[Are we to take away from your letter—as someone who posts on BAB regularly—that you would recommend that the woefully misguided who begin with Steyn, be directed, by the likes of yourself (who patronize Steyn), to a site like this one and its companion ilanamercer.com? We hope so.]

In my defense…

I did say it was not my intention to make too much of Steyn. My use of Jeremiah was of a generic type not as a model. I would no more make of Steyn a Jeremiah than Obama a messiah. Whether Steyn goes with the flow I wouldn’t know, haven’t read him often or long enough to know. As for him coming late to what others have long seen and understood – it’s something I’m willing to overlook for this reason: Steyn’s audience is not those versed in Burke, Kirk, or Mercer. He speaks to a different audience in aphorisms and parables and he calls out the nonsense and insanity where it is otherwise unavailable – the MSM. I don’t know his effect for a fact but I suspect he has moved some to concern and some to action – and good for him if that should be the case.

His latest book “After America” was quite a disappointment. Not only was it lacking in specifics. His smart-ass humor, so good in “America Alone”, seemed to have taken a holiday. I do not recommend this book at all.

He is entertaining. He can hardly be blamed for not being an everyman for everyman out there. He’s not an intellectual peddling theories, -isms, third, fourth, or fifth ways. He makes no claims to John the Baptist status, pointing to or anointing messiahs to lead us out of the wilderness.

It seems it has fallen upon him, or he has taken it upon himself, to be a secular Jeremiah of the secular times (lamentations) and the times to come (prophecies). Steyn, as did Jeremiah, laments on our manifold miseries, our national ‘sins’, our ruin and desolation, warns of our demise, and recalls us to our traditions. That his audience gets him and that he has made them aware is no small thing. [See comment in post.]

It’s not my intention to make too much of Steyn only to note that he is too belittled (a Thomas Jefferson coinage, by some accounts).

[Compassionatefascist, aka Tribly, has been sneaking emails past me, when he can, given there is only one of me spread thin. …]

The real subsidies to the “big six” banks were the total additional line of credit of 480 billion (no more than that was loaned at any one time) and the 13 billion of extra retained earnings made possible by below market interest charged on that line of credit.

The fascist fraudulent Fed engaged in theft through inflation of the fiat currency supply and the crony socialist banksters were in receipt of stolen goods. All that was made possible by the criminal gang in Washington who rely on the ignorance of citizenry they claim to be protecting. The arguments against these alarming crimes are sound enough without using technically true and scary big but ultimately non-relevant numbers as the referenced article does.

Those loans allowed the banks to remain solvent and pay bonuses to the undeserving employees who made the bad decisions that got them into that mess. The stockholders in those banks didn’t take the loss that their bad investment should have required. And, those loans added 13 billion to the “big six” bank’s capital through the extra margin they made as a consequence of the below market interest the Fed charged.

I’m outraged by this theft by the Fed on behalf of the “big six”. The Fed took billions from all of us fiat currency holders and gave it to the “big six” using the weapon of inflation of the fiat currency supply and eventual consequent devaluation of the dollar.