/tribal antipathy cannot be eliminated among the citizens of the United States, it cannot be eliminated anywhere.

It clearly cannot be eliminated in the United States.

It clearly cannot be eliminated.

If there is no racial-national-tribal discrimination against individuals by law, then everything that can and must be done about it has been done. In America it has been done. And yet racism is still with us.

Scolding people about being racist will make no difference. Privileging a minority with “affirmative action” or grants of unearned money will make no difference.

Racism cannot be compensated or educated out of existence. It cannot be reasoned away. It cannot be legislated, compelled, punished, “brain-washed” or habituated out of existence.

If it is natural, the best that can reasonably be hoped for is that most of us will make it ineffective with our own behavior.

Asked “What do we have, a monarchy or a republic?”, Benjamin Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

President Lincoln spoke of “government of the people by the people for the people.”

There was to be equality under the law.

But the law in the United States no longer protects all it citizens.

It protects only some people, not from crime but from legal retribution for committing crime.

Federal law enforcement, including the Department of Justice itself under the Biden junta, is a menace to all who do not support the profoundly immoral dictatorship or refuse to submit to its oppressive rules.

“President” Biden is guilty of bribery and worse – actual treason. His son is guilty of extorting enormous sums of money from foreign and enemy states by selling access to him to ask and be granted treasonous favors. Neither of them is subjected to legal investigation and punishment.

Thieves and murderers are allowed and even encouraged to continue their criminal activities if they are non-white and/or supporters of the illegitimate regime. Citizens who risk their own lives to save others from the criminal violence of the tolerated criminals are imprisoned for long periods without trial; when eventually tried, they are brought before dishonest partisan judges and juries charged with crimes they certainly did not commit and then punished with extreme severity.

Political opponents of this vicious regime are relentlessly persecuted.

Americans have failed to keep the free constitutional republic that the founders of the United States gave the nation.  

Archimedes – nom de plume  of a member of our forum – wrote an essay against affirmative action in 1977 when it was a topic of intense debate in America. The reason for the interest in the subject then was an appeal by a white man, Allan P. Bakke, to the Supreme Court against the rejection by many universities, partly on grounds of his race, of his application to their medical schools.

In 1978 the Supreme Court issued its verdict in the Bakke case. It found for Bakke, but also allowed affirmative action in favor of black applicants. The universities launched it as a policy which persisted – against majority opinion – until this year, 2023. Now the Supreme Court has declared affirmative action to be illegal.

We have reviewed the essay by Archimedes and we agree with the him that his argument is still valid. We think he makes it excellently well.    

Here is the essay:

To reward or punish a person on the basis of his race is morally wrong; no good can come of it. And what the opponents of Bakke are proposing is not an end to this pernicious practice, but merely a change in victims and beneficiaries. The results, however, will be the same: resentment, envy, bitterness, social divisiveness, stereotyping, and a general corrosion of the spirit.

The American judicial system is based on precedent. Should the Supreme Court rule against Bakke, the equal protection amendment, which has been the bulwark of the civil rights movement, could be severely weakened, in which case there would be little left in the law to prevent a new Supreme Court or a vengeful majority from legally institutionalizing an inferior status for blacks.

Preferential treatment is condescending and patronizing and both stimulates and nourishes the very attitudes we are supposedly attempting to eradicate. One does not patronize a person one regards as an equal; neither does one regard as an equal a person one patronizes. Similarly, one does not accept preferential treatment without a loss of self-respect and integrity. I suspect that behind all the fine talk by white liberals is a posture of noblesse oblige and superiority, and behind all the strident demands by certain black groups and leaders is a gnawing sense of inadequacy.

Preferential treatment taints all black achievement, makes it suspect, gives it the appearance of a benefit conferred rather than something earned. Let this policy continue for another twenty or thirty years and not a single black doctor, lawyer, civil servant, teacher, engineer, scientist, business manager, or politica appointee will know for sure whether his success is the result of his own talent and efforts or is at least in part the result of some gracious indulgence on the part of Whitey. I cannot conceive of a policy more degrading and damaging to the black person of real merit. By the same token, I cannot conceive of a policy more likely to arouse the skepticism, resentment, and disdain of whites, however well-intentioned and kindly disposed toward blacks they may be initially. And the longer this policy is pursued, the more likely it is that all black achievement (except achievement in sports and entertainment, where excellence is immediately obvious) will come to be regarded by most whites and probably many blacks as not genuine.

