America's Borg

by

Gadfly

“You will be assimilated; resistance is futile.”  This was a declaration heard by the crew of Star Trek’s Enterprise.  The declaration also revealed “the Borg” would absorb “biological” distinctiveness into the collective.  Once assimilated race and gender become irrelevant.

 

We all know Star Trek was a highly successful science fiction series.  Yet, how “fictional” is it?

Sexual orientation conversion therapy has been outlawed in numerous states, to include most recently, Colorado, where a homosexual governor signed the ban into law.  Parents now would be breaking the law by seeking therapy for a child that thinks he or she is anything but heterosexual.  The Colorado political elite has declared to parents: “You will be assimilated; resistance is futile.”  To amplify the effect, a Democrat-controlled legislature also advanced an educational bill to indoctrinate children in different sexual orientations and to begin as early as possible by funding full-day kindergarten.  Both are now signed into law by the Colorado governor.

With the left’s penchant for declaring contrary views as “extreme,” the Colorado Democrat-controlled legislature advanced a “red flag” bill that the governor signed into law.  The Second Amendment is very clear in establishing the inalienable right to bear arms.  Unfortunately, this right is an “extreme” view because it is contrary to those who believe in gun control.  Without due-process, individuals can now have their legally owned arms confiscated because someone accuses them of not being safe to possess them.  The burden of proof, along with the cost of legal representation, rests on the person who has been alleged to be unsafe.  Not only is the “red flag” law a violation of the Second Amendment, it further confirms the power of Colorado’s Borg.

Recently, South Bend (home of the University of Notre Dame), Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a fresh Democratic presidential candidate, attacked Vice President Mick Pence for his Christian views.  Although Pence never publicly said anything derogatory about Buttigieg or his lifestyle, the latter declared that if Pence had any issues about his homosexual lifestyle, he needed to take it up with his Creator.  In other words, God made him gay.

            Really?  What makes Buttigieg believe a homosexual orientation is an exception to other behaviors such as pedophilia, rape, adultery, masturbation, watching pornography, murder, robbery, and so forth?  Could not a thief argue that he was born to be a thief?  Buttigieg was a proselytizing pontificator when he demeaned Pence.  To be clear, in order for Buttigieg to consummate his relatively recent “marriage,” he and his male partner likely engage in sodomy with absolutely no possibility to procreate.  His Creator must be so pleased.

            My guess is that Buttigieg could care less.  He is counting on America’s Borg-assimilated drones to defend his sexual orientation by rallying in support of his candidacy.  The pool of potential drones is growing with many of our youth now “confused” about their gender.  The left encourages it because it makes them more vulnerable and malleable.

            Aside from the symbolism of the Cathedral of Notre Dame as a manifestation of Western civilization and its Judeo-Christian foundation, there is great irony in the unfortunate fact that it was consumed by fire yesterday.  Till yesterday, Notre Dame symbolically resisted the insidious and ubiquitous ambitions of the French Enlightenment and endured for centuries despite the atrocities of the French Revolution and the ravages of two World Wars.

 

With the tragedy and its implications of yesterday’s burning, it is further ironic to witness a Harvard- and Oxford-educated intellectual at the tender age of 37 beat his chest[1] as being morally superior because even though he claims to be Christian, he is truly a progressive secular humanist that is focused on “perfecting” humankind in his own image (even though God created us all in His image).  Because they believe “reason” and “science” are superior to “faith,” they can manufacture canards such as man-made climate change to rally their Borg-assimilated drones to achieve political power.  I love asking secular humanists to prove time, since it is so fundamental to our understanding of natural science.  Even when they understand they cannot prove an a priori truth, they still cannot admit to having “faith” in its a priori nature.

 

The author of Ecclesiastes was not Harvard- nor Oxford-educated.  Yet, he understood that inflated pride in oneself is not a generational infliction: “Vanities of vanities!  All things are vanity.  What profit has man from all the labor which he toils at under the sun?  One generation passes and another comes, but the world stays forever” (1:  2-4).

I watched Clint Eastwood’s movie, The Mule, last week.  He played the lead, 80+-year old character (Earl Stone) who served as a mule for a drug cartel.  He was eventually caught and tried in court, which was the most important scene in the movie.  Despite the good intentions of his lawyer to have him absolved of any crime, Earl interrupted the proceedings to plead guilty.  At his age, accountability and redemption were more important than vanity.

