Apparently that
claim reduced many of the assembled homosexuals and other leftists, as
well as their wallowing dupes, symps, serfs, and enablers, to tears.
Stop and think — earlier installments.
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
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?In effect, Cain was cracking wise to God, which most religious believers, I suppose, would consider a very bad idea. And indeed we sense in the next verse that God was not in the mood for such badinage:
And [God] said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.Obama claims that Jeremiah Wright led him to Christ, and maybe that is so, but it appears that Minister Wright did less well in leading him to the Old Testament.
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
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.
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
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
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
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 ...
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
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.Philip Bess is unfamiliar to me, but I certainly know who E. Michael Jones is. The SPLC knows, too. Here's what the always dependable Heidi Beirich has to say about him and about this latest Aktion on the part of her group: "Catholic University Cancels Anti-Semites' Lectures."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 WeekOctober 30, 2007
Fifth Swastika Drawn on GW Student's DoorNovember 1, 2007
Another Swastika Reported at GWUNovember 3, 2007
Another Swastika Appears at GWNovember 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
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
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,
"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
"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,
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
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
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
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.Lincoln's golden glow mustn't be tarnished by association with any Third World tin-pot Napoleon. Lincoln wasn't a dictator because — well, he wasn't. He was Lincoln! [David T. Wright]"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
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
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
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!In terms of domestic issues, Hillary is a Red Guard in good standing, and it is that very tendency — with the acquiescence of its Dark Suit employers — that has strapped the American workplace into a P.C. straitjacket. The Hillary Band is now playing a variation on the theme, as That Woman continues her parade toward the Imperial Palace. [NS]— 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
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.There's an example of how dirigiste government, pursuing the "progressive" demand for "alternative fuels," can actually serve established state-corporatists. Now, if the Gore platform were enacted — through treaty, statute, regulation, or judicial legislation — some companies that don't sit at the head of the ruling-class Big Table might well take a nasty hit. I think first of the coal-mining industry. Big Oil, too, might suffer, if a move toward "alternative fuels" failed to satisfy the Goreites. Electrical utilities that depend on coal would be affected, but they already enjoy important monopoly privilege, and we must expect that they would receive a cornucopia of taxpayer funds to help them convert to whatever energy sources were demanded. Remember, hydroelectric dams are built not by electrical companies but by the 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!Whether or not the two claims are contradictory from the standpoint of strict logic, they do seem to call for some muscular finessing, and it is instructive that one never hears imperial officials making both claims in the same breath. [Nicholas Strakon] (October 2007)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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.]The spokesman works for the NSC? — and not for the press secretary or the protocol office? Hmm. Stop and think about that for a moment. As you do, reflect also on this: Carter's story deals mostly with Ramadanizing at the Pentagon.
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
As I've mentioned before, shortly after the firestorm at Jena, the cops stopped a truck in a nearby town with (empty) nooses hanging from its tailgate. Now, according to CNN, another (empty) noose has been discovered hanging at an Army depot in Alabama.
The fascinating thing about all this is that the teenage noose-hangers at Jena were not racially motivated. Check out Jared Taylor's follow-up piece on Jena at American Renaissance: "What Really Really Happened in Jena." I interrupt the pursuit of my main point to note the astounding failure of the gigantic, finely engineered, always-rumbling "civil rights" machine to break through American teenagers' ignorance of history, both real and distorted. The state-run oblivion academies have shot themselves in the foot with this one.
My main point is this. Through their circus at Jena, the Negroes and their enablers have managed to popularize a new symbol of white resentment and resistance — and it's based on a canard!
That's chortleworthy, but let's not get too happy. Though it gives these folks too much credit to suspect that they deliberately set out to popularize the noose, they can't really be displeased at how things have turned out. The more symbols of HATE the "civil rights" goblins can create, the more secure their power and pelf will become. [Nicholas Strakon]
P.S. Get a load of this happy image. (October 2007)
An Ice Person strikes back, or, Keep your friends close, but not too close.
MSNBC reported on
It turns out that schools in Texas, Oregon, and Iowa are also banning public hugging. One mom — a Texan, if memory serves — who was interviewed by MSNBC denounced the anti-hugging rule as ridiculous, pointing out that the boys and girls are just "showing affection to their friends just like we would show affection to our friends." (Keep that admission in mind.) She also referred, indignantly, to some "Hugs, Not Drugs" propaganda that the School Authorities had previously disseminated, and understandably she detected some contradiction in the party line.
Now, you already know what I think about our aspirin-free, Christmas-free, learning-free state schools. I don't need to dwell too long on the libertarian aspects of the hugging controversy, and I won't, because I'm more interested in the cultural aspects. One observation I will make, touching on both freedom and culture, is this: A great culture is sinking at the same time a great leviathan is rising. In such circumstances, fewer and fewer traditional cultural practices will be "self-enforcing," if you will, and more and more of those practices will be enforced through the exercise of state power. That is assuming that the Authorities care to enforce particular practices, either to preserve a semblance of order within their own institutions or simply to demonstrate their own power. (Cf. the recently concluded "sexual-harassment" court case involving the Negro basketball figure Isiah [sic] Thomas.)
I don't know what the
various Authorities are thinking who are waging the anti-hugging
campaign, but it is the case that, to the extent that we ever saw American
children maintaining a dignified reserve in public, we're seeing far less of
it now. A few years ago a friend of mine had a gig as a substitute teacher
— at a junior-high school run by the Assembly of God, please note
— and as an Old American he was left open-mouthed at the continual
physical contact among his students, even during class time. From his
vivid description I formed the mental image of children — boys and
girls alike — squirming and lolling over and among each other like
puppies in a basket. And I, too, was left open-mouthed at this revelation
of how our culture had changed when I wasn't looking.
I probably should have exercised better jaw control, because I'd already experienced, horrifyingly at first hand, the revolution in casual physical contact among adults. The kids, as second generations of déracinés are wont to do, are just upping the ante. If I remember correctly, the reflexive abrazo upon meeting or parting erupted in my corner of the world — Indiana soybean country — sometime in the late 1970s. It seemed to be female-driven, mostly, with women practicing it on one another at first; but I'd hardly had a chance to scribble a few X's and O's in my Dear Diary before women began grabbing men to whom they weren't related or affianced; and then men who ostensibly were non-homosexual began cozying up to their male acquaintances.
I try to be a good sport, but I tend to react to all this hugging as if I were a paralytic being kicked into a swimming pool. I want to shout, Hey! I like you well enough, but keep your arms to your own damn self!
Having said that, I admit that I've trained myself to tolerate a little of the
hugging, as long as it's kept within bounds. Embracing an old female friend
whom I haven't seen for a year has come to seem appropriate, even if
we're not at a funeral. I don't, however, tolerate that prolonged rocking-
back-and-forth thing, and I don't get drippy about it. That's because I'm
what militant Negroes used to call an Ice Person. I admit it. I'm an "Anglo,"
and a Midwesterner in the bargain. But the newly afflicted huggers of my
acquaintance in the 1970s were, too. I cut people of other heritages some
breaks on the physical-contact front, but the routine abrazo or
abbraccio was not part of our folk tradition, and I'm sure my
interhugulators didn't pick it up from Mexicans or Italians.
It's my belief that my generation of whitebread Americanos contracted the hugging disease from the whole touchy-feely, heart-on-one's-sleeve, demasculinized, luuuuv meeee exhibitionistic goofiness that mainstream American culture plummeted into, in the '60s and '70s. All of that goes damp hand in damp hand, of course, with the sexual license and collapse of modesty (among girls and women) for which our era is notorious.
Maybe I'm trying to connect a couple of dots that are just too far apart, but I can't help thinking that the indiscriminate hugging, especially among adults, is also a kinetic expression of the softheadedness that makes so many modern people suckers for Big Nurse socialism. For example, I'd be willing to bet that a large proportion of our compulsive huggers are gripped with teary frustration at the Republicans' reluctance to expand the SCHIP socialist-medicine program quite as fast as the Democrats want. After all, SCHIP is for the children ... the CHILDREN! And don't we want the children to have health care? Isn't health care a good thing? Here, let me give you a big hug and a slobbery smack to make you change your mind, or what's left of it.
Irony embraces us at every turn, and hard, so I close on an ironic note.
During my own school days, when we kids were expected to display a
civilized reserve in school, we couldn't even imagine today's happyface
huggyface mania. But that's not the only thing we couldn't imagine. There's
a certain word I'm thinking of that we never heard or imagined, but that is
all too familiar to a lot of today's lovey-dovey puppykids: Lockdown.
[Nicholas Strakon]
Strakon, I don't believe it's an irony at
all. Instead, I believe you've connected a couple more dots. Do kids trained
to practice a civilized reserve bring assault weapons to school? Stop and
think. [XXX - OOO, Modine Herbey]
P.S. Speaking of "Christmas-free" schools, we need to alert you to some recent rule-making by another Chicago-area school district, representing yet another glorious advance for our multicultural socialist utopia: "Oak Lawn Schools Cancel Holiday Traditions," by Suzanne Le Mignot, cbs2chicago.com, October 2, 2007. In another couple of years, I'm afraid any kid who tries to hug another kid in this district may have his hands chopped off. [NS] (October 2007)
Greenspan and the "war for oil." Some people on our side of things are expressing suspicions about Alan Greenspan's recent "war for oil" analysis. I share those suspicions, and here's how I see the case.
Although not an actual member of the ruling class, Greenspan is a highly placed intellectual servant of the Dark Suits of Wall Street. As such, he shares the Suits' distress over the Bushite adventurism, which is almost intolerably rash from the traditional imperialist standpoint, threatening as it does the profitable fascistic deals that the Dark Suits like to cut with dictators overseas. But the Suits, like the Bush neocons, are very disproportionately Jewish; and that puts the former in an awkward position. Thus, when the Suits and their hired mandarins, such as Greenspan, express opposition to the war they find it fatally distasteful to come right out and connect the neocons' crimes with radical Zionism. Sometimes, as with Greenspan, their tortured dance even leads them to imitate the Left and accuse the senior Dark Suits' own junior partners — namely, Big Oil.
Establishment Zionism has always been at odds with a "proper" U.S. imperialism in the Middle East, but the senior Suits have usually been able to keep their balance. However, they've been stumbling pretty badly since their Towers fell down. [Nicholas Strakon] (September 2007)
Government as usual. About to enter the revolving door on her way to making a tidy fortune in the industry she has been regulating, FAA chief Marion Blakey admitted earlier this month that her agency's air-traffic-control technology is obsolete and that it contributes to the accelerating breakdown of commercial air traffic in this country. One TV commentator was less polite, inviting viewers to compare the GPS system in their car with the FAA's inability to adopt its own satellite-based system.
