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• I meant to link to this Wall Street Journal piece last time but unaccountably neglected to do so: "Business Donors Bypass McCain," by Brody Mullins. Editor's intro: "Democrats Rake In Cash from Industry; Catch-Up for GOP."
Barack Obama's success in raising money from established corporations is particularly striking. We are supposed to believe, of course, that the Imam is getting all his money from small-fry donors on the Internet and that he takes nothing from "Washington lobbyists." Since no one else seemed to be covering the story, I'd almost started to wonder whether CounterPunch's Holly Martens was making everything up about Obama's Wall Street support. Sorry, Miss Martens.
A parting thought: Even though he's a pol and therefore a professional liar, Obama may be telling the truth about not being financed by "lobbyists." He seems to be taking the big cash directly from the regime's employers. And an employer doesn't need to "lobby" his gardener to mow the lawn.
April 30, 2008
• This story may strike you as fairly routine, but I think its very routineness makes it all the more dismaying: "Petition seeks to remove Denton Confederate statue," by Debbie Denmon of WFAA-TV in Texas. Just think of the historical diseducation involved in making this sort of thing possible.
April 30, 2008
• I get impatient with myself when I react to this kind of story with shock and indignation: "From Chief Prosecutor to Critic at Guantanamo," by Josh White of the Washington Post. I shouldn't have to remind myself that government is organized crime — on a scale dwarfing the Sicilian and the Russian and all the other mafias — and that the criminality and corruption of the Bushites horrifies even other members of the political-criminal class.
April 30, 2008
• In March, senior editor Ronn Neff wrote this for our "Stop and think" section:
If millions of acres worldwide are converted from growing food to growing corn for ethanol, is it not a virtual certainty that at some point we shall hear the Left screaming that there are famines and people dying from hunger because of the West's insatiable demand for — or "addiction to" — ethanol?TLD is grateful to Comrade President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela for stepping up and confirming Mr. Neff's expectations: "Chavez calls ethanol production 'crime'" (AP brief). Mr. Neff notes that Comrade Chavez is an oil czar, so he may have concerns more pressing than the "world food crisis." In any event, I'd be happy if my fellow Americanos understood that the Yankee Empire's ethanol subsidies are indeed a crime.In what sense, then, can ethanol be said to be "sustainable"?
April 30, 2008
• At his Pro Libertate blog, one of my favorite writers on freedom and justice offers an account of the state's assault on the polygamists in Texas: "The Real Cult Menace (Part One): 'Waco' in Slow Motion," by Will Grigg. A taste: "It's obvious that a heavily armed cult possessed of a deluded sense of mission would be a public menace. Indeed, we are ruled by just such people."
April 30, 2008
• Must-Read Alert. I somehow missed this Robert Higgs piece when the Mises folk posted it in October: "The Song That Is Irresistible: How the State Leads People to Their Own Destruction." It's from a speech he gave at the Mises Institute's 25th anniversary celebration. It contains so many good observations that I hate to pick out just one, but here's one of the best: "The mass belief in the general beneficence of democracy represents a kind of Stockholm syndrome writ large."
April 11, 2008
• But I'm not finished praising Higgs. This essay at the Rockwell site qualifies for "must-read" status, too: "Truncating the Antecedents: How Americans Have Been Misled about World
War II." I myself have written a little something, a time or two, about how the amnesiac (and miseducated) American mind is incapable of understanding that in history one thing is connected to another and that, in some cases, it is not too bold to argue that one thing leads to another. But my poor efforts pale before those of historian Higgs.
A sample: "If anyone deserves to be recognized as the war's 'winner,' that person is Stalin. Somehow this fact has never seemed to me to fit comfortably into a characterization of this horrible conflict as the 'Good War.' Perhaps I'm just unduly squeamish."
April 11, 2008
• Sheldon Richman, another of my favorite writers on liberty, lands another hard blow on our adversaries in this piece at FEE: "Statecraft Is Not Soulcraft."
The Rev. Michelle Obama has uttered obnoxiousities about "our souls" in "this nation," and Richman responds: "I don't want my soul being diagnosed — much less fixed — by the government or 'society.' I suspect I am not alone here. Politician, heal thyself and leave the rest of us alone." But as you'll discover, old Bombs Away is the main target of Richman's heavy ordnance.
April 11, 2008
• Writing at allAfrica.com, Angelo Izamawe reports: "U.S. Army Set to Recruit Citizens." Ugandan citizens, that is. When senior editor Ronn Neff tipped me to this one, he commented: "Of course — because that's what empires do."
April 11, 2008
• The story here lies not in the fact that this Obama delegate resigned but that she was actually ticketed for what she said: "Obama delegate resigns after remark" (Associated Press, no byline). The state's "disorderly conduct" dodge around its guarantees of free expression has always been dangerous, but now we're starting to see its full potential for tyranny.
Though this account should frighten all of us, I can't help but feel some good old Schadenfreude at the fact that Red Guard censorship has stung — a Red Guardess! (Get a load of that progressive, multiracial last name.)
April 11, 2008
• From the Left: Gary Brecher provides some perspective on the Empire's latest famous victory, in this posting at AlterNet: "How the U.S. Just Got Schooled by a 'Rag-Tag' Neighborhood Army in Iraq." (Warning: this piece contains a bit of gratuitous obscenity.)
April 11, 2008
• With some folks, you just can't win. Actually, though, we'd better let the fascists and socialists responsible for the anti-redlining interventions of the '90s handle this one: "The largest hate crime in history," by Harry C. Alford at The Louisiana Weekly. It is certainly true that most poor blacks do not benefit, overall, from leviathan's turnings and twistings. Beware government geeks bearing gifts.
April 11, 2008
• Dept. of You Can't Make This Stuff Up. Thanks to BBC News, we learn: "Danes sorry for Viking invasion." Editor's intro: "The Danish government has expressed regret over the Viking invasion of Ireland more than 1,000 years ago." The apology was directed at the Irish.
No doubt the looming Mohammedans will be impressed by the strength of the West as they see the white girlymen of Europe weepily apologizing to one another.
It is nice about the boat, though.
April 11, 2008
• Dept. of Get Them Out Now! — and May No Child Be Left Behind. At the Washington Post: "For Little Children, Grown-Up Labels As Sexual Harassers," by Brigid Schulte. Reflect: this state-school craziness has gotten so bad that even the Washington Post is running stories on it!
April 11, 2008
• A history lesson for voting addicts. This is an old item, from 2005, but we've just tumbled to it. At the Portland Independent Media Center, "zorro" posted what he says is an excerpt from Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and on the basis of the content I see no reason to doubt it: "Rigged Elections in Vietnam, Nixon-Lodge Style."
The rubber hits the road, here, in the quote attributed to Henry Cabot Lodge beginning, "You've got a gentleman in the White House right now...." It's bad enough voting for pols if the elections are honest. What level of sap-hood does a voter descend to if they're rigged?
By the way, the Gen. Edward Lansdale referred to here has been implicated by Fletcher Prouty in a certain de-election held in Dallas, on
November 22, 1963.
March 29, 2008
• Speaking of history, here we go again. This is from the International Herald Tribune: "U.S. teens stumped by history survey," by Sam Dillon.
The students' performance on the Hitler question makes me wonder how far today's nitwits have actually fallen, because I still vividly remember an incident from my world-history class in high school, in 1965. It was a mixed class, including both sophomores and juniors, and we had been studying World
War II. I was a sophomore, ruminating in my dweebish way on the movements of armored units in the Battle of Kursk. The teacher asked a girl — an eleventh-grader whom I had not previously tagged as a space cadet — whether she could tell him who Hitler was. After an agonizing pause, the answer came in a hesitant little voice: "A ... Russian general?"Nevertheless, Dillon's report does have a distinctly modern flavor about it, as you will see when you get to the questions that the lads and lassies did the best with.
March 29, 2008
• Warning: This news from the Baltimore Sun may sicken you, especially if you're an old debater who played by the rules. The TLDer who tipped me to the story — himself an old debater — invited me to read it and then tell him whether there is any possibility that the fix wasn't in:
"Towson U. debaters take national championship," by Nick MadiganSubhead: "First African-American duo to win title are grads of city high schools."I don't know just how much corruption has riddled American society solely because of the fantasy of racial egalitarianism, but it probably makes LBJ-style electoral corruption look like spitting on the sidewalk.
March 29, 2008
• I've been waiting impatiently for The American Conservative to post these pieces from its
March 10 issue:— Robert Bryce: "Oil for War"March 29, 2008The title is a nifty turnaround, isn't it? Editor's intro: "After invading one of the most petroleum-rich countries on Earth, the U.S. military is running on empty."
— Steve Sailer: "Is Brown the New Black?" Subtitle: "Assimilating Latinos into the politics of victimhood."
The biggest chuckle I derived from Sailer has to do with the accordions and trumpets. And the most interesting serious nugget was the mention of those precious street smarts.
• I think race realists in both the statist and anti-statist camps will value this column by Fred Reed, writing from Mexico:
"Scoping Out Pepe: Why We Should Get It Right, But Won't"A taste: "While gringos and Mexicans live next to each other here in amity, they do not mix. They can't. A retired executive from Boeing has nothing in common with a man with a fourth-grade education who will never read a book in his life."
March 29, 2008
• At the Independent Institute, Robert Higgs takes on the Central Government's investigation of Major League Baseball, which meddling he accurately describes as both harebrained and unconstitutional; and he offers a reminder about who the biggest liars in this foolish spectacle really are.
"There's a Time and a Place for a Beanball"March 29, 2008
• I just hate it when warchick Ann Coulter writes a column that's a mandatory linker. Well, here we go again: "Throw Grandma under the Bus" (Yahoo! News). I don't buy everything Coulter says here, but she is right on target in showing how Obama has dishonored his grandmother for "express[ing] the same feelings about passing black men on the street that Jesse Jackson has." Honor, once discarded, is not easily regained. Even if he weren't so preachy, Obama would still be a disgusting man.
March 20, 2008
• This piece by Dana Milbank at the Washington Post strikes me as a remarkably frank (or at least frank-appearing) piece for an Establishment journalist: "The Audacity of Chutzpah." It deals with Obama's Jewish problem.
March 20, 2008
• I direct your attention to an article on gunowner-control that is unusually restrained and well-balanced, given the fact that it's at AlterNet: "The Coming Showdown on Gun Control." It's by Rhonda Brownstein of (gulp) the Southern Poverty Law Center, but hold on. It's actually worth reading. A taste: "The one point on which experts agree is that the Supreme Court's ruling in District of Columbia
v. Heller may be the most important decision on gun control in our nation's history." We need to keep our eye on this case.Brownstein mentions the importance the civil-disarmers accord to the phrase, "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State...." in the Second Amendment. Constitutionalists usually leap into a discussion of how the militia in olden times was actually the "people in arms," quite different from the modern National Guard; but I've always taken another tack, pointing out that the quoted portion is just a subordinate phrase. Our constitutional permission to bear arms would remain intact even if the amendment had started off, "An invasion from Mars, being considered imminent...."
I won't belabor the point that, whatever the wording of constitutional permissions, those permissions do not define our natural rights or equal liberty.
Modine Herbey comments. Every time the disarmament of the people is in the news, we ought to point out to our "progressive" friends that the poisonous wretches behind it want to disarm women threatened with murder and rape. They already have disarmed millions. Such trolls have no place in a civilized society.March 20, 2008
• I've had to employ my coinage "transparodistic" so many times now that I'm afraid it has about lost its punch. But I don't know how else to characterize the incident reported here: "Public Reading — a Hate Crime," by Richard Spencer at the blog for Taki's Magazine.
In tipping me to this piece, Ronn Neff observed, "Presumably, this means that eventually we will not be allowed to read any of Roger Devlin's articles in public."
I can testify from personal experience that, even before the cultural Bolsheviks imposed their thought control, public reading was already considered somewhat incorrect in this book-wary country.
March 20, 2008
• At The American Conservative, Scott McConnell attempts to peek behind the curtain: "Obama's Israel Test: Is the lobby losing its grip?" Obama's relationship with the Big Jews, Likudnik and otherwise, is something we need to keep investigating as the campaign wears on. It may change, in one direction or another. We have yet to see what the impact of the Jeremiah Wright fracas will be.
While his piece is well worth reading, McConnell seems unaware of the extent to which the Dark Suits are financing Obama.
March 17, 2008
• The fall of Eliot Spitzer continues to interest me. In my initial writing on the subject, I may have underestimated the offense Spitzer gave to the higher circles when, in 2005, he threatened John Whitehead. I should have recalled how senior a Dark Suit Whitehead was. In Dark Suits and Red Guards (1996) I referred to Whitehead as one of the investment-banking Wise Men who have served presidents as triple-digit-IQ advisors. Whitehead, a Goldman Sachs veteran, had been a deputy secretary of state for President Reagan as well as chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. In December 2005, Whitehead wrote this account of Spitzer's threat for Wall Street Journal Online: "Scary."
Something very interesting then happened. According to this unusually credible-sounding account of higher-circle plotting, when Spitzer began his run for governor he went hat in hand to Dark Suit titan Felix Rohatyn and apologized: "Putting on the Spitz: Eliot's Brain Trust," by Jason Horowitz at the New York Observer (August 6, 2006).
I don't know — and I doubt I'll ever know — what connection all of this had to Spitzer's eventual fall, but I am confident of one thing: while the Dark Suits may forgive, they never forget. One could speculate that even if the Suits didn't decide to knife Spitzer because of his smart mouth, they deliberately refrained from lifting a finger to save him when the weight, and smelliness, of his baggage threatened to become public knowledge.
It's true that if the Suits knew about Spitzer's baggage, it would have rendered him more controllable for as long as it remained unknown by us little people. But there's always another suitable pol in line, toting his own secret baggage. And chances are that that next pol will know to keep a civil tongue in his head.
Here's a more recent piece about Spitzer's fate, by John Cloud at Time.com: "Was Spitzer Destined to Fall?" Be sure to catch the anecdote about the Monopoly game. It's priceless — and so, so revealing.
March 17, 2008
• And now for today's screamer, courtesy of the AP: "Ala. building can't shake swastika shape," by Jay Reeves. I always knew all those Methodists were Nazis, didn't you? But there is a serious point to be made: the people raising this ruckus apparently feel that they're in no danger of exposing themselves to public ridicule.
And they're probably right.
March 17, 2008
• David T. Wright has tipped me to a story about the attack on California home-schoolers that is superior to the one I featured last time. This one is found at the San Francisco Chronicle, and one way in which it is superior is its inclusion of this classic quote from one of the Red Judges: "A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism, and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare."
"Homeschoolers' setback sends shock waves through state," by Bob Egelko and Jill TuckerThose who believe that totalitarian premises have infected the public mind only recently should take note that, according to the reporters, the judge was "quoting from a 1961 case on a similar issue."
March 11, 2008
• I was tipped to this one by senior editor Ronn Neff, who asked, "Where is Ayn Rand when you need her?"
"Minorities, poor get 'highly gifted' lift," by Jeremy P. Meyer, in the Denver PostEditor's intro: "A new [Denver Public Schools] system awards some kids an extra boost to make things more equitable." This kind of "equity" is, of course, one of the evil madnesses from which home-schooling parents are struggling to rescue their children.
March 11, 2008
• Another kudos goes to Mr. Neff for the tip to this AP piece: "Number of Hate Groups Rising, Report Finds" (no byline). Editor's intro: "Report Links Anti-Immigrant Sentiment to Rise in Hate Crimes." You get one guess about which "watchdog group" produced this report.
Mr. Neff would direct your attention to the funding figures reported in the latter part of the article. With respect to the anecdote reported at the very end, he also thinks it would have been interesting to know just what the "Hispanic man" said to the white woman.
For my part, I invite you to meditate on this rather dazzling irony: one of the groups endorsing SPLC's latest exercise in defamation is none other than La Raza — The Race! The AP blandly describes it as "a major Latino group." And so it goes, here in Bizarro World.
March 11, 2008
• Huzzah for Fred Reed! — who mounts a slashing assault on the pretenses of Duh-MOCK-risy in this piece at the Rockwell site: "Where the People Don't Rule."
March 11, 2008
• Reed's piece is a good lead-in to this one, by Sheldon Richman at FEE: "Are the Voters Qualified to Pick a President?" You can guess his answer, but that doesn't mean you should delay reading this essay, which is yet another in a long line of winners by Sheldon.
One of the libertarian classics he recommends, as an antidote to economic ignorance, is by the late Leonard Read, founder of FEE. I recently discovered a link to that essay, which I mean to award a permanent place on our main links page. But for now, this link will serve: "I, Pencil."
March 11, 2008
• At the Washington Post, Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz report that "The Iraq War Will Cost Us $3 Trillion, and Much More." You'll have to read past some endorsement of domestic socialism here, of course. (I have purloined this pick from a Future of Freedom alert.)
March 11, 2008
• Late-breaking news from the People's Republic of Alta California: "Ruling seen as a threat to many home-schooling families," by Seema Mehta and Mitchell Landsberg of the Los Angeles Times. Editor's intro: "State appellate court says those who teach children in private must have a credential." Apparently, if the Red Judges' decree is implemented, laws and regulations hitherto languishing in neglect will be enforced.
I find one possible consolation here: Even more white Westerners may now flee the Third World Communist hell hole that California is becoming. We would have to hope, though, that the refugees could find new homes that were more defensible against our rapidly multiplying adversaries.
March 6, 2008
• The editor's intro for this Dennis Dale piece at The American Conservative is, "The problem with partisanship: not enough of it." As one who believes that "bipartisanship" is just another word for collusion, I find that formulation congenial.
"In Search of Dear Leader"Dale deals largely with Michael Bloomberg's latest flirting with the presidential race, and now for the second time (by my count) Bloomberg has retreated from running. But Dale's analysis remains highly pertinent: "The Bloomberg effort suggests that our elites do not see the outsized power of the presidency and the direction of its policies as problems requiring any remedy other than the installation of a more capable sovereign." Ah, yes, we just need to elect good people, and then all will be well.
March 6, 2008
• Banana Republic Watch. The bigger and more powerful a state gets, the more it must depend on positive law, i.e., fake law. And the deeper the corruption of its "justice" system will become.
At CounterPunch, Paul Craig Roberts shows how it's done: "It Does Happen in America: The Political Trial of Don Siegelman."
March 6, 2008
• Dept. of No Spit, Sherlock. Kudos to Greg Toppo of USA Today for passing along this astonishing and unforeseen revelation: "Teens losing touch with common cultural and historical references." Actually, I'm pleasantly surprised to see how high the percentage is of less-than-total nitwits.
March 6, 2008
• You'll find some good entertainment on this page at Snopes.com: "I Have a WHAT?"
This has to do with a couple of placards displayed during a Martin Luther King Day, Jr. demonstration, or ritual, or something, in 2007; and the misspellings thereon. According to the accompanying commentary, a claim has circulated to the effect that the signs were actually displayed at an event promoting literacy, and the misspellings were deliberate. That turns out to be — sorry for the technical terminology, here — a lie.
March 6, 2008
• I usually don't link to pages that give you access to only the first paragraph of a piece and then demand that you register in order to see more, but I think it's worth doing this time. The gravamen is contained in the title and in the lead.
"Author's faked Holocaust memoir sparks concerns about consequences," by Penny SchwartzI think we can all agree that those "concerns" are understandable.
March 6, 2008
• Another thing I usually don't do, here in the Off-site department, is link to 10-year-old columns; but the Sobran's site has recently featured a piece by Joe from April 1998, and I can hardly do less, in view of all the bone-rattling that has emanated over the years from the closets of Hillary and McCain, and my assumption that some Obamite skeletons, too, are in need of desperate concealment: "Blackmail in Politics."
Comment by Henry Gallagher Fields: I don't expect anyone to successfully blackmail Hillary. Anyone who tried to use a skeleton in her closet would probably end up as a skeleton in a cornfield.March 6, 2008
• Jeff Tucker pens yet another piece at Mises that is both frisky and powerful in its attack on the totalitarian mentality: "Rain, Rain, Go Away."
He cites a movement on the Left that I was unaware of, linking to an article on it at Beliefnet. Here's a direct link: "Groups Hope to Make Bottled Water a Moral Issue," by Rebecca U. Cho. As they say, you can't make this stuff up. And as I say, it's just transparodistic.
March 6, 2008
• I'm headlining today's off-site picks with this grand-slam homer by Sheldon Richman at FEE: "The Crazy Arithmetic of Voting." It may save my having to gin up yet another anti-voting piece of my own during this year's electoral ceremonies. On the other hand, I may not be able to restrain myself.
February 16, 2008
• Though it was posted in November, and I really should have linked to it before this, it's not too late to alert you to these needle-sharp observations by Richman about the war criminal whom the Republicans apparently are going to nominate for emperor: "Woodstock May Have Saved Sen. McCain's Life." If I have any objection to this commentary, posted at Future of Freedom, it's that Richman is too kind to the raving thug.
February 16, 2008
• It's been a while since I've linked to a piece by Justin Raimondo over at Antiwar.com. Now it's time to redress that. A mailing from FFF has alerted me to this highly significant column of his, and I recommend it most highly: "The Rise of the Imperial Class." Editor's intro: "McCain is their avatar, and war is their mother's milk."
A taste: "While the civilian economy is shrinking, the military sector is expanding — and, if either of the eventual major party candidates have their way, the military expenditures will balloon. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are pledged to an even bigger U.S. military. It's good for business, if your business is war or war-related, and it's good for votes — especially the votes, active support, and political contributions of the growing group of Americans whose livelihoods, and claim to some sort of social status, depend on the continuation of our foreign policy of perpetual war."