We are told that quotas and affirmative action are necessary if we are to put an end to the underrepresentation of certain groups in various aspects of American life. But what does the word “underrepresentation” mean? When is a group properly represented? The quota people have the answer to that one. They tell us that if a group constitutes X per cent of the population as a whole, then that group should constitute roughly X per cent of every profession and trade. The premise here is that attitudes, aptitudes, tastes, and desires are, or at any rate ought to be, uniformly distributed among all racial and ethnic groups, and if in fact they are not, we must simply go ahead and pretend that they are and force people into their predetermined slots. This is egalitarianism at its worst. It is totally at variance with traditional American notions of individual merit and personal freedom. There is absolutely no health in it.

The argument that blacks as a group require quotas and special treatment as compensation for deprived and disadvantaged backgrounds lumps all blacks in one category and all whites in another category. Blacks are by definition “disadvantaged”; whites are by definition “privileged”. Yet we know that tens of thousands of black children are growing up in comfortable, middle-class homes and can by no rational standard be termed “underprivileged” or “disadvantaged” and that an even larger number of black children attend integrated schools and receive the same instruction and enjoy the same opportunities for learning as their white classmates. If the opponents of Bakke were truly sincere about taking into account and compensating for deprivation, they would exempt the above children from special consideration. But they do not. Deprivation is determined by race and race alone. What this says is that a black child who attends school in the wealthy, innovative, richly endowed Berkeley system is disadvantaged, while a white child who attends an impoverished, woefully understaffed school in Appalachia or the rural South is a member of a privileged group – the white race – and hence can learn to live with a few minor handicaps, such as exclusion from college or graduate school.

The whole argument about inferior schooling and disadvantaged backgrounds is shot through with cant and self-deception. It is true that blacks going to “bad” ghetto schools learn very little. However, it is also true and the NAACP knows this that – blacks enrolled in “good” desegregated schools do just as poorly. (This unwelcome fact has emerged from virtually every one of the numerous studies of the effects of school desegregation on academic achievement.) Thus, as things stand right now, even if the entire country were desegregated and every school had a statistically “correct” racial balance, the educational gap between blacks and whites would remain unaltered (as it has after nine years of integration in the much vaunted Berkeley school system) and there would still be a demand for quotas and preferential treatment.

What is required is not quotas but a fundamental change in the attitude of blacks toward academic achievement and a determination on their part to perform as well in the classroom as they do on the basketball court. But the policy of quotas and special placement seems to be precisely the kind of policy that will discourage such a shift in attitude and emphasis. It implicitly assumes that blacks cannot or will not do well enough to be admitted to colleges and graduate schools on their own merits; it awards blacks easy and unearned victories at the expense of a generation of whites that played no role in the previous subjugation of the black man; it discourages rather that stimulates a desire to excel on the part of blacks. And because it treats the symptoms instead of the causes of the problem, it cannot bring about fundamental change. To succeed in its goals, it can never be relaxed; it must be maintained forever. Is this what we really want?

Fortunately it can no longer be openly maintained.

Mark Levin roars for millions of us:

President Trump has been indicted on federal charges – all of them absurd – in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida.

Read the indictment here.

It happened on the same day that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives announced they have incontrovertible  proof that when “President” Biden was Obama’s vice president he accepted a $5million bribe from Ukraine. A single instance of his many treasonous crimes.

But innocent Trump is indicted, not corrupt, crooked, evil Biden – or his deeply guilty son Hunter.

Robert Spencer writes at FrontPage:

Donald Trump is the principal opponent of the Biden regime, and the individual who at this point is most likely to be elected president in 2024.

And that is why –

He has  been indicted on federal criminal charges related to the mishandling of classified documents, and is scheduled to be arrested on Tuesday. Not too long ago, when Trump was arrested by the Manhattan DA on bogus felony charges, critics of the Biden regime began to say that America had become a banana republic. We’re racing past that stage now. America is heading toward becoming a new Stalinist regime in which critics of those in power are arrested by the regime itself, tried on false and fabricated charges, and executed. The Left may not plan to murder Trump, but they’re certainly trying to execute him politically.

They might “suicide” him. The “Democrat” panjandrums are adept at that. 