It's a very good point, and for my part I invite readers to reflect that the advent of GPS-equipped autos resulted from market competition — while the FAA, as a monopoly government agency, faces no competition and is protected from market discipline.
Admitting her agency's technological failure, Blakey went on to say that the airlines need to cut down on their flights in response to that failure, and she warned that the government will do that for them if they don't "voluntarily" cooperate. That's infuriating, but as veteran TLD readers may remember, it's old stuff; I've written about it before. More often we hear it from government-privileged water and electric utilities, who urge their customers to buy less of their product whenever the utilities flub the dub and run short. You don't hear private companies urging customers not to patronize them. That's because such companies face hard competition in the marketplace and are in danger of going out of business if they flub the dub and fail their customers too often.
Now, the airlines are one of the most heavily regulated of America's industries, and as a result they have developed a stinky incestuous relationship with their regulators. So please don't think I'm defending them. But we need to recognize not only airline fascism but also the outright state socialism that underlies it. The FAA is an obvious socialist target for free-marketeers, but a less-obvious culprit is airport socialism. In America, commercial airports are government projects. And their own dub-flubbing contributes mightily to the congestion in air traffic.
Doubtless all of these systemic failures are nicely summed up in the verbal shrug that some bureaucrats have been overheard to utter, conversing among themselves: "Good enough for government work." [Nicholas Strakon] (September 2007)
An inconvenient evaporation? A few days ago, reporting on the international scramble for newly accessible resources in the Arctic, ABC World News with Charles Gibson aired an animated graphic showing that the ice cap had shrunk by about one-third (my estimate) over just the past year. What I haven't seen, however, is a story by ABC or any other news outlet claiming that the level of the world's oceans has risen accordingly. In fact, I saw some live tape of the Statue of Liberty the other day, and the Lady's feet were still dry. Someone should ask the High Sheriff of Climatology, Dr. Albert Gore, about this conundrum. [Nicholas Strakon] (September 2007)
Afterword. An account of Arctic developments that is far more nuanced and complex than the one offered by the cartoonists at ABC can be found at nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaiceminimum/20070810_i ndex.html.
At least 15,000 O.J. fans turned up in
Jena, Louisiana, on
At present, in our country, a prosecution for Hate Crime still requires a parallel prosecution for some actual crime against person or property. What our supervisors and their little friends in the Nonwhite Minority Community want is to separate the two, making Hate Crime a stand-alone offense that they can use to jail peaceful dissidents. As things stand, the United State lags lamentably behind the world's most advanced and progressive democratic-socialist totalitarianisms, where genuine thought-policing is firmly entrenched.
In L'Affaire Jena, some of the anti-white and pro-totalitarian spokesmen have explicitly called for the criminalization of peaceful acts of expression such as the hanging of (empty) nooses from trees. That was the resentful prank by white high-school students that served as the excuse for the original Negro violence — a typically courageous and non-Hateful ganging up of six blacks on one white. One of the outside agitators in Jena specified the display of Confederate flags as one of the kinds of free expression that should be criminalized. (I am uncertain whether beat-downs by black gangs would be decriminalized at the same time or whether that would have to await a further perfecting of Our Legal System.)
On
Strakon, you disappoint me. Or maybe you just didn't find a place to slip in your favorite characterization. Anyway, I'll do the honors: The Jena dust-up is yet another stirring chapter in the glorious history of our multicultural socialist utopia.
Meanwhile, as we watch tremendous amounts of social and economic
capital swirl down the drain because of such stuff, we need to keep
chanting: Diversity is our strength! [Modine Herbey, TLD Director
of Responsible Citizenship]
Did Joyce Kilmer die in vain? In July, the Jena State-School Authorities cut down the tree where the nooses had hung, and according to the Shreveport Times, school-board member Billy Fowler said, "There's nothing positive about that old tree. It's all negative."
What!? Nothing positive!? Did not the tree, even as she was abused by the dread teenage Kluxers, continue to absorb reactionary carbon dioxide and emit progressive people's oxygen? She may have been a senior arboreous citizen, but did she not continue to offer affordable perching and nesting opportunities for disadvantaged at-risk birds? Most likely the poor tree was utterly ignorant that she was being exploited to advance Hate — and in any case, as a Person Living with Treeness, she was just too slow to react effectively. I hope I give no offense to our leisurely, leafy friends in making that observation.
I call upon environmentalists around the world to rise in indignation and march to Jena in order to protest this crime against Our Holy Mother Gaia and her sacred green tresses and, you know, brown trunks and what not. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (September 2007)
An imperfect atrocity. When the story broke out of West Virginia that a band of whites had kidnapped, tortured, and raped a young Negress, slinging racial epithets at her along the way, I started to think that the Anti-white Authorities had been handed something very rare indeed: a genuine white-on-black Hate Crime.
But the established media hardly had a chance to drive their drumbeat to full roar before it transpired that one of the white males accused of the crime "may have" been involved in what I will anachronistically describe as a romantic relationship with the young woman. The deculturizing powers, of course, push such race-mixing liaisons as praiseworthy and progressive. And in fact, this particular one was of the type — white male/black female — that the entertainment industry prefers to depict even though it is much less common in reality than the reverse type, black male/white female.
Well, in terms of other-shoe-dropping, I must say that this thick-soled wingtip hit the floor with a resounding thud. In other words, the atrocity abruptly lost its perfection for those whose business it is to run the antiwhite hate campaign. Now, I fear, this crime will never qualify as an indelible element of the popular culture, to be taken out every other week and lovingly squeezed and stroked, decade after decade. Most likely, we won't even see a Showtime propaganda movie based on it.
For their part, the Central Government's Racial Thought Police quickly backed out of the investigation. Well, better luck next time. Meanwhile, the established media, the entertainment industry, the anti-white pressure groups, and Bolshevik academia will continue to ignore the ever-rushing torrent of hateful and violent attacks by blacks against whites. [Nicholas Strakon] (September 2007)
"Stop and thank," but don't stop and think, or, These jackboots are made for walkin'.
The
On Sunday the 9th, streets, bridges, and roads in the Imperial capital were blocked for the so-called America Supports You Freedom Walk, in which thousands of people apparently with nothing better to do trudged from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon — all obviously unaware of the irony of linking the two monumental edifices.
According to the "news" release put out by the Army Press Service, the walk was "hosted by America Supports You, a Defense Department program that connects citizens and corporations with military personnel and their families." It would be interesting to know the identities of the corporations involved in this blatantly fascist propaganda effort. How many of them are making nice profits from the current wars?
In any case, the usual bloated nonsensical rhetoric was much in evidence. From the Army press release:
"This walk shows that the people in the airplanes, in the World Trade Center towers, and in the Pentagon did not die in vain, and the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines dying now are not dying in vain," Command Sgt. Maj. Gainey [said]. "Don't let this be a one-day walk. Every time you're walking, and you see a veteran or someone you think is a servicemember, stop and thank them."Think about that for a minute. Apparently it means that all of the people who were minding their own business before being murdered on
That's the kind of razor-sharp thinking we're subjected to when it comes
to
In all the chest-thumping about
And in the years since the event, in all the "tributes" and "freedom" this-and-thats we've been subjected to, I've never seen one person wearing a black armband. Not one. [David T. Wright] (September 2007)
Luciano Pavarotti (1935-2007). He was a master emissary of the bright and beautiful West to a dark and ugly age. Now he has passed away; but his music will not pass away, for those Westerners still capable of hearing it. R.I.P. [Nicholas Strakon] (September 2007)
Imperial generosity. Fort Wayne's ABC-TV affiliate is hardly less pro-war than its CBS competitor, and the other night it aired a typical propaganda story from the local airport terminal, celebrating the glorious return of a heroic young Marine from Iraq, where he had worked as an air-traffic controller for a few months. But the telescreen's mini-interview with our young bravo contained a refreshing surprise.
Quoth the valorous air-traffic-controlling warrior: "There are a lot of good men and women over there fighting for their country."
I thought, How unexpectedly generous! Usually the Empire's officials and their little servants excoriate all their enemies as cowards, murderers, terrorists, fanatics, and so forth. But here we had a legionary sounding like Churchill in 1942, honoring Rommel across the havoc of war!
Or ... did I misunderstand? No, I'm sure I got it right — how else could I interpret "fighting for their country"? [Nicholas Strakon] (September 2007)
Imperial fortress. Authorities in Germany have now publicized a comically ambitious (and thoroughly penetrated) plot to attack the U.S. air base at Ramstein, Germany. Naturally, Minitrue is representing this as a great triumph in the Terror War.
Most Americans, I fear, will feel little more than indignation that evildoers sought to attack Our Glorious Democratic Forces for Peace, without pausing to wonder why the United State is running an air base in Germany. In pursuit of public enlightenment, I venture to post a couple of chunks from the base's Website:
Ramstein Air Base, Germany, serves as headquarters for U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) and is also a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) installation. The host unit at Ramstein is the 86th Airlift Wing, whose mission is the operation and maintenance of airlift assets composed of C-130s, C-20s, C-21s, a C-37, and a C-40 throughout Europe, Africa and the Middle East....Knowing just that much, how can anyone continue to pooh-pooh our references to a U.S. Empire as hyperbole, or as some sort of strained metaphor? (And, by the way, how can anyone continue to consider Germany a fully sovereign nation-state?)***
U.S. Air Forces in Europe Mission
As the air component for U.S. European Command, USAFE directs air operations in a theater spanning three continents, covering more than
20 million square miles, containing 91 countries and possessing one-fourth of the world's population and about one-third of the world's Gross Domestic Product.
Without Ramstein, the Empire would find it more difficult to persevere in its criminal occupation of Iraq — and more difficult, as well, to contemplate a criminal attack on Iran.
It follows that, from an objective tactical standpoint, the Ramstein base is quite a plausible target for armed forces resisting the Empire. [Nicholas Strakon] (September 2007)
The state in the toilet. Larry Craig says he's going to relinquish his cushy government job, and that is a good thing in itself. It's always a good thing when a member of Congress resigns. If only Craig could lead a procession of all 535 lawfakers down the Capitol steps! Assuming the famous Idahoan turns down his chance to propose such a thing, maybe Dr. Ron Paul will volunteer to take point. (Now, that truly would be educational.)
But there's more to be said about the Craig affair, and, as is so often the case, the mainstream media aren't saying it. They don't even know how to say it.
One thing I say, and keep saying, is that America has changed shockingly since the days when I was growing up here. One of the changes I despise the most is the rise of an army of secret cops who seem to lurk everywhere. They are assigned, mostly, to enforce victimless "crime" law, that is, to interfere with the peaceful acts of consenting adults and punish them — humiliate them, terrorize them, rob them, and, if they can, immure them in the rape gulag that passes for a prison system here in freedomland. But the sexual secret police are not new. They've been around for a long time, eagerly sniffing toilets all the while. We can look on these badge-toting guttersnipes as the pioneers of modern American secret policing, along with Prohibition agents and the early generations of drug cops.