February 16, 2008
• A tip o' the green eyeshade goes to senior editor Ronn Neff for letting me know about this one: "Moms passed AIDS virus to kids by pre-chewing their food," by Mike Stobbe of the Associated Press. My initial reaction: Wait ... They ... what, now? It isn't exclusively a Dark World phenomenon, according to Stobbe, who writes, "Three such cases were reported in the United States from 1993-2004, government scientists said...." Three cases then; three thousand, no doubt, to come.
February 16, 2008
• Save money — just use Western culture! Mr. Neff also alerted me to this AP piece by Robert Barr: "U.K. Campaign Targets Kid Repellents." Mr. Neff commented, "What a terrible waste of money, when all they had to do was play classical music."
Seriously, in the past some shopkeepers have played classical music in order to repel culturally deranged young savages. But isn't it a shame that those who have the best hearing won't listen to actual music?
February 16, 2008
• The campaign to suppress Kevin MacDonald and his work goes on, according to this February 7 piece by Andrew Smith in the Daily 49er (Cal State Long Beach):
"Psychology department to issue statement on professor's controversial literature"Editor's intro: "Staff and faculty are worried that psychology professor Kevin MacDonald's work has anti-Semitic and racist overtones."Without devoting an entire afternoon to the search, I tried to find something a little more recent but failed. The 49er, in particular, hasn't updated the story in nine days. I'd be grateful to anyone who could tip me to more-recent developments. We all need to track this.
February 16, 2008
• As the correspondent who alerted me to this controversy pointed out, leftist anticulture types are always "shocked! shocked!" when they discover that some don't agree with their party line:
"Sharia law row: Archbishop is in shock as he faces demands to quit and criticism from Lord Carey" (The Evening Standard; no byline)This Williams character, who for the moment is Archbishop of Canterbury, has achieved what I had thought was impossible — provoked a vigorous pro-Christian, pro-freedom reaction from within the Church of England!
February 16, 2008
• Dept. of Utopians in Action.
— Forgive me, but I just love this kind of thing:
"Study: Ethanol Worse for Climate than Gasoline," by Richard Harris at NPRNaturally this is written from a left-wing point of view and reflects the usual Global Warming obsession. What upsets me the most about ethanol fascism is what the subsidies are doing to livestock farmers and food prices for ordinary people.— Why, how is it possible that our benevolent and all-knowing Big Brother didn't foresee this?
"Low-water-use toilets might be too effective," by Tony Davis of the Arizona Daily StarFolk who believe that the state can successfully plan an entire economy and society, right down to toilet level, must be awfully low-flow, mentally. But some of the people who are actually doing the planning, and the tyrannizing, aren't low-flow utopian fools at all. They've got their grubby mitts locked around a faucet that gushes power, pelf, and privilege. You could even say that they're flushed with success. But now I've gone and over-metaphorized.
February 16, 2008
• Challenging the assertions of Clive Hamilton, an Australian "green socialist," Peter Saunders shows "Why Capitalism is Good for the Soul" in this piece at the Centre for Independent Studies.
A sample: "When I was a university teacher, I frequently encountered students who argued just as Clive does. We are too materialistic, they told me, we don't need all these possessions, we should stop the capitalist machine and devote our energies to better and higher pursuits. But whenever I asked them at what point in history they thought the machine should have been turned off, they would invariably reply, 'now!'"
In other words, not before now.
I can think of some American paleos who might profit from reading this piece.
February 6, 2008
• At FEE, Sheldon Richman provides analysis — incisive and highly readable as always — of the "stimulus" alchemy that our rulers are attempting to practice:
"Where Free-Market Economists Go Wrong"Thanks to Richman, we see again how radically people's ordinary thinking, which they must depend on to get through their day, differs from the magical variety of cognition that I call "statish thinking."
February 6, 2008
• Dept. of Myth. If we're talking myths, what seems to be a myth is the popular notion that people in Airstrip One are ever so much better educated than we Yanks. According to this brief dispatch from Agence France-Presse, "Quarter of Brits think Churchill was myth: poll."
In this context, the "Churchill myth" is unfortunately not what Churchill revisionists such as John Charmley, David Irving, or libertarian Ralph Raico might have in mind.
A special note. Until today I had not realized that Prof. Raico's Churchill series, "Rethinking Churchill," had been posted to the Net. Kudos to the Rockwell site! I heartily encourage you to hit the link above and read away.February 6, 2008
• This sort of dodge is probably inevitable in a society infested by the Thought Police and its slimy little friends: "In the U.S. south, is Canadian a new racial slur?," by Graeme Hamilton at the National Post, of Canada. Some acquaintances of mine have been known to use another euphemism to refer to a certain ethnic force that is often, shall we say, contextually unmentionable in polite company. (Sorry, I'm not going to spill those particular beans.)
People who have lived under other totalitarian systems will understand how careful one must be with one's language in today's imperial multicultural metropole.
Reader commentary on the National Post article may be found at American Renaissance News.February 6, 2008
• When it comes to noninterventionism, the imperialists just don't get it. Or at least they pretend not to. At the Independent Institute, Robert Higgs expertly lays waste to a whole assortment of canards, misrepresentations, non sequiturs, and simple idiocies: "Libertarian Foreign Policy in the Hobbesian Crosshairs: A Reply to Bret Stephens."
January 30, 2008
• And when it comes to expert layings-waste, the Mises Institute's Jeff Tucker plays in the same league as Higgs, as he demonstrates in this admirable essay: "How Free Is the 'Free Market'?" Tucker targets the Consensus World's persistent assumption, or claimed assumption, that we live under laissez-faire capitalism, and I know what he means when he writes that it "makes anyone versed in economic history crazy with frustration." His explanation of how the sheeple can fall for it has merit, but in my opinion it is not the whole story.
January 30, 2008
• Jacob Heilbrunn's revealing new book, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, provokes nutritious comment in two forums:
— By Philip Weiss at The American Conservative: "The Long Fuse to the Iraq War"
— By Jim Lobe at Inter Press Service: "Neocons Shaken, but Not Deterred"
January 30, 2008
• At Chronicles, Thomas Fleming hints that he is feeling more and more like a foreigner in his own country — just as I am — taking as his text the System's mourning over the death of the actor Heath Ledger: "Strangers in a Strange Land."
A taste: "The least depressing conclusion I draw from all the coverage of Britney, Lindsay, OJ, and now Heath is that elections mean nothing. People who care who the next American Idol will be or who will win Dancing with the Stars could not be trusted to elect the board members of the Parks Department, much less the temporary dictator of an empire of
300 million people." And yet they are so trusted. And they just won't stop voting. And, needless to say, the System labors relentlessly to cozen, or bribe, even more of them into voting.
I add two peripheral comments. Ledger's "ex-fiancée" Michelle Williams, with whom he produced an illegitimate child, has served the System's homosexualist agenda just as her mate did, though neither was actually a homosexual. Williams appeared not only in Ledger's homosexual-cowboy movie but also in an HBO homosexualist film, "If These Walls Could Talk 2," in which she played a lesbian. Naturally it was that performance that first garnered praise, from the System's scribblers, for Williams as a serious actress.
Now to Fleming's mention of "watching Charlie Gibson recite his ungrammatical and mispronounced platitudes on the nation's loss." Have you noticed, as I have, that the tele-heads are losing such command of grammar as they ever had, and, indeed, the ability even to construct an unscrambled sentence? The other day a young MSNBC commentator described her lack of engagement in the Hillary-Barack fight thus: "I don't have a dog in that pony." The malapropism is hilarious, inspiring at least two exotic images; but what are we coming to, when the tele-heads no longer have a grasp of the basic clichés?
January 30, 2008
• The totalitarians whom we permit to dwell among us will use any excuse to violate property rights and any excuse to terrorize ordinary peaceful people, as this entry at the Washington Post blog illustrates: "Preservation Police: Lock the Doors!," by Marc Fisher. The atrocity here occurred in 2003, but Fisher reports that the Central Government courts have now upbraided this particular department of the D.C. KGB. As I always exclaim in such contexts, So that's all right, then! Now Americans can continue forcibly exporting Freedom and Democracy, U.S. style, in good conscience.
January 30, 2008
• In this Los Angeles Times piece I find confirmation of something I had already started to suspect: "Girl, you'll be a woman sooner than expected," by Susan Brink. Editor's intro: "Puberty is arriving ever younger in American females — 8 is no longer considered abnormal."
Senior editor Ronn Neff comments, "The story mostly attributes this earlier maturation to better health and diet. But don't Third World girls (the ones featured on the Travel Channel, for instance) also become ready to produce babies fairly young? I don't get it." As for me, though I'm interested in exploring the effect of culture on biology, for now I restrict myself to observing: Strange days; strange days indeed.
January 30, 2008
• Though I fear that the Ron Paul campaign — and especially the success of its fund-raising — is a disaster for the freedom community, Dr. Paul certainly has many of the right enemies. At VDare, the muscular Steve Sailer swings his claymore at them, to good effect: "Marty Peretz vs. Ron Paul. Kids (and 'Mentor') vs. Grown-Ups."
Here's the original New Republic piece by James Kirchick: "Angry White Man." Subhead: "The bigoted past of Ron Paul."
At the American Conservative, W. James Antle III recognizes Paul's enemies but also identifies an inherent problem involving some of Dr. Paul's friends, as well as the candidate's own inherent identity problem: "The Paleocon Dilemma ... / The Ron Paul campaign illustrates the choices facing the antiwar Right."
Comments by senior editor Ronn Neff:
I like this observation by Antle: "Left-Right coalitions are ... problematic. They almost never end up being dominated by the Right." That is a point that even Murray Rothbard never picked up on.January 16, 2008In any case, I think that certain minarchist libertarians who thought the Paul campaign was going to publicize libertarianism and give implicit libertarians a standard to rally around are now faced with the fact that, hereafter, any libertarians who are not "debonaire" compromisers (e.g., in the ambit of the Cato Institute or Reason magazine) will have to defend themselves against gibes such as, "So, are you a racist like Ron Paul?" or "Are you an anti-Semite like Ron Paul?"
The great irony is that the MSM have taken Ron Paul and have defined him away from plain-Jane minarchist libertarianism. Indeed, except for his constitutionalism, Ron Paul's libertarianism is defined by ... TLD.
•
January 11 was a very chilly day for me, and I'm not talking about the weather. I'd just seen the news conference by KGB Chairman Mikhail Chertoff on the national ID card when I came across this piece by James Bovard at CounterPunch: "Stomping freedom: Inside the Martial Law Act of 2006." We haven't sufficiently taken account of that atrocity here at TLD. This link helps redress that.Also at CounterPunch I find this account, by Paul Craig Roberts, of a more recent triumph of bipartisanship: "Thinking for Yourself Is Now a Crime." Supertitle: "Jane Harman and Liberty's Lost Light."
It seems beyond question now that the Bush regime — assisted by its "loyal opposition" — has placed itself in the top rank of those that have demolished "civil" liberty, alongside the Lincoln, Wilson, and F.D. Roosevelt regimes, leaving less-focused competitors such as the Nixon gang far behind.
January 16, 2008
• A dispatch at Expatica.com informs us of a declaration by an eminent Eurobureaucrat: "Cultural tolerance 'is not enough,' says EU culture commissioner." Editor's intro: "Europeans should create an 'inter-cultural society' in which interaction across cultural boundaries is the norm, the European Union's top cultural official said."
We'll have to see how assiduously the Mohammedans pursue this policy after they finish taking over Europe. (The piece is dated
January 4, 2007, but I think that's a mistake.)
January 16, 2008
• They do know how to get my goat: According to this Reuter dispatch by Robin Emmott, "Catholics play vital role in helping migrants to U.S."
A priest quoted by Emmott declares, "Migration is a human right." Indeed it is! But I can only wish the good father had a more consistent view of rights. For I have a right to keep my money from migrating, via the IRS, into the hands of the Catholic Church as it pursues the antiwhite demographic revolution in this country. Everything the Church does on this front is subject to being considered criminal as long as it accepts loot from the government.
January 16, 2008
• In the context of District of Columbia v. Heller, the Anti-Defamation League offers strange new support for old-line constitutionalists skeptical of the 14th Amendment: "ADL to Supreme Court: States Should Regulate Firearms." The ADL's principal goal, of course, is to keep "guns out of the hands of 'violent bigots.'" Alas, one fears that the ADL will not pursue its radical federalism once the current case is settled.
January 16, 2008
• The telescreen reported the other night that the California Authorities have now "tabled" this scheme, so I guess there's nothing to worry about: "State proposes to take control of home temps," by Bradley J. Fikes of the North County Times.
Actually, I'm sure the Red Guards and their Dark Suit employers aren't distressed overmuch by the public uproar provoked by this totalitarian idea. They have an unending supply of such ideas in the pipeline, and the sheeple will buy most of them if they're properly advertised. No doubt this plan to have the state seize control of Californians' thermostats will be untabled as soon as its proponents link it to some tax break, mortgage relief, or other inducement.
January 16, 2008
• The import of this AlterNet piece by Stephen Zunes won't come as a surprise to you, but Zunes does provide some valuable chapter-and-verse from the history of Hillary: "Hillary Clinton Can't Be Trusted on Iraq."
Hillary strikes me as a good example of a "moderate" Zionist whose room for maneuver was constricted after 9/11, when the Bush Likudniks started their push for war on behalf of Israel. No doubt her difficulty reflects that of her "moderate" Zionist backers, who didn't envision a Likudnik war against Iraq before 9/11 but now have to go along in order to get along. (Moderate, in the present context, is very much a relative term. In 1997, for instance, one had to recognize the Clintons as radically Zionist.)
Zunes does not mention Israel or Zionism in his piece, which will come as no surprise to Steve Sniegoski.
December 19, 2007
• From BBC News we learn of yet another calamity in the Dark Continent: "Tanzania fear over albino killing." Editor's intro: "Tanzania's Albino Society has accused the government of turning a blind eye to the killing of albinos, after four deaths in the past three months." As is the case with all other unhappy developments in Africa, we may be sure that it is white Westerners who are really guilty of these crimes.
December 19, 2007
• When charlatans meet ... At Chronicles, Thomas Fleming posts an amusing assessment of "The Oprah Obama Show."
December 19, 2007
• Also at Chronicles is an especially thoughtful piece by Prof. Clyde Wilson. A Christian friend of mine fears the eventual Muslimization of America, but I have always pooh-poohed the possibility, insisting that Muslimization is a European problem and that other cultural infections pose a threat to America that is much more exigent and dangerous. On the basis of Prof. Wilson's observations I now wonder whether I should reconsider:
"A Muslim America?"December 19, 2007
• Given the déclassé cultural choices of so many middle-class white youths, I have long assumed that middle-class black youths must experience special difficulty in turning out recognizably bourgeois. Now the Brookings Institution offers an analysis of Census figures suggesting that black youngsters with a middle-class background are more likely than their white counterparts to subside economically: "Economic Mobility of Black and White Families."
December 19, 2007
• This Agence France-Presse dispatch falls under the head of "No spit, Sherlock!" — if you know what I mean — but it's still good to have it on the record: "U.S. minorities don't trust each other." Actually, this part was news to me: "All three [colored] ethnic groups viewed white Americans in a more favorable light than they did members of another minority."
December 19, 2007
• Run! Mammoth dung! Just when I thought I'd heard the Goreites' entire repertoire of scare stories, Steve Sniegoski tipped me to this one: "Mammoth dung, prehistoric goo may speed warming," by Dmitry Solovyov at Reuters.
Now the funny thing is that, heretofore, the Greens have always had good things to say about methane as an alternative fuel. I thought we might be getting into some analysis of that when I saw this claim by one of Solovyov's sources: "The deposits of organic matter in these soils are so gigantic that they dwarf global oil reserves." But the piece doesn't mention the possibility of capturing the (notional) methane as a resource. Do I smell some anti-economic premises bubbling under the permafrost?
December 19, 2007
• This piece by Paolo Caruso at Information Clearinghouse is written from a left-wing point of view, but it reminds me of what I wrote toward the end of Dark Suits and Red Guards about the uses of disorder: "The U.S. Middle Class Meets the Bloods and the Crips." Outer Party members, bad things can happen to you in ultra-violent Lumpen Land if you don't obey!
By the way, it is not necessary to postulate a cabal of cackling investment bankers, engineering every detail of this dynamic from the 53rd floor of Rockefeller Center. Certain political-cultural-economic phenomena emerge naturally from certain political-cultural-economic systems. General management is all that is necessary to make most things fall into place for our masters.
December 19, 2007
• I save the best for last, and I hereby award it a rave review. Jeff Tucker spent some time in court recently, and now, on the Mises site, he mashes a pie into the face of our minarchist cousins who defend a statized justice industry: "Victims on Trial: The Everyday Business of Courts." We must never forget that the state is a criminal gang, and this report by friend Tucker is a spicy and powerful aide-mémoire.
December 19, 2007
• Last time in this space I took note of the latest frightening Census figures, and now Steve Sailer at VDare frightens us anew by examining some recent numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics: "Diversity Is Strength! It's Also ... 2006's Demographic Death Spiral."
A taste: "The demographic good news for a number of years had been that black fertility was finally headed toward racial equality with white fertility. (You are in favor of racial equality, aren't you?)
".... But, ominously, the black 'total fertility rate' reversed its decline in 2006."
December 14, 2007
• Senior editor Ronn Neff prefaced his tip to this one by writing, "The fruit of free speech is Auschwitz." I thought it was just a sardonic gem, but as it turns out, it's a close paraphrase of something quoted in this Washington Post dispatch: "White Nationalist Group's Meeting Prompts Protest," by Fredrick Kunkle. Editor's intro: "Jewish Defense Organization Urges Herndon Hotel to Halt 'Neo-Nazi' Conference in February."
The demonic gathering referred to is the American Renaissance Conference.
You've got to stick with the story to the end to see how the Jewish Defense Organization — which is the adversarial outfit here — has been characterized, along with what group did the characterizing.
Information on the AR Conference appears here, and if you wish to register on line, you'll find a link leading you to the proper page.
December 14, 2007
• The irrepressible Fred Reed is scheduled to speak at the AR Conference, and as one of my correspondents observes, he seems to be warming up for it in this piece: "Learning from Diversity." It involves a racial horror story from Baltimore that will probably not inspire an investigative series on CNN or a propaganda movie on Showtime.
The subtitle is "The Case for Expatriation," although Reed never actually makes that case in the article. Still, I have to point out that Ronn Neff made the definitive case against the dictatorial policy of repatriation in his 1997 classic, "Repatriating the West."
December 14, 2007
• Writing at the Occidental Observer, Robert Griffin offers "Advice to Racially Conscious Whites under Fire." This subject calls for much more examination, and in fact we need to do more with it here at TLD.
I find this especially compelling: "Put your mind and body in the best condition possible. If you have some physical or mental issue, habit, addiction, whatever it is, that is getting in your way, get it out of your way, starting now. " Such things will get indeed in our way; moreover, any skeletons in our closet afford our prowling adversaries an easy means of destroying us while at the same time (under today's climate of illogic) discrediting our arguments.
December 14, 2007
• At Future of Freedom, Sheldon Richman writes trenchantly of "Iran's Phantom Nukes," and along the way he asks an excellent question: "Why is it dangerous for Iranians to know how to make a nuclear weapon (assuming they do) but not Americans?" Of course the ingenious Prof. Chimp would reply, "Because them's Evildoers, and us Amurkins is Good-doers!"
December 14, 2007
• From the Left, AlterNet's Jeremy Brecher and Brendan L. Smith ask: "Have Pelosi and Dem Leaders Been Complicit in Bush's Torture Policy Since 2002?" Beyond the effects of general moral degradation, a crucial factor here is the power of Zionism among "respectable" Democrat pols.
December 14, 2007
• Here's some more analysis, also from the Left, on complicity, or collusion, or — as the Goody Two-shoes types like to call it — civic-minded bipartisanship: "Cave Dwellers: More Democratic Deceit on War and Torture," by Chris Floyd at Atlantic Free Press. I relish the spectacle of all these leftists' savaging the Democracy.
December 14, 2007
• The moral slide continues, as demonstrated in this piece by Tanya Caldwell at the Orlando Sentinel: "Breaking rules necessary to get ahead, teens say." Editor's intro: "Some condone lying, cheating, and violence in an ethics survey." Fans and defenders of the Zeitgeist will reply that a large proportion of teens have always cheated and acted up, it was just underreported in the past, nothing has changed, yadda yadda yadda. But even if that is true, did youngsters in the past freely admit and try to justify their dishonesty and savagery?
December 14, 2007
• Meanwhile the Red Guards, ever tireless, continue their progressive, humanitarian, compassionate work: "Students Learn Lessons of Physical Challenges," by Nicole Barbano of the Staunton, Va., News Leader.
Unintentional humor and unintentional truth emerge side by side in this quote from one of the school's consultants: "The activities we're doing here are meant to make learning difficult."
Modine Herbey comments: It's nice to know there's at least one state-run middle school out there all of whose students can find their country on a world map and name the sides that fought in the Revolutionary War. No Jaywalkers there! Otherwise the teachers wouldn't be spending time on this frippery ... right?December 14, 2007
• At The New York Times we find an account by Mark Mazzetti of the astonishing news involving Iran: "U.S. Says Iran Ended Atomic Arms Work." Ended it, indeed, in 2003! In his news conference today, the Wee Emperor confirmed that none of his intelligence wallahs or aides explained the findings to him or suggested that he lower the volume when he was promoting terror about World War III a few weeks ago. That is further evidence that the little man is not among the top power players in his own administration.
