Earlier installments.

Stop and think, collected.

Comment?  
 
Reader responses

Current installments, continued.
 

That is a deliberate distortion. About 10 percent of the population was using Food Stamps during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the projection cited by Eckholm does not approach that level, although the total monetary outlay is, of course, higher.

But stop and think again: The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program (another telling indication that it is actually a farm program and not a hunger program) has been pressing for decades to increase the volume of its giveaways.

A February 14, 2008, press release from that department boasts:

Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer today announced that USDA will offer $5 million in grants to improve participation in food stamps for those who are eligible but for a variety of reasons do not receive the help intended for them.

"Nationally, about 65 percent of all those who are eligible for good stamp benefits are currently participating in the program," said Schafer. "Yet fewer than 31 percent of the elderly and 50 percent of Hispanic families who are eligible for food stamps are actually participating."

The Times and the actual state of the economy notwithstanding, couldn't those machinations have something to do with the increase...? [Douglas Olson]

Comment?

Return home. 

Government's crystal ball cracks again. Preparing for the current campaign for emperor, states competed more fiercely than ever before to one-up each other and schedule early primaries. In so doing they sought to give their voters (or local political apparat) a better chance to influence the nominations. On the Republican side, the competition may have been worthwhile for certain states. But on the Democrat side, it certainly wasn't. Appearing in my home state earlier this month, Barack Obama noted that, in the super-late May 6 primary, Indiana Democrats may actually help decide something for the first time since 1968.

State legislatures' scramble to schedule ever-earlier primaries now looks like another good example of bollixed-up government "planning," doesn't it? — at least on the Democrat side. Seems appropriate. Though both ruling parties are thoroughly totalitarian, it's the Democrats who jabber the most about "planning" our society and economy. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (April 2008)

Clintons still pimping out daughter. After using their political muscle to end, at least temporarily, the career of MSNBC commentator David Shuster for observing that Chelsea Clinton was being "pimped out" by Hillary's campaign, her parents continue to shamelessly pimp out their only daughter to promote her mother's pitiful delusions of grandeur. (Don't even think about demanding an apology or a suspension from The Last Ditch, Hillary! Unlike those wimps at MSNBC, we never back away from the truth.) With growing desperation to win the Pennsylvania primary in the face of shrinking poll numbers, Hillary's campaign scheduled surrogate Chelsea for an appearance at Woody's, a notorious "gay" bar in Philadelphia. To counter that sacrificial lamb, lesbian singer Melissa Etheridge pimped herself for Barack Obama by telephone at the event, which was sponsored by the homosexual National Stonewall Democrats group.

Hillary won the backing of the Liberty City Democratic Club, Philly's largest queer political organization. "We are proud to endorse Senator Hillary Clinton in this important primary cycle," declared spokesman Matthew Woodcock. (Sic: I'm not making this up!) "Her record of accomplishments is proof positive that she'll be a fighter for the LGBT [lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender] community in the White House, and that's what we need." [Douglas Olson] (April 2008)

Br'er Jeremiah and Br'er Barack. I hope this doesn't strike you as too conspiratorialist, but I have to wonder whether Minister Jeremiah Wright, in his interview with Bill Moyers and in his remarks at the National Press Club and the NAACP, was deliberately falling on his sword while appearing to nick Barack Obama with it. Minister Wright "dissed" Obama — if I may employ the popular ghettospeak — and thus handed the senator a perfect opportunity to definitively sever his ties with the radical Afro-cleric. Obama lost no time doing so, and now — he and his campaign hope — he can "move on."

It may not work; the telescreen talkers are still chattering about Obama's judgment and timing in handling the Wright crisis before now. But all that aside, if it were a stratagem, it would be interesting to know whether Obama or his handlers were in on it, or whether it was a brainstorm that Minister Wright came up with on his own in an attempt to help the candidate.

I never tire of quoting Ronn Neff in "Cognitive vanity": "Deceit is the basis of all politics." We are talking here, after all, about bigtime imperial politics — and Obama is one of the biggest charlatans to come down the political pike since Bill Clinton himself. [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2008)

The "elitist" evasion. Obama flacks always come out with some version of the same thing whenever a telescreen talker asks whether the Imam is an "elitist." The version I've heard most recently is that Obama was "born so far on the wrong side of the tracks that he couldn't even hear the trains."

In itself that's balderdash, of course. But my response to the overall claim is, No, no, no, no, no. No one is claiming that Obama is a woodpile scion of the Rockefellers or Vanderbilts, or that he grew up playing polo. Of the preening left-wing "bourgeois Bohemians" whom David Brooks surveyed in Bobos in Paradise, compulsively shopping for $400 designer hammers and hitherto-unheard-of kinds of cheese, I'm pretty sure a good proportion are sons and daughters of grade-school teachers and insurance agents. In this country those who issue from petit-bourgeois or even factory-class origins, graduate from one of the Bolshevik universities, and make their way into the corporate – media – law – administrative – political nomenklatura wind up as the shrillest, most obnoxious, most compulsive elitists you can ever hope to avoid. This isn't 17th-century France with aristos of ancient houses inspecting each other's coat of arms; it's 21st-century America with female lawyers of obscure origins sniffing over each other's diplomas and Hermès accessories.

Barack Obama is a graduate of Columbia and Harvard, isn't he? Or did I get that wrong? Seems I even heard that his father was a Harvard man, too. That's worth remembering even if Obama père sold collision coverage from State Farm on the side. [Nicholas Strakon]
 

P.S. Surveying the site, I find I have neglected to mention that I'm actually rooting for the Young Imam in the current contest for emperor, in my half-hearted way. That ought to give you an idea of what I think of the other candidates and, indeed, of this entire carnival of sociopathy. My hypothesis is that Obama has the better chance of keeping Field Marshal Bombs Away out of the imperial palace. I may be wrong about that, of course. For that matter I may be wrong in rooting for Obama: I rooted, half-heartedly, for George W. Bush in 2000, and just look what happened. Could the Horror of Gorror have been worse?

When we predict what some pol will do once in office, our only hope for avoiding Neff's "cognitive vanity" is to predict that he'll do something terrible. (April 2008)

Doesn't it take a cornfield? Hillary has been campaigning in the Hoosier state for a while now, but, strangely enough, she hasn't yet discovered a third or fourth set of grandparents down in Poland, Ind., or talked fondly of munching breaded-tenderloin sandwiches at Nick's in Huntington when she was in third grade, or reminisced about visiting Uncle Luther's old cottage on Lake Maxinkuckee. It's confusing. Here I thought she hailed from every state in the Union. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (April 2008)

Bill on the Bosnia trip. OK, wait a minute. Bill Clinton is a much better liar than this. How many immediately obvious untruths did he pack into his defense of Hillary's Bosnia lie? Three? Four? And not only that: he went on to suggest that Hill may have been having a senior moment when she produced her fairytale! Over on the Republican side der alte Feldmarschall must be cackling.

Is Bill deliberately sabotaging his wife, trying to get her to withdraw? [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2008)

Once again, government chefs do their best "To Serve Man." Lest stranded American Airlines ticket holders forced to camp out in fusty airline terminals and dingy airport hotels think that their sacrifices are in the service of air safety, allow me to draw their attention to the following article at Bloomberg.com:

In the FAA spot checks that began on April 7, inspectors found that the attachment of the wiring bundles didn't match agency specifications such as the orientation of certain clamps and ties, [company executive vice president Dan] Garton said.

Mechanics "had taken certain latitudes" in the work, Garton said, not realizing the "greater emphasis on strict compliance" at the FAA since U.S. lawmakers began raising questions last month about its oversight of airline maintenance. ("American Air Had 'No Choice' About Grounding Jets a Second Time," by Mary Schlangenstein, April 10, 2008)

There has been no indication that the installation violations actually affected safety. Almost certainly, they would not have caused an unsafe condition in the couple of weeks it would have taken American Airlines to correct them on a more normal schedule.

But that didn't matter to the geniuses at the FAA. The tens of millions of dollars lost by the airline, and the even greater costs imposed on its passengers, are acceptable — even desirable — because they draw attention away from the agency's manifest failure to prevent or correct actual safety problems, and its disastrous failure to update the United State's ancient, creaky air traffic control system.

But our guardians of airline safety are on the job now. And those thousands of flight cancellations and the suffering of would-be travelers prove it! [David T. Wright]

Utopian Watch. I expect the sages of the Consensus World to assure us that this latest disaster of regulation proves — the need for more and better regulation. [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2008)

Latest Noose: the jig is up for black professor. It has been a very strange affair, even for an Orwellian "hate crime," ever since a 4-foot noose was discovered on the office door of Columbia Teachers College professor Madonna Constantine in October. She is one of only two tenured black profs at the school.

First, the college forced the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force to obtain a warrant for the video surveillance tapes from the building, leaving everyone wise in the history of "hate crimes" to conclude that the most likely suspect was a Negro, and likely the "victim" herself. Providing additional fuel for those speculations was the fact that the cops maintained a studied silence for months after they obtained the tapes.

Now, finally, the other shoe has dropped. Some weeks ago the college "victimized" poor Madonna yet again by finding her responsible for at least two dozen instances of plagiarism of both text and ideas from the works of fellow faculty members and her students. (She still denies the charges.) It turns out that this 18-month investigation was quietly being conducted at the time the noose was discovered, making irresistible the assumption that the hate hoax was designed to deflect the probe, or at least create sympathy for the thief.

Now a Manhattan grand jury has issued a subpoena to the college for all the prof's records, including documents relating to the school's investigation, which was contracted out to a private investigator and a law firm.

It would seem that only two relevant questions remain:

(1) Did Madonna do the "hateful" deed herself, or did she have a friend do it?

(2) Will the perpetrator of this anti-white hoax be charged with a "hate crime" for faking a "hate crime"? [Douglas Olson] (April 2008)

Daughters of Charlemagne, or, We have to understand how far down we are. By now I expect we've all seen some of the tape of the cheerleader assault in Florida, if we could stand to watch it. In a story at Local6.com, the local sheriff is quoted as saying, "Shocking. I've never seen anything like it. [The girls] seem to have absolutely no remorse at all. I don't understand the sheer violence."

The photos posted by Sun-Sentinel.com (see link on that page) reveal that five of the girls arrested appear to be white, like their victim. One arrestee, Kayla Hassell, 13, is nonwhite. Both of the boys involved, who are accused of standing lookout, appear to be white. All have American-sounding names, with the possible exception of Miss Nichols, 16, whose first name is Mercedes.

I agree with the sheriff: it is intensely shocking that some young girls in America, including white girls, are now capable of perpetrating sadistic, protracted criminal beatings.

But the violence itself is not the most shocking aspect of the story. That distinction is reserved for the attackers' encouraging someone to tape their crime with the agreed intention of posting it on YouTube and MySpace. The girls are now to be tried as adults on a collection of major felony charges, including kidnapping, and given the existence of the tape one must pity their defense attorney, if he is not a wizard at getting evidence excluded.