By enforcing fake law, the secret sex cops have now entrapped and
destroyed a man who spent a career inventing fake laws along with his
co-conspirators in Washington City. That puts a strict limit on our
sympathy for Mr. Craig, but it's still the case that he is a victim of
injustice. (The fact that Craig pled guilty doesn't impress me. Many
innocent people, caught up in such madness, are intimidated or otherwise
shaken into pleading guilty and throwing themselves on the doubtful mercy
of the cold-eyed state. Some make the terrible error, early on, of not
"lawyering up.")
The injustice is layered. First, Craig was victimized by a fake, tyrannical law. Worse, though, was the way the lurking sex agent enforced the law. Actually we see this quite often in the enforcement of fake law. If a fake crime isn't actually occurring, the secret police proceed to create it. They offer to do drug deals, they masquerade as street-walkers, and more recently they've even started to infest the Internet, posing as over-sexed, unparented young girls. To what redoubled depth of statist absurdity have we submerged, when the Authorities busy themselves producing fake fake crime?
I admit I am making an assumption regarding the present incident — that the sex agent, through his own behavior, was doing his best to imitate a sodomite on the prowl. Or on the can, at least. But no other explanation even begins to make sense, especially in light of the cop's allegation that Craig stood peering into his stall for two minutes. I'd like to know how the sex agent reacted to that, assuming it really happened.
Let's get serious. On what did this fake fake crime rest? Some cop's dirty-minded assumption that his victim wanted to join him in committing it! We may be into triple-faking by now, but I'm afraid I've lost count.
The late-night comics have been amusing themselves and some of their audience by recounting the sex-trolling techniques Craig is purported to have used, including eye contact, foot tapping, and hand movements. But I am not amused. We seem to have proceeded, here, from advanced police semiotics to outright telepathy. I would advise us all to keep our hands in our pockets when encountering these heavily armed telepaths, were it not for the facts that 1) we won't know who they are until it's too late, and 2) we might be setting ourselves up for a charge of self-fondling.
By the bye, I've always reckoned that any cop willing to specialize in
these peculiar transactions has some interesting personal issues of his
own.
Most of the sex-trolling "crimes" we hear about occur on state-claimed property — at government rest areas, government parks, and, as we now see, government airports. There's a good reason for that. Government entities can't go out of business, so they don't have anything to lose by harassing and terrorizing their visitors.
Let's imagine how a "privately owned" (i.e., justly owned) airport would handle a sex-trolling problem. Clearly, it wouldn't plant undercover security officers in its restrooms to create naughty incidents involving its customers, or to attempt to read their minds. If management discovered that an unpleasant atmosphere (so to speak) had arisen in its restrooms, it would post uniformed security officers to discourage the unwanted conduct. And it would be in the airport's economic interest for those officers to treat its customers with caution, courtesy, and respect. Incorrigible customers would be banned from the property and threatened with an action for trespass if they strayed back in.
I've argued for a long time that if airports were market entities, we'd see some real security — security that didn't treat respectable grandmothers like al Qaeda agents and didn't reduce all those passing through them to terrified barefoot serfs. Now I have to point out another benefit: While answering a call of nature, you wouldn't have to worry about absent-mindedly tapping your foot with a tax-paid pervert lurking next door. [Nicholas Strakon] (September 2007)
Leave my mother out of it. At a bizarre
public ceremony in London on
Apparently that
claim reduced many of the assembled homosexuals and other leftists, as
well as their wallowing dupes, symps, serfs, and enablers, to tears.
It perfectly reflected the trashy thoughtlessness that the entire "Princess" Diana mania has always depended on. For my part, I immediately took offense. According to Mr. Windsor, "Princess" Diana was a better mother to him than my mother was to me. And according to him, she was a better mother than your mother, too.
I would have preferred the formulation traditionally favored by Italian-Americans: "My mother was a saint!" We might privately harbor some skepticism about that claim, on a case-by-case basis; but at least it doesn't amount to an arrogant derogation of our own mother.
Then again, I guess Mr. Windsor couldn't really claim his mother was a saint, now, could he?
P.S. Should anyone be inclined to offer the avuncular advice that I really oughtn't take seriously the stupid things that are said by people such as Mr. Windsor, especially in circumstances of high emotion, I would propose that the same advice be delivered to the established media. Soonest. [Nicholas Strakon]
Speaking of taking things seriously — perhaps misguidedly — I've now permitted myself to get worked up by the police PSAs the telescreen has been airing in the run-up to Labor Day, featuring the claim that "if you drive drunk, we will catch you." Well, that's just idiotic. No matter how much money they get from the Central Government to pay for overtime duty, the cops will identify and stop only a tiny proportion of drivers who are sauced-up beyond what the state defines as permissible. And — hello, MADDers — the more draconian and unrealistic the state's definition, the tinier that proportion becomes.
Now for another "more" formulation: The more people there are who believe idiotic cop propaganda, the worse off we all are, drunk or sober. [NS] (August 2007)
Push any mental button, and out pops ...
If you've watched some TV over the past few days, you may have seen the
footage of Miss South Carolina Teen, Caitlin Upton, and the answer she
tried to give during the "talk" part of the competition at the national
pageant on
The announcer quoted survey results showing that a shocking proportion of Americans — one in five — can't find their country on a world map, and he asked Miss Upton why she thought that was.
Her answer, as captured by USA Today:
I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, um, some people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future.At least three of the late-night comics — Jay Leno, Dave Letterman, and Jimmy Kimmel — had themselves some good fun at the poor kid's expense. Kimmel, my favorite news commentator, was particularly relentless, pointing out that, yes, indeed, it is tragic how those Asian countries lag educationally.
But what none of the three comics noted, or were willing to touch, was the mention of South Africa.
South Africa! Helping South Africa! That's so crazily irrelevant in the context of the question that it becomes highly relevant in a cultural and educational context. In other words, Caitlin's reply revealed something important about what Our Educational System is teaching kids — or programming into them. [Nicholas Strakon]
Modine Herbey cracks wise: Good point, Strakon. But I'll bet Oprah was happy. (August 2007)
The gun trade. Those survey-manufacturers do keep busy. According to the latest survey that the newsies are making a story
out of, Americans are the best-armed people in the world. Survey results
suggest that there are
Anyway, when I first sat down to write about this, I was going to take the smart-aleck route and ask, with rhetorical alarm, How many of those guns are in the hands of government employees? But as I dug into the print coverage, the implication emerged that the survey-manufacturers — a Swiss outfit called the Graduate Institute of International Studies — were most concerned to count guns in the hands of non-government types. At the same time, though — contrary to the impression I got from listening to the telescreen's superficialists — it seems that these Instituters aren't concentrating on how many shotguns Hoosiers or Alabamans have in their back closet. They're concerned with a much-larger topic: the worldwide arms trade. And while I don't trust the Instituters to protect my freedom as a gunowner any more than I trust some of their figures, I have to admit that they've managed to provoke thought.
In the West, most guns are manufactured and marketed to their first owners by private companies. But what drives the worldwide arms trade, supplying guns made in the industrial world to trigger-happy Third Worlders, both regime employees and rebels? The mega-state, that's what. And at the top of the list is the U.S. mega-state, for many decades assiduously pushing all manner of international arms deals — sales, giveaways masquerading as sales, and outright giveaways. If it weren't for leviathan, the sinister, shadow-lurking figure of the International Arms Dealer would be small potatoes. [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2007)
He said that he was leaving to spend more time with his family, and also
that his departure on
OK, I'm just joking. About the first two things, that is. Señor Gonzales really said that as attorney general he'd been living the American dream.
Meanwhile, of course, we've been living the American nightmare. [Nicholas Strakon]
Mexican politics. For me, the most entertaining part of the Gonzales extravaganza is how it reflects on the GOP's maniacal truckling after nonwhite voters, especially Hispanic voters. Bush's highest-ranking Hispanic appointee has now had to slink off the public stage, revealed to all not just as a slimy lying creep but as a creep with hands of ham as well. It's deliciously offensive! And it hardly goes down as an auspicious triumph of the inclusive, compassionate, multicultural politics that modern Republicans strain so hard to practice.
It's at times such as this that we most keenly miss our departed friend, Dr. Sam Francis, dissector of political parties both Evil and Stupid. [Modine Herbey]
Speaking of things delicious, how about some delicious irony? Gonzales announced his resignation in — Waco, Texas! Methuselahs with elephantine memories may remember that long, long ago Waco was the scene of another glorious event in the history of the Injustice Ministry, one that accounted for a glittering chapter in the golden chronicles of a certain predecessor of Gonzales. That individual, who was considerably more macho than Gonzales, never resigned, despite the fact that she, too, was "dragged through the mud for political reasons" by enemies of a previous emperor. [Henry Gallagher Fields] (August 2007)
Another big government war. Participating in a media event hosted by Lance Armstrong, Big Nurse Hillary has promised that if elected empress she will wage a war against cancer.
Just what we need: another war conducted by leviathan, laying waste to all around and worsening the robbery of ordinary Americans who have to pay for it.
We should at least entertain the possibility that if it hadn't been for the giant government and giant-government medicine that already exist, cancer might well be a distant memory, along with a thousand other ills that continue — in the 21st century! — to impoverish our lives.
You don't have to be one of Mr. Fields's Methuselahs to remember a big, slow, vacuum-tubey machine called UNIVAC. Now look what computers can do! I wonder where we'd be now if medicine had advanced as rapidly and radically as computer technology over the past few decades. I note that many of the advances that medicine has made depend absolutely on that very computer technology. Remember, in the context of modern industry in general, the computer industry has been relatively free of government meddling, including government "help." Can't say the same for the medical industry. [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2007)
Prof. Bush's history of violence. On
Omitted, however, was any mention of Bush's favorite litterateur, Al ("Bear") Kammoo.
Wee Bush proved able to read the speech fairly fluently, which suggests that his training has actually made some advances. "Nazism" did emerge from the imperial voicebox as "Naah-zee-ism," and that was piquant. Maybe he was trying to channel Winston Churchill. Beats me.
According to Bush's speechwriters, U.S. imperialism has produced very much that is good around the world. That, of course, is nothing more than the conventional propaganda line of the Yankee Colossus as it existed before, let's say, 1965, updated to take account of more-recent triumphs. Anti-Bushies on the Left seem most aghast over Bush's Vietnam Revisionism — he suggested that the United State pulled out too soon — and it was remarkable: Hasn't Bush said that he's agin' Revisionism? But what I found most remarkable was what the Bushwriters left out of their account.