Even more remarkably, Bush said that the revelations make no difference to his policy — "my opinion hasn't changed" — which indicates that, so far as he is concerned, the justifications for that policy are nonfalsifiable. But I suppose we already knew that.
Stop Press. The media are now reporting that Bush was briefed about the import of the new information at an early point.December 4, 2007It appears, then, that the wretched man just lied.
Of course, lying and being a pawn of powerful liars are in no way contradictory.
• In a cover article for The American Conservative, Scott McConnell assesses the impact of Mearsheimer and Walt's book: "The Lobby Strikes Back." Editor's intro: "A new book riles the AIPAC crowd, but makes it to the bestseller list anyway."
McConnell engages unnecessarily in some water-muddying midway through, and of course he doesn't mention the vast research accomplished by our own Steve Sniegoski long before we ever heard from Mearsheimer and Walt; but this piece is still very much worth reading.
December 4, 2007
• It goes on, and on and on it goes: "9-year old suspended for 'hate crime,'" by Robert Anglen at the Arizona Republic. Get a load of the mandatory public confession — very progressive, comrades! But not so progressive is the state official's telling the boy that it was OK for him to harbor thoughtcrime so long as he kept it inside his skull — that telling is in itself thoughtcrime! The official must surely lose her membership in the Outer Party, and forthwith.
Raising this black (or brown) comedy to the level of art is the name of the children's prison where it all happened: Abraham Lincoln Traditional School.
December 4, 2007
• On the Left, AlterNet's Joshua Holland writes "In Defense of Ron Paul." Editor's intro: "Ron Paul's a wingnut, yes, but he's an anti-empire, anti-war wingnut who doesn't believe the president should be king."
Along the way, Holland claims that Dr. Paul has "introduced four bills, including a Constitutional amendment, defining human life as beginning with conception." I thought that was worth checking out, because if it were true it would undermine Dr. Paul's old-time federalism; so I consulted an aide to Dr. Paul who has worked for him for 11 years. The aide replied: "Maybe [he did] in the seventies, but the only pro-life legislation Ron has introduced since I have been working for him restricts federal jurisdiction over abortion and forbids federal funding of abortion."
December 4, 2007
• As I have mentioned before, the scandal of purported libertarians' supporting Bush's War is one of the reasons I have pretty much dropped the word libertarian. Writing at EconLog, Bryan Caplan asks: "Why Did So Many Libertarians Support the War?" and offers some possible answers.
Some of the blog responses to the piece are more interesting than others, but here's one that illustrates the ahistorical approach of most responders: "My attitude is that wars are like hurricanes, or other massive destructions of physical and human resources, they happen with a certain regularity, and one adjusts one's behavior accordingly." A freeman's proper education — including some study of the political and imperial history of the past hundred years, at least — would correct the view that wars just happen.
If I were still inclined to mount a stout defense of the term libertarian, I'd award a full three cheers to the blog-responder who wrote: "No libertarians supported the Iraq war."
December 4, 2007
• No doubt you've heard something about the latest Census figures involving immigration. Investor's Business Daily posts this account: "Wave of Illegals Turns into Tsunami" (no byline). Whatever our beliefs about state power and the proper response to the deluge of colored aliens, we ought to be aware of the statistics making the rounds, even if they're untrue. I don't automatically lend credence to government number-crunching.
I do find these figures all too believable: "Nationwide,
40 percent of all households headed by illegal aliens use one or more major welfare programs. The share in cash programs is actually quite small — less than1 percent. But33 percent of all illegal households get food aid, and another27 percent are on Medicaid." And: "States together spend$20 billion a year on illegals' welfare costs alone."Now, in light of those revelations — assuming they're true — should those worried about the colored deluge demand an increase in government power or a decrease in government power?
December 4, 2007
• That pro-market freak of the mainstream media, John Stossel, proposes some alternatives to the Coercive Global Refrigeration agenda in this posting at TheAtlasphere.com: "Free Market Solutions to Global Warming." Stossel's observations are more moderate than anything you're likely to see here at TLD, but it's nice to know that someone else is in the same book, if not on exactly the same page.
December 4, 2007
• Two urban Democratesses are sponsoring a bill that is not finding favor among hunters in the Buckeye state: "Proposal Will Grab Guns from Young Adults and Youth in Ohio" (U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance). Apparently the Democratesses think their proposal — which would restrict the freedom of hunters of ages 18-20 — has something to do with suppressing urban crime, as well as gun accidents. Sometimes leftists and other totalitarians, whirling dizzily within the confines of their own obsessions, just appear ridiculous when they grab for more power. I hope this is one of those times.
December 4, 2007
• Anti-fascists, awaken! Courtesy of NY Protest Calendar, we learn: "White supremacist conference to be held in DC area in February!" Yes, fellow fraternal fighters, "in 2008, neo-nazis and racist bigots will be planning more racist terror at the American Renaissance Conference." More racist terror! Initially I thought this might be anti-leftist satire, but it's for real.
It's funny, but when anyone who's not a free-market absolutist uses the term anti-fascist, you know you're dealing with Commies. These Commies say: "In the spirit of the anti-fascists that [sic] came before us, let's shut these racists down by any means necessary." I plan to attend, and I'm not too worried. At the last AR conference I attended, the hotel efficiently banned protesters from its property, and that property included acres of parking lot. I never even saw any of the freedom-hating goofballs.
Actual information on the conference appears here, and if you wish to register on line, you'll find a link leading you to the proper page.
If you attend, please look me up and buy me a drink.
December 4, 2007
• Neocon or no neocon, Mark Steyn has penned another tremendously interesting piece — he's good when he sticks to culture or demographics — and I recommend it most highly. It prods me to get back to work on my long-envisioned article about today's Aesthetic of Ugliness:
"Twenty years ago today"It's posted at The New Criterion.
November 27, 2007
• I like gut-punching last lines. At Future of Freedom, Bart Frazier delivers a winner, winding up a short but resonant cri de coeur: "Heading Towards the Police State."
November 27, 2007
• TLDers may not agree with the folks at VDare about the solutions, but the latter do have a talent for pointing out the problems:
— As we know, the Red Guards never sleep, they never rest, and they never keep their filthy mitts off America's vulnerable youngsters for long. John Derbyshire writes: "Diversity Boot Camp Closed at the University of Delaware — but Big Brother Is Still Going Strong." A taste: "Untold thousands of people have their careers invested in this gibberish: not only outright babbling lunatics ... but bland, cheerful middle-class careerists — pod people, whose nervous systems have been taken over by alien intelligences."November 27, 2007— Stay away! Stay the hell away! would be my advice, but the Civil Rights Authorities won't let us: "Penicillin Is No Match for Immigration," by Edwin S. Rubenstein.
• Writing at the Washington Times, Donald Lambro reports some survey results that remind us that the ruling class is by no means a Republican preserve: "Study: Democrats the party of the rich."
I don't find the business about the "wealthiest congressional districts" as significant as the mentions of Democrat-subsidizing bankers and hedge-fund managers. Again I express my wish that G. William Domhoff would produce an updated version of his 1970s thought-provoker Fat Cats and Democrats. (The Dark Suits, of course, lined up pretty solidly behind Bill Clinton in his 1996 campaign against the zombie Baaab Dooole.)
November 27, 2007
• Freedom of expression goes global ... errr ... ahhh ...
"Vanity Fair sued over neo-Nazi interview" (Jerusalem Post, no byline)November 27, 2007
• Courtesy of Medical News Today we learn: "Study Finds White Children More Positive Toward Blacks after Learning about Racism." However — and I know this will shock you — black children, similarly educated, do not display more-positive attitudes toward whites.
As you read, remember that this piece appears at a site called Medical News Today, in a department called Children's Health News. Do you not hear the specter of the Soviet psychiatric clinic rattling its chains?
November 27, 2007
• There's another "zero tolerance" movement afoot among our supervisors, according to the Denver Post's David Harsanyi, writing at Reason: "Prohibition Returns! / Teetotaling do-gooders attack your right to drink." Make sure to catch the confessions forthcoming from the founder of MADD.
November 21, 2007
• The Noose News:
— At the The Detroit News, Paul Egan writes: "NAACP: Feds must toughen noose law." In alerting me to this, senior editor Ronn Neff wrote: "I didn't know there were any noose laws to be toughened!" Neither did I. Once again, things are moving too fast for us to keep up with.November 21, 2007— At MyFox Kansas City.com, Tess Koppelman writes: "Students Suspended for Talking about Nooses" — and if you haven't already, you should now start feeling the noose tightening around your neck.
• Speaking of free expression here in the Yankee Colossus, that great exporter of Duh-MOCK-risy to the world, I offer this op-ed by Ralph E. Shaffer and R. William Robinson of the Baltimore Sun: "Here come the thought police." It deals with the so-called Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, which is zooming through Congress.
Any time a story starts out, "With overwhelming bipartisan support ...," you know you'd better head for the hills. And any time you see "Joe Lieberman" and "Homeland Security" in the same sentence, you know you'd better run.
Oh, never mind. According to the story, the bill "clearly states that no measure to prevent homegrown terrorism should violate 'constitutional rights, civil rights or civil liberties.'" So that's all right, then. However, David T. Wright, who tipped me to this piece, does have one little question: "Is freedom from waterboarding a constitutional right, a civil right, or a civil liberty?"
November 21, 2007
• Paulists, watch out! The fire-rimmed Eye of Sauron has turned in your direction, according to this dispatch from the Jewish Telegraph Agency: "ADL taking concerns to Ron Paul" (no byline). But the Paul apparat may take comfort in the fact that at least one Establishment-designated Hate Site, TLD, will not be endorsing him. (We endorse no one for the post of Emperor.)
November 21, 2007
• Dept. of True Crime. A rash of armed robberies broke out in Idaho on
November 15, as a band of violent criminals made away with considerable quantities of real money on behalf of a giant counterfeiting ring based in Washington, D.C. The thugs also attacked a business in Evansville, Ind."FBI raids seize dies, records in CdA [Coeur d'Alene] / Operation targets 'Liberty Dollar,'" by Bill Morlin at SpokesmanReview.comI have to sound another alert for the Paulists, as Morlin writes: "The organization was about to begin selling and distributing 'Ron Paul' dollars."
November 21, 2007
• This is speculation, but it seems to be of the informed sort: "What World War III May Look Like," by Philip Giraldi at Antiwar.com. Former CIA officer Giraldi writes, "It might be useful to imagine just how war with Iran could play out if the Iranians don't roll over and surrender at the first whiff of grapeshot," and he goes right ahead and imagines.
November 21, 2007
• Paul Tibbets, Jr., a very important American indeed, died
November 1. At The Independent Institute, Anthony Gregory assesses this particular member of the "Greatest Generation," beginning with a comparison of how he died with how his victims died: "The Man Who Bombed Hiroshima."Gregory is not as radical as I on the question of Tibbets, but his account is still very much worth reading.
November 15, 2007
• It is imperative, for our rulers, that their subjects not be able to think economically. At the Mises site, Jeff Tucker manfully attempts to break through the ignorance, and we, at least, will benefit from his keen analysis: "The Other Side of the Transaction."
November 15, 2007
• At American Renaissance, Jared Taylor shows admirable patience in discussing the latest "achievement gap" smudge-out, convening this week in Sacramento: "Race/IQ Explanation Gap at 'Achievement Gap Summit.' " But what he writes still requires me to attach a Thoughtcrime Alert, of course. (The piece was originally posted at VDare.)
November 15, 2007
• Ronn Neff, who alerted me to this Chicago Tribune piece, wrote that he knew I'd appreciate its even-handed tone. I certainly do: "Illegal abroad, hate Web sites thrive here," by Russell Working. Subtitle: "1st Amendment lets fringe groups use U.S. sites to spread their message around the world."
Like other mainstream writers, Working is careful to concentrate on sites that can be accused of endorsing violence; but there's no doubt that if U.S. laws and practices were as democratic, fraternal, and peaceloving as those of Progressive Europe and Canada, The Last Ditch itself would be long gone, and Neff and I, along with the other TLDers, would be residing behind the wire. You might be, too. (I give us about five years.)
November 15, 2007
• Chutzpah unbound, on both sides: "U.S. to purchase $700m worth of arms from Israel," by Yitzhak Benhorin. Posted at YnetNews.
November 15, 2007
• Well, of course not! At the Jerusalem Post: "Israel won't be included in new genocide probes," by Hilary Leila Krieger.
November 15, 2007
• At Mises, David Gordon writes a useful review of Glenn Greenwald's A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency:
"The Manichean President"My own opinion is that, whatever Bush's ideology may truly be, his handlers and controllers have exploited it for their own very different purposes. And that they are phlegmatically shrug-prone about whether his presidency has been "destroyed."
November 11, 2007
• Meanwhile, William Astore of Tomdispatch.com argues that "The Bush Administration Plans to Blame You for Iraq." Astore persuasively draws some historical parallels. (The piece is at AlterNet.)
November 11, 2007
• I'm always nervous about linking to anything at the Weekly Standard — that fortress of our Adversary — but P.J. O'Rourke unfortunately writes for it, and this piece of his must not be missed: "Generation Vex: The (really) long goodbye of the Baby Boomers."
November 11, 2007
• At the Village Voice, Nat Hentoff surveys the current condition of the United State's "separation of powers," which, as we know, is always highly touted as an impenetrable bulwark of our liberties:
"Bush's Man Mukasey: Will the Supreme Court also bow low to the president?"One wonders whether the religious rightists who are so concerned about a Republican president's appointing "good judges" care whether those judges will wind up ratifying torture and unconstitutional imprisonment. Perhaps someone should ask Pat Robertson, who has just endorsed Rudy Giuliani.Hentoff identifies Mukasey as Giuliani's "close friend and, until his nomination, his adviser on constitutional matters during Giuliani's presidential campaign." Another friend of Mukasey is the Democrat senator from New York, Charles Schumer, who, it is fair to say, lacks a sterling record of opposing torture.
November 8, 2007
• The TLD stalwart who tipped me to this piece from the Kennebec (Maine) Journal Morning Sentinel observed along the way that it's "yet one more step toward making 'hate' a crime." Indeed:
"Man charged with hate crime," by Doug HarlowNovember 8, 2007
• At VDare, Nicholas Stix offers an extensive assessment of a certain black-on-white atrocity that Minitrue has smudged out: "The Knoxville Horror: Crime, Race, the Media, and 'Anti-Racism.' " Stix takes a little detour into Jewish matters, but it's probably necessary, given the awkward involvement, in the protests, of Alex ("No Jews, just right") Linder.
November 8, 2007
• Karen Kwiatkowski, honorable fugitive from the Imperial Colossus and unterrified interviewer of our own Steve Sniegoski, is on fire: "What the Neocons Need." Her fierce blaze glows at the Rockwell site.
November 3, 2007
• Justin Raimondo isn't exactly lukewarm in this piece at Antiwar.com: "'Invade and Bomb With Hillary and Rahm' / Why war with Iran is likely." He cites the stomach-churning results of the Zogby Poll, according to which
"52 percent of the American people favor attacking Iran to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons."
November 3, 2007
• I am advised that the Red Guard assault that is the subject of this package has now been abandoned — in this particular guise, and for the time being. So that's all right, then! No more worries!
"University of Delaware Requires Students to Undergo Ideological Reeducation" (news release from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education)Perhaps I'd just been anticipating the nightmare, but I'd assumed that such programs had long since been cemented in at all dorms at all state universities. And probably some "private" ones, too. (Let's keep checking.)"Brave New Schools / University to students: 'All whites are racist,' " by Bob Unruh at WorldNetDaily.com. Editor's intro: "Mandatory program 'treats' politically incorrect attitudes."
November 3, 2007
• Speaking of things that are Brave and New in the Huxleyite sense, here's a dispatch by Peter Fimrite of the San Francisco Chronicle that may have you reaching for the Soma: "Children detach from natural world as they explore the virtual one."
November 3, 2007
• Tipping me to this piece in the Daily Mail (of London), senior editor Ronn Neff quoted Pythonite Graham Chapman's tagline: "This bit has just gotten silly!" Yep:
"'Racism' protests over the high street hanging [of] black mannequins," by Luke SalkeldUnlike Jack Woltz in "The Godfather," the Nut Left and Colored Hystericon can afford to be made to look ridiculous. Unfortunately, that says more about us than it does about them.
November 3, 2007
• Too much bleakness? Well, this one's just for fun, y'all (or youse, as the case may be): "Yankee or Dixie?" — a dialect quiz.
November 3, 2007
• At VDare, Steve Sailer smites the O'Briens who seek to kill our mind: "James D. Watson: Broken by the PC Inquisition, Betrayed by the Righteous Right." One thing I like about Sailer's writing is the variety of citations and analogies he brings to bear. However, the business at the very end, about Galileo and the effect of his troubles on science in Italy, is balderdash. That said, there's no doubt that we are on the threshold of our own Dark Age.
October 29, 2007
• The drive to define Hate Crime as a stand-alone offense, European style, won a frightening victory in New York state last week: "New York Considers Anti-Noose Law," by Michael Gormley. This is an AP dispatch posted at AOL.com.
October 29, 2007
• Let's call this the Evil Schools Package:
— "Is That 4-Year-Old Really a Sex Offender?," by Yvonne Bynoe at the Washington Post. My opinion, as an out-of-touch Old American: A 4-year-old should not be in school in the first place.America's parents must abandon the state schools as if fleeing a forest fire — and may no child be left behind!— "Boy Suspended for Watergun Drawing." Posted at 11alive.com; no byline.
— "Maine middle school to offer birth control" (Associated Press, found at CNN.com). Apparently this is one of those thoroughly modern state institutions that's part school and part medical clinic. Now we see where that innovation of the welfare state can lead.
— This one is from 2005, but I first heard about it last week: "Explicit pamphlets displayed at school / Health center regrets mistake," by Joanna Weiss of the Boston Globe.
Another view of the "mistake": "Group Caught Giving Kids Graphic Homosexual Booklet," by Robert Knight at Concerned Women for America.
— Here's a similar horror story that's a little more current: "Pro-Family Groups to Appeal Against Md. Pro-Gay Sex Ed Curriculum," by Doug Huntington of the Christian Post.
October 29, 2007
• Meanwhile, columnist Mark Morford of SFGate.com writes: "American kids, dumber than dirt / Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history." Morford is obviously a liberal, which makes this piece even more interesting. Wait 'til you get to the part about using the rulers.
October 29, 2007
• Have you heard of Chalmers Johnson? Writing at The Nation, Stephen Holmes offers an overview of his thought, from Chalmers's third book on the U.S. Empire, Nemesis. Holmes's piece is "Apocalypse Now?"
As you read this excerpt, keep in mind the March of the Jaywalkers as described by columnist Morford: "[Johnson] almost begs his American readers to imagine what it would be like to have foreign soldiers stationed on bases inside the United States, molesting teenage American girls and running over American pedestrians while driving drunk. That anyone is listening is doubtful, however, which is why Johnson, in the end, lodges no more hope in American citizens than in the Congress they periodically elect."
October 29, 2007
• At the Rockwell site, the man himself takes an anti-statist look at the California conflagrations: "Land Socialism: Playing With Fire." Along the way, for benefit of those of us who are still pro-human, Rockwell formulates a fundamental law of reality: "We thrive and rule nature, or nature rules and eats us alive."
October 29, 2007
• It's really happening. Not yet in America, but in Airstrip One: "UK Police Visit Priest to Discuss Views on Radical Muslims," by Kevin McCandless of the Cybercast News Service. But don't get too upset. The Thought Police didn't actually haul the good father away; they just had a polite chat with him. So freedom of expression is unimpaired!
October 20, 2007
• This is happening here, thanks to Arnold Schwarzenegger, working hand in hand with the Red Guards of the California legislature to terminate what little remains of Western culture: "'Mom' and 'Dad' banished by California." This is an unbylined exclusive at WorldNetDaily. Subtitle: "Schwarzenegger signs law outlawing terms perceived as negative to 'gays.'"
Fans of fairy tales will delight in this latest triumph of decentralist American federalism, which creates a diverse assortment of "laboratories of freedom" across our land. As the article explains, "Analysts have warned that schools across the nation will be impacted by the decision, since textbook publishers must cater to their largest purchaser, which often is California, and they will be unlikely to go to the expense of having a separate edition for other states."
Meanwhile, millions upon millions of white Westerners continue to consign their children to the state schools.
October 20, 2007
• I never expect a high-toned lit'ry type to emit much in the way of good sense, so I find this piece by Doris Lessing remarkable: "Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer." It's at the New York Times.
A taste: "The phrase political correctness was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it."
October 20, 2007
• Despite her "anti-Semitism" crisis, Ann Coulter has not yet been shipped off to re-education camp, as this piece proves: "Another Liberal Noose-ance." Now here's the stunner: it is still possible to get such articles published by the timorous Human Events! Could it be that the editorial board automatically reacts in favor of a piece when they see that it beats up on "liberals"?
October 20, 2007
• At American Renaissance, Jared Taylor weighs in to good effect on the latest disgusting shriekfest over racial differences in intelligence: "Watson Recants."