      

In her book, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, Ayn Rand made this observation:

 

The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology (1999, Penguin, p. 8).

            The left is relentless with slogans about those with contrary views.  For now, there remains a substantial population of Americans who believe in liberty, the rule of law, and justice.  Because they hold firm to Judeo-Christian values, they will be called homophobes and Islamophobes, for they resist the absurdity of views contrary to natural law and two to four millennia of tradition.  They will be called racists and xenophobes because they believe in legal immigration.  They will be called misogynists because they believe in the sacredness of human life and motherhood.

 

For now, America’s Borg has a healthy and active opposition.  This opposition will resist; it will not be assimilated into America’s secular humanist Borg.  Ideally, the opposition will provide an alternative to the vulnerable and malleable members of our society.

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[1] Note:  C.S. Lewis might argue that Buttigieg has no chest, as discussed in his chapter, “Men without Chests,” in The Abolition of Man.

Who’s Afraid of Michael Wolff?

Old Gadfly:  The buzz dominating the current news cycle is Michael Wolf’s book, Fire and Fury:  Inside the Trump White House.  Your thoughts?

IM:  I watched his interview on Meet the Press this morning, and he said he was welcomed into the West Wing with no agenda.

AM:  Is that possible?  As a graduate of Columbia University and Vassar College, a copy boy for the New York Times, columnist, and entrepreneur, Wolff took advantage of a money-making opportunity.  He clearly had an agenda.  How can any individual claim to have no preconceived notions or predilections?  He claims to have been allowed to wonder about, “to sit on the couch,” simply observing and asking occasional questions.  If so, members of the White House appear to be open and transparent.  If so, they did not suspect Wolff’s intentions.  Knowing the public has yet to turn off all the fake news, Wolff generated material to feed off of this feeding frenzy.  He will become wealthy, possibly with “30 pieces of silver” from this book.  Perhaps someday he may come to grips with a conscience like Judas.

IM:  The picture you paint reminds me of an observation by Cicero:

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

AM:  Ironically, in 1962, Edward Albee wrote a book that became a hit on stage:  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff?  He also made a fortune from this work.

The themes in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff? dealt with reality and illusion.  Although Michael Wolff claims he had no agenda, based on the themes in Albee’s book, it seems Wolff may have “plagiarized” Albee's creative essentials to sensationalize human behavior in an atmosphere already agitated by a swarming anti-Trump mainstream media.  Here is a critique (presented by Wikipedia) of Albee’s work—notice the parallels to M. Wolff’s book:

. . . this play stands as an opponent of the idea of a perfect American family and societal expectations as it "attacks the false optimism and myopic confidence of modern society".  Albee takes a heavy-handed approach to the display of this contrast, making examples out of every character and their own expectations for the people around them. Societal norms of the 1950s consisted of a nuclear family, two parents and two (or more) children. This conception was picturesque in the idea that the father was the breadwinner, the mother was a housewife, and the children were well-behaved.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? smashes these conventions and shows realistic families that are far from perfect and possibly ruined. The families of Honey and Martha were dominated by their fathers, there being no sign of a mother-figure in their lives. George and Martha's chance at a perfect family was ruined by infertility and George's failure at becoming a prominent figure at the university. Being just a few of many, these examples directly challenge social expectations both within and outside of a family setting.

Old Gadfly:  On a broader level, this book episode merely affirms the progressive left’s notion that man is perfectible—the Marxist notion of a state-created Utopian paradise this side of the grave.  Trump is caricatured by the progressive left as the antithesis of their holy mission.  I'll just close with this.  Earlier this week, I watched a Star Trek movie, Star Trek:  The First Contact.  It introduced the Borg.  I could not help but suspect it could happen much earlier than their timeline.  Like now.  In witnessing today's political and media behavior, this line from the movie stood out:  "We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

Folklore, ISIL, and the Unkempt Bed

Old Gadfly:  Gentlemen, let's play the game of “Jeopardy.” Here is the answer to the question:  folklore, ISIL (i.e., the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant), and the unkempt bed.[1]

IM (An American citizen with an inquiring mind):  Beautiful set of metaphors, Gadfly.  The question is:  How will objective historians (which eliminates any Howard Zinn disciple) characterize candidate, then President, Obama’s policy agenda?

Old Gadfly:  Bingo, IM.