I didn't expect to hear any confession that the miracle-workings of the Empire have depended heavily on slaughtering civilians and obliterating their wealth and cultural achievements. Not from this little savage, I didn't. I do wish, though, that someone would ask Bush or his confectors to account for a certain gaping lacuna in their historical logic. Assuming that the glories of coercive global do-goodism are all true, how is it the proper business of the U.S. Government — financed involuntarily by Americans and in the old days requiring the conscription of their sons — to improve the quality of life for foreigners in far-distant lands?
The most remarkable omission from Bush's potted panorama was just how the United State came to have all those deadly enemies who, over more than six decades, kept popping up, one after another, and Attackin' Us and Threat'nin' Arr Way of Lahf. Pearl Harbor just happened. Korea just happened. Same with the Cold War, same with Vietnam, same with the later quarrels with the Muslims. Wide-eyed American innocents apparently restrict themselves to happily licking their lollipops and never poke anything with sharp sticks.
If pressed, the Bush confectors undoubtedly would fall back on the line that the world is full of evildoers who reflexively attack do-gooders (us, as United Statians) and need either to be reformed or terminated with extreme prejudice. The World War II version of that was to carpet-bomb kids from 20,000 feet, and then hand out chewing gum, Lucky Strikes, and fables about Duh-MOCK-risy to any who might have survived. According to Bushite history, it appears, we United Statians go rolling along, singing a song and minding our own business, until wicked, unpredictable, violent Vietna-jap-iraqis blind-side us from abroad. History is punctuated by those bizarre attacks, and they're not only unprovoked but also unconnected. In this reading of history, one thing does not lead to another.
For reasons that may or may not eventually become apparent, the established ruling class has permitted a cabal of neocon Luftmenschen and Israel-loyalists to carry out a revolution in the Empire's foreign and war policy. But it is possible to over-emphasize the differences between the neocon radicals and the relatively less-maniacal Dark Suits when it comes to the historical lessons they try to sell. I grew up receiving those lessons, not just as taught by the schools but also as disseminated by most organs of popular culture.
Things became a bit more nuanced, so to speak, when I hit college, for it was then that a competing ideology was arising. It produced some interesting scholarship — I'm thinking of works by Gabriel Kolko, James Weinstein, William Appleman Williams, the pre-neocon David Horowitz, and others — but its cruder epigones wound up proclaiming, in effect, that inherent American evil was responsible for everything bad in the world, including the pancaking of puppies by oxcarts in Upper Oogaboogaland.
That school of thought is still around, of course, expressed by the Red Guards every time their Dark Suit employers choose not to squelch them, for raisons d'etat. So this is what most people, in their ignorance, have to choose between: A school of America-haters vs. a school of United State-lovers. How likely is it that historically amnesiac Americans, who've never heard of Harry Elmer Barnes, Murray Rothbard, Steve Sniegoski, et al., will be able to fight their way through to something more reasonable?
I've said it before and I'm sure I'll be saying it again: I'm not optimistic. [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2007)
Another thought on the Roads Question. It doesn't take much to set me off, as you know, and a mini-story I just heard on one of the news nets did the trick. Apparently there is a blip of support, in some quarters, for reforming Prohibition as it applies to young adults. It would involve amending the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 to lower the national drinking age from 21 to 18.
Any surviving constitutionalists out there will observe that tinkering with such an act would make it no less unconstitutional or any less an affront to federalism than it already is. Prohibition 'til age 21 was in place in Indiana all the years I was growing up here, and (I'm sad to say) that was decades before 1984. Would the reformers impose a new and unheard-of drinking age of 18 on Hoosiers?
I'm not a constitutionalist; I'm an anti-statist; so this whole business of a National Minimum Drinking Age makes me want to reach for a bottle — and break it over the bar. I'd remembered that the Central Government successfully strong-armed all the states into imposing a uniform drinking age of 21, but I'd forgotten that it wasn't accomplished by having bureaucrats go to work behind the scenes, Mafia style. The lawfakers in Congress played a crucial and formal role. Let me quote the Wikipedia article: The act
... (Title 23 U.S.C. §158) was passed on July 17, 1984, by the United States Congress as a mechanism whereby all states would become thereafter required to legislate and enforce the age of 21 years as a minimum age for purchasing or public possession of alcoholic beverages. Under the Federal Aid Highway Act, a state not enforcing the minimum age would be subjected to a ten percent decrease in its annual federal highway apportionment.AWhile this act did not outlaw the consumption of alcoholic beverages by those under 21 years of age, some states extended its provisions into an outright ban.
Bribing and blackmailing the states, or should I say provinces, with
highway money stolen from taxpayers is also how the Central Government
imposed a uniform definition of drunk-driving at
a blood-alcohol level of
Last time in this space I wondered where we'd be if government hadn't come to dominate the highway industry. Well, one place we wouldn't be is in a prison of centralized social engineering built with highway swag. A road entrepreneur could indeed insist, if he wished, that we belt up in nine different ways when driving on his property; he could even insist that we wear a propeller beanie and drive a corn-fed minicar; but competition would sort out what customers would stand for from what they wouldn't stand for. Our insurance carriers would have their say, too. Those Mad Mommas, however, would no longer be in a position to send us to bed without our freedom. They'd have to rely on gentle persuasion instead of depending on their pals intoxicated with guns and plunder. [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2007)
Where would we be? A recent event in Minneapolis prompts me to ask, Where would we be if government didn't plan, engineer, fund, build, inspect, and maintain our roads and bridges?
Where would we be without government's protections from liability and its independence from ordinary insurance requirements? Without its power to unilaterally define what is safe? Without its power of eminent domain and the effect of that on what is economically possible for the entire transportation industry? And without the effect of government, including government education, on the evolution of construction and maintenance techniques?
Would we be better off, or would we be worse off?
Mainstreamers, I suppose, would reply that we'd all be prisoners in our houses — assuming that we had managed, somehow, to get into those houses in the first place. I would encourage such prisoners of statish thinking to imagine (it's easy enough) a different set of historical contingencies under which government was responsible for designing, producing, and selling all footwear. And then imagine that someone proposed a free market in shoes. No doubt, mainstreamers in that society would recoil in horror from the idea, fearing that all but the rich and powerful would go unshod in such an anarchistic environment.
Now, most government roads don't disintegrate — not immediately, at least — and most government bridges don't fall down. At least they haven't yet started to collapse with any frequency, even if we're now hearing new alarms on that front. But just think, then, what could be done by actors in a free market lacking all state privilege, lacking all protection for overbuilding, underbuilding, shoddy building, malinvestment in general, stultification of construction and materials technology, cronyism and favoritism ...
... and outright corruption. Without government control of the road- transportation industry, where would all the pols be, without their boodle from politically connected contractors and without all that pork to dish out? [Nicholas Strakon] (August 2007)
Why do only idiot ideas get media attention? Fatuous international "uplift" group Oxfam recently suggested that billions of dollars in federal subsidies to American cotton growers should be eliminated — not to end the official robbery victimizing American taxpayers, and not to inch in the direction of a free market (what, are you crazy?), but to improve the lives of African cotton growers. If it were done, claim University of California "economists" who did a study for Oxfam, world cotton prices would rise, and a typical farm family of ten (!) in Africa's cotton belt, which now earns an annual income of about $2,000, would enjoy an extra $64 to $114 a year. ("Oxfam Suggests Benefit in Africa if U.S. Cuts Cotton Subsidies," by Celia W. Dugger, New York Times, 6/21/07)
Now, we are certainly not against ending robbery and distribution of the swag by the U.S. government, but doing it in an attempt to benefit a gaggle of Africans is just idiocy. Even worse, the scheme demonstrably would not work. Although I am by no means an economist, the flaws in this moronic argument are glaringly apparent.
African cotton growers might indeed benefit, but what about the negative effect that rising world cotton prices would inevitably have on other denizens of that miserable hellhole, as well as on other parts of the Third World?
Higher cotton prices would increase basic costs for the disabled, for those who beg for a living, for farmers who grow food instead of fiber — indeed, for all those who do anything except grow cotton — by increasing prices for clothing, linen, and other cotton products. To benefit a tiny fraction of Africans, Oxfam would push billions of other Third Worlders even deeper into an economic cesspool they already have no hope of ever escaping. The same kind of stupidity led Franklin Roosevelt to "help" farmers by raising food prices during the Depression — at a time when uncounted millions of non-farmers were already unable to afford enough to eat.
Similarly, consider American food-giveaway programs to the submerging nations. The lasting result of such largesse is to drive farmers in those countries out of business, because they cannot hope to sell their crops even for the cost of production when everyone is already getting free food from Uncle Sucker. Such white "compassion" inevitably impairs, if it does not outright destroy, any hope of developing stable economies in Third World nations.
And we wonder why they are ungrateful! [Douglas Olson]
Comment. It's insulting, if you think about it: insulting to us American victims of the subsidies. Clearly, the academic boffins and NGO wallahs don't see the injustices imposed on us by FDR-style agricultural fascism as a reason to make any changes in the System. No, their compassion is reserved for exotic folk one tick above the Stone Age and half a world away. Not to mention, they wouldn't know justice if it bit them in their Egyptian-long-staple-cotton- clad ... Well, you know. [Modine Herbey] (August 2007)
Soon to be mandatory for all Newspeakers. I've encountered a new term. At least it's new to me.
Instead of referring to a black or Hispanic worker as a "minority worker" (or, worse, a "minority"), an article I've just come across refers to each worker as a "diverse" worker.
White workers are not diverse workers, no matter how little they look alike.
Unless they are women. Or handicapped. Or homosexual. Or "transgender" (which I guess is a mutilated impersonator?). Or older than 50. Let's see, who is it, then, who isn't diverse? [Ronn Neff] (July 2007)
"Experts say." The Central Government's latest decree concerning the minimum wage that employers must pay their employees has now kicked in, and one department of Minitrue — CBS News — is doing a fine job of anti-explanation in its anti-coverage.
According to the network-packaged segment aired by my local CBS
affiliate on
It gets worse. The one businessman who was interviewed proposed that businesses will just "pass along" their increased labor costs in the prices they charge their customers. No, no, no, no, no. What if our rulers declared that the minimum legal wage was now $1,000 an hour? Would employers be able to just pass that along to their customers? The only economic entities able, to some extent, to pass along their costs are legal monopolies with slave-customers. Your local electric utility is a good example. If we're talking about normal businesses — ones that must compete for customers or go out of business — the direct effect of government-increased costs is to suppress (and distort) economic activity.
Customers may eventually face higher prices, but not because businesses
are "passing their costs along" and going their merry way, unharmed.
Higher prices may result if businesses are crushed more painfully to the
wall and rendered less able to serve the demands of the marketplace at
the previous level of productivity. In effect, the government will have
created a shortage — of productive economic activity — and
shortages drive higher prices. Other indirect effects for customers may
include narrowed choices and lowered quality.