"Watson," of course, is Dr. James Watson, pioneer investigator of DNA and Nobel Prize winner. As Taylor notes, Watson has been suspended from his administrative responsibilities at the lab where he works. He's an old man now, and we should be grateful that he did not get himself into Negro trouble when he was still young and working hard to achieve scientific breakthroughs. But the example stands for young scientists who may find themselves pursuing actual truth in contradiction to Official Truth. Taylor imagines them asking: "If they made one of the most famous names in science grovel, what will they do to me?" Darkness continues to fall — right on schedule.
At the Independent: "As he arrives in Britain, DNA pioneer breaks his silence on racism row," by Steve Connor, Cahal Milmo, and Amol Rajan.October 20, 2007
• Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand's masterpiece, Sheldon Richman posts this exquisitely focused essay at FEE: "Atlas Shrugged and the Corporate State."
He writes: "What sometimes goes unappreciated by readers of the novel is the extent to which Rand targeted business people as potentially the most egregious saboteurs of freedom."
October 15, 2007
• At the Jerusalem Post, Nathan Burstein assesses a recent article of concern: "Jewish power dominates at 'Vanity Fair.'"
Here's the VF article itself: "The Vanity Fair 100: The 2007 New Establishment." Vanity Fair in fact understates Jewish power: the only members of its top 20 (24, actually) who may fairly be described as high-powered investment or banking types are Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group and Warren Buffett (a non-Jew, of course). Yet investment bankers, a disproportionately Jewish group, are the very presidium of the ruling class.
Near the end of his article, Burstein produces an authentic startler, referring to "a traditional Jewish aversion to political power." That cries out for an intelligible context.
October 15, 2007
• Winning this month's Nifty Title Award (for pieces not resident at TLD) is this highly dangerous article at the American Conservative by Philip Weiss: "Surge Protectors." Subtitle: "The mixed motives behind the Freedom's Watch ad campaign."
October 15, 2007
• Writing at the Telegraph, Boris Johnson asks: "How can we let children live in fear?" Apparently Airstrip One's civil-disarmament decrees, which might make Stalin blush, are somehow failing to protect peaceloving people. Rappers have now been enlisted to help with the propaganda:
And then it was the climax of the show, and a hip-hop group called Green Jade came on, and started singing a very catchy number all about what it was like to be caught in the crossfire. It was called Brah-kah-kah, and on the instructions of Wizdom, the lead singer, we all started waving peace signs in the air."Peace signs" — even more stuff you just can't make up! Those poor Brits.I wonder why it is that modern people, who are supposed to be so sophisticated and so much smarter than their dumbhead ancestors, are so insensible to idiom. The primitive brutality of the rappers' idiom is far more palpable and powerful than any "progressive" lyrics the "singers" may condescend to chant.
October 15, 2007
• Mean girls, redux. Four coeds at Ball State University, right here in my Hoosier homeland, have fully absorbed the new Zeitgeist: "Women Accused of Beating Victim, Bragging on Web" (posted at TheIndyChannel.com, no byline). Their photos, aired by the telescreen, reveal three of the pugilistic young ladies to be white and one to be a light-skinned Negress. (A fifth woman took part in the assault but is not a Ball State student.) All of the coeds are respectable-looking, which I suppose demonstrates the worth of first impressions. Be careful out there.
October 15, 2007
• Sheldon Richman has penned another winner at FEE: "Government Failure." Richman demolishes the always-lurking utopianism of our statist adversaries — their fantastic assumption that government can or will do better than the market. I recommend this one most highly.
October 10, 2007
• Intellectual Ammunition Dept. Antiwar.com has posted a long but illuminating excerpt from Grant F. Smith's Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal:
"Where Did AIPAC Come From?"A sample: "It took millions of dollars of Israeli government and overseas funds and decades of effort to create the public relations, lobbying, and political juggernaut that now dominates in America."
October 10, 2007
• One of the usual suspects has been heard from, and in no uncertain terms, according to this dispatch in the Telegraph by Toby Harnden: "U.S. 'must break Iran and Syria regimes.'" The veteran warmonger, whose name may be familiar to TLD readers, is David Wurmser, "a leading neoconservative who has played a pivotal role in the Bush administration since the
September 11th attacks," and who recently resigned as Dick Cheney's advisor on wrecking the Muslim Middle East and murdering its inhabitants.
October 10, 2007
• I linked to this piece by Jared Taylor in a "Stop and think" installment, but it deserves a place on this page, too: "What Really Really Happened in Jena." It's at American Renaissance.
October 6, 2007
• Isn't it plainer than ever before that the policeman is not your friend? Or as David T. Wright might say, that "You are the Enemy"? At the Rockwell site, Paul Craig Roberts takes on "America's Police Brutality Pandemic," pointing out that "Americans are in far greater danger from their own police forces than they are from foreign terrorists."
October 6, 2007
• To develop the theme, here's a CNN story on the death of a disturbed woman, Carol Ann Gotbaum, at the Phoenix airport, keying on the cops' indifference or incompetence in the face of her husband's desperate attempts to save her: "Husband called airport on day wife died in cell" (no byline). A police flack says that his bumbling thugs are "very upset about what happened."
October 6, 2007
• Writing at CBS News, David Paul Kuhn opines: "Dems Must Woo White Men to Win." Editor's intro: "Flight of White Male Voters Away from Democrats Will Shape 2008 Election."
Whatever your position on the voting mania and the threat of the Cackling Witch, I think you'll find some interesting cultural commentary here, including this:
Today, many white men continue to feel disempowered, distant from liberal mores and unmoored from the stability that their fathers and grandfathers enjoyed. Like others, white men feel controlled by bosses and compelled by fiscal responsibility. They take on thankless work to meet their obligations, and it often creates a sense of compromised manhood.... For many, the definition of being a man has meant surrendering what one wants to do for what one must do. This has long been true. But modern liberalism no longer saw it that way. The hard life was said to be the easy life if one was born white and male.October 6, 2007
• This press release may seem a a bit dated (it's from May), but I was provoked to link to it by a disgustingly damp PSA that Big Pharma is running right now on the telescreen, for the children ... for the CHILDREN!
"PhRMA [sic] Launches National Campaign To Support SCHIP Reauthorization"I cannot think of a better illustration of how Dark Suit and Red Guard agendas converge.
October 6, 2007
• Yet another New Yorker piece by the indefatigable Seymour Hersh is making headlines: "Shifting Targets: The Administration's plan for Iran." Hersh maintains that the new target in Iran is the Revolutionary Guard Corps but that, once again, the glorious victory is to be accomplished through "surgical strikes" carried out by the Imperial air force.
Hersh quotes a "recently retired C.I.A. official" in this wise: "The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through." Have they not, really? I wouldn't be too sure about what the neocons have and have not thought through.
October 2, 2007
• As the TLDer who alerted me to this AP story exclaimed, "Leave it to South Carolina!"
"S.C. leads in single-gender classes," by Seanna AdcoxThe segregated classes are purportedly "tailored to the learning styles of each gender." However, I'm not holding my breath waiting for compassionate progressives, even in South Carolina, to recognize the sharply different "learning styles" (and abilities) of each race.
October 2, 2007
• Sheldon Richman knows how to push my buttons, and here he goes again, this time in a posting at FEE, where he edits The Freeman: "Pundit in Wonderland."
The chief button this time involves the leftist notion that we live in an environment of "stateless laissez-faire capitalism." When it comes to political-economy, the leftists really do live on a different mental planet from the rest of us, don't they?
Immigration-restrictionists will find some of Richman's analysis irritating. So sorry.
October 2, 2007
• I do try to give leftists their due, as demonstrated by my frequent linkings to articles at AlterNet. Here's another one, written by a fellow who, I believe, takes a dim view of what he takes to be "capitalism," but who also makes some ponderable assertions: "The Mega-Lie Called the 'War on Terror': A Masterpiece of Propaganda," by Richard W. Behan.
Cutting across some of the analysis here at TLD is Behan's claim that, at least to some extent, the interventions in both Iraq and Afghanistan were "wars for oil." He writes:
By early February [2001], Vice President Cheney's "Energy Task Force" was at work. Federal agency people were joined by executives and lobbyists from the Enron, Exxon-Mobil, Conoco-Phillips, Shell, and BP America corporations.Finally we see some specific oil companies mentioned in the context of the run-up to the Bush wars. But I'd like to see Behan's sources. And if Behan is reporting accurately, I'd like to know how Big Oil could possibly be so stupid, in encouraging the easily foreseeable wrecking of the oil patch.Soon the task force was poring over detailed maps of the Iraqi oil fields, pipelines, tanker terminals, refineries, and the undeveloped oil exploration blocks.
October 2, 2007
• The conclusions of this piece surprise me, but the writer, IQ investigator and thoughtcriminal J. Philippe Rushton, directly confronts the counterintuitive aspects: "Indians Aren't That Intelligent (on Average)." It's at VDare.
October 2, 2007
• That woman, who may well end up as our first Empress, has now tinkered with her stand on torture, ostensibly after consulting — of all people — retired Imperial generals!
"Hillary flip-flop on torture inspired after meeting generals," by Michael McAuliffMaybe it's just as well she didn't consult Imperial generals who are still on active, and bloody, duty. The piece is at the New York Daily News.
October 2, 2007
• In this American Renaissance piece, Jared Taylor reveals some important details about the Jena circus that I hadn't heard from the MSM, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same were true of you: "What Really Happened in Jena." Especially noteworthy is the nature of the "party" that the victim attended after his stomping by the Negroes.
September 24, 2007
• A characteristic attack on anti-statists ("libertarians") by a conservative writer prompts Anthony Gregory to turn the tables, in this fine essay at the Rockwell site: "The Cultural Contradictions of Statism."
A taste: "Just because we think it immoral and socially destructive to use violence against someone doing something peaceful doesn't mean we have to approve what he does. Drinking three bottles of whiskey a day is legal now. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. Is this really that hard to understand?"
On the basis of my own forty years of frustration with the statist mentality, I answer: Apparently it is that hard.
September 24, 2007
• Gregory's piece serves as a perfect context-setter for this AP story by Matthew Verrinder: "Cities Cracking Down on Saggy Pants." Vanity of vanities! — when giant government at all levels sets out to restore the culture it has done so much to wreck and sets out, as well, to make the leopard change his spots.
September 24, 2007
• This piece at AlterNet is thought-provoking, but it calls for a nuanced introduction. The gist is that the Resident Evil and Grand Theft Auto series of video games involve a good deal of hateful violence against persons of color. Interesting, if true; and if true, it's even more interesting that few adults seem to be aware of it. My idea is that, as justifiable white resistance is driven underground, much of it is likely to become degraded, especially among unparented, diseducated white boys who lack righteous and heroic role-models.
"'Resident Evil: Extinction' Flick Based on Racist Video Game Series," by Roberto LovatoI was surprised to learn that the Grand Theft Auto series has evolved toward celebrating anti-colored violence. My only knowledge of the GTA games is based on some TV coverage I saw a few years ago — both commercials and outraged commentary — but that coverage strongly suggested that the games celebrated savage violence by Negro street trash.
September 24, 2007
• Davidus Petræus: dux aut deus? Egad, judging from the outcry from the warhawk Right in response to criticism of this military bureaucrat and Imperial proconsul, you'd think that he'd once beaten back a mass invasion by twelve-tentacled creatures from Alpha Centauri. But according to this account by Larry Beinhart at AlterNet, his achievements have been decidedly more modest: "Petraeus: A Failure by His Own Standards."
September 21, 2007
• We're hearing soft murmurs about "national service" once again, and I am afflicted by the sick feeling that if we retain a Democrat Congress and acquire a Democrat president in 2008, our masters will be in a good position to implement it. That's because the Dems, unlike the Reps, could keep the focus on emptying bedpans and pushing wheelchairs; and almost everyone is in favor of enslaving some fellow American in order to "help" some other fellow American. Of course at the same time, with GOP support, the Democrats would insert a subsection 98, paragraph 7 allowing a teenager to enlist in the Imperial military instead. There'd be no military draft to provoke a firestorm of resistance, because choosing the military option would be "voluntary"!
Anti-slavery stalwart Sheldon Richman expresses himself forcefully on the subject, in this piece at Future of Freedom: "Do Americans Owe Service to the Nation?"
September 21, 2007
• Another anti-slavery stalwart — writing at Mises — recounts some soft but relentless murmuring he and his wife had to endure before they could even escape from the hospital with their newborn son: "Uncle Sam Wants Me ... and My Children," by Joe Spoor.
September 21, 2007
• I'm always prepared to think the worst of government programs, such as war, but I'm still striving to be skeptical of the figure reported in this article at Common Dreams: "Independent Poll Confirms Iraqi Death Toll Over a Million" (no byline). At least we can hope and pray it isn't so.
September 21, 2007
• Prompted by the recent skirmish between Ron Paul and the war-fool Mike Huckabee, Future of Freedom's Jacob Hornberger has taken up his analytical knife to excellent effect: "Pro-Democracy Killing in Iraq." Hornberger takes seriously Huckabee's analogy between state action and normal human action — and demolishes it in its own terms. Good job.
September 16, 2007
• "I know they're maniacal adventurers," I keep telling my correspondents, "but surely they wouldn't dare start another war!" At CounterPunch, Jean Bricmont begs to differ: "When Wishful Thinking Replaces Resistance: Why Bush Can Get Away with Attacking Iran."
It is refreshing to see this declaration in an article at a left-wing site: "There is no reason whatsoever to think that Big Oil wants the war, as opposed to the Zionists. In fact, Big Oil is probably very much opposed to the war, but it is as unable to stop it as the rest of us."
September 16, 2007
• All right, all right, maybe I need to take my skepticism on this matter back to the drawing board: "U.S. Officials Begin Crafting Iran Bombing Plan," by James Rosen. Posted at Fox News.
September 16, 2007
• This sort of thing never happened when Gustavus Adolphus was king, by Yimminy: "Muslim ambassadors: 'Sweden needs to change its laws.'" Posted at The Local ("Sweden's news in English"); no byline.
September 16, 2007
• We will punish you if you say that! People on our side of things are used to that threat, as communicated by our supervisors, but now it's CNN's turn, according to this piece at The Forward by Nathan Guttman: "CNN Comes Under Unprecedented Attack."
September 16, 2007
• Robert Higgs presses the fight, in another impressive piece at The Independent Institute: "Another
9/11 — in a Long Series."Higgs writes:
Any symbol of such tremendous evocative potency invites exploitation, and each anniversary of that terrible day brings us an abundance of efforts to place its symbolic power in the service of various exploiters....And he writes:Far more troubling and much more dangerous [than the media's exploitation] is the state's exploitation of
9/11. AlthoughCall me crazy, but I find that to be one chilling insight.9/11 has served as an "open sesame" for the government's seizures of power, revenue, and liberties during the past six years, its potency is waning with the passage of time, and eventually it will no longer measure up as a "daily special" on the government's menu of irresistible dishes.
September 11, 2007
• I doubt this will come as any kind of surprise, but it's still a good idea for us to track the progress of our civilizational enemies. And progressing they are: "More schools offer gay studies classes," by Lisa Leff. (Associated Press; posted at Yahoo! News)
September 11, 2007
• Also tracking our enemies, and quite skillfully, is the unnamed author of this piece at The Paleo Blog: "Government's Brutal Attack on the Family."
He opens: "The decline or degeneration of social and cultural values in society has not happened in a vacuum. This decline has come about part and parcel with the rise of the Almighty Leviathan State."
September 11, 2007
• A long profile of Ron Paul appears in the New York Times Magazine, and whatever the nature of your interest in Dr. Paul, I think you'll find it absorbing: "The Antiwar, Anti-Abortion, Anti-Drug-Enforcement-Administration, Anti-Medicare Candidacy of Dr. Ron Paul," by Christopher Caldwell. I cannot, of course, testify to all of the alleged facts that Caldwell reports.
September 11, 2007
• From the Left: David Cole and Jules Lobel, writers for The Nation, seek to explain "Six Years After
9/11, Why We're Losing the War on Terror." They almost come off sounding like old-style republican constitutionalists! But sincere or not, they offer some worthwhile analysis and evidence. The piece is at AlterNet.
September 11, 2007
• At the Rockwell site, the man himself clobbers the same target I try to hit when I write about statish thinking and the epistemological chaos of statism: "Reality vs. the State," by Lew Rockwell.
September 7, 2007
• In a cover story at The American Conservative, James Kurth explores the implications of a "One-Child Foreign Policy," not only for the Empire but also for other demographically challenged states. Editor's intro: "Lower birth rates will alter both society and strategy." The white collapse is a catastrophe for our civilization, of course, but it also erects some hurdles for imperial strategy.
One part of the discussion I find especially nice deals with Donald Rumsfeld's response to the characteristic strategy of anti-imperial forces — asymmetrical warfare. He simply turned his back on it! At the same time, Kurth notes, the Imperial Army is in no shape to fight a big nation-state such as Iran.
Then there's this: "The Air Force really likes to bomb civilian targets," but nowadays that is "not seen as legitimate by the publics of postmodern societies." One can only hope that these problems are insoluble.
September 7, 2007
• From the Left, AlterNet's Joshua Holland offers perceptive analysis of the listless Democrat majority in Congress: "Democratically Controlled Congress Stands on the Brink of Irrelevance on Iraq."
I've deleted an interesting name from this passage, near the end: "... a debate that Bush — like every imperial-minded U.S. president since ______ _________ — wants desperately to avoid." You may be surprised when you see that name. I was surprised, and as a history-minded pathologist I was also pleased.
September 7, 2007
• It was just under-diagnosed in the bad old days! Bipolar disorder in children, that is, treatment for which multiplied 40-fold from 1994 to 2003, according to this piece by Benedict Carey: "Bipolar Illness Soars as a Diagnosis for the Young."
According to Carey, writing in the New York Times, "Many experts theorize that the jump reflects that doctors are more aggressively applying the diagnosis to children, and not that the incidence of the disorder has increased." Seems we've heard that explanation before. Senior editor Ronn Neff, however, says, "I'm not surprised that diagnoses have soared. Sounds to me as though we're talking about kids who simply have had no proper upbringing.
"What do you expect when you let 3-year-olds run around in restaurants?"
Not to worry, though. More and better drugging will solve this cultural problem just as it has solved so many others.
September 7, 2007
• Years ago I had to chuckle, albeit somewhat uneasily, when an elderly, half-blind uncle of mine secured a drivers-license renewal from a small-town BMV office in another county — one that had the reputation of being, let us say, extraordinarily friendly to the vision-impaired. That highlights the problem John Semmens is trying to get at in this piece at The Independent Institute, in which he proposes that insurance companies license drivers and register vehicles: "On the Road."
Of course, Semmens's plan would amount to only a half-measure, and thus would give rise to its own distortions, so long as the roads themselves remained in the hands of the state. (We'd need to get rid of insurance regulation, too.)
September 7, 2007
• Writing at Mises, Peter Beukelman goes to work, effectively, on a question that I will crudely formulate as, "Will the mestizo avalanche block the arrival of really good robots?"
Beukelman puts the question more soberly: "Does the Minimum Wage Boost Innovation?"
He does provide some frisky reductio ad absurdum, though.
September 7, 2007
• Our Great Teacher lectured us about Vietnam the other day, but Sheldon Richman offers a different lesson: "Iraq and Vietnam." Sample: "What [Bush] didn't learn from Vietnam is this: One good reason for not invading a country is that the invasion itself will create conditions that make leaving problematic." The piece is posted at Future of Freedom.
September 3, 2007
• Even worse for Prof. Chimp, his chittering about Vietnam has attracted the attention of one of today's most brilliant and distinguished anti-statist historians. At the Independent Institute, we find "The Carnage in Iraq — Past, Present, and Future," by Robert Higgs. Higgs does his best to maintain scholarly understatement when he writes: "It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the president's mind cannot accommodate much logic or empirical evidence."
Higgs's latest book is Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy.
September 3, 2007
• At The American Thinker, Thomas Lifson reports on "The Racial Engineering of San Francisco." One wonders what all the affluent white homosexuals in S.F. think about this.
American Renaissance News has posted some snippage from a USA Today article by John Ritter, followed by lively comments from AR readers: "San Francisco Hopes To Reverse Black Flight." (Ritter's full text.)
September 3, 2007
• Now we have P.C. zoology! You can't make this stuff up. Writing at The New Yorker, Ian Parker investigates a primate species that the Cultural Bolsheviks love but that you've probably never heard of: "Swingers." Editor's intro: "Bonobos are celebrated as peace-loving, matriarchal, and sexually liberated. Are they?" This piece is interminable (it is, after all, at The New Yorker), and I certainly didn't read the whole thing; but the first page and last three pages convey the gist.
September 3, 2007
• This piece leads the latest issue of Imprimis, published by Hillsdale College, and I was delighted to find a version of it on line: "Global Warming: Man-Made or Natural?" by S. Fred Singer. You'll find some hot intellectual ammunition here. One aspect of the question that Dr. Singer hits hard is the false claim of scientific consensus about the origin of global warming. "Everybody agrees that ..." — How especially hateful the Left and the whole Power establishment become when they tell that characteristic lie.
September 3, 2007
• It's ideologically incoherent, as you might expect of a piece at Rolling Stone, but you'll still find this a readable and informative ride: "The Great Iraq Swindle / How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury" (no byline). In my view, the loot available to Iraq War contractors has helped sell the neocons' Israelocentric crusade to many politically wired people who sit, shall we say, near the foot of the Big Table run by the ruling class. You always have a better chance of selling an adventure that's disastrous overall if you can make it profitable for somebody.
Here's some supplementary reading that is ideologically coherent, as you might expect of a piece at TLD: "Amid Blackwater, the tip of an iceberg / Privatizing war," by Ronn Neff (April 12, 2004).
