Paradocracy

Speaking of Wilhelm Steinitz’s 1886 victory over Johannes Zukertort, a Chess.com documentary makes a peculiar connection: “It was only fitting that an immigrant in the United States won the World Chess Championship in the same year the Statue of Liberty was dedicated.” This is a peculiar connection because of one thing: when it was dedicated, the Statue of Liberty was not a symbol of immigration but rather a diplomatic gesture from France in celebrating the 1876 centennial of America’s Declaration of Independence.  Indeed, people today often erroneously associate the Statue of Liberty with immigration, but that association developed only decades later. Dedicated in 1886 as a monument to liberty, republican ideals, Franco-American friendship, and the successes of the American Revolution, the statue was not originally intended as a symbol of immigration. Above all, it was a symbol of America. To suggest any symbolic connection to immigration is not only historically inaccurate — when...

Many descendants of America’s founding generation supported the Confederacy during the War between the States:  John Augustine Washington III was the great-grandnephew of George Washington and the last member of the Washington family to own Mount Vernon; he was a Confederate lieutenant colonel and aide-de-camp to Robert E. Lee. Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr. was the grandson of William Clark, co-captain of the famed Lewis and Clark Expedition; Meriwether was named after his grandfather’s companion from the Expedition and he served as a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. He would later dedicate his life to American horse racing, building Churchill Downs and originating the famed Kentucky Derby. Robert E. Lee was the son of Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee III, American patriot, congressman, and governor; he was the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia and later General-in-Chief of the Confederate armies. A top graduate of West Point, Lee served thirty-two years in the United ...

Many people revolt at the very thought of property taxes; their gut instincts telling them that there’s something fundamentally wrong about taxing homeownership, imposing an artificial condition for keeping a roof over a family’s heads — especially when that family owns the property and enjoys it peacefully, respecting the rights of their neighbors. Truth be told, their instincts are more than valid. They are right to revolt, and they are more than entitled to do so. After all, this is just as we as humans have evolved to do: to protect our families and to defend our homes. And the property tax is not just a direct assault upon the home; it is thereby an attack upon the whole family unit, an attack upon the very institution and sanctity of family, and upon the idea that they are each secure in their persons, property, and effects.   While the politicians point to programs and services that get their funding through property taxes — a form of ‘consequentialist justification’ or excu...

The events which transpired on January 6th, 2021, are erroneously regarded by many as an “attack” or the “downfall” of “democracy” or that of “American society”. However, this belies the truth about that day — a day when the lion’s share of protestors congregated peacefully at the United States Capitol to protest the injustices of a stolen election. The fact of the matter is that the 2020 presidential election was indeed fraught with major issues. The election was compromised, plain and simple, not just by suspicious statistical anomalies but by documented instances of voter fraud (in such cases as Fulton County, Georgia) and the deliberate suppression of critical information — including the truth around the Hunter Biden laptop scandal — which (if released) would have no doubt altered the outcome of the election. Ultimately, the January 6th protests at the Capitol Building are consistent with the very spirit of America’s forefathers and the patriots who have long maintained a tradition...

Conquered and captivated under illusions maintained,  a people kept in silence by smartly-dressed edicts and articles of shame — the clever comptrollers and dutiful deceivers, their methods are madness with ends much the same. The methods used to support every claim, the issues described squeezed into a single frame, to suit their grand strategy in their sheer political game.   * * * Apart from the ever-changing calculus around the basket of goods and the suite of hedonic adjustments, one thing I find strange about the discussion around the matter of inflation is that (in addition to the proper definition of ‘inflation’, and thus the proper method for measuring it and gauging its effects) nobody ever seems to talk about this: the fact that, as the base (whether prices or the money supply) increases, the percentage change may shrink (or appear relatively small) while the actual gains (in prices or money supply) are rather significant.  The following demonstrates the p...

During the American Revolution, one of the most popular rallying cries was “No taxation without representation!” This came at a time when the American colonists were being subjected to progressively higher taxes — imposed on progressively greater numbers of goods — levied by the Crown with the assurance that the colonists enjoyed “virtual representation”. Of course, this “virtual representation” was no representation at all, as the “virtual representative” was not elected by the colonists nor disposed to their grievances.  Well, there are those among us who fail to recognize (or to admit) the parallels present in the modern day, where taxes on Americans are not just unfathomably higher than when the colonists decried the injustice; they are just part of the total cost imposed upon a people not present in the negotiations nor properly represented in the government which claims to have resolved the problems of the past. A recent YouTube comment illustrates the misconception: “ T...

There is much confusion surrounding the concept of the “separation of church and state”; much of it likely born out of the steep secular decline in religious affiliation across recent generations, with particular emphasis among atheists and anti-deists.  While many have hastened to leverage this language (“separation of church and state”) in order to condemn or censure religious values — particularly those which are Christian — where they have carried influence in public life (i.e. prayer in schools, teachers covering lessons from the Bible, government representatives appealing to God, coinage bearing the words “In God We Trust”), the truth is that this “separation” was never expected to completely eliminate religious practice or religious sentiment from all matter of public life. In fact, religion was so deeply enmeshed in American life during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the French magistrate and prison reformer Gustave de Beaumont, during his nine-month tour of A...

A  recent post from a popular YouTube channel has provided more evidence of that which is blatantly obvious in modern America, at least to those who are willing to face the truth: the fact that cops, as with the governments they serve, are the enemy to goodness, justice, and American liberty.  This latest post is from The Civil Rights Lawyer, a channel (by a practicing civil rights lawyer) documenting police misconduct and civil rights violations since the year 2020. This time, it is a case of an elderly man, a former pastor suffering from dementia, murdered at the hands of “ the very people who were supposed to protect and care for him”: “Officers were dispatched to a business to assist an elderly customer who appeared to be suffering from dementia. At the scene, officers found him extremely confused. He told them the year was 1948 and that the president was George Washington. So they call his daughter to come pick him up. So how did things go so terribly wrong that day, tha...

The true “believer” is revealed by the consistency between his beliefs and his behavior. If someone truly believes that eternal destinies are at stake — that heaven and hell are real, that the consequences are everlasting, and that salvation depends upon faith or works — then the stakes are not merely high but infinite: infinite in degree and in scope, with the effects propagating into the future as humanity continues generation after generation. The number of souls at risk is not just in the billions today but expands indefinitely into the future. If that framework is taken seriously, then the rational response would seem to be an overwhelming sense urgency by those who claim to appreciate the stakes. Everything else — career, comfort, reputation, leisure — would become secondary to the singular task of “saving” as many people as possible. Yet, despite the billions who claim to be Christian — or who claim to believe in any God — there are precious few who make this their life’s purpos...