The real breath-taker, in the brief CBS segment, was what the network's "experts" did not say. Completely omitted was any observation that a minimum-wage hike disemploys marginal workers, insofar as the hike is great enough to exceed the true minimum established by the market, influenced, as may be, by government inflation of the money supply. It's as if someone were trying to teach the basic facts about the planet Jupiter without mentioning that it's a gas giant and the largest planet in the Solar System. Now, to obtain such comment, CBS needn't have winkled out those elusive extremists from the Mises Institute or the Foundation for Economic Education. It needn't even have approached Ron Paul for a sound bite. All it needed to do was find an economist bright enough to read a simple demand curve.
CBS stories posted to the Net are a little better. I actually found this in
the eleventh paragraph of one of them: "Critics of the federal increase say
it might force some businesses to stop hiring entry-level employees."
However, that is followed immediately by this, which strikes me as
contradictory: "They also contend that beneficiaries of a higher minimum
wage likely will be teenagers working part-time jobs, not the working
poor." To me, part-time teenage worker is a pretty close synonym
for entry-level worker, not to mention marginal worker.
("Minimum Wage Workers Get A Raise / $.70-Cent Boost to $5.85 Is First
Federal Increase Since 1997; Rate Will Jump to $7.25 in 2009," CBS/AP,
In the same story I also found this wrinkle, which the CBS department of
the telescreen didn't mention: "To help make the minimum wage provision
palatable for Republicans, Democrats added
Established-media stories in print form often feature somewhat less reality-avoidance than minute-long mini-stories on the telescreen. However, a picture — even a talking head — is worth a thousand words, and that's assuming we ignore inflation: what with the waning of literacy, the worth of a picture is probably up to ten thousand words by now.
In crafting economic stories for telescreen victims, the established media do their best to preserve ignorance and propagate nonsense on stilts. And it's not just a Red Guard operation. Remember, Guards in the established media work for the owners — those gents who wear Dark Suits. [Nicholas Strakon] (July 2007)
The law really, really, really is a ass. Not that we needed any more proof of Charles Dickens's immortal observation, but while cruising opinions recently in the Website of the U.S. Court for the District of Columbia, I found such a gem of a footnote that it absolutely shrieked to be cited here.
The issue involved the liability of an employer for the actions of an employee — whether the employee was acting "within the scope of his employment." The crimes described all took place in the District of Columbia, which will surprise no one, and there is surely no need to speculate on the race of the perpetrators — or the jury members.
Here is the footnote in its entirety, except for the detailed legal citations:
3. See Lyon v. Carey (upholding jury verdict finding a mattress deliveryman's rape and assault of plaintiff to be within the scope of his employment because it followed a dispute regarding delivery and payment of the mattress); Johnson v. Weinberg (holding that a laundromat employee was acting within the scope of his employment when he shot a customer following a dispute over missing clothes); Brown v. Argenbright Sec. Inc. (holding that a reasonable jury could determine a security guard's perpetration of an alleged sexual assault occurred within the scope of employment because it began with a physical search of a suspected shoplifter).
Competitive injustice. Bar owners in Fort
Wayne, Indiana, are upset, and loudly so, over the business they're losing
because of the recently imposed ban on "public" smoking. The word is that
five bars have already closed since the ban went into effect on
One city council member dropped in on a protest meeting of bar owners the other night in order to affect sympathy for their plight, and the owners told him it wasn't fair that smoking was still permitted at certain (open-air) events on land possessed by local government. Naturally, the pol found that to be a good point. Other totalitarians are stepping in to point out that if only the county authorities adopted a ban as strict as Fort Wayne's, the city's bar owners wouldn't have to operate under such a competitive disadvantage. Still others are raising the ante, proposing a statewide ban similar to the one recently imposed in Ohio, just across the line from Allen County.
Of course totalitarians who are really in favor of restoring competitiveness are urging a nationwide ban.
Once most bar owners give up on the possibility of Repeal, I expect many to pick up the cry of "It's not fair!" and work to spread the injustice to those not yet suffering under it. That's how things work in a country where almost everyone labors under totalitarian premises, and almost no one understands or cares one whit about justice for all. Recall the indignation that tax victims direct not against the robber state but against tax "cheats" who have managed to escape some of the robbery. America's Polite Totalitarianism thrives as prodigiously as it does because it depends on the aid of its victims, competing industriously to enslave one another. [Nicholas Strakon] (July 2007)
Another glorious victory for Ingsoc! Let's assume that what we're being told about the existence of Muslim terror-doctors in Airstrip One is true. I have to start with that qualification, because no adult — or even well-raised child — has any excuse for reflexively believing the pronouncements of a leviathan police state. Not, certainly, in our time, when the American and British leviathans are avidly feeding on terror, real or imaginary, in order to rapidly expand their power over every aspect of our lives.
Assuming the charges are true, I proceed to these observations:
1) For many decades Britain has had in place a system of socialist medicine known as the National Health Service.
2) Socialism being productive of shortages of all kinds, Britain labors under a severe shortage of doctors.
3) In an attempt to relieve the shortage, the socialist health authorities have strenuously sought to recruit foreign doctors willing to work under such a system. One of the places where they have recruited them is the Muslim world, which is home to large numbers of intelligent, hard-working, murder-minded people who hate the West and Westerners. It is not necessary here to explore the reasons for that hatred.
4) Hell — as the old saying goes — has come to breakfast.
***
Now let us reflect that for at least forty years the United State has been relentlessly building a socialist/fascist health-care system, and recently the media have begun warning us of a severe doctor shortage here. USA Today's Dennis Cauchon writes: "The marketplace doesn't determine how many doctors the nation has, as it does for engineers, pilots, and other professions. The number of doctors is a political decision, heavily influenced by [politically wired] doctors themselves.
"Congress controls the supply of physicians by how much federal funding it provides for medical residencies — the graduate training required of all doctors." ("Medical miscalculation creates doctor shortage," March 2, 2005)
In her great book Dependent on D.C., Charlotte Twight devotes a chapter, "Health Care Controls," to investigating the attack on American medicine, including Medicare's harassment of doctors and the Orwellian imposition of "federal health care offenses." Add to that the DEA's witch-hunt against doctors who seek to relieve patients' pain, and we may safely anticipate that some older, experienced doctors are either going to retire early or restrict themselves to treating only affluent, elective patients who are not prisoners of state medicine.
Just what dishes will be served at our own infernal breakfast? I predict they will make us sick; I can only hope they will not make some of us dead. [Nicholas Strakon] (July 2007)
The basis of all laws: "fear and
intimidation." A federal judge in Oregon has sentenced Kevin
Tubbs, a confessed arsonist affiliated with the Animal Liberation Front,
to more than
According to U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken, four of those fires — at a Forest Service ranger station, an automobile dealership, a police substation, and a tree farm — constituted acts of terrorism "intended to influence the conduct of the government or retaliate for government acts" (paraphrase by the Associated Press in a story of May 24, 2007). Apparently the destruction of private property at the auto dealership and the farm were not significant factors in her decision — only the intended effect of this pitiful fool's actions on the all-powerful government.
"Fear and intimidation can play no part in changing the hearts and minds of people in a democracy," the judge declared — twice, for emphasis — during sentencing.
It would be interesting to see whether Her Honor would apply the same melodramatic homily when deciding legal challenges to IRS tax-collection efforts, federal "hate crime" prosecutions, "equal employment opportunity" and "global warming" laws, statutes forcing the acceptance of homosexuality, and those promoting miscegenation, denigrating Christianity, and providing special benefits to illegal aliens.
I'd bet ten to one against Judge Aiken's striking down any of those laws for their unabashed use of "fear and intimidation" by Big Brother to "change the hearts and minds" of Americans. But if I did, I'd probably be violating the federal law against Internet gambling, and that would bring down more additional fear and intimidation than I can handle this week. [Douglas Olson] (June 2007)
The male recession: an unexpected
wrinkle. Some time back I encouraged readers to check the
lists of their local high schools' valedictorians and salutatorians when the
papers published them this spring. Chances were, I wrote, that both young
scholars would be female, at any given school, and I predicted further that
girls would comprise two-thirds of the list of other top scholars, such as
National Honor Society members. So when the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel
ran the names and photos of the number ones and number twos at the 20
high schools in Allen County, I thought I'd better do some checking of my
own (2007 Graduates supplement,
NHS members weren't listed, but I had that two-thirds figure in mind when I looked over the list that was published. Forty-three valedictorians or salutatorians were recorded (some ties occurred), and the sex differential didn't seem as grievous as I'd figured it would be. Twenty-six were female (60.5 percent) and 17 were male (39.5 percent).
But then I thought to calculate the percentages at the government high schools vis-à-vis those at the non-government high schools. At the government schools, with a total of 27 valedictorians and salutatorians, 19 were female (70.4 percent) and eight were male (29.6 percent). However, at the non-government schools, with a total of 16 valedictorians and salutatorians, seven were female (43.75 percent) and nine were male (56.25 percent). I should point out that, of the non-government schools, none are boys-only academies.
I'm not going to hang any heavy interpretations on those results; all manner of objections may be raised, I suppose, including the fact that the sample is pretty small. I'll just point out two facts. First, the seven non-government schools tend to be far smaller in enrollment than the 13 government schools. And, second, assuming the results are valid evidence for anything, they do not amount to evidence that, ceteris paribus, would encourage parents to send their boys to government schools in Allen County, Indiana. [Nicholas Strakon] (June 2007)
Why we avoid calling ourselves libertarians. In the July/August 1998 issue of Policy Report, Cato's vice president, David Boaz, wrote, "Libertarians are not 'anti-government.' Libertarians support limited, constitutional government — limited not just in size [or strength] but, of far greater importance, in the scope of its powers."
CATO's position on this matter hasn't changed. In the May/June 2007 issue of Policy Report, its president and CEO, Ed Crane, writes, "One of the myths about libertarians is that we are anti-government. We are not." (p. 2)
On page 7 of the same issue of Policy Report, I find this headline: "Bush Names Cato Scholars to Two Jobs."
No doubt these scholars will struggle mightily to help limit the size and strength of the state and the scope of its powers. While doing so, they will be collecting salaries paid from the proceeds from income and other taxation, to say nothing of inflation, fines, fees, DEA and RICO property seizures, Federal Reserve securities manipulation, eminent domain, forfeitures, and for all I know tribute from client states. [Ronn Neff] (June 2007)
I heard a somewhat decent sermon at Mass the other day, but it was marred by the priest's recounting of some of the events that took place after the Crucifixion.
In his sermon, he reminded the congregation that the apostles were hiding in the Upper Room, because they were afraid of the Romans and others in Jerusalem.
Romans? "Others in Jerusalem"?
The text says nothing about Romans, but it is explicit. The apostles were hiding "for fear of the Jews."