We have to grasp, here, not only the collapse of morality among the attackers and the collapse of their family culture but also the collapse of their very mind. Apparently they were unable to envision the complete disruption of their lives that would result from their act and the sabotaging of their legal defense that would result from their taping it. If they did envision all of that, they didn't care. As I find myself asking all the time these days, in various contexts, How is that possible?

Youths have always been wild and heedless compared with adults, I may be told. Well, look. Forty years ago — even twenty-five years ago — if we had seen tape of such an attack we could not have believed that it was carried out by "normal" suburban high-school girls, all but one of them white. We would have assumed it originated in a back ward of the Hospital for Criminally Insane Girls, during a lapse of vigilance by the inmates' keepers. I'm 58. I'm old enough to remember the America that was.

Honestly, in light of stories such as the one out of Florida, I wonder what the point is of our continuing to analyze imperial crimes in distant lands, neocon lies, racial politics, ruling-class exploitation, bureaucratic tyranny, and all the rest of it. But I suppose we must persevere. [Nicholas Strakon]

Ed Tom's take. In No Country for Old Men, set in 1980, Cormac McCarthy has his tired old sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, observe:

I read in the papers here a while back some teachers come across a survey that was sent out back in the thirties to a number of schools across the country. Had this questionnaire about what was the problems with teachin in the schools. And they come across these forms, they'd been filled out and sent in from around the country answerin these questions. And the biggest problems they could name was things like talkin in class and runnin in the hallways. Chewin gum. Copyin homework. Things of that nature. So they got one of them forms that was blank and printed up a bunch of em and sent em back out to the same schools. Forty years later. Well, here come the answers back. Rape, arson, murder. Drugs. Suicide.

So I think about that. Because a lot of the time ever when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I'm gettin old. That it's one of the symptoms. But my feelin about that is that anybody that cant tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum has got a whole lot bigger of a problem than what I've got.

Forty years is not a long time neither. Maybe the next forty of it will bring some of em out from under the ether. If it aint too late.

Welcome to Hell, Geraldine! Welcome to hell, Geraldine Ferraro — a hell of your own making, you and the leftists who have worked for two generations to criminalize thought and speech in this once-free country. Long a champion of the rights of minorities over the majority, you now know — albeit only in a very small way — what happens to the "mere" citizen who dares to speak out against the engine of anti-white oppression that you helped set in motion.

You have been thoroughly "spanked" by both the media and your fellow Democrat politicians for your comment that "if Obama was [sic] a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was [sic] a woman, of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."

Your offense is all the greater for the fact that your statement was absolutely and undeniably true.

As part of the hellishness of your situation, Miss Ferraro, I want you to know that Obama himself agrees with you! In an adulatory 2005 Chicago Tribune story, reporter Jeff Zeleny tells us:

In winning the Democratic Senate primary in Illinois, Obama drew as many as two white votes for every black one, showing nearly unprecedented crossover appeal for a black candidate in a statewide race.

Obama acknowledges, with no small irony, that he benefits from his race.

If he were white, he once bluntly noted, he would simply be one of nine freshmen senators, almost certainly without a multimillion-dollar book deal and a shred of celebrity. Or would he have been elected at all? ("When it comes to race, Obama makes his point — with subtlety," June 26, 2005)

Anti-Semitism among the MSM? By now we've all seen the tape of Joe Lieberman whispering instruction into the ear of old man Bombs Away on the difference between al Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgents. One wiseacre of our acquaintance points out that if that image were translated into cartoon form it would be the sort of thing that got Julius Streicher hanged. (April 2008)

She "misspoke." Hillary Clinton's recent declaration that in 1996 she was met at a Bosnian airport by sniper fire rather than by a little girl proferring flowers is more evidence that these power-maniacs differ radically from normal people. They think differently, if in fact they can be said to think as we understand thinking. Some of us here at The Ditch have wondered in the past whether any of them can be said to have actual ideas or beliefs, apart from the belief that it is pleasurable and profitable to wield power over their fellow humans.

Now we may question whether Hillary Clinton, in particular, has actual memories, as normal people have memories.

I suppose that I ought to leave room for an alternative to sociopathy or self-induced amnesia. Perhaps Senator Clinton is just a robot who will reflexively read aloud anything that ignorant or dishonest scriptwriters shove in front of her. Sort of like a TV newsreader.

Whichever Clintonistas are actually manufacturing the current untruths, it must be said that in the past they lied much more deftly. Either that, or the media just let them get away with it much more easily. [Nicholas Strakon]
 

"Normal people," Strakon? Is that really a good description of the millions of Americans who troop out at every opportunity and vote for such creeps? [Modine Herbey] (April 2008)

Where's Marshal Stalin when you need him? Constitutionalists, among others, may wish to meditate on something Hillary Clinton said in a speech on March 27. It is with respect to this sort of thing, unfortunately, that we may reasonably fear that she has real beliefs and is describing them accurately.

She said that what Americans need is a president who is commander-in-chief of the economy.

And some continue to insist — even after seven years of Marshal G.W. Bush — that America's political culture is not totalitarian! [Henry Gallagher Fields] (April 2008)

Irresistible. One wants to be careful about making jokes in the wake of atrocities, but it's a little different when they're driven by righteous outrage. So I pass along this response from an AR reader to American Renaissance's snippage of news stories about the coed killings in North Carolina and Georgia:

"I am very surprised by this development. I had expected the culprits to be white lacrosse players."

With respect to the case against Eve Carson's attackers, those who still repose some confidence in the basic structure of the "criminal justice" system may be glad that Michael Nifong, persecutor of whites, is no longer D.A. in Durham County, N.C. (March 2008)

Keeper-in-Chief? As the mainstream media moaned with delight over Rev. Barack Obama's gettin'-right-with-soggy-whites sermon of March 18, I was waiting for someone to point out that he had revealed himself to be an ignoramus in at least one respect.

Quoth the Holy One: "Let us be our brother's keeper, Scripture tells us."

Where exactly? Not in Genesis. I take as my text Genesis 4:9:

And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And [Cain] said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?

And [God] said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.

Without venturing into deep exegesis, a place I have no business being, I will propose that the "we are our brother's keeper" injunction is an unintelligent canard based on a wild misreading. Actually, I was taught in Sunday School that it is a canard. It is a canard of long standing, and Obama is hardly alone in disseminating it. Many other socialists have done the same.

What is a "keeper," anyway? Slave-keeper? Keeper of the mentally incompetent? Zoo-keeper? Those are the images that occur to me. What image occurs to Obama? Does it feature a cage? [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2008)

Renowned clerical bellower Jeremiah Wright is due to be honored by the Brite Divinity School, which is situated on the campus of Texas Christian University, in Fort Worth. But according to Holly Yan of the Dallas Morning News, TCU has now expelled the event from campus, citing security concerns. ("TCU moves event honoring the Rev. Jeremiah Wright off campus," March 20)

As for Brite, Yan says it is standing firm. She quotes its Website: "Brite does not endorse all of the statements or views of any of the church leaders recognized by the Divinity School. Brite is recognizing Dr. Wright for his forty-year ministry linking divine justice and social justice."

Excellent! Now we may be sure that in future Brite will bravely honor white clergymen with similarly impressive and laudable ministries — clergymen, I mean, who stand up for white rights, white achievements, and white identity, and utter fiery denunciations of the United State's criminal and imperialistic foreign policy, pointing out as Minister Wright did that on 9/11 chickens did indeed come home to roost.

I wouldn't want the fellow ranting about it in my living room, but when you're right, you're right, and Wright is right. And whites are right when they say the same thing. Right? [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2008)

Crimespeak! On March 14 I heard some commentary on MSNBC about New York's new governor, David Paterson, a "legally blind" Negro. It was meant as happytalk, but I'm afraid the reporter strayed into some deadly territory. I think he should be punished, just as so many other linguistically careless whites have been punished.

He said that while aides have to read everything to Paterson, the man is not totally blind. The reporter has played basketball with him, and he plays well.

Does MSNBC really want to stand behind the statement that in the new governor of New York we have a Negro who can't read but who can play basketball? [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2008)

At least they leave the snake-handlin' to us ofays. I wanted to have some fun with the Jeremiah Wright Crisis, but in view of what's happening on Wall Street, it'll have to keep 'til next time. For now I'll just pass along a characterization I heard on the George Stephanopoulos program for Sunday the 16th, from the Negro member of his panel, Donna Brazile. She's a Democrat Party flack, and in an attempt to pooh-pooh the flap she said that among the Negro preachers whose wisdom she has personally imbibed, Rev. Wright comes across as — a moderate! [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2008)

The government's Fault. I have postulated that 9/11 — a direct and massive physical attack on the Dark Suits — shook them sufficiently to weaken their grip on the Washington apparatus with respect to policy formation, liberating the Bush neocons to work their havoc. That loosening of control may have helped lead to what we're seeing now — a slow-motion financial 9/11 in Dark Suitdom — but the bones and muscle of the great fascist System remain intact. For now.

The official regime is rushing to the rescue, most remarkably stepping in to save Bear Stearns, the country's fifth-largest investment bank. In that endeavor it is being assisted by JP Morgan Chase — a name with which to conjure, representing as it does a melding of the two great and competing ruling-class interests of old, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. (Apparently Morgan Chase is going to be able to snap up Bear Stearns for two bucks a share. Ah, there's always a silver lining for these folks.)

On Sunday, Fox News's Chris Wallace asked finance minister Henry Paulson whether he didn't worry about the "moral hazard" represented by the government's bailing out a failing enterprise. Now, Paulson is a Goldman Sachs veteran — I almost wrote "operative" — and, while it's almost reassuring to know that a Suit instead of a Likudnik holds the finance portfolio, that means that Paulson is responsible for safeguarding established Wall Street interests. In fact, Goldman Sachs itself is said to be in some danger from the sub-prime cluster-fff ... umble, along with Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Vanguard, Janus, Fidelity, and UBS. Long story short, Paulson gave Wallace a smudgy non-answer answer, but one thing about it that wasn't smudgy was Paulson's belief that the "stability" of the System trumped the moral hazard.

I'm tempted to crack wise and wonder whether there's still enough morality in the System to be placed at hazard. But there is. The fascist System awards privilege to politically connected interests — that's actually its reason for being — and every time it does so, it substitutes its judgment for that of the market. That means that as the System's privilege machine rumbles on and on, decade after decade, it piles distortion upon distortion, malinvestment upon malinvestment. But until some final, absolutely totalitarian kind of fascism is reached, there is always a new malinvestment possible, a new blurring of the market's vision, a new crippling of the market's wondrous and automatic cybernetic action. And, I might add, a new injustice.

If Franklin Roosevelt, in 1933, had let the corrupt financial system truly collapse, hemorrhage away its malinvestments, and restructure itself on an honest free-market basis, that would have amounted to an 8.0 earthquake in economic terms. It would have been terrible, for ordinary folks as well as the swells, but soon over. And whatever real assets existed would still have existed. Instead, Roosevelt saved the bankers. (That was his reason for being.) If the System collapsed now, the liquidation of malinvestments would amount to a 9.0 earthquake. That, too, would soon be over, but I'm afraid that organized society would be over with it.