AM (an American combat aviator with an inquiring mind):  What a clever yet meaningful way to evaluate the context and unanticipated consequences of getting caught trying to transform America by deceptively engineering public sentiment.

Old Gadfly:  AM, your perception of the meaning of those related metaphors appears to be moving in the right direction.  Let’s unpack some of the assertions in your comment, such as “deceptively engineering public sentiment,” “unanticipated consequences,” and “getting caught.”

AM:  Engineering public sentiment refers to the folklore concept.  Dictionary.com defines folklore as “1.  The traditional beliefs, legends, customs, etc., of a people; lore of a people.  2.  The study of such lore.  3.  A body of widely held but false or unsubstantiated beliefs.”  In this regard, candidate Obama argued that he had superior judgment when it came to understanding the Middle East, diminishing his predecessor in the process.  As President Obama, he argued that he had decimated al Qaeda leadership and that al Qaeda was on the run.  He pulled the wool over the eyes of the American public by lying about the Benghazi attack to win an election.  Yes, I know it seems harsh to use the “lie” word.  But even the word “quibble” does not even come close to mollifying a deliberate attempt to deceive the American public; and, remember, the four Americans were mere speed bumps on his way to a second-term.  Just so there is no doubt, Dictionary.com defines a lie as, “A false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood.”  Dictionary.com defines quibble as, “An instance of the use of ambiguous, prevaricating, or irrelevant language or arguments to evade a point at issue.”

IM:  So, technically, Susan Rice quibbled on the Sunday morning talk shows and Secretary of State (at the time) Hillary Clinton quibbled when she shouted, “What difference does it make?”  Interestingly, Alan Colmes authored an article in the Huffington Post attempting to perpetuate the folklore of this deplorable Benghazi incident.  There seems to be tremendous resistance among the folklore subscribers to any contrary evidence, as we discussed in our “Connecting the Dots” conversation.

AM: As a matter of scale to drive home the dishonorable nature of these deceitful behaviors, Gadfly and I personally know of Service Academy cadets who were dismissed from the institution for simple quibbling.  Obvious lies and quibbles reek of hypocrisy when members of our armed forces observe their commander-in-chief getting away with far worse.

Old Gadfly:  Good point, AM.  Now, explain the unanticipated consequences.

AM:  ISIL epitomizes the cascading failures of a feckless foreign policy.  Obama and his disciples suffer from what I call ILOC.  The ILOC phenomenon was inspired by a fighter pilot phenomenon known as GLOC, which is an acronym for G force-induced loss of consciousness.

IM:  Help me out, AM.  What’s a G-force?

AM:  “G” refers to gravity, and fighter pilots can experience “G forces," or "Gs” in excess of 8 times the force of gravity when maneuvering a fighter in a dog fight, causing blood to pool in their lower legs and feet.  A 200-pound pilot weighs 1,600 pounds when pulling 8 Gs.  Depending upon the duration of the high G-force maneuver, the lower leg pooling of blood leads to hypoxia and can result in loss of consciousness.

IM:  Thanks.  I think I now see where you are going with ILOC.

AM:  Good, in this case ILOC stands for ideology-induced loss of [national] consciousness.  In other words, ideology now competes with what once constituted the American consciousness before someone decided to transform what that used to mean.

Old Gadfly:  My good friend, Dennis Haugh, developed the best definition I have ever read about what it means to be an American:  “A well-rounded individual who in time of competition or crisis will use his unique talents to the best effect possible. When the competition or crisis is over, he will return to being a responsible individual. He is NOT a member of 'the Borg'.”  (Dennis’ reference to the Borg refers to the Star Trek concept of a collective mind hive into which all individuals eventually assimilate).

IM:  Powerful definition.  We have observed nearly six years of deliberate attempts to fundamentally transform that meaning, that sense of American consciousness.

Old Gadfly:  AM, what did you mean by “getting caught.”

AM:  The meaning refers to the unkempt bed.  Because of Obama’s ILOC, American foreign policy is a disaster.

          Old Gadfly:  Yet, the unkempt bed is similar to the secular proverb, “you made your bed, you sleep in it.”  Unfortunately, it is not Obama who has to sleep in it.  Americans and the entire international community have to “sleep in it.”  

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[1] I want to thank my good friend D.K. who inspired me earlier this week to better understand the role motifs and folklore play even in modern, civilized culture.