A priest who is under oath to preach the Gospel — in the hearing of at least some who (Catholics notwithstanding) knew their Gospels — thus distorted and perverted the clear words of the Sacred Text.
Why would a priest do such a thing?
I can think of only one reason:
For fear of the Jews. [Ronn Neff] (May 2007)
Only the goose; never the gander. On
There's a fairly large homogenous population 60 and older that may not be sympathetic to the needs of a diverse youthful population.It seems not to occur to Mather (or to the Times) that the "diverse youthful population" may not be so sympathetic to that homogenous (i.e., white) population 60 and older, also.
But I suppose that's because only whites are racists; not diverse youthful populations. [Ronn Neff] (May 2007)
Stop the insanity! Shamelessly capitalizing on the Virginia Tech massacre, Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Arlen Specter (RINO-Pa.) have demanded stronger laws to prevent the "mentally ill" from purchasing guns.
Note that not a single politician has called for measures to keep the mentally ill from running for president or other public office, which is demonstrably a far clearer and more present danger to the nation than mere guns. [Douglas Olson] (May 2007)
A wholly owned subsidiary? Goody Two-shoes types, as well as some folks who aren't nearly so naive, keep telling us that we need more regulations and restrictions on campaign financing, even though the money in politics rises after every spasm of "reform" (while our liberty fades). The impression created by the current jungle of regs is that an individual renter or buyer of a politician can give his boy only a very small amount of boodle; and that helps the sheeple to sleep on, sleep on.
But it transpires that there are ways, perfectly legal ways, it seems, for
pols and their masters to sidestep the finance regulations altogether.
According to the Washington Post's Al Kamen, a rent-seeking entity in
Columbus, Ohio, has purchased a
The house is not situated anywhere near Gillmor's district. But why should it be? "The people" are not Gillmor's masters; his masters are the Dark Suits in Columbus.
Who are your congressman's masters?
Forgive me for continually adapting Frank Chodorov's old advice from the 1950s — Worried about Commies in government jobs? Get rid of the jobs — but I'd say that in order to get rid of political corruption, you've got to get rid of the politicians. And political power, too. [Nicholas Strakon]
If the reformers are sincere, they're utopians. The more powerful and extensive the government gets, the higher the demand for pols' services will be, and the higher their purchase price will rise. Go ahead — try to stop that dynamic through reformist regulation. And while you're at it, try to stop the rain. [Modine Herbey] (May 2007)
How our legal system works. Three
Kentucky ambulance chasers are under investigation after settling their
lawsuit against the manufacturers of the Phen-Fen diet drug for
Although the clients had agreed to
pay them between
The very generous judge then took retirement and signed on as director of the so-called charity — at a salary of $5,000 per month. [Douglas Olson] (May 2007)
NEWS FLASH — Democrats solve one national problem! There is a deafening silence, or indifference at least, in the news media today about the rising price of gasoline, which has now blown past $3 a gallon. One major media article has even suggested that, because so many American homes now have two incomes, the higher price is not really a problem.
Contrast that to the non-stop screeching we have heard every spring for the past few years about the "crisis" that poor and average-income Americans were facing ... about how they would have to choose between eating and driving to work ... about the naked greed of oil companies (although they make less on each gallon than the federal government seizes in taxes) ... and about how the Republicans' venality and incompetence caused the problem.
Prices are rising this year in spite of a fall in crude oil prices, and without supply-crippling hurricanes or a big new war in the Middle East. As always, the rise is really caused by federal mandates that require dozens of special additive formulations tailored for various parts of the country. Once the refineries finish retooling from winter fuel oil to these insane requirements, prices will fall drastically — as they always do.
We owe the media's blessed quietude solely to the Democrats' current
control of the House and Senate. Since demagoguery on this issue cannot
help them, and would only draw attention to their inability to repeal the
laws of supply and demand, their aiders and abetters in the media will
continue to spare us the usual sleazy, manufactured outrage over this and
similar non-issues. [Douglas Olson]
Since Mr. Olson mentioned refineries, I thought I might contribute this interesting bit of trivia: no new refinery has been built in the United State since 1972. I doubt it's relevant to anything, though. Surely the lack of new refineries has resulted from the purely economic decisions of investors and businessmen operating in a purely free market. Don't you think? [Modine Herbey] (May 2007)
You've probably heard about the tanker-truck accident in California that resulted in the collapse of part of a freeway. When I heard about it, I messaged the members of the TLD Gang in this wise:
I believe we are all skeptical, to say the least, of the claim that jet fuel could not burn hot enough to fatally weaken the steel frame of the World Trade Center. Well, the other day a fuel truck crashed on a freeway ramp near Oakland, spilling and igniting its cargo — ordinary gasoline, I think — and the conflagration weakened the steel supports of the freeway enough to make it collapse.David T. Wright was quick to respond:I wonder what our wilder-eyed cousins here in the fever swamps will say about this.
This was obviously a set-up to fool the people into thinking that burning jet fuel could have brought down the Twin Towers on 9/11 — skepticism about which has threatened to bring the ugly truth out into the open. A retired professor of philosophy, the owner of a chain of flower shops, and other experts have already analyzed news film taken of the California fire and come to the shocking conclusion that charges were set that severed the steel girders on the bridge at critical points.I stand abashed! [Nicholas Strakon] (May 2007)Further investigation reveals that the truck driver was actually a 33rd-degree Mason and had served a four-year term as a quartermaster's assistant in the U.S. Army. Furthermore, his sister-in-law's cousin works as a receptionist for a company that provides office supplies to the CIA. Only one reasonable conclusion is possible in light of these revelations.
Why the lack of injuries? Obviously because Jews were warned to stay away from the bridge at the appointed hour.
I have now read some of the "verses" of
Seung-hui Cho's teacher, Prof. Nikki Giovanni, as quoted by Steve Sailer at
Frontpagemag.com ("Virginia Tech's Professor of Hate,"
Having done so, I have a question for Westerners: Why does a person who writes like that have a job?
And why is such "writing" not self-published only? That is how Giovanni started out, to be sure, but now her works are brought out by William Morrow, a well-established commercial publisher.
As long as even one university in the West thinks it is intellectually honest to have a person such as Giovanni on its professorial staff (as opposed to the janitorial or kitchen staff), the West is dying.
As long as there are more than, say, half a dozen such people on faculties, the West is all but dead.
No wonder the world has become such an ugly place. [Ronn Neff]
Comment. Actually, even self-publication is too good for such a person — unless her house is filled with boxes and boxes of unsold copies. [Modine Herbey] (April 2007)
A pageant of perfect propaganda. Fort
Wayne's pro-war CBS affiliate, WANE-TV, has become awfully skilled at
weaving imperialist propaganda into its newscasts (its promo slogan, by
the way, is "Coverage you can count on"), but on
The scene was an elementary school in Fort Wayne. Some children were gathered together in an auditorium, and cheerful teachers asked one little boy to come up front and stand looking at the drawn curtain of the stage. When the curtain opened (swoosh!), there stood his dad — a big, shaven-headed, Jesse Ventura-looking combat sergeant in full uniform, back from Iraq, unbeknownst to his kid, who hadn't seen him for six months!
Joy! Joy for the kid! Joy for the noble and heroic warrior, back (albeit only temporarily, one supposes) from the Glorious Bushite Crusade for Duh-MOCK-risy in Peculiar Places!
But here's the thing that made it perfect:
The soldier was white.
His wife (or mate, at least), whom we got a glimpse of, was black.
The kid, of course, was mulatto.
Since I am not a child, no one had better try to tell me it was just by accident that the people behind this propaganda pageant wound up advertising not just imperialism but miscegenation, too. [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2007)
Much of the "Fox News Sunday" show for
Wallace noted that G.W. had suspended a student with "serious mental health problems" last year, and that "he sued [the university] under the Americans With Disabilities Act. And in fact, G.W. had to pay a settlement." Wallace went on to ask Trachtenberg: "Are school administrators now hamstrung when they want to try to protect the student body?"
It was then that Prexy Trachtenberg revealed himself to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. He reported that, in response to the suit, administrators at G.W. had "revisited our procedures and ... made them, I think, more empathetic than they were before." More empathetic with the Cho types, that is. He personally thought that G.W. hadn't been as "humane" in dealing with such wackos as it ought to have been. This, only six days out from Blacksburg!
I don't know whether Trachtenberg himself started out as a true Red Guard — though his crowing about how his campus "security" force carries no firearms is suggestive. Was he perhaps reading a script assigned by some Red Judge as a result of the court settlement? Well, not literally. But administrators such as Trachtenberg have been educated, as forcefully as necessary, in the ADA mentality. It's unclear to me just what effect the federal ADA, or maybe some state version, had on Cho's continued presence at Virginia Tech. But it's plain that the ADA and the lawsuits arising from it have engendered a whole pro-Cho mentality and institutional culture, widely accepted and enforced by people such as Trachtenberg. It has taken on a momentum of its own, vectoring toward that ultimate end of the perfect Polite Totalitarianism, where the people regulate themselves in exact accordance with their rulers' wishes.
Now, is it a good thing or a bad thing that the Central Government and its little friends in local government are forcing us, and educating us, to associate with maniacs? Hmmm ... A question thorny and recondite, indeed. All manner of nuance and subtlety and furrowing of the brow must be brought to bear on that one, for certain.
Seriously, it's interesting what happens when a totalitarian state sets out to regulate all the minutiae of our lives, including our decisions about whom we might associate with. But it's not so interesting that all the slaves of the totalitarian mentality are crying now for even more totalitarianism in order to solve the problems of "too much freedom." No, no, that's just predictable. [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2007)
Distasteful. The Associated Press recently investigated the antecedents of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and found (gasp!) polygamy in the Mormon's family tree! The AP article notes that Romney's great-great-grandfather had 12 wives, and quotes a church historian about what "a very important part" of the family the practice was.
Apparently the AP seems to believe this has — or should have — some bearing on the 2008 election. For the same reason, no media outlet has run any in-depth articles about the father of Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama, because Daddy Barack is said to have married several women without benefit of divorce.
Neither have the media tracked Obama's paternal great-great-grandfather to the wilds of Darkest Africa — where he may very well have been a cannibal! [Douglas Olson] (April 2007)
Please read this first. It's pretty short: "State Rep. Brooks Gets Hateful, Racist Email over Slavery Apology Bill," by Matthew Cardinale, posted at the Atlanta Progressive News.
Comment by Ronn Neff: I love the sanctimony of this "story." And the brave-heartedness of Brooks: "I've been receiving threats all my Civil Rights career" and "I'm not going to let fear impede [our] progress."
Then there's this: "We pray that the person will shed the disease called racism." Disease. You know, people who are soft on national health care should think about what such a system would lead to once beliefs were characterized as diseases.