Long story short, the System has chained us down, with them, astride the San Andreas Fault. Either we accompany them ever further into political-economic fraud and corruption, or we come asunder. If the Fault continues to hold another twenty years, and then gives way, we'll probably be facing a 10.0 earthquake.

Even leaving cultural matters aside, you can see why I've rarely been accused of being an optimist.

But I do always try to find the humor. And I think it's pretty funny, in a dark way, that for almost a century now the government has pretended to manage the "business cycle" — when it created the damn thing in the first place. [Nicholas Strakon]

But what does the overthrow of Eliot Spitzer have to do with all of this? Hey, I'm serious! [Henry Gallagher Fields] (March 2008)

Connections. When the Southern college students Eve Carson and Lauren Burk — both Georgians — were murdered last week, some of the mainstream media speculated about whether the crimes might be "connected." I thought that was a bizarre fantasy, at least as the media meant it. What? — were the killings a conspiracy on the part of the New Manson Family, the Russian Mafia, or perhaps al Qaeda?

I immediately suspected another kind of connection between the deaths of the two young women, one Nordic and the other Jewish and (perhaps) partly nonwhite but mostly white-appearing. I would have bet a thousand dollars that both killers were male Negroes. And so it has transpired, certainly in the case of Miss Burk and almost certainly in the case of Miss Carson.

I suspected also that when the assailants were revealed to be Negro, the mainstream media would abruptly drop all talk of a "connection" between the murders. That has happened.

I was able to predict accurately not because I am a genius or a fortune-teller. I was able to predict accurately because I am a race realist.

Our mainstream media insist that many of America's young white people have been blinded to racial differences: they tell us that the youths no longer even see differences in skin color. What they really mean is that white youths see those differences as irrelevant. The media celebrate the blindness, of course; it is celebrated even by "conservative" media spokesmen such as the former Florida Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program. (I note that the media do not spend much time trying to convince us that young blacks have been rendered similarly indifferent to racial differences.)

I don't know what part, if any, such racial blindness played in the deaths of the two women. Even race realists must take care to remain at Condition Orange when on the street, lest they encounter rampaging male Negroes, who seem to possess natural gifts for lurking, stalking, and attacking their prey with astonishing speed and violence. But such blindness will hardly help preserve the life and health of white youths.

For as long as we are forced to tolerate the presence of dark savages among us, we must arm our youths, and especially our young women, who are naturally less able to protect themselves. Though it may be wise to arm them (and ourselves) with the physical means of protection, doing so will be useless as long as we fail to arm them with knowledge, leading to race realism. [Nicholas Strakon] [March 2008] 

The fall of Spitzer. I celebrate the destruction of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer in a prostitution scandal. This man Spitzer has established a long record of shrill and vindictive enmity toward liberty and justice, and not recently in our history — not recently enough — has such a vaunting servant of Sauron been so well confounded by the very Power for which he lusted.

According to the media, Spitzer was betrayed first by his bank, which played informer to the Central Government Tax Police concerning some transactions in his account that it found "suspicious." The IRS then brought Washington's leading secret police agency — the FBI — into the case. Spitzer's "crime," of course, was paying for consensual sex with another adult. It's a fake crime that he himself had prosecuted, as New York attorney general, in the course of building an unholy résumé that would earn him 70 percent of the votes in the New York gubernatorial election.

Wall Street is said to be "gleeful" today. But we may suspect that, despite his attacks on specific capitalists, Spitzer had until recently remained in good standing with the senior powers on Wall Street. Otherwise, a little phone call would surely have been placed long ago — assuming he has indulged his expensive appetite for a considerable time — and he would be a distant memory by now. It is possible that he has recently offended the top Dark Suits, or that for some other reason they decided that his usefulness was at an end, and finally instructed someone to make that little call. We cannot expect ever to learn those details.

But there is something we can learn from the Spitzer scandal. It offers us a peek into the secret life of our country's political-economic aristocracy. Even if our people see no particular problem in tyranny and injustice, many retain something of a moral sense. And the theme of Stanley Kubrick's final film positively resonates with the Spitzer scandal, in a way, actually, that Clinton's low-rent fornications did not. I doubt that this is precisely how the film's title was meant, but I cannot resist quoting it, as I express the hope that fewer of the sheeple are grazing today with "Eyes Wide Shut." [Nicholas Strakon] [March 2008]

Stop Press. Interviewed on MSNBC this afternoon, longtime Spitzer comrade Alan Dershowitz maintained that no bank would have raised the alarm over the relatively minor sums involved. He insisted that someone "dropped a dime" on the pol. And he seemed to think that we will eventually learn a detail or two about the "little phone call" I mentioned. Whatever happens, I am distressed to find that Alan Dershowitz and I are thinking along similar lines.

I will soon be placing another big bright feather in TLD's cap when I post a review-essay by F. Roger Devlin, whose writings in The Occidental Quarterly I have found delightfully captivating. As an appetizer, here is an excerpt from his article "The Academy: Reform or Secession?" in the Winter 2006-2007 issue. It's from page 65:

In the great majority of cases, young women should be renouncing not sexual relations with men (formerly known as "marriage") but academic work. In its place, we should draw up our own "Women's Studies" curriculum, involving the analysis of such texts as Spock's Baby and Child Care and The Joy of Cooking. This is not a radical proposal. Even granting (only for the sake of argument) that women are "equal" to men in the professions, the survival of our people still depends on someone bearing and nurturing infants: It is hardly likely to be men. Women must do not what they are equal at, but what they are superior at. Many of the young women I have observed in a university setting are severely deluded about themselves and their prospects in life. They are "B" and "C" students who imagine that glamorous careers in law and medicine are theirs for the asking, and that they will be able to marry and raise children in their spare time whenever they choose to do so. Feminism and prosperity have set them up for enormous disappointments, and they desperately need proper guidance, preferably from a "predator" (i.e., husband).

Worst of all, there are the lesbian recruitment programs known as Women's Studies. These courses are not merely doctrinally unsound; they are notoriously easy, fostering an illusion of accomplishment without effort. Many veterans of the feminist classroom seriously imagine they are the intellectual equals of persons who have successfully majored in theoretical physics or ancient Greek. It is even possible that the credentialism I [have] criticized ... is itself partly a product of female influence. I have heard more than one man remark on women's seeming faith in the talismanic value of college degrees. Again, this is a confusion between schooling and education.

I am emphatically not recommending that women's education be limited to domestic skills. These are not the highest accomplishments women should aim at, but they are the first and most necessary, the essential basis for all that follows. Further enculturation is actually more important for them now than in the past, since so many will have to educate their own children at home. To this end, I would especially like to see their attention devoted to literature and the arts. In contrast, much of the coursework they are actually taking is either worthless or harmful.

At the time of this posting, Devlin's article had not yet been posted in part or in full at TOQ.

[March 2008]

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?

In what sense, then, can ethanol be said to be "sustainable"? [Ronn Neff] (March 2008) 

Thoroughly modern McCain. The Young Imam recently pointed out that Bush's War opened up Iraq to al Qaeda, whereupon Field Marshal Bombs Away replied, "That's history — that's the past — that's talking about what happened before."

Well, yes, it certainly is. However, I doubt that most people still operating a live brain would take John McCain's "argument" as a satisfactory rejoinder to what Barack Obama said.

If we are to understand the present at all, and if we are to imagine the shape of possible futures at all, it does help to have some understanding of the past. I'm embarrassed at having to point that out.

The Bush regime has made a practice of fleeing from its record of lies, blunders, and crimes by uttering the very same nonsense as McCain. But the live-brained must be forgiven if they fear that the same people who perpetrated lies, blunders, and crimes in the ... excuse the expletive ... p*st will perpetrate similar lies, blunders, and crimes in the future.

If we had any doubt about it, McCain has now definitively placed himself in the category of "the same people."

In doing so, though, he reveals himself to be a thoroughly modern American. Americans have always tended toward historical amnesia, and that tendency got stronger in the 1960s, thanks to the New Left. (This is not the only element of neocon thinking we can trace to the Left, of course.) I recall standing in a cafeteria line when I was in college and overhearing a leftist behind me observe to a coed that "history is irrelevant." As a history major, I had to restrain myself from turning around and slugging him. But I figured his own idiocy would furnish him a condign punishment.

Maybe it did, but there seem to be many Americans who, far from being punished for ignoring or even repudiating history, have instead been rewarded with power, pelf, and privilege. And now, of course, the state schools have largely abandoned teaching history, as we used to understand it, in favor of disseminating the Red Guard party line about the wickedness of white Westerners and the civilization they built. While the schools even in our time propagated many state-building fairy tales, we still got Columbus and Thomas Edison, while today's school victims get Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks.

Popular as repudiating the p*st may be, it can be hard to do it consistently. McCain himself has hardly been consistent, and I don't expect him to be consistent in the future. In other words, I won't be holding my breath waiting for him to repudiate his own highly touted p*st as Warrior Hero and Martyr of the Republic. [Nicholas Strakon]
 

Rectification. Maybe it's only the actual past we're supposed to repudiate, and not the Party's various versions of it. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (March 2008) 

"Our conservative values." The current Emperor's father, ex-Emperor George H.W., has now come out and endorsed Field Marshal Bombs Away, asserting that John McCain wants to pursue "our conservative values." Some Republicans who consider themselves conservative are puzzled about what George H.W., of all people, could possibly know about conservatism.

I don't want to sink into the quicksand of what conservative means these days — whether it means anything and in particular whether it can mean anything good — but I will defend one aspect of old George H.W.'s claim to be a conservative. His term in the Palace coincided with some major disturbances and changes in Central and Eastern Europe, and in true anti-secessionist Yankee fashion he did his level best to conserve the Soviet Empire. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (February 2008) 

Hispanics and the heart of darkness. During the day I am usually masochistic enough to let MSNBC drone away at me without respite, but pretty much only as "radio" — that is, I rarely look at the screen. And recently I've been hearing a Comcast commercial all in Spanish (well, except for the word "Comcast"), which I have permitted to rile me just on general principles. But the other day I actually watched the thing for the first time.

Two young Hispanics, one male, one female, are making their way through what one may initially assume is an Amazonian jungle. However, it turns out to be an African jungle, and of a very traditional sort, for our exploring pair find themselves accosted by stereotypical African cannibals, tricked out in the sort of tribal costume one might remember from Playboy cartoons of yore.

In the final scene, the big black chief is grinning as he picks Hispanic meat out of his teeth.

Now, since I don't savvy the replacement American language, it beats me what all this has to do with Comcast, though the Discovery Channel, History Channel, and CNN logos are shown at one point. Maybe the message is that if you watch certain Comcast cable channels, you'll know what parts of the world you should stay the hell away from. The ESPN logo makes an appearance, too; maybe watching ESPN helps Hispanics keep up on a more-sporting kind of African endeavor.

Try to imagine selling something to gringos these days (or any time during the past twenty-five years) while happily representing Africans as primitives, and, much worse, as stereotypical cannibals!