[Attorney General] Merrick Garland and his henchmen [at the “Department of Justice” and FBI] think they’ve found something they can use to destroy the principal foe of the regime, and so fairness, decency, common sense and impartial justice are out the window. Biden’s handlers are treating Trump the way Stalin treated the Old Bolsheviks whom he saw as rivals: he had them falsely accused, imprisoned, and executed. But Garland and the rest should take careful note: Bolshevik pioneers such as Nikolai Bukharin, Gregory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev had never actually been opponents of Stalin the way Trump is Biden’s opponent. They had been his friends, whom he turned against in his paranoia and destroyed in his quest for absolute power. They had helped install the authoritarian Communist regime in the Soviet Union, only to find themselves becoming its victims. It likely never occurred to them that someone could subject them to the same treatment they had meted out to so many others.

But it could happen here, just as everything else we used to think couldn’t happen here is happening now. Now that the Justice Department has become a weapon of political vengeance, it could turn one day against the very people who are using it so ruthlessly today against Donald Trump. But right now, firmly ensconced in power, they can’t even envision a day when someone might displace them. This gang of criminals aims to be in power forever.

And so this is yet another dark day for the United States. Once again we see how few people with integrity there really are among today’s political movers and shakers. A notable exception was Ron DeSantis, who tweeted Thursday: “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation. Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?

And what of all the perpetrators – including Hillary Clinton – of the “Russia collusion” hoax which was aimed at destroying Trump’s presidency, whose guilt in the conspiracy is authoritatively confirmed by the Durham report? They  are all free and gloating over the martyrdom of Donald Trump.

Powerful “Democrats” are above the law.

The free constitutional Republic of the United States is lost.

We are living in one of the most tragic eras of history. The Enlightenment is being undone.

Another Dark Age is descending on the world. 

Today, June 5, 2023, is the 300th birthday of Adam Smith.

He is one of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment. As the founder of free-market capitalism he did more for the prosperity of humankind than anyone else in history.

In 1776 he published his famous book, An Enquiry into the Nature  and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. It taught that when people are free to pursue their own ends (under the rule of law), they and their society will prosper.

His name stands forever for Liberty and Prosperity, the two greatest aids to the pursuit of happiness.

What a year 1776 was for Liberty! Adam Smith’s book taught the benefits of it for the thriving of nations and individuals, and the American Declaration of Independence  established it as the political condition of a new nation coming into being – a nation that was to prove him right. 

Economics professor Mark Skousen writes at the New York Post:

Adam Smith (1723-1790) put together the classical model of economics, consisting of free trade, limited government, the virtue of thrift, balanced budgets and sound money.

Smith called it “the system of natural liberty”.

He made an outlandish prediction in his famous book The Wealth of Nations, declaring in 1776 that his model would result in “universal opulence which extends to the lowest ranks of the people”.

It was a tall order.

Indeed, at that time life was “nasty, brutish and short” for most people, to quote Thomas Hobbes. There was very little progress.

But as the world gradually adopted Adam Smith’s model of free trade, low taxes, deregulation, patent law and sound money (supply-side economics), we witnessed the Industrial Revolution in the West, then in the East, and a 100-fold increase in our standard of living.

Adam Smith’s incredible forecast had come true.

The outcome was a hat trick: maximum liberty, individual improvement and public benefit, all at the same time.

So, how much of the Adam Smith model still exists today?

At the top of the list, free trade and globalization have been a big success. The Soviet central-planning model has been abandoned.

Capitalism delivers the quantity, quality and variety of goods and services that the centrally planned economy never could.

The Economic Freedom Index — based on the Smithian measures of laissez faire, balanced budgets, sound money, free trade and rule of law — shows a marked increase from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s.

However, for most of the new century, the Adam Smith model has come under attack by Keynesians, Marxists and interventionists who want a return to top-down policies of authoritarian government, deficit spending, tax hikes, fair trade and over-regulation, all in the name of fairness, equity and saving the planet.

If Adam Smith were alive today, he’d be appalled by the never-ending federal deficits and out-of-control national debt.

He would not approve the overgrown welfare state and military-industrial complex.

He’d be shocked to see the US tax code at over 7,000 pages, and the federal tax regulations exceeding 75,000 pages.

The bloated bureaucracy would be a reminder of the mercantilist policies of his age.

Perhaps there’s a white knight out there coming to put America back on a sound fiscal and monetary basis, but I fear Humpty Dumpty has fallen and can’t be put together again.

I don’t see America becoming another Venezuela, but neither do I see it as another Singapore.