Also, of course, there is the business of calling the e-mail message a threat. Threat? What threat? If that's the worst "threat" this guy has ever received, I guess it's pretty easy for him to strut around pretending to be brave.
Finally, note this pregnant remark: "Who knows what else this person is capable of?"
Is there any, any, any reason not to believe that we live in a conquered country?
Comment by Nicholas Strakon: That "Who knows ...?" remark is pregnant, indeed. And ominous, given the police involvement. Although there is nothing in the e-mail, as quoted, that a reasonable man could interpret as a threat, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation "isn't sure if it qualifies as a hate crime, and that is under review. 'Hateful languate [sic] is a bordeline [sic] issue but can also be a First Amendment issue. We're looking into it,' [GBI operative] Bankhead said, declining to describe it as a formal investigation." Oh, it can be a "First Amendment issue," eh? How reassuring!
Weaselly language such as Bankhead's ought to elevate the eyebrows of everyone who is worried about "hate crime" laws. I'm sure we've all expected that sooner or later the Kops would be able to slide from punishing nasty words connected with violent crime to punishing nasty words alone. Sounds as though the Georgia secret police has at least poked its toes onto that path. (April 2007)
Really, I don't know Don Imus from Von Shimus, since when it comes to radio I listen exclusively either to classical music or (yes, yes, I know) NPR Bolsheviks. But a savvy reader reports that Imus is a liberal — and opines that with his "nappy- headed hos" remark the now-liquidated talk-show host was just being a white liberal trying to sound black. Well, we're all familiar with that phenomenon; and if it's true in Imus's case, then this whole thing starts to look even more chuckleworthy than I thought. [Modine Herbey]
Those who oppose the consolidation and regulation of the economy may savor this footnote to the Don Imus affair. In response to questions whether Imus, now fired by CBS and MSNBC, might have his show picked up by satellite radio, Sirius and XM Radio say that they're not willing to get into anything "controversial," what with government approval of their merger deal still pending. Both fascist consolidation and socialist regulation produce just this kind of timidity. And that's particularly disturbing when it comes to the communications industry, is not it? [Nicholas Strakon]
"Controversial," eh? Some liberty-lover with uncorrupted Western DNA should survey the play lists of Sirius and XM. What do you want to bet he'd find more than a little programming that would strike him as controversial? For one thing, he'd encounter entire thunderstorms, traffic jams, and hog riots of pseudo-music. What regulation and consolidation do, really, is suppress "controversial" departures from the party line, cultural and otherwise. [MH] (April 2007)
Big Sister. I saw something in a Dick Morris-Eileen McGann column the other day that got me wondering. After noting that "Hillary Clinton's negatives are rising among American voters," and dilating upon all of that, Morris and McGann wind up by warning that
her ace in the hole is the vast infusion of new single women voters she will attract to the polling booths on Election Day, who are voting for the first time. All current polling excludes these women from its sample because they do not now say they are likely to vote, or aren't even registered yet. But, by the time Oprah beats the drums for Hillary, they will realize a woman is running and will turn out to support her candidacy. ("Getting to Know Hillary," Huntington [Ind.] Herald-Press, April 2, 2007, p. 4A)Morris and McGann's curled lip comes across vividly, doesn't it?
I doubt the writers meant it this way, but when I read "single women," I thought "single mothers." There's no doubt that the demolition of the American family — engineered by culture destroyers throughout society but especially within leviathan — has enormously strengthened the demand among women for totalitarianism of the socialist-welfare variety. Instead of being able to depend on the aid of strong, loyal, hard-working husbands, millions of frazzled young mothers have turned to Big Sister government. And who on the government scene embodies Big Sister better than Hillary Clinton?
I shrink from making political predictions, especially in light of those rising negatives Morris and McGann write about, but it would really be something — wouldn't it? — if we were to wake up the morning after Election Day 2008 and realize, It wasn't Iraq, stupid! [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2007)
Newsmax.com has posted a version of the column titled "Hillary's Star Appeal Fading."
Gasping for sanity. George Allan England (1877-1936) was a rabid socialist, but also a very talented and innovative writer of science fiction and fantasy. In 1915 he penned a novel, The Air Trust, in which the world's plutocrats conspired to corner the oxygen market and charge people for the very air they breathed.
Far too similarly for comfort, the Supreme Court ruled on
It is hardly a coincidence that this same gaggle of supreme morons (Stevens, writing for the bare majority of himself, Ginsburg, Breyer, Souter, and Kennedy) is precisely the combination that gave us the notorious Kelo decision of 2005, which decreed that local politicians could seize private land for the sole purpose of handing it over to wealthy, well-connected "developers" in an effort to increase the tax base — and thus enhance those same pols' ability to spend your money.
For all the ill that can be said of George W. Bush, and it is legion, none of his appointees was a party to either of these outrageous decisions. If he should get a chance to replace another of these senile old bastards, that could be cause for moderate and cautious rejoicing. [Douglas Olson]
Note. The Air Trust is out of print, but a new Black Dog Books reprint of England's excellent The Empire in the Air (1914) is available from Amazon.com.Update. A reader has kindly advised us that England's Empire in the Air is available for downloading or reading on line at www.gutenberg.org/etext.
What Don Imus said on the air was uncivil, but it ought to be possible — and perhaps it is worthwhile — to observe that tattooed, heavily muscled, high-testosterone, basketball-playing Negresses do not represent the traditional white Western image of womanhood. Actually that is only a neutral, objective statement. After all, most people these days, including most whites, would agree that any fugitive wisps of repressive superstitions about the proper image and conduct of the respective sexes — excuse me, genders — need to be finally blown away. For one thing, with every passing year more and more burly young fellows who happen to be female are going to be called upon to participate in the adventures of the imperial military machine. [Nicholas Strakon]
But I still smell a double standard. Previously Imus was allowed to get away with calling some NBA team a bunch of "chest-bumping pimps." He was criticized for it but not yanked from the air. Seems to me the thinking must have been, "They're men — they can take it." Highly offensive to all progressive identitarians! [Modine Herbey] (April 2007)
Soy vey! According to CBS News, the Center for Science in the Public Interest — better known hereabouts as the Food KGB — is now attacking Chinese food. Seems that when you order your Oriental delights you wind up with too much sodium to suit the twigboys of totalitarianism. It's true that Chinese food often contains more veggies than a typical steakhouse meal, but that doesn't get your local House of Hoooonan off the hook. As CBS News commentator Greg Hunter opined, "Vegetables are better than meat, but ..."
... but the commissars won't be satisfied until they can prevent you from putting salt (and, no doubt, butter) on your confounded boiled broccoli. (I'm paraphrasing, a bit.)
Luxuriating in the automatic, lavish, and uncritical coverage they get from the mainstream media, these CSPI operatives always seem to get most of what they want, sooner or later. They shrill forth their demands, usually accompanied by threats of litigation and appeals to bureaucracies, and a few weeks or months later the giant food and restaurant corporations all take a fall as if punched by an invisible fist. But I wonder how well the CSPI's latest attack on people's private tastes and appetites will fly among their fellow Blue State city slickers. I'm hoping that the thousands of Chinese restaurateurs in New York City can teach our Red Guards a thing or two about swimming and hiding, Maoist-guerrilla-style, in the sea of a hungry people. I'm hoping, too, that it's not merely an urban legend that New York Jews are addicted to Chinese take-out. [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2007)
Dark Suits, lavender agenda. A
constitutional amendment to ban homosexual marriage passed the Indiana
General Assembly in 2005, but it has to pass in the current legislature,
too, in order for the state's voters to have a crack at it in a referendum.
But it's now dead, at least for this session, after bogging down in
committee on
The interesting part of this year's shindig came when some big, established Indiana companies, including Eli Lilly, Wellpoint, and the always "progressive" Cummins Engine, stepped forward to warn of undesirable economic and recruiting consequences if the measure were adopted. (Apparently, in today's America the best and the brightest among the corporate-nomad population tend to be sexual deviants.)
The Suits also told the committee — and this, apparently, was the killer — that they'd have difficulty awarding homosexual couples all the benefits they deserved, because of a part of the amendment providing that state law "may not be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents of marriage be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups." But as proponents of the amendment pointed out, reasonably enough, the provision "does not prohibit the government, public employers [sic], or anyone else from voluntarily offering such benefits." ("Gay marriage ban fails in committee," by Deanna Martin, Associated Press, found in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, April 4, 2007, p. 1L)
Do the companies actually believe — to turn around E.B. White's famous litmus test for dictatorship — that everything not compulsory is prohibited?
Here's what I think is really going on. Big, established companies with political influence typically prefer to have some state authority lay down definitions and standards — in this case, concerning what counts as a marriage and who is eligible to get what benefits. That way, the companies themselves can dodge the responsibility and possible blame for doing so (who remembers who lobbied for what at a General Assembly committee hearing?), escaping a blizzard of lawsuits from society's snarling elements and at the same time advancing their anti-competitive agenda. In the ordinary course of events it is the big players that help mold state policies, and they like to hobble newer, smaller, and potentially more nimble competitors by forcing everyone into the same Procrustean bed.
I myself oppose banning homo marriage, because such bans take the state even deeper into defining and regulating marriage. The state should get out of that business altogether. Faith and other affinity communities should be left to define and recognize marriage, and the "civil" aspects ought to be left to the partners and whatever valid and binding contracts they could form. Nothing special in that area would appear to be necessary so far as contract law is concerned, though it would certainly help if, at the same time, leviathan were also to withdraw completely from regulating the labor markets, dismantle its entire welfare apparatus, and delete all of its "civil rights" laws. That last bit would cut the ground out from under those snarling elements I mentioned.
In a free society, corporations and everyone else would be obliged to stand up and proclaim and try to sell their own standards and definitions, instead of just lurking behind the scenes and whispering to the pols they'd rented. [Nicholas Strakon] (April 2007)
A few weeks ago the city Authorities in Fort Wayne finally approved their despotic smoking ban, in an attempt to show the national Authorities that theirs is a thoroughly modern and totalitarian town. The ban won't become "law" until June, but mirabile dictu, a little rebellion has already broken out, led by the owner of Piere's, a huge and hugely popular nightclub. This unsheeplike chap is threatening lawsuits (good luck with that) and, more inspiringly, actual disobedience. He even hosted a rally at his club that was attended by a raucous crowd of aggrieved business owners and good-old-boy smokers of both the male and the female variety. Naturally they produced a nice rich tobacco haze to float over the proceedings. Good for them!
But also attending — uh-oh — were quite a few pols on the make who assured the crowd that they opposed the smoking ban, too, and would overturn it if only they could seize Power. For all I know, some of them reported their true sentiments, but I immediately started wondering what other brands of high-tar statism one would be sucking in by backing these brave tobacco "libertarians." I didn't have to wonder long.