Language and culture seem to be the defining elements here, for the young Hispanics look pretty white. They could be Italian, Spanish-Spanish, or Caucasian Cuban. In any case the commercial strikes me as an interesting sidebar to the current Negro-Hispanic divide in the Democrat presidential race. Unlike today's soggy whites, Hispanics in this country feel no guilt or obligation whatsoever toward the blacks, and they are — not to put too fine a point on it — unsentimental about them and their troubles. Unlike whites, Hispanics feel no compulsion to mince about on tiptoe. Sooner or later, the cannibal spot may land Comcast in very hot water (heh heh) with the Negro Machine and the white sob-sisters, but the target audience probably finds it to be hilarious. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2008) 

This adversary has only the power we allow it. On February 12, I received a dispatch from Fran Griffin of Griffin Communications, in Vienna, Virginia:

An 11-part lecture series titled "Building Catholic Communities," being held at Catholic University of America (CUA), has been cancelled at the CUA campus because of pressure from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The series will be held off-campus.

Katie Lee of the CUA Public Affairs office (202-319-5600) received a call yesterday from the SPLC, and discussed the matter with the Dean who decided to cancel the 10 remaining lectures. The Public Affairs Office told Tim Ehlen, the coordinator, that because the series was not a course, it was not covered by academic freedom. It is unclear what the SPLC complaint was.

The symposium which was to be held in the School of Architecture tomorrow (Wednesday, 2/13/08) at 5:30 p.m. has been moved to the Catholic Information Center, 1501 K St., NW, Washington, D.C.

The event being held tomorrow is titled "A Symposium on the Nature of Community" and will discuss the role of religious communities in creating alternatives to suburban sprawl. Dr. Philip Bess of Notre Dame University and author Dr. E. Michael Jones, editor of CULTURE WARS magazine, are the panelists.

The location of the remaining nine lectures has not been determined.

For information on the lectures, see http://www.buildingcatholiccommunities.org/main.cfm?r 1=4.00&ID=19&level=1.

Call the CUA Public Affairs office to complain about this caving in to the Southern Poverty Law Center demands.

Much could be said about this latest despicable attack, but I will strain to restrict myself to two points only.

First, the SPLC emerges here as frighteningly omniscient and omnipresent; naturally, that is how it wants to appear. What happened, no doubt, is that one of its slimy little volunteer agents at CUA tipped Headquarters about the impending outbreak of unapproved opinion on campus. As I understand it, that's how the East German Stasi operated, too — depending mostly on part-time and unpaid informers who either had volunteered or had been intimidated into cooperating. It's also how the Sicherheitsdienst's "Spheres of Life" domestic-surveillance program operated, under an earlier German regime.

Under our own regime of Polite Totalitarianism, the SPLC hardly needs state power to restrict free expression (though it is easy enough to imagine what these creatures would do with state power if they had it). And that brings me to my second observation, namely, that all it took was one lousy phone call from the SPLC Authorities to make CUA capitulate, tout suite. One of my correspondents contends that the Church in America is undergoing a renaissance at the grass-roots level. I'll be convinced that something substantial is really happening when Catholic colleges respond to SPLC instructions with some charitable and loving encouragement to buzz off. [Nicholas Strakon]

Here's the story in the Washington Times: "Catholic University nixes lectures," by Julia Duin (February 13, 2008). According to Duin, the dirty deed was done by "SPLC's Intelligence Project." 

From time to time we have to point out the obvious, and this time it's my turn: In the CUA incident we see revealed again what the "progressive" totalitarians among us mean by "diversity" — uniformity of opinion, determined by them. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (February 2008) 

Among the believers. February 12 was also the day of the Virginia primary. I was talking to Virginian Ronn Neff on the phone, and I jokingly asked him whether he'd voted yet. Soon thereafter he sent me this diverting account:

"You vote yet?" asked the immigrant grocery-checkout gal.

"No," I replied.

"You going to?" she asked.

"None of your confounded business," I didn't reply. "No," I settled for.

She gasped, and her eyes got big. "Why not?"

"I'm not registered." I was trying to avoid unpleasantness.

"You not Amelican?" Did I forget to mention she was Oriental?

"Yes, I am."

"Why you not vote?"

"I don't believe in democracy."

She gasped again, her eyes becoming about as round, I wager, as they could ever get. She was so astonished that the conversation was over.

Ah, if only I could have given her a copy of this story from the Toronto Globe and Mail, in which we see how the people's representatives in the glorious democracy next door to Amelica enact the will of the people: "Toronto Board Holds to Afrocentric School," by James Bradshaw. (February 2008) 

Good timing. An Ohio jury convicted the Negro ex-cop Bobby Cutts today of murdering his white girlfriend, Jessie Davis, and of aggravated murder in the killing of her fetus, "Baby Chloe." (Both proponents and opponents of abortion rights must agree that Ohio criminal law turns out to conflict profoundly with the ideology behind Roe v. Wade.) Will white girls and their parents learn anything from this well-publicized case? Probably not. However, we may take some comfort from the fact that the convictions came during our supervisors' official African-American History Month. The verdict provides a more balanced perspective, amid all the propaganda about George Washington Carver. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2008) 

The murders at Northern Illinois. We have to expect frequent outbreaks of irrational violence as a civilization breaks up and people are cut adrift from cultural anchors, but that doesn't take us too far in understanding either the latest campus atrocity or the previous ones, assuming any further understanding is possible. Not does it help, in understanding the entire phenomenon, to learn that one shooter had a loveless childhood; or that another shooter had personal conflicts with some of his victims; or that yet another shooter had been diagnosed with ADD.

It's true that young males are always more likely to resort to violence under pressure than low-testosterone females or older males, who if not wiser are at least more fatigued. However, young males suffered from various discontents and disorders in the past, but — with the exception of the tumorous Charles Whitman, in 1966 — they didn't decide to shoot up their teachers and fellow students.

This is as far into understanding as I've penetrated so far, though maybe I should call it speculation rather than understanding: Our current break-up displays a feature that, if not historically unprecedented, is still quite unusual. I have taken to calling it the Great Male Recession, and it is especially damaging as it affects young white males, the irreplaceable carriers of civilization into the future.

The media tell us that the Northern Illinois shooter was an accomplished student, highly respected by his teachers and by his peers. There is more to his story — we learn also that he had quit taking some medication that someone thought he should be taking — but in any case the Recession extends beyond particular male grievances and the hatred directed at males, especially white males, by those who engineer the dominant anticulture. It even extends beyond all the new physical and psychological disorders that we are told are burning like wildfire through America's young people, and especially young males, despite the highly touted marvels of modern medicine.

The Recession is profounder than all of that. It encompasses the fatal fact that males are no longer taught to be proper males, as our civilization once understood proper maleness.

The campus shooters who have allowed themselves to be sucked into evil, violent madness may not think of their act in just these terms, but we can hardly expect highly improper young men to go off stage properly. Or quietly. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2008) 

Dystopia: the final frontier. The War Ministry says it will try to blast apart its falling spy satellite before it re-enters the atmosphere. The Pentagon purports to fear that the thing won't break up sufficiently on its own and will kill people when its toxic fuel hits the ground.

You've got to hand it to government. It seems to have an almost fairytale power to make bad things happen. It can make freedoms fall and economies fall; in its wars it can, of course, make innocent civilians fall into death or desolation. With enough help from its victims, it can make many millions of people fall into ignorance and delusion, and whole cultures and races fall into dissolution.

Now we see that Chicken Little's canard is made real, and government can even make the sky fall. [Nicholas Strakon] (February 2008) 

If Hillary Clinton becomes president, she will have achieved what no wife has ever achieved before. Not just one man, but the whole damn country is going to be hen-pecked. [Ronn Neff] (February 2008) 

More triumphs of Duh-MOCK-risy. On Super Tuesday, MSNBC reported that "hundreds" of voters in Virginia were enraged when they showed up at polling places only to find them closed. And authorities in Florida received "hundreds" of calls from would-be voters asking where the polling places were.

Virginia holds its primary next Tuesday. Florida held its primary a week ago Tuesday.

One wonders whether the voting addicts in the Old Dominion will be able to hang in there until the 12th, without someone to swab out their throat so they don't strangle on their own spit.

Meanwhile, on the evening of Super Tuesday, NBC's Jay Leno aired a Jaywalking episode from Universal City in which he displayed photos of the leading presidential candidates to various young and youngish folk passing by. None of them could identify any of the photos — not even the one of Hillary Clinton — except for one Negro gent who was able to come up with "Obama" when shown the Imam's image. He thought the candidate's first name might be Bill. (February 2008) 

Fill 'er up with doublethink. During George W. Bush's meanderings among the Mohammedans earlier this month, I was struck by a pair of news stories that were broadcast in tandem.

The first story was bad news. You could tell by the dour tone affected by the newsreader. It told us that Bush had asked the Saudi King to produce more oil so that the price would come down. Bush complained that the high price of oil was hurting the American economy. But the King said No. So we're going to continue to pay high prices at the pump.

The next story was much more upbeat, as reflected in the newsreader's cheery tone as he told us that someone or other had proposed that gasoline taxes be increased. That was good because it would mean that people would use less polluting fossil fuels, and the money would go to repairing aging road systems and bridges.

Not once in the second story was it mentioned that increasing taxes on gasoline would make the price go up! Not once.

It reminded me of Barbara Ehrenreich's discussion of how hard the plight of the working girl is, what with the costs of getting to work and dressing for work and all, in which Ehrenreich never mentioned the bite that taxes take out of a paycheck. [Ronn Neff] (January 2008) 

No one said there'd be a war! An MSNBC anchor proposed today that many Hispanics may be reachable by the Rev. Dr. Obamarama — in his role as the antiwar candidate — because so many Hispanic families have loved ones doing the Empire's business over there in Mesopotamia. (Once again I indulge in paraphrase.) What?! Did the Authorities bring back the draft when I wasn't looking? Aren't all these Hispanic bravos volunteers?

No doubt many of the relatives who are now purported to be upset encouraged their queridos to sign up, in light of all the groovy educational and career opportunities offered by the War Machine. Well, let's hope they all have better luck — or better judgment — next time.

By the way, what are we to make of Obamarama's antiwar stance? Some of us insist that the neocon war-maniacs emit a distinct odor of Trotskyism. Picking up on that, I've decided that the Young Very-Non-Mohammedan Reverend is the American equivalent of a certain foreign notable, as he was in the early part of his reign: Joe Stalin. You know — "Socialism in One Country"? [Nicholas Strakon] (January 2008) 

Hill and Bill, Kluxers extraordinaire. Surrogates and dupes of the Young Negro Imam are accusing the Clintons of insulting political Negroes and their glorious achievements, and I have to stipulate to this right away: it couldn't have happened to a nicer pair of criminal sociopaths. In fact, Schadenfreude is running through the TLD Editorial Offices right now like bird flu in a Third World hatchery. But the dust-up also serves to indicate how little can be said nowadays, even by anti-white whites notorious for their truckling, if it touches even tangentially on Negro topics.