August 30, 2007
• Darn those folks at Mises: they keep posting pieces that I just have to link to. Today's pick is William Anderson's "The Party Is Over — Again." Anderson, one of the most readable writers on economics whom I'm aware of, takes on the System's "monetary charade." The implications may be dismal, but Anderson's writing is not.
A taste: "... In one way, the Fed has succeeded (temporarily) in giving us the ultimate Keynesian economy, one in which the U.S. government prints dollars and the Chinese accept them without question." And: "The entire time [the current Bush] administration has been in office, it has given us the 'economy by bubble.'"
August 30, 2007
• At AlterNet, Scott Thill reminds us why we aren't hearing so much these days about the Drug War, per se. The regime has folded it into the Terror War: "Pot Growers Are New Target in 'War on Terror.'" As I noted when I addressed this topic in 2002, totalitarianism is unitary.
August 30, 2007
• Steven Malanga, writing at City Journal, sidesteps the criminal-immigrant aspect of the Newark massacre, but what he does write about is well worth pondering: "City without Fathers / Behind Newark's epidemic violence are its thousands of fatherless children." He writes: "According to 2005 figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, only 32 percent of Newark children are being raised by their parents in a two-adult household."
August 30, 2007
• Better late than never. A while ago I was looking for a straight account of the latest U.S.-Israel arms deal. I've now found one, at BBC News: "U.S. and Israel in $30bn arms deal" (no byline). The Washington gang wanted to provide billions in arms to various Muslim state-gangs, but the only way our gangsters could make it fly was to buy off their peaceloving friends in the world's most important country, big time. I trust we ordinary Americans will enjoy paying for all this nasty business.
August 30, 2007
• A self-hating Jew has gotten his comeuppance, according to this Chicago Tribune dispatch: "DePaul pulls plug on controversial professor / Course cancelled a week before class," by Ron Grossman. The thoughtcriminal here is Norman Finkelstein. (You may be asked to register; it's a pain, but it's free.)
August 30, 2007
• The old question of whether we are really "going the way of Rome" is one I've played with in the past, as you can see from my column of April 2000, "Going the way of Rome ... and going ... and going ..." Now David Weigel tries his hand, in this highly readable essay posted at Reason: "Quo Vadimus? / Looking at Washington, dreaming of Rome."
Like the fellow Weigel confronts here, Atlantic managing editor Cullen Murphy, I, too — upon gazing at monumental Washington — have "been seized with a vision of how the city might appear as a ruin." Well, what is a dream for some is a nightmare for others.
August 27, 2007
• I somehow missed this Mises posting when it first appeared in June, and I'm grateful to the man who has now alerted me to it: "The Student Loan Fiasco: Made in D.C.," by Robert P. Murphy.
The country where I now live differs shockingly from the one where I grew up (no, I haven't moved), and one of the shocking differences is the state-created plague whereby millions of college graduates continue to owe tens of thousands of dollars for their bad, overpriced education, years into their working life. One certain result — which may or may not have been intended — has been to force a higher proportion of graduates into purportedly secure positions as salarymen and cubicle denizens, and thus depress the level of entrepreneurship, risk-taking, innovation, and economic independence below what we would see in a free market.
One lesson we learn again, courtesy of Murphy in this article, is that our "utopians in action" will never cease trying to get their government thing to work right.
August 27, 2007
• Also at Mises is this major, illuminating treatment of the thought of an anti-statist giant: "Albert Jay Nock's Laws of Political Process," by Mark Sunwall. The author is concerned to demonstrate the continuing value of Nock's analysis, despite his apparent marginalization by the rigorous geniuses of the Austrian School.
A sample: "The salient social fact, as Nock saw it, was the use of state power by one or more classes to exploit the rest. This, to him, lay at the heart of modern society's many injustices." I am especially happy to see Sunwall mention Nock's treatment of the great question of the Western lands, which is crucial to understanding America's first ruling class.
Nock's Our Enemy, the State (full text)
August 27, 2007
• Its ideology is restrictionist, of course, seeing as how it resides at VDare, but this review by Steve Sailer will still interest freedom-lovers who take a dim view of the demographic revolution: "Black Scholar's Immigration Anthology Breaks Academic Taboos." Especially interesting to me are the comments on Mexican culture, redistricting, and the black-brown conflict.
August 27, 2007
• At the Wall Street Journal, columnist Jeff Zaslow asks, "Are We Teaching Our Kids To Be Fearful of Men?," and his answer is Yes. Degraded men are proliferating and their inhibitions are collapsing, as our culture disintegrates; and that has naturally produced a backlash, especially on the part of the forces that oppose even honorable men and honorable masculinity. No easy answers here.
August 27, 2007
• I don't know whether Justin Raimondo is right about the trendy aspects here, but the strange piece he criticizes seems actually to have been posted to a non-satirical Website, and that's worth comment. In any case, it's always fun to see Raimondo go to town: "The Outer Limits / The War Party's wackos are indicative of a trend." Raimondo's column is at Antiwar.com.
August 23, 2007
• Anthony Gregory is one of my favorite writers at the Rockwell site, and I think you should not miss this piece of his: "Statism Is Counterintuitive."
"It seems to me," Gregory writes, "that people often forget just how intuitive libertarianism is, once some basic and mostly universal values are embraced consistently." That last phrase is a crucial stipulation.
August 23, 2007
• Getting out of Dodge. At Yahoo News we find this AP story on the ever-more-colorful American West: "Meatpacking remakes rural U.S. towns," by Roxana Hegeman.
A taste: "Dodge City (Kansas) school officials count 23 different languages spoken by immigrant families, though the town is overwhelmingly Latino." And: "Just a decade ago, about
70 percent of Dodge City students were English-speaking whites. Today, that statistic has flipped: about70 percent of the 5,800 students who now attend Dodge City school are Hispanic, with non-Hispanic whites now comprising nearly25 percent."
August 23, 2007
• Also at Yahoo News is this AP dispatch: "One in four read no books last year," by Alan Fram. It's American adults we're talking about here. Actually I was pleasantly surprised to learn that, according to the survey,
73 percent had read a book, but a wise woman of my acquaintance warns me to postpone the celebration until I find out just what it was they read.
August 23, 2007
• A good companion piece for the article above is this one by Victor Davis Hanson, posted at American.com: "Blissfully Uneducated." As you'll probably be able to guess, Hanson is some kind of neocon, but I think he's on to something in denouncing what he calls the "therapeutic curriculum."
August 23, 2007
• At WorldNetDaily, Jesse Lee Peterson, a black clergyman, levels this charge: "Black Americans die while their leaders fiddle." Peterson is writing about the escalating dust-up between blacks and browns in this country. He begins: "Have you heard that black Americans are under attack by Hispanic gangs from coast to coast? If you did hear it, you didn't hear it from a black leader."
August 23, 2007
• At Future of Freedom, Sheldon Richman takes the War Liberals down hard, in "Casual Talk of War." A sample: "We so blithely talk about war in this country. The possible invasion of Pakistan — and let's not forget Iran — is discussed as though it were a Boy Scout project. We never were very good at remembering that in war innocents die."
August 17, 2007
• On the basis of this dispatch at Power and Interest News Report, I conclude that resistance to the U.S. Empire continues to coalesce on the part of some states that have preserved their independence: "S.C.O. Summit Demonstrates Its Growing Cohesion," by Dr. Marcel de Haas.
August 17, 2007
• I'm often disappointed by even the friendliest explanations of the Western achievement because typically the writer relies solely on environmental and cultural factors. With respect to the latter, I always find myself asking, Does a people's ability to develop and sustain a culture really have nothing to do with their biological inheritance? At VDare, Steve Sailer reviews a book that I'm hoping will offer an answer: "A Real Diamond: Michael Hart's Understanding Human History."
August 17, 2007
• Tired of hearing American socialists warble about how wonderful the doctoring is in the Great White North? Writing at City Journal, David Gratzer unmasks "The Ugly Truth about Canadian Health Care," and in so doing unmasks himself as a former med-socialist who's now in recovery. Vale!
August 17, 2007
• The folks at The Economist seem to be mildcat neocons, mostly, but sometimes Brits are willing to deal with touchy subjects a little more boldly than their American counterparts. And the former don't even have the glorious First Amendment to rely on! Here's a provocative Economist piece on one wrinkle of our multicultural socialist utopia: "Where black and brown collide" (no byline). You've got to appreciate the frankness of the editor's intro: "The struggle for political dominance pits natural allies against each other."
August 17, 2007
• Dr. Tomislav Sunic, who in 2003 kindly permitted me to post a version of his piece "Intellectual terrorism," has a book recently published, Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, and he's just sent me the link for its page at Amazon.com. I haven't read the book yet, but I mean to, and I'm pretty confident in recommending it to your attention.
Here's an excerpt of the book's description at Amazon: "Postmodern Americanism, with its abstract theories of multiculturalism and its global desire for world improvement, turned America into a menacing and self-destructive continent that puts not only the survival of America's European heritage at risk, but threatens the heritage of other peoples worldwide as well." Kevin MacDonald wrote the foreword.
August 17, 2007
• Jim Lobe offers us a rare and valuable glimpse of the conflict among our supervisors over the Mideast adventure, in this posting to his blog page at IPS.org: "AEI: Caught Between Its Likudist Heart and Its Corporate Head."
August 12, 2007
• It's time for an update on the demographic revolution, in the form of this AP dispatch found at CNN.com: "Minorities become the majority in 10 percent of U.S. counties." The MSM's characteristic spin on this story, during the past several days, has been that the spread of colored aliens into new territory has prompted even more of that evil and irrational "discrimination" on the part of white Americans.
August 12, 2007
• At Spiegel Online, Siegesmund von Ilsemann provides a useful overview: "The Checkered History of American Weapons Deals." Editor's intro: "The United States has upset its European allies with plans for a massive arms deal with several governments in the Middle East. Washington has been down this road before."
When the arms deal was first announced, I'm sure I heard that, in order to sell the deal, Washington had to promise to send Israel more than it was sending Saudi Arabia. Subsequently I haven't encountered any mention of that, but it's understandable, since it's such an exceedingly minor and uninteresting detail.
August 12, 2007
• We can only hope that this goofery on the part of totalitarians in New York City reveals some internecine strife among our adversaries, namely, between the Stalinettes and the Street Negroes: "It's a Female Dog, or Worse. Or Endearing. And Illegal?" The piece, by Michael M. Grynbaum, is posted at The New York Times.
August 12, 2007
• I don't know whether this chap is naively sincere or a conscious tool of the neocon warhawks: "To save America, we need another 9/11," by Stu Bykofsky at Philly.com. "We needed" the first 9/11 in order to ignite the neocon revolution in foreign and war policy. Do "we need" a second 9/11 in order to keep it going? One might think that another 9/11 would tend to discredit the Bush neocons, but we shouldn't let the public's impatience with the Iraq adventure mislead us into underestimating their underlying credulity.
August 12, 2007
• Robert Higgs (Crisis and Leviathan) has replied to the pro-war "libertarian" Randy Barnett in a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, and the Independent Institute has now posted the full version. Apparently the Journal could not bring itself to run the entire text of this brief letter from an eminent historian.
August 6, 2007
• At the Forward, Jennifer Siegel tells us: "Obama, Clinton Battle for Endorsements," endorsements, that is, from Jewish members of Congress. This should remind us again not to expect too much when the Bush neocons leave office. After all, it was the bipartisan, "moderate" pro-Israel imperialism preceding the neocon upsurge that provoked the attacks of 9/11.
August 6, 2007
• Here's the latest foray into statist propaganda by the TV series that did so much to introduce "justifiable" torture as a theme of mainstream entertainment: "Jack Bauer's Next Mission: Fighting Global Warming," by Eviana Hartman at the Washington Post.
August 6, 2007
• Whether you're a state-restrictionist, like those of us here at TLD, or an immigration-restrictionist, chances are you'll want to read this VDare piece by Joe Guzzardi: "'Wave of Hate'? More Propaganda from the Treason Lobbyists at La Raza." It is endlessly fascinating how these anti-white Red Guards, backed by the Dark Suits, control and mold the public vocabulary. It is fascinating, too, how rich the System makes our enemies. (By the way, Guzzardi doesn't even like the description "immigration-restrictionist," preferring "patriot," but that's where he and I part company.)
August 6, 2007
• I should have linked to this column by Joe Sobran before now, but better late than never: "The Lessons of History." Joe examines the question of whether "future generations will look back just as fondly on Bush" as they look on Truman. That formulation, naturally, is good grist for Joe's humor, very serious, very sharp.
August 6, 2007
• Maybe we could "Support Our Troops" by donating money to resettle them all in Antarctica. In any case, I really don't think we want these savages to ever come home: "Accustomed to Their Own Atrocities in Iraq, U.S. Soldiers Have Become Murderers," by Chris Hedges, author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Posted at Alternet.
August 1, 2007
• It's good to know that I'm not the only extremist who takes a dim view of leviathan's crucial slogan "Support the Troops." This analysis by Jeremy Weiland is posted at the Center for a Stateless Society: "Without the State, No Troops to Support."
August 1, 2007
• At the Rockwell site, Will Grigg fires another volley at the militarized brutishness that is still known as "law enforcement" here on the home front: "'To Punish and Enslave.'" With respect to the first incident Grigg describes, note well the military intervention that raised it to the level of a tyrannical atrocity.
August 1, 2007
• Last time, I linked to Justin Raimondo's piece on "libertarian" warhawk Randy Barnett. Now Sheldon Richman takes on the scandal in this piece at Future of Freedom: "A Bogus Libertarian Defense of War." Richman cuts cleanly through the underbrush, as always.
August 1, 2007
• The repulsive "Borat" phenomenon comes in for much-deserved unpacking, courtesy of Jerry Mazza, in "'Borat's' rage masked as laughter." When I first heard of the movie it didn't take me too long to grasp the ethnic motivation of Sasha B. Cohen's attack on Muslims, but I didn't know that Kazakhstan's population was
44 percent Christian. Mazza includes other context-widening observations. Posted at Online Journal.
August 1, 2007
• A TLD co-conspirator tipped me to this one in a message under the subject line, "The benefits of Western civilization": "Wash. City Using Classical Music To Chase Gangs from Bus Stop." Posted at Local6.com.
August 1, 2007
• The Bush imperialists may be as squirmy and slippery as eels, but Future of Freedom's Sheldon Richman manages to land the hook in them good and hard: "Yes to Recriminations against Iraq Policymakers."
July 26, 2007
• Writing at The American Conservative, John Derbyshire offers analysis of the political-correctness pandemic that's both thoughtful and highly readable:
"Better Dead Than Rude"Editor's intro: "Political correctness began as a reasonable adjustment of manners, but as an ideology, it corrupts language and dulls thought." True, Derbyshire does make a few concessions that we TLDers might not make, and he manages not to mention George Orwell except in an irrelevant context, but still I must cry, "Well played, Milord!"
July 26, 2007
• I suppose we should retain the ability to laugh at such spectacles, but, I swear — the pandemic runs rampant even in Finland?!
"Comments in interview could bring charges of inciting racism against PM Vanhanen's father"The unbylined piece is posted at Helsingin Sanomat.
July 26, 2007
• How bad is the pandemic in this country? How bad the thought-policing, in both relentlessness and idiocy? This is how bad:
"Rep. condemned for Hitler comparison"The unbylined piece is posted at the Jewish Telegraph Agency.
July 26, 2007
• Not to pile it on, but here's a good deracinated liberal, dementedly pursuing racial and cultural suicide in the inner suburbs of Chicago:
"Feeling way too white: Talking with my black neighbors can be agonizingly awkward," by Emily L. HauserThe biggest laugh here, I think, comes when Hauser notes that "families" from a contiguous Negro district "often visit my neighborhood to play in its parks or go trick-or-treating." I'll just bet they do! Hauser does make one ponderable declaration: "What [America] needs is to acknowledge the sheer distance between the races, and to make a real effort to bridge it." I'll give you one guess about how I'd edit that sentence.The piece is posted at the Christian Science Monitor.
July 26, 2007
• Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo seems as fed up with pro-war "libertarians" as I am, and in this piece he takes after a hitherto-respected scholar whom he describes as a "victim of 9/11 Derangement Syndrome":
"Bizarro 'Libertarianism'"In 2003 our own David T. Wright detected fatal slippage into Bizarro World on the part of a different band of ideologues.
July 26, 2007
• And now for another foray into the World Socialist Web Site:
"U.S. generals call for extension of Iraq war," by Patrick MartinMartin writes, "These declarations amount to blatant defiance of the long-standing principle that the U.S. military should stay out of politics." Naturally, the Left never squeals when militarists publicly oppose the Bush imperialism, but that aside, this piece may serve to indicate the limits of the "military rebellion" that some antiwar folks thought they had detected in the past.
July 26, 2007
• An e-mail dispatch from VDare alerted me to this highly ponderable column by Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com: "The World Turned Upside-Down," dealing with the Empire's growing practice of recruiting non-Western aliens for its legions. White Westerners — whether immigration-restrictionist or state-restrictionist — will find hair-raising insights here.
July 16, 2007
• In the context of the TB scare involving air traveler Andrew Speaker, Robert P. Murphy deftly brings anti-statist analysis to bear on a typical claim of freedom-failure: "How the Free Market Would Handle Quarantines." Murphy maintains: "If the government relinquished its role in handling contagious diseases, the public would be far safer." The essay is posted at the Mises Institute.
July 16, 2007
• If I may warp us just a few light-years away from Mises in the ideological galaxy, here's a piece at the World Socialist Web Site reporting on Sen. Joe Lieberman's latest foray into warmongering: "U.S. Senate unanimously passes threatening measure against Iran," by Peter Symonds. Antiwar stalwart Jeff Blankfort, who alerted us to this piece, notes its limitations:
This article follows the tradition of the U.S. and worldwide Left [and] offers no analysis as to why the Democrats are so willing to follow the pro-Israel agenda. [Symonds] describes Lieberman as "an unapologetic supporter of the Iraq occupation," but not what really drives Lieberman, who is an unapologetic supporter of Israel. In fact, there is no mention of Israel in the article.True enough. I suspect that Blankfort is as tired as I am of recommending articles critical of interventions in the Middle East and then having to stipulate that there's "no mention of Israel" therein. But the gravamen of what Lieberman and his co-conspirators did is still worth knowing — as is the fact that they did it unanimously.
July 16, 2007
• At City Journal, I find a provocative account of human artificial insemination, which the writer points out is worsening the "unmarriage revolution": "The Incredible Shrinking Father," by Kay S. Hymowitz. Editor's intro: "Artificial insemination begets children without paternity, with troubling cultural and legal consequences."
July 16, 2007
• Remember the Admiral of Massachusetts? I found this Washington Post story to be a real scream: "Nixon Aide Wanted GOP to Court Kerry," by Mary Ann Akers. Ronn Neff, who tipped me to the article, observes:
This is an interesting little piece that gives us some insight into how the political class operates. Note also Kerry's admission that although he didn't vote in 1968, he was a "supporter" of Hubert Humphrey in the general election. Humphrey! Does that not show either that Kerry is dumb or that he wasn't really against the war as such? His own candidacy (which many voters thought was an anti-war candidacy) turns out to be an interesting mirror of that Humphrey campaign.July 16, 2007
• If you haven't had the pleasure already, you'll want to savor Joe Sobran's
May 29 celebration of our holiest 20th-century statesgod and his priests: "The Great American Fascist."
July 16, 2007
• Finally, here's something to help you get to sleep tonight, courtesy of Paul L. Williams at Newsmax: "Chertoff's 'Gut Feeling' Could Be a Nuclear Detonation." Would someone out there please get back to me ASAP and assure me that this is straight from the nut file? Thanks!
July 16, 2007
• The established media permit us to learn that Iraqis are killing many of their countrymen, and they tell us also that a few imperial legionaries are killed from time to time, but they evade the question of how many Iraqis have been murdered and are being murdered by "coalition forces." At CounterPunch, Michael Schwartz attempts to figure it all out: "Media Silence about the Carnage in Iraq: Killing 10,000 Iraqis a Month." If the flacks of empire were ever forced to stipulate to that figure, I'm certain they would confidently instruct us that all those Iraqis had to die, in order that any survivors might enjoy the glories of Imperial Duh-MOCK-risy.
July 10, 2007
• If I may paraphrase a well-known exhortation, Read, Men of the West! —
"Tales of Titans and Hobbits," by Juliusz Jablecki, posted at the Mises Institute.Jablecki, who appears to be a real Pole living in Poland, has produced a superlatively good essay on the comparative value, for lovers of liberty, of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Though I wish never to neglect Rand's achievement in Atlas, I have to express my special delight that someone has finally written a substantial piece drawing out the anti-statist themes of Lord of the Rings, including the central theme that one cannot use Power to defeat Power. I recommend this article most heartily.
July 10, 2007
• At the Daily Mail, Sonia Poulton chronicles one result, in Britain, of the destruction of the Western family: "Mothers are raising a generation of wimps."
In contemplating the great recession of males from our civilization, I've usually thought in terms of anti-male teachers and curricula oppressing boys in the schools; but if Poulton is right, we should also factor in oppressive mollycoddling at home, in the absence of a father.
July 10, 2007
• If any such problems afflict the Germans, I'm sure this will set things right: "German Sex Ed = Homosexual Role Playing / Berlin Schools May Battle Homophobia by Teaching Students Gay Pick-Up Lines," by Emil Steiner of Reuters. I do detect a little ambiguity in this brief dispatch; it is possible that the German program is designed only for children who have already declared themselves to be sodomites; but in any case we must continue to sleeplessly scrutinize the educationists as they plot to destroy us.