To some extent the smoking ban is indeed an invasion of "smokers' rights" — it transpires that the Fire Department (sic!) will have the power to ticket especially recalcitrant smokers — but mainly it is an invasion of property rights, victimizing business owners and tyrannically setting policies for the management of what is purported to be their own property. So what kind of statism would smoking-libertarians be endorsing if they supported smoke-friendly pols? In the case of Matt Kelty, a Republican candidate for mayor, they'd be supporting ... an invasion of property rights, victimizing business owners and tyrannically setting policies for the management of what is purported to be their own property.
According to Kevin Leininger, writing in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, "a
Kelty administration would try very hard to protect the public from the
effects of what could be called 'secondhand pornography.'" ("A mayor
should curb crime, not sin,"
Where, oh, where may we expect party-political activism to lead us? If we labor under a mental fog on this subject, here we have a lesson for clearing it out that's as powerful as an unfiltered Camel. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2007)
The Ministry of Corn. As Strakon noted in
this space on
As the consequences of Mexicans' poverty swell, so too will the pressure for them to come to the United State, where they stand to make more money — perhaps by working on farms growing corn for ethanol, further impoverishing their countrymen. Or by working in food factories, processing corn products instead of, say, Peter Pan peanut butter.
But this joint attack by the Dark Suits and Red Guards features more than one sharp talon. As previously reported, livestock farmers are being pressed hard by the inflation of corn prices. I caught NPR's take on that the other day, and the newsreader told us, joyfully, that everyone is going to have to learn how to eat like vegetarians.
Everyone except the Gores, of course. (That's my take.) [Modine Herbey] (March 2007)
No comment. On
"The pageant will include girls ages 4-6. The winner will receive a $1,000 cash award and air transportation to compete in the national pageant at Disneyland in California."
Accompanying the story is a headshot of the little child, wearing a fashionable pair of sunglasses. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2007)
Fulfilling his mission. According to the local ABC-TV affiliate, a teacher at a state high school in Fort Wayne has been showing the Al Gore vehicle "An Inconvenient Truth" to his students — and that's not all. For extra credit, the state-children may sign a petition that will be sent to Congress, urging members to heed Gore's beliefs and policy prescriptions concerning "global warming" — that is, urging members to further expand state power and further violate our liberty. As if the conspirators of Capitol Hill needed any encouragement.
In undertaking all of this, of course, the teacher is only fulfilling his mission as a perfect product of the Red Guard teacher factories: turning his young victims into good statists — and busy advocates of statism. Some in Fort Wayne consider the teacher's project to be controversial, which indicates that the chief purpose of state education has escaped them. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2007)
Even more socialist medicine is on the way — specifically, war-socialist medicine. The Walter Reed revelations are already opening up a whole new vista of tax-and-spend opportunities across the country, not only for military hospitals but also for those white elephants of dumbhead socialism, the VA hospitals. (Technocratic socialists undominated by careerism would just have distributed health-care vouchers to veterans and let them spend the money wherever they chose.) I hope the boffins of public finance relentlessly track these medical expenditures, which are going to be a big, big share of the cost of Bush's War.
But costs in money aren't the half of it, of course. I've heard that
Naturally, it's in the material interest of state-doctors to overdiagnose health problems (ordinary doctors can't get away with that so easily); and, naturally, rent-seekers in the health-care industry will welcome those diagnoses. But whatever the real proportion of the disturbed is among Our Boys (and Wymyn), we've got crazy — and expensive — days ahead of us, for sure, and I'm afraid they'll continue long after that twisted little squirrel monkey in the presidential palace capers off to his gold-plated asylum in 2009. [Nicholas Strakon]
An afterword on smart fascism. I suspect the archipelago of VA hospitals resulted not from socialist idiocy or backwardness but instead from the determination of smart fascists to award juicy hospital-construction contracts to builders, who are always well-wired politically. Even if a voucher system prompted the construction of ordinary hospitals across the country, veteran-patients would have been distributed among them thinly and in an uncontrolled pattern, and the pay-off to developers and contractors would have been much less visible and much less calculable. No good, politically. No good, either, for bureaucratic empire-builders.
The same dynamic applies to building "public" housing developments rather than issuing housing vouchers. According to G. William Domhoff, developers are always the executive committee of the ruling class at the local, municipal level. They must be served, and they must see themselves as having been served. [NS] (March 2007)
Our multicultural socialist utopia strikes again. According to a police brief in a local paper, a Somali gentleman in Fort Wayne, arrested in the rape of a 12-year-old girl, has now been permitted to plead guilty to a reduced charge of child-molesting. Unfortunately the newly minted Midwesterner speaks only some lingo called "Mai Mai," so taxpayers were forced to fly in two translators from out of state for the court proceedings. The paper doesn't mention whether some crazed Red Guard church group, also working with taxpayer funds, imported the chap into Fort Wayne in the first place — but we know which way to bet, don't we? [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2007)
Brigandage in the cornfield. The
government, in its superior and farseeing wisdom, subsidizes the
production of ethanol to the tune of
The political, bureaucratic, and media classes seem to have greeted ethanol's inflation of the price of corn with the same purported surprise that they greeted the "astonishing" discovery, after the invasion, that there were no WMDs to be found in Iraq. Naturally, any economist able to multiply two by two and come up with four would have had no difficulty predicting the price rise. And anyone, economist or not, who could do a little arithmetic could figure out that you can't subsidize Peter without expropriating Paul. But it doesn't take much study of Our System of Government to suspect that, when the subsidy was first being considered, anyone who dared utter the obvious was brushed aside by political- entrepreneurs among the Dark Suits. (I've noted before that the grain industry appears to be better wired, politically, than the meat industry, milk subsidies notwithstanding.)
Eventually, of course, the production of corn will catch up to the politically enhanced demand, and, mutatis mutandis, prices will stabilize or even fall — which is to say that yet another political distortion of the economy will have been institutionalized.
Stumpf writes, "The best way to manage the competing interest of food and fuel needs is to consider all the costs." She's writing for a socialist newspaper, so I imagine this observation wouldn't be too popular there, but I have to point out that the free market performs all those calculations automatically. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2007)
Wildly appropriate. I disagree with Field Marshal Wide Neck (R-Ariz.) on almost everything, but it's worth pointing out how far I disagree with his characterization — "wildly inappropriate" — of what Ann Coulter said the other day.
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, she claimed
she'd planned to comment on John Edwards but had been told she'd have to
go into rehab if she used the word "faggot." The telescreen actually
bleeped out the dread and vile obscenity — our new f-word —
which provided me my first hoot. Further hoots followed soon, as all the
masculine-manly-macho-man Republicans — including Wide Neck,
Romney Moroni, and
I haven't found too much good to say about warchick Coulter over the past few years, but now I'm rediscovering something like a soft spot in my granite heart. I doubt she meant to single out Edwards as a faggot; I'm pretty sure she considers almost all Democrats to be hopeless fags. In any case her real achievement was to terrify, humiliate, and expose all those would-be bravos of the GOP, forcing them to cower publicly before the anticultural homosexualist Cheka. Old-style Republicans who dream of the Party's regrowing a spine in the face of the prevailing cultural Bolshevism may hope that Coulter has made it more pointless than ever for GOP pols to suck up to the homosexualists. (Of course that doesn't mean the suckers won't try.) On the other hand, maybe some Normals, seeing the spectacle, will have second thoughts about supporting any of the GOP's quivering little rabbits. As for Coulter herself, she says she's still laughing. Hear, hear. Nifty demolition job. [Nicholas Strakon] (March 2007)
I wish pirates still wore eyepatches and
wooden legs. And I wish they still kept to the sea. Dressing in business
suits and coming from all directions as they do these days, they can sneak
up on us if we don't watch out. In my case I've been neglecting, over the
past some years, the "historic-preservation" pirate who aims to
undermine people's right to their own home. But Fort Wayne, Ind., is
apparently suffering through an upsurge in that kind of pirate attack,
according to this
The article, represented as a column, is by Kevin Leininger, who in the past has given the impression of being a hemi-demi-semi-libertarian; and he starts out promisingly enough:
Imagine having to get some city bureaucrat's approval before painting your house, replacing a leaky roof, installing new windows, or even planting a tree.Unfortunately, Leininger then proceeds to stake out a new frontier of wishy-washiness. But note how his wishy-washiness winds up translated, by the headline-writer, into a fairly categorical endorsement of "historic- preservation" statism. Well, as all stern totalitarian comrades have long understood, that's just the sort of thing that wishy-washers are asking for.But about 650 Fort Wayne homeowners don't have to imagine. In the name of historic preservation, they've been living that way for years — and could soon have lots of company.
Leininger cites homeowners who purport to be eager to give up their freedom in return for higher property values, and I'm sure such freedom- suicides exist in this arena. They exist everywhere, and their loudly advertised eagerness to be enslaved makes it especially difficult for partisans of freedom to be heard in a country and among a people who have become deaf to principle.
Any melodic ring of libertarian principle quickly fades in this writing by Leininger, who eventually starts talking about "trade-offs," in the context of freedom vs. regulation. Anytime you hear someone talking about "trade- offs" in that way you know he's actually broken through his wishy- washiness and has landed with a thud in the middle of amoral utilitarianism.
Let's glance, at least, at the real-world dynamics of power and the lust for power. Do you expect these bureaucratic buccaneers to stop finding districts that are "historic" any time soon? Or do you expect them to persevere in extending their power over other people's property, in the name of "history"? Leininger himself proposes that the current victims "could soon have lots of company."
The question, as posed here in The Ditch, is of course rhetorical, since we don't number too many state-dazzled Pollyannas among our readers. And, really, the "history" excuse is a bit rich, isn't it? Anyone who believes that our statist supervisors have any understanding and regard for history as freemen understand and regard it just hasn't read much history. The state, after all, is the great wrecker of history and the great suppressor of history's lessons.
Leininger quotes one of the "historic" bureaucrats as claiming, "We start with what the owners want." And that is a good place to start. But we need to teach these pirates that it's also a good place for them to stop. [Nicholas Strakon]
Comment. Higher property values are a dandy thing, assuming you're already grandfathered in as an owner, but whenever the state succeeds in raising the asking price for a piece of property, it works an injustice on those interested in buying it. I remind readers of the California Coastal Commission and the housing shortage it has caused for ordinary people, in the course of privileging established wealthy people. The state cannot privilege some people without injuring other people. And it has no more business distorting the real-estate market than it has distorting any other market. [Modine Herbey]
Comment. Has there ever been a "trade-off" that benefited liberty? Has anyone ever traded away something else and kept the liberty?
Liberty-lovers are willing to give up a lot for their liberty — lives come to mind — but I don't think they ever talk about it as a trade- off. [Ronn Neff] (March 2007)
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