We Old Americans who have difficulty reconciling ourselves to the fact that we now live in a giant open-air insane asylum may find ourselves most dizzied by how readily the mainstreamers and other respectables fall into line — furrowing their brow, stroking their chin, and doing their best to take seriously the infantile and hysterical squealings of the "civil rights" establishment. Thus, commentators on MSNBC explained that the squealers might have a point, anent Hillary's "insulting" St. Michael Later Known As Martin L. King. As one asked, with respect to the 1964 "civil rights" act, who put the pen in Lyndon B. Satan's hand? Martin L. King, that's who! (I paraphrase.) The fact that they were looking through the wrong end of the telescope completely eluded them. Hillary was pointing out only that King needed Mr. Satan to wield that deadly pen. Or are we to believe that the Kingons, in 1964, were ready to turn away altogether from state power and rely on voluntary means to implement their "dream"?

In fact the Kingon "dream" depended on state power in the same way planets depend on the Sun to form the solar system. Voluntary means could not have officially demolished our freedom of association, erected a gigantic official apparatus of thought-policing, laid the groundwork for the current system of official antiwhite discrimination, and massively strengthened the growth and grasp of centralized officialdom over our lives.

We must reflect, too, on the fact that much of the current madness on racial questions, and the narrowing of the range of respectable opinion to about two millimeters, has resulted from the antiwhite propaganda disseminated by the official schools over the past half century. It's easy to forget all of that, since the official rectification has lately inspired non-state schools and an entire panoply of other non-state entities, including private businesses, to help leviathan grind into a grease spot what little remains of the white Western mind and the white Western spirit.

I point out en passant that the Kingons themselves have built a complicated and highly profitable network of careers and sinecures on the plain fact that King's "dream" of "racial equality" has not yet been realized despite their eager and lustful liaison with totalitarianism. If the ever- receding dream — or fantasy — were somehow realized, they'd all have to go out and get an honest job. Or depend on a form of state welfare that was less disguised and much less remunerative.
 

As for what Bill said, about the Imam's statements on the war and how they've been portrayed by the MSM, the Hot Springs hustler may be right or wrong, but finding a racial insult therein requires the same level of irrationality, or imbecility, as finding a racial insult in the use of the word denigrate.

More recently, Hillarite billionaire Robert Johnson, head of Black Entertainment Television, protested in a speech that the Young Imam Movement must think blacks are stupid if they're expected to misinterpret so drastically what the Clintons said. But that glimmer of common sense winked out almost immediately, because the only thing the mainstream talking heads were willing to talk about was Johnson's brief allusion to the Imam's admitted use of cocaine in his pre-Imam days. You just can't taunt the Holy One that way! In fact, Hillarite apparatchik Billy Shaheen was sacked for it. Since Johnson is himself black, I suppose this can't be a case of racism but only self-hatred. But the resultant furor, taken seriously by the MSM, is another good example of the self-imposed madness that passes these days for respectable opinion when it comes to Negro affairs.

Not too long ago in this space, Henry Gallagher Fields shook his head over the fact "that Al Sharpton — Al Sharpton! — enjoys free access to the 'respectable' media, which award him the status of a 'respectable' commentator and spokesman." Once we fully digest the implications of that, I suppose there's really not much more to say, except to remind Americans still operating a live brain that for rational racial commentary they now have to resort to profoundly disreputable venues such as this one. [Nicholas Strakon] (December 2007) 

Offering gifts to the Empire. Iranian speedboats buzzing U.S. Navy warships! Those terrorist cowards!

Seriously, one hopes that a fellow as interested in history — especially revisionist history — as Mahmoud Achmedinijad remembers the Gulf of Tonkin. But as Steve Sniegoski would be quick to remind me, Achmedinijad is by no means fully in control of the Iranian regime: the mullahs loom.

The Iranian bifurcation reminds me of the divisions among the Japanese, during the run-up to the Pacific War, among certain moderate diplomats and Cabinet officials, hard-liners in the War Ministry, and the Japanese forces in China and Manchukuo, which forces often ran their own foreign and war policy. So one hopes that important people in Iran remember not only Tonkin but also the U.S. gunboat Panay, which was mucking about in the Yangtze nearby when the Japanese attacked Nanking in 1937. What a gift to the U.S. Empire it was when the Japanese also attacked the Panay, which just happened to have newsreel cameramen on board. I'm afraid one of the Iranian factions may eventually offer a similar gift to the Empire, and the entire Iranian people will pay the price. [Nicholas Strakon] (December 2007) 

Anatomy of a hate crime. Following are the headlines posted on the Website of WRC-TV (Washington, D.C.), concerning a series of "hate crimes" at the George Washington University:

October 29, 2007
No Arrests Made in Apparent GW Hate Crime / Swastikas Found in Campus Buildings Five Times in One Week

October 30, 2007
Fifth Swastika Drawn on GW Student's Door

November 1, 2007
Another Swastika Reported at GWU

November 3, 2007
Another Swastika Appears at GW

November 4, 2007
GW Makes Arrest in Swastikas Case (The story notes: "The university is not releasing the student's name, citing privacy laws.")

November 5, 2007
Police: Jewish GW Student Admits Putting Swastikas on Her Door

[Douglas Olson] (December 2007) 

Those wicked American millionaires! Yesterday I heard stories on both MSNBC and Fox News to the effect that a "millionaire couple" in New York had been convicted of enslaving their two Indonesian housekeepers. Neither news channel identified the culprits by name or ethnic heritage. I thought I'd better consult a print story, because I remembered hearing of the case several months ago, and it seemed to me that we weren't dealing, here, with Schuyler and Muffy van Snooten or any of their circle.

Leaving the electro-journalists to puff out their mouthfog, I consulted an AP dispatch and discovered — in the second paragraph — that the "millionaire couple" labor under the monikers of Mahender Murlidhar Sabhnani and Varsha Mahender Sabhnani.

I'm not surprised that MSNBC chose to disguise the fact that the perps hailed from Somewhere Radically Else, but I thought it was illuminating to see Fox follow the same party line.

I've noticed certain parallels between modern America and the Soviet Union when it comes to the administration of popular enlightenment. Under the Soviets' Impolite Totalitarianism, only the nomenklatura were permitted access to Western journals and newspapers that (occasionally) contained anti-regime material. It's looser here, under Polite Totalitarianism, but a two-track system does exist. The distinction in America is between readers and non-readers. Both classes are fed a steady diet of propaganda, to be sure, but the non-readers dependent on electronic journalism get the worst of it. For one thing, they are routinely disinformed by the omission of crucial facts that any newspaper reader would expect to see in the story's first or second paragraph. Obviously the Associated Press had to identify the perpetrators in the present case; just as obviously, the news channels did not have to. Moreover, the electro- journalists often blow right past crucial and obvious questions raised by their reporting — dumbfounding viewers who are still operating a live brain.

By the way, keep in mind that the cable news channels tend to practice a better — i.e., somewhat less brain-dead — kind of journalism than your local network affiliates do.

As of a few years ago, the Ministry of Love listed brown-on-black crime as white-on-black crime, because it had no category for Hispanic perpetrators. Whether it resulted from ideology or bureaucratic idiocy, that policy inflated the number of crimes that could be advertised as white-committed hate crimes. One wonders how Miniluv will classify the crime committed by electronic Minitrue's colorless, raceless "New York millionaires." [Nicholas Strakon] (December 2007) 

How long do you suppose it will be before Muslims demand that Chevrolet change the logo on its cars? [Ronn Neff] (December 2007) 

The government that says there's too much government. You can imagine how dumbfounded I was, several days ago, when the telescreen started reporting that a bipartisan commission appointed by Gov. Mitch Daniels had concluded that Indiana has "too much government"! As I pointed out when I wrote about the state's latest property-tax crisis, relatively few Indiana pols were willing to demand a halt even in the growth of government spending. What, I now wondered, had accounted for the startling turnaround?

Well, I'm embarrassed that I took the telescreen's dumb-head propaganda seriously even for an instant. The commission does indeed "hope" that its proposals will "lead to long-lasting cost savings for property taxpayers." ("State government reform panel: downsize, consolidate," by Mary Beth Schneider and Brendan O'Shaughnessy, Indianapolis Star, December 12, 2007) But our bipartisan colluders don't want to cut the power and reach of government overall; they just want to make government more efficient.

Doing so would involve eliminating certain "government units," in the words of the Star reporters. Is the commission referring to such criminal subgangs as the state Department for Picking My Pocket and Handing the Loot Over to Parasites? The Office of Disseminating Noxious Red-Guard Propaganda? Or the Administration for Bribing Fascist Predators and War Contractors to Relocate in Indiana?

Uhhh, no. According to Schneider and O'Shaughnessy, the commissioners propose "eliminating township government and shifting those duties to the county; replacing most county elected officials, including sheriffs, with appointees; consolidating school districts so none has fewer than 2,000 students; merging libraries into one countywide district; and forcing more cooperation and communication among public safety units." The three- member board of elected county commissioners would be replaced by a "county executive." Since the news coverage is vague on this point, I am uncertain whether that eminento would be elected or appointed (by the governor?).

I am uncertain, as well, about the desirability of imposing even more giantism in the state schools and imposing even more cooperation among the police agencies that are responsible for enforcing ten thousand unjust state decrees.

Among the county positions that would be appointive are those of sheriff and clerk — offices prescribed by the state constitution for at least 150 years. The township system, too, enjoys a constitutional foundation and harks back to a relatively more benign era of small, decentralized local government. As an anarchist, I'm not exactly sentimental about any of that, but on the other hand I can recognize unitary, centralizing technocracy as well as the next extremist.

That technocratic ideology is nothing new. It's the same thing as the Progressive ideology, which I treated at some length in a column I wrote in 2000, "Where's Dick Daley when you really need him?"

I've made the point, too, in previous writings that government "efficiency" is a two-edged sword; and I suspect that the edge they're hiding is a lot sharper than the edge they're advertising. The clever technocrat Reinhard Heydrich, had only he lived a little longer, might well have come up with a scheme for rationalizing the concentration-camp system, removing some of the burden from the German taxpayer while at the same time making it even more difficult for prisoners to escape. Would that have been a cause reformers could support, with flags flying?

If we're doomed to be serfs of the state, maybe it's better to reject technocracy and hang on to the Under-Reeve of the Independent Borough Prothonotary, even though his only function since 1908 has been to grant licenses to parakeet owners. OK, I made that up. But, really, it's foolish to gamble that government "efficiency" will make the whole criminal enterprise cheaper for tax-victims, in the long run. In fact, expanding the size and power of centralized government will impose heavier and more grievous costs on all of us sooner or later — costs in stolen money and costs in stolen freedom. Or have we actually learned nothing from the history of statism?