July 10, 2007
• I must say, if this is true it's certainly piquant, in light of everything else that's happening: "Iran, Iraq to Build Joint Power Plant" (Alalam News, no byline).
July 10, 2007
• At Future of Freedom, Jacob Hornberger observes
July Fourth with this good reminder of freedom's past: "What Freedoms Are Americans Celebrating Today?" One cannot find a libertarian utopia in Hornberger's 1880 — fifteen years after Dictator Lincoln, when the vampiric ruling class was spreading its leathery wings — but we may be forgiven for mistaking it as such, as we look back from our age of blood and tyranny.
July 4, 2007
• Newsweek's Brian Braiker looks not at the past but at the American mind in "Dunce-Cap Nation," starting out:
Even today, more than four years into the war in Iraq, as many as four in 10 AmericansOne doesn't know what the Squirrel-Monkey-in-Chief thinks he's doing with "his" state-education schemes, but a populace ignorant of all but the narrowest technical skills is just what our true rulers want — and need.(41 percent) still believe Saddam Hussein's regime was directly involved in financing, planning, or carrying out the terrorist attacks on 9/11, even though no evidence has surfaced to support a connection.I must admit to feeling a bit relieved, though: assuming these survey results are representative, the American genpop actually knows much more than the nitwits Jay Leno recruits for his "Jaywalking" segments. On the other hand, the Jaywalkers are mostly youngfolk, with recent exposure to Bush's schools.
July 4, 2007
• The brave Chris Hedges, author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, risks unperson status in writing this piece at Truthdig: "A Declaration of Independence from Israel." Left-wingers have a better chance of surviving this kind of truth-telling than others have, and we may hope that is so in Hedges's case. There is much here that TLD readers will already be aware of, but I think you will be glad to see yet another writer putting it on the record. Hedges's truth-telling includes this: "The [U.S.-Israel] alliance, which makes no sense in geopolitical terms, does makes sense when seen through the lens of domestic politics."
July 4, 2007
• Imperialism abroad, totalitarianism at home. This hollow-voiced character is turning out to be a major evildoer, or at least evil-proposer: "Lieberman calls for wider use of surveillance cameras," by Klaus Marre at TheHill.com. It's thanks to the efforts of Sen. Joe Lieberman's frenziedly interventionist confreres that Americans are terrorized at home, of course, so you can see how nicely things are working out for these people.
Catch this quote from Mr. War on Iran: "You might say that, in Iraq, we've got the enemy on the run."
July 4, 2007
• Courtesy of Eurekalert comes some interesting news for those of us monitoring the demographic revolution: "Immigration slows rate of racial and ethnic intermarriages." According to the uncredited article, black-white marriages have continued to increase. Naturally. And here is another significant if predictable detail: "Almost all [interracial] marriages are between whites and [colored] minorities."
July 4, 2007
• I don't know what to say about this one except that leviathan giveth, and leviathan taketh away: "U.S. terror laws stymie SE Asia's refugees," by Clifford McCoy at Asia Times Online. I'm pretty sure, though, about what old Frank ("Abolish the jobs") Chodorov would say: Abolish the terror laws, and abolish the resettlement program!
July 4, 2007
• In October, I linked to a Financial Times piece reporting the distress of Harvard prof Robert Putnam at the results of his research on "diversity." Now Erica Goode, writing for the New York Times, explores those results, asking, "What if, at least in the short term, living in a highly diverse city or town led residents to distrust pretty much everybody, even people who looked like them?"
The piece is titled, nicely enough, "Home Alone."
Now, Goode does manage to end on a hopeful note, as she cites the rising popularity of race-mixing. In particular, fans of empire and militarism will be heartened to know that, according to Putnam, "soldiers have more interracial friendships than civilians." Seriously, that should remind us that the imperial military has always served as an institution of social engineering and cultural deformation.
June 24, 2007
• Whenever an especially vicious and repulsive agent of injustice receives his comeuppance, some of us may give in to the temptation to become all warm and fuzzy, and conclude, "Well, that's all right, then!" Writing at Slate, David Feige argues that we'd better not: "One-Off Offing: Why you won't see a disbarment like Mike Nifong's again."
June 24, 2007
• Don't you just love it when our supervisors' grand policies conflict? In this case, the Jewish Agenda seems to be colliding with Nationalized Education. Let's just hide and watch Them fight:
"Mountain View High cancels genocide history class," by Stacey Palevsky of J. Weekly (the Jewish News Weekly of Northern California)June 24, 2007
• At American Renaissance, Jared Taylor espies some "Lessons from the Immigration Debate." I find this to be worthwhile and provocative analysis, although what Taylor wants done about mass colored immigration naturally differs from what we want done. He writes the truth when he observes: "Looming unmistakably in the background of the debate is the increasingly widespread realization that mestizos do not make good Americans, that Hispanic immigration has given us yet another crisis-ridden underclass to add to the black underclass we have had since the 1960s."
June 14, 2007
• I've seen some snide comments on the Net about National Review's recent dabbling in some ethnic realism, but I'm not inclined to cavil about this NR Online piece by John Derbyshire: "Towards a White Minority." Derbyshire attends to the collapse of white Western morale, the elephant in the room of which some immigration restrictionists seem insensible as they tinker with their statist "solutions."
Make sure to catch the passage beginning, "How will a majority nonwhite young workforce feel about paying out income and Social Security taxes for the sustenance of old, white Anglos?"
June 14, 2007
• A longtime friend of TLD has alerted me to this compelling piece at Taki's site, "The Death of American Empire," by anti-imperialist Patrick Foy. I find the title somewhat misleading: Foy proposes the end of empire but does not forecast it. Still, the strength of this attack on American imperialism, covering more than a hundred years of history, is quite sufficient for me to promote it here.
June 14, 2007
• Tibor Machan has a way of cutting through the underbrush, concentrating our minds, and inoculating us against what I call statish thinking. I recommend this piece of his, posted at The Atlas Sphere: "Soft Pedaling Coercion."
May 23, 2007
• The kids sometimes ridicule people they don't like as "tools," and I'm unsure just what they mean by that; but this brief dispatch by Itamar Eichner at Ynetnews.com certainly reveals Oprah Winfrey to be a tool in the plain old meaning of the word: "Oprah coming to Israel for solidarity visit." Editor's intro: "American talk show queen accepts Elie Wiesel proposal to come to Israel, says she sympathizes with Israelis' suffering."
Will the people orchestrating this pageant feel called upon to make any carefully modulated, semi-respectful mention of the Palestinians?
In any case, we see now what services one may be called upon to provide, once the System decides to plant an astonishing fortune in one's lap.
May 23, 2007
• Here's another very brief dispatch, this time from Reuters, that makes me wonder at least two things: first, how much harder the shrinking competent middle class can be squeezed; and, second, whether a whole lot of unproductive wheel-spinning is going on out there in Cubicle World: "Nearly half of Americans let vacation days slip." Both of my wonderings emerge from my assumption that the economy continues to slip deeper into fascism, and our people deeper into incompetence.
May 23, 2007
• At The Star-Ledger (Newark, N.J.), Paul Mulshine maintains that "The neocon moment is over," and argues to his conclusion by reference to the attention and support Ron Paul has been receiving in the wake of the Republican debate on Fox. Whatever you think of Mulshine's thesis, I think you'll find his column interesting. I don't agree with all of his analysis; for example, this statement calls for considerable unpacking and nuancing: "Out in the heartland ... isolationism is the default setting." There do seem to be quite a few Red Staters, boys and wymyn alike, trooping to the neocons' bloody colors.
May 23, 2007
• In a posting at AlterNet, Terry J. Allen of In These Times argues that "Pentagon's Teen Recruiting Methods Would Make Tobacco Companies Proud." (The title alone, with its reference to the wicked tobacco companies, tells us immediately this comes to us from the Left.) Allen's perspective delivers a sharp blow to the more-fantastic variety of American Exceptionalism: "The child-soldier problem is global and so is America's part in it."
May 23, 2007
• The good Will Grigg knocks another one out of the park in this piece at the Rockwell site: "Because They Can: The Logic of the Torture State." It occurs to Grigg to connect tyranny and torture abroad with tyranny and torture at home, and propose that the torturers share the same mentality. If I may resort to understatement, that is a minority view among American commentators. Of course some hardly recognize the torture abroad, and most don't recognize it at all here at home.
May 17, 2007
• Jacob Hornberger assesses Ron Paul's performance during the Republican debate on
May 15 : "Giuliani's Attack on Ron Paul Falls Flat," posted at Future of Freedom.Party-political activists of a libertarian kidney are forever saying that they're not trying to seize Power but only educate the people in ideas on Liberty. Paul now seems actually to have done some of the latter, and I'm happy that a thinking man who apparently is as honorable as an officeholder can be was permitted to stick a pin in the gasbag tyrant Giuliani. I do have to point out, though, that you can't educate in isolation; Paul is also teaching the lesson that government is necessary and, in principle, morally respectable. After all, he's a part of it, isn't he?
May 17, 2007
• At the New York Times, Sam Roberts informs us: "New Demographic Racial Gap Emerges." What he's talking about is a "racial generation gap" between whites and nonwhites. It doesn't come as much of a surprise to those of us tracking the demographic revolution in America, but it may surprise more-somnolent whites who expect the welfare state to care for them when they become aged and infirm. Even if the American style of socialism were a sound proposition otherwise, how many of the onrushing coloreds do you think will be excited about supporting decrepit, hated whites?
May 17, 2007
• Too damn much racial harmony, if you ask me. First we had the demonic Korean Cho imitating the worst of whites, and now we have other Koreans imitating ... Well, you'll see: "Rap music links Koreans, blacks," by Peter Prengaman of the Associated Press. Subtitle: "Years after L.A. riots divided races, young rappers build mutual respect." (This version is posted at the Monterey [Calif.] Herald.)
I had more respect for the Koreans of L.A. when they were toting shotguns and AK-47s in order to protect their businesses.
May 10, 2007
• One really hates to be so negative all the time about Our Leader's ingenious crusade to eliminate evildoing and bring utopia to benighted parts, but here's yet another persuasively pessimistic evaluation, this time by Patrick Cockburn of CounterPunch: "Beyond the Green Zone's 'Gated Community,' Bush's Surge Is Failing" (posted at AlterNet).
A sample: "There are army and police checkpoints everywhere but Iraqis are terrified approaching them because they do not know if the men in uniform they see are in reality death squad members."
May 10, 2007
• Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone has another provocative piece at AlterNet: "Tension Mounts as Antiwar Movement Challenges Dems' Commitment to Stop the War."
It seems to me that if the Democrats did see a surefire way to stop the war, they might hesitate to employ it. Whenever the war ends, it is likely that we will see even more of a bloodbath than is now occurring. (That magnified bloodbath will be another large part of George W. Bush's stirring legacy.) It is probably wiser, politically, for the Dems to make a strong "show of action" against the war while making sure it continues through the presidential campaign next year. That will allow them to cry, We tried! — but to bring peace we need a Democratic president! If the Democrats should succeed in electing a president using that strategy, well, I'd hate to be that guy, but you know pols: plenty of them would love to be that guy.
If this scenario does play out, extending the war, it will provide an illuminating lesson in political collusion — a collusion that emerges from the very structure of our political system, even when the duopoly parties are truly competing for power.
Finally, Taibbi's detour into oil politics has started me wondering whether the Dems, shriekingly leftist as they may appear, might actually do a more satisfactory job of serving the Big Oil agenda than the Bushites have. Remember, though Bill Clinton often came off as a shrieking leftist, he was actually a splendid corporate-statist, beloved of the Dark Suits, and in 1996 he garnered bigger corporate donations than the Republican zombie Dole.
Of course Zion looms, always and forever, in both ruling parties; but there are different flavors of Zionism; and as we saw in the decades before 2001, some are quite compatible with the old-fashioned, "moderate" imperialism of the Suits.
Warning: You will find jarring obscenity sprinkled throughout this piece. I'm afraid this sort of thing isMay 10, 2007de rigueur for Taibbi.
• I'm just mystified. The two ethnic groups of most importance in this ESPN story out of Las Vegas are Asians and ... who, now?
"Casino exec: All-Star Game wasn't good for business."May 10, 2007Modine Herbey comments. I think I get it, Strakon. And I'll bet all those Asian "whales" visiting Vegas went back home and told their fellow corporate magnates how necessary American-style "diversity" is for (let's all say it together) Competing in the Global Marketplace.
• At Future of Freedom, Tibor Machan offers this nifty and highly readable reminder of what ownership must entail, and he does so at the expense of one of the many villainous lawfakers from California: "Boxer's Confusion about Ownership."
May 10, 2007
• Some years ago the veteran socialist Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a gripping book titled Nickel and Dimed that confirmed my impression (formed over here on the free-market side of things) that something is just deeply wrong with work in America. I've been thinking of giving her my coveted "Righteous Leftist" award, hitherto granted only to Seymour Melman of Pentagon Capitalism fame; and if I do, it will be this mind-nudging piece at Zmag that tips it for her: "Higher Education Conformity."
Influenced by Albert Jay Nock, I've thought for many years that
80 percent of college "students" ought really to be in voc-ed training centers, assuming that a sound high-school education had prepared them for such an endeavor. (Wouldn't it be nice to have more electricians and auto mechanics with triple-digit IQs in this country? And fewer lawyers of any IQ?)
May 10, 2007
• On the whole, this article at Der Spiegel buys into the Global Warming ideology, but it still amounts to pretty good "inside baseball" and even contains some contrarian commentary: "Emotionalizing Climate Change / Is the IPCC Doing Harm to Science?" by Uwe Buse. Editor's intro: "No United Nations organization currently dominates the headlines as much — or is as controversial — as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Critics call the panel politically one-sided and its reports alarmist. Its defenders say the opposite is true. The IPCC will publish its third report on
[May 11]."
May 10, 2007
• Many fans of classic basketball consider the version that the NBA plays to be a profoundly debased form of the sport, full of infantile showboating, brutality, and (n.b.) slack officiating, but it appears that there's more to be said, at least by the usual suspects: "Study: White refs call more fouls on blacks." This is an Associated Press dispatch (no byline) posted at Fox Sports.
The remaining observations on this piece are courtesy of veteran sports commentator Ronn Neff:
One of the striking things about this story is that it does not consider the following possibilities, even as possibilities:May 3, 2007(1) Black players actually do commit more fouls than white players do.
(2) Black refs don't call them because they're the ones whose calls are racially tinged.
(3) White refs call fouls more accurately (or more fairly) than black refs.
(4) When black refs call fouls against white players, their own racial prejudices are at work.
• Anti-war activist Jeffrey Blankfort has tipped us to an intriguing piece by Robert Kagan in the Washington Post: "Obama the Interventionist." In the message to his mail list, Blankfort commented:
I don't know what the headline was in the print edition of the Washington Post, but the headline on this column when I first saw it online was "Obama the Neocon." Someone with clout apparently didn't like that. But "con artist" would have been more like it, and if anyone still maintains illusions about this election's Mr. Chameleon, this article should put an end to them.My own assumption is that Obama is better described as an interventionist in general than as a neocon in particular. Kagan notes the possibility that "maybe his speech only reflects what he and his advisers think Americans want to hear." Actually, I suspect it's what the established ruling class needs to be convinced of before declaring him a safe choice.
May 3, 2007
• I'm not sure about all the evidence he adduces, but in this posting at AlterNet, "Election '08: One Long Humiliation Contest," Matt Taibbi really grabbed me with this conclusion:
It must be beneficial to the American power apparatus somehow to demean the individuals who seek to occupy its highest offices. Maybe it's because while dignified human beings are unpredictable, an old turned-out whore can be counted on to do anything for forty bucks — and these are the kinds of people we need in the White House.One quibble: I maintain that most candidates who have been permitted to get on national TV were "turned out" years before we ever heard of them.Make sure you catch Taibbi's comment about the weirdness of how everyone in the media "quickly ... got the memo to switch word choices" in a certain context. In the past, Ronn Neff has pointed out examples of this sort of thing to me many times. The phenomenon even applies to language blunders, such as the fast-blooming misuse of the phrase "begs the question," which now seems to be fading, and the illiterate "honing in," which seems to be hanging in there.
Warning:You will find jarring obscenity sprinkled throughout this piece.May 3, 2007
• Much of what George Tenet is finally saying is interesting, but at AlterNet some veteran spook-bureaucrats warn us that we'd better not erect his statue in the town square just yet: "Former Intelligence Officials Hold Ex-CIA Chief George Tenet's Feet to the Fire," by former CIA officers Phil Giraldi, Ray McGovern, Larry Johnson, Jim Marcinkowski, Vince Cannistraro, and David MacMichael. They describe Tenet as "the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community — a grotesque mixture of incompetence and sycophancy shielded by a genial personality."
May 3, 2007
• I doubt it was the writer's intention, but to me this piece at CorpWatch shows how little the interests of Big Oil count among the Bushite neocons: "How Much Iraqi Crude Oil is Being Stolen? Mystery of the Missing Meters," by Pratap Chatterjee.
May 3, 2007
• Elsewhere on the oil front, Power and Interest News Report warns that "Saudi Arrests Demonstrate Threat to Energy Markets" (no byline).
May 3, 2007
• Did you grasp the scale of this enormity? I didn't. Yes, I heard some murmurings last year about revisions to the "posse comitatus" law, but if James Bovard's reading of this Power-explosion is accurate, my alarm was off by several orders of magnitude: "Working for the Clampdown: What might the president do with his new power to declare martial law?" (posted at The American Conservative).
Bovard writes that, for example, under the new "law,"
Bush could send the Alabama National Guard to suppress antiwar protests in Boston. Or the next president could send the New York National Guard to disarm the residents of Mississippi if they resisted a federal law that prohibited private ownership of semiautomatic weapons.April 28, 2007
• Prof. Kevin MacDonald has been under scrutiny for some time by forces that would love to get him fired, but now Morris Dees and his crew are pitching in to help the purge: "Probe of Cal State Long Beach professor sought: Law center that tracks hate groups wants to know [whether] anti-Semitism is being taught," by Louis Sahagun. (Possible copyright violation: This story seemingly originated at the Los Angeles Times and was then reposted by Ziopedia.)
Are any influential Establishment figures agitating to get Nikki Giovanni fired?
April 28, 2007
• I assume this brouhaha will redound to the embarrassment of the fellow who started it, but I hope I'm not falling into sunny optimism: "Handel's 'Hallelujah' chorus: A malice toward Judaism?" by James R. Oestreich at the International Herald Tribune.
April 28, 2007
• At Time.com, Lisa Takeuchi Cullen informs us that "Employee Diversity Training Doesn't Work." That is, it "has little to no effect on the racial and gender [sic] mix of a company's top ranks."
You mean someone actually thought it would? Surely it does work, though, to demoralize many white men in the corporate workforce and render them more docile under Dark Suit rule. Moreover, "diversity" re-education and for that matter the whole "civil rights" carnival certainly work for the Suits in another way. Insofar as the "diversity" tyranny arises from government mandates that affect all corporations, it disproportionately raises the overhead of any of the Suits' competitors that are smaller, newer, and politically unconnected, but potentially more nimble.
And as for the Suits' Red Guard underlings? Well, thousands and thousands of them have made sinecurish careers out of this insulting, infuriating balderdash.
A "golden oldie" by our own Virginia Dare:
"A spoonful of sugar for the prisoners of starvation"April 28, 2007
• I saw this Associated Press story in the paper earlier in the week, and my jaw dropped. We're being permitted to know about this crime only now?
"Documents: U.S. troops used 'comfort women' after WWII" (no byline; posted at CNN.com)It makes me wonder what else we don't know about the Last Good War. And what all we think we know that we actually don't.
April 28, 2007
• Writing for The Freeman, Howard Baetjer lays out some facts and analysis that are sure to worsen paleoconservatives' disdain for economics: "At the Intersection of the Minimum Wage and Illegal Immigration."
Disdained or not, though, economics is hard to escape. Here are Ronn Neff's comments:
Many in the anti-immigration crowd argue that if wages were increased in this country, white people would be willing to do some of the work that we are told they are not willing to do now. So many anti-immigrationists implicitly — and some explicitly — favor a state-mandated increase in wages.April 28, 2007What Baetjer argues — though it takes him a while to get to it — is that increasing the minimum wage gives employers an incentive to hire illegals (whom they can pay less) rather than legals.
It is also worth noting that when white people call for a state-mandated increase in wages, they are implicitly calling for the state to take action against their fellow whites, rather than against the minorities they want to get rid of.
• Neocon Paul Wolfowitz's misconduct at the World Bank goes well beyond coddling his mistress, according to Emad Mekay and Jim Lobe, writing at CounterPunch: "Scoring at the World Bank: Wolfowitz's Quid Pro Quo." Free-marketeers and friends of justice will agree, naturally, that the Bank itself engages in unremitting misconduct merely by existing.
April 25, 2007
• I'd been wondering what Sheldon Richman might write about the Cho massacre. Well, here are his thoughts, posted at Future of Freedom, and they are as trenchant as always: "The Lesson of Virginia Tech." A sample: "The idea that one's security can be ensured by an external authority underlies ridiculous ideas such as gun-free zones, which end up being free-crime zones."
And: "People ... wonder whether better mental-health monitoring can prevent mass shootings. We ought to be careful what we ask for." Yes!
April 25, 2007
• At Strike the Root, Francois Tremblay deftly dissects the system I like to call Duh-MOCK-risy: "Democracy: Social Organization for Dummies."