It’s easy to become pessimistic. But perhaps we can learn something from Smith, the ultimate optimist.

Nearly 250 years ago, he wrote, “The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition . . . is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite both of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration.”

This well-known and much quoted passage from The Wealth of Nations is a beautifully phrased  explanation and defense of a free market economy:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Enlightened self-interest, not philanthropy, not altruism, not the impossible agenda of trying to love our neighbors as ourselves, is the key not only to each our own benefit, but inevitably also to the benefit of our society, our nation, and potentially our world.

Provide something – goods or services – that others want and will pay for, and the result is personal and general prosperity.

An “invisible hand” – as Adam Smith wrote –  works the trick.

The day of his birth was a great day for mankind.

We celebrate it.

May 18, 2023 was the 975th anniversary of the birth of one of our favorite atheists, the Persian poet, mathematician and scientist, Omar Kayyam (born May 18, 1048).

We are convinced that he was an atheist, though some scholars have found reason in his writings to doubt it.

Simon Maass has examined the arguments for and against Omar Kayyam’s atheism.

He writes at our Forum:

Some of the Islamically dominated world’s greatest cultural and intellectual achievements have been completely unconnected to religion.

Think of Omar Khayyam, the twelfth-century poet and polymath who did so much to advance algebra and conducted an “outstandingly accurate” measurement of the length of a year. Having lived in Khorasan, Bukhara, Samarkand and Isfahan, he was practically an Eastern Erasmus, a historical figure shared by Persia, Turkey and Central Asia.

He was also, as many have speculated based on his poetry, likely an atheist or agnostic. This would only have been appropriate, as Khayyam hailed from Iran, one of the clearest examples of a country that had been, to recycle Atatürk’s phrase, “a great nation even before [it] accepted the religion of Islam.” One analysis that leans relatively heavily towards deeming Khayyam to have been a believer is the entry on him in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The authors cite the great Persian scholar’s philosophical treatises, in which he defends certain religious ideas, and interpret those verses he wrote which suggest an attitude of scepticism or agnosticism as reflecting merely his emotional experiences of the world around him, rather than what he believed on an intellectual level. This interpretation seems highly dubious, as the same article quotes the following lines from Khayyam’s pen:

“The secrets which my book of love has bred,
Cannot be told for fear of loss of head;
Since none is fit to learn, or cares to know,
‘Tis better all my thoughts remain unsaid.”

Against this backdrop, given the conflict between what Khayyam explicitly wrote on religious matters in his treatises and what he subtly implied in his poems, it seems much likelier that the latter reflects his true convictions, whereas the former was written to protect himself, or simply as an intellectual exercise. Even if Khayyam truly believed all he wrote in the treatises, there is little, if anything, the authors attribute to him which implies a religious belief beyond deism. Meanwhile, the article acknowledges that “Khayyam challenged religious doctrines, alluded to the hypocrisy of the clergy, [and] cast doubt on almost every facet of religious belief.”

Moreover, even these commentators see fit to observe:

“It is noteworthy that Khayyam’s philosophical treatises were written in the Peripatetic tradition at a time when philosophy in general and rationalism in particular were under attack by orthodox Muslim jurists—so much that Khayyam had to defend himself against the charge of ‘being a philosopher.’”

More broadly, the main effect that Mohammad’s creed had on Khayyam was to trip him up and hold him back. The polymath’s powerful patron, Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk, was assassinated by a member of a rival Islamic sect, whereupon the mathematical maestro fell out of favor with the royal court. J. J. O’Connor and E. F. Robertson write:

“Funding to run the Observatory [where he worked] ceased and Khayyam’s calendar reform was put on hold. Khayyam also came under attack from the orthodox Muslims who felt that Khayyam’s questioning mind did not conform to the faith. He wrote in […] the Rubaiyat [the collection of his quatrains] :

‘Indeed, the Idols I have loved so long
Have done my Credit in Men’s Eye much wrong:
Have drowned my Honour in a shallow cup,
And sold my reputation for a Song.’”

According to various online sources, though I have been unable to locate the source of this claim, Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked “that he would never forgive Christianity for taking [Blaise] Pascal.” The great iconoclast, it seems, was not a little distraught to see such a brilliant mathematician waste his exceptional brainpower on Christian apologetics. To speak similarly of what Islam appears to have done to Khayyam, forcing him to veil his true thoughts and squander time and energy fending off religious attacks, would be entirely justified.