If we want to reform government, we need to throw the whole monstrous growth, root and branch, onto a consuming, cleansing, highly efficient fire. [Nicholas Strakon] (December 2007) 

Why are there no pro-peace, anti-military spots on TV countering the Pentagon's propaganda aimed at seducing and corrupting American youngsters? Would all the networks and cable channels really refuse to run them, or is the problem just a lack of money? That may sound like a big "just," but think of the millions of dollars that people are pouring into Ron Paul's coffers. If that money went to TV spots promoting peace and discouraging enlistment, it might actually save some lives ... instead of merely swirling down the toilet of electoral politics. [Nicholas Strakon]

Henry Gallagher Fields observes: If the nets and channels did refuse to sell the time, that would be a big news story — which the established media couldn't completely smudge out, even if covering it embarrassed their ad departments.

Modine Herbey observes: Recall that "the public," i.e., leviathan, claims to own the airwaves. It might be an even bigger story than Mr. Fields imagines, if leviathan actually prohibited TV outlets from airing pro-peace spots. (December 2007) 

The hidden hand in action. When attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey (who is Jewish) got in trouble with Democrats for refusing to condemn "waterboarding" as torture — a responsible position, because he knew nothing about that interrogation technique at the time — who came to his rescue and secured his confirmation? Democrat senators Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein (who are both Jewish).

Why would good, card-carrying, Bush-hating Democrats such as Schumer and Feinstein derail a golden opportunity to embarrass the White House with a stinging rejection of a major nominee on a point of supposed morality? Just because they and the nominee are all Jews?

Well, perhaps — but there's more to it than that.

The other shoe dropped on November 12 — four days after Mukasey's confirmation, and even before he was sworn in — when Norman Pearlstine (who is Jewish) published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. An early test of Mukasey's integrity in office, declared Pearlstine, will be his review of "the Justice Department's flawed, embarrassing prosecution of two former lobbyists for AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee." The two are "the victims of selective prosecution for behavior that has become commonplace," Pearlstine maintained.

Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman (who are Jewish) have been charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 with receiving classified information from Defense Department bureaucrat Lawrence Franklin (who is not Jewish), and with passing that data on to a contact at the Israeli embassy (who is almost certainly Jewish) and to a Washington Post reporter (ethnicity unknown).

The goy Franklin has pleaded guilty and been sentenced to 12 years in prison. The trial of the two Chosen is scheduled for January. It is vitally important to Israel that they not be tried, lest some very inconvenient truths emerge in the process.

Pearlsteine, not surprisingly, urges Mukasey to quash the planned prosecution. Franklin can rot in prison for espionage, but the Jews should not be prosecuted because they only did with that illegal information what Jews do every day with similarly illegal information — gave it to their country, to the detriment of the country in which they happened to be born and of which they are citizens.

Even if Mukasey does not stop the trial, he can still ensure that the Department of Justice pulls enough critical punches to avoid giving away the truth, thereby ensuring a not-guilty verdict.

That is why Mukasey had to be confirmed, and why Schumer and Feinstein aided and abetted that process — to facilitate the upcoming obstruction of justice. [Douglas Olson] (December 2007) 

Annapolis.

Q: How can you tell when a president realizes his presidency is in ruins?

A: He calls a Middle East peace conference to try to save it. [Ronn Neff]

About the only thing I'm interested in is finding out how painfully the Washington gangsters are going to nick American taxpayers in order to subsidize their gangster guests from overseas, à la Camp David. No word on that yet, but sometimes we're not permitted to learn such trivia for weeks or months. {Nicholas Strakon] (November 2007) 

Joe Sobran writes: "The only defense I can offer for Bush is admittedly not a very effective one: 'Well, he's not as bad as Lincoln!'" ("The Great Uniter," Washington Watch, The Wanderer, July 12, 2007) (November 2007) 

"The logic of the Civil War." At the same time he's rising in the polls, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is making it clear that he's a Southerner of the fully Reconstructed, deconstitutionalist variety. Interviewing Huckabee on the "Fox News Sunday" show for November 18, Chris Wallace asked the Republican candidate:

"Now, Thompson and McCain both talk about leaving abortion and gay marriage to the states, the way, in the case of abortion, it was before Roe vs. Wade ever became the law of the land in the first place.

"Why isn't that good enough, basically making this a federal issue and leaving it up to each state?" (Surprisingly, Wallace used the word federal as it was used during the days of the old Republic, as it existed before Lincoln.)

Huckabee replied:

"Well, it's the logic of the Civil War. If morality is the point here, and if it's right or wrong, not just a political question, then you can't have 50 different versions of what's right and what's wrong.

"Again, that's what the whole Civil War was about. Can you have states saying slavery is OK, other states saying it's not?

"If abortion is a moral issue — and for many of us it is, and I know for others it's not. So if you decide that it's just a political issue, then that's a perfectly acceptable, logical conclusion.

"But for those of us for whom this is a moral question, you can't simply have 50 different versions of what's right."

Wallace dropped the matter and went on to something else.

It is always risky — and sometimes just foolish — to try to decipher what these pols say, but I'm nevertheless going to try. As Wallace pointed out, the Union Government permitted the states to determine the legality of abortion until 1973, Civil War or no Civil War, Lincoln or no Lincoln. Was Huckabee aware of that? If so, in the time before Roe vs. Wade, did he really object to that arrangement? Does he really object to it in retrospect?

In arguendo, let us grant that abortion is murder. Is Huckabee aware that, with minor exceptions, the Union Government still permits the states to pass and enforce statutes prohibiting murder? Does he object to that arrangement?

Since he emphasizes that "morality is the point here," and claims that "you can't have" 50 (or, one supposes, 300 million) determinations of what is moral, Huckabee seems to be proposing that the Union Government define and enforce everything that he considers a "moral question." Under the rule as he has formulated it, we have no reason to think that Huckabee would limit such questions to initiations of force such as murder or slavery. And we are entitled to wonder what other "moral questions" this man wants the Union Government to decide for all Americans, by force.

Listening to Huckabee, I hear once again the iron voice of the Kansas Red Leg in the classic movie "The Outlaw Josey Wales," justifying his murder of Confederate POWs: "Doin' right ain't got no end."

With respect to Huckabee, the only question remaining is: Is he a scalawag, or only a carpet-bagger? Well, Googling reveals that he is an authentic scalawag, born in a town called Hope. That may stir memories of another Arkansas scalawag, although I'm afraid that compared with Huckabee, the original Hope boy starts to look like a foe of consolidated and centralized government.

I'm not sure we should take any satisfaction from this, but when we are completely smothered and enslaved by the Union Government — when all of us are rendered unto Caesar — Huckabee's short-sighted supporters will be, too. [Nicholas Strakon]

If I may exploit an old saying of Joe Sobran's in another context, I will observe that, should lightning strike and Huckabee be elected, he will pose no threat to our system of government. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (November 2007) 

A hint about where Power lies. Of the PSAs you see on the telescreen, what percentage promote freedom? and what proportion promote fascism, socialism, war, or Red Guard deracination?  

The fact that Al Sharpton — Al Sharpton! — enjoys free access to the "respectable" media, which award him the status of a "respectable" commentator and spokesman, hints at something, too. But it's so ugly that I can't bring myself to write any more about it right now. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (November 2007) 

Waterboarding, with fava beans and a nice Chianti. I've noticed that I come to hate whatever court faction is in opposition more than the one in power. After all, the majority is doing what those in power do: lie, steal, cheat, lie some more, and use their power to silence legitimate opposition and lay waste to the countryside. But what's infuriating is the way the "opposition" yowls and postures but does nothing to resist.

When the grinning psychopath Clinton was emperor I despised the Republicans for their craven ineffectiveness at taking him on. Their pathetic mock impeachment was especially infuriating. But now that Bush Jong-il holds the reins the Democrats have shown they can be just as spineless and dishonest as the Republicans ever were.

The Michael Mukasey confirmation brought my disgust into sharp focus. Here's a guy who sat in front of a bunch of senators, all of whom are supposed to be against torture, and with remarkable sang-froid refused to declare whether or not controlled drowning, or "waterboarding," is torture. At least, he said, not until he got more information!

What further information was needed, one wonders? Was it perhaps the temperature of the water going into the victim's lungs? The percentage of his lungs that are filled with water? Maybe whether or not he actually loses consciousness? Or dies?

Waterboarding was deemed to be torture when the United State put Japanese soldiers in prison for waterboarding U.S. legionaries. It's torture according to all precedents in international law. And you can bet that if Vladimir Putin or the Iranians were found to be doing it, instead of the Empire, Messrs. Bush et al. would be pompously furrowing their brows and condemning it with every synthetic fiber of their being.

Here was a chance for the Democrats to really stick it to Bush, to make him and his reptilian nominee writhe on the hook while they bloviated and postured, squeezing the issue for every ounce of favorable publicity. And instead, they gave him a pass.

"I don't believe that Judge Mukasey should be denied confirmation for failing to provide an absolute answer on this one subject," said Senate Judiciary Committee member Diane Feinstein, who along with fellow committee member (and co-religionist) Charles Schumer voted to confirm Mukasey.

Well, you can see her point. After all, whether or not our guvamint tortures people is a minor issue compared with, say, universal health care or farm subsidies. And you can bet that if Mukasey had refused to condemn, say, spray-painting swastikas on people's doors, that would have resulted in a stronger reaction. One must have standards.

It makes me wonder what's waiting for us in the future: "In view of the nominee's sterling credentials, I don't believe he should be denied confirmation just because he raped one child. Okay, selling the video on the Internet raises questions, but still ..." Or, "Surely we can agree to disagree on the question of cannibalism. After all, the nominee only consumed illegal immigrants who had not paid their Social Security taxes; and he cooked them using carbon-neutral energy and disposed of their corpses in an environmentally friendly manner."

Mukasey even looks a little like Hannibal Lecter. God help us. [David T. Wright] (November 2007) 

Incredible, unforgettable, unforgivable. In a promo aired on the telescreen in preparation for the Veterans Day festivities (it's actually a commercial for the great murder-contractor Boeing), veterans or actors pretending to be veterans comment in a dreamy tone about the "incredible things" they experienced while in the "service" and the people they met whom they'll "never forget."

My dad could have testified to that, though his tone would have been more nightmarish than dreamy. In 1941, assisted by Dad's own neighbors on the local conscription board, F.D. Roosevelt kidnapped Dad and threw him into the Pacific murder-riot to kill or be killed. One incredible thing Dad saw, during his 42 months of captivity by the United State, was the ruined corpses of Japanese soldiers, long dead, flopping like wet rags as Army vehicles drove over them in the road. Another incredible thing was the sight of fresh-killed Marines languidly lifting and drifting in the surf, on the beach at Saipan.

Dad never forgot seeing the body of his best friend, drilled through the head by a sniper five minutes before, being carried down a mountain road. Nor did he forget the interminable night he spent in a foxhole, swimming in water, mud, and human waste, as Japanese soldiers crept about in the dark. Unforgettable, too, was what Dad saw when dawn at last broke over Saipan — the body of a Japanese soldier on the foxhole's verge, arm outstretched holding a grenade.

I know that Dad experienced, and saw, and — I'm sure — did many unforgettable things that he was unwilling to talk about. I say that his tone in recounting them would have been nightmarish instead of dreamy because, fifty years after Roosevelt's War — fifty years after the Moloch Roosevelt departed our world — Dad was still afflicted by hellish nightmares.