Hearken: "Two conclusions can be drawn from the democratic experiment:
"1. Democracy is a spectacular failure at doing what it was supposed to do: empower the masses politically.
"2. Democracy is a spectacular success at empowering, financing, legitimizing, and ensuring the stability of the ruling class. "
This one's right down my alley.
April 25, 2007
• The Iraqi refugee disaster will surely go down as yet another crushing cost of Bush's War, and I expect that American taxpayers will wind up paying a large part of it. At AlterNet, Dahr Jamai reminds us, if we have forgotten, of "Iraq's Forgotten Refugees." (Originally posted at TomDispatch.com.) Perpetual war results in indelible responsibility, at least in the opinion of war's victims. As one refugee interviewed by Jamai puts it, "Since the U.S. government caused all of this, shouldn't they also be responsible for helping us now?"
Pouring billions of our confiscated money into refugee resettlement sounds like just the sort of thing the Democrats might do, doesn't it?
There's no good solution now, though. Remember, refugee camps are a notorious breeding ground for terrorists.
April 25, 2007
• Europe's bold, unrelenting search for truth and its stern commitment to freedom of expression both achieved glorious transcendence
April 19 when "European Union nations agreed ... to set jail sentences against those who deny or trivialize the Holocaust, as part of efforts to combat racism and hate crimes across the 27-nation bloc." I am quoting this Associated Press dispatch posted at Haaretz: "EU approves criminal measures against Holocaust denial."There is some foggy language in this story, as you might expect of any story that tries to report on the declarations of EU bureaucrats, but I do learn that the current measure has been "drastically watered down" to "only cover genocides recognized under statutes of the International Criminal Court." Curiously enough, "the genocide of Jews is the only genocide referred to within the new rules."
The EU's utterance isn't a full ukaze yet: it "still needs the backing of national parliaments and the European Parliament, officials said." We'll have to see what Tony Blair's Airstrip One decides to do.
Don't miss this priceless (if awkwardly worded) tidbit: "An effort by Baltic nations demanding major Stalinist atrocities should be included in the EU law was rejected." Well, of course it was. But it is good to know that the Balts, unlike the rest of the Yurpeens, are consistent in their libertarianism, isn't it?
April 21, 2007
• It goes on and on, and on and on it goes: "Help sought to resettle African refugees here," by Karina Gonzalez of the Chattanooga Times-Free Press. One of the busy-bee Red Guards behind this particular onslaught warns that the Burundian refugees "will have special needs." No! — really? Taxpayers, head for Lookout Mountain.
April 21, 2007
• The Long March is nearing its end: "Interracial marriages surge across U.S.," by David Crary. I was aware of the increasing push by the established media — especially in their TV series — to popularize race-mixing, and with every passing year I've seen Minitrue promote more pols and "celebrities" who are racially doubtful; but I had hoped the final barrier was still holding relatively firm.
No.
April 21, 2007
• Earlier this month Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi interviewed the heroic and relentless Seymour Hersh: "Cheney's Nemesis." Promo head: "For forty years, Seymour Hersh has been America's leading investigative reporter. His latest scoop? The White House's secret plan to bomb Iran."
April 19, 2007
• Reading this AP brief, Ronn Neff asks: "The 'Joint Terrorism Task Force'? — What can possibly be their interest in this matter?"
"'White Power' banner hung on Westmoreland water tower." (Found at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)April 19, 2007
• I know that some in the white "ethnically sensitive" community deny it, but I take it for granted that Jews, overall, are intellectually superior to the general run of whites. At Commentary, Charles Murray does some clever theorizing about why that is so: "Jewish Genius."
If the most influential Jews of the West are, in some sense, adversaries of the West (formerly "Christendom"), it is apparent that whether we propose a free society or a politicized society under the thumb of a ruling class — the only possibilities available — difficulties will ensue for white Westerners of Christian heritage. A free society can minimize those difficulties, but getting there is made much trickier by the fact that the Jewish geniuses of liberty — Mises, Rand, Rothbard, and so on — are overwhelmingly outnumbered by Jewish geniuses of tyranny.
April 19, 2007
• May one still admit to being shockable? As infantile as it may make me seem, I was shocked by this — specifically, by its subtitle: "As U.S. tax rates drop, government's reach grows," by Mark Trumbull of the Christian Science Monitor. Here's that subtitle: "Study: 1 in 2 Americans now receives income from government programs."
I should not have been shocked, in light of a New York Times story I saw in 2004 revealing that "about
47 percent of all babies born in the United States each year participate in the [WIC] program." ("Stores specializing in food vouchers bill for top prices," by Robert Pear, found in the Seattle Times,June 7, 2004)
April 19, 2007
• Sad to say, this one doesn't shock me much:
"Sorry We Shot Your Kid, but Here's $500," by Greg Mitchell at Editor & PublisherPromo head: "For the entire war in Iraq, the press has been kept largely in the dark concerning the number of civilians killed by our forces, and what happened in the aftermath. Now several hundred files posted online reveal some of the true horror while raising questions about lack of compensation."Remember that any compensation the United State can offer will necessarily come out of our pockets, robbed from us in the same way as the money that leviathan used to kill its Iraqi victims in the first place. Leviathan has no rightful property of its own.
April 19, 2007
• Sheldon Richman demonstrates his deep understanding of our rulers' strategies in this winner of a column at Future of Freedom: "Preventing Opposition to War."
April 14, 2007
• The proliferating bans on "public" smoking are a showcase example of how a people who understand nothing of rights — or of any principle, in fact — must rapidly fall under the sway of the totalitarian mentality. When the Anti-Smoking Commies began winning their victories in your town, how often did you hear any protester mention property rights?
That's by way of introducing this excellent piece by Walter E. Williams, posted at Townhall.com: "Phony Science and Public Policy."
April 14, 2007
• Prompted by the shriekfest over the Saying of a Bad Thing, Michelle Malkin seeks to put matters in perspective in this article at VDare: "Imus or Rap? The Culture of 'Bitches, Hos, and Niggas.'" A taste: "One dumb radio/television shock jock's insult is a drop in the ocean of barbaric filth and anti-female hatred on the radio." (Warning: Malkin quotes some savagely obscene and offensive lyrics.)
April 14, 2007
• Does the phrase "gated communities" conjure an image of affluent suburban enclaves? If so, you're behind the times, according to Robert Fisk, writing at The Independent. The Imperials, oblivious to absurdity, have hijacked the term to describe their latest brilliant idea: "Divide and rule — America's plan for Baghdad."
Subtitle: "Revealed: a new counter-insurgency strategy to carve up the city into sealed areas. The tactic failed in Vietnam. So what chance does it have in Iraq?"
April 14, 2007
• Amid all the sunny reports and forecasts by trusty statesgods such as John McCain, and the official statistics about how splendidly the imperial military is achieving its enlistment goals, I come across this un-public-spirited dispatch by Mark Benjamin, writing at Salon: "Injured troops shipped back into battle."
April 11, 2007
• Some on the anti-war Left keep warbling about how the Mesopotamian adventure is a "war for oil," but if the Big Oil companies were the culprits they miscalculated grievously. That emerges plainly enough in this piece at CNNMoney.com by Steve Hargreaves: "And Iraq's big oil contracts go to ... " Hargreaves begins: "Despite claims by some critics that the Bush administration invaded Iraq to take control of its oil, the first contracts with major oil firms from Iraq's new government are likely to go not to U.S. companies, but rather to companies from China, India, Vietnam, and Indonesia."
Hey, I know! The secret China lobby was behind the whole thing! (I think you can say that without getting fired.)
April 11, 2007
• Now here's a nasty little article for you, written for the Los Angeles Times by a chap named Gregory Rodriguez: "Illegal? Better if you're Irish." Rodriguez expatiates on the advantages that Irish illegals enjoy, compared to the plight of Mexican illegals. Basically, his point is that the lucky Irish look and act and apparently even sound American. How dare they!
Why is the article objectionable? It's the context. Many friends and foes of the revolutionary Immigration Act of 1965 seem to think that it merely expanded the freedom to immigrate to America, across the board, but that's not so. In fact, in the first year after passage of the act, leviathan's enforcers drove down legal immigration from Ireland by
62.5 percent in favor of colored folk, according to James C. Russell in Breach of Faith: American Churches and the Immigration Crisis (p. 70). And by 1970, it was down71 percent for the five-year period. According to Russell, by now "[legal] immigration to the U.S. from Ireland and other European nations has been virtually wiped out for all intents and purposes, as a result of [the] act." (p. 86)All of that being so, I think that highlighting the luck of the Irish with respect to illegal immigration amounts to adding insult to injury. And that's nasty.
April 11, 2007
• Despite the obvious power of Zionism among the Democrats, some of us may have been hoping for better days on the Middle East war front if a Democrat should succeed Bush and his neocons in 2009. At Antiwar.com, Philip Giraldi presents a cautionary assessment of what the Dems are up to even now:
"Democrats Earn Their Stripes in the War Party"What Giraldi has to say seems more substantial than the pacific spectacle of Madame Pelosi tricked out in Arab headdress while schmoozing with the Syrians.Along the way, the writer reminds us that "historically, the Democratic Party has been the party of war in the United States, having actively maneuvered to involve the U.S. in the First World War, Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam in spite of considerable popular support for isolationism or nonintervention, particularly among Republicans." (However, one mustn't forget the earlier contributions to National Glory of Lincoln and McKinley.)
April 5, 2007
• "To protect and serve." Have you seen a story about this police atrocity on the front page of your local paper? I'll bet you haven't, unless you live in Delaware: "Death Squad in Delaware: The Case of the Murdered Marine," by William Norman Grigg. The piece is posted at the Rockwell site.
So this is how They Support Their Troops, eh?
I read recently that the reason so many cops are running wild nowadays — especially the undercover cops who are roaming around everywhere — is that the mean streets are so terrifying to them. A reasonable man operating within the System might propose that cities start recruiting cops who aren't so easily terrified. And a reasonable men who rejects the System might propose that we reconsider the fake laws that cops — especially undercover cops — are supposed to spend most of their time enforcing.
April 4, 2007
• In a recent column, Walter E. Williams pours a little cold water on Shaman Gore and his cult of enforced unanimity: "Global Warming Heresy." It's posted at Townhall.com.
April 4, 2007
• In Britain, the Shining Path of political correctness has just taken a sharp turn, if we are to believe this report by Laura Clark in the Daily Mail: "Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims." It's true that the Red Guards are allowed to get away with a lot, on both sides of the Atlantic, but this dispatch started me wondering whether the ruling class in Britain had been overthrown overnight. If not, then some bloody fur will surely fly.
A question that deserves long pondering, though, is this: As Europe becomes Eurabia, what will happen to its ruling class? The provocative aspect, of course, is that the Dark Suits of Europe have diligently promoted the demographic revolution in their countries, just as the American Suits have done here.
April 4, 2007
• In May 2004, shortly after the Abu Ghraib revelations began to emerge, I wrote a "Stop & think" installment about the mainstreaming of torture on American TV, "Just look what they've made us do!" It was sparked by an observation of Robert Fisk's, but others besides just Fisk (and me) are finally starting to notice: "What Would Jack Bauer Do?" by Michael Brendan at The American Conservative. Promo head: "Fox's hit drama normalizes torture, magnifies terror, and leaves conservatives asking why George W. Bush can't be more like 24's hero."
March 27, 2007
• A TLD co-conspirator has tipped me to a column by George Will, "The Politics of Anger," that not only is worth reading in itself but also gives me an opportunity to make one of my little points. Will asserts that "Americans are infatuated with anger" these days and goes on to attribute that, in large part, to what he considers "individualism." Well, all right. But twenty-five years ago, when I first spotted a bumper-sticker reading "Sh*t happens" (I have provided the asterisk) and recoiled in shock (I was more innocent; the days were more innocent), I had to reflect on the difference between the sort of individualism we old Randians promoted — reasoned individualism in pursuit of rational self-interest — and the sort of heedless, disconnected, infantile individualism that was taking over America. It's a difference in kind: the difference, in fact, between authenticity and falseness. Well, look, can you imagine a Randian defacing his body with tattooes? So there's my little point. (The piece is posted at Townhall.com.)
March 27, 2007
• This piece in the Los Angeles Times is just a delight, demonstrating as it does just how twisty the Shining Path can be for our Red Guard friends: "Not the lesson they intended: Two L.A. charter school teachers lose their jobs over a planned Black History Month presentation," by Carla Rivera.
March 27, 2007
• When it comes to the current imperial strategy, the path seems not just twisty but mazelike. Not to mention, paved with quicksand: "Pakistan's Strategic Goals and the Deteriorating Situation in Afghanistan," by Dr. Harsh V. Pant at Power and Interest News Report.
March 27, 2007
• Going abroad in search of monsters to create. Thanks are due to AlterNet for alerting me to another major piece by Seymour Hersh at The New Yorker: "The Redirection: Is the Administration's new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?" Hersh begins: "To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East.... A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda."
Able commentary on the response, or non-response, to Hersh's latest revelations is provided at AlterNet itself by Tom Engelhardt of Tomdispatch.com: "Neocons in Cheney's Office Fund al Qaeda-Tied Groups ... and No One Cares?"
March 17, 2007
• CounterPunch has now posted, in full text, the piece by Christopher Ketcham that I alerted you to on
February 16. It is long, but I urgently recommend it to your attention: "High-Fivers and Art Student Spies: What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?" Marc Perelman of the Forward, who had bravely probed the question of Israeli foreknowledge, provides Ketcham a delicious quote that illustrates how things work here in the land of the incurious: "There weren't even stories [in the MSM] saying it was bulls**t."By the way, anyone who unreflectively sneers at us for buying into "conspiratorialism" on this question deserves to be accused of infantile credulity in the face of leviathan's machinations — though I understand that we're all too civil to make such a riposte. It might be more gentlemanly to remind our interlocutors that professionals in the middle reaches of the security and intelligence bureaucracies were interested in exploring the question of foreknowledge — but were squelched from above. (According to Ketcham, Fox News was squelched from above, too — in the person of the ADL's Abraham Foxman.)
In any event, officialdom would tell us that this entire story is now "ancient history" and totally irrelevant; we have to "look forward" and focus on how to achieve the Empire's Next Great Victory for Freedom and Democracy in Strange Foreign Lands. Onward off the cliff, with blindfolds securely affixed!
March 17, 2007
• You may detect a theme emerging in today's off-site picks, but this is the stuff I find compelling right now. Thus, "Taming Leviathan: These are both the best of times and the worst of times for the American-Jewish lobby," by Kevin Kallaugher at The Economist. It may seem remarkable that a writer for an important neocon organ such as The Economist is allowed to refer matter-of-factly to the Israel lobby — but then the Brits are still freer than we are when it comes to discussing some topics.
March 17, 2007
• And now an appetizing departure from my theme: "Bushmeat: Curse of the Monkey's Paw: The Illicit Trade in Wild Animal Meat Could Spark a Public Health Crisis," by Russell Goldman of ABC News. The friend who tipped me to this piece wisely observes that here we see the limits of Diversity: if it gets in the way of regulation, it's brushed aside.
March 17, 2007
• I sustain the thematic departure by returning to AlterNet: "Millions More for a Failed Anti-Drug Propaganda Campaign? Ridiculous!," by Paul Armentano. Fort Wayne's plump shiny chickenhawk of a congressman, Mark Souder, features prominently here as a spokesman for the regime and its perpetual Drug War. I do not, of course, endorse any of Armentano's own statist proposals.
March 17, 2007
• Young Master Obama has made a pilgrimage to Israel, and to AIPAC as well, and according to Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo, the peaceniks' great semi-white hope has uttered "an oath of fealty quite beyond what even the vehemently pro-Israel Hillary Clinton has been willing to say." And so it goes, in the world of imperial politics:
"A Horse of a Different Color: Obama, the Lobby, and the next war"March 12, 2007
• From AlterNet comes a left-wing take on the semi-cartoonish box-office smash "300," a movie that deals with Leonidas and the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, sort of. (Thanks to the cryptic font used in the promos, I keep misreading the title as "Zoo.") Steve Burgess's attack may be of interest to non-leftist antiwar types as well: "'300' Flick Is Ready-Made for the Right-Wing Crowd."
March 12, 2007
• Great news for white Western preservationists! It is permissible now for whites to get together and hash out strategies for ethnic preservation. That's my conclusion after reading this report at Haaretz about a conference sponsored by the Institute for Policy Planning of the Jewish People: "Questions of survival," by Shmuel Rosner. In future the mostly European-American whites of mostly Christian heritage who gather at the American Renaissance conferences will be able to do so equally free from slander, prejudice, and harassment. Right?
March 12, 2007
• Leviathan's identification of great new terrors never ceases. And why should it, since terrormongering is such a powerful mechanism for expanding state power? Lee Jones, writing at spiked, offers this dispatch from Airstrip One: "Turning children green with fear." Subtitle: "A new survey claims many children stay awake at night worrying about apocalyptic climate disasters. Where could they have got ideas like that?"
March 12, 2007
• Pursuing his examination of the secret-police powers claimed by the Bush criminals since 9/11, Jacob G. Hornberger of Future of Freedom takes a look at Chile's experience under Pinochet in "It Can't Happen Here." I know, I know — Aw, jeez, Pinochet again? As if we haven't heard enough warbling about him from the Left over the past thirty years! But this is different. Hornberger finds ominous parallels between Pinochet's reign of terror and the one that's looming over us thanks to Bush and his handlers. Moreover, he vividly illustrates the ugliness at the heart of U.S. conservatives' complaisance toward Pinochet: "What was a Chilean woman lying on a rape table supposed to think — 'At least we now have sound money in Chile'? What was a man whose fingernails were being removed supposed to scream — 'Viva Milton Friedman!'?" Good questions. Surely we're not expected to trust right-wing military and spy buffs on similar subjects now, in our own homeland.
March 7, 2007
• The worsening clash between black and brown comes in for some worthwhile and extended social-science analysis in this posting at the Center for Immigration Studies: "Immigration, Intergroup Conflict, and the Erosion of African American Political Power in the 21st Century," by Frank Morris and James G. Gimpel. Their approach is neither anti-statist nor fully racial-realist, but I predict you will learn some things worth knowing.
March 7, 2007
• At OneNewsNow.com, Chad Groening and Jody Brown inform us, "Feminism labeled a 'society killer.'" It's only one of many such killers stalking us, of course.
March 7, 2007
• It usually strikes us as awfully grim, but the alliance of Dark Suits and Red Guards can sometimes earn guffaws, as demonstrated by this Fox News dispatch: "Angelina Jolie to Join Council on Foreign Relations."
March 7, 2007
• At Strike the Root I find a link to a particularly revolting but instructive tale: "L'Eggo My Lego," by Maureen Martin at TCS Daily. It starts: "Some Seattle school children are being told to be skeptical of private property rights. This lesson is being taught by banning Legos." As the blurb at Strike the Root notes, it's all happening at a private school. Polite Totalitarianism rules! — and parents determined to protect their children from the state schools need to be vigilant in choosing private alternatives, for Red Guards are everywhere.
March 1, 2007
• This isn't surprising, but it's nice to see it made official: "Welfare State Growing Despite Overhauls," by Stephen Ohlemacher of the Associated Press. The comments by Ron Haskins, an ex-advisor to Bush on welfare parasitism, are simply priceless.
March 1, 2007
• Speaking of things nice, it would be nice if this were true: "U.S. generals 'will quit' if Bush orders Iran attack," by Michael Smith and Sarah Baxter of the Sunday Times (of London).
March 1, 2007
• One of the Bush regime's most counterintuitive assertions is that their radical adventurism in the Middle East has prevented terrorist attacks. At The Independent, Kim Sengupta and Patrick Cockburn adduce some contrary evidence: "How the war on terror made the world a more terrifying place." Subtitle: "New figures show dramatic rise in terror attacks worldwide since the invasion of Iraq."
March 1, 2007
• On September 16, 2001, I wrote:
As early as the evening of September 11, I found a group of talking heads on the telescreen predicting, or even pronouncing, the demise of the "open society" in America. They actually sounded a little sad about it. As that "discussion arc" has developed in the ensuing days, almost all the talking heads who are participating in it have identified the same ideal model for America to imitate, and it is none other than that authoritarian state that has occupied Palestine since just before I was born.For more-extensive analysis that takes account of the past five years, I refer you to the brave Chris Moore of Libertarian Today: "Judeofascist authoritarians and the 'War on Terror' laws."El Al's security procedures, the Israeli intelligence services, Israeli policies and attitudes in general: those things are what we are to substitute for the tattered, and now shattered, remnants of our "open society."
March 1, 2007
• At SFGate we find a new heart-warming chapter in the glorious chronicles of our multicultural socialist utopia: "Asian paper's 'I Hate Blacks' column assailed," by Leslie Fulbright. The friend who tipped me to this uproar also gave me a link to a copy of the offending column, "Why I Hate Blacks," by Kenneth Eng, reposted at AngryAsianMan.com. You'd have to scroll down a ways to find it, so instead just search for "Kenneth Eng, Feb 23, 2007". Once again, I recommended that we just hide and watch them fight. Anyone got popcorn?
March 1, 2007
• A parents' rebellion is erupting over our supervisors' attempts to force medical treatment on American girls. And the chief totalitarian pervert, Texas governor Rick Perry (R), is being righteously slimed over his links with the fascist pharmaceutical entity Merck & Co. Here's the story as told by the Associated Press: "Texas Governor Defends Vaccine Order" (posted at The New York Times).