I trust that the imperial forces, or their murder-contractors, won't be calling on me to write their recruiting propaganda anytime soon. [Nicholas Strakon] 

"Warfare/welfare state" — no truer words ... On November 11, CNN ran a long, droning package of veterans propaganda, and the part of it I found most offensive was the interviews with advocates for veterans-socialism. Spouting acronyms of medicalese — TBI, PTSS, and so on — they self- righteously demanded that "we" be forced to spend more and ever more millions of dollars to subsidize imperial legionaries after they return home.

It's fair to say that welfarist-socialism got its start in this country with the pensions for Yankee veterans that the Grand Army of the Republic (the American Legion of the day) successfully lobbied for, after the Lincolnites crushed the Second American Revolution. Ever since then, veterans- socialism has served as an important inspirational prop of American socialism in general.

We're supposed to thank today's veterans for something or other on November 11. Very well. I'll thank them if they keep their sticky fingers the hell out of my pocket after getting banged up in a criminal war that they volunteered to fight in. Let them ask their friends and families to pay for whatever they think they need.

I'll thank the legionaries, too, if they promise to commit no other crimes in the service of destroying what remains of Americans' freedom. [Nicholas Strakon]

Comment  by Henry Gallagher Fields. Promoting veterans-socialism is a no-brainer for antiwar leftists, in the media and elsewhere. It demonstrates their "patriotism" for purposes of sheeple-deception, and also — well, it's socialism! (November 11, 2007) 

Musharraf's blasphemy. Here's a little comment I sent NPR regarding something I heard on the "All Things Considered" program for November 5:

I was amused by the spluttering outrage of [historian] Daniel Farber on Monday's "All Things Considered," over General Pervez Musharraf's comparison of himself to Abraham Lincoln in shutting down domestic dissent and throwing opponents in jail.

"General Musharraf," [Farber] says, "I admire Abraham Lincoln, I have studied Abraham Lincoln, and you're no Abraham Lincoln."

Farber apparently believes that Lincoln's ends justified his means. "Defending the constitution and the law sometimes required extreme actions," says Farber. "Some of those actions strained the very laws he was trying to uphold."

Excuse me, but this is mealy-mouthed nonsense. "Straining" the law is a euphemism for breaking the law, or at the least betraying its original intent. If you are President and you "strain" the law to keep states from seceding — which they had every right to do under the Constitution — then you're acting as a dictator. If you throw people in jail and shut down newspapers for speaking out against you, as Lincoln did, you're acting as a dictator. If you issue an arrest warrant for a Supreme Court justice for ruling against you, as Lincoln did, you are acting as a dictator.

Pointing to the high-minded sentiments expressed in Lincoln's letters, as Farber does, or the rhetoric of the Gettysburg Address, doesn't do anything to change that. Nor does Lincoln's goal of keeping the Union together justify what he did. Saying it does is exactly the same kind of thing dictators like Musharraf do to justify their actions.

Well, wait a minute, Dave. Wasn't Lincoln elected in a fair and free election? Twice? In view of that, he couldn't have been a dictator, could he? I mean, it doesn't matter what the Leader does once he has power; the only thing that matters is how he seizes power. That's what the Authorities taught me when I was a kid serving time in the state socialization center, anyway. (They taught me also that the rule does not apply to the chancellor of Germany elected in 1933.) [Modine Herbey]

I hooted with delight when I heard Musharraf's comments on Lincoln as aired by the telescreen. They illustrate so hilariously the risk our imperials take when they export Duh- MOCK-risy: Perceptive wogs just may read the historical record a little too closely! [Nicholas Strakon] (November 2007) 

Demographic revolutions don't come cheap. According to WANE-TV, the CBS affiliate in Fort Wayne, the county health department held an "executive board meeting" on November 8 to figure out how to handle the ever-increasing flow of Burmese refugees.

Every refugee, said the reporter, must be screened for tuberculosis, hepatitis, and infectious parasites. The department has already cut back ordinary clinic hours in order to cope with the burden.

Fort Wayne already luxuriates in the largest number of Burmese of any Indiana city, including Indianapolis, and it is now starting to show up in nationwide statistics as a significant locus of such folk. In 2006, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health revealed that drug-resistant tuberculosis was "spreading unchecked" in Burma, along with AIDS, malaria, and bird flu. A few years ago, shortly after a considerable number of Burmese were first imported to Fort Wayne, the city suffered an outbreak of TB that shocked and puzzled local government health authorities.

The naïveté of local TV journalists can be revealing. According to the WANE-TV reporter, Fort Wayne has received 165 Burmese refugees a year over the past four years (I assume that is an average), but — and this is an exact quote — "the government sent 400 refugees to Fort Wayne in the past year."

Often we don't get such frank and succinct admissions from the print media, but one can find much illuminating detail in print stories, such as a November 1 piece in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel by Ashley Smith, "Resources stretched / District needs more teachers, translator." Concentrating on the impact of Burmese on the state schools, Smith reminds us that the Central Government is working hand in hand with its notorious unofficial partner, the so-called Catholic Charities, to import the South Asians. That Red Guard bastion derives two-thirds of its budget from taxpayer money; as such, of course, it is neither Catholic nor charitable.

The assault on taxpayers never lets up. The TV reporter revealed that the county health department is currently seeking a waiver allowing it to bill Medicaid for the disease-screening instead of billing the refugees. Billing "Medicaid," of course, means billing taxpayers. It will cost $36,000 to screen the refugees this year, but as the influx of Burmese accelerates, the health authorities are estimating that it will cost $100,000 in 2008.

Chalk it all up as another glorious achievement of "free" immigration. Free for the immigrants, that is. Not so free for us Americans, who are forced to pick up the tab at gunpoint. [Nicholas Strakon] (November 2007) 

"Personal" questions for Bill Richardson. In the Democrat debate on October 30, Gov. Bill Richardson defended his supposed competitor, Sen. Hillary Clinton, against charges that she cannot be trusted and has been captured by special interests. He characterized those charges as "personal attacks" and indicated that they should not be made.

What would Richardson say about the same charges directed against a candidate who was untrustworthy and in the thrall of special interests? In Richardson's mental universe, could such a candidate exist? Would Richardson not concede that some Republican candidate or other could be so described?

Does Richardson mean to imply that such charges as directed at Hillary are untrue? Or just a form of lèse majesté?

In Richardson's universe, are the facts of the case relevant? Or are corruption and dishonesty just too "personal" to be talked about?

If the facts are not relevant, why should anyone pay any further attention to anything this man says? [Nicholas Strakon]  

The beasts! Encouraged by the Witch herself, certain pockets of the Hive are suggesting that Hillary's Democrat competitors (except for the milquetortilla Richardson) are ganging up and attacking her "as a woman." It's sexist, and misogynistic, and just out of line! Skillfully, the busy bees often couch it as a warning that the voters will be offended.

You won't be surprised to hear that mean old Strakon has never quite grasped what all the fuss is over "negative" campaigning. When it comes to these contemptible perverts for power, the more negativity, the better, I say. But the bleats and whines about Hillary's being "picked on" are starting to honk me off in a special way. I smell a parallel here with the Official Feminist Ideology in the workplace, according to which:

1) I am WOMUN! Hear me roar! I'm just as strong as any (shudder) MAAAN!

— and simultaneously —

2) The BEASTS! I'm just a little woman, and I need special protection from (shudder) MENNN!

As I recall, Geraldine ("Carmela Soprano") Ferraro tried to use a similar ploy against George Bush the Elder during her 1984 campaign for veep, but Bush — to his credit — just laughed at her and the bleating Mondale. And the two weirdos went down to bitter defeat. Ah, the good old days. It's too much to say that men were still men then, but they weren't fully neutered yet, either. [Modine Herbey] 

Picking on poor little Hillary? You've got to admit — the whole idea is counterintuitive. Did Beowulf "pick on" poor little Grendel? [Henry Gallagher Fields] (November 2007) 

The Goreites and the ruling class. As I say in my column of October 27, we have much to fear from the new momentum that the Green Stalinists have derived from their global-warming story. But I don't think that the ruling class will permit the Gore Party to kill off industrial civilization — at least, our ultimate rulers have no intention of permitting it. (It's more likely that the death of the American mind will do the trick.) The senior Suits of the financial sector, and especially the investment-banking sector, must continue to have a large, active corporate sector upon which to exert their state-granted power over money and credit.

For decades, in the course of exploiting us, the Dark Suits have also exploited the socialist obsessions of the Red Guards — and I've no doubt that the same will be true of the burgeoning Green Guards.

In an essay I linked to earlier this month, Sheldon Richman writes:

All the so-called top-tier presidential candidates favor a comprehensive energy policy designed to cut back the use of imported oil and to stimulate development of alternative fuels. Who stands to gain most from the subsidies, tax preferences, and market manipulations that will constitute such a policy? You guessed it. The energy companies, which have never stood on their own, independent of government.

Who would actually benefit? Construction companies immediately come to mind, whether hired by government entities to build new "Green" transport systems or by corporations, including manufacturers, that were under the gun to get "Green." If the Goreite fakelaw required the retrofitting of existing houses and apartment buildings, homebuilders might start escaping their current plight; no doubt some socialist program would help property owners with conversion costs.

And retrofitting might be the least of it if Gore and his comrades hiked the cost of living in the suburbs, shoving millions of people back into the city. The ruling-class analyst William Domhoff argues persuasively that developers are always the executive committee of ruling classes on the municipal level; a state-mandated construction boom in older urban areas would be a boon for those local Suits, and in the bargain it would establish stronger links between them and the Suits of Wall Street.

One may imagine, too, a great expansion of companies that manufacture equipment for detecting and processing "greenhouse gases," as well as companies that make wind-power and solar-power equipment. If that sounds like a benevolent development, remember that the whole thing would be state-directed, state-privileged, working to arbitrary government standards, and riddled with corruption. I could go on — sellers of warm clothing and makers of insulation would benefit if it were harder for Americans to heat their homes, Big Pharma would benefit if more fell prey to infections during the winter and heat stroke during the summer — but I've made my point.

Why would the Dark Suits at the head of the Big Table permit all the uproar, if it resulted merely in their trading one class of corporate clients for another? Well, leviathan's power would have taken another great leap forward, wouldn't it? — and let us recall who owns leviathan and its stinking, gaseous pols. [Nicholas Strakon] (November 2007) 

Doin' the imperial twist. On one of the newsnets the other day, some Expert or Authority on Islamic terrorism predicted that the American homeland would suffer a serious attack before the end of the year.

Well, who knows? We hear similar blood-curdlers all the time. But hearing this one stirred some of my gray cells into action, permitting me to identify yet another convolution in the Empire's party line. Sorry if you tumbled to it years ago:

Claim one: If the Empire quits attacking the terrorists in Mesopotamia, they will follow "us" home. Imperialism is necessary!

Claim two: Over the past so many months (choose any number), "our" clever and vigilant Security Organs have foiled a gazillion spectacular terrorist plots against the imperial metropole. Domestic police-statism is necessary!