Meanwhile we learn: "Merck to Halt Lobbying for Vaccine for Girls." This story was written for the Times, by Andrew Pollack and Stephanie Saul.
Even if reawakened Americans do succeed in delaying the oncoming wave of forced medical treatment, what further evidence do we need that our rulers and their "private sector" allies consider us their chattel property?
February 23, 2007
• I'm tempted to include the
Malcolm X Grassroots Movement in our pemanent list of site-links, on the strength of this statement on its intro page: The MXGM "does not view black people in the United States as true Americans but rather as the descendants of forcibly transplanted Africans — descendants whose very presence in North America is nothing more than an unfortunate legacy of slavery." Actually these folks are more radical than I on this point, since I do consider native blacks in this country to be Americans.If you look at the page, note the occurrence of a phrase that we're seeing more and more often from the Left: "by any means necessary." Naturally, the Left and our other adversaries have always believed in doing whatever is necessary to seize power and destroy our liberties and civilization, but it's chilling that they're now willing to admit it openly.
Don't miss the final sentence on the page, starting "MXGM has received funding...."
February 23, 2007
• The theory of this piece at TruthOut will come as no surprise to those who are aware of the Washington regime's established techniques, practiced over the past 146 years, of manipulating its designated enemies: "Former Bush Officials Accuse White House of Trying to Provoke Iran."
February 23, 2007
• I've observed that Hillary's funding by Zionist moneymen was forcing her to do an intricate dance on the war. But in this piece at AlterNet, Amy Goodman sees more of a simple march — maybe all the way to Iran: "Clinton to Anti-War Voters: Bring It On." Looks as if the left-wing peaceniks may have to waltz off with some other comrade.
February 23, 2007
• It's likely that we haven't seen anything yet on the tainted-food front. Digest, if you can, this horror story by Joyce Howard Price at the Washington Times: "Parasitic infection plagues states along Mexico border."
February 20, 2007
• If you think the language I use in describing the sins of the empire is colorful, see what you think of the palate employed by Justin Raimondo in this outstanding piece at Antiwar.com: "Murder, Inc.: That's the reality of American foreign policy."
Savages they were when they went to Mesopotamia, and worse savages they will return.
February 20, 2007
• I saw a version of this L.A. Times piece in my Sunday paper, and I immediately went looking for the original on line: "The hot button of a casual embrace: Interracial relationships abound on TV now, but they're often colorblind. How real is that?," by Greg Braxton. Note the permitted parameters of debate, here, over the miscegenation that the entertainment industry has begun to relentlessly promote. Either it represents Glorious Progress, or it's not so glorious because it doesn't go far enough. The white West is gone — or have I said that already?
February 20, 2007
• Tipping me to this AP story, my correspondent commented, "I'll bet you thought the purpose of athletic associations was to promote school athletics." Not I, kemosabe!
"U. of Illinois bars Indian symbol," by David MercerFebruary 20, 2007
• Tibor Machan wins three cheers for having the patience to demolish a certain type of slavery in plain, straightforward language, in this succinct essay at TheAtlasphere.com: "Health Care: A Value, Not a Right." You've got to hand it to Randians — they're better than most at cutting right through to the essentials.
February 20, 2007
• Writing at CounterPunch, John Walsh examines a discouraging state of affairs, with respect to "Libertarians," that some of us may already have noticed: "Nader and Libertarians Not Welcome / A Splintered Antiwar Movement." It's especially discouraging because only the anti-statist tendency can offer a consistent and thoroughgoing critique of state violence, including imperialistic, adventuristic war-making. No doubt the wiser heads on the statist Left understand that; in any case, all good Red Guards do whatever they can to conceal the existence of anti-statists from the public view. Nonetheless, purported anti-statists do shoot themselves in the foot sometimes: see the next item.
February 16, 2007
• If even libertarians won't be libertarian, who will be? At Future of Freedom, Jacob G. Hornberger makes a valiant and eloquent attempt to reach those who call themselves libertarians and yet support Bush's War and its underlying premises: "The Critical Dilemma Facing Pro-War Libertarians." The repellent phenomenon of pro-war "libertarians" is one reason I now avoid using the word libertarian to describe myself.
February 16, 2007
• If you're seeking a "high-concept" take on the American fate, you should take a look at Michael Vlahos's "The Fall of Modernity: Has the American narrative authored its own undoing?," posted at The American Conservative. Vlahos analyzes the unraveling of America's "sacred narrative" in modern times but does not mention Lincoln, who did the most to transform its fabric into cheap, shoddy, and toxic polyester.
February 16, 2007
• I was distressed to see that this powerful essay by Tom DiLorenzo, posted at the Rockwell site, was already seven months old before it swam onto my screen. It deserves recognition now, though, in the wake of the latest Lincoln's Birthday ravings and also on account of its mention of Doris Kearns Goodwin, the loving chronicler of liberal Machiavellianism. Freedom-lovers understand that Abraham Lincoln worked hard to enslave white people, but his active support for black slavery is still not sufficiently known, and DiLorenzo does his best to redress that in this 2006 piece: "The Lincoln Cult's Latest Cover-Up." Along the way, he aims a left-handed compliment at Goodwin, a recent dinner companion of George W. Bush, who, in turn, claims to have read her most recent treatise.
February 16, 2007
• In its print edition, CounterPunch is revisiting the question of Israeli foreknowledge of 9/11, in a piece by free-lance writer Christopher Ketcham. At Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman interviews Ketcham, CounterPunch editor Alexander Cockburn, and Marc Perelman, a reporter for the Forward who has done his own work in the field: "Cheering Movers and Art Student Spies: Was Israel Tracking the Hijackers Before the 9/11 Attacks?" I assume CounterPunch will post the full text of Ketcham's article before long; I'll link to it at that time.
February 16, 2007
• There's another interracial-rape case perking at Duke University, venue of the Nifong bogus-rape scandal, but Townhall.com blog poster Mary Katharine Ham bets you haven't heard about this one, for, as she writes, "The accuser is white. The suspect is black." (The accuser doesn't seem to be a stripper this time.)
"A Tale of Two Rapes in Durham"February 16, 2007
Rectify! Rectify! All Culture Materials from the Pre-Revolutionary Period must be rectified fullwise!
"Opera expert says Puccini's Butterfly is 'racist,'" by Amy Iggulden of The TelegraphFebruary 16, 2007
• This piece at the Christian Science Monitor can't come as a surprise to us, but it is good to know how far our extinction has progressed. Now even the Establishment is warning of trouble in the future: "Coming U.S. challenge: a less literate workforce," by Amanda Paulson. Of course the researchers themselves "emphasize they're not saying the U.S. [i.e., America] is in any danger of collapse." Nooo, nooo ... of course not!
The report cited by Paulson blames foreign-speaking immigrants mostly, but in fact that's not the half of it. Riyeeet? Liyeeek, whateverrr ...
February 13, 2007
• Actually I wish the campus Left practiced the Whateverrr way of life. But as John Leo demonstrates in this incident-rich tour d'horizon at City Journal, it does not: "Free Inquiry? Not on Campus." Leo zeroes in on an important rule enforced by the censorious comrades: "Politically incorrect speakers are responsible for attacks on them by students who resent their speech."
February 13, 2007
• Now, I don't hesitate to cite leftists when I think it's appropriate. And when they're exposing the neocons, it's often appropriate. At Alternet, I find this useful backgrounder to the push for war with Iran: "For Neocons, an Attack on Iran Has Been a Six-Year Project," by Larisa Alexandrovna.
February 13, 2007
• The man who alerted me to this Washington Post article suggested that — given its source — it's perhaps more illuminating than the essays at Antiwar.com and Counterpunch that we're used to seeing: "Victory Is Not an Option," by William E. Odom. Odom, a retired general and former NSA director, argues here for what I suppose one could call the conservative-imperialist approach, which includes a willingness to curtail a counterproductive adventure and take one's lumps.
February 13, 2007
• When the movie "Rain Man" came out in 1988, most Americans probably had never heard of autism. And it's hard to believe that the only reason was, as the Zeitgeisters like to chant, It was just underreported. Autism is now turning into an epidemic, if we believe current reports. And some Zeitgeisters are even admitting it, laying the blame on mercury in children's vaccines. If that's correct, then mercury has a worse effect on boys than on girls. In any case the incidence of autism accords strangely with the overall recession of males in our society.
Here's one of many current writings on the problem: "New Jersey has highest [autism] rate ever documented in U.S.," by Lindy Washburn of NorthJersey.com.
And here's another piece on the question, at The New York Times: "Study Puts Rate of Autism at 1 in 150 U.S. Children," by Benedict Carey.
February 13, 2007
• If for any reason you need to start blasting superheated steam out your ears, this piece from Haaretz should do the trick. It certainly worked for me: "Israel, U.S. begin discussions on renewal of foreign aid package," by Shmuel Rosner.
February 13, 2007
• At The Cavalier, the student newspaper of the University of Virginia, we learn: "Student Council passes diversity pledge aimed at first-year students," by Franny Corneliussen. She starts out: "Student Council passed a resolution last night to institute an undergraduate pledge against prejudice.
"The legislation is designed to give students a chance 'to reflect on issues of community diversity and multi-vocality after first-year orientation' and recognize 'the history of institutionalized inequalities at the University.'"
The plan is to make names of the pledgers publicly available, which is meant as an "effort ... to create a friendlier environment." Whether or not it turns out to be friendlier for those choosing not to sign up, I predict that in all the giant posters that are going to appear at the University of Victory — I mean, Virginia — Big Brother will be smiling.
February 3, 2007
• In an essay from The Voluntaryist posted at Vermont Commons, Donald Livingston asks: "What is 'Secession'?" I find Livingston's assessment of the changing import of secession to be quite useful. As an anarchist, and contra Livingston, I argue that if pursued to the end, secession does result in anarchy. I insist also that, as the moribund, over-inflated American federation approached the Lincoln Revolution, it had either to fall apart or transform itself (as it did) into the United State.
February 3, 2007
• Pat Buchanan examines the drive toward war with Iran in this piece at Antiwar.com: "Hysteria at Herzliya."
February 3, 2007
• The good folks at Power and Interest Report really have a flair for zingy titles, as you can see here: "The Mara Salvatrucha Organization and the U.S. Response," by Samuel Logan and Ashley Morse. But this is a meaty piece, analyzing the sort of phenomenon I like to call Yet Another Triumph of Our Multicultural Socialist Utopia. Seriously, ask yourself how much of a threat M-13 would be if it were not for the government's perpetual war on the unlicensed drug industry. Ask yourself, too, whether the Police Statists can really want to "win" that war, even in the way they claim.
February 3, 2007
• There is a Disturbance in the Tribe, Luke, according to this muse-worthy piece by Patricia Cohen at The New York Times: "Essay Linking Liberal Jews and Anti-Semitism Sparks a Furor." Once again this may be a chance for us to just hide and watch them fight.
February 3, 2007
• I've taken a shot or two at Sen. Lindsey Graham's historical knowledge and acumen, and now it's Sheldon Richman's turn to squeeze off a few rounds, in commentary at FEE: "Lost Articles." In so doing Richman reminds us of the first U.S. constitution and takes a look at how America fared under that system. This account is far different from the one you were offered in state school, assuming you were offered anything at all. (I am particularly happy to see Richman cite the good Merrill Jensen.)
January 30, 2007
• Power and Interest News Report assesses the current state of play between the Empire and Iran: "U.S. Moves to Regain Leverage over Iran." According to the unidentified writer, since PINR's last assessment, in 2004, "Developments have clearly moved in a direction closer to Iran's best-case scenario."
January 30, 2007
• And now Hillary. On January 22, I linked to a piece at the Forward about John McCain's success in recruiting big Jewish moneymen in New York. Now it's the turn of La Clinton, who "is expected to snare the lion's share of the Jewish community's substantial political donations in the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination," according to this article in the Forward by E.J. Kessler: "Hillary the Favorite in Race for Jewish Donations / Biden, Obama Expected to Make Some Inroads." It will be fun to watch the dance Hillary is going to have to do on the War, under the gaze of Democrat peaceniks, including antiwar blacks whose support she may need to get the nomination.
January 30, 2007
• Taking off from the David Irving persecution, Paul Gottfried has penned, for the Rockwell site, a splendid essay on the narrowing of permissible opinion in the West: "A Lament for Lost Freedom." Here's one observation that makes it splendid: "At the very time that Irving was condemned for slighting Hitler's crimes, people who deny openly and even proudly the numerous mass murders of Stalin and Mao had been elevated to seats of power in 'European democracies.'"
January 30, 2007
• Merely from casual observation it is clear that American police are coming to resemble the old tommygun-toting Communist and Nazi gorillas more with every passing year, but this Antiwar.com piece by Paul Craig Roberts, "The Empire Turns Its Guns on the Citizenry," still has the power to shock. Here's a little shocker: "Today SWAT teams are deployed for routine police duties. In the U.S. today,
75-80 percent of SWAT deployments are for warrant service." And during what (perpetual) war here at home did these SWAT commandos really get rolling? I remember. Roberts does, too.
January 30, 2007
• I know I'm walking upon dangerous ground, here, but I insist that Mark Steyn is one neocon worth reading, especially when he's discussing demographics and the loss of cultural morale. He's even worth reading about, as I urge you to do in this review of his latest book by another neocon, Daniel Pipes: "Steyn's New Book Combines Humor, Accuracy, Depth." Citing the book, Pipes writes: "Traumatized by the electoral appeal of fascism, post-World War II European states were constructed in a top-down manner, 'so as to insulate almost entirely the political class from populist pressures.' As a result, the establishment has 'come to regard the electorate as children.'" But even without the special European circumstances, America has driven quite far down the same road. (The review is at The New York Sun.)
January 30, 2007
• This is good for a laugh. Courtesy of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency we learn, "Jewish leader saves white separatist from mob." The separatist referred to is Jared Taylor. Catch the hero's surmise in the final paragraph. Anyone conversant with the traditional makeup of the American mobbing Left may advance a surmise of his own, namely, that an interesting proportion of the masked attackers were Jewish.
January 30, 2007
• As you may know by now, the Diversity Thugs mobbed American Renaissance's Jared Taylor in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on
January 16 and prevented him from giving a talk that he had previously been barred from giving at a local college. Here's the story at CNews: "Halifax mob prevents 'race realist' from delivering speech," by Melanie Patten. As has been obvious for a long time, one rather significant form of diversity these little Stalinists don't care for is diversity of opinion. I am glad to report that Mr. Taylor, our brave and heroic friend, was not physically injured.The speech Mr. Taylor was to give, posted at American Renaissance: "Is Racial Diversity Good for Canada?"January 22, 2007
• Who would have guessed that the lawfakers' own corruption would lead them to try to squelch free expression? Well, only the vigilant, including those who have paid attention to past campaign-finance "reform." This time the issue is lobbying, and Gary North keeps the vigil: "Senate Democrats to America: 'Shut Up!'" The piece is posted at the Rockwell site.
January 22, 2007
• At the Telegraph, I find "the first exclusive extract from his new book on language" by John Humphrys, who "argues that we must safeguard grammar and clarity in an age of texting, slang, and hype":
"Mind your language — it matters!"One of my correspondents has urged me to link to this so others could like hone in on it's awesomeness. So, like, enjoy, you guyssss!Seriously (and more literately), one supposes that the British are capable of destroying their language all by themselves, but it seems to me that very many of the errors and uglies cited here have invaded Britain from our side of the pond.
January 22, 2007
• The Forward comes through again, publishing revelations for all to see but to which most will be blind: "McCain Lines Up N.Y. Money Men, Raising Pressure on Rudy Giuliani," by Jennifer Siegel. The Forward, of course, is referring to Jewish money men. I assume that, hoping to offer voters a real choice in November '08, they will also line up behind Big Nurse.
January 22, 2007
• Writing at the Independent, Robert Fisk takes a look at the war plan that the Chimp-in-Chief announced the other day: "Bush's new strategy — the march of folly." Fisk starts out: "There will be timetables, deadlines, benchmarks, goals for both America and its Iraqi satraps. But the war against terror can still be won. We shall prevail. Victory or death. And it shall be death."
January 22, 2007
• At VDare, Paul Craig Roberts insists that the Bushites' aim is one of "Distracting Congress from the Real War Plan," namely, widening the war to include Iran. This piece appeared
January 9, and it's remarkable that, since that time, even some TV commentators — embedded nine feet deep in the asphalt of the mainstream — have started to recognize the danger.
January 22, 2007
• The assault on white civilization being pressed by our supervisors has suffered a minor and temporary setback. From David N. Goodman, writing at the Washington Post, we learn: "University of Michigan Drops Affirmative Action for Now / School Will Continue Its Legal Fight Against a Ban on the Practice, However."
NPR interviewed the school's president, Mary Sue Coleman, on
January 10, and like any self-respecting Red Guard she was utterly unrepentant, making no bones about her intention to pursue "diversity" by other means. She insisted that a "diverse" student body and a "diverse" campus were good for all students (though, I suppose, not so good for the white males prevented from becoming students). The reason is that students need to be prepared to enter our modern "diverse" society — which of course the Red Guards themselves have labored so hard and relentlessly to build, while undermining white civilization, morale, and freedom of association.Stories such as this should remind us how great a defeat it was, both for defenders of Liberty and for defenders of the white West, when separation of school and state was abolished.
January 11, 2007
• From the Left comes this take on congressional Democrats' confrontation with the Wee Emperor's "new" war policy: "Democrats Draw Battle Lines against Bush's 'Surge,'" by Alexander Zaitchik. Writing at AlterNet, Zaitchik mentions in passing the hysterically funny collision between the droning Democrat policy wonk Rahm Emanuel and the Cindy Sheehan gremlins, who didn't want to let him get a word, however socialist, in edgewise. I saw it on TV while sipping my morning mug, and I just about sprayed Maxwell House all over my pants.
January 11, 2007
• Power and Interest News Report is not optimistic about the chances for Bush's "new" plan: "U.S. Moves to Implement the Surge Strategy." The un-bylined "intelligence brief" includes this matter-of-fact prediction: "Once the surplus soldiers are called back, or once the insurgents adapt to the increased numbers, attacks will escalate again and Washington will be in the same position that it is in now."
January 11, 2007
• Future of Freedom's Sheldon Richman pounds another one into the bleachers in this commentary: "Bipartisanship? Bah!" He points out that the trumpeted glories of "bipartisanship" (which we at TLD usually think of as collusion) don't comport too well with the trumpeted glories of the "two-party system." Not logically, at least.
January 11, 2007
• Walter Williams has penned a nifty column about creeping tyranny and creepy tyrants. I found this version at Townhall.com: "Trans Fat ban."
January 11, 2007
• A profile in caution. According to Bob Woodward, writing in the Washington Post, "Ford Disagreed with Bush about Invading Iraq." But the ex-president embargoed the
July 2004 interview until after his death. Well, thanks, Jerry. A lot of good your opposition does us now. How many have died in the Iraq War since the summer of 2004? How many have been maimed? How many left grieving, desolate, even mad?Let's take a glance further back for a moment — to 1974. Some apparently think Ford's pardoning of Richard Nixon was courageous, and courageous it may have been, at least in the way defined by John Kennedy's ghostwriter. But I thought, and think, that it was shockingly wrong as well as bad for the country. Wrong, because few knew at the time what all crimes Nixon had committed. What if he'd had people kidnapped and held incommunicado, contravening the Central Government kidnapping statutes? What if he'd committed some Clintonicides that could have been prosecuted on the federal level?
And bad for the country, because if Nixon had been permitted to twist in the wind for years, with hearings and trials droning interminably on, and more and more pols and appointees being dragged down the sewer with him, the imperial presidency would have suffered an even worse and longer-lasting wound. And that would have been good for the country.
These statesgods seem to act courageously only when they're doing wrong.
January 3, 2007
• In an earlier writing on the Duke rape case, I inquired sardonically whether North Carolina actually had a bar association. At that point it was conspicuous in its absence from the story. But finally it turns out that North Carolina does have such a thing, and even I, the radical skeptic, am having a tough time considering this recent development to be bad news: "Charges filed against Duke D.A.," by Aaron Beard of the AP. I found this version of the story at the Pocono (N.C.) Record.
Not to go on and on about this, and toot our own horn, but my skepticism about the Duke case from the git-go has been proved right just as our skepticism, here at TLD, about the Iraqi WMDs was proved right. However, we are neither geniuses nor Nostradami. What does give us a leg up on these matters is our unsleeping, unrelenting suspicion of all government and all its servants.
January 3, 2007
• At the Los Angeles Times, Andrew Cockburn offers a reminder about Saddam Hussein's early career: "So long to 'our' tyrant."
January 3, 2007
• And at The Independent, Robert Fisk observes: "He takes his secrets to the grave. Our complicity dies with him / How the West armed Saddam, fed him intelligence on his 'enemies,' equipped him for atrocities — and then made sure he wouldn't squeal." A longish title, certainly, but revealing.
If the title isn't enough, here's how Fisk starts out: "We've shut him up. The moment Saddam's hooded executioner pulled the lever of the trapdoor in Baghdad ... Washington's secrets were safe."
Washington has secrets? Nooooo ...
January 3, 2007
• This little chapter in the ongoing history of our multicultural socialist utopia suggests that maybe, if we're very lucky, we'll be able to just hide and watch them fight: "Hispanics battle blacks in major Calif. prison riot," by Adam Tanner of Reuters. At least when they're attacking each other they're not attacking us, and that's a mercy.
January 3, 2007