Did anyone else notice ...? Opening his news conference of October 17, the Wee Emperor asserted the urgency of moving forward on the following fronts: the SCHIP socialist-medicine scheme, which of course he favors; his domestic- spying conspiracy; further government meddling in the mortgage industry; and further government intervention in international trade. A few minutes later in his stand-up routine, Bush boasted of the tremendous amounts of taxpayers' money that he has funneled to "poor children" through Medicaid.

I wonder whether the country's surviving handful of constitutionalists noticed that all those measures are flatly unconstitutional. (In terms of trade intervention, we've gone far beyond simple tariffs here.) Whatever the actual motives of some of the Founders may have been, I think I'm on safe ground in imagining that Bush's programs would have left most of them thunderstruck. I wager that goes even for the sinister Alexander Hamilton, whom libertarians like to call the Stalin of the American Revolution.

I'm sorry if I've wasted your time pointing out something that's glaringly obvious to you. Just remember: to almost all of your neighbors, it's terra incognita. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (October 2007) 

¡Tibetans, si! ¡Armenians, no! I'm not in favor of U.S. pols' self-righteously promulgating the Official Truth about various historical events overseas, any more than I'm in favor of their apologizing, on our behalf, for the real or imagined sins of our ancestors. But their sanctimonious gyrations may offer both instruction and amusement.

Recently the Democratic Congress has attempted to officially recognize, for purposes of denunciation, the massacre of Armenians by the Turks during World War I. But during his news conference, Prof. Chimp chastised the lawfakers, declaring that in light of all the important socialist business pending domestically, "One thing that Congress should not be doing is sorting out the historical record of the Ottoman Empire."

It's fun to imagine Bush's puzzlement when his scriptwriters fed him that line: "'Ottoman Empire'? What's 'at, a chain that sells them footstool thangs?"

Bush's handlers and controllers want to avoid offending the Turks, of course, because they want to avoid disrupting the supply chain supporting imperial forces in Mesopotamia. And why is the United State mucking about in Mesopotamia in the first place? Well, it's serving the interests and advancing the agenda of the World's Most Important Country, which itself used to be a part of the Ottoman Empire. Maybe some additional sorting out of the Ottoman Empire's record is actually appropriate, along with some sorting out of the records of the British and American empires, too.

If additional irony be required, let's recall that some chroniclers of the Jewish Holocaust® of the 1940s have been known to become antsy when other events, not involving their own folk, are described as genocides.

After his news conference, the Chimp-in-Chief swung off to host an appearance by the Dalai Lama, who proceeded to sort out the historical record of the Chinese Communist Empire. [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2007) 

The prize for Most Poisonous Gasbag. As you may have heard, Comrade Professor Albert Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize on October 12. To me the real news here is the elevation of the "global warming" scam to full legitimacy.

This is the most pernicious, deadly threat to humanity since the Cold War. The tree-hugging anti-growth fanatics have finally found a way to achieve their goal: the destruction of modern industrial society. They will do it by using the power of the state to literally strangle economic activity, by preventing the economy from breathing.

Any kind of major economic activity produces CO2. Moving from one place to another produces CO2. Breathing produces CO2. And CO2 is a vital ingredient in the photosynthesis process, upon which all of us depend, in the end, for every molecule of food we eat. Thus, if there were no CO2 in the atmosphere, we would all die. (By the way, those hug-mandatory trees would die before we did.)

But that immensely important gas has now been designated as a pollutant, based on shaky scientific theories. That means that the only way to "save our planet" is to become poor.

Those who challenge the conventional wisdom, such as Danish meteorologist Henrik Svensmark or Canadian geologist Jan Veizer, are marginalized, shouted down, or worse. Every day we are subjected to "global warming" propaganda by the organs of Minitrue.

And now, the Nobel Prize committee has enshrined this folly as revealed truth.

How many millions of people will die because of this catastrophe? I'm not talking about "global warming." I'm talking about the loss of jobs and the drastic lowering of income that will result from CO2-abatement measures. The anti-growth types envision a non- industrial pastoral world, and it is now within their reach. They ignore or even look forward to the massive human misery that would entail.

Europe is already feeling the clammy hands of the bureaucrats around its neck (vehicles are now taxed on their "carbon footprints"), and George Bush has signed on, too. And now this.

We're scr*wed for sure. But Al Gore might be able to exploit the issue to become president, so perhaps all is not lost. [David T. Wright] (October 2007) 

The socialist-free GOP. In a discussion of the SCHIP socialist-medicine scheme on October 15, British reporter Richard Wolf told MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski that SCHIP is far from being "socialized med'cine" — because many Republican lawmakers are for it. Zbig's daughter seemed to think that was an excellent point.

Do these people really understand nothing, or are they only pretending? [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2007) 

"Going to war is the most important decision the president can make," Rudy Giuliani proclaimed during the October 9 debate among Republican presidential candidates. And now the Giuliani campaign is ridiculing Mitt Romney for stipulating that the president should consult "attorneys" before launching a war. It appears that among the attorneys whom it is ridiculous to consult, in the opinion of Il Duce, are the ones who helped write a certain document at a Convention in Philadelphia, back in 1787.

For benefit of our foreign readers, under the Constitution that all these pols pretend to cherish, and that a president must swear to preserve, protect, and defend, only Congress can make the decision to go to war; the president is restricted to asking for war. As the moribund republic transformed itself into an empire, that provision became ever less enforceable (it's funny, isn't it, how the Constitution can't enforce itself?), but if Il Duce seizes power, it seems as though it will become as much of a dead letter as the three-fifths clause. Or the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (October 2007) 

"Are girls becoming meaner and more vicious?" MSNBC posed that question on October 10, under some startling footage it was airing. Unfortunately, the only answer I can offer — employing the modern parlance — is "Duh!"

As an Old American, I naturally shuddered when the deculturizing forces began producing movies and TV shows that showed little 120-pound women cartwheeling through the air and smacking down 250-pound musclemen. I shuddered, too, when a few years later the same forces upped the ante by mainstreaming atrocities such as female boxing.

My initial fears were twofold: first, that young girls in the real world would start believing that they, too, could magically defeat huge male bruisers without the aid of either honorable male defenders or (in default of those) a .45-caliber pistol; and second, that the rising generations of boys would lose whatever restraint they otherwise might have had in respect to roughing up girls: after all, the entertainment industry was telling those boys that the girls "can take it." As we know, and as I mentioned recently in this space, the culture no longer discourages public and casual physical contact of the hugging variety between boys and girls; the slope downward to casual contact of a less-affectionate nature seems awfully slippery.

What I didn't foresee — despite the bright red flag represented by female boxing — was that girls would begin attacking and beating down each other, doing their best to imitate brutally violent males. But as it happens, that is yet another evil that we are not to be spared, as we submerge to the lightless depths.

Such battles go far beyond the "catfights" that we see in some of the old movies, choreographed typically for comic relief and consisting mostly of pushing, nail-scratching, and hair-pulling. A good example of the new style of amateur female combat has now been captured, thanks to the video site YouTube.com. The videotaped encounter, picked up by MSNBC, took place on September 20 in a girls' locker room at a middle school in Norwood, Ohio, an old industrial suburb of Cincinnati.

It's just awful. Cleverer words elude me, and the words of this brief account at WLWT.com don't convey it, either: "Online Video Shows Girl Attacked at Area School." However, the WLWT page also includes a link to the video. (YouTube itself has apparently pulled the video from its site.) The attack did indeed involve hair-pulling, but even that transcended the typical catfight featured in a comic western of the 1960s. Imagine instead a female version of "Clockwork Orange."

According to MSNBC, the girl attacked, Katelind Lewis, was 12 years old. Her attacker was 14. MSNBC's print story reports, "Katelind's family said the attack was planned, and a group of girls encouraged the attack and prevented the teen from fleeing." That it was planned is likely indeed, as a crony of the attacker (also 14) stood ready with her video camera. (She can be heard egging on Katelind's attacker.)

From the standpoint of civilizational analysis, the new style of catfight graphically illustrates how far a sufficiently rotten culture can override not only hundreds of years of behavioral tradition but also biologically conditioned traits and temperament. I have to wonder whether even cavewomen behaved so savagely.

Oh — did I mention that both combatants were white? [Nicholas Strakon]
 

Small comfort. At least the girls weren't shooting at each other. But just wait a year or so. [Modine Herbey] (October 2007) 

The noose news never stops. I stayed tuned to MSNBC on October 10 and was rewarded with a story about a "noose incident" occurring at the Columbia University Teachers College in New York. MSNBC reports that the victim is a female professor who "happens to be black" and who "teaches a class on racial justice." According to Times Online, the prof "discovered a hangman's noose hanging on her office door, in the latest in a series of copycat racist incidents across the United States."

Now there's some objective reporting for you. Yes, this could be the real deal, but what the British newsies may not know is that racist hoaxes are endemic on American college campuses. If this does turn out to be a hoax, we should expect to hear that it was just an example of "unconventional teaching," confected in order to "raise awareness" among Columbia students. Let's stay on top of this one.

Something else we should stay on top of is the fact that "police are investigating the incident as a hate crime" (MSNBC), even though no violence or destruction of property is being reported. What actual charge are the cops and prosecutors contemplating, should they manage to identify a (white) perpetrator? Inciting to riot? Trespassing? Disorderly conduct? Or is it really possible now, in the state of New York, to jug someone — European style — for a stand-alone "hate crime"? [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2007)

Late-breaking. In a follow-up interview on MSNBC, an agent of the Southern Poverty Law Center imagined a charge of "criminal intimidation."  

Little George and the Fifth Pillar. In connection with this year's official observations — here in, uh, this country — of the Holy Month of Ramadan, the Washington Times has run a story revealing that "iftar," i.e., the end of the daily fast, is celebrated at the palace of our own Wee Sultan. Timeswriter Sara A. Carter reports:

"President and Mrs. Bush host an iftar dinner every year because they want people around the world to know how much they respect Islam and the many Muslims living in the U.S. who are free to worship as they want, and are an integral part of our society," said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the White House National Security Council. [Emphasis added.]

Here's what we want to know: When GWB leaves the White House, are he and the missus going to continue to have these little fêtes? That is, are they going to continue to "respect" Islam and care whether the world knows that they care about Muslims?

What a lot of — you should excuse the expression — hogwash. [Ronn Neff and Nicholas Strakon]

Isn't it meaningless, if not offensive, for non-Muslims to host an iftar dinner? I mean, we're not being asked to believe that the Imperial Couple have actually been fasting, are we? [Modine Herbey] (October 2007) 

The noose craze. Poobahs and panjandrums of the U.S. Coast Guard are tromboning with concern at the moment over the hanging of (empty) nooses in close proximity to a CG "civil rights" officer and a cadet (both Persons Living With Color, I believe). The Commandant says he's determined to get to the bottom of the crimes, in order to assure folks in his force that they're "safe" — not from being lynched from the masthead of a cutter, as it transpires, but from having to serve the Empire in a "hostile work environment." Heavens to Murgatroyd, we wouldn't want that!

In an interview with CNN on October 4, the Co